Complete works of hall c.., p.686
Complete Works of Hall Caine, page 686
When the act-drop rose on act two, Mr. Receiver-General was in office under the Parliament. From the place of Receiver-General he was promoted to the place of Governor. He had then the money of the island under his control, and he used it badly. Deficits were found in his accounts. He fled to London, was arrested for a large debt, and clapped into the Fleet. Then the Commonwealth fell, the Dowager Countess went upstairs again, and Charles II. restored the son of the great Earl to the lordship of Man. After that came the Act of Indemnity, a general pardon for all who had taken part against the royal cause. Thereupon Christian went back to the Isle of Man, was arrested on a charge of treason to the Countess-Dowager of Derby, pleaded the royal act of general pardon against all proceedings libelled against him, was tried by the House of Keys, and condemned to death. So ended act two.
Christian had a nephew, Edward Christian, who was one of the two deemsters. This man dissented from the voice of the court, and hastened to London to petition the king. Charles is said to have heard his plea, and to have sent an order to suspend sentence. Some say the order came too late; some say the Governor had it early enough and ignored it. At all events Christian was shot. He protested that he had never been anything but a faithful servant to the Derbys, and made a brave end. The place of his execution was Hango Hill, a bleak, bare stretch of land with the broad sea Under it. The soldiers wished to bind Christian. “Trouble not yourselves for me,” he said, “for I that dare face death in whatever shape he comes, will not start at your fire and bullets.” He pinned a piece of white paper on his breast, and said: “Hit this, and you do your own work and mine.” Then he stretched forth his arms as a signal, was shot through the heart, and fell. Such was the end of Brown William. He may have been a traitor, but he was no coward.
When the chief actor in the tragedy had fallen, King Charles appeared, as Fortinbras appears in “Hamlet,” to make a review and a reckoning, and to take the spoils. He ordered the Governor, the remaining Deemsters, and three of the Keys to be brought before him, pronounced the execution of Christian to be a violation of his general pardon, and imposed severe penalties of fine and imprisonment. “The rest” in this drama has not been “silence.” One long clamour has followed. Christian’s guilt has been questioned, the legality of his trial has been disputed, the validity of Charles’s censure of the judges has been denied. The case is a mass of tangle, as every case must be that stands between the two stools of the Royal cause and the Commonwealth. But I shall make bold to summarise the truth in a very few words:
First, that Christian was untrue to the house of Derby is as clear as noonday. If he had been their loyal servant he could never have taken office under the Parliament.
Second, though untrue to the Countess-Dowager, Christian could not be guilty of treason to her, because she had ceased to be the sovereign when her husband was executed. Fairfax was then the Lord of Man, and Christian was guilty of no treason to him.
Third, whether true or untrue to the Countess-Dowager, the act of pardon had nothing on earth to do with Christian, who was not charged with treason to King Charles, but to the Manx reigning family. The Isle of Man was not a dominion of England, and if Charles’s order had arrived before Christian’s execution, the Governor, Keys, and Deemster would have been fully justified in shooting the man in defiance of the king.
I feel some diffidence in offering this opinion, but I can have none whatever in saying what I think of Christian. My fellow Manxmen are for the most part his ardent supporters. They affirm his innocence, and protest that he was a martyr-hero, declaring that at least he met his fate by asserting the rights of his countrymen. I shall not hesitate to say that I read the facts another way. This is how I see the man:
First, he was a servant of the Derbys, honoured, empowered, entrusted with the care of his mistress, the Countess, when his master, the Earl, left the island to fight for the king. Second, eight days after his master’s fate, he rose in rebellion against his mistress and seized some of the forts of defence. Third, he delivered the island to the army of the Parliament, and continued to hold his office under it. Fourth, he robbed the treasury of the island and fled from his new masters, the Parliament. Fifth, when the new master fell he chopped round, became a king’s man once more, and returned to the island on the strength of the general pardon. Sixth, when he was condemned to death he, who had held office under the Parliament, protested that he had never been anything but a faithful servant to the Derbys.
