by Edmund Curtis (1881-1943)
Introduced by W.E. Vaughan, formerly of Trinity College, Dublin.
What follows is the text of Edmund Curtis’s lecture to the Dublin Literary Society, 17 February 1925, published in the Irish Rosary, xxix, no. 5 (May 1925), 321-9. (It was reprinted in Peter Crooks (ed.), Government, war and society in medieval Ireland. Essays by Edmund Curtis, A.J. Otway-Ruthven and James Lydon (Dublin, 2008) pp 55-62. The editors wish to thank Dr Crooks for permitting them to use his text of the article as the basis for digitising it for tintéan.)
Edmund Curtis was born in 1881 in Bury, Lancashire, of Irish parents, left school at the age of thirteen, went to work in a factory from which he was rescued by two benefactors, who admired some verses he had published in a magazine. One of them was the Reverend Cecil Grant, who took Curtis with him as head boy when he was appointed headmaster of Keswick School, a co-educational boarding school. In 1900 Curtis went from Keswick to Keble College, Oxford, and graduated with a first in 1904. While a lecturer at Sheffield University he published Roger of Sicily and the Normans in lower Italy (1912). In 1914 he was appointed to the Erasmus Smith chairs of modern history and oratory at Trinity College, Dublin. Meanwhile he had been learning Irish and developing a love of Gaelic literature. His History of medieval Ireland, published in 1923, was based on Anglo-Norman and Gaelic sources and was his most important piece of research.
When he gave his lecture to the Dublin Literary Society in 1925 he could speak with the authority of an actual historian and not just as a professor of history at an ancient university. In addition to being a practising historian, he had a peculiar right to talk about ‘scientific’ history: he had been an undergraduate at Oxford in February 1903 when J.B. Bury delivered his inaugural address as regius professor of modern history at Cambridge, declaring that history ‘is herself simply a science, no less and no more’. Another connection with Bury was the fact that only eleven years separated Bury’s vacating the Erasmus Smith chair of history from Curtis’s appointment.
The Dublin Literary Society was predictable enough as a venue: it met in a house near the back gate of Trinity; it was prestigious – it had been lectured to by Shaw and Yeats; it was a diverse body – its members included protestants and catholics, unionists and nationalists, savants and windbags. One of its luminaries, for example, was Senator William Magennis, professor of metaphysics in University College, Dublin (1909-41), a Knight of Columbanus and a vigorous advocate of the Censorship of Publications Act 1929. Curtis was vigorously opposed to the act.
What was not predictable was the publication of his lecture in the Irish Rosary, a catholic devotional journal founded in 1897 and published by the Irish Dominicans. The Irish Rosary was not well disposed to freemasons, communists or Jews. While Curtis was not a Jew or a communist, he belonged to an institution where there was strong tincture of freemasonry; it was also an institution that the Irish catholic bishops considered a danger to the faith and morals of catholic students. From that tainted bastion he was launching an iconoclastic assault on the battered ornaments in the national pantheon.
The unlikely conduit from Curtis to the Irish Rosary seems to have been Father Humbert MacInerny OP, who spoke at Curtis’s lecture as ‘a fellow-historian who expressed agreement with nine-tenths of the lecturer’s charming address’. Father MacInerny was the author of A history of the Irish Dominicans, from original sources and unpublished records, which was published in 1916 and runs to 657 pages on archive.org. As a painstaking scholar he would have sympathised with Curtis, which was important. But what was more important was the fact that he was the editor of the Irish Rosary from 1923 to 1929.
Father MacInerny’s courageous decision to publish allowed Curtis to state his opinions fully and in detail, an opportunity that he might not have got anywhere else. The report of the lecture in the Irish Times, for example, was a full one but not as full or as clear as the Irish Rosary’s version. The episode is a cheerful one in the history of 1925, a year made memorable by Yeats’s speech on divorce in the senate: a nationalist historian cast a cold eye on Irish history and a catholic priest gave him a platform from which to proclaim his views.
Edmund Curtis TCD Ms 3184a/1, No. 4 with permission of the Board of Trinity College Dublin
Irish History and its popular versions
by
Edmund Curtis
The following remarks are the fruit of a good deal of experience as an examiner for the intermediate and other boards in the subject of Irish history. Like the native language, native history is being made compulsory for many posts and educational distinctions, and unfortunately, just as there is a lack of good reading matter in Irish, so there is a lack of good histories of Ireland, as a whole or in periods.
But as books must and will be produced to meet the demand, it is now both timely and fair to ask what kind of ‘Irish history’ are we going to have? As a race, we have an extraordinary habit of make-believe. Thus the kilt is spoken of in the papers as the ‘national garb’ though only a few schoolchildren and one or two grown-up enthusiasts wear it. The ‘national language’, in spite of the way we talk about it in English, is only the language of about one Irishman in twenty. Are we to have a similar established and solemn sham called ‘national history’, which no one must criticize?
Will Irish history be, as it was mainly in the past, a fictitious version of the nation’s story, one-sided in putting all the blame on the English and other foreigners, unreal in expecting us to believe in a pious, noble and patriotic race led by gallant, brilliant and wise soldiers and statesmen, who, strange to say, lost every time, and conceited in wanting us to believe in some extraordinary virtue and intellect in the Irish people, marking them off from all others. Or shall we have what other nations consider ‘scientific history’, founded on fact and judicial research, putting us in our place as members of the European family and as having the ordinary defects and virtues of ordinary human beings acting under certain extraneous circumstances of climate, religion, geography etc.? The old type of history we have in abundance; and up till lately it was treason to question it. The new type, as written by John MacNeill and a few others, will no doubt make its way among the thoughtful; the question is, how long it will be till Ireland as a whole accepts it, and learns that truth is infinitely more interesting than fiction, and that what Irish men and women have performed, labouring under the drawbacks of their human nature and the imperfections of external things, is more remarkable, credible and creditable than the things they are supposed to have done as immaculate saints, invincible heroes, and ponderously perfect scholars.
Irish history has always been the favourite field of the legend-maker and it must be admitted that as a race we have generally preferred a good story about a thing rather than the facts about the thing. Hence it comes as shock to many to hear from our modern scholars, such as MacNeill and Bergin, that the ‘history of Ireland’ from the time of the flood to the to the first century or two of the of the Christian ere, as told by the Four Masters and Keating, was most of it just manufactured by scholars and poets after Ireland became Christian, when the need of a written chronicle which would be fitted in with the Bible story and world history was felt. Hence the occurrence of names such as Heber, Solamh, Partholan in our early annals, which are simply the Jewish Heber, Solomon and Bartholomew. But, disappointing though it may be to many to have to give up this legendary history, do we not gain by having our ancestors presented in true historical setting as Mediterranean dark-whites, Alpine or Celtic red blonds, Nordic fair blonds, who from the continent at various times and have their kinsmen there still?
Far be it from me to disparage the value of tradition, folklore, legend. The discoveries of Sir Arthur Evans and others have shown that the minotaur, the labyrinth, the brazen bull etc., which used to be thought fictions of the Greeks, were actual and historic facts in the remarkable civilization of Knossos in Crete. So in our early records, legends conceal much historic verity; thus the Firbolg seem to be the early inhabitants of neolithic or Mediterranean race; the story that Labhraidh Loingsech, having been exiled to Gaul, came back with 2,200 Gaulish men, from whose broad spears (Ir. laigin) the province of Leinster got its name, points to some early Gaulish settlement in the south-east of our country, which perhaps was spread over many years.
But legend and tradition must be carefully used by trained scholars, who can discern what is true and what is false in them, and often make discoveries from them more wonderful than the legends themselves. Thus Dr John MacNeill, noting the tribe-names and personal names in our earliest records, has proved from them how the first ancestors of the Eugenian and Dalcassian dynasties of Munster were Gauls and worshippers of Gaulish gods, and show there were German tribes in early Ireland, such as the Menapii, from whom, with the customary change of ‘P’ to the Gaelic ‘Ch’, the name Fermanagh comes. Here surely is a case where scientific history is more fascinating in its interpretations than unverified tradition or invented history.
It must be admitted that a good deal of what passes for ‘Irish history’ with the Irish people consists of mere fireside stories, or impressions derived from sermons, political speeches, or trashy articles in newspapers. As far as written history is known, it is generally derived from popular works of the D’Arcy M’Gee and John Mitchel type of historian. This type makes the history of Ireland that of a virtuous, noble, intensely patriotic and deeply religious race, whose troubles have come entirely from foreigners. As a nationalist of the old home rule type said to me once: ‘I believe that the virtues of the Irish are all their own, their defects have been put into them by their conquerors!’ I believe that this brand of national history, which served its turn in keeping up the self-esteem of the people in dark days, has now rather curdled on the national stomach. It is only too evident and must now be admitted by all that, though the Irish cause in general was a good one, it was badly fought; most of our leaders were of inferior calibre, and even when great men like Hugh O’Neill or Owen Roe O’Neill came along, their genius and strivings came to nothing because of the treachery or folly or faint-heart of those who, having once joined the cause, should have followed them to the death.
What we have to learn in Ireland now is that history is a science, that it is concerned with cause and effect, and that it must serve the truth at all costs. It is not a branch of rhetoric or religious conviction, or politics or racial pride. It may be natural and right to hold that our father, mother, brothers and sisters can do no wrong, but we must not treat the whole of the Irish people, some millions strong, as if it were our family, and get personally annoyed if our past is critically examined. Up to this, Irish history, and perhaps history in general, has been very badly taught in our country, and very few seem to regard it as a serious subject, even in our universities. My experience has been that when an examination question is set on certain people and subjects in our past, there almost inevitably follows a gush of legend, rhetoric, passion or panegyric, which may be very natural, but is not ‘history’.
One is almost afraid to set a question on St Patrick, Brian Boru, the early Irish church, Owen Roe O’Neill, Cromwell, the penal laws, Sarsfield or Daniel O’Connell. Seldom, for instance, does one get an historical answer about our national apostle; what one generally gets is blurred memories of the customary panegyric which the child has heard every St Patrick’s day since he can remember in his parish church. Nearly always we are told of the meeting with the Ard Rí Laeri at Tara and such late legends of the saint, the answer often ending with the sweeping statement that Patrick put an end to paganism, and in his lifetime ‘turned us into a nation of saints and scholars’.
How much more interesting and human is the Patrick whose life and achievements have been the subject of great European historians such as Zimmer, Todd, Bury and that great living Benedictine scholar Gougaud. His achievements both in bringing in the Christian faith and European civilization into our country are the natural pride of all Irishmen, but we detract from the glory of these achievements if we attribute too much to him. It is certain that he did not christianize all Ireland in his lifetime. For over a century, the high kings refused to touch the new religion which, with its gospel of meekness and the emancipation of slaves, made little appeal to the warlike Gaelic aristocracy; King Diarmaid, who died in 565, held the pagan feis of Tara in 557.
Now if we had not got such a Christian conceit into our blood, and had more historical sense, we would find it quite natural and even admirable that paganism made a bit of a fight against the new faith. The proud and sincere man who stands by his opinions is a far finer asset, when you do win him over, than the man who comes over at once. Irish druidism was not anything we need to be ashamed of, but an organized faith full of natural poetry and philosophy,
with a great learned class files or sages behind it.
The historical mind knows that such great changes as the conversion of a whole people is a slow process; it has to work through human agencies and human minds, and even has to compromise with the thing it displaces. It seems clear that there was a good deal of compromise in Ireland, the druids accepted baptism, but kept up their pagan lore and became the Gaelic poets of Ireland, and Celtic paganism left up till very recent times a very strong imprint upon the Irish mind.
On all this history of the early church in Ireland in the dark ages which were a golden age for Irish Christianity, the picture drawn is generally too impossibly perfect. It is the fashion to paint monastic Ireland of that time as perfectly learned, artistic and sinless. We must give our children a more manly and actual conception of this and other aspects of Irish history; we must impart to them something of the stern joy that monks, missionaries and heroes had in grappling with the defects and passions of other people’s human nature and their own, and teach them that historical achievements are relative, not absolute, and God works through very imperfect men and women. Colmcille, who was so human, and Patrick, who was so self-diffident, hearing the kind of panegyrics that are pronounced upon them year in and year out, as if they never were assailed by the passions that battle in the restless heart of man, must reflect that little of their spiritual modesty has descended upon us.
To turn to Brian Boru. A picture derived from many popular histories comes at once to us of an aged king with a crown and a terrible lot of white hair and beard, riding between the ranks before the battle of Clontarf, lifting up a crucifix and adjuring the Irish to fight for the faith against the pagan Norse. I don’t know where this picture comes from. It is not found in the life of Brian given in the Wars of the Gael and Gall, written soon after his time. From that and other sources, Irish and Norse, we know that half the army which faced Brian were Christian Leinstermen in revolt against Brian. The Danish king of Dublin, Sitric was a Christian and had married Brian’s daughter. Earl Sigurd was apparently not a pagan, nor do the Norse sagas make it to be a pure fight between Odin and the White Christ; they mention Brodir, the Viking who slew Brian, as one who had forsaken the faith, ‘turned God’s dastard and worshipped fiends’, as though this was exceptional.
The Norse at Clontarf were, we might say, pagans tinctured with Christianity. It is equally certain the Irish were Christians tinctured with paganism. This is shown in the Irish account of how, when Brian was in his tent waiting for the issue of the battle and constantly repeating prayers, psalms and paternosters, he pauses to tell his attendant that the banshee of the Dalcais, Aoibhill of Cragliath, had come to him the night before and told him he would be slain that day. Another pagan passage relates how, as the lines were forming for battle, one Dunlaing O’Hartigan appeared, fresh from the fairy mounds, to his bosom friend, Murchadh, son of Brian, and says that he has abandoned great delights — namely, life without death, without cold, without thirst, without hunger, without decay, beyond all delights of the earth until the Judgment — to be with Murchadh and the Dal-cais that day, and moreover it is fated that both Murchadh and himself shall fall that day. ‘That is not good encouragement for the battle’, answered Murchadh, ‘but often was I myself offered in fairy hills and mansions that world and those gifts you speak of, but I never abandoned for one night my country or my inheritance for theirs.’
So far, then, from being a crusading battle between Norse pagans and Irish Christians, Clontarf was a grim out-and-out fight between the army which Brian had drawn from the southern half of Ireland, and a confederacy of rebel Leinstermen and Dublin Danes, to whose help Earl Sigurd of Orkney had brought a great Viking army. It was the supreme moment of Brian’s fifty years of empire-making, and he took up the challenge like a man, to end the last revolt and put a final crown on Dalcassian supremacy. No other interpretation of his last battle need be given.
Brian, though in many ways he was more humane than others of his time, and though he grew milder as he grew old, was, we must remember, essentially a warrior and statesman, not a saint. Let us note the account given in the Wars of the Gael and Gall of what happened after Mahon and Brian defeated the Norsemen at Limerick in 968. The Irish, we are told, followed their foes into the fort, and slaughtered them in the streets and houses, twenty hundred in all.
Then they [the Irish] carried off their jewels and their best property, their saddles beautiful and foreign, their gold and silver, their beautifully woven cloth of all colours and of all kinds, their satin and silk cloth pleasing and variegated, both scarlet and green and all sorts of cloth in like manner. They carried away their soft, youthful, bright, matchless girls, their blooming silk-clad young women, and their active well-formed boys. The fort and the good town they reduced to a cloud of smoke and red fire afterwards. The whole of the captives were collected on the hill of Saingel, and every one that was fit for war was killed, and every one of them that was fit to be a slave was enslaved.
We pass from Brian, who was a great realist and constructive statesman, to Silken Thomas, Lord Offaly, who was the very opposite. Yet both are reckoned Irish heroes Actually 1 can see nothing romantic about Silken Thomas but his name; he owes his reputation mainly to Thomas Davis’ absurd ballad on the Geraldines; and the fact is that Thomas was about the most idiotic and most futile young hothead that ever smashed up all the crockery. His family had ruled Ireland for sixty years and, had he obeyed his father’s sage advice and the counsel of wiser men, he might have ruled it too, and, who knows, might have kept it for Catholicism and Irish ways against all the designs of Henry VIII. But on hearing a false rumour of the death of his father in the Tower, which he does not try to verify, out he bursts, allows an archbishop to be foully murdered, fails to take Dublin Castle, blunders round, does not even fight a good battle, though he had most of Ireland at his beck and call, and at last, when he should have died sword in hand, miserably surrenders and is miserably hanged at Tyburn. The ruin of the Geraldine supremacy was a heavy price to pay for the romantic rashness of this mere boy, who is much to be pitied, but when he is treated as an Irish hero, I have no patience with him.
Owen Roe O’Neill is a true hero and with reluctance would one criticize the generous emotions that the name of this noble and good man evokes. But when I am told, as I nearly always am told, or when I see in print as I sometimes do, that Owen Roe stood for the Old Irish cause of complete separation and national independence, while Preston and the Catholics of the Pale asked only for religious tolerance and home rule from the English crown, I find myself again in the presence of a legend which passes for history.
The evidence is conclusive that O’Neill was ready at all times to accept Charles I as his king, though of course on terms securing the national pride, right to freedom of religion, and the government of the kingdom of Ireland under the Stuart crown by native Irishmen. Owen’s last letter, written five days before his death, to the earl of Ormond, protested that he had always been loyal to the crown: ‘my resolution from first to last in these unhappy wars tended … truly and sincerely to the preservation of my religion, the advancement of his majesty’s service, and the just liberties of this nation’.
Moreover, Owen Roe found it as hard as any one else to be consistent in that kaleidoscopic time. After the execution of Charles I, Owen’s old enemies, the of Scots in Ulster, declared for Charles Il, while a Cromwellian army held out in Derry for the English commonwealth. One of Owen’s last acts was to send supplies to Coote and so enable him to break the siege of Derry, while his last act of all was to accept Ormond as head of the royalist forces in Ireland and to march in the king’s name against Cromwell, when as we know he died on the way.
Instead of holding up Owen Roe and other leaders as models of consistent and uncompromising patriots, how much more humanly true and interesting it would be to teach them to watch with admiration and understanding the spectacle of brave men struggling with crushing difficulties and making the best of them.
I pass from heroes to subjects. On certain subjects, examinees, whether children or adults, go off in a breathless whirl of words. Take the penal laws: ask a question about them, and you evoke at once a perfect shower-bath of ‘facts’ and assertions without discrimination, order or restraint, in which the comparatively unimportant law that the Roman Catholic could not possess a horse worth more than five pounds is put alongside the deprival of the franchise and such weighty matters, and no attempt is made to compare the penal laws in Ireland with those in European countries or in England itself, as if ours was the only country where religious persecution prevailed.
Teachers and textbooks should be able to tell our children that Protestants were persecuted out of existence in France, Spain and Italy, and that Bohemia in the Thirty Years War was converted by armed force from Calvinism back to Catholicism. They should know that few, and these not the great churches, believed in religious toleration till within a hundred years ago. It is generally known that many good Protestants disapproved of the penal laws when they were passed, just as all Protestants regret them now, and our generous-minded people give them credit for this. No one will grudge our Catholic fellow-countrymen the glory and honour of having stood so true to their faith and endured so much for it, yet that glory will not be diminished by being set beside a parallel picture of what other nations and minorities have suffered for their creed in other countries.
This comparative picture we must have if we are to have history in the true sense, for the essence of an understanding of history is to put things and men in their time and place and judge them by such circumstances. But, of all the things a teacher or examiner looks for in ‘history candidates’ in Ireland, that which is most lacking of all is ‘historical perspective’ and ‘historical atmosphere’; candidates nearly always write as if St Patrick was a modern archbishop, and talk as if in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Ireland there should have been the democratic and tolerant sentiments that we all share today.
Goodness knows we do not want to create young cynics in Ireland; hero-worship is a fine and natural thing, and all right-minded children and adults feel it. But we are so undiscriminating in our heroes, and so many of them are presented out of all human proportion, that we wonder if that kind of hero-worship can be of any use in filling the young mind with noble images and exemplars. So general is what I may call ‘the panegyric mind’, that really when a youth does present you with some unexpected unconventional or ‘minority’ view, you cannot but welcome it, even if it strikes on you as cynical; for porridge is impossible without some salt, and seldom do examinees on Irish history put in the salt.
An example occurs to me of a child in the senior grade who, in his answer to a question about the Irish brigade in France, declared that Louis XIV used Irish soldiers for hunting down the French Huguenots, that the Irish exiles took to the work with enthusiasm as a way of avenging the wrongs they themselves had suffered, and that so general was the terror inspired by them that when in a Huguenot village the cry of ‘voilà les Irlandais’ was raised, a general panic set in and all the villagers fled.
Now I do not know where the boy got the story, and I know many of my readers will be indignant at it; yet, was it not a welcome sign of the passing away of a lot of our old national self-righteousness? The Irish never persecuted, it is true, but then they never got the chance to persecute. We know, however, that it is human to wish for revenge, the Irish are human, certainly eighteenth-century Gaelic poetry is full of what the ‘Clanna Gaedheal’ would do to the ‘Lutherans’ and ‘Calvinists’ if once the Stuart king came home.
This boy, I say, had ‘historical perspective’ and something of the ‘historical method’. But someone may say, he was probably from the North. Very well, let me finish by saying that the heroes who are worshipped in the North, and such subjects as the rise and progress of the Orange Order, are every bit as distorted and out of proportion as much of our national history here in the south, and probably with less saving grace of humour and toleration. Certainly, no person could be more unlike the legendary representation of him than the tolerant and honourable William Ill, who has become the hero and symbol of Protestant intolerance and self-righteousness among a large section of our countrymen in the north-east. Too many of us err in talking as if always: ‘On our side is virtue and Erin; on theirs is the Saxon and guilt.’ They err in taking as exaggerated a view on the other side.
I said enough, I hope, to drive home my points that we want a complete representation of Irish history. That this paper will offend many good people, and provoke some bitter people to attack my views and me, is inevitable. As regards the latter type, cannot we now, in the name of all that is reasonable, get out of the stage and attitude in which we were always looking for ‘another insult to Ireland’? Imagine a man who, when it is pointed out to him that he is very much like other people and that while he has many good points he has many faults, flames up at once and asserts that any such criticism is an intolerable insult. What would we think of him except that he has neither humour nor manliness, and that he must be singularly lacking in true self-esteem and modest dignity? Of course, if such people hold in their hearts or say with tongue or pen that unless you belong to the faith and politics of the majority here and accept legendary views, you have no right to speak or on such things as Irish history, language etc., there is no reply to them except that those who dare to hold what they consider salutary if untraditional views do not intend to let themselves be silenced.
Many of the religious minority here have in the past shared all the enthusiasm of the majority about Irish subjects, even when they thought that enthusiasm uncritical and over-impassioned; but now that Irishmen have charge of their own destinies, they think it time to do what every honest European nation has to do, namely, to look itself in the face and recognize the facts, the faults and merits of its past and its present, a task in which the historian can give invaluable aid.
[1] A lecture delivered before the Dublin Literary Society, 17 February 1925, and first published in the Irish Rosary, 29:5 (1925), 321-9.
Tinteán 