Lady Gregory's Toothbrush Read Free Page B

Roughly two million people left Ireland permanently between 1845 and 1855, according to the historian Oliver MacDonagh, who also wrote: “The cottier class had virtually disappeared. The number of holdings under one acre had dropped from 134,000 to 36,000 … the number of persons per square mile … had fallen from 355 to 231; and the average productivity had risen greatly. In short, the modern revolution in Irish farming had begun.”
    Sir William’s father died of fever during the Famine, and he himself witnessed the suffering around Coole andwrote about this in his book. “I did … all I could to alleviate the dreadful distress and sickness in our neighbourhood . I well remember poor wretches being housed up against my demesne wall in wigwams of fir branches … There was nothing that I ever saw so horrible as the appearance of those who were suffering from starvation. The skin seemed drawn tight like a drum to the face, which became covered with small light-coloured hairs like a gooseberry. This, and their hollow voices, I can never forget.” In April 1847, four thousand destitute labourers gathered at Gort, the nearest town to Coole, looking for work. A year later, a Poor Law inspector wrote that he could scarcely “conceive a house in a worse state or in greater disorder” than the workhouse in Gort. A quarter of the population in the area sought relief in those years.
    No one denied Sir William’s personal concern about his tenants during the Famine, but the Poor Law clause he proposed in the House of Commons became one of the main causes of suffering in Ireland in those years. The importance of the Gregory Clause was emphasized during Sir William’s lifetime by Canon John O’Rourke, author of the first history of the Famine, which was published in 1874 and remained in print as the only serious account for many years. Canon O’Rourke wrote: “A more complete engine for the slaughter and expatriation of a people was never designed … Mr Gregory’s words – the words of aliberal and pretended friend of the people – and Mr Gregory’s clause – are things that should be forever remembered by the descendants of the slaughtered and expatriated small farmers of Ireland.”
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    S ir William’s “evil reputation” was as much a part of the legacy of Coole as his good name as a landlord. His famous clause helped to undermine the very class that Yeats and Lady Gregory later sought to exalt. Neither Yeats nor Lady Gregory wrote plays or poems about the Famine. It was not part of the Ireland they sought to celebrate or lament or dream into being. And there is something astonishing in the intensity with which Yeats sought to establish Coole Park and its legacy as noble, with “a scene well set and excellent company”,
    Where none has reigned that lacked a name and fame
    Or out of folly into folly came.
    Lady Gregory’s response to her ambiguous legacy is fascinating. There was nothing impetuous in her nature. In the years after she had edited her husband’s autobiography, she began to learn the Irish language, she went once more to the Aran Islands, and she began to study Irish history in order to edit the letters of Sir William’s grandfather. Gradually, her unionist sympathies dissolved, disappeared. The transformation was slow. She did not go the way of other women of her class such as Constance Gore-Booth or Maud Gonne. She did not become a firebrand or a revolutionary . Her personality was calm and steadfast, and there was an odd wisdom in the way she lived after the death of Sir William. She loved Coole and she wished to remain true to her husband’s memory and keep the estate and the house in order until Robert, her only child, could come into his inheritance. And slowly she began to love Ireland also, in the way that other nationalists of her time loved Ireland, inventing and discovering a rich past