Such is Christian. He a hero! No, but a poor, sorry, knock-kneed time-server. A thing of rags and patches. A Manx Vicar of Bray. Let us talk of him as little as we may, and boast of him not at all. Man and Manxmen have no need ol him. No, thank God, we can tell of better men. Let us turn his picture to the wall.
THE ATHOL DYNASTY
The last of the Stanleys of the Manx dynasty died childless in 1735, and then the lordship of Man devolved by the female line on the second Duke of Athol by right of his grandmother, who was a daughter of the great Earl of Derby. There is little that is good to say of the Lords of the House of Athol except that they sold the island. Almost the first, and quite the best, thing they did on coming to Man, was to try to get out of it. Let us make no disguise of the clear truth. The Manx Athols were bad, and nearly everything about them was bad. Never was the condition of the island so abject as during their day. Never were the poor so poor. Never was the name of Manxman so deservedly a badge of disgrace. The chief dishonour was that of the Athols. They kept a swashbuckler court in their little Manx kingdom. Gentlemen of the type of Barry Lyndon overran it. Captain Macheaths, Jonathan Wilds, and worse, were masters of the island, which was now a refuge for debtors and felons. Roystering, philandering, gambling, fighting, such was the order of things.
What days they had! What nights! His Grace of Athol was himself in the thick of it all. He kept a deal of company, chiefly rogues and rascals. For example, among his “lord captains” was one Captain Fletcher. This Blue Beard had a magnificent horse, to which, when he was merry, he made his wife, who was a religious woman, kneel down and say her prayers. The mother of my friend, the Reverend T. E. Brown, came upon the dead body of one of these Barry Lyndons, who had fallen in a duel, and the blue mark was on the white forehead, where the pistol shot had been. I remember to have heard of another Sir Lucius O’Trigger, whose body lay exposed in the hold of a fishing-smack, while a parson read the burial service from the quay. This was some artifice to prevent seizure for debt. Oh, these good old times, with their soiled and dirty splendours! There was no lively chronicler, no Pepys, no Walpole then, to give us a picture of the Court of these Kings of Man. What a picture it must have been! Can you not see it? The troops of gentlemen debtors from the Coffee Houses of London, with their periwigs, their canes, and fine linen; down on their luck, but still beruffled, besnuffed, and red-heeled. I can see them strutting with noses up, through old Douglas market-place on market morning, past the Manx folk in their homespun, their curranes and undyed stockings. Then out at Mount Murray, the home of the Athols, their imitations of Vauxhall, torches, dancings, bows and congés, bankrupt shows, perhaps, but the bankrupt Barrys making the best of them — one seems to see it all. And then again, their genteel quarrels — quarrels were easily bred in that atmosphere. “Sir, I have the honour to tell you that you are a pimp, lately escaped from the Fleet.” “My lord, permit me to say that you lie, that you are the son of a lady, and were born in a sponging-house.” Then out leapt the weapons, and presently two men were crossing swords under the trees, and by-and-by one of them was left under the moonlight, with the shadow of the leaves playing on his white face.
Poor gay dogs, they are dead! The page of their history is lost. Perhaps that is just as well. It must have been a dark page, maybe a little red too, even as blood runs red. You can see the scene of their revelries. It is an inn now. The walls seem to echo to their voices. But the tables they ate at are like themselves — worm-eaten.
Good-bye to them! They have gone over the Styx.
SMUGGLING AND WRECKING
Meanwhile, what of the Manx people? Their condition was pitiful. An author who wrote fifty years after the advent of the Athols gives a description of such misery that one’s flesh creeps as one reads it. Badly housed, badly clad, badly fed, and hardly taught at all, the very poor were in a state of abjectness unfit for dogs. Treat men as dogs and they speedily acquire the habits of dogs, the vices of dogs, and none of their virtues. That was what happened to a part of the Manx people; they developed the instincts of dogs, while their masters, the other dogs, the gay dogs, were playing their bad game together. Smuggling became common on the coasts of Man. Spirits and tobacco were the goods chiefly smuggled, and the illicit trade rose to a great height. There was no way to check it. The island was an independent kingdom. My lord of Athol swept in the ill-gotten gains, and his people got what they could. It was a game of grab. Meantime the trade of the surrounding countries, England, Wales, and Ireland, was suffering grievously. The name of the island must have smelt strong in those days.
