Part 26

"And there was Bill Beresford," he continued, "a gallant soldier and the best horseman in Ireland--good, old 'Ulundi Bill,' as he was fondly known. There isn't a man between the four seas to-day that can compare with him, either for a fight or a frolic. Bill Beresford overtopped them all. He did more to improve and encourage horse racing in Ireland than any man that ever lived except it was his father, Lord Henry Beresford, the third Marquis of Waterford. They called him the Nestor of the Irish turf, and he did deeds of daring and devilment in every corner of the world. His lordship was killed in the saddle, the place where he would prefer to die, for he loved horses as much as men, and there was mourning in all Ireland. His son Bill took closely after him. As colonel of the Ninth Lancers, Bill saved the British forces at the battle of Ulundi and was given a big jeweled star and a Victoria Cross for the job. But Charley is just as good a man as Bill. The Beresfords are all fighters. No family in Ireland has drawn the sword so often or so effectively, even if you go back to the invasion of the Normans when they first came into the country. And what's the matter with the motto, 'No dependence but the cross'?"

Lord "Bill" Beresford was laid to rest on the first day of the twentieth century and his obituaries said that he was the most popular man in Ireland. He was the third husband of that beautiful American woman, Lillian Warren-Hammersley-Churchill-Beresford, originally of Troy, N.Y., and afterward of Washington, widow of the late Duke of Marlborough and still one of the most charming women in London society. There was another brother, who recently died in Mexico, where he lived for many years as a ranchman, and left a large family of half-breed children.

The present Marquis of Waterford, Henri de la Poer Beresford, was born in 1875 and married Lady Beatrice, daughter of the Marquis of Lansdowne, in 1897. He is a lieutenant in the Horse Guards at London, is said to be a fine young fellow, and is developing the hereditary traits of the family. He has a son--the Earl of Tyrone, born in 1901--and three daughters who are younger.

Carrick Castle, which stands on the banks of the Suir not far from Waterford, is another beautiful place, built in 1309 by the great Earl of Ormonde. The Carricks were originally Butlers, and trace their descent as far back as Rollo, Duke of Normandy, grandfather of William the Conqueror. Edmund Butler was created Earl of Carrick in 1315, and his descendants have owned this estate ever since his time. The beautiful but unfortunate Anne Boleyn, wife of Henry VIII. and mother of Queen Elizabeth, was born in Carrick Castle and lived there until she was fifteen years old, when she went to England with Sir Thomas Boleyn, her father, and Lord Rochford, her brother, who was executed upon the same scaffold with herself.

The Province of Munster might be called properly "the Land of Ruined Castles," for they are more numerous here than on the banks of the Rhine. You are scarcely ever out of sight of a crumbling tower or a useless gigantic wall wearing a mantle of ivy. Nearly all of these ruins are attributed to Cromwell and his army, who have no defenders, and the religious historians and local guides tell us that they were destroyed by that man of mighty prejudices and purposes in order to plant Protestantism upon the ruins of the papal power in Ireland. Cromwell was undoubtedly guilty of atrocious cruelty and devastation at the cost of thousands of innocent lives and hundreds of millions of property, but he could not have destroyed all these castles and monasteries if he had remained in Ireland ten times as long as he did, because many of them were in ruins when he arrived and many were not built until after his departure.

Torna, the Druid, prophesied that a wind from the southeast would fell the tree that covered Ireland. And that was always a vulnerable shore. Agricola planned to cross with his legions from the Cornish coast and add Eire, as this country was then known, to the Roman Empire. The southeastern corner, the counties of Wexford and Waterford, with their harbors open and undefended, were the gates through which many foreign invaders came and brought death and devastation with them. The harbor of Waterford was called the Haven of the Sun until the Danes came, but was afterward known as the Valley of Lamentation, because of the mourning that followed the battles that were fought there. And even the invaders did not do so much damage as domestic strife. The kings and the clans, the Desmonds and the Geraldines, the O'Briens and the O'Donoghues, the MacCarthys, the O'Connors, the O'Sullivans, and other local chiefs who occupied the southern third of Ireland, were always attacking each other, besieging the castles of their rivals and often leaving them as we see them now--green wrecks and grassy mounds. And they spared not the monasteries that were built near all the homes of the great. This was a form of munificence as well as piety which prevailed also in Italy and France in the Middle Ages, where every robber baron kept a small army of friars and monks to do his praying, just as he kept squadrons of knights to do his fighting. Hence you will invariably find in southern Ireland the ruins of an abbey or a monastery beside the ruins of a castle, and most of them are the result of duels and feuds between the native chieftains and their clans, although many were left in flames and gore by the forces of William of Orange, Henry VIII., and Queen Elizabeth, as well as Cromwell.

