Читать книгу The Preacher and the Prelate - Patricia Byrne - Страница 14

CHAPTER THREE

Bonfires in the West

It was Friday night, on the first day of August 1834, when a heavily laden sailing boat – a traditional hooker – with four passengers on board cast anchor in Dugort Bay in north Achill, where the ghostly figures of a welcome party waited on the strand next to shooting bonfire flames.1 Edward Nangle, his sister-in-law Grace Warner, the Newport rector William Stoney and a female servant stepped ashore and helping hands unloaded the Nangle family’s possessions. This was to be their new home and Eliza would shortly travel from Newport with their three small daughters: Frances, Henie and baby Tilly. Edward and his family had earlier travelled from Ballina, County Mayo, where they had lived in recent years on Home Mission Society work.

In the enveloping Dugort darkness, they could just about make out the vague outline of the work already carried out on the ‘infant settlement’, work that became clear in the morning light. It was a most pleasing vista for Edward: a couple of two-storey slated houses on the western end of the site next to reclaimed and cultivated fields; two more houses emerging from foundations further east; and in between, hillocks of peat marking out an area where yet more buildings would rise. His vision was already taking practical shape in a spectacular mountainside development, the like of which had never before been seen in Achill.

Edward was not the first resident at the Achill Mission colony, for a steward, a schoolmaster and a scripture reader already occupied one of the houses, and the Nangle family would share the second with Joseph Duncan, the assistant missionary. The ground-floor room served as a parlour, drawing room and study during the day, and Joseph Duncan’s bedchamber at night, a situation amusingly described by Edward: ‘Mr Duncan could not retire to rest until we vacated the apartment for the night, nor could we come down in the morning until he had arisen and completed his toilet.’2

The passengers appreciated the warmth of bonfire flames and welcoming hands after their two-day journey from Newport, through Clew Bay, then northward along the eastern edges of Achill and through the treacherous straight at Bullsmouth. Edward was now the full-time permanent head of the Achill Mission, with a growing physical infrastructure and an emerging organisation to drive forward his evangelical mission. He retired to bed in his new home on the flanks of Slievemore with the sounds of the ocean ringing in his ears.

Grace Warner, Eliza Nangle’s sister, is an intermittent and shadowy presence in this story. She landed at Dugort with her brother-in-law before Eliza and her daughters had yet set foot on Achill soil. A young unmarried woman, it appears that she may have divided her time between the home of her widowed mother, Patience, at Marvelstown House, Kilbeg, County Meath, and that of her sister, Eliza, with her growing family. She was in Achill from the start of the Achill Mission, and she would be there at the end of her own life, long after Edward, Eliza and their children had departed the island. In the summer of 1834, Grace made a mountainside house ready for her sister and children.

Edward plunged into his work. Slates arrived by hooker from Westport for the new colony buildings. Prayers and worship took place each morning and evening in both the Irish and English languages. Labourers worked on reclaiming the soil and planting crops, and each Sunday the congregation worshipped in the parlour of the Nangle home. Edward took to the mountain slopes to shoot rabbit for dinner and, all the while, storm clouds were gathering.

***

In the same month that Edward alighted on Dugort strand, the Catholic pontiff, Pope Gregory XVI, then three years into his papacy, made an important announcement in Rome when he confirmed the appointment of John MacHale as Catholic archbishop of Tuam, which included Achill Island in its jurisdiction. There was consternation in Britain that John MacHale would now be among the four most powerful Catholic clerics in Ireland. ‘Anybody but him’, the British prime minister had implored the pontiff, for the political establishment viewed John MacHale as an agitating prelate who inflamed passions at a time when sectarian tensions in Ireland were intense.3 Perhaps nervous of John MacHale’s impetuosity, the Pope warned his new archbishop to maintain ‘in every transaction of your rule singular prudence, moderation of spirit, and the greatest care for peace and beneficial quiet’.4 The archbishop’s tenure in Tuam could not have been more different in action and in tone from that recommended by his pontiff.

John MacHale was a tall, lean, athletic man fired with a colossal energy. Born a decade before Edward Nangle in the shadows of Nephin Mountain, County Mayo, he shared Edward’s experience of having lost his mother as a child. He was a prominent, assertive, Irish-educated Catholic cleric, who had already made his mark as a scholar, teacher and vigorous public speaker and writer. He and Edward had crossed swords before Edward’s arrival in Achill in truculent public exchanges that set the tone for their vigorous and uncompromising sparring throughout their long lives.

