–SEVEN–

New Directions, 1828-40

Though Britain be safe from the incursions of foreign foes, and though peace and prosperity encompass our sea-girt isle, yet is she in imminent danger as long as she nourishes in her bosom men who under the garbled form of liberality, with ‘Emancipation’ in their mouths, but contemplated ‘ascendency’ [sic] in their hearts, aim at no less than the utter subversion of the British constitution.

The Watchman, 3 February 1827¹

We found some caution at first, but on a further acquaintance we were well received, especially by the clergy, who opened their pulpits to us and came in numbers to our meetings. No religious society ever attracted such crowds in that country. We left the best of the clergy preparing to study the controversy. From what I saw, I am convinced there is a splendid and unfathomed mine of good Protestant feeling in England which only requires to be well worked. When I spoke of the persecution suffered by Protestant clergy and people, I excited a feeling that must be seen to be understood.

M.G. BERESFORD²

In the story of the Church, the landed aristocracy may see their own perils predicted. Because the clergy of Ireland had not opportunity or power to defend themselves, their rights have been violated and injuries unredressed … Aristocracy should take counsel. They are a colony in a hostile country, and if not closely and effectively united, they are lost!

Dublin University Magazine, October 1833³

RETRENCHMENT AND REDEFINITION

The ideological and political showdown of the 1820s had consequences for denominational relations that can hardly be overestimated. The Catholic Association’s strategy of popular mobilization, particularly the collection of the ‘Catholic rent’, proved remarkably successful despite all attempts of the government to outlaw its activities. When the Association was suppressed by an act of parliament in March 1825, it was reconstituted by O’Connell as the New Catholic Association and succeeded in having four pro-Emancipation candidates elected to parliament in the general election of 1826. When O’Connell himself was elected as a member of parliament for County Clare in the famous by-election of 1828, the implication was clear: as a Catholic he would have to be allowed to take his seat, or his success could be multiplied all over the country in the next general election. The prospect in that event was a withdrawal of Catholic members from Westminster and possible civil war in Ireland. Against this situation, Wellington yielded, and the Catholic Relief Act was passed and came into operation in April 1829.⁴

The sustained momentum of the Emancipation campaign had the predictable effect of reinforcing ultra-Protestant sentiments. The natural alliance between the defenders of the Protestant interest in politics and the evangelical organizations became even more sharply defined. In 1828 it was cemented by the foundation of the Brunswick Clubs, a voluntary organization militantly dedicated to preventing the passage of an Emancipation bill. The men behind the formation of the clubs were those whose names were synonymous with the Reformation cause, including Lord Farnham, Lord Roden and Thomas Lefroy. Their tactics included the popular mobilization of Protestants in the border counties and a propaganda blitz to inform public opinion in Britain about the dangers facing the Protestant community in Ireland.

The depth of popular Protestant hostility to the Emancipation campaign was revealed during the famous ‘march on Ulster’ in 1828. On this occasion O’Connell unwisely commissioned a Belfast journalist, John Lawless, to lead a non-violent pilgrimage of thousands of Catholics from the southern counties for the purpose of holding political meetings to mobilize the Catholics of Ulster behind the Emancipation banner. As the marchers approached the border counties, armed bands of Orange supporters massed to prevent their passage. Only O’Connell’s sensible decision to call off the march prevented bloodshed on a large scale, as there were not enough troops in the area to keep the peace.⁵ Given the overwhelming numerical superiority of the Catholics and the avowed militancy of armed Protestants, it seemed to Peel and Wellington that civil war in Ireland would be inevitable if Emancipation were not granted. They struck a deal with O’Connell that if the forty-shilling freehold voters on whose power the entire Emancipation movement had been carried forward were disenfranchised, an Emancipation bill would be passed.⁶

The passage of the Catholic Relief Act brought one phase of the Catholic question to a close, but it did not inaugurate religious peace in Ireland. On the contrary, Catholics became more militant in asserting their numerical superiority in civil and religious affairs, and Protestants ever more embattled and disposed to close denominational ranks against the threat of Catholic ascendancy. The first salvo of Catholic resurgence, predictably, was manifested in the anti-tithe movement, which began to assume serious momentum in the autumn of 1830. The movement began in Graiguenamanagh, County Carlow, with the refusal of a Catholic priest and relative of Bishop Doyle to pay tithe to the local Protestant clergyman, who was known to be a passionate supporter of the Reformation movement. His gesture was widely supported among the local community and the movement soon spread to the surrounding counties. The movement was not supported by the Catholic Church nor by Daniel O’Connell, but it was vehemently defended by Bishop Doyle, whose fulminations against tithe had been a central feature of his writings throughout the 1820s and whose hallmark rhetorical flourish ‘may your hatred of tithe be as lasting as your love of justice’ had provided the campaign with its most popular slogan.⁷ When military force proved ineffectual against popular resistance, a consensus emerged on the reform of the system to make both the collection and payment of tithe the responsibility of the landlord class. This was preceded by the Church Temporalities Act of 1833, which restructured the diocesan system and reduced the number of archbishoprics. That the government was willing to back such legislation was at one and the same time a recognition that the Church of Ireland was an institution separate from the Church of England, and an ultimate admission that it would never become the church of the majority population, in other words a recognition of the failure of the Reformation crusade. It was the first nail in the coffin of the Church of Ireland that would culminate in its disestablishment in 1869.

The launching of the anti-tithe campaign so soon after the Emancipation victory deepened fears about Catholic resurgence and its ultimate objective. Strident defenders of Protestant supremacy such as Henry Maxwell, heir to the Farnham Estate, and the Rev. Hans Hamilton of Knocktopher, County Kilkenny, were convinced that the political activism of the priests was part of a Jesuitical scheme that had been plotted years in advance to bring down not only the Protestant presence in Ireland but the entire British empire.⁸ The dividends that accrued to the evangelical movement on this account were enormous. Preachers and polemicists were afforded a platform from which to voice their fears of Catholic ascendancy and unquestionably attracted a great deal of moral and financial support that they might not otherwise have received, particularly from Britain.

Insofar as the ultimate success of the Emancipation movement and the progress of the anti-tithe campaign affected the progress of the Reformation movement, however, it was confined mainly to the area of public opinion. The granting of Emancipation and the Church Temporalities Act did not in themselves affect the programs that were already underway to convert Catholics, or if they did, it was on the credit side of attracting further support for the work of the evangelicals. The reform of the education system, however, which followed on the heels of the Emancipation act, dealt a death blow to what had become the central foundation of the evangelical mission. With the advent of a national system of primary schools funded by public money, the evangelicals were deprived of their most important bridgehead to the primary source through which they sought to effect their ends—the vast majority of children of school age.

Long before the setting up of the National Board of Education in 1831, it was understood that the Catholic hierarchy would never agree to the attendance of Catholic children at government-sponsored schools in which the reading of the Bible without note or comment was obligatory. The formidable lay and clerical opposition launched by O’Connell and MacHale in the early 1820s, and subsequently upheld by Bishop Doyle and the Catholic Association, succeeded in demolishing the KPS’s system over this issue. In 1824 the government had established a commission of inquiry to investigate the entire range of educational agencies currently operating in Ireland.⁹ Between 1824 and 1827 this commission produced a total of nine reports based on the evidence of witnesses who represented the various educational interests. The first and most substantive of the reports, released in 1825, clearly revealed the Catholic hierarchy’s fear that ‘a combined and systematic attempt’ was underway to wean schoolchildren away from the Catholic faith, not only by the more aggressive of the evangelical agencies, such as LHS, but also by the KPS, and that in reality there was little difference between them. The commissioners noted that

this confusion has in some degree arisen from the circumstances that the same persons in several instances take a prominent and active part in the management of more than one of these societies, and the Roman Catholics have concluded that their objects are alike in all.¹⁰

The bishops’ allegations were borne out by the unapologetic admission of certain agencies, particularly the LHS, that they were indeed educating Catholic children with a view to their ultimate conversion to the Protestant faith. It was the opinion of the commissioners after surveying the evidence that neither threats nor rewards could induce Catholic parents to send their children to schools of which their clergy disapproved.¹¹

The debate over state-sponsored education continued for another six years, by which time the government agreed to support a system in which religious education would be provided by the pastors of the respective denominations. This system was originally envisaged as nondenominational in character, but since the management of the schools at the local level was effectively placed in the hands of that clergyman whose denomination was overwhelmingly represented in the school, it did not take long for sectarian interests to assert themselves. ‘The main result of the introduction of the National System’, as S.J. Connolly has neatly concluded, ‘was to bring about a dramatic increase in the educational resources of the Irish Catholic Church.’¹²

The government’s decision to develop the National System destroyed the prospects of the evangelical educational agencies in one blow. In the first place, they were deprived of their most important and reliable source of income. They were also, needless to say, deprived of pupils. The LHS and the KPS rapidly fell into decline. Many of their schools simply applied for funding to the National Board and refashioned their objectives under the aegis of the new system. Others aligned themselves with projects such as the one currently underway in the Kingscourt District. The Irish Society and the Scripture Readers’ Society appear to have followed a similar route and became heavily involved in the experiment with colonies in the west, which, from the 1830s onwards, began to absorb the energies of the evangelical movement generally.

The demise of the educational societies, however, does not appear to have affected the popularity of the evangelical movement among the Protestant population. The figures available for the growth of the HBS provide one measure of this popularity. From a total of 147 contributory institutions in 1822, the number increased to over 600 by the early 1830s.

Comparative surveys of the distribution of these societies on a county basis give some indication of how the system had set down roots in the provinces. The areas in question, Westmeath and east Galway, occupy a fertile stretch of the midlands on each side of the River Shannon, and the towns represented are either county towns or substantial market centres, with a sprinkling of smaller villages in each case.

