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Title: The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent Author: S.M. Hussey Editor: Home Gordon Release Date: August 5, 2005 [EBook #16450] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE REMINISCENCES OF AN ***
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent
S.M. Hussey
THE REMINISCENCES
OF AN
IRISH LAND AGENT
BEING THOSE OF
S.M. HUSSEY
Compiled by
HOME GORDON
WITH TWO PORTRAITS
LONDON
DUCKWORTH AND COMPANY 3 HENRIETTA STREET, W.C. 1904 Edinburgh: T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty
PREFACE
Probably the first criticism on this book will be that it is colloquial. The reason for this lies in the fact that though Mr. Hussey has for two generations been one of the most noted raconteurs in Ireland, he has never been addicted to writing, and for that reason has always declined to arrange his memoirs, though several times approached by publishers and strongly urged to do so by his friends, notably Mr. Froude and Mr. John Bright. If his reminiscences are to be at all characteristic they must be conversational, and it is as a talker that he himself at length consents to appear in print. In this volume he endeavours to supply some view of his own country as it has impressed itself on ’the most abused man in Ireland,’ as Lord James of Hereford characterised Mr. Hussey. How little practical effect several attacks on his life and scores of threatening letters have had on him is shown by the fact that he survives at the age of eighty to express the wish that his recollections may open the eyes of many as well as prove diverting. Possessing a retentive memory, he has been further able to assist me with seven large volumes of newspaper cuttings which he had collected since 1853, while the publishers kindly permit the use of two articles he contributed to Murray’s Magazine in May and July 1887. To me the preparation of this book has been a delightful task, materially helped by Mr. Hussey’s family as
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent
well as by a few others on either side of the Channel. HOME GORDON. 13 OVINGTON SQUARE, S.W.
CONTENTS
PREFACE CHAP. I. ANCESTRY II. PARENTAGE AND EARLY YEARS III. EDUCATION IV. FARMING V. LAND AGENT IN CORK VI. FAMINE AND FEVER VII. FENIANISM VIII. MYSELF, SOME FACTS, AND MANY STORIES IX. THE HARENC ESTATE X. KERRY ELECTIONS XI. DRINK XII. PRIESTS XIII. CONSTABULARY AND DISPENSARY DOCTORS XIV. IRISH CHARACTERISTICS XV. LORD-LIEUTENANTS AND CHIEF SECRETARIES XVI. GLADSTONIAN LEGISLATION XVII. THE STATE OF KERRY XVIII. A GLANCE AT MY STEWARDSHIP XIX. MURDER, OUTRAGE, AND CRIME XX. THE EDENBURN OUTRAGE XXI. MORE ATROCITIES AND LAND CRIMES XXII. COMMISSIONS XXIII. LATER DAYS INDEX
ILLUSTRATIONS
PORTRAIT OF S.M. HUSSEY PORTRAIT OF MRS. HUSSEY
REMINISCENCES OF AN IRISH LAND AGENT
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent
CHAPTER I
ANCESTRY
’My father and mother were both Kerry men,’ as the saying goes in my native land, and better never stepped. It was my misfortune, but not my fault, that I was born at Bath and not in Kerry. However, my earliest recollection is of Dingle, for I was only three months old when I was taken back to Ireland, and up to that time I did not study the English question very deeply, especially as I had an Irish nurse. There is a lot of Hussey history before I was born, and some is worth preserving here. It is a thousand pities that so many details of family history have been lost, and to my mind it is incumbent on one member of every reasonably old family in this generation to collect and set down what should be remembered about their ancestors for the unborn to come. My contribution does not profess to be very exhaustive, but it will serve for want of a better. When a man claims to be descended from Irish kings, it generally means that his forbears were bigger scoundrels than he is, for they were cattle-lifters and marauders, whilst his depredations are probably disguised under some of the many insidious forms of finance. Just as every Scotsman is not canny and every American is not cute, so every Irishman is not what the Saxon believes him to be. But there can be little doubt what type of men these ancient Irish sovereigns were, and I regretfully confess I cannot trace my descent from them. The family of Hussey was of English extraction, according to that rather valuable book The Antient and Present State of the County of Kerry, by Charles Smith, 1756—the companion volumes dealing with Cork and Waterford are much less precious. Personally I always understood that the Husseys hailed from Normandy, as will be seen a few pages on, but tradition on such a point is not of much value. Anyway the family of Hussey settled in very early times at Dingle, and also had several lands and castles in the barony of Corkaquiny. Dingle was the only town in this barony, and it was incorporated by Queen Elizabeth in 1585, when she granted it the same privileges which were enjoyed by Drogheda, with a superiority over the harbours of Ventry and Smerwick. The Virgin Sovereign also presented the town with £300 for the purpose of making a wall round it. The Irish formerly called Dingle Daingean in Cushy, or the fastness of the Husseys. One of the FitzGeralds, Earl of Desmond, had granted to an ancestor of my own a considerable tract of land in these parts, namely, from Castle-Drum to Dingle, or as others say, he gave him as much as he could walk over in his jackboots in one day. That Hussey built a castle, said to be the first erected at Dingle, the vaults of which were afterwards used as the county gaol.
