Читать книгу The Preacher and the Prelate - Patricia Byrne - Страница 12

CHAPTER ONE

Shaking the Dry Bones

At precisely midday on Friday, 26 January 1827, a stern man in his sixties, known for his mild manner in private and his obstinate views in public rose to address a gathering in a packed courthouse in the mid-northern Irish town of Cavan. John Maxwell-Barry, 5th Baron Farnham and head of an expansive 30,000-acre estate, ought to have been wintering in England with his wife, Lady Lucy, to escape the winter dampness that seeped into his bones. But he could not leave, for he was swept up in developments which could well drag pathetic Ireland out of its stupor.

The town crackled with religious commotion, the agitation reported in the Freeman’s Journal with a suggestion – in something of an overstatement – that ‘recent events have directed all eyes towards Cavan’, and that those events could have implications far beyond the town.1 For months, Roman Catholics in Cavan had been renouncing their faith and converting to Protestantism in a wave of evangelical fervour.2 Bulletins on the town’s walls carried daily updates, and hired men walked the streets with placards announcing the latest conversions. Lord Farnham himself claimed that 453 people had defected from Catholicism since October: evidence, surely, that the conversion of thousands of Ireland’s inhabitants to Protestantism was no longer ‘a matter of Utopian speculation’.3 He believed that Cavan was at the nerve centre of nothing less than a new moral order in Ireland. It was the clever coincidence of a system that both improved the moral and practical conditions of the tenants while boosting the efficiency of the landlord’s estate.

Public notices announced the purpose of the Cavan courthouse assembly that winter day. There were plans afoot to establish a new society, one that would promote the progress of the Reformation and Protestantism across the whole of Ireland. Many of those gathering to listen to Lord Farnham believed that the spirit of evangelical revival would sweep out from Cavan like wildfire, delivering Ireland from the forces of the antichrist in the shape of Roman Catholicism and its priests. Cavan had to seize the moment. This was the point in time when a number of factors coalesced to germinate a remarkable narrative: the historical phenomenon of the second reformation as the evangelical movement swept across the midlands region and the southern belt of Ulster; the fusion of this movement with economics and landlordism as exemplified in the figure of Lord Farnham and the innovative management of his estate; and a young, volatile clergyman who became caught up in the Cavan turbulence with life-changing repercussions. Out of this maelstrom emerged an astonishing series of events that reached across Ireland into an isolated island community.

On a winter’s morning, the sun splashes light on the high grey walls of Farnham House, flinging thick shadows across the green pastures. Nowadays, the demesne – a modern golf and spa hotel resort – boasts several nature trails across what the hotel promotion literature describes as ‘the three-hundred-year-old footprints of landed gentry’. Grazing cattle move out of the shadows into the warmth of the morning sunshine while hotel guests stroll nearby. The only embellishment on the plain building façade is the Farnham coat of arms incorporating the family motto: Je suis prêt (I am ready).

It is a brisk twenty-minute walk along the old estate road pathway to the secluded Farnham Lough where decaying leaves of beech, oak and sycamore are soft underfoot. Perhaps Lord Farnham strolled here before heading out through the arch of the stone perimeter estate wall on the short journey into Cavan town. He was a landlord on whom the wellbeing of many tenants rested; he was also a man imbued with the sureties of his faith and a conviction that the religious reformation of the people was good not just for his estate and tenants, but for the progress of the whole of Ireland.

Sectarian tension seethed through 1820s Ireland as agitation for full Catholic emancipation grew. Among the landed classes across the southern stretch of the province of Ulster, including Cavan, a counter force was at work: it was the Protestant evangelical movement known as the ‘second reformation’.4 Evangelicalism and landlordism combined in reacting to the growing assertiveness of Irish Roman Catholicism as evangelical Protestantism and economic progress became inextricably linked. The evangelical crusade aimed at nothing less than the moral reformation of the minds and hearts of the Irish peasantry and Cavan was leading the campaign. The movement was underlined by a belief that the Protestant Irish had the moral character and enterprise essential to economic progress, while Catholicism and its priests were held responsible for the wretched state of the country and its peasantry.

It was five years since John Maxwell-Barry had inherited the Farnham estate on his uncle’s death and he had wasted no time. Believing that there was nothing more injurious to good estate management than idle, slothful tenants and the influence of the Catholic Church and its priests, he immediately set about the transformation of his estate with a neat formula: break the hold of Catholicism on the tenants, promote evangelical education with good moral living, and improved estate efficiency would follow. It was a win-win for landlord and tenant and the landlord quickly circulated his plans in a pamphlet to over 100 of his tenants.5 He told them that he wanted them to prosper, to be virtuous and happy, and to live good moral lives. If they did so, they would receive his praise, his support and his practical help; but all evildoers would be punished, without favour or leniency. They, his tenants, must use their own industry and exertions to improve their lot, remove all evil from their lives and grow in prosperity.