In addition, the founding of the Established Church Home Mission Society in 1828 heralded the formal commitment of the Church of Ireland to the ideals of the evangelical wing. Its main function appears to have been the organizing of preaching tours and itinerancies for ministers supportive of the cause. Noel’s account of the Home Mission in 1836 gives the impression that the Protestant community throughout the country was alive with activity:

Besides a diocesan mission in the diocese of Meath and another in the diocese of Tuam, there are now ten missionary circuits, travelled by above 100 zealous ministers of the Church of Ireland, the majority being incumbents. These circuits extend through Donegal, Londonderry, and Down; they occupy Fermanagh, Monaghan, and Cavan; they come into Westmeath and Meath; they fill Kildare; they run from Sligo across Ireland, through Athlone and Carlow to Wexford; they extend along the south-western coast from Wexford to Youghal; and lastly, from Youghal they pass through Killarney to the remotest parts of Kerry and through Charleville to the mouth of the Shannon. Each circuit has about 24 stations and almost all the stations are visited once a fortnight; so that now the mission sends a pious clergyman every fortnight to about 240 stations, scattered across the four provinces. Each missionary is on the circuit for a fortnight; he has usually 24 places to visit, preaches two sermons daily, and is conducted to the different stations in a car or gig at the expense of the mission. The missionaries do not at present reach the Roman Catholics or the great landowners, their work lying chiefly among the smaller gentry and the middle class of Protestants. Most of all are they useful to the clergyman in whose parishes they labour. If a clergyman is devoted to his work, they confirm his doctrine, silence his opponents, who find how many able men think with him, teach even ungodly persons to respect his ministry, and carry conviction to the minds of some he could not previously impress. If he is a good man but indolent, he is usually roused into activity. If he be ignorant of the gospel and careless in his life, he stands rebuked by their zeal, and through it, may both himself and those who hear him be saved from eternal death. In this manner the talent and piety of a minister of the Irish church, instead of being monopolised by the 60 or 100 Protestants in his own parish, become subservient to the welfare of many congregations in many towns.¹⁵

During the late 1820s and the early 1830s the Kingscourt District remained the most successful example of the combined influence of landlord and clergy to evangelize at the grassroots level, and it was in Kingscourt that new initiatives were undertaken to expand the movement to other parts of the country and to consolidate gains already made. The most significant of these initiatives was the design to introduce Protestant colonists, often to lands from which Catholics had been evicted, in order to maintain numerical superiority. Part of the idea behind the desire to establish colonies was the fear that Protestants were going to emigrate en masse because of the threat of Catholic ascendancy. It was not in Ulster, however, but in some of the most remote districts of the west that the colony movement took root most firmly. This was the result of a combination of factors, not least the presence in the archbishopric of Tuam of the most evangelical-minded prelate of the Church of Ireland, the Rev. Power le Poer Trench.

ARCHBISHOP TRENCH AND THE EVANGELICAL MOVEMENT IN THE WEST

Like many of his evangelical contemporaries, the Rev. Power le Poer Trench was of Huguenot descent. The family had originated in the Seigneurie of La Tranche in the traditionally Protestant territory of Poitou, but had fled the religious persecutions of the late sixteenth century and settled in the north of England. One branch of the family acquired estates in Ireland during the confiscations of the seventeenth century, first in Cavan and later in east Galway, where the family seat was located, at Garbally near Ballinasloe.¹⁶ The history of the Trench family in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries reveals an extraordinary record of success obtained largely through clerical preferment and support for the Union and the ultra-Protestant cause. The main protagonist in this spiral of progress was William Power Keating. He had married Anne Gardiner, the sister of Viscount Mountjoy, in 1762. He served as an MP for County Galway from 1769 to 1797, and in 1798 he was elevated to the peerage with the title of Baron Kilconnell. According to Michael Davitt, this was a reward for his services to Earl Camden in connection with the 1798 Rebellion. In 1801 he was made 1st earl of Clancarty, allegedly for his role in suppressing the Rebellion, but more likely for his support of the Union.¹⁷ One of his daughters married into the Gregory family and another into the La Touches. William Power Keating’s eldest son, Richard, succeeded to the earldom, while his second son, Power, became archbishop of Tuam and another son, Charles, was made archdeacon of Ardagh.¹⁸

Depending on which source is used to assess contemporary opinion, the Trench family was looked upon in east Galway either as patriotic benefactors or reactionary tyrants. Several of the younger members of the family, including the future archbishop (who was a captain in the yeomanry) and his brother the archdeacon, were involved in the bloody purge of suspected rebels in the aftermath of 1798, the ferocity of which shocked even hardened campaigners like Lord Cornwallis. One of the most notorious incidents to have survived in the popular memory regarding the family’s record for cruelty was associated with Charles Trench, future archdeacon of Ardagh, who, as captain of the Galway militia stationed in Cork, had a woman named Winifred Hynes flogged in public for the crime of stealing a candlestick. When the soldier appointed to the task balked at the order, the archdeacon is said to have torn the clothes from the victim’s back and administered the lash himself in the full view of her husband.¹⁹ Even if the more gory details of this story are apocryphal there is abundant evidence in the poetry of Raftery of the odium attached to the Trench family by the Catholics of east Galway. On the other hand, the archbishop’s biographer, Joseph D’Arcy Sirr, recounts the statements of several Catholics who testified that he was the most fair-minded and charitable of men.²⁰

At the outset of his career as a clergyman, Dr Power le Poer Trench was not kindly disposed to the evangelical cause, though he apparently established a reputation for attention to duty that would have rivaled that of the most conscientious evangelical. In 1802 he was appointed to the bishopric of Waterford and Lismore, and immediately set about introducing reforms in what had previously been a much neglected diocese. Chief among these reforms was the maintenance and improvement of church buildings, the regularizing of church services and the foundation of a widows’ fund for the wives of poor clergymen.²¹ In 1810 he was transferred to the diocese of Elphin, where he upheld his reputation as a conscientious administrator and a friend of the poor. He personally sponsored industrial schemes in spinning and weaving, and also the establishment of a dispensary and a school, efforts that were generally appreciated by local Catholics, especially during the famine and typhus epidemic of 1816–17.²² The dispensary physician, a Catholic named Michael Dillon, gave the following account of Dr Trench’s benevolence during this period:

The years of 1816–17 were years of great distress. Famine and pestilence stalked over the land. Elphin felt severely their effects, having a wretched population, without a market, without business of any kind, and very remote from turbary [i.e. peat bogs, or a fuel supply]. The poor of the town and its precincts were supplied with fuel, blankets, clothing, plenty of milk, etc. by his Lordship. The wandering beggars, who were attracted to the place by the report of this beneficence, had food such as soup, rice, plentifully dispensed to them; at the distribution of which he and some members of his family frequently attended. He also provided a place for the sick poor labouring under typhus, had them attended to by the dispensary physician, and supplied with every requisite.²³

Interestingly, Dillon went on to note the change in religious feelings that overtook Trench while he was bishop of Elphin, and added a comment on his motivations:

When his lordship first came to Elphin, that weak and mistaken zeal for proselytism, which has obtained the approval of some otherwise good men, was not much encouraged by him; but at the close of his sojourn here he seemed to partake a little of that religious feeling, which appears to me not so well calculated to secure the happiness of mankind, as its advocates on either side seem to think. He thought and acted, I believe, from the dictates and impulse of a good conscience. What he said and felt arose not from any selfish or mean principle, but were, I believe, intended to promote the religious and moral good of his neighbours.²⁴

Two incidents occurred in 1816 that helped to push Trench into a closer identification with the ideals of the evangelical movement. The first was the death of his beloved sister, Lady Emily, the fervently religious wife of Robert La Touche. Her death in childbirth at the age of twenty-seven deeply affected the entire Trench household, especially her brother the bishop, who had attended her deathbed. As an acquaintance later revealed, ‘in watering her soul as God’s minister, his own soul was indeed blessedly watered. This, I know, was a season he never forgot. He frequently spoke of it to me.’²⁵ Shortly after this, he engaged in an exchange of opinion with Archdeacon William Digby of Elphin, as a result of which he wholeheartedly embraced evangelicalism as his guiding inspiration in civil and religious affairs.

The Rev. William Digby was one of those energetic clergymen whose work at the parochial level by the second decade of the century was turning the area around Boyle in County Roscommon into a powerful local expression of a spiritual ‘awakening’ among the Protestant community. Born into a long-established clerical family in the area (his grandfather had been bishop of Elphin) he assumed his duties as archdeacon of Elphin in 1809. According to Maiben Motherwell, the biographer of Albert Blest, Digby was ‘instrumental in introducing real religion into the upper classes of society to an extent hitherto unknown’ in the region.²⁶ Certainly, the Lorton family of Rockingham lent the whole weight of their social and economic eminence to the campaign. Since many of the Lorton family’s marriage connections in other parts of the country were active evangelicals, their collective involvement appears to have been a family affair, as indeed was true of virtually all the nobility and gentry associated with the movement. Digby’s energy and enthusiasm, backed by the social and economic clout of the Lorton family, made the area around Boyle into a centre that radiated with the excitement of religious revivalism.

Shortly after Dr Trench was transferred to Elphin, the diocese was alive with the evangelistic zeal of energetic young curates, including the Rev. Robert McGhee, who went on to become famous as a controversial orator, and the Rev. Charles Seymour, the apostle of evangelicalism in Connemara. These men owed their promotion to the influence of Archdeacon Digby and Viscount Lorton. During the winter of 1816–17, at the instigation of a clergyman who was a tutor in the Lorton household, clerical meetings for ministers of the diocese were begun on a regular basis. They were fully sanctioned by Bishop Trench and proved an enormous success with clergy and laity alike. Digby’s description of the involvement of local Protestants in these monthly meetings is one of the most valuable accounts of the momentum that accompanied the spread of the evangelical movement in the provinces:

For now clergymen from all parts of the diocese began to attend, and the few that did not were the exceptions. The word of God increased remarkably in the neighbourhood, and the number of disciples (especially among the gentry) multiplied, so that there was scarce a great company of the parochial clergy which had not one or more of its members with us; and a great number of the parochial clergy became obedient to the faith. At our clerical meetings there was nothing done through strife or vainglory, nor were there any vain janglings about unprofitable questions; but each came prepared to receive or to impart what good they could. The happy result of this was that our pulpits generally uttered the same sound, and that no uncertain sound … And those meetings, having led to a closer examination of scripture or the articles, liturgy, and formularies of our church, and by the solemn promises made by our clergy at their ordination, proved a blessing unto many—a revival of religion took place, and vital piety gradually spread among clergy and people.²⁷

Archdeacon Digby’s greatest contribution to these developments lay in the personal influence he wielded over the proclivities of his diocesan superior. Shortly before he was transferred to Tuam, Trench acknowledged his indebtedness to the archdeacon in this regard:

He is full of zeal in God’s service, and I confess that if it pleases God ever to make me a Christian, he has been much the means of my hitherto weak and feeble conversion. If ever I shall be a child of God, I shall, humbly speaking, in a great measure be his son in the gospel.²⁸

Trench’s experience of evangelicalism while he was bishop of Elphin is crucial to our understanding of his record as archbishop of Tuam. There he had direct exposure to the revival in the Church of Ireland. He endeavoured to make clergy and laity alike aware of their duty to improve the moral and spiritual welfare of all Christian subjects in Ireland, Catholic as well as Protestant. He had also sanctioned cooperation between the Church of Ireland community and the Dissenting evangelicals associated with the LHS in Sligo.²⁹ His accession to the see of Tuam opened enormous and exciting possibilities for the expansion of evangelicalism throughout a diocese that was undoubtedly the most backward in the country, in terms of both the material welfare of its Catholic population and the manpower of the Catholic Church.³⁰ His coming brought with it dramatic change. The procurement of livings for zealous curates, the enlistment of landlords and other lay Protestants (especially magistrates, doctors, coastguards and military officers), and naturally the introduction of Bible schools and scripture readers were now pursued on a grander scale in Connaught than they had ever been in any other part of the country.

