James Sheridan Knowles – I Gotta Be Me!

James Sheridan Knowles, despite initial attempts at being conventional, did something remarkable. He made a life out of being himself. And ‘himself’ was different. And he was just that whenever the fancy took him. In a life almost totally forgotten, he made a life less ordinary, as a soldier, doctor, writer and actor. He even found God. If he’d been Catholic, he’d probably have become Pope.     

James Sheridan Knowles, born in 1784, was a Corkman. As if that wasn’t enough for him to want to set himself apart, he was also the son of James Knowles Sr, lexicographer, teacher of ‘high reputation’ of elocution and a cousin of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, doyen of Georgian London’s theatre world. James Sr was a free thinker himself, and in 1793, the family were forced to move lock, stock to London, following the backlash he received for his support for Catholic Emancipation. The move proved fruitful, however, for young James. Aged a mere 14 years, he penned a hit ballad, ‘The Welsh Harper’, which opened the door to a social circle which included leading cultural lights such as William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Inexplicable, and fascinating, then, was his next career move.

When he finished his schooling, he took up a commission in the militia of Wiltshire and later Tower Hamlets (no doubt a tougher station today). He then left it to study medicine under Dr Robert Willan to obtain a qualification as an MD. Not one to be tied down to the respectable life, and still exuding the creative panache of his youth, Knowles, as the biographical note to his play ‘The Hunchback’ neatly states, ‘gave it all up for the theatre’ and returned to Ireland, where Crow Street Theatre beckoned by way of Bath for his debut as an actor in the early 1800’s. He lived with his relations, the LeFanus, before touring with Edmund Keane across the regional theatres of Ireland, performing in Waterford and publishing a volume of his poetry. In 1809, he married Maria Charteris, a fellow treader of the boards from Scotland, with whom he acted during his time touring. With Edmund Keane, meanwhile, top actor in his time, Knowles Sheridan truck up a fruitful relationship as writer and collaborator. Sheridan Knowles the A-list playwright emerged out of this partnership, as he once again successfully avoided complacency and Keane starred in his play ‘Leo’ in 1810. His success stalled however, and Knowles Sheridan taught to support himself – not unlike the activities of his father – elocution, this time in Belfast. By 1820, he was the father of a son, and again showed his ability to get on with the right people. William Macready, another leading actor of his day, a man who had since his teens been beguiling audiences across England, readily championed him and by 1825, Macready, starred in a production of Sheridan Knowles’ version of ‘William Tell’ at the Drury Lane Theatre. ‘William Tell’ was the breakthrough. From then on in, he was one of the renowned playwrights of his age. In 1834, he returned to Cork, was received like a hero.

It’s hard to understand how his work alone would have made him famous. If you read over his plays, a glance suggests dated, laboured language. They are described by one source as ‘workmanlike’ and ‘professional’. High praise indeed! However, he clearly gave the punters what they wanted, and he gave him hit after hit. From ‘Virginius’ in 1820, to ‘William Tell’ (1825) to ‘The Hunchback’ (1832) to ‘The Beggar of Bethnal Green’ (1834), his plays were performed to a grateful, loyal public. What the texts can’t possibly show is his apparent ability to attract people to him. Macready’s championing of Knowles Sheridan’s work is only one example. He was, it seems ‘warm of heart’. On his feted return to his native Cork, he sought out his old nurse from his young years, and ensured she got the best seat in the best box in the house for his appearance in a local theatre.

Knowles the performer, never faded, though his health did. He took to lecturing on oratory and drama, the fall-back of his youth. In 1841 his wife died. He would remarry two years later to a former pupil, Emma Elphinstone. Like a true iconoclast might, he changed his life’s path and replaced one form of performance with another. He gave up on the theatre and embraced theology and preaching. He even collaborated with another leading light if his time, Cardinal Wiseman, authoring a text together on Transubstantiation in 1851. A truly ecumenical matter, given that in 1845 he became a Baptist minister.

James Knowles Sheridan. Actor, performer, teacher, theologian and minister, died aged 78 in 1862. His esteem never faded. For the last years of his life, his services to the arts were rewarded with a pension of £200 a year by Sir Robert Peel, from the funds of the Civil List.

 Ask most people today and this man means nothing. Zip. He is, tragically, totally forgotten, which is a pity, whatever about his prose. He is a likable figure not for what he produced, but for the fact that whilst today so many of us will throw our hands up and say we’re fecked, from his teens he got on by being himself, whatever that was at a particular time. He had that unnatural gift to do well with what he was involved. Unfortunately, in a world of doozers and beancounters, it’s not your bonhomie which counts as your productivity. Knowles had the guts never to be pigeonholed, no matter what, and how refreshing is that.     

Anne Devlin: Tenacious Rebel

I never liked Irish history. It always felt like cod liver oil after dining on the exotic morsels of the Dreyfus Affair. For me it was stodgy and politically suspect. So it was with surprise that, when I started this series, I came across the long forgotten name of Anne Devlin and she’s a woman I simply can’t reconcile with what I remember from school. Although known in national mythology as the loyal housekeeper of Robert Emmet, there as much more to her than the ability to keep shtum.

There was a time when kids learned about Robert Emmet and his housekeeper, Anne Devlin. I’m not sure if they still do, but their lives as taught in school can be encapsulated thus:  well-to-do protestant nationalist got kicked out of college for nationalist activities, went to France and then plotted to overthrow the Brits in 1803. His squeeze was Sarah Curran, who went on to have a long and illustrious career as a nightclub in Rathfarnham. Emmet was executed brutally following his abortive revolution, which was so bad it would have been funny but for the fact that people died. Emmet redeemed himself with his speech from the dock on his conviction in Green Street Courthouse. If you can’t win Irish freedom, then at least have a level of oratory to express your beliefs which most of today’s politicians could only dream of (as it is, most TDs think oratory is a small chapel). Devlin was captured and brutally interrogated. She wouldn’t give up Emmet. Robert was brutally executed and became a legend.  Devlin became a footnote. The dutiful woman to brave Robert, an example of female obedience and loyalty. But Anne Devlin was much, much more than just a resolute Mrs Doyle.  

She was from Rathdrum in Wicklow, born in 1780 into a family known for its nationalist sympathies. Her father was a law abiding, successful farmer. Anne moved to Dublin to live with her landlord’s sister in law, who was very fond of her. Shortly before 1798 rebellion kicked off, she was called back home. Devlin’s family had quite the revolutionary streak and several members were active in 1798, her father was apparently moved to call Anne home in anticipation of the oncoming trouble. He would himself be arrested and charged for his activities. When the case against him collapsed, the Devlins moved to Dublin, to Rathfarnham, now a nondescript suburb of Dublin, but back then was in the wilds of the Dublin hills. Nearby lived Robert Emmet, on Butterfield Lane, who was busy trying to resurrect the 1798 rebellion, and using his base in Rathfarnham as the centre for his operations.  Emmet was notoriously paranoid about the possibility of spies, of the authorities getting wind of his activities. Anne became ‘housekeeper’, for Emmet, who was going by the imaginative pseudonym of ‘Ellis’. The idea of posing as a housekeeper was to give the operation an air of normality, which successfully avoided any suspicion being raised. Devlin was, like all good housekeepers, the one who ran the operation. She did Emmet’s running, acted as his messenger, agent and fixer. But even she couldn’t do anything about the fact that Emmet was wholly unsuited to running the operation to begin with. The rising of 1803 was a disaster. Delayed on the day because of Emmet’s pathological fear of spies, the rebellion descended into a drunken and bloody farce. Emmet called off the rebellion, but it was too late. Meanwhile, Devlin was picked up by the British at Rathfarnham, under the orders of Henry Charles Sirr, Dublin’s Chief of Police. She was brutally tortured both at home and later in custody. She endured half hanging, repeated questioning, she was even offered bribes and inducements to give up Emmet. The failed rebellion leader even asked her to tell all to save herself, but she stood firm and said nothing. She was placed in solitary confinement in Kilmainham Gaol and following Emmet’s execution, one source describes her brought to Thomas Street and being forced to look at the bloody aftermath of Emmet’s execution, where he had been hanged and beheaded. Dogs were licking the blood as it trickled down the streets.

