Lord Mayo was a sportsman in more than the ordinary sense. To a keen physical relish for many forms of manly exercise, he added a less common industry in the branches of knowledge collateral with them. He was not content with enjoying hunting; he studied it. At Palmerstown he set on foot and personally managed an association for improving the breed of horses and cattle. His work as M. F. H. will be presently noticed. He familiarised himself with the country which he hunted, as a general would study a district which he had to hold or to invade; and, indeed, he used to say laughingly, that he thought he might do very well some day as Commander of the Forces in County Kildare.
When Lord Naas accepted the Mastership of the Kildare Foxhounds in 1857, he found that a succession of hard winters had left the hunting country destitute of good coverts, the severe frosts having killed the gorse. Just before he became Master, the huntsman, after a blank day in the centre of the county, had declared that he could not tell where they should find a fox the next season; and gentlemen who knew Kildare felt that it would not afford two days' hunting a week for many years to come.
Lord Naas set himself to bring about an equilibrium in the finances, and to do this he felt he must give value to the subscribers for their money. He rejected a friendly proposal to hunt only twice a week for the first season, declaring that Kildare should never sink into a two-day-a-week county in his time, and he laboured to make up for the poverty of the coverts by good management and hard work. One day, during his first season, a firm supporter said to him: 'Well, you have now drawn two turnip-fields, three hedgerows, and one highroad. Have you a covert for the evening?' He said he had, and gave a fine run. His industry and popularity soon began to tell on the funds. By the end of his first season the subscriptions had risen from £900 to £1450, and the field-money from £250 to £358, thus quenching a deficit of £500, and leaving a surplus of £150 instead.
More than twenty new coverts were formed during his five years, and at least thirty others rehabilitated. 'In fact,' writes a Kildare gentleman, 'the whole country was re-made during Lord Naas' Mastership, through his personal exertions, and by means of the great enthusiasm which he created among his supporters.' Before he gave up the hounds, in 1862, he had placed the hunt on such a basis as to warrant the expenditure being fixed at £1900 a year, and to enable his successor to hunt seven days a fortnight from the first.
'As Master of the Kildare hounds,' writes one of his brother sportsmen, 'Naas had a good deal against him in his public capacity as a politician, with the farmers and others; but his innate goodness of heart, his thorough love of Ireland and Irishmen, and his wondrous enthusiasm for sport, soon made him loved by all who knew him. There are many farmers who have not hunted since his time, and he made many a man hunt who never thought of it before. He was never once in a field without knowing it ever afterwards, and how to get out of it. He remembered every fence in the country; and one day, having lost his watch in a run, he next day walked over the ground, part of which he had crossed alone, and found it. He reckoned that the greatest compliment paid to him while Master was by the farmers of the Maynooth country. One of them gave the land, and they all turned out with men and horses, and made a stick covert for him in a single day. Nothing ever gratified him more. But, indeed, there were men in Kildare among all classes who were devoted to him, and with whom he had marvellous influence—men of different religion and of different politics from himself.
'Lord Naas drew very late, and was always delighted, when it was very late, if somebody asked him to draw again. He often went to the meet when the country was deep with snow and hard frost; but if it was thawing he always hunted, even with no one out. He never had a very bad fall; and when he had an ordinary one, he never cared. Those who saw him at Downshire jump into a trap filled with water will not easily forget his joyous whoop when we ran to ground, and his fine manly figure and happy face as he scraped the mud off his coat.
'To sum up: Lord Naas took the country in 1857 with poor funds, no coverts, and few foxes. In five years he gave it up with all the coverts restored, full of foxes, and with a balance of money in hand—the subscriptions having increased by £500 a year. The gentlemen of the county are solely indebted to him for the present satisfactory state of the county as a great hunting country. He advocated the admission of members who would not have been admitted under the old rules, and did much thereby to popularise the Hunt.' The same friend remarks in a private letter:10 'We are indebted to Lord Naas for Kildare as it is—for its good sport and good-fellowship.' Perhaps a too enthusiastic estimate of the services of any single man; but Lord Mayo carried so intense a vitality alike into his work and his play, that he was apt to infect with enthusiasm all who came near him.
10 Written in 1874.
To return to his public career. As the session of 1868 gradually disintegrated his party, Lord Mayo's difficulties increased. It may well be imagined, therefore, how he began to look forward to the independence held out by the Indian viceroyalty. 'He had but a single regret,' writes a colleague; 'he feared that his appointment would mortify a friend who (he thought) wanted it. I was struck by the manly self-reliance, and at the same time the becoming modesty, of his bearing. How strong he felt himself, and yet how fully he realised the responsibilities and difficulties before him! But the one great feeling which seemed to animate him was joy at being at last free—to do, to think, and to act as he himself found to be wisest. He seemed to me to be like a man who, having been for some time denied the light of the sun, was suddenly brought into the open day. The only expression which could give utterance to all that was passing within him were the two words, "At last."'
The tottering state of the Ministry throughout the session of 1868 strongly directed public criticism to their having appointed one of themselves to a great office which would not fall in till January 1869. The reason of its being intimated early in the autumn was that Lord Mayo desired to visit the chief political centres in India before assuming office, with a view to studying on the spot certain large questions then pending. How thoroughly he accomplished his purpose was realised by every one who, during the early months of his Viceroyalty, had to discuss those topics—ranging from the Suez Canal to the state of local feeling on important matters in Bombay and Madras. The moment the appointment was made, and while still in England, he threw himself into his new destiny. He denied his heart its last wish to spend the remaining weeks in Ireland; attended the India Office at all hours; held daily consultations with the leading Indian authorities; toiled till late in the night on the documents with which they supplied him; and employed those about him in collecting books and papers bearing upon India.