May, Lou & Cass Read online

  As agrarian unrest and political protest had increased rather than diminished in Ireland following Catholic Emancipation in 1829, Sir Robert Peel’s government concluded that it must begin to work towards extra measures, including an education act and the establishment of a system of poor relief. In 1838, just when Lord George bought his property in Gweedore, the Poor Relief (Ireland) Act meant that the English system established in 1836 was – despite the advice of an earlier Commission of Enquiry against it – extended to Ireland. Taking no account of the difference in culture, custom and conditions in Ireland, the extension of the system led to overcrowding which, exacerbated by recurring famine, encouraged the spread of infectious disease.34 Daniel O’Connell’s Repeal Association was established in 1840. Mass or ‘monster’ meetings were held and over the first five years of the decade the movement for repeal attracted young men inspired by the wave of revolutionary spirit sweeping Europe.William Smith O’Brien, himself a landlord, whose name would recur in the lives of Louisa and her family many years later, was one of these. Others included John Mitchel, a gifted orator of a more militant disposition than the increasingly weary O’Connell, and the idealistic poet Thomas Davis. Davis was one of the founders with Charles Gavan Duffy and John Blake Dillon of The Nation newspaper which, inspired by the writings of Thomas Carlyle, called for a non-sectarian, cultural nationalism, including a revival of the Irish language. After the prohibition of the latest in a series of mass meetings to demand repeal, planned for Clontarf in October 1843, and the arrest and imprisonment of the nearly seventy-year-old O’Connell, the young men became increasingly militant. Davis’s untimely death in 1845 deprived the movement of a moderate voice, one consequence of which was that a number of those left broke with O’Connell to form Young Ireland and, in 1848, to make an unsuccessful bid to mount their own revolution.35

  Louisa was familiar with the debate over Catholic Emancipation, for her brother Charles considered it a moral issue and discussed it within the family, while her brother-in-law Sir Edward Knatchbull and her sister Fanny were utterly opposed to it. Comprehending the debate as it applied to Ireland, however, with its extra layers of political complication was another matter: Jane Austen had warned Louisa’s cousin Anna as far back as 1814 of the difference in ‘the manners there’ when Anna had proposed sending her fictional family to Ireland. By 1834, the year of Cassandra’s wedding, Maria Edgeworth, the Irish novelist whose work Jane Austen greatly admired, considered it ‘impossible to draw Ireland as she now is in a book of fiction’. ‘We are in too perilous a case to laugh,’ she wrote, ‘humour would be out of season, worse than bad taste.’36 If it had been difficult to understand Ireland in 1814, the intervening years had made it no easier and, however conversant Louisa might have been with existing political issues in England, nothing could have readied her for what she found in Ireland in the middle years of the 1840s.

  Landlords had become accustomed to dealing with the recurring nightmare of famine, to which Ireland had for many years been subject.37 Though Lord George was aware that this could happen in any year if the crop failed sufficiently, neither he nor anyone else was adequately prepared when the autumn of 1845 signalled the beginning of the latest and most devastating famine yet, with the spread of a new fungal disease of the potato, phytophthora infestans. About half of the population of eight million people subsisted largely on potatoes: if the crop failed through bad weather or disease, famine ensued, as had happened in the terrible winter of 1816–17, when the harvest failure had been followed not only by famine, but also by the rapid spread of disease amongst an already weakened population. The novelist William Carleton, from Donegal’s neighbouring county of Tyrone, had lived through several such famines since his birth in 1794. Witnessing the partial failure of the potato crop in the autumn of 1845, he wrote graphically and urgently of the effects of the 1817 famine in his novel, The Black Prophet, in the hope that it might serve as a warning, ‘to awaken those who legislate for us into a humane perception of a calamity that has been almost perennial in the country’:38

  Famine, in all cases the source and origin of contagion, had done, and was still doing, its work. The early potato crop, so far as it had come in, was a pitiable failure — the quantity being small and the quality watery and bad. The oats, too, and all early grain of the season’s growth, were still more deleterious of food, for they had fermented and become sour, so that the use of them, and of the bad potatoes, too, was the most certain means of propagating the pestilence which was sweeping away the people in such multitudes.39

  Like Maria Edgeworth, Carleton was despairingly conscious that unless he could convey his message to a British readership, nothing whatsoever might be done. ‘Alas,’ he wrote, ‘little do our English neighbours know or dream of the horrors which attend a year of severe famine in this unhappy country.’40 Carleton did not exaggerate, yet, though all the signs of imminent acute distress were present, and though he dedicated his preface to the then Prime Minister, Lord John Russell, little was done in the first year, when further disaster might have been averted. Russell was not sympathetic. ‘The common delusion,’ he wrote to Lord Lansdowne in October 1846, ‘that government can convert a period of scarcity into a period of abundance is one of the most mischievous that can be entertained. But, alas! The Irish have been taught many bad lessons and few good ones.’41 Therefore, although the blight was, if anything, worse in 1846, Russell’s administration took the view that responsibility towards the famine-stricken belonged not to government but to the wealthy of Ireland.42 This meant that it was, in real terms, the responsibility of the Irish landlords to address the problem, an attitude which accorded not only with that of Louisa Knight but also with that of her family and the great majority of their acquaintance.

  For Louisa, the need to comprehend Ireland’s distress came in the wake of a series of personal losses. In the year following Cassandra’s death, Henry Knight, the charming, affectionate older brother who had left in his teens to join the 6th Light Dragoons and risen to become a Major in the 9th Lancers, died at the age of forty-six. He had been suffering from ‘attacks in the head’, later discovered to be epileptic fits, one of which was to be the cause of his premature death.43 His visits home had always been a source of joy to his family, and despite the fact that he and his volatile brother George had briefly shocked their aunt Jane by dallying in their teens with a servant, she liked him ‘to the utmost, to the very top of his class, quite brimful’, and he had sorely missed her after her death.44 Henry had grown up to be a kind and good husband, first to his cousin, Sophia Cage and, three years after her death in 1833, to Charlotte Northey. Charles was deeply distraught over his brother’s last illness and death. He was almost unable to describe it, as with his sister Cassandra’s funeral, and his uncharacteristically illegible diary entries on the subject speak to the depth of his distress. This time it was he, Marianne, William and their father who ‘on the wettest night almost ever known’ got the sudden call. ‘An express came in the night,’ Charles wrote on 5 May 1843, ‘with a bad acc’t of Henry, whereon William and I went in the middle of the night to B[asing]-stoke in his four carriage to meet the next train.’ They were joined the next day by their father and Marianne. ‘May & I saw Henry & talked to him,’ Charles entered in his diary; yet, though Henry survived the crisis which caused their emergency dash to his side, he did not improve. He died on 31 May 1843 with Charles at his side.45

  Two of the Godmersham children Jane Austen had known were now dead, and other losses followed that year, with the death, in August, of James and Francis Austen’s second wives, the former Mary and Martha Lloyd. The two sisters had been dear friends of both Jane and Cassandra Austen. Mary had helped nurse Jane in her last illness at Winchester in 1817 and Martha had been, for a time, a member of the Austen household. With so many companions gone, Cassandra Austen too had become very frail. On 23 March 1845, Easter Day, Charles wrote: ‘We heard today the sad news we had been expecting of poor At. Cassandra’s
death, which took place yesterday at 4 in the morning at Portsdown Lodge.’ 46 She had been staying at her brother Francis’s house in Portsmouth, tended by her brothers Henry and Charles Austen, and her niece, James’s daughter Caroline. By strange coincidence, she died at about the same hour in the morning as her sister Jane. The old order had passed, but there was no room for sentimentality among the Austens. By the beginning of April, Edward Knight Jr had cleared the cottage where Jane had lived the last eight years of her life. ‘After Cassandra Austen died it was used for labourers’ tenements,’ her great-nephews wrote in 1911, by which time it had become a village club. Edward’s decision ended his family’s link with Chawton Cottage, and its memories of Jane Austen, for over a century, until the efforts of the Jane Austen Society and Jane Austen Memorial Trust ensured its survival.47

  Louisa’s new commitment to her sister’s children meant she could not always choose to be with her family. In the summer of 1845, Fanny, whose own daughter Fanny Elizabeth was dying, wrote to Miss Chapman: ‘Marianne and my youngest brother are going to Brighton, and my sister Louisa has been all the summer in Ireland with Ld George Hill and his children.’48 Lord George’s family was already in mourning for the 3rd Marquess of Downshire, who had died on 12 April 1845 as the result of a fall from a horse, ‘whilst he was riding over his Blessington Estate in the company of his agent’.49 In her new circumstances, Louisa could not easily return to comfort her sister. As with the Austens and Knights, so with the Hills: the sentimental had no place. Lord George, determined to be known as a landlord who did not leave the care of his estate, or his business, to others, threw himself into his work. The hotel provided the perfect opportunity. It had begun the year 1845 with a reputation for such hospitality that prospective guests could knock on the door at any hour of the day or night and expect to be admitted.50 Just a month after his brother’s death, Lord George was attending to his hotel guests personally, and explaining his mission to them. ‘We had the pleasure,’ wrote one, ‘of meeting Lord George Hill who kindly accompanied us, and pointed out the various improvements made in that part of his Lordship’s property — a most gigantic undertaking, in this wild but highly interesting district affording a bright example — how much may be effected by judicious management by a Landlord residing upon his estates & attending to the moral and social condition of his Tenantry.’51

  In that last summer before the onset of the Great Famine, visitors continued in a stream, writing of the sights to be seen and the good care taken of them by Lord George. They included the Young Irelanders John Mitchel and John O’Hagan, who wrote that they had been ‘much pleased with the accommodation afforded in this hotel and the attention of the servants’.52 Mitchel, with Duffy and O’Hagan, had travelled to Donegal, armed with a copy of Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus: they experienced no sense of foreboding about the famine to come, and went away cheered by all they saw in Gweedore. ‘And here I once for all, remark what I observed in the South as well as in the North,’ John O’Hagan wrote in his account of that journey, ‘that the Irish-speaking population, who generally live in the mountains, never present the same aspect of destitution as we see in the English-speaking townlands. I suppose they are not ground down by high rents, or eaten up by too large a population.’53 O’Hagan’s diary of that trip especially commended Lord George’s work in expanding the port of Bunbeg: ‘Lovely little quay, most convenient for Lord George to land his goods ... Immense business done at the store, considering the bareness of the country.’54