She was thrown back into clink until 1806, when she was released, and the popular assumption is that she vanished until the 1840s. Keeping under the radar may have been more than just the tragic fate of a brave young woman, however. It appears that for much of her later life, those she had helped didn’t forget her. She was given employment by the Emmet family in various domestic positions. Robert’s father was a senior figure in St Patrick’s Hospital, and had many friends who employed Devlin. She even married a man by the name of Campbell and had two children, a boy and a girl. From 1825 she was paid a handsome salary of £63 a year by the hospital. There may have been a suggestion of good old fashioned Irish nepotism in her appointment, as the head of the hospital could have been of the same Campbell family as her hubby.  

So her middle years had much comfort, until a damning report of the hospital’s governance lead to a shakeup in the way the hospital was run, if that doesn’t sound familiar, and Devlin was made redundant, no longer laundress of St. Patricks. Her husband died in 1845, leaving Devlin, her son and invalid daughter to end up in the tenements near the Coombe, out of favour and without a benefactor, doing menial work as a washerwoman. One account describes her son having to support mother and sister. Around that time, she came into contact with Brother Luke Cullen and Richard Madden, the historian of the United Irishmen, who upon finding her was able to give her some support. Her death occurred when Madden was in America and was ignominious: she died of malnourishment in her tenement in the Coombe, whilst others were, across in Merrion Square at the Great Exhibition, trying to put behind us the squalor she and her like endured.

So was Anne Devlin’s fate. She never got the glory, but she at least she got a permanent burial place, unlike her collaborator Robert Emmet. That much Madden was able to see to, and she is located, fittingly, close to Daniel O’Connell’s round tower in Glasnevin cemetery, an echo of Glendalough, in her native Wicklow.

It’s striking, when looking at Emmet and his tenacious Anne, how young they were when picking a fight with the amassed strength of the British Empire. Not only that, but a British Empire which was on the rough end of the Napoleonic wars. Whilst many songs were sung and written about Emmet, who was all romance and chintz, Devlin didn’t get her place in the national consciousness beyond a neat analogy for where a woman belongs. For Emmet’s words, Devlin replied with action: rebel, organiser, determined fighter; the multifaceted revolutionary. Not bad for a girl of 23, and no bad role model for the 23 year olds of today.    

Isaac Butt, 1813-1879: Iconoclastic Godfather of Home Rule Nationalism

I had a mate who really annoyed our history teacher once. We were doing what we thought was the boring bit of the Leaving Cert, Irish history, when we were confronted with the odd figure of Isaac Butt. Taken by our teacher’s passion for the man, and her compassion for his drinking and womanizing, my mate responded by concluding an essay on Butt by paraphrasing Denis Leary’s summation of Jim Morrison’s life: He was drunk: he was nobody; he was drunk: he was famous; he was drunk: he was dead. Butt certainly enjoyed a drop, and women were never far from his attention. He nonetheless possessed rare levels of perception and farsightedness. His idea was powerful in its simplicity: to put Irish self-rule back on the agenda. His path to taking this initiative was anything but predictable.

He was born in Donegal in 1813, as Protestant as shortbread and as Tory as kicking a beggar. He studied in Trinity College, Dublin and became a barrister, practicing in Ireland and then in Britain. Renowned for his academic and legal mind, he served as Professor of Political Economy in Trinity before entering Politics, representing both English as well as Irish constituencies.

