The Irish Assassins, page 1
Also by Julie Kavanagh
Secret Muses: The Life of Frederick Ashton
Rudolf Nureyev: The Life
The Girl Who Loved Camellias: The Life and Legend of Marie Duplessis
THE IRISH ASSASSINS
Conspiracy, Revenge, and the Phoenix Park Murders That Stunned Victorian England
JULIE KAVANAGH
Atlantic Monthly Press
New York
Copyright © 2021 by Julie Kavanagh
Jacket design by Gretchen Mergenthaler/Background illustration: The Phoenix Park Murders, 1882, gouache on paper, by Cecil Doughty (1965) © Look and Learn; Amputation knife© Science Museum / Science & Society Picture Library. All rights reserved.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or permissions@groveatlantic.com.
FIRST EDITION
Published simultaneously in Canada
The book is set in 13-point Centaur MT by Alpha Design & Composition of Pittsfield, NH.
First Grove Atlantic edition: August 2021
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.
ISBN 978-0-8021-4936-7
eISBN 978-0-8021-4938-1
Atlantic Monthly Press
an imprint of Grove Atlantic
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West
groveatlantic.com
21 22 22 23 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my father
CONTENTS
A Brief History
Before
ONE: The Leader
TWO: That Half-Mad Firebrand
THREE: The “Irish Soup” Thickens
FOUR: Fire Beneath the Ice
FIVE: Captain Moonlight
SIX: The Invincibles
SEVEN: Coercion-in-Cottonwool
EIGHT: Mayday
NINE: Falling Soft
TEN: Mallon’s Manhunt
ELEVEN: Concocting and “Peaching”
TWELVE: Who Is Number One?
THIRTEEN: Marwooded
FOURTEEN: An Abyss of Infamy
FIFTEEN: The Assassin’s Assassin
SIXTEEN: Irresistible Impulse
Color Plates
After
Author’s Note
Bibliography
Endnotes
Acknowledgments
Index
A BRIEF HISTORY
EVERY READER of this book will know about the age-old hostility between the Irish and the English, but not everyone will know how, when, and where it started. It was in 1170, to be precise, that Anglo-Normans first invaded Ireland, going on to grab the best land and introduce their own feudal system—a hierarchy of master and serf, landlord and tenant that was still in place more than seven hundred years later. Since then, the theme of violence between the two places—erupting, receding, erupting again—has never entirely disappeared. The muraled “peace walls” separating Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods in Northern Irish cities like Belfast and Derry had been prefigured in the fourteenth century by the thorny hedges and ten-foot ditches bounding “The Pale,” an area covering Dublin and its surroundings, under protection of the Crown and governed by its rules. It was considered to be a pocket of safety and civilization in marked contrast to the barbarous conditions of Irish life outside (and is the origin of the expression “beyond the pale”).
This “Us and Them” divide, “their religion” or “our religion,” intensified during the Reformation, when Protestantism replaced Roman Catholicism as the national church in England and Ireland, and Irish Catholics were seen as dangerous worshippers of the anti-faith. Henry VIII had broken ties with Rome when the pope refused to annul his first marriage and made himself supreme head of the English Church. He was also named king of Ireland, but his daughter, Queen Elizabeth, took much firmer control of their neighboring island. Fearing that her enemy—the Spanish Catholic King Philip—would use Ireland as a foothold to launch an attack on England, she decided to populate the country with loyal subjects. This involved confiscating vast quantities of land from powerful Gaelic families in the province of Munster and planting Irish estates with English and Scottish settlers.
One of the first arrivals was the great Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser. Appointed a colonial official, he was a party to what was literally a war of extermination by the English—the 1580 suppression of a rebellion against the queen in Munster. More than six hundred Spanish and Irish soldiers were massacred; ordinary people systematically butchered; Catholic priests, hanged until “half dead,” were then decapitated, their heads fixed on poles in public places to instill fear in the native inhabitants. “So the name of an Inglysh man was made more terrible now to them than the sight of an hundryth was before,” remarked Sir Humphrey Gilbert, the queen’s ruthless military governor. The appalling famine that resulted from the merciless destruction of crops and cattle by Elizabeth’s troops left an estimated thirty thousand inhabitants dying of starvation—“anatomies of death,” who crawled along the ground because their legs were too weak to support them and feasted on carrion and carcasses they had dug out of graves. Spenser was one of the queen’s most ardent devotees, and his masterpiece, the allegorical epic The Faerie Queene, an extravagant homage to her sovereignty. And yet, his horror of what he saw in Munster is embedded in his writing: the hollow-eyed character of Despair wearing rags held together with thorns, his “raw-bone cheeks … shrunk into his jaws,” is the very image of the Irish famine victim.
It was as if the English felt themselves absolved from all ethical restraints when dealing with the Irish. The divine right of kings legitimized the use of force in maintaining the dominion of the sovereign, and as the insurrections of the Irish amounted to treason, Englishmen had God’s sanction to keep the rebellious natives in their thrall. Right of conquest had also validated England’s confiscation of Irish land.
* * *
Ultimately, in 1641, the long-suppressed Irish retaliated with a wave of horrific attacks. Queen Elizabeth’s successor, James I, had followed her policy of planting Irish estates with English and Scottish settlers and was concentrating on Ulster, the center of residual Gaelic resistance. Native resentment erupted: a County Armagh widow was captured by insurgents, who drowned five of her six children; in Portadown, one hundred English Protestants were herded from the sanctuary of a church, marched to a bridge over the River Bann, and forced into the wintry waters, where they died of exposure, drowned, or were shot by musket fire. As always, though, Britain, with its far superior military resources, had the upper hand. Retaliation for the 1641 uprising, and the reconquest of Ireland (which, following the English Civil Wars, had become the monarchy’s last chance of retaining the throne), resulted in one of the most shocking war crimes ever recorded.
In August 1649, six months after the execution of King Charles I, the parliamentarian General Oliver Cromwell decided to crush any remaining Royalist loyalty among Irish Catholics by conducting a massive campaign of ethnic cleansing. During his nine-month rampage, six hundred thousand perished, including fifteen hundred deliberately targeted civilians. Landowners, given the choice of going “to hell or to Connaught,” were forcibly driven west to the bleakest and poorest of the provinces, where they were allowed 10 percent of their original acreage. And yet, the vast majority of Cromwell’s contemporaries applauded his ruthless mission. To Irish Protestants, he was a brave deliverer who put down popery and set them free, while the celebrated English poet and parliamentarian Andrew Marvell endorsed Cromwell’s view of himself as a divine agent, regarding him as an elemental firebrand who could not have been held back. “’Tis madness to resist or blame / The force of angry Heaven’s flame,” he wrote, in “An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland.”
No other figure in nine centuries of Anglo-Irish history has so starkly embodied the divide between the two nations: Ireland’s view of Cromwell as a monstrous tyrant is countered by England’s admiration of the soldier and statesman—today considered “one of the ten greatest Britons of all time”—who steered his country toward a constitutional government. A 1946 spy film, I See a Dark Stranger, gently satirizes this polarity, pairing the naïvely romantic Irish heroine (a dewy Deborah Kerr) with a British army type (Trevor Howard). He is writing a thesis in his spare time on Cromwell, explaining that the “underrated general” is a highly neglected character. “Huh! Not in Ireland!” snorts Kerr’s Bridie Quilty. “Do you know what he did to us?” Her private war against Britain has been provoked by hearing Guinness-fueled tales of Cromwell’s terrible deeds, and although she ends up marrying the Englishman, she still retains her fierce nationalist principles. On the first night of their honeymoon she storms off with her suitcase after spo
* * *
Accounts of appalling suffering have been handed down from generation to generation, mythologized in folklore, poems, and patriotic songs. It was this historical grievance against the English—the “taunting, long-memory, back-dated, we-shall-not-forget … not letting bygones be bygones”—that Tony Blair decided to address when he was elected prime minister in 1997. The year marked the 150th anniversary of the Great Famine, when Ireland lost two million of its population through death or emigration—the most cataclysmic chapter of its history. The Irish had always blamed the disaster on Britain, which in the interest of protecting its economy, continued to import food from Ireland when its population were starving. Blair conceded that his country had indeed been accountable. In a message of reconciliation, read at a memorial concert by the actor Gabriel Byrne, he said, “That one million people should have died in what was then part of the richest and most powerful nation in the world is something that still causes pain. Those who governed in London at the time failed their people through standing by while a crop failure turned into a massive human tragedy.” Hailed as a landmark in Anglo-Irish relations, Blair’s admission coincided with a breakthrough in the Irish peace process—a few weeks later, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) restored its cease-fire.
* * *
The Great Famine had begun in 1845, when a virulent fungus, Phytophthora infestans, migrated from America to the potato fields of Ireland, Britain, and Europe, reducing entire crops to a black stinking mush. Nineteenth-century science had no remedies for such epidemic infestations, and as potatoes were the staple diet for at least half the people, the impact of the crop’s massive failure was more catastrophic in Ireland than anywhere else. “The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the famine,” was a typical nationalist response at the time, the accusation being that the apathy of English politicians, combined with their laissez-faire economic doctrine, had decimated the Irish peasantry. Even more incriminating was the belief that their campaign had been deliberate. The minister in charge of charitable relief, Charles Trevelyan, was demonized by the twentieth century, his much-quoted remark that “God had sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson” used as evidence by conspiracy theorists. In 1996, New York governor George Pataki ordered the Irish Famine to be included in the state’s school curriculum, saying that children were to be taught that hunger had been used by Britain as a tool of subjection, “as a means of keeping people down.” The Irish Famine/Genocide Committee, founded in the United States a year earlier, looked into the possibility of forming an international tribunal to rule on legal accountability for the human loss.