But there was a fouler odour than that of smuggling. Wrecking was not unknown. The island lent itself naturally to that evil work. The mists of Little Mannanan, son of Lear, did not forsake our island when Saint Patrick swept him out of it. They continued to come up from the south, and to conspire with the rapid currents from the north to drive ships on to our rocks. Our coasts were badly lighted, or lighted not at all. An open flare stuck out from a pole at the end of a pier was often all that a dangerous headland had to keep vessels away from it. Nothing was easier than for a fishing smack to run down pole and flare together, as if by accident, on returning to harbour. But there was a worse danger than bad lights, and that was false lights. It was so easy to set them. Sometimes they were there of themselves, without evil intention of any human soul, luring sailors to their destruction. Then when ships came ashore it was so easy to juggle with one’s conscience and say it was the will of God, and no bad doings of any man’s. The poor sea-going men were at the bottom of the sea by this time, and their cargo was drifting up with the tide, so there was nothing to do but to take it. Such was the way of things. The Manxman could find his excuses. He was miserably poor, he had bad masters, smuggling was his best occupation, his coasts were indifferently lighted, ships came ashore of themselves — what was he to do? That the name of Manxman did not become a curse, an execration, and a reproach in these evil days of the Athols seems to say that behind all this wicked work there were splendid virtues doing noble duty somewhere. The real sap, the true human heart of Manxland, was somehow kept alive. Besides cut-throats in ruffles, and wreckers in homespun, there were true, sweet, simple-hearted people who would not sell their souls to fill their mouths.
Does it surprise you that some of all this comes within the memory of men still living? I am myself well within the period of middle life, and, though too young to touch these evil days, I can remember men and women who must have been in the thick of them. On the north of the island is Kirk Maughold Head, a bold, rugged headland going far out into the sea. Within this rocky foreland lie two bays, sweet coverlets of blue waters, washing a shingly shore under shelter of dark cliffs. One of these bays is called Port-y-Vullin, and just outside of it, between the mainland and the head, is a rock, known as the Carrick, a treacherous grey reef, visible at low water, and hidden at flood-tide. On the low brews of Port-y-Vullin stood two houses, the one a mill, worked by the waters coming down from the near mountain of Barrule, the other a weaver’s cottage. Three weavers lived together there, all bachelors, and all old, and never a woman or child among them — Jemmy of eighty years, Danny of seventy, and Billy of sixty something. Year in, year out, they worked at their looms, and early or late, whenever you passed on the road behind, you heard the click of them. Fishermen coming back to harbour late at night always looked for the light of their windows. “Yander’s Jemmy-Danny-Billy’s,” they would say, and steer home by that landmark. But the light which guided the native seamen misled the stranger, and many a ship in the old days was torn to pieces on the jagged teeth of that sea-lion, the Carrick. Then, hearing loud human cries above the shrieks of wind and wave, the three helpless old men would come tottering down to the beach, like three innocent witches, trembling and wailing, holding each other’s hands like little children, and never once dreaming of what bad work the candles over their looms had done.
But there were those who were not so guileless. Among them was a sad old salt, whom I shall call Hommy-Billy-mooar, Tommy, son of big Billy. Did I know him, or do I only imagine him as I have heard of him? I cannot say, but nevertheless I see him plainly. One of his eyes was gone, and the other was badly damaged. His face was of stained mahogany, one side of his mouth turned up, the other side turned down, he could laugh and cry together. He was half landsman, tilling his own croft, half seaman, going out with the boats to the herrings. In his youth he had sailed on a smuggler, running in from Whitehaven with spirits. The joy of “the trade,” as they called smuggling, was that a man could buy spirits at two shillings a gallon for sale on the island, and drink as much as he “plazed abooard for nothin’.” When Hommy married, he lived in a house near the church, the venerable St. Maughold away on the headland, with its lonely churchyard within sound of the sea.
There on tempestuous nights the old eagle looked out from his eyrie on the doings of the sea, over the back of the cottage of the old weavers to the Carrick. If anything came ashore he awakened his boys, scurried over to the bay, seized all they could carry, stole back home, hid his treasures in the thatch of the roof, or among the straw of the loft, went off to bed, and rose in the morning with an innocent look, and listened to the story of last night’s doings with a face full of surprise. They say that Hommy carried on this work for years, and though many suspected, none detected him, not even his wife, who was a good Methodist. The poor woman found him out at last, and, being troubled with a conscience, she died, and Hommy buried her in Kirk Maughold churchyard, and put a stone over her with a good inscription. Then he went on as before. But one morning there was a mighty hue and cry. A ship had been wrecked on the Carrick, and the crew who were saved had seen some rascals carrying off in the darkness certain rolls of Irish cloth which they had thrown overboard. Suspicion lit on Hommy and his boys. Hommy was quite hurt. “Wrecking was it? Lord a-massy! To think, to think!” Revenue officers were to come to-morrow to search his house. Those rolls of Irish cloth were under the thatch, above the dry gorse stored up on the “lath” in his cowhouse. That night he carried them off to the churchyard, took up the stone from over his wife’s grave, dug the grave open and put in the cloth. Next day his one eye wept a good deal while the officers of revenue made their fruitless search. “Aw well, well, did they think because a man was poor he had no feelings?” Afterwards he pretended to become a Methodist, and then he removed the cloth from his wife’s grave because he had doubts about how she could rise in the resurrection with such a weight on her coffin. Poor old Hommy, he came to a bad end. He spent his last days in jail in Castle Rushen. A one-eyed mate of his told me he saw him there. Hommy was unhappy. He said “Castle Rushen wasn’t no place for a poor man when he was gettin’ anyways ould.”
THE REVESTMENT
It is hardly a matter for much surprise that the British Government did what it could to curb the smuggling that was rife in Man in the days of the Athols. The bad work had begun in the days of the Derbys, when an Act was passed which authorised the Earl of Derby to dispose of his royalty and revenue in the island, and empowered the Lords of the Treasury to treat with him for the sale of it. The Earl would not sell, and when the Duke of Athol was asked to do so, he tried to put matters off. But the evil had by this time grown so grievously that the British Government threatened to strip the Duke without remuneration. Then he agreed to accept £70,000 as compensation for the absolute surrender of the island. He was also to have £2000 out of the Irish revenue, which, as well as the English revenue, was to benefit by the suppression of the clandestine trade. This was in exchange for some £6000 a year which was the Duke’s Manx revenue, much of it from duties and customs paid in goods which were afterwards smuggled into England, Ireland, and Scotland. So much for his Grace of Athol. Of course the Manx people got nothing. The thief was punished, the receiver was enriched; it is the way of the world.
In our history of Man, we call this sweet transaction, which occurred in 1765, “The Revestment,” meaning the revesting of the island in the crown of England. Our Manx people did not like it at all. I have heard a rugged old song on the subject sung at Manx inns:
For the babes unborn shall rue the day
When the Isle of Man was sold away;
And there’s ne’er an old wife that loves a dram
But she will lament for the Isle of Man.
Clearly drams became scarce when “the trade” was put down. But, indeed, the Manx had the most strange fears and ludicrous sorrows. The one came of their anxiety about the fate of their ancient Constitution, the other came of their foolish generosity. They dreaded that the government of the island would be merged into that of England, and they imagined that because the Duke of Athol had been compelled to surrender, he had been badly treated. Their patriotism was satisfied when the Duke of Athol was made Governor-in-Chief under the English crown, for then it was clear that they were to be left alone; but their sympathy was moved to see him come back as servant who had once been lord. They had disliked the Duke of Athol down to that hour, but they forgot their hatred in sight of his humiliation, and when he landed in his new character, they received him with acclamations. I am touched by the thought of my countrymen’s unselfish conduct in that hour; but I thank God I was not alive to witness it.
