Ireland Stephens became a member of the Phoenix National and Literary Society, a club which had been founded at Skibereen by some young men, of whom the chief was Jeremiah Donovan, afterwards known as O'Donovan Rossa. Stephens, by holding out assurances of American support, persuaded these men to prepare for a rising, which was to deal a fatal blow at the supremacy of England. But the Government had kept their eye upon the movement, and on December 3, 1858, a viceregal proclamation was issued warning the country that a dangerous conspiracy was afoot. A series of raids was made a few days afterwards in various towns in Ireland upon men known or suspected to be members of the Phoenix Society, and twenty persons were arrested. Nothing, however, of any importance was brought to light at the trials beyond the fact that a secret organization had in truth existed, that drillings had regularly taken place, and that a shadowy being known as the "Hawk," and generally supposed to be James Stephens, had issued his orders and been looked upon as leader. The offenders, with one exception, were treated with lenity. Daniel O'Sullivan, after being brilliantly defended by Thomas O'Hagan, who became later on Lord Chancellor of Ireland, was sentenced to ten years' penal servitude; but the other prisoners after eight months' imprisonment agreed to plead guilty, and were released in their own recognizances of £200 to come up for judgment on a fortnight's notice. Thus ended the Phoenix conspiracy. In addition to its whimsical character it had lacked internal cohesion and the indispensable momentum from outside, and the local leaders having fallen into the hands of the Government, the empty bubble burst and left scarcely any record behind it. Stephens himself fled to America, and eventually died in that obscurity from which it is a pity that he had ever emerged. Meanwhile O'Mahony had been spreading his revolutionary propaganda in America, and a secret association, of which perhaps the Emmet Monument Association had laid the foundation, was established there in 1858, called the Fenian, or as it had been first known in Ireland the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood. This body was founded in Dublin on March 17, 1858, chiefly by Stephens, another prominent and early member being Thomas Clarke Luby. The oath of membership ran-" In the presence of Almighty God, I solemnly swear allegiance to the Irish Republic, now virtually established, and to take up arms when called on to defend its independence and integrity. I also swear to yield implicit obedience to the commands of my superior officers." O'Mahony had been the first to suggest the old Celtic title of Fenian, which he borrowed from the half-mythical chivalry of the Feni, companions of Fioun, the son of Coul, whose deeds of valour had stirred the patriotism and fired the imagination of prehistoric Ireland. In 1861 the funeral of Terence Bellew M'Manus, one of the insurgents of 1848, who had escaped from his Australian prison in 1851 and died in America, took place in Dublin. The body was borne to its last resting-place in Glasnevin in the presence of a vast multitude of silent mourners whose hearts bled less for the deceased than for the hopeless cause he had suffered for. This tribute to an idea-for the idea was wrapped in the graveclothes of the departed rebel-gave an extraordinary impetus to the Fenian movement in Ireland. The imaginations of Irishmen were struck by this reinterment of 1848, and from the dust of M'Manus there floated a spirit like the soft premonitory breeze before a hurricane. In November 1863 Stephens had founded a paper in Dublin called the Irish People, under the direction of John O'Leary, Thomas Clarke Luby, a Protestant, and Charles Joseph Kickham. This journal, which played a somewhat similar part in the Fenian movement to that played by the United Irishman in the history of Young Ireland, openly advocated rebellion, and contemptuously described the methods of the Nation newspaper, another old-time organ of the Young Irish Party, as having always led to discreditable failure. A struggle for freedom was meanwhile shaking another continent. The cry of the slave against the tyrant had at last been heard; and a million of men had waded through their blood to answer it. As the rebels of 1798 drew courage from 1789, so did the conspirators of 1865-7 from 1861. The spirit of liberty was abroad in the world, and the enfranchisement of the negro might be Ireland's opportunity. Stephens, O'Mahony, and Mitchel were the most prominent leaders of the new movement. Their object was the formation of a great league of Irishmen banded together against the hated British rule and those whom they considered the ultimate