The Earl's promise

by Mrs. J. H. Riddell

I do not defend the system. Of course amongst a people so highly enlightened as our own—in a state of society which produces such profound thinkers, and renders the views of even the lowest so clear and so just, as that which recommends itself at present—it is most desirable the freedom of action and of conscience should obtain, even if such freedom of action and of conscience produce similar results to those England and Ireland have both had to deplore during the last few years; but still those who took Lord Ardmorne’s farms did so with a perfect knowledge of consequences.

There was no secrecy about the matter. My lord having a certain set of opinions, expected his tenants to acquiesce in those opinions; and they were aware of the fact.

When by reason of death—the resignation of a member, or other causes—an election took place, Lord Ardmorne expected his men to vote for his man. If they refused to do so, my lord turned them out. They rented his land, knowing well the full consequences of contumacy, and if they liked to risk those consequences, it was scarcely fair to grumble (as they did) when the marquis enforced his share of the bargain.

If an Irish farmer of that period could only live a struggling trader for a year in the city of London, in this, he might well pray heaven to deliver him from the men of our time, and to restore him even a hard landlord like the marquis, who expected his tenantry to think as he thought for the sake of an exceptionally low rental and various other indulgences beside.

The Marquis of Ardmorne would have found scant favour at the hands of those gentlemen of the press who, in the present day, are good enough to instruct the nobility in their duties as landlords and landowners. He was in no way romantic. He might have forgiven a tenant a year’s rent, but he could not overlook his venturing to have an opinion of his own.

His manners were not genial; he could not, to reproduce an old Irish phrase, have “charmed a bird off the bush,” even if he had tried to do so. He was one of those who, it is sometimes stated, strive to stop progress. His own party honestly thought they were only the breakwaters that tended to keep the perilous waves of innovation from sweeping over and destroying the land.

The Reform Bill he believed to have been the ruin of the country. Had he lived to see the Irish Church Bill passed, he would have covered his face and turned him to the wall, feeling death had lingered too long. Tenant right stank in his nostrils. Liberty of conscience was a phrase which sounded in his ears like the claptrap expression of a party who were trying to lead the lower orders astray.

The peasantry he regarded as children who, not knowing what was best for them, ought to do as they were told. There could be no mistake as to what Lord Ardmorne considered the first duty of a tenant-farmer; and if the tenant-farmer chanced to entertain a different opinion, why so much the worse for him.

On the other hand, the Ardmorne tenantry enjoyed advantages unknown to those who rented the Somerford lands. The marquis, it is true, did little or nothing in the way of improvements; but he did not prevent the farmers improving their holdings if they pleased to do so. Lime and stone were supplied to them at almost nominal prices. The shore rights, such as the Glendares had let and the lessee sublet again, were practically free to those who, behaving themselves properly, were suffered to cultivate his lordship’s lands and pay rent to his lordship’s agent; and when crops failed or sickness laid low, and the gale days came round, time would often be given to make up that rent for which, as on the Glendare estates, the farmers and their wives, and their sons and daughters, and men-servants and maidservants, worked from morning till night from week’s beginning to week’s end, from the time they were big enough to pick up stones and herd cows till they were carried to their graves.

Nevertheless, the marquis was not liked as Th’ Airl had been. Though his religious opinions were identical with their own; though he reverenced the glorious, pious, and immortal memory of King William; though he had nothing but contempt and hatred for that of James; though he was an Orangeman, and thought “Protestant Boys” the most charming melody ever composed; though his watchword, like theirs, was “No Surrender;” though his feelings towards the Pope were identical with their own sentiments, despite the fact that he uttered his commination services in Parliament in more orthodox and gentlemanly fashion than they shouted out theirs in the streets and highways,—still, his lordship failed to win the hearts of his people.