Tag: Michael Davitt

Footstepping Gladstone

In 1877, William Gladstone, now in Opposition, paid a private visit to Ireland. He arrived 17th October and left 12th November. He stayed at Killruddery House, outside Bray, County Wicklow. His host, a former Liberal MP, was William Brabazon, 11th Earl of Meath.

Gladstone took time to visit the Cripples Home in Bray.

Three months earlier, 18th July, O’Connor Power had written to Gladstone, asking him to support a motion for the release of Fenian political prisoners. Power moved the motion in the House of Commons 20th July.*

A week before Christmas, 19th December, Michael Davitt was released.  Fellow prisoners were given their freedom three weeks later. They travelled to Dublin and, on 14th January, called on O’Connor Power at his lodgings and thanked him for his ‘unceasing exertions on behalf of prisoners’.

*See That Irishman, pps. 61, 62.

13 February 1878.

On his 32nd birthday, 13th February 1878, O’Connor Power invited the newly released Fenian prisoners to ‘a private room in Parliament House’. Here Michael Davitt wrote an account of his prison treatment, which was published in a pamphlet with a selection of O’Connor Power’s speeches on Amnesty in the House of Commons.  It is available to download at Post, Selected Writings, pp.21-64.

 

Grand Centre

I have just re-read Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds (1873).  One of the characters, one of ‘Lizzie’s Guests’,  is Irishman Lord George de Bruce Carruthers . He is a man about town with no visible means of income, ‘a bitter radical’.   ‘He was suspected even of republican sentiments, and ignorant men about London hinted that he was the grand centre of the British Fenians.’  The picture is complete with a full description, ‘In person he was a long-legged, long-bodied, long-faced man, with rough whiskers and a rough beard on his upper lip, but with a shorn chin. His eyes were very deep set in his head, and his cheeks were hollow and sallow, and yet he looked to be and was a powerful, healthy man.  He had large hands, which seemed to be all bone, and long arms, and a neck which looked to be long; because he so wore his shirt that much of his throat was always bare.  It was manifest enough that he liked to have good-looking women about him, and yet nobody presumed it probable that he would marry.’

Westminster Portrait, 1877.  O’Connor Power is holding a letter from Michael Davitt in Dartmoor Prison which he read aloud in the House of Commons.