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent
There is mention of this in the grant of a charter to Dingle by King James I. in the fourth year of his reign: ’The house of John Hussey granted for a gaol and common hall to the corporation.’ A grim interest lurks in the fact that the dedication of Smith’s History to Lord Newport, Lord Chancellor of Ireland, recites that ’this Kingdom, my lord, is a kind of Terra Incognita to the greater part of Europe.’ Is it not so to this day? Do I not meet scores of people who tell me they would love to go to Kerry, but they have never been nearer than Killarney. That is the sort of speech which makes me wonder how geography is taught. It is on a par with the remark of a prominent Arctic explorer, that he had never been to Killarney because it was so far off. People, however, who go there apparently like it. The chief Elizabethan settlers in Kerry were William and Charles Herbert, Valentine Brown, ancestor of the Kenmares, Edmund Denny, and Captain Conway, whose daughter Avis married Robert Blennerhasset, while a little later, in 1600, John Crosbie was made Bishop of Ardfert and Aghadoe. To-day the descendants of those settlers are still among the principal folk in Kerry, though that is more due to their own selves than to the support they had from any British Government. This Valentine Brown, who was a worshipful and valiant knight, wrote a discourse for settling Munster in 1584. His plan was to exterminate the FitzGeralds and to protestantise Ireland; but by the irony of fate his own son married a daughter of the Earl of Desmond and became a Roman Catholic. In the Carew Manuscript it is recorded that he estimated that one constable and six men would suffice for Cork, but for Ventry, ’a large harbour near Dingle,’ one constable and fifty men were necessary; so he evidently had a clear apprehension of the villainous capabilities of the men of Kerry. It is also recorded that in the parish of Killiney is a stronghold called Castle Gregory, which before the wars of 1641 was possessed by Walter Hussey, who was proprietor of the Magheries and Ballybeggan. Having a considerable party under his command, he made a garrison of his castle, whence having been long pressed by Cromwell’s forces, he escaped in the night with all his men, and got into Minard Castle, in which he was closely beset by Colonels Lehunt and Sadler. After some time had been spent, the English observing that the besieged were making use of pewter bullets, powder was laid under the vaults of the castle, and both Walter Hussey and his men were blown up. Prior to this, ’on January 31, 1641, Walter Hussey, with Florence MacCarthy and others, attacked Ballybeggan Castle, plundered and burnt the house of Mr. Henry Huddleston, and did the same to the house and haggards of Mr. Hore, where they built an engine called a saw, having its three
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sides made musket-proof with boards. It was drawn on four wheels, each a foot high, with folding doors to open inwards and several loopholes to shoot through, without a floor, so that ten or twelve men who went therein might drive it forwards. These machines were set against castle walls whilst the men within them attempted to make a breach with crows and pickaxes.’ Infernal machines are, after all, not confined to our own times, and this same rascally ancestor of my own appears to have had predatory habits more likely to be appreciated by his followers than by his foes. Dingle is now a somewhat dilapidated town, but that was not always the case, for it is mentioned in my dear old friend Froude’s History of England that the then Earl of Desmond called on the ambassador of Charles V. at his lodgings in Dingle. The old records of the place would be worth diligent antiquarian research, a matter even more difficult in Ireland than elsewhere. Should all be brought to light, I fancy the part played by my family would not grow smaller. The Husseys spread away over the county, after having their lands forfeited under both Elizabeth and Cromwell, which was the most respectable thing to suffer in those times. In the reign of Queen Anne, Colonel Maurice Hussey sold Cahirnane to the Herberts, and there is a garden still called Hussey’s Garden in the property. He built a mortuary chapel for himself on the top of a small hill just outside the gates of Muckross, where his own grave near that beautiful abbey can be seen to this day. This Colonel Maurice Hussey resided for some time in England, and appears to have married an English lady; and it is odd that though a Roman Catholic he was trusted by the Governments of both William and Anne. There seems to have been something