Ireland has never been at peace until now. No soil has been fought over so often. The mysterious round towers that we see on the hilltops and in the glens in their lonely majesty are evidence that it was necessary for the overlords to build places of refuge for their servants, and provide means for lighting signal fires to warn them against the enemies that surrounded them.

"In the Island o' Ruins remembrance o' grief Hallows the hills as, when summer is slowly Fadin' in darkness, the fall o' the leaf Makes the woods holy.

"Green are the woods though the mountains are gray; Spring is too young to remember old doin's. Ah! but I wish I was roamin' to-day In the Island o' Ruins!"

The little station of Doneraile is the getting-off place for visitors who would see one of the most attractive ruins in Ireland, both for its picturesque beauty and for its historical associations. A solitary tower, standing by a small river in a lonely and deserted glen, is all that remains of Kilcolman Castle, one of the greatest strongholds of the Geraldines, afterward and at the time of its destruction the home of Ireland's greatest poet, Edmund Spenser. He came here in 1580 as private secretary to Earl Grey, then lord lieutenant, and after one of the many rebellions he was given a little more than three thousand acres which surrounded this castle, confiscated from the Earl of Desmond, as one of the "undertakers," as certain speculators and adventurers were called who agreed to colonize the country with English settlers. It was here and in the neighboring town of Youghal, the home of Sir Walter Raleigh, in 1589 and 1590, that Spenser wrote the "Faerie Queene," which was published at the expense of Raleigh and dedicated to Queen Elizabeth. For this honor the queen proposed to give him quite a liberal pension. Lord Treasurer Burleigh remonstrated, saying:

"What? So much for a rhyme?"

"Well, then, give him what is reason," said her majesty.

Nothing further was heard of the matter, however, until Spenser sent the Virgin Queen the following epigram:

"I was promised on a time To have reason for my rhyme. From that time, until this season, I've had neither rhyme nor reason."

Elizabeth was so pleased that she instantly ordered Spenser's name to be put upon the pension rolls at fifty pounds a year.

Spenser married an obscure relative of the famous Earl of Cork, a Miss Boyle, and lived in the old castle until 1598, when it was sacked and burned by the rebels in the Tyrone uprising. His youngest son perished in the flames and, heart-broken and beggared, he took the rest of his family to London and died within a few months from starvation and grief. He was buried in Westminster Abbey at the expense of the Earl of Essex.

It is said that the sins of the fathers are sometimes visited upon their children and children's children, and this prophecy applies with singular aptness to the Spenser family, for the poet's grandson was driven from his home at Kilcolman by Cromwell's men, just as the Desmonds had been driven from the same place by Earl Grey.

It was a cheerful change to find a castle without a scar or a crumbling stone and all the modern improvements at Riding House, the Irish estate of the late Earl of Devonshire. He was one of the wealthiest, the ablest, and the most influential of the British nobility, and a conservative leader in the House of Lords, and died, universally lamented, a year or so ago. He was one of the largest landowners in Ireland, having more than a hundred thousand acres rented to tenants, and managed to get along with them without much friction, which is the highest proof that he was a just, honorable, tactful, and conscientious man. There are good landlords in Ireland; there are many of them, and it is not true in every instance that the tenants show little or no appreciation of their generosity, although, unfortunately, there have been some conspicuous cases of that kind. Several large property owners, who have endeavored to treat their tenants with kindness, have lowered their rents and made generous concessions to them, have been accused of cowardice by the very people they tried to please, and have been treated very badly. But the Duke of Devonshire was not one of those. He had honest, brave, fair-minded agents on the ground and looked closely after the management of his Irish property himself.

Riding House is near the town of Lismore, and, on the principle that to him who hath shall be given, it was inherited by the Duke of Devonshire in 1753 through his wife, Charlotte, daughter of Richard Boyle, fourth Earl of Cork, who was a munificent patron of literature and the arts and the friend of Pope, the poet. The Cork family is one of the most famous in the history of Ireland, although not one of the oldest. The first earl lived on Cork Hill, where the Castle at Dublin stands. He was a native of Hereford County, England, and was born in 1566. He studied law at the Middle Temple, London, and was called to the Bar, but, having no clients, he embarked for Ireland as an adventurer. After a while he obtained the favor and protection of Queen Elizabeth, which enabled him to amass considerable wealth and won him his title. His brother Michael, who went to Ireland with him, became Bishop of Waterford. Richard, a nephew, became Archbishop of Tuam, and his son, Michael, became Archbishop of Armagh.

The second Earl of Cork was a distinguished figure in camp, court, and in the literary world. He was lord lieutenant of Ireland under Cromwell. He was known as "the great Earl of Cork," and lies in the old Church of St. Mary at Youghal with his figure at full length in marble in the center of an enormous monument that covers a quarter of an acre of wall. There is a duplicate quite as large in St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin.