Immediately upon succeeding to the archbishopric of Tuam in 1819 Trench turned his attention to the advancement of those interests that had occupied so much of his energy at Elphin. Clerical meetings, or ‘diocesan synods’ as one commentator called them, were scheduled for the third Thursday of every month. Attendance at these meetings by ministers from all over the archdiocese was often so heavy that accommodation began to be a problem. The education of the poor, especially the promotion of Sunday schools, the repair of church buildings and the organization of a widows’ fund, were likewise the objects of his concern. But the crisis that above all absorbed his attention and energy very shortly after his transfer was the famine that struck the western counties in the summer of 1822.

The failure of the potato harvest in 1821 had left the peasantry of the west facing starvation in the following spring, without either crops for consumption or seed for planting. The response of Archbishop Trench to this calamitous situation was both swift and effective, and probably without equal in the records of episcopal charity anywhere in the British Isles. Indeed, the personage with whom he was most frequently and eulogistically compared was Bishop Belzunce of Marseilles (immortalized by Alexander Pope), who had ‘walked through the valley of the shadow of death’ ministering to his parishioners during the plague that struck that city in 1720. Trench personally assumed the responsibility of travelling to the most afflicted areas and reporting on conditions to the newspapers and the government. Besides contributing to relief efforts out of his own pocket, he supervised the distribution of aid from outside sources, especially that of the London Tavern Committee, an organization specifically committed to the relief of famine in the west. In May and June 1822 he visited the western parts of County Mayo around Castlebar, Newport and Westport, and made the following report to the London organization:

Here, much fever, dysentery, and cholera prevail. I have, everywhere I went, and I presided at all their committees, advised their more extended relief, and to endeavour to keep as many alive as they can for one fortnight to three weeks, when I was assured large further supplies would be sent, from the strong representation I made to the government. I wrote on Tuesday last to Mr. Goulburn such a statement as could only be equalled by the scenes I have since seen. In short, sir, if thousands are not immediately sent into these counties, particularly to Mayo and the West of Galway, without the fear of contradiction, I say large proportions must die! It is now become so bad, that it would be folly to talk about immediate employment. The people in general are too weak to work, and must be fed and strengthened gradually before employment could be available. If our government has not sufficient funds to relieve this most extraordinary demand, I hope they will again apply to parliament for a liberal supply. There is no time to discuss the matter; our case cannot be met by ordinary rules or reasonings. If we are not supplied, we must die. If we are promptly supplied, many may yet be saved. I SHALL LIVE AMONG THESE FAMISHING PEOPLE TILL THE SUMMER IS OVER, when I pray that the Lord may bless us with a plentiful harvest; FOR ALTHOUGH I CAN DO THEM NO GOOD, I THINK IT CHEERS THEM TO SEE ONE ANXIOUSLY INQUIRING ABOUT THEM, and it encourages the gentlemen (who indeed in most parts are doing their job well) to go on in their work of mercy.³¹

Throughout July and August the archbishop laboured unceasingly on behalf of famine victims in the Tuam area and in Galway city, which was being swept by a fever epidemic. The dispersal of aid in outlying regions he entrusted to local relief committees, in most cases supervised by Protestant clergymen, among whom the evangelical Archdeacon Thomas Grace of Westport was distinguished by his dedication.³² But the cooperation of the Catholic clergy was likewise not in short supply, and their gratitude to Trench was expressed on several occasions. On 3 August 1822 a Catholic priest in Galway informed the local newspaper that Archbishop Trench had entered every wretched cabin in that part of his parish known as Bohermore, a suburb on the main Dublin road outside Galway city. Trench comforted the inmates and promised that ‘their days of bitterness and trial would shortly pass away, and plenty and comfort be their future lot’. This was no idle promise on the archbishop’s part. When the crisis of the famine finally passed its peak (relief provisions had kept it from assuming catastrophic proportions), the first project to occupy his attention was the development of cottage industries based on spinning and weaving throughout Galway and Mayo.³³

Exposure to the actual conditions of everyday life among the peasantry of the west had a profound effect on Archbishop Trench. His heroic labours on their behalf during the terrible summer of 1822 created for him a bond of attachment that embraced the social as well as the spiritual aspects of their well-being. At one point he came dangerously close to identifying the true source of their misery, but his intellectual and spiritual disposition and his role as a leading representative of the Church of Ireland precluded any radical demands that the existing social and political system should be overhauled in favour of a more equitable distribution of the sources of wealth. Thus the most that he could achieve was to intercede with the government on behalf of the unfortunate peasantry and to exert his own energies to the full in contributing to their relief. His awareness of these limitations is clearly revealed in correspondence addressed to the London Tavern Committee in August 1822:

At all times a large proportion of our peasantry have no beds, little or no covering at night, a few miserable articles of furniture, and clothing scarcely fit for decency; wretched hovels—some without any gardens and some with a few perches, for which of course they must be under some rent. I am now speaking from my own knowledge. There is not regular employment for one-quarter of our labouring poor, and the wages are six pence, eight pence, or ten pence per day, with which they are to pay their rent, subsist, and clothe their families, provide fuel, etc … Those whose cases were a little improved by possessing something are most extensively reduced from the pressure of the present famine; they have sold their clothes, their blankets, their furniture, their pigs, horses, cows, sheep—in short—every article upon the earth, to procure food in the early part of the current distress and to avoid their seeking relief by public or private alms … In relieving much of the want I have stated as arising from the state of this particular year, one great difficulty occurs to me. Most of these unhappy people are in considerable arrears to their landlords. Much danger is to be apprehended that, were you now to replace such articles as they may have sold in order to procure for themselves and their families’ food, they would be seized for the payment of the rent, and thus your funds would not mend their condition, but go into the landlords’ pockets, a class of people who no doubt have a right to the rent for their land, and who are very great sufferers from the present distressed state of the times.³⁴

The archbishop’s efforts did not go unappreciated by local Catholics. In his own locality the country people bestowed on him the traditional gesture of gratitude by collectively harvesting his crops. When he got word of what was taking place and hastened to provide beer for their refreshment, they refused to partake of it ‘in order to avoid even the appearance of receiving any recompense for their unsolicited and gratuitous services’.³⁵ On a more formal level the Catholic archbishop of Tuam, Dr Oliver Kelly, at the last meeting of the local relief committee on 19 August 1822, on behalf of himself, his clergy, and their parishioners, offered Dr Trench ‘the humble tribute of our sincere gratitude, hoping that his benignity of character and his active and well-directed beneficence (qualities worthy of our emulation) may long continue to shed their light over us’.³⁶

With the possible exception of Bishop Jebb of Limerick, no prelate of the Established Church stood higher in the esteem of his countrymen at this time. Even the Dublin Evening Post at the height of the Bible War of 1824 would not allow his good name to be tarnished, despite his fervent commitment to the evangelical cause. The editor reminded his readers of the archbishop’s Herculean labours in the west in 1822; while many of his compatriots, who,

with a species of bitter irony, are called the natural protectors of the poor, were uttering fine sentiments on the banks of the Thames or the Seine, he was visiting every part of his extensive and starving see, distributing food and raiment, comforting the afflicted, and saving hundreds from the jaws of death.³⁷

The question that must be addressed at this point is why a man of such integrity did not appreciate the risk involved in throwing the whole weight of his influence behind the ‘Second Reformation’ movement. It seems reasonable to presume that the generous bestowal of his energy and personal resources on the starving poor of the west in 1822 might have awakened his conscience to the benefits to be gained if Protestants and Catholics joined forces in a meaningful effort to improve the condition of the peasantry. But such a presumption would of necessity omit a consideration of the evangelical conscience, which was at all times the guiding spirit of his actions, spiritual as well as temporal. His work among the famine victims of the west only strengthened his belief that they were flocks within his keeping, for whose salvation he stood accountable in the eyes of God. Because of his good standing with the Catholic community, he thought it fitting to devote to this subject a large portion of the sermon delivered at his triennial visitation in 1823.

The visitation was held at the Protestant cathedral in Tuam, and a sizeable proportion of the congregation was Catholic. That part of the sermon directed at the Catholics was wholly concerned with the right of the individual to base his religious convictions on the diligent and serious examination of the scriptures, as opposed to ‘the intentions and traditions of men [which have been] made the fundamental basis of your creed’.³⁸ The tone of his address had none of the militancy of Archbishop Magee’s visitation sermon at St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin in the previous year. Yet it was, for all its sincerity, a ringing declaration of the spiritual dimensions of the evangelical mission to the Catholic population:

My friends, you are kept in ignorance, and darkness, and delusion, and prohibited the use of God’s holy word, which can alone enlighten your understandings and open your eyes to behold the wondrous things of God. Let the most wicked and abominable books, books of sedition, of treason, of rebellion, of blasphemy, of impurity, be disseminated among you, not one word is said from your altars to caution you against their evil tendency or to guard the people against reading or listening to them. But if one of your communion dares to look into the precious Gospel of Christ—if he there looks for the true way of deliverance from the curse of the law and for the truth which can make him free—if he ventures to seek in that sacred volume the means of saving his immortal soul—the heaviest denunciations and curses of his church are immediately pronounced against him. And what, my friends, is all this for; is it for an hearty desire for your salvation—is it that you may become good Christians— is it that you may pass from earth to heaven and ever rest in the bosom of your heavenly Father? No; but it is from fear that you should discover your error and protest against it.³⁹

Trench was criticized in many quarters for his resolute adherence to evangelical principles, but critics were largely without influence on this single-minded prelate, who proceeded to put into practice what he had long been preaching. He shortly had a vanguard of evangelical curates operating in strategic locations throughout the diocese: the Rev. Charles Seymour in Clifden, the Rev. William Stoney in Newport, the Rev. Thomas Burgh in Ballinrobe, the Rev. Giles Eyre in Galway and the Rev. Thomas Walker in Westport. Most of these men were recent products of Trinity College. In the dissemination of vital religion they cooperated with each other, with the gentry of the districts in which they held their livings, with the agents dispatched by the educational societies in Dublin, and above all with their diocesan superior in Tuam. The results of their combined activities became immediately apparent in the years after 1824, when the ‘Second Reformation’ was in full flower. The amount of sectarian controversy prevailing in a given district was usually a reliable measure of the influence of the local evangelical clergyman. A case in point was the area around Newport, County Mayo, where the Rev. William Stoney kept up a continual battle with the local priests over his right to minister to the Catholic population.⁴⁰