A year earlier, while both men were based in Ballina, County Mayo, newspapers published an open letter from John MacHale carrying a tirade against Protestantism in Ireland, contrasting its wealth and patronage with the lamentable condition of the people. The established church, he thundered, was ‘the prolific womb from which all the misfortunes of Ireland teemed in fearful succession’.

Edward could not leave John MacHale’s letter unchallenged and he set to work. Each week, throughout the months of August and September, he wrote a long letter of reply, defending the established church and venting a full-blooded condemnation of the evils of Irish Catholicism. The language bristled with frenzy and hysteria, conveying the sense of one teetering on the brink, such was the fierceness of emotion and hostility in the letters.

In a breathless diatribe, Edward condemned the practices of Roman Catholicism, its ‘masses, and purgatory, and penances, and pilgrimages, and priestly pardons, and crucifixes, and holy ashes, clay, candles, bones, teeth, hair, nails, rings, cords, scapulars, and all other thrash and filth, which has become encrusted on it from the muddy stream of a corrupt and sinful world’.

All the religious and folk practices of the people were derided and demeaned in a vitriolic rant.

His most vehement condemnation was aimed at the most central and revered of Catholic beliefs: the mass and the Eucharist. How, he asked, could a mere wafer, ‘a bit of senseless, motionless paste’, be worshipped in a most odious practice? Provocatively, he queried if such a belief indicated that Catholicism condoned cannibalism.

Edward was furious that John MacHale did not take the bait by replying publicly to the letters. Is it ‘beneath your dignity to reply to my statements?’ he asked petulantly in his final letter in September. ‘But who is Doctor MacHale? What entitles him to assume such a lofty position of self-exaltation?’5

The tone of the relationship between John MacHale and Edward Nangle was already set. The colony on the slopes of Slievemore would be the dramatic stage on which their raging antagonism would play out as the pair jousted, their words polished and honed with precision in support of each man’s version of the truth. The pair symbolised, in a spectacular way, the social and religious fault lines that bedevilled the Ireland of their times.

Here were two driven, articulate, larger-than-life men, each with his own version of the Christian truth.

***

Edward’s tenure in Achill was punctuated by bouts of poor health, depression and emotional volatility. Periods of intense activity, elevated mood, high productivity and extraordinary verbal output alternated with episodes of illness, fatigue, despondency, and occasionally total collapse: features of what nowadays could be labelled bipolar disorder. Childhood trauma, residual vulnerability from his Cavan breakdown, difficult living conditions and constant conflict in Achill may all have been contributory factors.

In the weeks immediately after his arrival in Achill, excerpts from Edward’s diary reveal that his chest was causing him concern.6

Monday, 18th August – Obliged, from soreness to my chest, to give up our morning meeting. Our school is greatly increased; sixty-eight children on the roll. Wrote several letters.

Monday, 25th August – My chest so weak this morning that I was obliged to order Downey to assemble the people and read to them … It is a great cause for thankfulness that when I am unable to speak, in consequence of the weakness of my chest, I can still write.

Tuesday 26th August – Arrived at Newport at three o’clock…my chest very poorly.

Tuesday, 2nd September – Still poorly in health; our readers met with much opposition this day.

Monday 8th September – My chest very sore.

Edward’s spells of illness were defining life events. A contemporary writer on psychosomatic disorders has noted that, even when compared to the most aggressive multisystem disease, psychosomatic trauma-triggered illnesses are noteworthy for how little respect they have for any single part of the body.7 Edward suffered numerous symptoms through his many and varied illnesses: headaches, stomach and joint pain as well as seizures – a possible manifestation of psychological distress. It was as if his explosions of passion and energy were sustainable only if countered by intervals of lethargy and fatigue. It was a pattern that added to the harsh conditions of life in Achill as the Nangle family faced their first winter on the island with its inhospitable storms; and Eliza was in the early weeks of pregnancy.

Hostilities broke out within weeks as the Achill Mission’s programme to bring the scriptures to the people swung into action. To add to Edward’s troubles, gale force winds swept across the island and he feared that the roof of one of the new colony buildings would be demolished. One squall from the north-west descended from Slievemore with such force that it threw two men off their ladders but, providentially, they escaped serious injury.

He was heartened when twenty children attended the mission’s first Sunday school, but the event was not without incident when a ‘Popish zealot’8 stood near the gate with a rod and threatened to beat the attending children. One of the scripture readers was attacked, thrown to the ground and his clothes torn by two men about four miles from Dugort. When a mission steward travelled by boat to nearby Mulranny to purchase some farm implements, he was met by a hostile crowd.

