The Fall of the House of Wilde Read Free Page A

shrine of St Patrick’s tooth, though the old piece of linen, known as the ‘King’s Blood’, impressed William more. The King’s Blood got its name from having been soaked in the gore of the decapitated King Charles in 1649; how it made its way from Whitehall to Cong, William does not tell, though he does tell of its reputed talismanic power: touching it could keep evil at bay. But the abbot had other objects to entice William into his house. Standing in the cupboard of his sitting room was the oaken Cross of Cong, thirty inches high and nineteen wide, commissioned by the King of Ireland, Turlough Mór O’Connor, in the year 1123. William’s aesthetic imagination was fired at the sight of this cross, washed in gold, enriched with intricate carvings of grotesque animals and edged with precious stones. The Cross of Cong now stands in the National Museum of Ireland, considered one of its most precious objects. 6
    Hundreds would travel from the surrounding villages at Christmas and Easter to the Abbey to pay homage to relics, and to hear of their miraculous powers. The spirit of the age, as William’s
Irish Popular Superstitions
makes clear, was a blend of magic and religion, of plague and violence. 7 The supernatural clung to religion as a corpus of parasitic belief and there was a pronounced magical cast to many of the rituals of popular piety that William witnessed at Ballymagibbon. Though the Church condemned superstition, it is not hard to see why credulous thinking prevailed. In pre-industrial Ireland most people worked on the land and were still illiterate; harvest and Catholic ritual shaped their year, and to keep misfortune away, one prayed in learnt words to high heaven and brought the same mechanical efficiency to sayings and signs to ward off evil.
    Closely allied to religious sentiment and ritual expression, the supernatural lived on in Ireland longer than in more industrially advanced countries. It was a land where nature could swallow one in a bog concealed behind a field of flowers, or an outbreak of plague could add fuel to justified anxiety; it is little wonder, then, that terrified imaginations ran wild. Everything in William’s childhood was writ larger than life. The devil was also shockingly near in rural Ireland: not metaphorical, but as real as your neighbour. One turned to God, the angels and the fairies to wrest control of the natural world. Praying and casting spells ran into each other, just as magic and science did in the days of the alchemists. Alternatively, home-brewed poteen could blank out existential terror.
    Far from depicting his former neighbours as emptily credulous, William showed their world views as consistent and imaginative.
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    Like William’s, Jane Elgee’s ancestors also came from Durham. Her paternal great-grandfather, Charles Elgee, was a bricklayer, who came to Dundalk, County Louth, in the 1730s. Elgee’s business expanded enough to undertake the commission of Cumberland Castle. He was, however, less fortunate as a father; he and his wife Alice lost all but one of their eight children. The only surviving child of the marriage, John Elgee, Jane’s grandfather, entered the Church as a curate in Wexford. There in 1782 he married a local woman, Jane Waddy. In 1785 she gave birth to their first son, also called Charles, Jane’s father.
    Reverend John and Jane Elgee raised seven children in the Wexford rectory, whose noble proportions attracted attention. Attention was not altogether welcome during the 1798 Rebellion, when old scores were being settled by Gaels, whose ancestors had lost their land to Protestant settlers. We know from Jane that insurgents seized John, but released him as soon as they recognised him as the rector who looked after the welfare of Catholics in the local prison. John was appointed Archdeacon of Wexford in 1804.
    The reverend’s son, Charles, left Wexford in 1807 to practise as a solicitor in