The present Earl of Cork was the largest landholder in this section except the Duke of Devonshire, but has sold most of his estate under the provisions of the Wyndham Land Act of 1903. The Devonshire estate is still intact, and, as the late duke had no sons, was inherited by Victor Cavendish, his nephew. The late Earl, Richard Edmund St. Lawrence Boyle, was an aid-de-camp to Queen Victoria, with whom he had a warm friendship. He was devoted to her all his life and was her master of horse and master of buckhounds for many years. He married in 1853 a sister of the present Earl of Clanricarde, who is fighting the Wyndham Land Act so bitterly. His eldest son and heir, late the Viscount Dungarvin, was born in 1861, served in the army for several years, and commanded the Twenty-second Battalion of Yeomanry against the Boers in South Africa. The second son of the late earl, Robert John Lascelle, born in 1864, married Josephine Hale, daughter of J.P. Hale of San Francisco, and the son of this American girl is the heir presumptive of the great Cork estate. One sister of the present earl married Francis Henry Baring of the famous London banking house, and another married Walter Long, one of the leaders of the unionist party in parliament. He represents a district of the city of Dublin, although he is an Englishman and never lived there.

"Tipperary is the deadest town in all Ireland," said a bookseller of that place, of whom we were buying some postcards. "I don't believe there was ever a deader town than Tip-rar-ry [for that is the way they pronounce it] and everybody is going to America who can get away." And that seemed to be the prevailing sentiment among the people I talked with. It is the most pessimistic community I found in the country, without even a single good word for their own town. "There's no business outside of cattle and dairying," said another merchant. "Trade is so dull that the shopkeepers are loafing half the day." But the people seem to keep up their interest in politics, and that they have some money left is evident, because at a meeting here, the day before my arrival, £95 was collected in a few minutes for the expense fund of the parliamentary Irish party. Outside, in the streets, there was a good deal of activity. It was market day and the farmers from all the surrounding country were in town to sell their produce and buy a stock of supplies for the ensuing week, but there was no vehicle, not even a jaunting car, at the railway station to take us to the hotel, and evidently nobody was expected. So we had to do the best we could and succeeded in persuading a farmer who was there with an "inside car" to carry us and our luggage, which he managed to do by sitting on the shafts himself. And afterward when we wanted to see the town we couldn't find a vehicle in the street, although Tipperary is a town of six thousand population, and the hotel proprietor sent out to a livery stable for one.

Tipperary lies in the midst of a lovely country, more level than that we had been traveling through for the past three weeks, but there are only a few patches of timber and a few gentle slopes and no peat bogs so far as we could see from the railway train. The landscape reminded me of the Western Reserve of Ohio, with the exception that the Silievenarmick Hills rise in the background to the height of nine hundred and one thousand feet. The Aherlow River waters the plain and runs through the town. There doesn't seem to be much cultivated ground in the neighborhood, but there are long stretches of meadow in which the farmers were cutting the hay, and we can perceive the perfume as we pass through them if we stand at the open window of the car. Alternating with the meadows are fine pastures, where large herds of sleek and fat cattle and many yearling colts and foal mares are feeding. There are several large stock farms in the neighborhood, and, as it was the season for county fairs when we were there, the Tipperary farmers are raking in prizes for all kinds of stock. In the town is a creamery which, we were told, is the largest in Ireland. It employs one hundred and twenty hands and its butter is shipped almost entirely to London.

The most interesting feature of Tipperary is the new town lying on the outskirts of the old, which represents an exciting incident in Irish history. During the land war of 1887 the leaders of the Irish party selected several landlords as examples for boycotting for the purpose of attracting attention to the conditions in the country and creating public opinion. This was called "The Plan of Campaign." Among the places selected as storm centers were the Ponsonby estate near Cork, the Vandaleur estate in County Clare, the Defrayne estate in Roscommon, the Massaure estate in County Louth, and the Smith Barry estate in Tipperary. These estates were selected as battle grounds because the landlords were treating the tenants badly, were very exacting and oppressive, and furnished excellent examples to illustrate the evils of the Irish land and tenantry system. Some of the tenants were behind in their rents and, being unable to pay, were threatened with eviction unless they settled on or before a certain date.