versatile about his rather mysterious career, the key to which may be found in the surmise that until the accession of King George he was a Jacobite at heart; which throws some doubt on his assertion in a letter that there are very few Tories—or outlaws—in Kerry, where the Whig rule was never enforced with great severity. He was, however, committed to ’Trally jail’ (i.e. Tralee) on the fear of a landing by the Pretender, whence he wrote pleading letters, in one of which he mentions that his son-in-law, MacCartie, has taken the oaths of abjuration; and later, when released, he seems to have been disturbed at the large number of German Protestants, driven out of the Palatinate by Louis the Fourteenth, who settled at Bally M’Elligott. Any one who rambles about Dingle and investigates the older buildings, so carefully examined by Mr. Hitchcock, will notice how frequent is the emblem of a tree; and that is a conspicuous feature of the Hussey armorial bearings. With reference to the allusions made in Smith’s book to my ancestors, it may be pointed out that he repeated the popular tradition at the very time when the Husseys, like the rest of their fellow Catholics all over the country, were disinherited and depressed, and when he could gain nothing by doing them honour. As for my name, it seems to have really been Norman, and to have been De La Huse, De La Hoese, and later Husee, Huse, and, finally, Hussey.
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Burke in his extinct Peerage states that Sir Hugh Husse came to Ireland, 17 Hen. II., and married the sister of Theobald FitzWalter, first Butler of Ireland, and that he died seized of large possessions in Meath. His son married the daughter of Hugh de Lacy, senior Earl of Ulster, and their great-grandson, Sir John Hussey, Knight, first Earl of Galtrim, was summoned to Parliament in 1374. Moreover, the State Papers in the Public Record Office, quoted in the Journal of the Royal Society of Irish Antiquaries for September 1893, p. 266, prove beyond question that Nicholas de Huse or Hussy and his father, Herbert de Huse, were land-owners of some importance in Kerry in 1307. Stirring times they must have been, of which we have no fiction under the guise of history, though then men had to fight hard to preserve their lives and maintain their dignity. We can imagine the tussle, even in these degenerate days when no challenge follows the exchange of insults, even in the House of Commons, and when the perpetration of the most cowardly outrage in Ireland has to be induced by preliminary potations of whisky. Of course, those old times were bad times, but the badness was at least above board and the warfare pretty stoutly waged. There is some sense in fighting your foe hand to hand, but to-day when a battle is contested by armies which never see one another, and are decimated by silent bullets, the courage needed is of a different character, and the wicked murder of such combats is obvious. But let us quit war and confiscation for the equally stormy region known as politics, wherein it may be noted that in 1613 Michael Hussey was Member of Parliament for Dingle. Now for a coincidence in Christian names. Only two Husseys forfeited in the Desmond Rebellion, and they were John and Maurice. In the Irish Parliament of James II., when Kerry returned eight members, two of them were Husseys, and their names were John and Maurice. My grandfather’s name was John, and his father before him was Maurice, and I christened my two surviving sons John and Maurice. We do not go in for much variety of nomenclature in our family. My grandfather, John Hussey, lived at Dingle, his mother being a member of the well-known Galway family of Bodkin. He was an offshoot of the Walter Hussey who had been converted into an animated projectile by the underground machinations of Cromwell’s colonels. He was a very little man, who had a landed property at Dingle, did nothing in particular, and received the usual pompous eulogy on his tombstone. I never heard that he left any papers or diaries, and I do not think that he ever went out of Kerry—he had too much sense. A rather diverting story in which his sister was the heroine may be worth telling, if only because it was so characteristic of the period. In those days, as now, Husseys and Dennys were closely associated, and both my great-aunt and Miss Denny, known locally as the ’Princess Royal,’ were going to a ball. At that time it was the fashion for the girls of the period to wear muslin skirts edged with black velvet. The muslin was easily procured; not so the velvet, which was eventually obtained by sacrificing an ancient pair of nether garments belonging to my great-grandfather.