Butt was the classic 19th century bourgeois citizen politician, respected and every bit an establishment figure. It all changed because of two things: the calamitous Famine of the 1840’s spurred Butt on to question his long held (and culturally defining) political beliefs, given that his party, the Tories, were held responsible for the scale of the disaster, if not for causing it. The second thing happened during his day job, when Butt became a proto-Michael Mansfield, defending high profile nationalist revolutionaries. Butt once had the unenviable task of defending the leaders of the Young Irelanders during their trial for high treason in 1848, at which time the nasty old Brits had suspended habeas corpus and made the golden thread that runs through British justice unravel on the Emerald Isle. The generally lousy treatment meted out to the Irish on both counts lead Butt to conclude that the domestic affairs of Ireland were really its own concern and far better dealt with at home than by the men of Westminster, who frankly were pretty rubbish at this task.

The respectable, loyal MP now took to setting up a new group, The Home Government Association. At its first meeting in 1870 in Dublin, those present were not only the usual nationalist suspects, but a whole range of characters and political hues; figures like Butt – Protestants disillusioned with Westminster, who wanted to see change in the governing of Ireland’s affairs. Was this the moment of blossoming cooperation, our very own ‘rainbow nation’? Despite some misgivings, Butt did his damndest to get all sides working together, and his view was clear from his experience: Protestants had nothing to fear from Catholics, and it was Catholics who had suffered an injustice. He said it so himself:

“Trust me, we have all grievously wronged the Irish Catholics, priests and laymen.”

They trusted him, and within three years, the Home Government Association grew to the much catchier Home Rule League. Contesting elections, the Home Rule League gained quick prominence and it was thanks to Butt. Unfortunately, human nature got in the way and it all fell apart. Protestant support waned as the influence of nationalists, among them the Irish Republican Brotherhood, took up the political oxygen. As unity in the Home Rule League unraveled, so did Butt. His leadership wasn’t much to write home about: as MPs weren’t paid at the time, Butt maintained prolonged absences from Westminster in his perpetual attempts to keep the wolves from the door. His timing was also awful. In his absence, Home Rule’s prominence dissolved in Westminster, as, yes, you guessed it, the Tories took power, and we all know how they felt about Ireland, especially when there was a global empire to run.
Butt’s other great flaw, apart from his need to get paid without backhanders and a lack of organisational skill, whose scale can only be described in terms of a high pitched shriek, was his love of drink and women. Whereas someone like Ben Franklin was feted despite his peccadilloes, Butt never cut it in the uptight morality of Victorian Britain. It was said he fathered so many children out of wedlock, that he’d get heckled when speaking at public meetings by the women whose bastard children he had allegedly sired. Whether or not such reports are entirely accurate, Butt the bon vivant was gifting the opponents of Butt the politician the necessary arsenal to be rid of him. In 1873 the inevitable happened. Butt was replaced by William Shaw, another northern Protestant nationalist, though not without bitterness among his followers. He was an outcast from the party whose very soul he had called into existence. In the vacuum, the Home Rule League caused trouble in the House of Commons by way of its new policy of obstructionism. Among the radicals was Charles Stewart Parnell, who would eventually take over, pay his MPs and define nationalism for a generation. Parnell himself would also come a cropper on morality, although where Butt had trysts with many women, it only took one to topple the future Uncrowned King of Ireland. In the end, Butt the womaniser and drinker won out over Butt the statesman, and he died in 1879 in a cottage in Clonskeagh, a place so unremarkable, death must have been a mercy.

Isaac Butt was a man of incredible gifts: He was eloquent, genial and insightful. He had the vision to get people to sit together and discuss constructively the future of his country. He dared to change minds, as his had been in the course of his life. He brought Protestants to the brink of sharing a vision of a self-governed Ireland with Catholic nationalists, governed in the interests of all of her people. The only problem was that while his greatness came to define his actions, it was his flaws which would hamper his own greatness. For all of that, imagine if Butt had been able to see it through. Ireland would have been a very different, maybe even better, place.