DISTRIBUTION OF EGYPTIAN WAR MEDALS BY HER MAJESTY THE QUEEN AT WINDSOR, November 21, 1882.
On the 8th of the following month a gentleman called Walter Bourke, riding with a soldier as escort near Gort, was shot at, and both were killed; and in like manner, on the 29th, Mr. Blake, a land agent, and his steward, Mr. Keene, were murdered by concealed assassins near Lough Rea. Ireland had come to a desperate condition; it was garrisoned with not less than 20,000 cavalry and infantry and 20,000 mounted constabulary, yet the Executive seemed powerless to cope with an almost universal conspiracy against life and property. The murdered Cavendish was succeeded as Chief Secretary by Mr. G. O. Trevelyan, and the first act of the Government was to introduce a fresh Coercion Bill, of extraordinary severity, creating special tribunals for the trial of suspects and criminals, conferring rights of search on the police, and giving further powers for dealing with incitement to crime. The Bill was vehemently opposed by Mr. Parnell and his party; nevertheless, the Government pursued their apparently hopeless policy of conciliation by introducing and carrying through the Arrears of Rent Bill, whereby about two millions of money was applied to release Irish tenants of a moiety of the liabilities which the Land League had forbidden them to fulfil, and the balance of arrears was wiped out at the expense of landlords.
Sir J. D. Linton, P.R.I.] [From the Royal Collection.
1. The Queen.
2, 3. The Bride and Bridegroom.
4. Prince of Wales.
5. Grand Duke of Hesse.
6. Princess Beatrice.
7. Princess of Wales with her three daughters.
8, 9. Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh.
10, 11. Duke and Duchess of Teck.
12. Duke of Cambridge.
13. Prince Edward of Saxe-Weimar.
14. Princess Victoria of Hesse.
15. Archbishop of Canterbury.
16. Dean Wellesley.
17. King of the Netherlands.
18, 19. The Bride’s Parents.
20. Queen of the Netherlands.
THE MARRIAGE OF THE DUKE OF ALBANY AND PRINCESS HELEN OF WALDECK AND PYRMONT AT ST. GEORGE’S CHAPEL, WINDSOR, April 27, 1882.
The additional powers conferred on the police by the Crimes Act of 1882 resulted in the capture of the gang who had planned and carried out the murders in the Phœnix Park. In January 1883 seventeen persons were arrested in Dublin, and on one of them, Farrell, turning informer, it came out that they were members of a secret society. Their principal object had been to make away with Mr. W. E. Forster when he was Chief Secretary, and on various occasions he had escaped assassination by what seemed the narrowest chances. |Trial and Execution of the Phœnix Park Murderers.| Among those arrested was James Carey, who had given the signal for the murder of Burke by raising a white handkerchief, and who turned Queen’s evidence. He was allowed to go free after the trial, while five of his gang were hanged, the remainder being sentenced to various terms of penal servitude. Finally, this bloody chapter was brought to a close in the murder of Carey himself, by a man named O’Donnell, who had travelled in the same ship with him to Cape Town. O’Donnell was brought home to England and hanged early in December.
While the trial of the Phœnix Park assassins was proceeding, another formidable conspiracy was brought to light. A gang of Irish-Americans had come to this country with the object of terrorising the Government by a series of explosions of nitro-glycerine. |The Dynamite Conspiracy.| On the evening of March 15, 1883, part of the Local Government Board Offices in Whitehall was wrecked by the explosion of a canister of dynamite placed inside one of the balustrades. Simultaneously, another explosion took place at the office of the Times, in Printing House Square. By the help of informers, the police were enabled to arrest a number of persons in London, Birmingham, and Glasgow, all of whom were brought to trial, and most of them proved to be active agents in a heinous conspiracy against life and property. The formidable power which modern explosives had brought within the reach of secret societies made it necessary to make the law dealing with such crimes more stringent, and Sir William Harcourt, the Home Secretary, on April 9, introduced a Bill to cope with what he termed “the pirates of the human race.” He assured the House that the danger was so grave and imminent that the Bill must pass through all its stages on that day. It was read a first, a second time, passed through Committee, and was read a third time, all within little more than an hour. Taken up to the Lords on the same evening, it was dispatched there with equal promptitude, and received the Royal Assent next day—an example of rapid legislation almost without parallel.