Stones of Aran (57 page)
Authors: Tim Robinson
The descendants of the aged piper, who sounds a note from the days when music had a place at the chieftain’s table, were known
by such nicknames as Mícheál an “Pipe” down to the end of the century at least. A more up-to-date feature of the house is
indicated
by “Bryan Flaherty, 55, gardener to Mr. O Flaherty,” living in the village. (This man would have been just as much a descendant of the original Flaithbheartach as his master, of course, and so an Ó Flaitheartaigh like any other, but Patrick O’Flaherty makes the distinction between his own and the common sort by allowing the “O” only to his immediate family and to Fr. Francis.)
George Petrie stayed at Patrick O’Flaherty’s in that year of 1821, and left an account of the house’s good cheer. This fervent Celticist and romantic did not look at his host with the cold and calculating eye Mr. Blake had cast on the O’Flaherty of Renvyle just a decade earlier:
Would that I could convey to the mind of my reader even a faint outline of the character of our never-to-be-forgotten host!… Such is the unaffected grace of his politeness, the mild charm of his conversation, and the sincere warmth of his hospitality, that though uninvited strangers, we were but a few minutes in his house when we felt all the full freedom of enjoyment that could belong to our own firesides, with old and congenial friends to share it…. His house, however, bespeaks the simplicity of the place, as well as the usages of remote times. It is an oblong, thatched cottage, without a second story, containing five or six apartments, with a long porch, forming a kind of hall, attached to the centre of the front. The parlour is not boarded, nor do the chairs present the luxury of a soft seat. In the parlour are a few pictures, two of which, the portraits of a fine gentleman and lady, the work of a court painter, excited my curiosity. “That,” said Mr. O’Flaherty, “is the portrait of an uncle of mine, and the other that of his lady. He was one of six brothers, all men of fine and striking appearance. He went to England to seek his fortune, and that lady, who was daughter to Sir Henry Englefield (a respectable English Catholic), and who had a large fortune, fell in love with him and married him. He was much attached to my father, and had those pictures painted for him.
I interrupt Petrie to report my following-up of this clue to Patrick’s ancestry, which I spent an afternoon pursuing through the
shadowy bookstacks of the London Library. I found the
Englefields
in a seldom-disturbed tome, Burke’s
Extinct
and
Dormant
Baronetages
of
England,
Scotland
and
Ireland.
The Englefields of Wotton Bassett were indeed “respectable Catholics.” The title was created in 1612, and a Sir Francis Englefield obtained a letter from Charles I protecting him from the penalties of recusancy, that is of denying the authority of the Church of England. Sir Henry
Englefield
, who died in 1780, had three sons and two daughters; thus I know that the lady in the portrait Petrie saw is either Ethelinda-Catherine or Teresa-Anne, but unfortunately the name of her husband is not given. Sir Henry’s heir and the last of the line was Henry-Charles, also known in his turn as Sir Henry. Eminent enough to have been written up in the
Dictionary
of
National
Bi
ography,
he was a Fellow of the Royal Society, Secretary of the Society of Dilettanti, and, until he was objected to as a Catholic, President of the Society of Antiquaries. He published papers on astronomy and geology and even on a dyestuff (“The Discovery of a Lake from Madder,” for which he won a gold medal from the Society of Arts). He was a friend of Charles James Fox, was painted by Sir Thomas Lawrence, and had a hand in the drafting of the Catholic Relief Bill of 1791. I was intrigued to find in the
Catholic
Encyclopedia
a
reference to a
Life
of
Sir
Henry
Englefield
by William Sotheby, London 1819, which I felt sure would tell me the only fact about this man of parts that concerns me: what was the parentage of his brother-in-law? But not even the catalogue of the British Library will admit the existence of any such book…
To conclude Petrie’s panegyric:
Mr. O’Flaherty is a native of Aran, and he has never been further from his native rocks than to the city of Galway and the adjacent coast of Thomond…. He is deeply religious, but altogether free from narrow prejudice. His
religion
has something of a romantic character, and he feels his piety more excited in the little, deserted, roofless temple, among the rocks, beside his own house, than it possibly could be in the most crowded and magnificent church. In this solitary ruin he offers up his morning and evening prayers;
and his figure in the centre of the nave, looking towards the mouldering altar, in the act of adoration, as I saw it once by chance, will never be effaced from my recollection.