Worryingly, Edward got word through an informant of a secret plan to attack the colony, kill those living there, burn the buildings and put an end to the Achill Mission. He informed Captain Reynolds, chief officer of the Achill coastguard, who made plans to have his men armed and ready on the night of the suspected attack. Eliza even took the precaution of moving the children’s beds away from the positions where they might be hit by bullets. No attack took place and Edward believed that the preparations they made had deterred the assailants. Others claimed that the alleged attack was a figment of Edward’s excitable imagination and that his charges were driven by a motive to attract sympathy and support for his cause.

Achill hit the headlines repeatedly in subsequent months as summonses were issued for purported assaults against the missionaries, and those charged with the offences congregated at Newport and Westport to attend court hearings. A Connaught Telegraph writer was infuriated at the ‘outrageous proceedings’, when more than forty islanders were obliged to travel, at great inconvenience and hardship, to attend the courts and answer what the paper claimed were entirely vexatious charges.9 Prior to the arrival of Edward Nangle, said the writer, the Achill islanders had lived a life of peace, harmony and goodwill towards one another but now discord, ill will and hatred were being propagated through the island. Achill had become ‘a theatre of riot and confusion’.

***

At seven o’clock on a mid-October evening in 1834, as the sun was setting in the west, 300 important guests, all men, gathered at the Mitre Hotel, Tuam, some sixty miles from Achill in a south-western direction, for a celebration dinner to honour the elevation of the new archbishop, John MacHale. Earlier in the day, at the chapel of Tuam, every available space was filled for the ceremony of installation as the Te Deum rang out from choir and organ. John MacHale had travelled that day from Castlebar, in an elegant Swiss carriage presented to him by the people and clergy of Killala, where he had ministered for almost a decade. A Freeman’s Journal journalist estimated that crowds numbering up to 40,000 greeted the new prelate on the route into Tuam which was bedecked with flags, while an arch of green boughs festooned the town’s north bridge.

When the dinner guests had eaten and drunk heartily, John MacHale rose to respond to the toast. He was, he said, humbled and overawed and, perhaps, a little fearful lest his future be like ‘a brilliant taper which might shed a brilliant light in a narrow apartment, but would only twinkle when exposed in a broader atmosphere’. If he had been criticised for indulging in the exposure of the grievances of the poor in the past, this was an accusation to which he would freely confess, he said, without the least contrition.

Within the week, the Freeman’s Journal was extolling the triumphal elevation of the archbishop, ‘now the bright luminary of the Catholic hierarchy, fearlessly vindicated’.10 John MacHale, asserted the writer, had vindicated his religion and cast the shield of protection around the poor at a time when besotted bigotry was at its height, and to be a Roman Catholic was considered a disgrace.

The new archbishop embarked on a tour of his extensive diocese, greeted everywhere by blazing bonfires. At Newport, a large procession greeted the archbishop outside the town, those at the front of the parade on foot, followed by horseback riders, and next the carriages. Tar barrels blazed in every direction, illuminating the town. The archbishop’s carriage halted at the house of the priest, James Hughes, and the people knelt to receive the episcopal benediction. One journalist claimed to have observed the rector and parish priest’s neighbour, William Stoney, watching among the crowd.

More than likely, prelate and priest discussed the worrying developments in Achill as it would have been unimaginable to both men that they could allow Edward Nangle to continue with his work at Dugort uncontested. The archbishop would soon visit the troublesome island.

John MacHale and Edward Nangle had several traits in common: an ability to deliver powerful rhetoric not tempered by prudence, restless energy, combative natures and an unshakeable belief in their version of the truth. Each man excelled in the crafting of belligerent polemics and in the thrill of robust, vicious public debate. Both had outlets through pen and pulpit for their venomous words to take poisonous flight. Both exhibited also a dangerous propensity for egomania and narcissism. What a coincidence that this pair of clergymen shared the stage in nineteenth-century Ireland and played out their antagonism theatrically on a remote Atlantic island.

Their mutual hostility soon focused on education and the mission schools, for education was Edward Nangle’s main bridgehead for conversions. He would combat popish error by establishing a system of scriptural education to teach the children the principles of Protestantism and civilised living. Not for the first time in the battle for the souls and hearts of a people, schools became the focal point of a religious crusade.