Complete works of hall c.., p.687
Complete Works of Hall Caine, page 687
I should have shrieked with laughter. The absurdity of the situation passes the limits even of a farce. A certain Duke, who had received £6000 a year, whereof a large part came of an immoral trade, had been to London and sold his interest in it for £70,000, because if he had not taken that, he would probably have got nothing. With thirteen years’ purchase of his insecure revenue in his pocket, and £2000 a year promised, and his salary as Governor-in-Chief besides, he returns to the island where half the people are impoverished by his sale of the island, and nobody else has received a copper coin, and everybody is doomed to pay back interest on what the Duke has received! What is the picture? The Duke lands at the old jetty, and there his carriage is waiting to take him to the house, where he and his have kept swashbuckler courts, with troops of fine gentlemen debtors from London. The Manxmen forget everything except that his dignity is reduced. They unyoke his horses, get into his shafts, drag him through the streets, toss up their caps and cry hurrah! hurrah! One seems to see the Duke sitting there with his arms folded, and his head on his breast. He can’t help laughing. The thing is too ridiculous. Oh, if Swift had been there to see it, what a scorching satire we should have had!
But the Athols soon spirited away their popularity. First they clamoured for a further sum on account of the lost revenues, and they got it. Then they tried to appropriate part of the income of the clergy. Again, they put members of their family into the bishopric, and one of them sold his tithes to a factor who tried to extort them by strong measures, which led to green crop riots. In the end, their gross selfishness, which thought of their own losses but forgot the losses of the people, raised such open marks of aversion in the island that they finally signified to the king their desire to sell all their remaining rights, their land and manorial rights. This they did in 1829, receiving altogether, for custom, revenue, tithes, patronage of the bishopric, and quit rents, the sum of £416,000. Such was the value to the last of the Athols of the Manx dynasty, of that little hungry island of the Irish Sea, which Henry IV. gave to the Stanleys, and Sir John de Stanley did not think worth while to look at. So there was an end of the House of Athol. Exit the House of Athol! The play goes on without them.
HOME RULE
It might be said that with the final sale of 1829 the history of the Isle of Man came to a close. Since then we have been in the happy condition of the nation without a history. Man is now a dependency of the English crown. The crown is represented by a Lieutenant-Governor. Our old Norse Constitution remains. We have Home Rule, and it works well. The Manx people are attached to the throne of England, and her Majesty has not more loyal subjects in her dominions. We are deeply interested in Imperial affairs, but we have no voice in them. I do not think we have ever dreamt of a day when we should send representatives to Westminster. Our sympathies as a nation are not altogether, I think, with the party of progress. We are devoted to old institutions, and hold fast to such of them as are our own. All this is, perhaps, what you would expect of a race of islanders with our antecedents.
Our social history has not been brilliant. I do not gather that the Isle of Man was ever Merry Man. Not even in its gayest days do we catch any note of merriment amid the rumpus of its revelries. It is an odd thing that woman plays next to no part whatever in the history of the island. Surely ours is the only national pie in which woman has not had a finger. In this respect the island justifies the ungallant reading of its name — it is distinctly the Isle of Man. Not even amid the glitter and gewgaws of our Captain Macheaths do you catch the glint of the gown of a Polly. No bevy of ladies, no merry parties, no pageants worthy of the name. No, our social history gives no idea of Merry Man.
Our civil history is not glorious. We are compelled to allow that it has no heroism in it. There has been no fight for principle, no brave endurance of wrong. Since the days of Orry, we have had nothing to tell in Saga, if the Sagaman were here. We have played no part in the work of the world. The great world has been going on for ten centuries without taking much note of us. We are a little nation, but even little nations have held their own. We have not.