Arthur Hugh Smith Barry, the landlord who was selected as an awful example at Tipperary, is descended from the Earl of Barrymore, whose title expired when the direct male line became extinct forty or fifty years ago. He came into possession by inheritance of a large tract of land near Cork and another tract covering between eight and nine thousand acres in this vicinity, which paid him an annual revenue of £7,368. His first wife was a sister of the present Lord Dunraven. His second and present wife was Elizabeth Wadsworth Post, a sister of former Congressman James Wadsworth of Geneseo, N.Y., and was the widow of a Mr. Post at the time of her marriage with Mr. Barry in 1889. They have a beautiful home at Fota on Fota Island, in Cork Harbor, near Queenstown, and a town residence in Berkeley Square, London. Mr. Barry has been a member of parliament and has served the government in different capacities with great credit to himself and usefulness to his country. For that reason the old title of his family was revived in 1902 and he was elevated to the peerage as Lord Barrymore.

The courage and determination he exhibited during the fight that was made upon him by the Land League was one of the reasons for giving him the honor. The boycott was managed on behalf of the Land League by William O'Brien, then, as now, member of parliament for that district. Under the latter's direction between five and six hundred tenants of Mr. Barry stopped paying rent. Some were actually too poor to do so; others were perfectly able, but they all went in together and made a common cause and boycotted their landlord, who promptly took steps to evict them. Mr. O'Brien and other leaders of the Land League appealed to patriotic Irishmen all over the world and raised between £40,000 and £50,000--nearly $250,000--in America, Australia, Ireland, and elsewhere, with which they started to build a new town upon land belonging to Stafford O'Brien, who, by the way, is no relation of the member of parliament of the same name. Several blocks of tenement-houses were built of substantial materials and attractive appearance, and are models in their way. But when Mr. Barry got the machinery of the law in motion and wholesale evictions commenced, the managers put up cheap barracks of wood as rapidly as possible to accommodate those who were turned out of their homes.

There was a general and generous response to the appeal to the patriotism of Ireland, and people in this country who had no money gave material and labor to help the cause. Carpenters and stone masons, bricklayers, and other mechanics came to Tipperary from all parts of Ireland to work on the buildings, without wages, and within a short time all of the evicted tenants of the Barry estate were comfortably housed, free of rent, while his revenues ceased entirely and the boycott was complete. It was a significant illustration of the unity of purpose of the common people of Ireland; but, unfortunately, the leaders of the party quarreled before the demonstration was complete. The death of Charles S. Parnell in 1891, about eighteen months after the boycott was undertaken on the Barry estate, caused a split in the Irish party which continued until a few years ago. The effect of this division was to demoralize their followers at Tipperary, and the tenants of the Barry estate began gradually to slip back to their old homes and resume paying their rents. The houses at New Tipperary which were built at that time now belong very largely to Stafford O'Brien, who furnished the land upon which they were built. Others are still the property of the Land League, and the rent, which is collected by a committee, goes into the parliamentary fund.

Many people at Tipperary now declare that the "kick-up," as they call the quarrel between the leaders of the Land League, ruined the town, because it broke the boycott and compelled the tenants to surrender to the landlords, who have had them under their heels ever since. Several people told me that the "kick-up" ruined the butter business, but I could not get anyone to explain why. At any rate, Tipperary lost a great deal of its prosperity as well as its commercial importance immediately after that trouble, especially because it was followed by a large exodus to the United States. As many of the Barry tenants as could raise the money emigrated when the support of the Land League was withdrawn from them. They refused to stay and surrender to the landlords. All the young people in the county caught the emigration fever and left for the United States as fast as they could get money enough to buy steamship tickets. I was told that several of them had come back, bringing a good deal of money with them, and had bought farms in the neighborhood, but they soon became discontented. The experience of a few years in the United States unfits people for the primitive methods and the monotony of life in Ireland; and the eagerness of everybody to get to the United States is very significant. The jaunting car drivers, the hotel porters, the dining-room waiters, the chambermaids at the hotels, and everybody of the working class that a traveler comes in contact with, always ask questions about the expense of the journey, the probabilities of securing employment in the United States, and express their determination to emigrate as soon as they can.

Tipperary also claims the authorship of that ancient and beautiful old air, "The Wearing of the Green." It is one of the oldest of Irish melodies, but only modern words are sung to it now, and there are several versions. That which Henry Grattan Curran, who is an excellent authority, claims to be the original, was written at Tipperary and runs as follows:

"I met with Napper Tandy, And he took me by the hand, Saying how is old Ireland? And how does she stand? She's the most distressful country That ever yet was seen, And they're hanging men and women For the wearing of the green.

"I care not for the thistle, I care not for the rose, When bleak winds round us whistle Neither down nor crimson shows; But, like hope to him that's friendless, When no joy around is seen, O'er our graves with love that's endless Blooms our own immortal green."

The late Dion Boucicault used to sing another version in one of his plays, which he said was made over from a street ballad that he once heard in Dublin. He was not able to get all of the words and filled in what was lacking himself, as follows: