Butler succeeds to the title at the age of fifteen and was educated at the University of Oxford, taking the degree of LL.D. in 1677. In 1678, he is commissioned as a captain in Colonel Thomas Dongan‘s regiment, which is disbanded before he takes up his post.
In 1692, Butler is created Earl of Newcastle in County Limerick in the Jacobite peerage of Ireland. In France he is named Colonel of the 2nd Queen’s Regiment of Irish Horse in the service of that country and serves with distinction in various battles of the War of the Spanish Succession, also becoming a Lieutenant-General in the Spanish army. He is at the Siege of Roses in 1693, and in 1694 is a Brigadier attached to the army of Germany. He serves in Italy and other parts of Continental Europe from 1701 to 1703, sharing all the fortunes of the Irish Brigade. He later serves in the French army as a Lieutenant-General. He is created Brigadier of Cavalry in 1694.
Butler dies at the age of eighty-eight in Paris on June 18, 1740, and is buried at St. Paul’s there. John C. O’Callaghan writes in Irish Brigades in the Service of France (Glasgow, 1870): “The successive claimants of the title of Galmoy were officers in France down to the Revolution; in whose armies, as well as in others, various gentlemen have honourably represented a name, of which the illustrious General Lafayette is related to have said, in the war for the independence of the United States of America, that ‘whenever he wanted anything well done, he got a Butler to do it.'”
Notwithstanding the attainder, the viscountcy is assumed by his nephew, James Butler of the Irish Brigade in France, the son of the Viscount’s brother, Richard Butler of Galmoye.
O’Faolain describes her early life as growing up in a Catholic country which, in her view, fears sexuality and forbids her even information about her body. In her writings she often discusses her frustration at the sexism and rigidity of roles in Catholic Ireland that expect her to marry and have children, neither of which she does.
O’Faolain becomes internationally well known for her two volumes of memoir, Are You Somebody? and Almost There; a novel, My Dream of You; and a history with commentary, The Story of Chicago May. The first three are all featured on The New York Times Best Seller list. Her posthumous novel Best Love, Rosie is published in 2009.
O’Faolain’s formative years coincide with the emergence of the women’s movement, and her ability to expose misogyny in all its forms is formidable, forensic and unremitting. However, her feminism stems from a fundamental belief in social justice. Unlike most commentators, who maintain a detached, lofty tone, she places herself at the centre of things, a high-risk strategy that works because of her broad range of erudition, worn lightly, her courage and a truthfulness that sometimes borders on the self-destructive.
O’Faolain is engaged at least once but never marries. In Are You Somebody? she speaks candidly about her fifteen-year relationship with the journalist Nell McCafferty, who publishes her own memoir, Nell. From 2002 until her death, she lives much of the time with Brooklyn-based attorney John Low-Beer and his daughter Anna. They are registered as domestic partners in 2003.
O’Faolain splits her time between Ireland and New York City. She is diagnosed with metastaticcancer and is interviewed on the Marian Finucane radio show on RTÉ Radio 1 on April 12, 2008, in relation to her terminal illness. She tells Finucane, “I don’t want more time. As soon as I heard I was going to die, the goodness went from life.”
In a last attempt to grasp as much of life as she can, O’Faolain holidays with family members in Sicily and visits Berlin with a group of friends to hear music and see art. She previously tended to avoid Berlin because, through contact with Jewish friends and lovers, she associated it with the Holocaust. She dies at the Blackrock Hospice, Dublin, on May 9, 2008.
O’Faolain wins a Jacob’s Award in 1985 for her work as the producer of the RTÉ One television programme Plain Tales. In 2006, she wins the Prix Femina étranger, a French literary award, for The Story of Chicago May.
O’Faolain is the subject of a film documentary, Nuala: A Life and Death (2011), directed by Patrick Farrelly and Kate O’Callaghan, and produced and narrated by Marian Finucane. Hugo Hamilton‘s novel Every Single Minute (2014) is based on his experiences when accompanying O’Faolain to Berlin shortly before her death.
Fagan is born in Belfast on May 18, 1873, the eldest of the five children of Sir James Fagan, a surgeon at the Belfast Royal Hospital and an inspector of Irish reformatories, and Mary Catherine Fagan (née Hughes). He attends Clongowes Wood College near Clane, County Kildare and then moves to England. Initially interested in a career in the church, he begins studying law at Trinity College, Oxford in 1892 but leaves in 1893 without a degree. He works for a time in the Indian Civil Service but abandons this career for the stage.
Fagan begins his career as an actor with the company of Sir Frank Benson for two years, then joining, from 1895 to 1899, the company of Herbert Beerbohm Tree at Her Majesty’s Theatre. There he appears in Katherine and Petruchio, A Man’s Shadow, Julius Caesar, The Musketeers and Carnac Sahib. He starts writing plays in 1899, with The Rebels, for the time forsaking acting. In 1913, he returns to the stage touring as the Rt. Hon. Denzil Trevena in his own play, The Earth. He next writes The Fourth of August (1914) and Doctor O’Toole (1917). In 1917 he produces his first play, his own adaptation of the Eugène Brieux play Damaged Goods at St. Martin’s Theatre. He next produces The Wonder Tales and The Little Brother at the Ambassadors Theatre in London.
Fagan is persuaded by Jane Ellis, the actress who with Alfred Ballard founds the Oxford Playhouse “Red Barn” in 1923, to be its first manager. His first production at the Oxford Playhouse is a restaging of Shaw’s Heartbreak House and numbered Shaw among the audience. He produces The Cherry Orchard, at various theatres, to favourable reviews, popularising Anton Chekhov in Britain. From November 16, 1925, with Dennis Eadie, he presents Juno and the Paycock at the Royalty Theatre, thus bringing Seán O’Casey to the attention of London’s theatre-going public. O’Casey’s The Ploughand the Stars follows the next year.
Fagan receives little support from the University of Oxford or the play-going public and resigns in 1929. His successor is Stanford Holme, who broadens its appeal and, despite the straitened times, makes it financially viable. In 1929, he is a director of the Festival Theatre, Cambridge, where his friend Terence Gray is director. He also produces many works for the Irish Players.
Beginning in the 1920s, several of Fagan’s plays are adapted for film. He moves to Hollywood in 1929 for the filming by Paramount Pictures of his play The Wheel as The Wheel of Life. Other film work includes his co-adaptation of the screenplay for the 1932 film Smilin’ Through, and he co-writes Paramount’s Forgotten Commandments the same year. His play Bella Donna is filmed four times, including posthumously in 1946, and a 1936 film, The Improper Duchess is based on his 1931 play of the same name.
James Bernard Fagan dies in Hollywood, California, on February 17, 1933, at the age of 59 of a heart attack following a bout of influenza.
Parsons also performs some preliminary work in association with the practices of the electrodeposition of copper sulfate upon silver films circa 1865 while in search of the design for a truly flat mirror to use in a telescope. However, he finds it impossible to properly electroplate copper upon these silver films, as the copper contracts and detaches from the underlying glass substrate. His note has been cited as one of the earliest confirmations in literature that thin films on glass substrates experience residual stresses. He revives discussion in his work Nature’s August 1908 edition after witnessing similar techniques used to present newly devised searchlights before the Royal Society.
Although overshadowed by his father (when astronomers speak of “Lord Rosse”, it is almost always the father that they refer to), Parsons nonetheless pursues some astronomical observations of his own, particularly of the Moon. Most notably, he discovers NGC 2, a spiral galaxy in the constellationPegasus.
After some years of ill-health, Parsons dies on August 30, 1908, at Birr Castle and is buried in the local churchyard. He leaves a bequest to the Royal Society to establish the “Rosse Fund,” and a further £1,000 to the science school fund at TCD.
O’Brien is a ship builder and designer, and his notable boats include the Kelpie (used for gun running in 1914), the Saoirse (in which he circumnavigates the globe) and the Ilen (a Falkland Islands service ship).
O’Brien is credited with two buildings in his lifetime: the Co-operative Hall in County Donegal and the People’s Hall in County Limerick. He is also known as a naval architect, having designed two ships, the Saoirse and the llen. He later captains both of these ships himself.
In Saoirse, a 20-ton, 42-foot ketch designed and built in 1922 in Baltimore, County Cork, he and three crew members circumnavigate the globe between 1923 and 1925 – the first recorded by an amateur skipper from west to east, the first yacht circumnavigation by way of the three great capes: Cape Horn, Cape of Good Hope and Cape Leeuwin, and the first boat flying the Irish tri-colour to enter many of the world’s ports and harbours. His voyage begins and ends at the Port of Foynes, County Limerick, where he lives. His account of the voyage, Across Three Oceans, (1927) becomes one of the classics of maritime literature.
Up until O’Brien’s circumnavigation, this route is the preserve of square-rigged grain ships taking part in the grain race from Australia to England via Cape Horn (also known as the clipper route).
O’Brien’s seagoing experiences are put to use in his design of the Ilen, which is built for the Falkland Islands as a service boat and launched in the spring of 1926. In 1998, Ilen returns to the site where she was first built, on the River Ilen near Baltimore, County Cork, where she undergoes a full restoration and is re-launched in May 2018. This task provides work-based learning for the students of the Ilen School.
O’Brien has some involvement with gun running in 1914 on behalf of the Irish Volunteers, for political reasons and because he has experience in sailing. On July 26, 1914, nine hundred guns are brought to Howth harbour aboard Erskine Childers‘ yacht Asgard. As part of the same operation, O’Brien transports arms on his yacht, Kelpie. The guns on Kelpie are transshipped to another yacht, Chotah, owned by Sir Thomas Myles, before being landed at Kilcoole in County Wicklow on August 1, 1914. After the gun running incidents, he serves in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve.
In 1928, O’Brien marries a well-known artist, Kathleen Francis, the youngest daughter of Sir George Clausen, RA. The couple thereafter moves to Ibiza, where they live on the Saoirse until Kathleen’s death in 1936. They have no children. Relocating to Cornwall, where he lives with his sister, he writes books on sailing and works of fiction for children. Although too old for active service when war with Germany breaks out in 1939, he assists the British war effort by serving in the Small Ships Pool, which delivers support vessels across the Atlantic and brings food supplies from the United States in private yachts.
In 1940 O’Brien sells Saoirse to the Royal Cornwall Yacht Club. The boat remains in use until 1980, when it is lost off the Jamaican coast. After the war he retires to another sister’s home in Foynes, County Limerick, where he lives and continues to write books for children until his death on April 18, 1952.
Brady is born in 1527, but his parentage is uncertain, as are most of the details of his early life. He is said to be a graduate of the University of Oxford and later a professor of divinity there, but there is no evidence of this in the college registers.
Brady’s first patron is Edmund Grindal, Bishop of London, under whose auspices he secures a prestigious appointment to the rectorship of St. Mary Aldermary, London, in early 1561. Over the next two years he becomes acquainted with a relative and chief advisor of Queen Elizabeth I, William Cecil. He is eager to return to Ireland and is appointed Bishop of Meath on October 21, 1563, while still in England. He is ideally qualified for this role, being a native of the diocese and a skilled preacher fluent in English and Irish. Arriving in Dublin on December 3, 1563, he is consecrated on December 19, being made a member of the Privy Council of Ireland soon thereafter.
On reaching his diocese, Brady is dismayed at its dilapidated state. His diocesan income scarcely exceeds £60 a year, many of the churches are in ruins, his clergy are uneducated and largely pro-Catholic, and the right to appoint clergy to many parish churches is in the hands of Catholic landowners. Further, the rival Catholic Bishop of Meath, William Walsh, is dedicated, capable, and popular. Although Walsh is belatedly arrested in 1565, his willingness to lead by example and suffer persecution for his beliefs stiffens Catholic resistance in Meath.
Brady is always diligent in attendance at Council meetings. He is vigorous in beating off raids on his diocese by Shane O’Neill, the effective ruler of Ulster. He enjoys the friendship of Sir Henry Sidney, the Lord Deputy of Ireland, who praises his sound judgment, hospitality and blameless private life. His good qualities lead Sidney and Adam Loftus, Archbishop of Armagh, to propose Brady as Archbishop of Dublin, after they have lobbied successfully for the recall of Archbishop Hugh Curwen. However, soon after, Brady and Loftus quarrel, and Loftus blocks Brady’s nomination in order to obtain the See of Dublin for himself.
Nonetheless, Brady retains Sidney’s confidence and finds a new ally in 1567 when Robert Weston becomes Lord Chancellor of Ireland. Weston sympathises with his educational and evangelical bent while gaining the respect of the querulous Loftus, thereby defusing the animosity between Ireland’s leading Protestant clergy.
In 1569, Brady’s diocese is amalgamated with the diocese of Clonmacnoise. He now heads a sprawling diocese that includes Gaelic areas where the crown has very little authority. In practice, he appears to have largely ignored Clonmacnoise. In Meath, a government inquiry in 1575 shows that he has made little headway in spreading the Protestant faith or in restoring the fabric and finances of the church. He has found clergy for nearly every church in the diocese, but most are of a poor standard. He contributes to the diocese’s worsening finances by alienating church land to family and associates. The free school he establishes is also forced to close due to a lack of suitable premises.
Following Sidney’s dismissal as Lord Deputy of Ireland in 1578, Protestant hard-liners begin to dominate the Irish government, causing Brady to lose influence. He complains in 1581 that his letters to London are being opened and read by his colleagues and sometimes being suppressed. His influence declines in Meath also as discontent with the government increases. In 1577, his men capture a number of friars at Navan but are attacked by locals and forced to free their captives. Thereafter, local officials and landowners routinely defy his authority. His conciliatory policies totally discredited, he stays away from Dublin and resides mainly at his episcopal palace at Ardbraccan.
From 1582 Brady suffers from ill health, forcing him to curtail his preaching. He dies on February 14, 1584, and is buried near the parish church at Dunboyne.
Brady marries twice, but little is known of his first wife. In 1568, following the death of his first wife, he marries Weston’s daughter Alice. They had at least four children, including Luke, their eldest son, and Nicholas, grandfather of his namesake the poet. After Brady’s death, his widow marries Sir Geoffrey Fenton and has further issue, including Catherine, Countess of Cork. The poet Nicholas Brady is the bishop’s great-grandson. Maziere Brady, Lord Chancellor of Ireland, is a nineteenth-century descendant of the bishop.
Dowden is the son of John Wheeler Dowden, a merchant and landowner, and is born three years after his brother John, who becomes Bishop of Edinburgh in 1886. His literary tastes emerge early, in a series of essays written at the age of twelve. His home education continues at Queen’s College, Cork and at Trinity College, Dublin. He contributes to the literary magazine Kottabos.
Dowden has a distinguished career, becoming president of the University Philosophical Society, and wins the vice-chancellor’s prize for English verse and prose, and the first senior moderatorship in ethics and logic. In 1867 he is elected professor of oratory and English literature in Dublin University.
Dowden’s first book, Shakespeare: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (1875), results from a revision of a course of lectures, and makes him widely known as a critic: translations appear in German and Russian; his Poems (1876) goes into a second edition. His Shakespeare Primer (1877) is translated into Italian and German. In 1878 the Royal Irish Academy awards him the Cunningham gold medal “for his literary writings, especially in the field of Shakespearian criticism.”
Later works by Dowden in this field include an edition of The Sonnets of William Shakespeare (1881), Passionate Pilgrim (1883), Introduction to Shakespeare (1893), Hamlet (1899), Romeo and Juliet (1900), Cymbeline (1903), and an article entitled “Shakespeare as a Man of Science” (in the National Review, July 1902), which criticizes T. E. Webb’s Mystery of William Shakespeare. His critical essays “Studies in Literature” (1878), “Transcripts and Studies” (1888), “New Studies in Literature” (1895) show a profound knowledge of the currents and tendencies of thought in various ages and countries; but his The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1886) makes him best known to the public at large. In 1900 he edits an edition of Shelley‘s works.
Other books by Dowden which indicate his interests in literature include: Southey (1879), his edition of Southey’s Correspondence with Caroline Bowles (1881), and Select Poems of Southey (1895), his Correspondence of Sir Henry Taylor (1888), his edition of William Wordsworth‘s Poetical Works (1892) and of his Lyrical Ballads (1890), his French Revolution and English Literature (1897), History of French Literature (1897), Puritan and Anglican (1900), Robert Browning (1904) and Michel de Montaigne (1905). His devotion to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe leads to his succeeding Max Müller in 1888 as president of the English Goethe Society.
In 1889 Dowden gives the first annual Taylorian Lecture at the University of Oxford, and from 1892 to 1896 serves as Clark lecturer at Trinity College, Cambridge. To his research are due, among other matters of literary interest, the first account of Thomas Carlyle‘s Lectures on periods of European culture; the identification of Shelley as the author of a review (in The Critical Review of December 1814) of a romance by Thomas Jefferson Hogg; a description of Shelley’s Philosophical View of Reform; a manuscript diary of Fabre d’Églantine; and a record by Dr Wilhelm Weissenborn of Goethe’s last days and death. He also discovers a Narrative of a Prisoner of War under Napoleon (published in Blackwood’s Magazine), an unknown pamphlet by Bishop George Berkeley, some unpublished writings of William Hayley relating to William Cowper, and a unique copy of the Tales of Terror.
Dowden’s wide interests and scholarly methods make his influence on criticism both sound and stimulating, and his own ideals are well described in his essay on The Interpretation of Literature in his Transcripts and Studies. As commissioner of education in Ireland (1896–1901), trustee of the National Library of Ireland, secretary of the Irish Liberal Union and vice-president of the Irish Unionist Alliance, he enforces his view that literature should not be divorced from practical life. His biographical/critical concepts, particularly in connection with Shakespeare, are played with by Stephen Dedalus in the library chapter of James Joyce‘s Ulysses. Leslie Fiedler is to play with them again in The Stranger in Shakespeare.
Dowden marries twice, first to Mary Clerke in 1866, and secondly in 1895 to Elizabeth Dickinson West, daughter of the dean of St Patrick’s. His daughter by his first wife, Hester Dowden, is a well-known spiritualist medium.
Dowden dies in Dublin on April 4, 1913. His Letters are published in 1914 by Elizabeth and Hilda Dowden.
A Dublin City Council plaque commemorating Dowden is unveiled on November 29, 2016.
O’Connell had rejected a suggestion from “friends of emancipation,” and from the English Roman Catholic bishop, John Milner, that the fear of Catholic advancement might be allayed if the Crown were accorded the same right exercised by continental monarchs: a veto on the confirmation of Catholic bishops. O’Connell insists that Irish Catholics would rather “remain forever without emancipation” than allow the government “to interfere” with the appointment of their senior clergy. Instead, he relies on their confidence in the independence of the priesthood from Ascendancy landowners and magistrates to build his Catholic Association into a mass political movement. On the basis of a “Catholic rent” of a penny a month (typically paid through the local priest), the Association mobilises not only the Catholic middle class, but also poorer tenant farmers and tradesmen. Their investment enables O’Connell to mount “monster” rallies that stay the hands of authorities and embolden larger enfranchised tenants to vote for pro-emancipation candidates in defiance of their landlords.
O’Connell’s campaign reaches its climax when he himself stands for parliament. In July 1828, he defeats a nominee for a position in the British cabinet, William Vesey-FitzGerald, in a County Clare by-election, 2057 votes to 982. This makes a direct issue of the parliamentary Oath of Supremacy by which, as a Catholic, he will be denied his seat in the Commons.
As Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Wellington’s brother, Richard Wellesley, had attempted to placate Catholic opinion, notably by dismissal of the long-serving Attorney-General for Ireland, William Saurin, whose rigid Ascendancy views and policy made him bitterly unpopular, and by applying a policy of prohibitions and coercion against not only the Catholic Ribbonmen but also the Protestant Orangemen. But now both Wellington and his Home Secretary, Robert Peel, are convinced that unless concessions are made, a confrontation is inevitable. Peel concludes, “though emancipation was a great danger, civil strife was a greater danger.” Fearing insurrection in Ireland, he drafts the Relief Bill and guides it through the House of Commons. To overcome the vehement opposition of both the King and of the House of Lords, Wellington threatens to resign, potentially opening the way for a new Whig majority with designs not only for Catholic emancipation but also for parliamentary reform. The King initially accepts Wellington’s resignation and the King’s brother, Ernest Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, attempts to put together a government united against Catholic emancipation. Though such a government would have considerable support in the House of Lords, it would have little support in the Commons and Ernest abandons his attempt. The King recalls Wellington. The bill passes the Lords and becomes law.
The key, defining, provision of the Acts is its repeal of “certain oaths and certain declarations, commonly called the declarations against transubstantiation and the invocation of saints and the sacrifice of the mass, as practised in the Church of Rome,” which had been required “as qualifications for sitting and voting in parliament and for the enjoyment of certain offices, franchises, and civil rights.” For the Oath of Supremacy, the act substitutes a pledge to bear “true allegiance” to the King, to recognise the Hanoverian succession, to reject any claim to “temporal or civil jurisdiction” within the United Kingdom by “the Pope of Rome” or “any other foreign prince … or potentate,” and to “abjure any intention to subvert the present [Anglican] church establishment.”
This last abjuration in the new Oath of Allegiance is underscored by a provision forbidding the assumption by the Roman Church of episcopal titles, derived from “any city, town or place,” already used by the United Church of England and Ireland. (With other sectarian impositions of the Act, such as restrictions on admittance to Catholic religious orders and on Catholic-church processions, this is repealed with the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1926.)
The one major security required to pass the Act is the Parliamentary Elections (Ireland) Act 1829. Receiving its royal assent on the same day as the relief bill, the act disenfranchises Ireland’s forty-shilling freeholders, by raising the property threshold for the county vote to the British ten-pound standard. As a result, “emancipation” is accompanied by a more than five-fold decrease in the Irish electorate, from 216,000 voters to just 37,000. That the majority of the tenant farmers who had voted for O’Connell in the Clare by-election are disenfranchised as a result of his apparent victory at Westminster is not made immediately apparent, as O’Connell is permitted in July 1829 to stand unopposed for the Clare seat that his refusal to take the Oath of Supremacy had denied him the year before.
In 1985, J. C. D. Clark depicts England before 1828 as a nation in which the vast majority of the people still believed in the divine right of kings, and the legitimacy of a hereditary nobility, and in the rights and privileges of the Anglican Church. In Clark’s interpretation, the system remained virtually intact until it suddenly collapsed in 1828, because Catholic emancipation undermined its central symbolic prop, the Anglican supremacy. He argues that the consequences were enormous: “The shattering of a whole social order. … What was lost at that point … was not merely a constitutional arrangement, but the intellectual ascendancy of a worldview, the cultural hegemony of the old elite.”
Clark’s interpretation has been widely debated in the scholarly literature, and almost every historian who has examined the issue has highlighted the substantial amount of continuity before and after the period of 1828 through 1832.
Eric J. Evans in 1996 emphasises that the political importance of emancipation was that it split the anti-reformers beyond repair and diminished their ability to block future reform laws, especially the great Reform Act of 1832. Paradoxically, Wellington’s success in forcing through emancipation led many Ultra-Tories to demand reform of Parliament after seeing that the votes of the rotten boroughs had given the government its majority. Thus, it was an ultra-Tory, George Spencer-Churchill, Marquess of Blandford, who in February 1830 introduced the first major reform bill, calling for the transfer of rotten borough seats to the counties and large towns, the disfranchisement of non-resident voters, the preventing of Crown officeholders from sitting in Parliament, the payment of a salary to MPs, and the general franchise for men who owned property. The ultras believed that a widely based electorate could be relied upon to rally around anti-Catholicism.
In Ireland, emancipation is generally regarded as having come too late to influence the Catholic-majority view of the union. After a delay of thirty years, an opportunity to integrate Catholics through their re-emerging propertied and professional classes as a minority within the United Kingdom may have passed. In 1830, O’Connell invites Protestants to join in a campaign to repeal the Act of Union and restore the Kingdom of Ireland under the Constitution of 1782. At the same, the terms under which he is able to secure the final measure of relief may have weakened his repeal campaign.
George Ensor, a leading Protestant member of the Catholic Association in Ulster, protests that while “relief” bought at the price of “casting” forty-shilling freeholders, both Catholic and Protestant, “into the abyss,” might allow a few Catholic barristers to attain a higher grade in their profession, and a few Catholic gentlemen to be returned to Parliament, the “indifference” demonstrated to parliamentary reform will prove “disastrous” for the country.
Seeking, perhaps, to rationalise the sacrifice of his freeholders, O’Connell writes privately in March 1829 that the new ten-pound franchise might actually “give more power to Catholics by concentrating it in more reliable and less democratically dangerous hands.” The Young IrelanderJohn Mitchel believes that the intent is to detach propertied Catholics from the increasingly agitated rural masses.
In a pattern that had been intensifying from the 1820s as landlords clear land to meet the growing livestock demand from England, tenants have been banding together to oppose evictions and to attack tithe and process servers.
Craig is born at Sydenham, Belfast, on January 8, 1871, the seventh of nine children of James Craig (1828–1900), a wealthy whiskey distiller who had entered the firm of Dunville & Co. as a clerk and by age 40 is a millionaire and a partner in the firm. Craig Snr. owns a large house called Craigavon, overlooking Belfast Lough. His mother, Eleanor Gilmore Browne, is the daughter of Robert Browne, a prosperous man who owned property in Belfast and a farm outside Lisburn. Craig is educated at Merchiston Castle School in Edinburgh, Scotland. After school he begins work as a stockbroker, eventually opening his own firm in Belfast.
Craig enlists in the 3rd (Militia) battalion of the Royal Irish Rifles on January 17, 1900, to serve in the Second Boer War. He is seconded to the Imperial Yeomanry, a cavalry force created for service during the war, as a lieutenant in the 13th battalion on February 24, 1900, and leaves Liverpool for South Africa on the SS Cymric in March 1900. After arrival he is soon sent to the front and is taken prisoner in May 1900, but released by the Boers because of a perforated colon. On his recovery he becomes deputy assistant director of the Imperial Military Railways, showing the qualities of organisation that are to mark his involvement in both British and Ulster politics. In June 1901 he is sent home suffering from dysentery, and by the time he is fit for service again the war is over. He is promoted to captain in the 3rd Royal Irish Rifles on September 20, 1902, while still seconded to South Africa.