Education and religion were at the heart of Lord Farnham’s system. He encouraged parents to send their children to the estate schools, to train them in virtue and sobriety, and withdraw them from ‘dances, ball-alleys, cock-fights and all other scenes of dissipation’.6 The schools were strictly scriptural: classes opened and closed with the singing of a hymn, a reading from the Bible and a prayer.

Soon, change was visible across the Farnham estate. In place of run-down shebeens there were neat slated dwellings, whitewashed inside and out, with perimeter fences, painted gates and a kitchen garden for fruit and vegetables – an attractive vista, like in a contemporary glossy property brochure. Tenants could purchase building materials, shrubs and implements from the estate depot at reduced prices. On no account were pigs or cattle permitted indoors, and an area of six feet in width had to be kept clear and clean around each dwelling. As to the moral improvement of his tenants, Lord Farnham did not leave this to chance, but introduced the most innovative part of his new management system: a special moral agent took charge of the moral and religious development of the tenants to the exclusion of any commercial duties. The role was central to the new order of converting the native Catholic population to the reformed religion.

Cavan town everywhere bears the stamp of the Farnham family, including the wide elegant Farnham Street built by the 5th Baron’s predecessors to cater for the burgeoning coach trade of the early nineteenth century. Here is the Farnham Centre and the Johnston County Library with a statue of a grim-looking 7th Baron Farnham at the entrance. Inside the library are the faded pages of Lord Farnham’s courthouse speech with its powerful message: convert the people to the reformed faith and prosperity and civilised living will follow. It was an address that brimmed with confidence and assurance.

Up until very recently, he told his audience, he was of the opinion that the superstitious attachment of the people to their priests was so strong, and the sway of the clergy over the minds of their flocks so absolute, that the idea of them adopting the reformed faith seemed far-fetched. But all that had changed in recent months, ever since 8 October when seventeen people had arrived at his home and read their recantations, rejecting Catholicism in favour of the reformed faith. Since then, the recantations had continued unabated on each successive Sunday and he was now convinced that the demeaning grip of Catholicism on the people could finally be broken forever.

It was no surprise, he said, that a fierce backlash against their work was underway. Had not four Catholic prelates – including the firebrand John MacHale from the County Mayo diocese of Killala – arrived in the town just a couple of weeks earlier, and made totally unfounded allegations that money, jobs and other briberies were used to bring about the Cavan conversions. They had even falsely claimed that ignorant and starving people had been carried in carts to Farnham House to revoke their faith.

‘There is,’ said Lord Farnham, ‘no thinking man who does not perceive in the preponderance of the Roman Catholic religion in this country, the fruitful source of most of the calamities and agitations with which it is afflicted.’7 Together, they must emancipate the Irish people from these chains and rescue them from their degrading bondage. It was their duty to advance the Reformation in Ireland.

The meeting overwhelmingly agreed to establish ‘The Cavan Association for Promoting the Reformation’ and nominated Lord Farnham as president. It was, for him, an unforgettable day and he returned, satisfied, to the comforts of his fine home where he and Lady Lucy planned to dine as usual with their new moral agent, appointed to his post a mere nine months earlier. The young man and his daughter had become as family to the childless Farnham couple.

***

On 19 February, three weeks after the Cavan courthouse meeting, William Krause sat at his desk in his cottage home on the Farnham estate, overlooking a delightful parkland vista, as he wrote a letter to his sister. It was two and a half years since his wife’s death and the cottage was a tranquil refuge for him and his small daughter who, he wrote, was delighting him with her infant prattle.8

A reserved young man, described by some as aloof and cold, he was born in the West Indies and served as an officer of the British army at Waterloo. Well-educated and fashionable in his early years, a personal illness and his wife’s death brought about a change in character and a conversion experience now reflected in an exaggerated religious tone. Lord Farnham had selected him personally for the linchpin position of moral agent and he relished the work. It had been a hectic few months, leaving the cottage early in the morning and seldom returning until nine or ten at night; at times he was absent for two to three days at a time, calling to schools throughout the estate and visiting as many tenants as possible to improve their habits and moral living.

He was buoyed up by his new responsibilities, somewhat awed by what he perceived as the importance of what was happening on the estate: ‘Farnham’s system is altogether new in this country and the eyes of all Ireland are upon him.’ By improving the lot of his tenants, he was certain that his employer was inducing Catholics to free themselves from the bondage of their priests; if only other gentry across Ireland would likewise exert themselves, he believed that the Irish people would desert Catholicism and flock in their thousands to the reformed church. He knew beyond doubt that, in Cavan, he was at the centre of seismic and historic events: ‘In Ireland there is a shaking of the dry bones, and a stir throughout the country, such as never was known in the land.’9

Not far from William Krause’s peaceful cottage, another young man was feverishly absorbing the intense evangelical fervour in the Cavan district. He was witnessing first hand an exceptional moment in Irish history, the fervour of which permeated his being to bring about a psychological and spiritual tipping point. An accidental conversation with William Krause affected Edward Nangle profoundly.