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After the early dinner then fashionable, each of the damsels was departing for the Castle, with a swain at the door of her sedan-chair, when our kinswoman, Lady Donoughmore, who was on the door-step watching them off, enthusiastically shouted:— ’Success to the breeches! Success to the breeches!’ Imagine the horrified confusion of the poor ’Princess Royal,’ not then eighteen. This episode reminds me of the modern Scottish story of a tiresome small boy who wanted more cake at a tea-party, and threatened his parents with dire revelations if they did not comply with his demands. As they showed no signs of intimidation, he banged on the table to obtain attention, and then announced:— ’Ma new breeks are made out of the winter curtains.’ An incident connected with one of the earliest private carriages in Kerry is worth telling. The vehicle in question had just been purchased by a certain Miss Mullins, daughter of a former Lord Ventry, who regarded it on its arrival with almost sacred awe. A dance in the neighbourhood seemed an appropriate opportunity for impressing the county with her newly acquired grandeur, but the night proving wet, she insisted on reverting to a former mode of progression, and rode pillion behind her coachman. The result was that she caught a violent chill, which turned to pneumonia, and as her relatives were assembled round her deathbed, the old lady exclaimed, between her last gasps for breath:— ’Thank God I never took out the carriage that wet night.’
CHAPTER II
PARENTAGE AND EARLY YEARS
My father, Peter Bodkin Hussey, was for a long time a barrister at the Irish Bar, practising in the Four Courts, where more untruths are spoken than anywhere else in the three kingdoms, except in the House of Commons during an Irish debate. All law in Ireland is a grave temptation to lying, and the greatest number of Courts produced a stupendous amount of mendacity—or it was so in earlier times, at all events. Did you ever hear the tale of the old woman who came to Daniel O’Connell, outside the Four Courts, as he was walking down the steps, and said to him:— ’Would your honour be so kind as to tell me the name of an honest attorney?’ The Liberator stopped, scratched his head in a perplexed way, and replied:— ’Well now, ma’am, you bate me intoirely.’
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent
My father had red hair, and was very impetuous. Therefore he was christened ’Red Precipitate’ by Jerry Kellegher. This legal luminary was a noted wit even at the Irish Bar of that time, a confraternity where humour was almost as rampant as creditors—irresponsible fun, and a light purse are generally allied; your wealthy fellow has too much care for his gold to have spirits to be mirthful. The tales about him are endless. Here are just a few I have heard from my father’s lips. Jerry had a cousin, a wine merchant, who supplied the Bar mess, and a complaint was lodged that the bottles were very small. To which Jerry retorted:— ’You idiot, don’t you know they shrink in the washing,’ which satisfied the grumbler. And that always seemed to me the strangest part of the story. In those days religious feeling ran pretty high—I will not go so far as to say it has entirely died down to-day—and the usual Protestant toast was:— ’The Pope, the Devil, and the Pretender.’ Now, Jerry was a Roman Catholic, none the less earnest because he had a merry way with him. On a certain Friday he was seen to be fasting by a very foppish barrister, who thought a great deal of himself. He remarked to Jerry, with unnecessary impertinence:— ’Sir, it appears you have some of the Pope in your stomach.’ To which Jerry, quick as a pistol-shot, retorted:— ’And you have the whole of the Pretender in your head,’ after which there was the devil to pay. There was a certain Chancellor in Ireland who was born a few years after his father and mother had separated. As he did not like Jerry, he used to make a great fuss about how he should pronounce his name. At last in Court one day he burst out:— ’Pray te..."
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