On June 7, 1921, Craig is appointed the first Prime Minister of Northern Ireland by the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. The House of Commons of Northern Ireland assembles for the first time later that day.
Craig had made his career in British as well as Northern Irish politics, but his premiership shows little sign of his earlier close acquaintance with the British political world. He becomes intensely parochial and suffers from his loss of intimacy with British politicians in 1938, when the British government concludes agreements with Dublin to end the Anglo-Irish trade war between the two countries. He never tries to persuade Westminster to protect Northern Ireland‘s industries, especially the linen industry, which is central to its economy. He is anxious not to provoke Westminster, given the precarious state of Northern Ireland’s position. In April 1939, and again in May 1940 during World War II, he calls for conscription to be introduced in Northern Ireland (which the British government, fearing a backlash from nationalists, refuses). He also calls for Winston Churchill to invade Ireland using Scottish and Welsh troops in order to seize the valuable ports and install a Governor-General at Dublin.
While still prime minister, Craig dies peacefully at his home at Glencraig, County Down at the age of 69 on November 24, 1940. He is buried on the Stormont Estate on December 5, 1940, and is succeeded as the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland by the Minister of Finance, J. M. Andrews.
(Pictured: James Craig, 1st Viscount Craigavon, bromide print by Olive Edis, National Portrait Gallery, London)
Dodds is the son of schoolteachers. His father Robert is from a Presbyterian family and dies of alcoholism when Dodds is seven years old. His mother Anne is of Anglo-Irish ancestry. When he is ten, he moves with his mother to Dublin, and he is educated at St. Andrew’s College, where his mother teaches, and at Campbell College in Belfast. He is expelled from the latter for “gross, studied, and sustained insolence.”
In 1912, Dodds wins a scholarship at University College, Oxford, to read classics, or Literae Humaniores, a two-part, four-year degree program consisting of five terms of study of Latin and Greek texts followed by seven terms of study of ancient history and ancient philosophy. His friends at Oxford include Aldous Huxley and T. S. Eliot. In 1916, he is asked to leave Oxford due to his support for the Easter Rising, but he returns the following year to take his final examinations in Literae Humaniores, and is awarded a first-class degree to match the first-class awarded him in 1914 in Honour Moderations, the preliminary stage of his degree. His first tutor at Oxford is Arthur Blackburne Poynton.
After graduation, Dodds returns to Dublin and meets W. B. Yeats and George William Russell. He teaches briefly at Kilkenny College and in 1919 is appointed as a lecturer in classics at the University of Reading, where in 1923 he marries a lecturer in English, Annie Edwards Powell. They have no children.
In 1924, Dodds is appointed Professor of Greek at the University of Birmingham, and comes to know W. H. Auden, whose father George, Professor of Public Medicine and an amateur classicist, is a colleague. He is also responsible for Louis MacNeice‘s appointment as a lecturer at Birmingham in 1930. He assists MacNeice with his translation of Aeschylus, Agamemnon (1936), and later becomes the poet’s literary executor. He publishes one volume of his own poems, Thirty-Two Poems, with a Note on Unprofessional Poetry (1929).
On his retirement in 1960, Dodds is made an Honorary Fellow of University College, Oxford, until his death on April 8, 1979. He dies in the village of Old Marston, northeast of Oxford.
Among Dodds’s works are The Greeks and the Irrational (1951), which charts the influence of irrational forces in Greek culture up to the time of Plato, and Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety, a study of religious life in the period between Marcus Aurelius and Constantine I. He is also editor of three major classical texts for the Clarendon Press, Proclus: Elements of Theology, Euripides‘ The Bacchae and Plato’s Gorgias, all published with extensive commentaries, and a translation in the case of the first. His autobiography, Missing Persons, is published in 1977. He edits Louis MacNeice’s unfinished autobiography The Strings are False (1965) and MacNeice’s Collected Poems (1966).
seamus dubhghaill 