E. B. C.
people had brought with them, were left with them, untouched.
It must have been eighty or ninety years ago that the first member of “The Chief’s” family reached Castlehaven. This was his second son, the Rev. Charles Bushe, who was, as Miss Edgeworth says of her stepmamma’s brother, “fatly and fitly provided for” with the living of Castlehaven. Somervilles and Townshends had been living and intermarrying in Castlehaven Parish, with none to molest their ancient solitary reign, since Brian Townshend built himself the fort from which he could look forth upon one of the loveliest harbours in Ireland, and the Reverend Thomas Somerville, the first of his family to settle in Munster, took to himself (by purchase from the representatives of the Earl of Castlehaven) the old O’Driscoll Castle, and lies buried beside it, in St. Barrahane’s churchyard, under a slab that proclaims him to have been “A Worthy Magistrate, and a Safe and Affable Companion.” The two clans enjoyed in those days, I imagine, a splendid isolation, akin to that of the Samurai in Old Japan, and the Rev. Charles Bushe, an apostle of an alien cultivation, probably realised the feelings of Will Adams when he was cast ashore at Osaka, may, indeed, have felt his position to be as precarious as that of the first missionary at the Court of the King of the Cannibal Islands.
My great-uncle Charles was for forty years the Rector of Castlehaven Parish, and the result of his ministry that most directly affects me was the marriage of my father, Colonel Thomas Henry Somerville, of Drishane, to the Rev. Charles’s niece, Adelaide Coghill. (That she was also his step-sister-in-law is a fact too bewildering to anyone save a professional genealogist for me to dwell on it here. I will merely say that my mother’s father was Admiral Sir Josiah Coghill, and her mother was Anna Maria Bushe, daughter of the Chief Justice.)[6]
There is a picture extant, the work of that artist to whom I have already referred, in which is depicted the supposed indignation of the Aboriginal Red men, i.e., my grandfather Somerville and his household, at the apostasy of my father, a Prince of the (Red) Blood Royal, in departing from the family habit of marrying a Townshend, and in allying himself with a Paleface. In that picture the Red men and women are armed with clubs, the Palefaces with croquet mallets. It was with these that they entered in and possessed the land. My grandmother (née Townshend, of Castle Townshend), a small and eminently dignified lady, one of my great-aunts, and other female relatives, are profanely represented, capering with fury, clad in brief garments of rabbit skin. The Paleface females surge in vast crinolines; the young Red man is encircled by them, as was the swineherd in Andersen’s fairy tale, by the Court ladies. My grandfather swings a tomahawk, and is faced by my uncle, Sir Joscelyn Coghill, leader of the second wave of invasion, with a photographic camera (the first ever seen in West Carbery) and a tripod.
* * * * *
I think I must diverge somewhat farther from my main thesis in order to talk a little about the Ancient Order of Hibernians (if I may borrow the appellation) who were thus dispossessed. For, as is the way all the world over, the missionaries ate up the cannibals, and the Red men have left only their names and an unworthy granddaughter to commemorate their customs.
Few South Pacific Islands are now as isolated as was, in those days,—I speak of ninety or one hundred years ago—Castle Townshend. The roads were little better than bridle-paths; they straggled and struggled, as far as was possible, along the crests of the hills, and this was as a protection to the traveller, who could less easily be ambushed and waylaid by members of the large assortment of secret societies, Whiteboys, Ribbonmen, Molly Maguires, Outlaws in variety, whose spare moments between rebellions were lightened by highway robbery. I have heard that my great-grandmother’s “coach” was the only wheeled vehicle that came into Castle Townshend. My great-grandfather used to ride to Cork, fifty-two miles, and the tradition is that he had a fabulous black mare, named Bess, who trotted the journey in three hours (which I take leave to doubt). All the heavy traffic came and went by sea. The pews of the church came from Cork by ship. They have passed now, but I can remember them, and I should have thought that their large simplicity would not have been beyond the scope of the local carpenter. There was a triple erection for the pulpit; the clerk sat in the basement, the service was read au premier, and to the top story my great-uncle Charles was wont to mount, in a black gown and “bands,” and thence deliver classic discourses, worthy, as I have heard, of the son of “silver-tongued Bushe,” but memorable to me (at the age of, say, six) for the conviction, imparted by them anew each Sunday, that they were samples of eternity, and would never end. My eldest brother, who shared the large square pew with our grandfather and me, was much sustained by a feud with a coastguard child, with whom he competed in the emulous construction of grimaces, mainly based, like the sermons, on an excessive length of tongue, but I had no such solace. Feuds are, undoubtedly, a great solace to ennui, and in the elder times of a hundred years or so ago they seem to have been the mainstay of society in West Cork. Splendid feuds, thoroughly made, solid, and without a crack into which any importunate dove could insert so much as an olive-leaf.
Ireland was, in those days, a forcing bed for individuality. Men and women, of the upper classes, were what is usually described as “a law unto themselves,” which is another way of saying that they broke those of all other authorities. That the larger landowners were, as a class, honourable, reasonably fair-minded, and generous, as is not, on the whole, disputed, is a credit to their native kindliness and good breeding. They had neither public opinion nor legal restraint to interfere with them. Each estate was a kingdom, and, in the impossibility of locomotion, each neighbouring potentate acquired a relative importance quite out of proportion to his merits, for to love your neighbour—or, at all events, to marry her—was almost inevitable when matches were a matter of mileage, and marriages might be said to have been made by the map. Enormous families were the rule in all classes, such being reputed to be the will of God, and the olive branches about the paternal table often became of so dense a growth as to exclude from it all other fruits of the earth, save, possibly, the potato.