One Irish Summer

by William Eleroy Curtis

Lady Eleanor MacCarthy saved the life of Gerald Fitzgerald, the son of Silken Thomas, Earl of Kildare, who rebelled against English authority. She succeeded in escaping from the country with him and taking him to Rome, where the babe, the only survivor of the vengeance of Henry VIII., was concealed and cared for by a cardinal who happened to be a distant relative. And it was thus, through the devotion of a brave woman, from its hereditary enemies, that the house of Kildare escaped extinction.

In the time of Queen Elizabeth, however, upon the suppression of what is known in history as the Geraldine rebellion, the vast estates of the Earl of Desmond and those of the MacCarthys and one hundred and forty other chiefs and landowners in Munster were confiscated by a parliament that met in Dublin, and were given to English adventurers for two pence and three pence an acre and sometimes for no price at all, upon agreements that they would colonize the lands with Englishmen. The head of the house at that date was imprisoned in the Tower of London with Sir Walter Raleigh, accused of treason, and it was he who outwitted Queen Elizabeth with his “deludering” until she coined the word “blarney” to describe his fluent conversation.

Blarney Castle, County Cork

The famous Blarney stone is as well known as the King of England, and the superstition is that whoever kisses it becomes instantly endowed with wonderful persuasion of speech. But very few people and only the most daring athletes have ever tried the experiment. The miraculous stone is the sill of a window, which projects from the main wall near the top of the tower. As it is eight or ten inches below the level of the floor and across an open space of about twenty or twenty-four inches, it is not only difficult, but dangerous to attempt to reach it. A slip would send you head first to the ground, one hundred and twenty feet below. The only way in which it can be done is for the person who tries to support himself over the edge of the wall by straps from the top, and, with his face upward, draw himself across until his lips can reach the stone. Almost everybody that visits Blarney Castle comes home with a tale of the time he had in kissing the Blarney stone, but no one has seen him doing so for years, and it can only be done by carrying tackle to the castle. Mrs. Hanna Ford, a gentle and considerate old lady, who has been custodian of the place for more than thirty-six years, told me that she had never known but half a dozen people to kiss the stone in all that time.

Sir George Colthurst, the owner, charges a sixpence of every visitor and collects scarcely enough to pay the expenses of keeping the place in order. The visitors average about one hundred a day during the summer months, but nobody ever goes out there during the winter.

Kilkenny is one of the prettiest and most interesting little cities of the kingdom, and is simply loaded with historical associations, political, personal, military, and religious. No town has more fascination for a student of the history of Ireland, because here was enacted that extraordinary and outrageous code known as the statute of Kilkenny of 1367, which was intended to exterminate everything Irish from the face of the earth. According to this law intermarriage, trade, and relations of every kind between the English settlers in Ireland and the natives was forbidden as high treason, and the punishment was death. It was intended to separate the two races entirely and forevermore. If any man wore Irish clothing, or used the Celtic language, or rode a horse without a saddle, as the Irish were accustomed to do, his lands and houses were forfeited and he was sent to prison. The Irish were forbidden to follow their ordinary customs and habits, and were commanded to speak only English, a language they did not know. It was forbidden them to speak Celtic, it was forbidden them to sing native songs or to receive or listen to Irish bards or pipers; no native could become a clergyman, a lawyer, or enter any of the professions, and every possible connection with the past was obliterated. All Irish books and manuscripts were ordered to be destroyed, and if the intention of the parliament which passed that law in Kilkenny in 1367 had been obeyed, every event, tradition, and legend concerning the Irish race would have been forgotten. But it soon became a dead letter. It could not be enforced, and the English and the Irish continued to live in a friendly way, and intermarry and enjoy themselves as much as ever before.

Then Kilkenny was the scene of the famous “Irish confederation,” which met here in 1642 with the intention of reconciling all the conflicting interests in Ireland and doing exactly the reverse of what was proposed by the statute of 1367. It was desirable to unite the Irish with the English to sustain King Charles I., and to defend the Roman Catholic religion against Cromwell and the parliament. Therefore Kilkenny became the object of resentment and vindictiveness to the parliamentary army when it invaded Ireland. The destruction committed by that army may be seen all through this part of the country. Kilkenny is in the midst of a land of ruins, and this county has been fought over for ages—one of the most frequent scenes of conflict in all the universe ever since history began.

There is an Irish town and an English town, as in Limerick, and the two are engaged in an eternal controversy, the racial prejudice being intense. This controversy, which at one time had nearly impoverished both communities, was illustrated by a writer two centuries ago by the famous story of the “Kilkenny Cats,” which, by the way, is said to be true. In the sixteenth century, during the time of Queen Elizabeth, some soldiers of the English garrison at Kilkenny Castle amused themselves one day by catching two vagrant cats, tying their tails together and hanging them over a line. An indignant officer coming up in the midst of their hilarity endeavored to separate the animals, and, being unable to do so, released them by slashing off the tails of both with his sword; and as their paws touched the ground, they fled into oblivion. The waggish soldiers preserved the remnants of the tails and showed them as evidence of the combative abilities of the cats of Kilkenny, which fought until nothing was left but their tails.