and primary excuse for that rule, the Irish landlords. No means were to be omitted, no instruments spurned, however atrocious; and the germs of a gigantic conspiracy were created, which had its separate centres in America, Great Britain, and Ireland. There was a conspicuous similarity between it and the conspiracy of the United Irishmen ; they both aimed at the subversion of British supremacy, and were prepared to effect it through the medium of agrarian and any other outrage.1 1 Although their intended methods were infamous, the rebels had ample cause to be discontented. Bright said in a speech about this time "Bear in mind that I am not speaking of Poland suffering under the conquest of Russia.... I am not speaking about Hungary or of Venice as she was under the rule of Austria, or of the Greeks under the dominion of the Turk, but I am speaking of Ireland-part of the United Kingdom-part of that which boasts itself to be the most civilized and the most Christian nation in the world." Dissensions, however, soon arose in the camp; the leaders became estranged from one another, and finally broke out into open feud. At the beginning of September 1865 information was conveyed to the Government by a man named Pierce Nagle, who was in the service of the Irish People, that a rising was being planned, and on September 15 a sudden raid was made on the office of that newspaper. The plant was seized, the paper suppressed, and O'Leary, Luby, and O'Donovan Rossa were arrested. Two months later, on November 11, Stephens was taken, although he shortly afterwards effected his escape,1 and with him were arrested Kickham, Hugh Brophy, and Edward Duffy. The abortive conspiracy was finally snuffed in Ireland by the Constabulary putting down some bodies of half-armed men in Kerry and Limerick, and by the capture of a small Fenian party on the outskirts of Dublin. The rising in fact was as signal a failure as the one of 1848. The sentences upon the prisoners were harsh-Luby and O'Leary were sentenced to penal servitude for twenty years, and O'Donovan Rossa to penal servitude for life-and their severity appeared all the more odious in the eyes of the Irish people, inasmuch as one of the two presiding judges in the case was the hated apostate, Sadleir, the man who had been bribed to desert his associates, and who had actually been charged with having in the election of 1852 openly recommended assassination. On the 31st of May, 1866, the Fenians in America invaded Canada and occupied Fort Erie, but their undertaking stopped where it had begun, as the United States stepped in to preserve the neutrality of the frontier and arrested the leaders of the raid. In England the Fenian movement assumed a graver complexion. A raid upon Chester Castle in 1866 was only frustrated by a mere accident, the plot being betrayed by the informer Corydon, and the situation wore so ominous an aspect that the Habeas Corpus Act was suspended.2 In the early months of 1867 came the general Fenian rising in Ireland, but the Government had all the threads of the conspiracy in their hands, and the insurrection which never assumed any great proportions was almost immediately suppressed. In February 1867 a Bill for the further suspension of Habeas Corpus had received the Royal Assent, and it was again suspended in May. On May 3, 1867, a petition was presented by Bright in the Lower House praying that the sentences on the Fenian prisoners might be revised, and the latter treated as 1 Stephens escaped from Richmond Prison by the aid of a band of Fenians under Thomas Kelly, who was subsequently rescued in 1867 from the Manchester prison His escape was largely due to John Breslin, an infirmary warder, Byrne, an assistant warder, and John Devoy. van. 2 Appendix LVI, extract from speech by John Bright. political prisoners, but it was rejected, John Stuart Mill being the only other member who expressed himself in agreement with it. On the 18th of September two prisoners, named Kelly and Deasy, were rescued by Fenians at Manchester whilst on their way to the borough gaol at Salford. One of the constables in charge of the van, Police-Sergeant Brett, was killed, and five of the rescuers-Allen, Larkin, Michael O'Brien, Maguire, and Condon-were captured and sentenced to death. Although the most energetic attempts were made to obtain a reprieve, three of the latter-Allen, Larkin, and O'Brien (or Gould-the name under which he was tried) were hanged by order of the authorities in the presence of 12,000 spectators, and "Martyrs' Day" is still solemnized in Ireland and in America in their memory.1 The other two condemned men, Maguire and Condon, were pardoned, it being proved that the former had had no hand whatever in the affair. James