  Despite the personal stress of 1845, by the year’s end Lord George had published his detailed pamphlet, Facts from Gweedore, an account of the work he had begun in 1838 on his estate.55 At the same time, Louisa began to find her own mission. Though she had originally come to Ireland to care for the motherless Hill children, she found herself becoming increasingly involved with their father’s cause. It became a matter of vital importance to Louisa to publicise her brother-in-law’s efforts to improve the lot of his tenants, and she enlisted the willing assistance of Fanny who, in her turn, wrote to her old friend Miss Chapman, asking her to make the work known. This early marketing was quite concentrated: the sisters were determined to raise money through the sale of the book and of hand-knitted garments, mostly socks and stockings, in order to bring Anglicanism to Gweedore. The fact that it did not seem to be particularly welcomed by the majority of the tenants seemed irrelevant: good was to be done to them whether they wished it or not. When the impact of the famine began to be felt in Gweedore, and Lord George started to put all his efforts into relieving the distress of his tenants, Louisa simply added this concern to the work of improvement. Famine did not take precedence over missionary zeal and nothing would persuade her, or Fanny in her letters to Miss Chapman, that one issue might be separate from the other.

  Because neither Louisa nor any member of her family had lived in an area stricken by famine and, crucially, because she did not, in Jane Austen’s phrase, ‘know the manners there’, she failed to comprehend some unalterable aspects of life in Ireland. Louisa did not see that a change in religion was not acceptable to the Catholic tenants of Gweedore. She was as determined as Lord George to see the establishment of an Anglican Church at Bunbeg for the approximately seventy tenants on the estate who were Protestant, with the additional plan at the outset of a glebe house for the Minister and his family. She may also have been in need of a project, finding herself so far from all that was familiar. Whatever her reasons, Louisa concentrated her energies into the selling of Lord George’s book, and her influential oldest sister gladly took up the cause, as Fanny’s letters of the mid-1840s to Miss Chapman show:

  I want to ask you ... to patronize a little work just published ... called ‘Facts from Gweedore’ compiled from notes made by my brother-in-law Lord George Hill ... Lord G. Hill has bought of late years some property in this almost isolated part of the North of Donegal and he & his children & my sister Louisa have been passing the summer near the spot — they are now at Godmersham House and I have heard so much of interest from them about these poor people that I feel anxious to assist in promoting their welfare. The proceeds of the sale of ‘Facts from Gweedore’ are intended to assist in establishing a clergyman and if possible building a place of worship, for they are 10 miles from the nearest place of protestant [worship] ... It is only 7s 6d & I think you would find it interesting & well worth the money.56

  Miss Chapman responded immediately, and Fanny offered to send her a copy of an ‘ “Appeal” for subscriptions for a Church & etc’.57 The appeal was ‘made on behalf of a district on the north-west coast of Donegal ... where there are upwards of seventy souls, including children, without any permanent provision for the supply of their spiritual wants’. The expense of providing teachers and a schoolhouse, which had to double as a place of worship, had fallen, the appeal explained, on Lord George Hill: if money were forthcoming, he was prepared to give ten acres ‘as a glebe’ and, if further subscriptions should be made available, would add a church to the glebe house. Yet, despite the appeal, by February 1846 there had been only a limited response and Fanny’s next letter to Miss Chapman indicates a certain distancing from the concerns of the Irish:

  There has not yet been much collected, but Lord G. is determined to begin the clergyman’s house. I trust to providence for being enabled to do more. I am trying to assist by spreading the fame of the book as far as I can, & my contributions whether by way of selling the book, or by friends offering subscriptions (all of which tell in the long run) will of course be thankfully rc’d. You are so kind in really thinking about it, that I am tempted thus to enter into details, but you are by no means to think it necessary to torment yourself or your friends on the subject. In Ireland it is particularly desirable to have the ‘Appeal’ circulated ... 58

  In other words, the problem was for the Irish to solve; and the attitude that Ireland’s wider difficulties were Ireland’s problem followed on from that perception.59 Lord George, however, did not distance hi
mself from his tenants’ sufferings, any more than from their spiritual welfare. As the famine worsened, soup kitchens were established at Stranacorcragh and Dunlewey and, as Chairman of the Relief Committee in Donegal, Lord George made urgent requests for help in setting up a soup station at Bunbeg during 1846 and into 1847. Having heard from Sir James Dombrain that a ship was shortly to sail to Sligo in the west of Ireland, he set out to try to relieve his tenants’ immediate anxiety that they would run out of food before relief came. In September 1846, he wrote to the Relief Commission:

  I trouble you with these few lines to request that you will have the goodness to order a cargo with as little delay as possible to Bunbeg Store at Gweedore, as the wants of the people are daily increasing & their fears — that their provision, which is but small, will run out before a supply is sent in — are great.60