Ordinary people’s resentment was directed not so much at the British government as at local agents, land-grabbers, and moneylenders—the avaricious “gombeen men,” who exploited the situation to their own advantage. What can be in no doubt, however, is the culpability of many Irish landlords. Regarding the removal of the poor from their estates as a prerequisite to making agricultural improvements, they used the Famine as an opportunity for mass clearances, evicting an estimated quarter of a million people. With nowhere to go, desperate tenant families built temporary shelters near their former homes, only to have them burned down or destroyed by bailiffs and hired crowbar brigades emboldened by the support of police and soldiers. In March 1846, responding in Parliament to complaints of inhumanity, the home secretary sided with the landlords, rejecting the notion that they were liable for criminal proceedings: as property owners, each had the right to do as he pleased.
* * *
In post-Famine Ireland, most smallholders were in arrears with their rent, and while numerous employers went out of their way to treat their workers with compassion—“Feed your family first, then give me what you can afford when times get better,” said one Bantry-based man—landlords continued to be much despised. The most prominent were often absent from their properties, the MPs in London while Parliament sat, the wealthiest moving between their various estates and delegating the management to land agents, who notoriously exploited their power over the tenants. Less prosperous owners did not have the cash to invest in improvements, and consequently, the country’s farming methods had stagnated. The umbrella term for the situation was “landlordism,” an entirely pejorative word implying abuse of authority, from rack-renting to mercilessly arbitrary evictions.
And then, in the late 1870s, when rural Ireland—especially the west—was again threatened with starvation and eviction, a radical change took place. Determined never again to make “a holocaust” of themselves, smallholders began collectively rising up and fighting for ancestral territory that was theirs by right. The Land War of 1879–82 became the greatest mass movement Ireland had ever known, a social revolution led by a messianic land activist and an inspirational new political leader whose mission to bring down feudalism was funded by what today would be millions of American dollars. For the first time in seven hundred years, Irish tenant farmers stood together to destroy the landlord system, mounting an anarchic campaign of intimidation, which the British tried to suppress with hateful new coercive measures.
By the beginning of the 1880s, the Irish land issue had reached a crisis point, occupying an astonishing nine-tenths of Britain’s political agenda. What is less known is that the first rumblings of resistance took place more than two decades earlier—not in Dublin, the hub of revolutionary fervor, but in a wild, wind-battered corner of County Donegal, in Ireland’s northwest.
BEFORE
ALL ALONG Donegal’s Bloody Foreland, the Atlantic surf was seething and hurling itself against the rocks. It was the winter of 1857, and most of the inhabitants were down on the shore—men, women, and children, braving the gale to scythe seaweed from the shingles or wade into the foaming brine to gather it in armfuls. Draping the granite boulders with slimy, reddish-brown matting, these tangles of kelp were a commodity valuable enough for the locals to risk their lives in every storm. As the breakers boomed around them, sucking up seaweed from the deep, the families went out in force to collect it—soaked to the bone and aching with windchill and exhaustion.
Less than ten miles away, in the warm glow of a gaslit, mahogany-paneled room, a Belfast journalist was enjoying a glass of punch served by a fetching young barmaid. The door opened, and Lord George Hill, the owner of the Gweedore Hotel, looked inside to ask whether there was anything he could do to make the guest more comfortable. A convivial host, Hill had opened the hotel sixteen years earlier, modeling it on a Scottish Highlands lodge to provide salmon fishing and grouse shooting for the gentry. He had been enchanted by the vast open spaces, lakes, rivers, dramatic mountains, and savage seas of Gweedore, a small Roman Catholic community in northwest Donegal, and had bought land comprising twenty-four thousand acres, intending to create a kind of oasis there. The hotel he opened offered English tourists a pampering but adventurous alternative to Cheltenham’s Promenade or the Pump Room in Bath, and with the arrival of guests as eminent as the Scottish historian and writer Thomas Carlyle, Hill could claim to be bringing metropolitan manners and culture to a place that had long been cut off from the world outside.
Situated in the northern province of Ulster—the most Protestant part of Ireland—and geographically distant from the rest of the Republic, Donegal has a unique spirit of independence. The parish of Gweedore, located in the heart of the Gaeltacht, where Irish is still the first language, is even more distinctive. It has none of the soft pastoral lushness of the south but is a remote area of blanket bog and primeval rocks, with a harsh, architectural beauty of its own. For centuries, its people had clung to the coast, struggling to make a living from land not meant to be worked, many of them living in mud hovels shared with a farm animal. Potatoes were their regular diet, and their main source of income was kelp, which they burned in kilns until the ashes could be compressed into hard blocks to be shipped to Scotland, where they were used to make iodine. Some traded in woolen goods, eggs, and corn (much of which was distilled into the illegal whiskey poteen), and it was this small local industry that Lord Hill decided to expand on a massive scale.