Cahill, another of the rescuers, who was supposed by many to have been the man who actually killed Brett, escaped from England two months after the incident, and died at Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1902. On the top of this came the Clerkenwell outrage. A Fenian of the name of Burke was confined in the house of detention there, and a friend outside, named Barrett, had determined to attempt a rescue by blowing in a portion of the prison wall and so affording an exit. A barrel of gunpowder was with this intent rolled against the wall of the building. When all was in readiness, on the 13th of December, 1867, a fuse projecting from it was lighted, and with a report which was heard several miles from the spot and which still reverberates in history, the mass of powder exploded. Although the wall was two feet thick and twenty feet high, a breach was made in it twenty feet wide at the bottom and seventy feet broad at the top, whilst several houses near the spot were entirely destroyed. Six persons were killed outright, sixteen expired soon afterwards, and at least 120 were more or less seriously injured. Fifteen of the latter lost their eyes, legs, or arms. Forty mothers were prematurely confined; twenty of their babes died, and the rest came into the world dwarfed, or otherwise deformed. Two women besides went mad. The wantonness and thoughtlessness of the crime was shown by the fact that the yard inside the damaged wall was the exercise ground of the prisoners, so that had the latter been there at the time of the explosion, many of them, including perhaps the friend whom Barrett had hoped to rescue, must have inevitably perished. This last outrage and the Manchester rescue brought the Disestablishment of the Irish Church, as Gladstone said, "within the region of practical politics." 1 Appendix LVIA, verses by A. C. Swinburne. The Habeas Corpus Suspension Act had, in view of the Fenian movement, been continued in 1867, for as the misery of the Irish people was unbounded, it was determined to make their punishment as severe.1 On the 10th of March, 1868, John Francis Maguire, member for Cork, moved for a Select Committee to consider the state of the country, and on the 16th, during the debate on the motion, Gladstone said "He (Lord Mayor) told us that the Irish in Australia and the Irish of Canada had no Fenian instincts or impulses, and if that be so, does it not compel us to ask the question, what is the difference between Ireland and Australia, what is the difference between Ireland and Canada, which gives one character to the Irishman in Canada, and another character to the Irishman in Ireland? Well, sir, there are these differences-and grave enough they appear to me to be. Neither in Canada nor in Australia does an Irishman labour under the slightest difficulty with regard to the legal security he enjoys for the fruits of his industry and labour, nor is he confronted by the spirit, or by the remaining institutions of a hostile Ascendency. We remember the words, the earnest and touching words with which the noble Earl (the Chief Secretary for Ireland) closed his address, when he expressed a hope, and uttered a call inviting the Irish to union and loyalty. Sir, that is our object, too, but I am afraid that, as to the means, the differences between us are still profound; and it is idle, it is mocking, to use words unless we can sustain them with corresponding substance. That substance can be supplied only by the unreserved devotion of our efforts now, in this, perhaps, last stage of the Irish crisis, to remove the scandal and mischief which have long weakened and afflicted the empire. For that work I trust strength will be given us. If we be prudent men, I hope we shall endeavour, as far as in us lies, to make some provision for a contingent, a doubtful and probably a dangerous future. If we be chivalrous men, I trust we shall endeavour to wipe away all those stains which the civilized world has for ages seen, or seemed to see, on the shield of England in her treatment of Ireland. If we be compassionate men, I hope we shall now, once for all listen to the tale of woe which comes from her, and the reality of which, if not its justice, is testified by the continuous migration of her people; that we shall 'Raze out the written troubles from her brain, Pluck from her memory the rooted sorrow.' But, above all, if we be just men, we shall go forward in the name of truth and right, bearing this in mind, that when the case is proved, and the hour is come, justice delayed is justice denied."" Satisfied at having brought the Irish question under discussion and overjoyed that another great orator had enlisted in 1 Appendix LVII, extract from speech by John Bright. |