***

A dozen miles to the south-west of Cavan is the townland of Arva, on the shores of Garty Lough beneath Bruse Mountain, at the meeting point of three of Ireland’s four provinces: Connaught, Leinster and Ulster. The road winds and bends among the curving drumlin hills through a landscape of lake, woodland and hillock – a place where a person might find tranquillity and peace. A small, plain church sits on an elevation that slopes down to the lake at its rear, while a tower and porch added some years after the church’s construction relieve the building’s starkness.10

This inconspicuous place of worship was the focal point of the parish where the Trinity-educated curate, Edward Nangle, had already served for two years prior to Lord Farnham’s famous Cavan address. He was absorbing the fever of evangelical excitement in the area and the exciting model of Lord Farnham’s estate with its moral agency. A tall, thin, pale young man, Edward spoke in gentle tones, came across as serious and intense, and seldom appeared to smile or laugh. Yet, he could also display a surprising passion, according to a contemporary: ‘when animated, the most extraordinary fire lights up his eyes’.

His father, Walter, was of a staunchly Catholic family from Kildalkey, near Athboy, County Meath. Walter Nangle’s first and third wives were Catholic, his second – Edward’s mother – was Protestant and died when her son was just nine years old, a loss which appears to have left him with an emotional vulnerability that manifested itself in bouts of depression and mania.11

Overworked in his busy Arva ministry, Edward neglected his physical wellbeing. Frequently his breakfast consisted only of a crust of oaten bread and a glass of water; and after a hard day’s work, when mind and body had been taxed to their utmost strength, ‘the remnant of the oaten cake and another draught of water served for a dinner in his lonely lodging’.12 The elation of the Cavan evangelical explosion and his own psychological fragilities and poor physical wellbeing combined to bring about his personal collapse. A delicate, sensitive and overwrought personality had become strained to breaking point. He had to resign his Arva ministry, losing his only means of a livelihood and returning to his home place in Athboy.

Dr James Adams, a retired army surgeon in Athboy and a Nangle family friend, was worried about his guest who lay prostrate on his drawing room sofa, unable to speak, using sign language like one deaf and dumb. The young clergyman’s condition was precarious, one lung was gone and the other was at risk, and the doctor held out little hope for the young man’s recovery. But Edward Nangle was lucky as, throughout his life, he had the capacity to attract the goodwill of benefactors and patrons. People now entered his life who would provide a bedrock of assistance through this early illness and through his remarkable endeavours in future years.

James Adams’ brother, Dr Neason Adams, ran a successful medical practice at St Stephen’s Green, Dublin, and he and his wife, Isabella, took Edward under their care in their Dublin home. For the remainder of their lives, the childless Adams couple would go to exceptional lengths to support their volatile protégé and his family.

***

Recovery for Edward was slow, and he had time to read and to reflect. He travelled to recuperate in the Scottish Highlands and into his hands came the recently published Historical Sketches of the Native Irish by the Scottish Baptist Minister, Christopher Anderson. Over two decades, Anderson had made a detailed survey of the state of the Irish language, with a particular interest in Ireland’s coastal islands, and Historical Sketches was the fruit of this work. Reading the book induced a conversion-style experience in the classic evangelical mode for Edward, and directed his interest towards the evangelisation of the Irish-speaking people in the west.

Christopher Anderson could not speak Irish but had developed an enthusiastic appreciation for the native Irish culture and language, and came to the view that enlightenment should be brought to the Irish people through the medium of their own native tongue. The use of the Irish language, he believed, would ‘operate like the insertion of a leaven’ to lead the destitute people of the west of Ireland towards the truth and towards a better life.13 Christopher Anderson’s book had a profound life-changing effect on the frail, recuperating Edward. It was like the final piece of a jigsaw that was building piece by piece in his imagination, providing the lifelong spark for his future life’s work. He would credit his reading of Historical Sketches with the origins of the Achill Mission.

A quarter of a century afterwards, when William Krause and Christopher Anderson died within weeks of one another, Edward reflected on the profound influence of two very dissimilar men on his life: Krause, ‘cold and reserved’, Anderson ‘affectionate, bland and open-hearted’.14 The pair provided him with the intellectual foundations for his daunting Achill project.

A vision was taking shape in Edward Nangle’s imagination, a vision that took seed among the drumlin hills of County Cavan and was motivated by a premillennial urgency and a belief in the biblical prophecy that the Lord’s coming was imminent. He would build nothing less than an exemplary Christian colony in the most deprived and remote location on Ireland’s west coast. It would be an oasis of civilisation in the midst of superstition and squalor. He could see it in his mind’s eye: neat, orderly houses with vegetable gardens and whitewashed walls; a community conducting itself with piety, sobriety and industry; scriptural schools buzzing with the laughter of children; the people learning the Bible, the source of all truth, in their native tongue; and a people transformed beyond all recognition.

It was a daring and ambitious concept. Could Edward Nangle’s ambition possibly be realised and, if so, where?