Connemara, to which Trench dispatched Rev. Charles Seymour in the early 1820s, was notorious as one of the few remaining spots in Ireland where the writ of English law often did not apply.⁴¹ The first two decades of the nineteenth century brought about great changes, however, as speculators newly enriched by the booming economy of the war years began to purchase land and to build splendid new houses.⁴² The most prominent of those who established themselves in Connemara in this fashion were men whose names suggest their association with the ‘tribes’ of Galway—Hiberno–Norman merchant families that had dominated that city’s economic and political life since the heyday of the Spanish trade in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. By the early nineteenth century many of these families, such as the Blakes, Burkes, Martins and D’Arcy’s, were classic examples of members of the Catholic upper classes who had converted to the Protestant religion in the eighteenth century, and who had capitalized on the commercial revolution, particularly the West Indian trade. Henry Blake, whose modern residence at Renvyle was said to have been built on the proceeds of his family’s plantation in Montserrat, began his career as an improving landlord when he settled in the area with a fashionable English wife and an equally fashionable commitment to promoting ‘the Irish Highlands’ of Connemara for wealthy tourists in search of romantic scenery and antique remains.⁴³

The Martins of Ballinahinch had a somewhat longer history in the area, but they more than equalled the Blakes in their penchant for modernization and development. The flamboyant Richard Martin, the popular ‘Humanity Dick’, founder of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and lord of the sprawling Ballinahinch estate, could hold his own with the most fashionable of Westminster’s aristocratic philanthropists.⁴⁴ Henry Blake and Richard Martin were both outmatched by John D’Arcy, who in 1815 founded the town of Clifden, which he planned to develop as the commercial hub of the surrounding area, and built a magnificent neo-Gothic castellated mansion on his model estate west of the town.⁴⁵

While Martin and D’Arcy were ardent supporters of O’Connell and Emancipation, they (or, perhaps more accurately, their wives) were enthusiastic promoters of the trend for improving the lives of the peasantry. The schools of the KPS were thus introduced to Clifden, and land was provided by the Martins for a school run by the LHS in Ballinahinch. The Blakes of Renvyle were by far the most enthusiastic ‘improvers’ in Connemara, engaging in famine relief as well as attempts to introduce industry and education to the area. In April 1824, on the publication of a letter from Martha Louisa Blake complaining of the opposition of the local priest to the children attending her school, the Dublin Evening Post saw fit to describe Connemara as an area ‘where all the proprietors are extremely litigious and are infected with the most virulent description of the biblical mania’.⁴⁶

The source of the ‘infection’ undoubtedly was the man chosen as the instrument of evangelization by Archbishop Trench: the Rev. Charles Seymour, formerly curate of Ardcarne, and Archdeacon Digby’s most diligent footsoldier in the Elphin diocese. In 1820 Seymour was appointed to the union of Ballinakill, which embraced almost the whole of Connemara and Joyce’s Country, including the town of Clifden and the extensive estates of the Martin family at Ballinahinch. Seymour’s proficiency in Irish was particularly suited to his mission, and he aspired to carry out a ‘holy war’ with what he called his two-edged sword—the Irish and English testaments. In a letter to Joseph D’Arcy Sirr, who was working for the Irish Society in Dublin at this time, he described the prospects for the Irish Bible in Connemara:

It is a truth learned better by experience than by reasoning that the Irish language in some parts of Ireland (particularly Connemara) is a better introduction to the English than the English to the Irish. I have found my Irish sword (Irish testament) of singular service in clearing away the obstacles that opposed my English weapon (the English testament). I am every day polishing, sharpening, and, I thank God, in some degree successfully brandishing my Irish sword, and I long for some powerful ally to be sent down by the society to help me.⁴⁷

Seymour’s mission predictably met with strong opposition from the local Catholic clergy. The Kildare Place school in Clifden was put under severe prohibition on these grounds; even the use of a spelling book published by the Irish Society, which contained some parables from the Bible, was forbidden. Among the local gentry, however, Seymour’s exertions were warmly supported. The Martins provided land for a London Hibernian school at Ballinahinch and supported the education of an Irish-speaking master. A Sunday school was established in Clifden and a weekly school for girls was patronized by Mrs Blake at Renvyle. The promising start made by Seymour in the Clifden area prompted his transfer to Louisburgh, County Mayo, in 1822. He was replaced by his nephew, the Rev. Anthony Thomas. Sirr suggests that Seymour’s removal to Louisburgh was occasioned by the reputation of the surrounding area as a centre of Catholic pilgrimage. (In addition, the settlement of refugees who had fled the northern counties during the terror of the 1790s lent an ultra-Catholic character to the area.⁴⁸) Between the activities of Seymour and those of Stoney in Newport and the Rev. Edward Nangle in Achill, the whole of western Mayo was characterized by bitter sectarian conflict throughout the middle decades of the nineteenth century.

In Connemara, meanwhile, largely because of the active involvement of the local gentry, the evangelical crusade was making distinct progress. Until the early 1830s the Rev. Thomas worked alone from his vicarage in Ballinakill. His dedication and energy may be illustrated by his Sabbath duties, which took him first to Ballinahinch, a distance of about twelve miles from his home; from there he travelled on horseback to Clifden, another six miles, and then proceeded to his base at Ballinakill to repeat the ceremony. Because of his wife’s ill health he was obliged to leave Connemara in 1834, but his work was carried on by two curates whom Archbishop Trench had dispatched earlier to assist him. These were the Rev. Mark Anthony Forster, who ministered in the village of Tully from 1830 to 1832, before moving to Roundstone on the southern coastal flank of the district, and the Rev. Brabazon Ellis, who was appointed to the curacy of Moyrus near Carna in 1831.⁴⁹

Between them these men were the guiding spirits of the Connemara mission and were responsible for founding the Connemara Christian Committee in 1836.⁵⁰ This organization, which included lay as well as clerical members, was dedicated to the holding of clerical meetings and the evangelization of local Catholics. An appeal for local support signed by Forster and Ellis, representing the ‘Connemara Christian Committee, under the sanction and approval of his grace, the archbishop of Tuam’, stated clearly that the mission to the Catholics was the organization’s first concern. The strategy proposed to achieve this end was based in its entirety on the methods developed over long years of experience in other parts of the country:

The MEANS by which they seek to effect this high and holy object are the apostolic means of united deliberation, united prayer, and united exertion. The plans which they propose adopting will embrace—First, Bible associations; second, Scriptural schools; third, Scripture readers; fourth, public lectures; fifth, public meetings for reading the Scriptures; sixth, tract shops; seventh, periodical publications; eight, protection of approved converts.⁵¹

In addition to the evangelical clergymen appointed by Archbishop Trench, the Connemara Christian Committee was actively supported by the younger generation of the local gentry. Of these the most significant was Hyacinth D’Arcy, the eldest son of John D’Arcy of Clifden Castle, who had returned from Trinity College in the early 1830s to inherit his father’s estate and to devote himself to the evangelization of Connemara. From the very beginning he was active on the Connemara Christian Committee, having been elected treasurer at the Society’s first meeting in Clifden on 11 February 1836.⁵² Largely because of Hyacinth D’Arcy’s influence, Clifden became the centre for the work of the Society for the Irish Church Missions, an organization infamous in the popular memory for what became known as ‘souperism’ during the years of the Famine between 1845 and 1850. This practice in brief was the alleged refusal of evangelical missionaries to deploy their substantial resources among any but those who either apostatized or, at the very least, allowed their children to attend evangelical schools. The record of Hyacinth D’Arcy and his fellow workers in this regard does not lie within the scope of the present work. What is of vital importance, however, is the degree to which the native soil had been prepared and the requisite connections set in place when Alexander Dallas, with substantial funds and manpower from England, opted for Connemara as a base from which to launch his proselytizing offensive on the eve of the Great Famine.⁵³

One of the greatest challenges faced by the Connemara Christian Committee was the protection of converts faced with the ostracism and hostility of their Catholic neighbours. The Rev. Brabazon Ellis reported how the sixty or so converts under his care in the years 1835–6 were constantly persecuted. One family, several of whose members were teachers in the Clifden area, was subjected to the following treatment after converting: ‘Persecution set in—their schools were denounced; their scholars withdrawn; they were left without the means of subsistence, and they had no apparent alternative but to perish from starvation or to return to Rome.’⁵⁴ Ellis and his wife were likewise subjected to denunciations from the altar, threatening letters, and even physical abuse. By his own admission they were virtual prisoners in their home in Clifden, though he claimed that he was always treated with kindness by the country people of the surrounding area.⁵⁵ In view of the overwhelming local opposition to the mission Ellis, D’Arcy and Forster, with the approval of Archbishop Trench, began to consider the prospects of developing a Protestant colony. This project was based on the evident success of the Rev. Edward Nangle’s experiment on Achill Island. Land was purchased on a desolate and windswept stretch of moorland between Clifden and Letterfrack called Sionnanach, but this scheme never materialized during the archbishop’s lifetime (he died in 1839). Instead, Protestant settlement in Connemara confined itself to small enclaves of dispersed settlements like those at Ballinakill, Kingstown, Moyrus, Errislannon and Castlekerke near Oughterard, which were usually centred on the residence of the local landlord or clergyman.

The development of Protestant colonies was responsible for much of the success, such as it was, that the evangelical movement enjoyed during the 1830s and 1840s. Perhaps no other aspect of the Reformation movement so clearly reflected its connections with the militant defenders of Protestant supremacy, or the degree to which the enterprise was an exercise in cultural imperialism.

THE IDEA OF PROTESTANT COLONIES: THE ACHILL AND DINGLE EXPERIMENTS

A combination of several trends in the late 1820s gave rise to discussion among the leaders of the evangelical movement about the utility of setting up Protestant settlements that would serve as a bulwark against the undermining of the ultra-Protestant cause. If the number of converts were to be increased, some form of protection would be necessary to enable them to be socially and economically independent of their local communities, which subjected them to ostracism and physical abuse. Fears were also expressed in certain quarters that the lower classes of Protestants were emigrating in vast numbers because of the threat of Catholic ascendancy implicit in the passage of the Emancipation act.⁵⁶ In 1833 the Dublin University Magazine claimed that Protestants were leaving Ireland in such numbers that

it was impossible to state fully, and if so stated would not be credited. It is not from this or that district alone. Panic and disgust have seized upon the Protestant yeomanry throughout Ireland. The country is not bleeding merely, it is sweating blood.

