The Last Gasp of Southern Unionism: Lord Ashtown of Woodlawn

The Edwardian era has often been seen as a time of partial reconciliation between the landlords and their former tenants in Ireland following the violent upheavals of the land war. After the Plan of Campaign had run its course in the early 1890s, leaving some 1,600 evicted families in its wake, the land-purchase acts of 1903 and 1909 facilitated the transfer of over twelve million acres to the new owner-occupiers, who paid annuities to the state instead of rent. As a result, the old and much despised edifice of landlordism slowly but surely crumbled. Most of the Anglo-Irish gentry outside Ulster, who had survived the slaughter of the Great War, faced a hard choice between self-imposed exile and accommodation with their new masters.

On the political front the specter of a Catholic nationalist government in Dublin haunted Protestant loyalists or unionists in the south. However, a few of the more liberal gentry—men like Sir Horace Plunkett and Shane Leslie—urged their class to abandon apathy and resentment and act like true aristocrats by cooperating with the Catholic majority to establish a new and more Irish, if not Gaelic, political community. Although ardent unionists north and south cried betrayal, the two devolution schemes hatched in 1904 and 1908 that gave voters a larger voice in local self-government attracted a few influential landlords, some of whom eventually became moderate Home Rulers. Admittedly, both proposals foundered amid much acrimony. At the same time the Liberal government assuaged some of the old land hunger by reinstating the evicted tenants. To optimists the kinder, gentler face of bourgeois Redmondism and the loss of power by the Protestant landed élite seemed to herald a narrowing of the historic social, ethnic, and religious gap between the latter and Catholic nationalists in town and country. Fox-hunting, coursing, horse-breeding, and racing, as well as the Gaelic League and the Abbey Theatre, constituted foot-bridges over the great divide. In short, there were signs, especially in the more prosperous and anglicized parts of Leinster and Munster before the resurgence of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, that the bad old memories of eviction and rackrents might be expunged, ushering in an era of peace and forgiveness between ancient antagonists.

Here and there, however, some landlords refused to bury the hatchet and fought hard to resist further concessions to the Home Rule party. Many members of the Irish Unionist Alliance and the Irish Landowners' Convention criticized both the strategy and the operation of land purchase, demanded compensation for their lost rents, and accused Liberal and Tory politicians in England of throwing them to the wolves by promoting the sale of their tenanted land to potential or actual "rebels." They also denounced the government's failure to enforce law and order during the Troubles.

One of the leading reactionaries was Frederick Oliver Trench, 3rd Baron Ashtown (1868–1946), who fought tooth and nail against Home Rule, the United Irish League, and every other manifestation of Catholic nationalism for most of his life. Controversy followed him as closely as the police escort that kept would-be assassins at bay. Whether he was the exception that proved the rule, or simply an extreme example of a class that could not bear to surrender the last vestiges of the Ascendancy is a question deserving of more discussion. In short, did the ex-landlords who remained in residence make peace with their new masters, and if so, on what terms? The following profile of Ashtown's public and private life, with its many twists and turns, may serve as a point of departure for further study of how the southern Irish gentry and aristocracy coped with the forces of indebtedness, democracy, nationalism, class resentment, and land hunger that sooner or later engulfed them.

1. The Bomb

By the lethal standards of today's terrorists the explosion at Glenahiry lodge...