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Irish poetry under the Union, 1801–1924

social function. This was performed mainly through the Castle Levée, increasingly scorned by the old Irish Protestant aristocracy but attracting the emerging Catholic bourgeoisie, the “Castle Catholics”. The Chief Secretary represented the government and served a political function at the centre of the Dublin Castle administration. The Chief Secretary Ireland sat at Cabinet, the Lord Lieutenant did not. The Chief Secretary answered to parliament, the Lord Lieutenant did not. Spencer was not a member of the Cabinet through the first Gladstone ministry (1868–74) that disestablished the Church of Ireland, passed the 1870 Land Act and made an attempt to deal with the question of a Catholic University. The historical record shows that the key shapers of policy were Gladstone and the Chief Secretaries Ireland; “Buckshot” Fortescue and then Hartington. Spencer was a mere onlooker. Spencer did secure a seat in the second Gladstone Cabinet (1880–85), but as Lord President of the Council. His return to the Irish Lord Lieutenancy followed the resignation of Forster in May 1882. The murder of the new Chief Secretary Cavendish in Phoenix Park by the Invincibles created the crisis that allowed Spencer to keep his seat in Cabinet whilst retaining the Lord Lieutenancy. Due to the ineffective new Chief Secretary Ireland, Trevelyan, the role of the Chief Secretary and the Lord Lieutenant was now combined in effect by Spencer, allowing him to shape Irish policy at the Cabinet and drive it at the Castle. The politicisation of the Lord Lieutenancy was as much the result of Spencer’s determination to stay within the Cabinet as any scheming by Gladstone. It was in this period that Spencer acquired his reputation for “coercion to the hilt”. Spencer’s main innovation in the government of Ireland was in redirecting coercion from place to person. Formerly coercion was, as with Westmeath in 1870, imposed on a locality. Spencer, with the Prevention of Crime Act 1882, targeted persons. One of the most notorious victims of this new aggressive policy was Myles Joyce, an Irish-speaking peasant dumb before the English-speaking Court, convicted and executed for the Maamtrasna murders protesting his innocence. Murphy’s discussion of this episode is curiously theological, querying whether Myles Joyce’s protests of his innocence made on the scaffold can be taken as truthful because Joyce was untutored in Tridentine sacramental niceties (235–6). Spencer, despite the author’s sympathies for his subject, comes across, in the words of Randolph Churchill, as a “small-minded, vain, obstinate and dull man” (351). Gladstone, much the cleverer man, dominated and used him as he did most of his Liberal colleagues. Spencer’s loyalty shows he never noticed. His correspondence as deployed in this stimulating book shows a man devoid of ideas but confident that he had always conducted himself well and was never guilty of bad behaviour.