In all, it was claimed that 94,000 Protestants had left Ireland since 1829.⁵⁷

It was this aspect of the debate that led to the establishment of the Protestant Colonisation Society. The Society took its inspiration from a work published in Edinburgh in 1828, An Account of the Poor Colonies and Agricultural Workhouses of the Benevolent Society of Holland, which described the success of Dutch settlements organized on the cooperative principle, devoted to land reclamation, agricultural innovation and the increase of capital.⁵⁸ In November 1829 plans for the launching of the Society were drawn up by a group of influential landlords, clergymen and laymen well known for their anti-Catholic sympathies. The committee of management included the earl of Enniskillen, Lord Mountcashel, Lord Lorton, Marcus Beresford, Colonel Blacker, N.D. Crommellin and Anthony Lefroy. Among the vice-presidents were Archbishop William Magee, the marquis of Donegal, Lord Bantry, Viscount Dungannon, Lord Farnham, Lord Longford and the earl of Muskerry. Dignitaries such as the bishops of Bath and Salisbury, the duke of Newcastle and the earl of Winchelsea lent their support.⁵⁹ It was agreed that settlements would prove an effective means of halting the emigration of poorer Protestants and of introducing industry, discipline and obedience to the law in those parts of the country where they were needed most. More fundamentally, it was hoped that the plan would prove to be an important stepping stone in the creation of political stability. One of the clergymen present claimed:

Protestant colonies would be found most useful in preserving the connection between this country and England. The poorer class of Irish Protestants were in truth the chain that bound conquered Ireland to the conqueror England; and it was as much the interest of England as of Ireland to encourage those Protestants by whom this connection was preserved. ⁶⁰

But the aims of the Protestant Colonisation Society went far beyond the vision of self-sufficient cooperative enclaves that would provide protection and support for converts from Catholicism. According to the earliest pronouncements issued by the management committee, it was clear that they were envisaged as missionary centres from which influence would radiate to the surrounding areas through the work of preachers, Bible readers and schools, as well as through the example of what Protestant investment, industry and good management could achieve in backward areas.⁶¹ The connection between the Protestant Colonisation Society and the various settlements started in the 1830s is unclear.⁶² Although the Society was clearly involved in small-scale efforts undertaken at Aughkeely, County Donegal, and Kilmeague, County Kildare, it is not at all clear that it was connected with the more substantial colonies of Achill and Dingle.

What is certain, however, is that it was closely connected with the Brunswick Clubs. The Dublin Evening Post in 1830 reported that an attempt to set up an auxiliary in Sligo in that year was the work of two men, James Gore Jones and James Wood, who were well known locally as Brunswick sympathizers.⁶³ Even more revealing was the transfer of the Brunswick Society funds to the Colonisation Society when the former was disbanded in the early 1830s. The justification for the transfer was that the Colonisation Society offered, so it was claimed, ‘the only immediate practical means for effectively countervailing the growing national calamity of Protestant emigration’.⁶⁴

Among the earliest experiments of the Protestant Colonisation Society was that in Aughkeely, County Donegal, a townland between Letterkenny and Stranorlar, on the estate of Sir Edmund Hayes of Drumbo Castle.⁶⁵ Applicants were invited to apply for homesteads consisting of a comfortable house and five acres of ground (the allotment could be extended to twenty-five or thirty acres where desirable) at a rent of fifty shillings a year. Families from Scotland and England were welcomed, but the majority of the twelve households of the Aughkeely colony in 1832 were of Ulster origin, with a sprinkling of representatives from the southern counties.⁶⁶ It is not known to what degree the Aughkeely colony functioned as a refuge for converts, and no mention of it occurs in the subsequent historiography of the evangelical movement. Another experimental settlement of this kind was founded at Kilmeague, County Kildare, and up to a hundred families were said to have taken occupancy there in the decade before the Famine.⁶⁷ In 1835 Kilmeague was brought to the attention of Lord Farnham as an example of a project that had aroused great interest in England. According to Farnham’s correspondent, funds were being raised by no less a personage than the Rev. Wood, tutor to Prince George, who had already collected almost £100 for the persecuted inhabitants of the colony.⁶⁸

The colonies started at Achill and Dingle in the early 1830s were by far the most substantial of their kind and also the most famous. The Colonisation Society appears to have had little to do with the launching and development of these particular colonies. While talk of colonies was very much in the air at this time, and while the policies of Archbishop Trench in the Tuam archdiocese indicated favourable prospects for missionary expansion in that area, the specific event that turned the evangelical focus westward was a severe outbreak of famine and cholera that swept the coastal regions in the years 1830–1. In the case of both Achill and Dingle, it was famine relief that drew the attention of evangelicals to the possibilities for missionary work based on the colony system. The labours of individual clergymen were soon reinforced by agents supported by the Irish Society and the Scripture Readers’ Society, and leading Dublin evangelicals, especially those connected with the Home Mission Society, were in frequent contact with the west. In the case of Dingle, this combination of influences was clearly behind the launching of an integrated system of missions on the peninsula in the 1830s.

The evangelical tradition in County Kerry went back to the days of Charles Graham and the Methodist mission to the Irish-speaking population in the late eighteenth century. The choice of Kerry as an area in which to begin this mission may have been influenced by an Anglican clergyman, the Rev. Nash, who lived near Dingle in the 1790s and was a close friend of Adam Averell, the head of the Methodist convocation in Ireland at that time.⁶⁹ It is unlikely that Graham’s mission produced any remarkable results in converting the Catholics of Kerry. What is certain, nevertheless, is that there was a sustained interest in this idea during the first three decades of the century. When George Ensor published his famous attack on the ‘Second Reformation’ in 1828, he referred to an allegation that ‘hundreds of families’ had been converted in Kerry.⁷⁰ Similarly, during the winter of 1826, when reports of converts were coming in from Kingscourt and Askeaton, The Watchman commented that people in the Dingle area were ‘all ablaze for the Irish scriptures’.⁷¹ Despite the lack of solid evidence on this point, it does suggest that something was afoot, a view that finds support in the record of a tour by two representatives of the Home Mission Society, the Rev. Denis Browne of Santry and the Rev. John Gregg of the Bethesda Chapel, who were invited to Kerry by the Rev. Arthur B. Rowan, an evangelical minister who had been appointed to the curacy of Blennerville near Tralee in 1824.⁷² They mentioned the Dingle peninsula as an area badly in need of further visits from the Society’s agents. The reason given was the ‘singularly enthusiastic overture’ they had received from the enthusiastic curate of Dingle, the Rev. Thomas Chute Goodman.⁷³

Thomas Goodman, or ‘Parson Tom’ as he was called locally, was the product of a remarkable blending of the older presence of the Church of Ireland with the local Catholic community and also with the administrative innovations of the modern state that were beginning to penetrate the remote fastnesses of the west by the 1820s. The Dingle peninsula was remarkably similar to Connemara in that it was largely Irish-speaking and relatively untouched by the modern world. Among the more significant modern intrusions in the 1820s was the building of four coastguard stations, staffed by officers and their families who were mostly Protestant. It was concern for the spiritual welfare of this community, which averaged between thirty and forty souls per station, that first brought the attention of Bishop Jebb to ‘this westernmost parish in Europe, the wildest country he ever beheld’.⁷⁴ Jebb’s estimation of the excellent conduct of the coastguard community, particularly the good relations the residents enjoyed with their Catholic neighbours and even the local priest, convinced him that it might function as a centre from which the influence of Protestantism would radiate in the quiet and unobtrusive fashion that had always appealed to him. His plan to provide a pastor to minister to the coastguards and their families, if carried into effect, he said, would

not merely be a provision for the welfare of 120 or 130 souls (though that of itself is a most important consideration) but the nourishing and perhaps with God’s blessing dispersing the seed of Protestantism in a remote and extensive district: a seed too, from all appearance, of the most promising quality. A nucleus might then be formed round which the scattered and lapsed Protestants (of which there are several in that part of the country) might rally. This has partially been the case hitherto. And what is remarkable, Roman Catholics have occasionally attended the sermons and have expressed themselves surprised to find so much religion among Protestants.⁷⁵

Jebb’s concern to provide a pastor for the coastguard community was occasioned by his disappointment with the rector of Dingle, Rev. John Goodman, who had held the living since 1787. The elder Goodman was English and also held a living in Kemerton, Gloucestershire, but in the opinion of Bishop Jebb, after his many years in Dingle he had practically gone native. A fluent Irish-speaker, he was on extremely good terms with his Catholic neighbours, and according to Jebb, ‘did as little as he could with any decency’.⁷⁶ The son Thomas, however, was considered to be more promising material: ‘though far more respectable than his father … from his defective education and aboriginal habits, [he is] incompetent to act without assistance’. Jebb saw the needs of the coastguard community and the particular weaknesses of Thomas Chute Goodman—his lack of training coupled with his close affinity with the native Catholic community—as affording the perfect opportunity for the placement of a pastor devoted to the evangelical mission of the Church of Ireland.⁷⁷

In 1831 a clergyman named George Gubbins took up residency in Dingle, reputedly to assist Goodman in relieving the distress caused by famine and cholera, which were once again scourging the seaboard counties of the west. Little is known about this man’s background, and it is not clear to what degree Bishop Jebb was behind the appointment, but it is apparent that he came primarily to carry on missionary activity. An exemplary evangelical in every way, he was as remarkable for his humble lifestyle and dedicated relief work as for his desire to advance the missionary cause. He is generally credited with the initiation of proselytism in the area.

Significantly, it was during this outbreak of famine, when the evangelical mission in Kerry gained real momentum, that the baneful term ‘souper’ first came into popular usage. According to Mrs D.P. Thompson, the chronicler of the Dingle Mission, ‘a benevolent lady in Dingle’ opened a soup kitchen to provide sustenance for the starving inhabitants in 1831. The local priest forbade them to have anything to do with it, and anyone who did so was consequently labelled a ‘souper’.⁷⁸ Eventually, the expression ‘to take the soup’ implied not only the acceptance of food or clothing but also the assumption of the Protestant religion, outlook and behaviour in return for material advancement, especially in the forms of housing, land or employment.

The most important figure behind the expansion of evangelical missions in Dingle was Lord Ventry, the proprietor of a vast estate on the peninsula. His name was not to be found along with those of Roden, Farnham, Lorton and de Vesci on the lists of patrons of evangelical societies, and the occasion of his conversion to the cause is unknown. But by the early 1830s he was prepared to place his enormous personal influence behind the enterprise. In 1833 he invited a young clergyman, the Rev. Charles Gayer, to become his personal chaplain.⁷⁹ Though of English birth, Gayer had been educated in Ireland and had held two previous livings at Slawin, County Fermanagh, and Kinnegad, County Westmeath. On assuming his position as chaplain to Lord Ventry, he set as his first objective the organization of a comprehensive mission that would be centred on the town of Dingle and extend to the five parishes of the peninsula, including the Small Blasket Island. With the sustained financial support of Lord Ventry behind him, he made rapid progress and succeeded in developing a full-scale missionary enterprise that covered the whole of the peninsula by the late 1830s.⁸⁰

Along with a small number of assistants, including Goodman and Gubbins, Gayer first sought converts in the immediate vicinity of the town of Dingle. When a sufficient number of local Catholics responded to his overtures, a schoolhouse was built and formal instruction in the reformed faith begun. The next step was to procure the conversion of those in attendance at the school and to enlist their aid in spreading the Reformation to the adjoining parishes.⁸¹ For the first two or three years the progress of the mission was gradual but steady. Several prominent members of the local Protestant community were active supporters of the mission. These included Lieutenant Clifford of the Coastguard, David Thompson, the local magistrate and agent of Lord Ventry, whose wife wrote a history of the mission in 1846, and Catherine Hartland Mahon.⁸² Here the chief attraction was the use of Irish as the primary medium of instruction. As was often reported by agents of the Irish Society working in other parts of the west, the directors of the Dingle Mission perceived that hostility to the scriptures was reduced remarkably when the Irish version was used, and they made the oft-repeated claim that Irish country people truly believed that no evil could be transmitted through their native language.⁸³ Though Gayer himself could not speak Irish, its use as the primary means of communication between the missionaries and the Catholic Irish of Dingle was a virtual necessity, since the area was wholly Irish-speaking.