Mr. O’Flaherty may be justly denominated the
pater
patriae
of the
Araners
. He is the reconciler in all differences, the judge in all disputes, the
advisor
in all enterprises, and the friend in all things…. In 1822 a great number of the islanders had determined to emigrate to America. A ship lay at anchor in Galway to convey them, and they proceeded thither accompanied by Mr. O’Flaherty, to aid them to the last with friendship and advice. Several days elapsed before the vessel was ready to set sail, and Mr. O’Flaherty still
continued
with them; but at last the hour to bid an everlasting adieu arrived…. Men and women all surrounded him—the former with cheeks streaming with tears, and the latter uttering the most piercing lamentations—some hung on his neck, some got his hand or arms to kiss, while others threw themselves on the deck and embraced his knees. It is no discredit that on such an occasion the object of so much affectionate regard was more than unmanned, and it was a long time before his health recovered the injury, or his face lost the sorrowful expression caused by the grief of that parting.
My viewing of this touching genre-picture is troubled as if by an intrusive reflection, in the light of the bitter conviction of
several
villagers I have spoken to that their ancestors were turned off that good land under the scarp at Cill Mhuirbhigh to make room for the O’Flaherty garden, and that many islanders were forced to emigrate when the whole of Ceathrú an Turlaigh to the west was emptied by the landlord’s agent and leased to the O’Flahertys. (It seems that the latter event happened at some period before Thomas Thompson succeeded his father as agent in 1848.)
As to Patrick O’Flaherty, “judge in all disputes,” this position was made official in 1830 or ’31 when he was appointed Justice of the Peace. A later magistrate for the district including Aran gives this account of Patrick’s sittings, which he probably gathered from the oral lore of legal circles as well as from that of the islanders:
He was the only magistrate in the islands, but ruled as a king. He issued his
summons for “the first fine day,” and presided at a table in the open air. If any case deserved punishment, he would say to the defendant, speaking in Irish, “I must transport you to Galway gaol for a month.” The defendant would beg hard not to be transported to Galway, promising good behaviour in the future. If, however, his worship thought the case serious, he would draw his committal warrant, hand it to the defendant, who would, without the
intervention
of police or anyone else, take the warrant, travel at his own expense to Galway and deliver himself up, warrant in hand, at the county gaol.
This was published in 1887, and J.M. Synge would probably have read it before his visit in 1898. Synge’s own version also draws on the reminiscences of the old islanders with whom he discussed ancient justice and injustice:
I have heard that at that time the ruling proprietor and magistrate of the north island used to give any man who had done wrong a letter to a jailer in Galway, and send him off by himself to serve a term of imprisonment. As there was no steamer, the ill-doer was given a passage in some chance hooker to the nearest point on the mainland. Then he walked for many a mile along a desolate shore till he reached the town. When his time had been put through, he crawled back along the same route, feeble and emaciated, and had often to wait many weeks before he could regain the island. Such at least is the story.
One must remember that between the visit of Petrie and that of Synge lay half a dozen famines and the Land War, by which patriarchal attitudes had been starved out and shouted down; the truth about that “first fine day” of Patrick O’Flaherty’s reign had long been left desolate on the shore, bare, unaccomodated, and perhaps forked.
Petrie was to have the opportunity of thanking O’Flaherty again for his hospitality, and of proposing a toast to that “fine old Irish gentleman,” in 1857, during the British Association’s famous banquet in Dún Aonghasa. O’Flaherty would have been well known to several of the eminent banqueteers, and especially to
the director of the excursion, William Wilde. Wilde had visited the islands in 1848, and perhaps on other occasions, and later he built a summer home about thirty miles from Galway, near Cong. He had an O’Flaherty connection through his grandmother, and it is part of the lore of Kilmurvey House that Patrick stood
godfather
to his son, Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde, born in 1856. (The earlier biographies of Oscar Wilde state that his
godfather
was King Oscar of Sweden, who it is alleged was treated for an ear complaint by Sir William; more scholarly studies such as Richard Ellmann’s show that this is not so, but leave open the question of who was Oscar’s godfather. If this is a little literary mystery, here is its possible solution.)
