Galway is only a big borough nowadays, where ruins are nearly as numerous as inhabited dwellings. From the road that skirts the Bay, after leaving the harbour, the long islands of Arran may be seen rising on the west; from another road, which goes northwards, Lough Corrib appears, famous for its salmon fisheries. As an historic place, the county possessed already the field of Aughrim, celebrated for two centuries as the spot where James II. lost his last battle against William III.—a battle so murderous that the dogs of the country retained a taste for human flesh for three generations after. But since the last year it has acquired a new celebrity: another and no less epic battle has been fought at Woodford in August, 1886, for the agrarian cause. The account of it is worth telling. Never did the character of the struggle between League and landlord appear in such a glaring light. All the factors in the problem are there, each playing its own part. It is like a vertical cut opening Irish society down to its very core, and permitting to see it from basis to summit; a supplementary chapter to Balzac’s Paysans.
Woodford is a pretty village seated on the shore of Lough Derg on the slope of the hills which divide Galway from Clare. The principal landowners there are the Marquis of Clanricarde, Sir Henry Burke, the Westmeath family, Colonel Daly, and Lord Dunsandle. Agrarian hatred is particularly alive in that district; the Galway man is bloodthirsty, and counts human life as nought. Five or six years ago Mr. Blake, Lord Clanricarde’s agent, was shot dead, and in March, 1886, a bailiff named Finley, a veteran of the Crimean war, had the same fate while he was going to proceed to an eviction on the account of Sir Henry Burke. The spot is shown still where the unfortunate man was murdered and his corpse left twenty-four hours without sepulture, nobody daring or willing to bear it away. A detachment of the police in the pay of the Property Defence Association having settled their barracks in the vicinity of Woodford, the inhabitants, about one thousand in number, organized a sort of grotesque pageant, which made its progress along the streets of the town behind a coffin bearing the inscription: Down with landlordism! then concluded by burning the coffin in sight of the barracks.
There are two churches, one Protestant, the other Catholic. The faithful who attend the first are two in number, no mere nor less, which would be sufficient to show how legitimate it was for the Irish to protest when obliged to pay the tithes of an altogether alien worship. The second is headed by a jolly compeer, much beloved by his parishioners for his good humour and liberality, Father Caen, a pastor of the old school, whose boast it is that he keeps the best table and cellar, and has the prettiest nieces in the county. He is president of the local board of the League; the treasurer of that committee is the guardian of the poor law of the district, what we would call “l’administrateur du bien des pauvres;” but the true agent of the League—the Deus ex machina of the place—is the secretary, Father Egan, curate of the parish, an austere, thin, fanatic-looking man, a peasant’s son, with all the passions of his race, who sucked the hatred of landlords with his mother’s milk, and ever remembers that many of his kindred have been reduced to emigrate, and that an uncle of his went mad after being evicted. A feature to be noted down; that priest, tall, strong, sinewy, is an excellent shot and an inveterate poacher. Nothing would be easier for him than obtaining leave from the landowners to shoot on their grounds; but he scorns the leave. His delight is to lurk at night till he has shot some of their big game, or to head openly a battue for a general slaughter five miles round.
One of the finest estates in the county is that of Lord Clanricarde, to which are attached three hundred and sixteen tenants.
Hubert George De Burgh Canning, Marquis of Clanricarde and Baron Somerhill, was born 1832, according to the Peerage. He was never married, has no children, belongs to the House of Lords as Baron Somerhill, is a member of two or three great clubs, and lives in Piccadilly, at the Albany, a sort of caravanserai (not to say seraglio), almost exclusively a resort of rich bachelors. That is about all that is known of him. His tenants do not know him. The only glimpse they ever had of their landlord was on the following occasion. In 1874, at the funeral of the late Marquis, a man of about forty, with fair hair, who had come from London for the ceremony, was noticed among the mourners. He was said to be the new master. That was all: he disappeared as he had come. Save for that hazy and far-away remembrance, the landlord is for the Woodford people a mere name, a philosophical entity of whom they know nothing except that he has a land agent at Loughrea, a little neighbouring town, and that into the hands of that agent they must pay every year £19,634 out of the product of the land. The tenants of Woodford are in that sum for about £1,000.
The Marquis’s father died in 1874. Quite contrary to the present owner, he was the prototype of the Irish lord resident. Great sportsman, scatter-brain, violent, extravagant, but kind and open-handed, he was liked in spite of his numerous failings, and tradition helping him he was emphatically the master almost all his life long; a fact which he was wont to illustrate by boasting that if it pleased him to send his old grey mare to the House of Commons, the electors would be too happy to vote unanimously for the animal.
In 1872, however, the Marquis’s tenants took it into their heads to cut the tradition, and gave their vote to a certain Captain Nolan, the Home Rule candidate. The irascible nobleman took revenge for what he chose to consider as a personal insult by raising the rent of all bad electors. He went so far in that line that in 1882 the Land Commissioners had to reduce them by half. That judgment could not, of course, have a retrospective effect and bring a restitution of the sums that had been paid in excess during the last ten years, and which varied from £50 to £100. It may be imagined how they must weigh still on the peasant’s heart, and what a well-prepared ground the agrarian movement was to find at Woodford. The successive murders of the land agent Blake and Bailiff Finlay were among the first and visible signs of that ferment of hatred.