In 1836 the Irish Society became heavily involved with the mission when one of its inspectors visited the school and reported on its progress. An agreement was made to supply twenty instructors to augment the mission staff, with wages and other support drawn from the Society’s funds. These teachers were not necessarily Protestants, but they were fluent Irish-speakers prepared to give lessons in the scriptures through Irish whenever opportunity offered, usually during domiciliary visits under cover of night. Before the end of 1836, upwards of 170 men were in regular attendance at the Dingle school, and reports of converts were arriving from several parishes on the peninsula.⁸⁴

In the decade before the Famine the fortunes of the Dingle Mission continued their upward course, and several conversions of well-known Catholics took place. The most celebrated of these was a priest, Fr Brasbie of Kilmalkedar, who had originally been sent into the area to counter the work of the evangelicals but who had ended up joining their ranks. According to Mrs Thompson, he had been extremely popular prior to his conversion, but afterward he dared not appear in public without protection, and when he attempted to deliver sermons the military had to be called out to prevent violence.⁸⁵

Another famous case of conversion, this time on a family scale, was that of the Moriartys, four of whom took up the evangelical banner. The most remarkable among them was Thomas Moriarty, who joined the Irish Society and worked for a time in the Kingscourt District. In 1838 Gayer requested that he return to Dingle, in all likelihood because his services were considered necessary; in the following year Gayer himself was appointed rector of Dunurlin on the departure of George Gubbins, who was transferred to Ballingarry, County Tipperary, to attempt a repetition of the Dingle experiment. The Irish Society not only consented to release Moriarty from his duties at Kingscourt but also undertook to support him, along with a number of Bible readers and a schoolmaster and mistress who were to work under his direction at the newly opened mission station at Ventry. Two of Thomas Moriarty’s brothers followed his example in adopting the Protestant faith and serving the cause of Reformation; one was employed in the nearby town of Castleisland and the other went farther afield to County Tyrone.⁸⁶ Their sister, who remained a Catholic for seven years after the conversion of her brothers, was looked upon as a great example by local Catholic stalwarts. When she finally relented and apostatized, there was a tremendous local uproar, followed by great hostility to the converts.⁸⁷

The evangelical mission in Dingle was a continual source of social and sectarian conflict, although there is some evidence that a degree of tolerance was accorded those of local origin, particularly the Rev. Thomas Chute Goodman. One piece of evidence in support of this view is to be found in the postscript to a threatening letter received by the Rev. Gayer. The letter warned Gayer to look out for his life, but it also added: ‘Parson Goodman is a good man. He interfaries [sic] with no man’s religion. I lave him to you.’⁸⁸ Even Gayer was not always the object of execration. However misguided his efforts were thought to have been, local Catholics appear to have appreciated that he was genuinely interested in their welfare. This was especially true during periods of dearth, when he did not hesitate to use the resources of the mission for temporal relief.

The Dingle Mission assumed a more permanent character and its resources were greatly advanced when Gayer’s ambitions for a full-scale colony were realized in 1839. A number of cottages were built to house converts, along with a church, a glebe house and schools. Farmland was leased from Lord Ventry, and attempts were made to develop the fishing industry. The evangelization of the surrounding area continued unrelentingly. At one point Gayer sent a Bible reader to the Blasket Islands, but he was obliged to beat a hasty retreat when the islanders threatened to hurl him over the cliffs. Three years later, they reportedly sent a deputation to the headquarters at Dingle, asking that a teacher be sent among them.⁸⁹ This was typical of the ambivalence with which the Kerry people responded to the missionaries. Gayer succeeded in having a church built on the Blaskets only by invoking the protection of the law; the owner of the islands was a Catholic lady who would not allow her tenants to work on the project.⁹⁰ Yet in 1845, when a schoolmaster from the mission visited the islands, he was kindly received in a Catholic household, one of whose members informed him that it was only the relief sent by Gayer that had kept them from starving the previous summer.⁹¹

The record of the Dingle colony during the years of the Great Famine has never received detailed scrutiny. Gayer, along with his co-workers and the converts, was never free from local hostility, especially after the Catholic Church began a more organized defence of its interests in the 1840s. When the American philanthropist Asenath Nicholson visited the colony during her tour of Ireland in 1844–5, she was greeted with suspicion and resentment by the local priest and by Charles Gayer’s wife, who admonished her for having deigned, as a Protestant, to have anything whatever to do with Catholics, especially a priest: ‘And what did you call on him for? I will never go near any of them. They are a persecuting people.’⁹² Outraged at the rude and arrogant manner in which she had been received, Mrs Nicholson lamented that ‘so noble, so apostolic a work was in the hands of those whose hospitality, whose humility, whose courteousness to strangers, and whose self-denial were so far behind the principles they professed to inculcate’.

When she interviewed the converts, she found that they had only a faint understanding of the differences between the faith they had departed from and that into which they had been received. The only answer she repeatedly encountered when she enquired about the nature of their new-found enlightenment was, ‘We do not worship images.’ She was appalled at the educational methods in use, which seemed designed to teach the poor to know their place, and which were especially discriminatory against females. This latter aspect she compared very unfavourably with a school run by Catholic nuns ‘whose lessons in grammar, geography, and history would do honour to any school, and [whose] needlework was of the highest order’. One of the teachers observed of the three hundred or so pupils in attendance: ‘Though they are the children of the poor, we do not know what station God may call them to fill. We advance them as far as possible while they are with us.’⁹³

The death of Charles Gayer in 1847 was a severe blow to the mission. The colony survived into the 1850s, but many of the converts emigrated during the Famine years, and the remainder gradually drifted back to the Catholic faith.⁹⁴ The visible remains of Gayer’s mission is the row of houses of the ‘Colony’ in Dingle, which is still known by this name. A less tangible legacy may have been the introduction of literacy in Irish through the work of the Irish Society. It is impossible to determine what the relationship was, if any, between the introduction of literacy in Irish and the emergence of the famous school of writers associated with Tomás Ó Criomthain and others in the early twentieth century. It is believed locally that Ó Criomthain, the greatest of the Blasket writers, learned to read in Irish from the primers issued by the Irish Society.⁹⁵

Whatever the record of the Dingle evangelical missionaries during the Famine years toward the local people who received their spiritual bounty, good care was taken of all who deserted the Catholic ranks. When Henry Wilberforce visited the area in 1852, he was informed that the inhabitants of the colony paid no rent and had plenty of work, in glaring contrast to their ragged and starving neighbours.⁹⁶ A Catholic labourer remarked of Gayer that ‘he was a good warrant to help any poor man that would go his way’. Wilberforce, who had converted to Catholicism as a result of the Oxford Movement, was a leading opponent of the evangelical mission in Ireland and had taken up residence in Connemara, where he headed the Catholic Defence Association to counter the work of the Irish Church Missions.⁹⁷ In his view the enterprise was a ‘demoralising system of wholesale bribery’. He probably reflected the viewpoint of most critics when, on observing the comfortable situation of the Dingle converts with their rent-free houses and land, he tartly commented ‘it was worthwhile to be Protestant at that rate’.⁹⁸

No project cast up by the campaign to evangelize the west of Ireland created more controversy and sectarian conflict than the Achill colony established by the Rev. Edward Nangle in 1834. Nangle’s overpowering presence often made it appear that he was singlehandedly responsible for turning Achill into the ‘Mecca of all true believers’, as the Freeman’s Journal sarcastically referred to it.⁹⁹ Certainly, it is not difficult to see why his personality and demeanour enabled those who interviewed him and observed his approach at first hand to arrive at this conclusion. In an interview with the Rev. Caesar Otway, he once compared his task on Achill with that of Martin Luther:

Their colony, he said, was established in direct hostility to popery; that it lost all claim to a religious and proselytising establishment if they treat gently which was like the nettle, a thing that, when only touched lightly, stung the hand severely, but when grasped lustily, might be plucked and eradicated without injury.¹⁰⁰

Despite the furious controversy and polemics that could be traced to his door and his printing press, Edward Nangle was only the most visible aspect of the westward thrust of the evangelical movement, which was based largely on two organizations—the Irish Society, already a veteran in the field, and the recently formed Irish Islands and Coasts Society. In the case of both organizations the impulse to expand in the west came largely from the Kingscourt District.

By 1830 the evangelical mission in Kingscourt was the project on which the Irish Society was concentrating its resources.¹⁰¹ More than any other area where missionary work was underway, Kingscourt was particularly remarkable for the virulence and blatancy with which its successes were publicized. Converts were paraded in church on Sunday, and teachers obliged to publish petitions to the effect that the policy of teaching the scriptures in Irish was both popular and acceptable to Catholics. Because the prospect in the northern counties appeared more promising in the years 1825–8, the Irish Society had virtually deserted the west, although Archbishop Trench of Tuam was clearly in close contact with the directors of the Society in Dublin, particularly Joseph D’Arcy Sirr and Henry Monck Mason. Between 1826 and 1829 he frequently discussed with Monck Mason the possibility of introducing the Kingscourt system on a broader scale in Connaught. The outcome of these deliberations was the foundation of the Connaught Auxiliary of the Irish Society on 22 January 1829. So enthusiastic was Dr Trench about the possibilities that now appeared before him that he committed himself to a policy under which he would not ordain clergymen for work in the Tuam archdiocese unless they were proficient in Irish. His concern for educating future clergymen in the native language was a motivating force behind the endowment of a professorship in Irish in Trinity College.¹⁰²

Archbishop Trench’s promotion of the evangelization of the Irish-speaking west gave renewed impetus to the Irish Society and its supporters in the Kingscourt District. Tactics and strategies were soon being discussed, and the Irish Islands and Coasts Society made its appearance, a corollary of the Irish Society designed to extend its operations to the 50,000 or so inhabitants of the islands along the west and south-west coasts.¹⁰³

The founder and lifelong secretary was Mrs Henrietta Pendleton, a native of Fatham near Kingscourt. She was married to the Rev. E.C. Pendleton, who was employed by the Irish Society in the area.¹⁰⁴ Formerly, she had acted as secretary to the Ladies’ Auxiliary of the Irish Society and had engaged herself with projects involving the islands. In 1833 it was decided to set up an independent agency for this branch of the work, since the Irish Society could not meet the demand, ‘the field of its labours in the interior requiring all the resources it could command’.¹⁰⁵

The Islands and Coasts Society appears to have been largely a female concern. Money was raised through letter-writing and private appeals, while individual ladies undertook the education of future scripture readers and preachers. Work was underway by 1834, and the Society began issuing its own reports in the same year. Little is known about the extent of the efforts involved. In 1836 the Rev. Noel drew attention to the needs of the islands and seemed unaware of Mrs Pendleton’s organization. Likewise, there is no mention of the organization in the records of the Achill Mission, although Achill, while connected by a causeway to the mainland, was certainly considered an island.

The events that led to the foundation of the Achill colony in 1834 clearly illustrate the links between the various support centres of Irish evangelicalism in Kingscourt, Dublin and Tuam. The founder of the colony, Edward Nangle, was not a well-known figure in evangelical circles prior to 1830. A native of Athboy, County Meath, he had graduated from Trinity College in 1823 and was ordained a minister of the Church of Ireland in 1824. He spent a brief period as a curate in his native Athboy and another at Monkstown near Dublin. Sometime between 1825 and 1830 he was transferred to the curacy of Arva, County Cavan, where he probably had exposure to the progress of the evangelical mission centred at Kingscourt. After a year and a half of this work his health broke down, and he was obliged to convalesce for a period. During this time he chanced to read Christopher Anderson’s Historical Sketches of the Native Irish (first published in 1828). This induced in him something like a conversion experience, from which he emerged committed to making the evangelization of the Irish-speaking west his life’s work.¹⁰⁶

Nangle’s first opportunity to survey the scene of his future labours came when he accompanied an expedition on the S.S. Nottingham, which carried a cargo of relief provisions to Achill in the summer of 1831. Like the Dingle peninsula, western Mayo had been severely hit by famine and cholera in 1830–1, and relief efforts were similarly characterized by bitter rivalry between Catholic priests and evangelical missionaries resident in the area. In the vicinity of Ballina, for example, the local Baptist minister, the Rev. James Allen, became the object of particular hostility when he charged that the priests were monopolizing the relief funds in the town and refusing relief to country people who were in any way connected with the Baptists. Led by Archbishop MacHale, the Catholic majority on the local relief committee demanded Allen’s expulsion on grounds that he was using relief funds to assist his proselytizing campaign. Local Protestants, however, representing ‘all the wealth, independence, and influence of the town’ came to his defence, determined not to be put down by the ‘popish faction’. This situation confronted the beleaguered Rev. Allen with a set of equally undesirable alternatives:

Should the supplies, at this stage of the proceeding, be handed over to the popish party, a complete triumph both over myself and the independence of the town would be effected. On the other hand, should the supplies be withdrawn, the most fatal consequences would ensue.¹⁰⁷

It is not known if Nangle had any knowlege of the controversy over the handling of relief in the Ballina area. But it is clear that, in addition to its cargo of food and clothing, the expedition of the S.S. Nottingham was also designed to test the ground for missionary work on Achill.¹⁰⁸ It was sponsored by people of influence in Dublin, particularly Thomas Parnell of the Religious Tract and Book Society and Henry Monck Mason and the Rev. Robert Daly of the Irish Society.¹⁰⁹ Also in 1831 a committee was formed with the intention of leasing land for reclamation and development and laying the foundation of a settlement. When Nangle was appointed director in 1834, the mission already consisted of a house and farm occupied by two families, and a schoolmaster and scripture reader had begun work among the local population. The substantial support made available from Dublin and also from English sources guaranteed rapid progress for the Achill Mission. Land was leased from the absentee proprietor of the island, Sir Richard O’Donnell, and four schools were in operation by 1835.¹¹⁰ A church was built around the same time, and a printing press was donated by supporters in London and York.

By 1836 it was clear that the Mission was not simply to function as a refuge for converts, as the Rev. Nangle so emphatically claimed, but as a missionary centre from which agents could be sent out to evangelize the whole of western Mayo. This was the main objective pursued during the Mission’s heyday, which lasted from 1835 to about 1860.¹¹¹ It was also the source of bitter controversy and even physical violence. Few people—even Protestants—who might ordinarily have been sympathetic to the enterprise had anything good to say about the Rev. Nangle and his tactics. Yet, as one of his most outspoken critics, the travel writer Samuel Carter Hall, was obliged to admit, the colony unquestionably contributed a great deal to the development and modernization of the island.¹¹²

The first physician to take up residence in Achill, Dr Neason Adams, left a profitable practice in Dublin to supervise the dispensary at the colony; formerly, the nearest medical help available to the Achill people was at Newport, some twenty-five miles distant. Adams was universally lauded as ‘the St Luke of Achill’, and it was the opinion of an English visitor in 1844 that local opposition would have long since broken up the colony were it not for the good influence of Dr Adams among the Catholic population.¹¹³ The colony schools were also said to be well run, but it is not clear whether the children in attendance were of local parentage or orphans brought from other parts of the country. The land-reclamation scheme likewise met with approval. But most visitors who published accounts of their visits to Achill implied that a great deal more might have been accomplished by the project if the proselytizing dimensions had been absent. The Rev. Caesar Otway had this to say of Nangle’s experiment:

Why not establish a settlement, where, by introducing better modes of rural economy, setting examples of cleanly, regular, and sober habits, showing the natives by well-tried experiments the advantage of attending the winter feeding of cattle, the cultivation of green crops; also by giving premiums for home industry and cleanliness amongst females, and establishing schools for the teaching of needlework … Even suppose literary and religious instruction were quite left out of the question, why do not some of your patriots, your liberal well-wishers, for the good of Ireland, bestir themselves? Why in this way confine themselves to benevolence, while all the beneficence is left to Mr. Nangle and his supporters.¹¹⁴

The more outspoken Asenath Nicholson thought little of the Rev. Nangle’s beneficence. The more that she saw of the Achill colony, the more willing she was to compare it with the slavery of the southern United States, where tyrannical slave-owners lectured their unfortunate chattels from the scriptures on the obedience owed to masters. The converts in her opinion had yielded more than spiritual allegiance when they crossed the religious divide:

I had looked into the cabins of many of the converts of Dingle and Achill, and though their feet were washed cleaner, their stools scoured whiter, and their hearths swept better than in many of the mountain cabins, yet their eight pence a day will never put shoes upon their feet, convert their stools into chairs, or give them any better broom than the mountain heath for sweeping their cabins. It will never give them the palatable, well-spread board around which their masters sit, and which they have earned for them by their scantily paid toil. Those converts turned from worshipping images to the living and true God, as they are told, holding a Protestant prayer book in their hands which they cannot read, can no more be sure that this religion, inculcated by proxy, emanates from the pure scriptures than did the prayer book which they held in their hands when standing before a popish altar.¹¹⁵

An intelligent and courageous woman, Mrs Nicholson perceived very clearly what the evangelical mission in Ireland was about: in her opinion, it had less to do with the social or spiritual welfare of those to whom it was directed than with the upholding of a social hierarchy built upon the subservience of the native population.

Undoubtedly there were many evangelical Protestants whose devotion was based upon their faith that they were liberating Catholics from spiritual slavery. But the alliance between evangelicalism and political conservatism that broke into open expression in the 1820s obliterated any possibility that the evangelicals would be considered in a neutral light. The events that followed Magee’s famous sermon of 1822 united the issues of religious and political liberty for Catholics and opened the door that enabled the Catholic clergy to assume political as well as moral authority. The success with which they assumed this role placed an intractable barrier in the path of both the integration of the Catholic population into the Union and the prospects of future harmony between Protestants and Catholics in Ireland.

The unbounded evangelical belief in Providence reached particularly worrisome proportions when famine struck in the 1840s, and struck hardest in precisely those areas of the west where the evangelicals were entrenched. The willingness of the most extreme elements to look upon the Famine as providing an opportunity to expand the work already underway coloured the already disastrous history of evangelical missions in Ireland. Now their ambitions really would be seen in the cold light of an effort to exterminate Catholicism, and the Catholic Church for the remainder of the century and beyond would be provided with an ironclad claim to its position as defender of the people and the faith.

Notes

1. The Watchman, 3 Feb. 1827.

2. M.G. Beresford to Lord Farnham, 9 July 1834 (NLI, Farnham Papers, MS 18,608/10).

3. Dublin University Magazine (Oct. 1833).

4. Bartlett, Irish Nation, pp. 333–42.

5. Hereward Senior, Orangeism in Ireland and Britain, 1795–1836 (London 1966), pp. 227–30.

6. Bartlett, Irish Nation, p. 342.

7. McGrath, Politics, Interdenominational Relations and Education, pp. 152.

8. Hans Hamilton to Lord Farnham, 29 March 1831 (NLI, Farnham Papers, MS 18,612/10); Notebook of Henry Maxwell (NLI, Farnham Papers, MS 3504).

9. Akenson, Irish Education Experiment, p. 91.

10. First Report of the Commissioners of Irish Education Inquiry (1825), , XII, p. 90.

11. Ibid. p. 2.

12. Connolly, Priests and People, p. 86.

13. Annual Report of the Hibernian Bible Society (1831), p. XL.

14. Annual Report of the Hibernian Bible Society (1832), appendix III.

15. Noel, Notes of a Short Tour, pp. 221–3.

16. D’Arcy Sirr, Trench, pp. 2–3.

17. Michael Davitt, The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland, or the Story of the Land League Revolution (London and New York 1904), pp. 31–2.

18. A complete account of the Trench family is provided in A Memoir of the Trench Family, Compiled by Thomas Richard Frederick Cooke-Trench (Dublin 1896).

19. Bowen, Protestant Crusade, pp. 138–9.

20. D’Arcy Sirr, Trench, pp. 17–18.

21. Ibid. pp. 28–38.

22. Ibid. pp. 45–6.

23. Quoted in ibid. pp. 46–7.

24. Quoted in ibid.

25. Quoted in ibid. p. 79.

26. Motherwell, Albert Blest, p. 112.

27. Quoted in ibid. pp. 82–4.

28. Quoted in ibid. p. 92.

29. As early as 1811 Trench had openly sanctioned cooperation with the Dissenters, and he and Archdeacon Digby had since that time enjoyed warm relations with Albert Blest and the LHS. In 1818 the Society printed a circular to refute claims made in the Christian Guardian that it was a bigoted organization patronized mainly by Dissenters. (SOAS/MMSA, Methodist Papers [Ireland] box 74, file 2, no. 105).

30. According to S.J. Connolly, the number of Catholics per priest in the Tuam archdiocese in 1834–5 was 4199, compared with 1941 in the more prosperous diocese of Ferns. Poverty and population growth were the main barriers to improvement in Connaught; ‘the rate of population growth was faster than in other regions, while at the same time a largely impoverished population were unable to support even the same inadequate rise in clerical numbers which was achieved elsewhere’. Connolly, Priests and People, p. 35.

31. Quoted in D’Arcy Sirr, Trench, p. 144.

32. Ibid. p. 149.

33. Once the threat of famine had passed, much of the money collected by the London Tavern Committee was used to purchase looms and spinning wheels for the peasantry of the west in an attempt to foster the linen industry. What little progress was initially achieved was quickly negated by the dissolution of the Linen Board and the collapse of the domestic linen industry because of the introduction of mechanization. Ibid. pp. 151–64.

34. Quoted in D’Arcy Sirr, Trench, pp. 152–3.

35. Ibid. p. 146.

36. Ibid. p. 147.

37. DEP, 27 Oct. 1824.

38. Quoted in D’Arcy Sirr, Trench, p. 132.

39. Quoted in ibid. p. 133.

40. The Rev. Stoney’s trials in the Newport area began when he established schools and actively sought the conversion of local Catholics. In addition to the usual denunciations from the altar, he was also the recipient of threatening notices commonly associated with the Whiteboys. An example provided in the Trench biography gives some indication of how he was regarded by at least one belligerent but imaginative representative of the local Catholic community: ‘May the devil pull the tongue from root and branch out of your ugly mug. We will leave the devil to punish hypocrite Stoney—amen. Have a care of yourself, or by hell, we will coffin you. You are not fit to be a clergyman over a regiment of monkeys. You are a devil in the shape of a man—all that is wanting is a pair of horns and a tail … Bad luck to you, Stoney; I am afraid all your prayers won’t keep you from hell’s fires, when the devil will be laughing with joy to get his brother Stoney, you hypocrite, rascal, scoundrel, swaddler … We all shakes in our skins when we meet you, you d—d rascal; and I ask you, who wouldn’t when they would meet the devil?” Quoted in ibid. p. 207.

41. Because of its isolation Connemara became a refuge for Catholics and Protestants fleeing the troubles in the north and later the dragooning of Mayo in 1798. It was notorious as a haven for smugglers because of its indented shoreline and freedom from the forces of law and order. When asked if the King’s writ ran in Connemara, Richard Martin was said to have given the reply, ‘Egad it does, as fast as any greyhound, if any of my good fellows are after it.’ Patricia Kilroy, The Story of Connemara (Dublin 1989), p. 71.

42. Ibid. pp. 62–76. For an account of the rise of a new elite in the Celtic fringe based on an influx of new money and well-connected matrimonial alliances, see Colley, Britons, pp. 158–64.

43. Ibid. p. 78; see in particular Letters from the Irish Highlands of Connemara for the views of Henry Blake and his wife on Connemara as a tourist venue.

44. For the career of Richard Martin see Shevawn Lynam, Humanity Dick Martin: ‘King of Connemara’, 1754–1834 (Dublin 1989); Peter Philips, Humanity Dick: The Eccentric Member for Galway. The Story of Richard Martin, Animal Rights Pioneer 1754–1834 (Tunbridge Wells, Kent 2003).

45. Kathleen Villiers-Tuthill, History of Clifden, 1810–1850 (Galway 1981), pp. 11–13.

46. DEP, 29 April 1824.

47. Quoted in D’Arcy Sirr, Trench, pp. 112.

48. Many Ulster Catholics fled to the western counties in 1796 and 1797. The estate of Lord Altamont, which extended over a vast area of western Mayo between Westport and Louisburgh, was a particular haven for these refugees. Their homeless and destitute condition was a source of grave concern to Lord Altamont, who feared that they would be driven to plunder on this account. W.E.H. Lecky, A History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, vol. IV (London 1892), p. 140.

49. D’Arcy Sirr, Trench, p. 630–6.

50. Ibid. pp. 637.

51. Ibid. p. 641.

52. Ibid. p. 639.

53. Irene Whelan, ‘The stigma of souperism’ in Cathal Poirteir (ed.), The Great Irish Famine (Thomas Davis Lecture Series, Cork 1995), pp. 135–54; Bowen, Protestant Crusade, pp. 215–18.

54. D’Arcy Sirr, Trench, p. 645.

55. Ibid. p. 643.

56. Lord Farnham’s agent, W.H. Krause, for example, in a letter to his sister in 1832, expressed his conviction that the wrath of God had fallen on the Protestants of Ireland because ‘popery [is] cherished and encouraged by the rulers of the land’ and ‘Protestants are emigrating in hundreds, feeling that they have no protection from the government, and that they are not allowed to protect themselves’. Stanford, Krause, p. 175.

57. Dublin University Magazine (March 1833), 266; (May 1833), 30.

58. Address and Prospectus of the Protestant Colonisation Society from the Meeting of December 18th, 1829.

59. Ibid.

60. Dublin University Magazine (26 Nov. 1829).

61. Protestant Colonisation Society of Ireland: Transactions … at a Public Meeting of Subscribers (Dublin 1832), p. 2.

62. No records beyond the first prospectuses of 1829 and 1832 exist.

63. DEP, 26 Jan. 1839. For an account of the Brunswick Clubs see Machin, Emancipation Crisis, p. 151.

64. Protestant Colonisation Society of Ireland: Transactions … at a Public Meeting of Subscribers (Dublin 1832), p. 12.

65. Ibid. p. 25.

66. Ibid. p. 6.

67. J.G. MacWalter, The Irish Reformation Movement in Its Religious, Social, and Political Aspects (Dublin 1852), p. 70.

68. Anthony John Preston to Lord Farnham, 30 Nov. 1835 (NLI, Farnham Papers, MS 18,612/27).

69. Acheson, ‘Evangelicals’, p. 35.

70. Ensor, New Reformation, p. 21.

71. The Watchman, 25 Nov.; 2 Dec. 1826.

72. Acheson, ‘Evangelicals’, p. 194.

73. D.P. Thompson, A Brief Account of the Rise and Progress of the Change in Religious Opinion Now Taking Place in Dingle and the West of the County of Kerry (Dublin 1846), pp. 7–8.

74. John Jebb to Charles Forster, 17 Nov. 1830 (TCD, John Jebb Papers, MS 6392/22).

75. Ibid.

76. Ibid. Further details of the life of the Rev. John Goodman of Dingle may be found in Breathnach, ‘Séamus Goodman’, 154.

77. John Jebb to Charles Forster, 17 Nov. 1830 (TCD, John Jebb Papers, MS 6392/22). According to the official chronicler of the Dingle Mission, the Rev. Gubbins came to the Dingle area in the first instance to assist in famine relief. There is no mention of the involvement of Bishop Jebb in the affair. Thompson, Brief Account, pp. 7–9.

78. Ibid. p. 69.

79. Ibid. p. 10.

80. An account of Charles Gayer’s family background and career in Ireland is provided by Arthur Edward Gayer, Memoirs of the Family of Gayer (privately printed, London 1870).

81. Thompson, Brief Account, pp. 38–40; Bowen, Souperism, pp. 83–4.

82. Thompson, Brief Account, p. 29.

83. Ibid. pp. 45–6.

84. Ibid. p. 27.

85. Ibid. pp. 140–4.

86. Ibid. p. 36; Bowen, Souperism, p. 84.

87. Ibid. p. 149.

88. Ibid. p. 151.

89. Ibid. pp. 85–6.

90. Ibid. p. 84.

91. Ibid. p. 175.

92. Asenath Nicholson, Ireland’s Welcome to the Stranger, or an Excursion through Ireland in 1844 and 1845 for the Purpose of Personally Investigating the Condition of the Poor (New York 1847), p. 368.

93. Ibid. pp. 369–72.

94. Bowen, Souperism, p. 88.

95. Interview with Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, poet and native of Ventry, County Kerry; Greenwich, Connecticut, 28 Feb. 1993.

96. Henry Wilberforce, Proselytism in Ireland: The Catholic Defence Association vs. the Irish Church Missions on the Charge of Bribery and Intimidation: A Correspondence between the Rev. A.R.C. Dallas and the Rev. Henry Wilberforce (London 1852), p. 21.

97. Henry William Wilberforce (1807–73) was the youngest son of William Wilberforce, the famous philanthropist. He had a brilliant career as an undergraduate at Oxford, where he became closely associated with John Henry Newman. Like Newman, he was ordained a clergyman in the Church of England, became involved in the Tractarian movement, and eventually became a Catholic in 1850. In 1852 he became secretary of the Catholic Defence Association, a Dublin organization established to counter the work of Alexander Dallas and the Irish Church Missions and to defend the Catholic cause during the height of the ‘No Popery’ controversy of the early 1850s. Between 1854 and 1863 he edited the London-based Catholic Standard. He spent much of his time in the 1850s in Ireland. He died in Gloucestershire in 1873 and was buried in the Dominican Friary at Woodchester. David Newsome, The Wilberforces and Henry Manning: The Parting of Friends (Cambridge, Massachussets 1966), pp. 404–5.

98. Wilberforce, Proselytism in Ireland, p. 41.

99. FJ, 22 June 1852.

100. Otway, Tour in Connaught, pp. 426–7.

101. In an account of the Irish Society’s schools in Kingscourt that the Rev. Winning submitted to the Christian Examiner in October 1828, it is clear that the Society was already thinking in terms of territorial expansion and expected eventually to extend its system from the Irish Sea to the Atlantic. Christian Examiner (Oct. 1828), 306.

102. D’Arcy Sirr, Trench, pp. 556–61.

103. Alfred Clayton Thiselton, A Memorial Sketch of the Life and Labours of Mrs. Henrietta Pendleton, Forty Years Secretary of the Irish Islands and Coasts Society (Dublin 1895), p. 7.

104. Ibid. p. 16.

105. Ibid. p. 21.

106. D’Arcy Sirr, Trench, p. 598. Historical Sketches of the Native Irish was the second of Christopher Anderson’s studies of Ireland. One of the outstanding features of the book was its emphasis on the islands and coasts of the west as areas where the English language had made very little impact. Besides stressing the usefulness of Irish in promoting the Protestant religion, Anderson insisted that the national interest would be greatly served by halting its decline, and even suggested the establishment of a model school in Dublin where children could be educated exclusively in Irish.

107. Seventeenth Annual Report of the Baptist Society for Promoting the Gospel in Ireland (1831), appendix, p. 48.

108. The Irish Society’s report of 1833 mentioned the Achill project as an admirable example of a growing concern to evangelize the inhabitants of the western islands. It also made it clear that it had originated from sources other than the Society. Fifteenth Report of the Irish Society (1833), p. 16.

109. Quarterly Extract of the Irish Society, 42 (Dublin, 1832), 242–4.

110. Henry Seddall, Edward Nangle, the Apostle of Achill: A Memoir and A History With an Introduction by the Most Rev. William Conyngham Plunket (London 1884), pp. 54–62.

111. For a complete account of the Achill Mission, see Irene Whelan, ‘Edward Nangle and the Achill Mission, 1834–52’ in Raymond Gillespie and Gerard Moran (eds), A Various Country: Essays in Mayo History, 1500–1900 (Westport 1987), pp. 113–34.

112. Samuel Carter Hall, Mr S.C. Hall and the Achill Mission: Correspondence between S.C. Hall and Edward Nangle (Dublin 1844), p. 12.

113. James Johnson, A Tour in Ireland With Meditations and Reflections (London 1844), p. 239.

114. Otway, Tour in Connaught, p. 413.

115. Nicholson, Ireland’s Welcome, p. 443.