One great king we have had, King Orry. He gave us our patriarchal Constitution, and it is a fine thing. It combines most of the best qualities of representative government. Its freedom is more free than that of some republics. The people seem to be more seen, and their voice more heard, than in any other form of government whose operation I have witnessed. Yet there is nothing noisy about our Home Rule. And this Constitution we have kept alive for a thousand years, while it has died out of every other Norse kingdom. That is, perhaps, our highest national honour. We may have played a timid part; we may have accepted rulers from anywhere; we may never have made a struggle for independence; and no Manxman may ever have been strong enough to stand up alone for his people. It is like our character that we have taken things easily, and instead of resisting our enemies, or throwing them from our rocky island into the sea, we have been law abiding under lawless masters and peaceful under oppression. But this one thing we have done: we have clung to our patriarchal Constitution, not caring a ha’p’orth who administered our laws so long as the laws were our own. That is something; I think it is a good deal. It means that through many changes undergone by the greater peoples of the world, we are King Orry’s men still. Let me in a last word tell you a story which shows what that description implies.
ORRY’S SONS
On the west coast of the Isle of Man stands the town of Peel. It is a little fishing port, looking out on the Irish Sea. To the north of it there is a broad shore, to the south lies the harbour with a rocky headland called Contrary Head; in front — until lately divided from the mainland by a narrow strait — is a rugged island rock. On this rock stand the broken ruins of a castle, Peel Castle, and never did castle stand on a grander spot. The sea flows round it, beating on the jagged cliffs beneath, and behind it are the wilder cliffs of Contrary. In the water between and around Contrary contrary currents flow, and when the wind is high they race and prance there like an unbroken horse. It is a grand scene, but a perilous place for ships.
One afternoon in October of 1889 a Norwegian ship (strange chance!), the St George (name surely chosen by the Fates!), in a fearful tempest was drifting on to Contrary Head. She was labouring hard in the heavy sea, rearing, plunging, creaking, groaning, and driving fast through clamouring winds and threshing breakers on to the cruel, black, steep horns of rock. All Peel was down at the beach watching her. Flakes of sea-foam were flying around, and the waves breaking on the beach were scooping up the shingle and flinging it through the air like sleet.
Peel has a lifeboat, and it was got out. There were so many volunteers that the harbour-master had difficulties of selection. The boat got off; the coxswain was called Charlie Cain; one of his crew was named Gorry, otherwise Orry. It was a perilous adventure. The Norwegian had lost her masts, and her spars were floating around her in the snow-like surf. She was dangerous to approach, but the lifeboat reached her. Charlie cried out to the Norwegian captain: “How many of you?” The answer came back, “Twenty-two!” Charlie counted them as they hung on at the ship’s side, and said: “I only see twenty-one; not a man shall leave the ship until you bring the odd one on deck.” The odd one, a disabled man, had been left below to his fate. Now he was brought up, and all were taken aboard the lifeboat.
On landing at Peel there was great excitement, men cheering and women crying. The Manx women spotted a baby among the Norwegians, fought for it, one woman got it, and carried it off to a fire and dry clothing. It was the captain’s wife’s baby, and an hour afterwards the poor captain’s wife, like a creature distracted, was searching for it all over the town. And to heighten the scene, report says that at that tremendous moment a splendid rainbow spanned the bay from side to side. That ought to be true if it is not.
It was a brilliant rescue, but the moving part of the story is yet to tell. The Norwegian Government, touched by the splendid heroism of the Manxmen, struck medals for the lifeboat men and sent them across to the Governor. These medals were distributed last summer on the island rock within the ruins of old Peel Castle. Think of it! One thousand years before, not far from that same place, Orry the Viking came ashore from Denmark or Norway. And now his Manx sons, still bearing his very name, Orry, save from the sea the sons of the brethren he left behind, and down the milky way, whence Orry himself once came, come now to the Manxmen the thanks and the blessings of their kinsmen, Orry’s father’s children.
Such a story as this thrills one to the heart. It links Manxmen to the great past. What are a thousand years before it? Time sinks away, and the old sea-warrior seems to speak to us still through the surf of that storm at Peel.
THE STORY OF THE MANX BISHOPS
Some years ago, in going down the valley of Foxdale, towards the mouth of Glen Rushen, I lost my way on a rough and unbeaten path under the mountain called Slieu Whallin. There I was met by a typical old Manx farmer, who climbed the hillside some distance to serve as my guide. “Aw, man,” said he, “many a Sunday I’ve crossed these mountains in snow and hail together.” I asked why on Sunday. “You see,” said the old fellow, “I’m one of those men that have been guilty of what St. Paul calls the foolishness of preaching.” It turned out that he was a local preacher to the Wesleyans, and that for two score years or more, in all seasons, in all weathers, every Sunday, year in, year out, he had made the journey from his farm in Foxdale to the western villages of Kirk Patrick, where his voluntary duty lay. He left me with a laugh and a cheery word. “Ask again at the cottage at the top of the brew,” he shouted. “An ould widda lives there with her gel.” At the summit of the hill, just under South Barrule, with Cronk-ny-arrey-Lhaa to the west, I came upon a disused lead mine, called the old Cross Vein, its shaft open save for a plank or two thrown across it, and filled with water almost to the surface of the ground. And there, under the lee of the roofless walls of the ruined engine-house, stood the tiny one-story cottage where I had been directed to inquire my way again. I knocked, and then saw the outer conditions of an existence about as miserable as the mind of man can conceive. The door was opened by a youngish woman, having a thin, white face, and within the little house an elderly woman was breaking scraps of vegetables into a pot that swung from a hook above a handful of turf fire, which burned on the ground. They were the widow and daughter. Their house consisted of two rooms, a living room and a sleeping closet, both open to the thatch, which was sooty with smoke. The floor was of bare earth, trodden hard and shiny. There was one little window in each apartment, but after the breakages of years, the panes were obscured by rags stuffed into the gaps to keep out the weather. The roof bore traces of damp, and I asked if the rain came into the house. “Och, yes, and bad, bad, bad!” said the elder woman. “He left us, sir, years ago.” That was her way of saying that her husband was dead, and that since his death there had been no man to do an odd job about the place. The two women lived by working in the fields, at weeding, at planting potatoes, at thinning cabbages, and at the hay in its season. Their little bankrupt barn belonged to them, and it was all they had. In that they lived, or lingered, on the mountain top, a long stretch of bare hillside, away from any neighbour, alone in their poverty, with mountains before and behind, the broad grey sea, without ship or sail, down a gully to the west, nothing visible to the east save the smoke from the valley where lay the habitations of men, nothing audible anywhere but the deep rumble of the waves’ bellow, or the chirp of the birds overhead, or, perhaps, when the wind was southerly, the church bells on Sunday morning. Never have I looked upon such lonely penury, and yet there, even there, these forlorn women kept their souls alive. “Yes,” they said, “we’re working when we can get the work, and trusting, trusting, trusting still.”
I have lingered too long over this poor adventure of losing my way to Glen Rushen, but my little sketch may perhaps get you close to that side of Manx life whereon I wish to speak to-day. I want to tell the history of religion in Man, so far as we know it; and better, to my thinking, than a grave or solid disquisition on the ways and doings of Bishops or Spiritual Barons, are any peeps into the hearts and home lives of the Manx, which will show what is called the “innate religiosity” of the humblest of the people. To this end also, when I have discharged my scant duty to church history, or perhaps in the course of my hasty exposition of it, I shall dwell on some of those homely manners and customs, which, more than prayer-books and printed services, tell us what our fathers believed, what we still believe, and how we stand towards that other life, that inner life, that is not concerned with what we eat and what we drink, and wherewithal we shall be clothed.
THE DRUIDS
And now, just as the first chapter of our Manx civil history is lost, so the first chapter of our church history is lost. That the Druids occupied the island seems to some people to be clear from many Celtic names and some remains, such as we are accustomed to call Druidical, and certain customs still observed. Perhaps worthy of a word is the circumstance that in the parish where the Bishop now lives, and has always lived, Kirk Michael, there is a place called by a name which in the Manx signifies Chief Druid. Strangely are the faiths of the ages linked together.