There is certainly some mystery about Patrick’s wife, who is not named in any of the documents I have seen or mentioned in any contemporary accounts. According to the tomb by Port Mhuirbhigh, Patrick’s son James died in October 1881 aged
sixty-four
; therefore he was born in 1816 or 1817—but neither he nor his mother figure, at least identifiably, in the 1821 census. Gossip has it that when James heard his father was dying he realized that there might be difficulties about his inheritance, came home from Galway in a hurry with a priest, and got the situation regularized.
By the time James succeeded his father as the island’s chief middleman and JP in 1864, the Hill Farm at Killeany must have been added to the O’Flaherty holdings in Cill Mhuirbhigh and Ceathrú an Turlaigh. If Patrick had enjoyed and dispensed some residual organic warmth of feudal relationship with the islanders, none of it was passed on to his son, who is remembered solely as a scheming exploiter, in league with the proselytizing minister Kilbride and the extortionate agent Thompson. A local
newspaper
, the
Galway
Vindicator,
alluded to this falling-off in a verse of the anti-souper “Song of the Arranman” I have already quoted in writing about the involved hostilities of the 1860s:
There was a time, people of Aran,
When O’Flaherty’s voice would oppose,
In thunders as clear as clarion,
The tyrants and tract strewing foes.
But now, o degenerate son, you
May lend the vile system a name,
While they fondle the hope that they’ve won you,
We’ll think of your conduct with shame.
At that time O’Flaherty owned the
Arran
Yacht
in partnership with Thompson, and used it in their monopolistic transport trade in kelp, bread and other supplies. He bought a forty-foot smack, the
Breeze,
in 1870 for £105, and employed a local crew in fishing. In the 1870s many tons of stone were drawn from Carraig an Bhanbháin near Cill Éinne, and Kilmurvey House arose to eclipse the old family home; it is said that James called in a Dublin
architect
to provide the style requisite to a gentleman’s residence. The stables and high-walled cattle-yard on the other side of the lane past his main gates completed the demesne. From a window in one of the outhouses there James O’Flaherty JP handed down judgment to lesser islanders standing in the laneway. The yard was the fort and stockade of the bailiffs’ Indian Wars. I hear of the exploit there of an Ó Direáin from Sruthán: he had lent his horse to a neighbour to bring back a sack of meal from Cill Rónáin, and this other man was stopped by the bailiff because he owed rent, and the horse and the meal were seized and taken off to O’Flaherty’s yard. When he heard of this, Ó Direáin, who was a big powerful fellow, took his blackthorn stick and walked over to Cill Mhuirbhigh, pushed his way past O’Flaherty’s men into the yard, leaped on his horse, and when they tried to stop him by shutting the gate, smashed it down and rode off. Nothing was done about him at the time, but when next he came to pay his rent it was refused, and he eventually had to leave the island.
James O’Flaherty’s wife Julia, whom he married in 1848, was the daughter of Thomas and Julia Irwin of Cottage in Roscommon. Julia bore him five daughters: Julia, Mary, Jane, Delia and Lily. James Hardiman was a friend and trustee of the Irwins, and his
son married the eldest daughter, Julia (in fact in Galway they say that a boat-load of O’Flahertys threatened to come over and call on him if he did not marry her). O’Flaherty’s mistress was a
married
woman of Gort na gCapall; he is supposed to have had four illegitimate sons, and their descendants are known by a nickname that nowadays is borne with a touch of pride. In fact James’
extramarital
capers won him a nickname too: An Pocaide Bán, the white billygoat.
Thus James is the original of the man whose reputation makes the old woman cross herself, in Ó Direáin’s “Ó Morna.”
According
to the poem, he was first led astray by a fawning bailiff who persuaded him that the womenfolk would deny nothing to one of his rank and ancestry; then his lonely eminence on the island and the coldness of his wife drove him into melancholy excesses. (Ó Direáin apparently shares the belief that unenthusiastic couplings result in girl children.) Maddened by the wild spring-tide of
desire
he storms through the island: