Unlikely Rebels Read online

  The saddest eyes in Irish history? Grace Gifford in the ensemble worn at her wedding to Joseph Plunkett hours before his execution

  Anne Clare

  To my parents, Liam and Katie,

  and to Pearse, Paul and Irene

  for our shared childhood

  MERCIER PRESS

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  © Anne Clare, 2011

  Epub ISBN: 978 1 85635 818 7

  Mobi ISBN: 978 1 85635 819 4

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  Introduction

  It ought to have been a joyful occasion; there should have been flowers and music, wine and the laughter of family and friends. But there were none of these things: no pretty bridesmaids, no wedding cake, no speeches. And what speeches they would have been, with the bride’s father a magnanimous solicitor, used to good company, and with intimates such as John B. Yeats and his sons. The groom’s father, too, fraternised where talk was seasoned with wit and wisdom, for he was a papal count, a barrister and a fine-art connoisseur. As for the groom, what golden, happy words he would have used, a mystic poet with, perhaps paradoxically, a great gift of laughter and, most of all, a young man whose tender letters to her showed how much he loved his young bride.

  So why were these nuptial pleasantries absent when Joseph Mary Plunkett married Grace Vandeleur Gifford on 3 May 1916? The venue itself was the least likely place to engender celebration of even the most sober kind. The marriage took place within the confines of the Catholic chapel in Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin, whose cold, grey walls had absorbed the sighs of Irish political prisoners for over 100 years. Illumination comprised candlelight, and the witnesses were British soldiers carrying bayonets. The British authorities might have allowed her sister, Nellie, a prisoner in the jail, to stand by her side, but Grace Gifford was not allowed even that comfort.[1] The only resemblance to an ordinary marriage ceremony was the age-old promise of fidelity spoken to the priest, but even that was macabre. The words ‘till death us do part’ held a hollow ring for that young couple, who knew not only that there would be no married life or honeymoon, but that death by firing squad awaited the groom within a matter of hours, because he had been one of the seven signatories of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic at the General Post Office, Dublin, ten days before.

  After the stark ceremony they were allowed ten minutes together, in Plunkett’s cell, surrounded by British army personnel. A simple meal might have been provided. Instead, a bowl of gruel lay on a small table on the cell’s stone floor. Grace recorded later that there was no spoon and, not surprisingly, the bowl was untouched.[2] This for a man whose family table was furnished with fine napery and crystal glasses.

  No description of Grace Gifford on her wedding day is extant, except that recorded by the jeweller who sold her the ring on her fateful dash to the prison. He said that her eyes were red with weeping.[3]

  There was a press notification of the wedding in Kilmainham Gaol in The Irish Times, and it read starkly: ‘Plunkett and Gifford – May 3rd, 1916, at Dublin, Joseph Plunkett to Grace Gifford.’[4]

  Thirteen words reflected aptly the paucity of the event. Yet, for all its starkness, even the Gothic horror of its setting, the ceremony at Kilmainham was, in fact, the wedding of the year. Daniel Maclise, the artist, has recorded in oils another politically significant wedding – that of the twelfth-century nuptials of the conquering Norman, Richard de Clare, Earl of Pembroke, known as Strongbow, to Eva McMurrough, daughter of the King of Leinster. Maclise saw the ceremony as symbolic of the death of Gaelic civilisation. The harpist’s instrument is broken, and Strongbow’s foot crushes some artefacts of early Irish art.[5] But if the artist’s symbolism of the death of an old civilisation is valid, so too does the Plunkett–Gifford wedding symbolise, for all its wretchedness, the reawakening of Gaelic Ireland. In that sense, it was the wedding of the year in 1916 – a sort of wedding and wake combined.

  When all the executed had been buried, when the consequent War of Independence had been fought and partly won, and when the Irish Free State emerged from the Treaty of 1921, though only after the trauma of Civil War, southern Ireland began to settle down. The Irish Republic was not declared until 1948, and the generation who were born and grew up between those years were very aware of historical happenings. There were many mixed households, such as my own. We knew that our beloved grandfather, Christopher Walshe, had been regimental sergeant major of the Connaught Rangers during the First World War and that when he ‘took the Saxon shilling’ he was told by his brother Henry that he had disgraced his Fenian forebears: the brothers remained estranged for life.

  When we hid under the stairs playing hide-and-seek, we knew that was where Great-Uncle James, who had been in the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH), had hidden a gun in 1916. We approached the vegetable shop of Paddy Spain in Sandwith Street with a certain awe, aware that this mild-mannered man, selling pot herbs and potatoes, and always with a bandaged hand, was reputed to have been involved in the attack on Oriel House, at the corner of Westland Row. His sister, Maggie, had been jailed in Kilmainham and had ‘died of it’ – the strange diagnosis of her neighbours.

  There was mention of our maternal great-grandparents having met at the Foresters’ Ball, he wearing their dashing uniform and she a green ball gown. There were uncles on the paternal side who had been in the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and aunts who had been in Cumann na mBan. We heard references to ‘The Troubles’, ‘The Struggle’, ‘The Troubled Times’ and ‘The Movement’. Men were referred to as having been ‘one of the boys’, and this was an accolade. There was great talk of ‘the Big Fella’ and ‘Mick’, and my mother described how impressive Michael Collins was, walking in his IRA officer’s uniform at the funeral of Thomas Ashe. We knew that our father, while still at school, had worked with Arthur Griffith on his paper Sinn Féin, and we absorbed all this when the hurts of Easter Week, the War of Independence and the Civil War were gradually fading in the huge effort to formulate a new nation.

  It seemed the most natural thing in the world for me to take history at university. There, however, a rude cultural shock awaited, because a professor stood before me and I was informed by him, vis-à-vis the Great Famine:

  1. The extent of the suffering tended to be overstated.

  2. The help given by England tended to be understated.

  3. The Great Hunger by Cecil Woodham Smith was not, we must remember, written by a professional historian.

  It was a first taste of revisionism, and it led me to make a visit to Kilmainham Gaol. At that stage the Office of Public Works had handed over restoration of the disused jail to a group of voluntary workers, and guided tours were taking place. Perhaps that was the best place to learn Irish history, where much of it had happened.

  It was a nostalgic visit. As a little girl, I had made visits to Aunt Kathleen (Power) who had a shop opposite the jail, and on these visits there had been playtime in the jail with the caretaker’s daughter, Ita Stafford. The leaking roof over the main compound meant that small trees and shrubs had begun to seed themselves in the flagstone floor. We were warned about the dangers. The spiral staircase w
as verboten. We wondered at the Kilmainham Madonna painted by Grace Gifford, and an abiding childish memory was revulsion at the heavily encrusted cell doors, like a sort of wooden leprosy.

  On my return as an adult, the encrustation was the least of many horrors. The whole place had fallen into advanced decay, but the voluntary workers were doing Trojan work in their spare time. It was the easiest thing in the world to set aside revisionists and happily associate with those who identified with the patriotic dead.

  Women volunteers became guides, and men did physical work and acted as guides. There was a short training course, and then the new guide would take tours around the jail, pointing out such places as the cell where Charles Stewart Parnell had been detained, where Robert Emmet awaited his execution, the escape route of Ernie O’Malley, the execution yard, and the dungeon from which Anne Devlin emerged looking like an old woman at the age of twenty-five.

  This was not book history: the records were there, the jail was there. Denial was impossible. This was history at source, not revised. It was, and is, at once an eerie and wonderful place. If I was the last guide there on a cold, winter’s evening, I was glad to hear the great door close after me with its hollow, reverberating clang and to go back, unlike the unhappy political prisoners, to the comfort of a warm, welcoming home.

  Of all the facts we gave the visitors, the story that most moved them was the wedding ceremony in May 1916. Everyone knew of the groom, Joseph Plunkett, but his bride, Grace Gifford, was, at best, a shadowy figure. She slipped quietly, tearfully, onto the stage of Irish history and just as quietly, having played her part, slipped back into the wings.

  It was my good fortune to have met her niece, Maeve Donnelly, at the Dublin Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals’ committee meetings and to have been given, with other material, a sort of diary kept by her mother, Nellie Gifford-Donnelly.

  The original intention for this book was merely to tell the story of Grace herself – to put a face on this sad bride. However, the Gifford papers revealed a whole family well worth recording. After one death at birth, there were six boys and six girls born to Frederick and Isabella Gifford. All the boys remained staunch Protestant unionists despite their Catholic baptisms. All the girls declared for Irish republicanism; four of them became Catholic despite their Protestant baptisms, and two of them married signatories of the proclamation of Irish freedom. To trace their political significance, it is necessary to delve deeply into history and widely – to France, America, Canada and as far as Australia. Back in Dublin, where the Gifford parents settled and reared their family, two of the daughters afford us a very intimate account of a fairly typical Victorian ménage of the Protestant upper-class Ascendancy, as it then was in Ireland.

  Essentially, this is the story of the Gifford daughters, who were, by virtue of their forebears and their training, most unlikely Irish rebels.

  Notes

  [1]Kilmainham Gaol Records: 1916 Political Prisoners.

  [2]Grace Gifford’s description of the wedding is recorded by her friend R. M. Fox in his Rebel Irishwomen, Dublin: Talbot Press, 1935; National Library (MS 21593); her statement to the Bureau of Military History in 1949.

  [3]National Library, MS 25913.

  [4]The Irish Times, 5 May 1916.

  [5]National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin.

  1 - Forebears

  Frederick Gifford, the Catholic father of the Gifford rebels, married Isabella Julia Burton, a Protestant, on 27 April 1872 in the venue of her choice, the Church of Ireland parish church of St George, on the north side of Dublin. Though they differed in religion, both were unionists politically. Relatively little is known of Frederick’s family, except what his name and faith imply, the details given on his marriage certificate and a few notes written in after years by his daughters Sidney (known as ‘John’) and Nellie.

  The official details which Frederick gave on his marriage certificate were that he was a bachelor, ‘of full age’, pursuing a career as a land and law agent; that he lived at 8 Hardwicke Street, Dublin; and that his father, William Gifford, was a surgeon.[1] Family papers relate that both his (unmarried) parents died young, in County Tipperary, and that two maternal Catholic maiden aunts had raised him.[2] There is also an indication that his father, an aristocrat, left instructions and money to have his son educated in law, a process helped by the Solicitors’ Benevolent Fund, but that he did not publicly acknowledge paternity. There was a rumour at the time, even more dramatic, that Frederick’s mother was a daughter of Lord Edward Fitzgerald. The only other information can be inferred from heraldic sources, which confirm that the Norman Giffords came to Ireland in the twelfth century, along with their impressive family motto: ‘I would rather die than be dishonoured.’

  Owing to his being orphaned early with, apparently, neither siblings nor cousins, Frederick Gifford cuts a lonely figure, symbolic in a way of a man who seemed to be only nominally head of his household, who was for many years the only Catholic in a family of fourteen and who is buried alone in Deansgrange Cemetery, County Dublin. Surprisingly, though the more loved of the Gifford parents, he is the forgotten man. His fine tombstone, erected by Isabella, lies broken on his grave.

  Isabella’s details given in their marriage certificate include addresses at 7 Russell Place (near St George’s church) and ‘Innisfallen’, Howth, a fine residence in its own grounds. There is one fleeting mention in family records that she escaped through a window to marry Frederick, perhaps because of family opposition to his Catholicism. She gave her father’s profession as ‘Clerk in Holy Orders’, but it was the curate of St George’s, R. Johnston, who married them. In fact, her father had died twenty years earlier.

  Isabella’s forebears, brothers Francis and Thomas Burton, came to County Clare in 1610. They were taking over land which had been violently seized from its lawful owners, though their own hands had not been bloodied in the process. They settled in a country that seemed subdued after the ‘Flight of the Earls’, and the people appeared to accept the Tudor and Stuart system of administration, based on the English model of shires and sheriffs, provincial presidents and lord justices, a system completely supportive of the fourteenth-century Statutes of Kilkenny and their denigration of the Irish. The Burton men were loyal to the legal obligations of those statutes, which forbade marriage to the Irish: their wives’ recorded names show neither a Gráinne nor a Bridget among them. The sons of the earlier Burtons began to make their way in the world. Their line produced an eminent banker, an alderman, a mayor and an MP. Three of them became high sheriffs, including F. P. Burton, who took that office in 1751. His son Samuel married Hannah Mallet in 1808. They had four sons, including Robert Nathaniel Burton and Sir Frederick William Burton, who was an artist and Director of the National Gallery in London.

  It was the second son, Robert Nathaniel, who married Emily Cole Hamilton Walsh and fathered her nine children, among them Isabella. Isabella’s elder sisters, Hannah, Emily and Mary, remained unmarried and had enough money invested on which to live for some time. When faced with financial difficulties, they took up nursing to earn a living, Hannah eventually becoming a matron in an English hospital.

  There is nothing in the family papers to indicate what became of Isabella’s brothers, except for portraits taken in Buenos Aires and London, and references to their having been doctors. On the other hand, family papers, family word of mouth and church records inform us about the life of Isabella’s father, Robert Nathaniel Burton, who was vicar of Borris, County Carlow, during the years of the Great Hunger. [3] He and the local parish priest used to give their breakfasts to the hungry. The vicar could read the Gaelic Bible from his time in Clare, and learned the Catholic rite for the dying – there were so many dying – so that if the priest was not available he could ease them into death with some dignity. Almost inevitably, he caught typhus and died in 1851. His brother, Sir Frederick Burton, financed the rearing of the vicar’s children. He himself had been engaged to Margaret Stokes, an archaeo
logist, but when she caught smallpox her face became disfigured, and, according to Isabella, he jilted her. Isabella never forgave him for that.

  Isabella’s maternal line was more colourful.[4] Miss Emily Bisset, daughter of a wealthy Huguenot merchant, was her grandmother. Some Huguenots expelled from France had settled in America and felt themselves loyal Protestant subjects of the British Crown. They were, in fact, known as the United Empire Loyalists. When Britain lost the American War of Independence, these Huguenots fled northwards and were under the protection of the British army stationed at Halifax, Nova Scotia. The Bissets settled in their new North American home, Mr Bisset building his gold into the brickwork of his house (there being no banks).

  When a young officer from Ireland, Captain Claude Cole Hami-lton Walsh, whose mother was the Hon. C. Hamilton of Beltrim Castle, County Tyrone, met the fifteen-year-old Emily Bisset, they fell in love. He married her a year later, when she was sixteen, taking her back with him to his family home at Gortalowry House, Cookstown, County Tyrone. There Emily bore him twenty-three children, among them some sets of twins. Emily is reputed to have had red hair, which her great-grandchildren inherited, ungratefully. Claude was a boyhood friend of the Duke of Wellington and is reputed to have been on his staff at Waterloo, so it is not surprising to learn that the Iron Duke was godfather to one of Claude and Emily’s sons.

  Eventually, when there were still sixteen of his family unprovided for, Claude died. Emily sold her home, realised her other assets, chartered a ship, had the complete makings of a house put on board, purchased a year’s supply of food, engaged governesses for the younger children and servants for the house and set sail for Australia. It is generally accepted that the only career for an upper-class girl in those days was wifehood, so perhaps Emily decided Australia was the best place to bring her unmarried daughters, since there was a great scarcity of marriageable women for the officers stationed there.