CONVERSION TO CHRISTIANITY
We do not know, with any certainty, at what time the island was converted to Christianity. The accepted opinion is that Christianity was established in Man by St. Patrick about the middle of the fifth century. The story goes that the Saint of Ireland was on a voyage thither from England, when a storm cast him ashore on a little islet on the western coast of Man. This islet was afterwards called St. Patrick’s Isle. St. Patrick built his church on it. The church was rebuilt eight centuries later within the walls of a castle which rose on the same rocky site. It became the cathedral church of the island. When the Norwegians came they renamed the islet Holm Isle. Tradition says that St. Patrick’s coming was in the time of Mannanan, the magician, our little Manx Prospero. It also says that St. Patrick drove Mannanan away, and that St. Patrick’s successor, St. Germain, followed up the good work of exterminating evil spirits by driving out of the island all venomous creatures whatever. We sometimes bless the memory of St. Germain, and wish he would come again.
THE EARLY BISHOPS OF MAN
After St. Germain came St. Maughold. This Bishop was a sort of transfigured Manx Caliban. I trust the name does him no wrong. He had been an Irish prince, had lived a bad, gross life as a robber at the head of a band of robbers, had been converted by St. Patrick, and, resolving to abandon the temptations of the world, had embarked on the sea in a wicker boat without oar or helm. Almost he had his will at once, but the north wind, which threatened to remove him from the temptations of this world, cast him ashore on the north of the Isle of Man. There he built his church, and the rocky headland whereon it stands is still known by his name. High on the craggy cliff-side, looking towards the sea, is a seat hewn out of the rock. This is called St. Maughold’s Chair. Not far away there is a well supposed to possess miraculous properties. It is called St. Maughold’s Well. Thus tradition has perpetuated the odour of his great sanctity, which is the more extraordinary in a variation of his legend, which says that it was not after his conversion, and in submission to the will of God, that he put forth from Ireland in his wicker boat, but that he was thrust out thus, with hands and feet bound, by way of punishment for his crimes as a captain of banditti.
But if Maughold was Caliban in Ireland, he was more than Prospero in Man. Rumour of his piety went back to Ireland, and St. Bridget, who had founded a nunnery at Kildare, resolved on a pilgrimage to the good man’s island. She crossed the water, attended by her virgins, called her daughters of fire, founded a nunnery near Douglas, worked miracles there, touched the altar in testimony of her virginity, whereupon it grew green and flourished. This, if I may be pardoned the continued parallel, is our Manx Miranda. And indeed it is difficult to shake off the idea that Shakespeare must have known something of the early story of Man, its magicians and its saints. We know the perfidy of circumstance, the lying tricks that fact is always playing with us, too well and painfully to say anything of the kind with certainty. But the angles of resemblance are many between the groundwork of the “Tempest” and the earliest of Manx records. Mannanan-beg-Mac-y-Lear, the magician who surrounded the island with mists when enemies came near in ships; Maughold, the robber and libertine, bound hand and foot, and driven ashore in a wicker boat; and then Bridget, the virgin saint. Moreover, the stories of Little Man-nanan, of St. Patrick, and of St. Maughold were printed in Manx in the sixteenth century. Truly that is not enough, for, after all, we have no evidence that Shakespeare, who knew everything, knew Manx. But then Man has long been famous for its seamen. We had one of them at Trafalgar, holding Nelson in his arms when he died. The best days, or the worst days — which? — of the trade of the West Coast of Africa saw Manx captains in the thick of it. Shall I confess to you that in the bad days of the English slave trade the four merchantmen that brought the largest black cargo to the big human auction mart at the Goree Piazza at Liverpool were commanded by four Manxmen! They were a sad quartet. One of them had only one arm and an iron hook; another had only one arm and one eye; a third had only one leg and a stump; the fourth was covered with scars from the iron of the chains of a slave which he had worn twelve months at Barbadoes. Just about enough humanity in the four to make one complete man. But with vigour enough, fire enough, heart enough — I daren’t say soul enough — in their dismembered old trunks to make ten men apiece; born sea-rovers, true sons of Orry, their blood half brine. Well, is it not conceivable that in those earlier days of treasure seeking, when Elizabeth’s English captains were spoiling the Spaniard in the Indies, Manx sailors were also there? If so, why might not Shakespeare, who must have ferreted out many a stranger creature, have found in some London tavern an old Manx sea-dog, who could tell him of the Manx Prospero, the Manx Caliban, and the Manx Miranda?
