Alice Stopford Green


Life
1847-1929 [Alice Sophia Amelia Stopford Green; née Stopford; Mrs. J. R. Green]; b. Kells, Co. Meath; dg. Archdeacon Stopford (d. 1874); ed. at home; moved to London at her father’s death, m. pioneering social historian John Richard Green, M.A., LL.D., and Honorary Fellow of Jesus’ College, Cambridge, 1877, and collaborated with him on his work; she edited his The Conquest of England (1883) and issued on her own account Town Life in the Fifteenth Century (1894) but abandoned English history for Irish at death of husband in March 1883 (d. Menton, France); issued The Making of Ireland and its Undoing 1200-1600 (1908), inspired by strong anti-imperialist views and containing sections on commerce, learning, Brehon law, &c.; she was opposed to the S. African [Boer Wars; issued Irish Nationality (1911), very popular in Ireland but attacked by English reviewers for alleged inaccuracy;
 
closely concerned with Howth gun-running, her home in London being the scene where plans were laid with among Roger Casement, Bulmer Hobson, Darrell Figgis, and others; moved to 90 St. Stephen’s Green, after 1916, making it an intellectual centre; issued Ourselves Alone in Ulster (Dublin 1918, attacking Carson’s policy; participated in the Treaty talks, 1921; appt. to Irish Senate, 1922; contrib. the Catholic Bulletin in the 1920s; A History of the Irish State to 1014 (London 1925), based on questionable historiography of ninth century annals; d. Dublin, 28 May 1929; the Alice Stopford-Green Papers are held in the NLI; presented casket to Senate for its Constitution. JMC ODNB DIB DIW DIH OCIL FDA

[See portrait - infra]

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Works
Historical works (English)
  • Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, 2 vols. (Lodnon; Macmillan 1894, 1908) [Vol 1: xvi, 439pp.; Vol 2: viii, 476pp.].
  • Henry the Second, by Mrs. J. R. Green [Twelve English Statesmen ser.] (London: Macmillan & Co. 1894, 1903, 1908, 1919, 1926), vi, 224pp.
 
Historical works (Irish)
  • The Making of Ireland and Its Undoing 1200-1600 (London: Macmillan 1908), Do., [2nd edn., with add. Appendix] (Oct. 1909; rep. 1913),. xxiv, 573pp.; Do. [another edn.] (Dublin: Maunsel, 1919, rep. 1920), xxiv, 573pp., ill. [map; copies at Oxford ULs at Southampton UL; see COPAC online]. Do. [another edn.] (London: Macmillan 1924), 573pp.; and Do. [rep. of 1st Edn.] (NY: Books for Libraries Press 1972), xvi, 511pp. [see details].
  • ‘The Irish Parliament in the Seventeenth Century, in Scottish Historical Review, 7, 27 (April 1910), pp.232-43.
  • Irish Nationality [Home University Library of Modern Knowledge, No. 6] (London: Williams & Norgate [1911], 1922, 1925), 256pp.; [another edn.] (London: T. Butterworth 1929), 252pp. [also Irish trans., as infra].
  • The Old Irish World (Dublin: M. H. Gill & Son 1912), vii, 3 lvs., 197pp., ill. [pls., maps (1 fold.); 23cm.].
  • Loyalty and Disloyalty: what it means in Ireland (Dublin: Maunsel & Co. [1918]), 14pp.
  • Ourselves Alone in Ulster (Dublin: Maunsel & Co. 1918), 40pp., and Do. [new. edn., with notes] (Dublin: Maunsel 1918), 40pp..
  • The Government of Ireland, with a foreword by George Russell (Æ) Labour booklets, 5] (London: Labour Publ. Co. 1921), 16pp.
  • Irish National Tradition (London: Macmillan 1923), 31pp. [rep. from History (July 1917).
  • History of the Irish State to 1014 (London: Macmillan & Co 1925), xi, 437pp., ill. [front. map; maps, plan].
  • Studies from Irish History (London: Macmillan & Co. 1926), 6 pts., 8º. [see details]
 
Miscellaneous
  • A Short Geography of the British Islands, by John Richard Green and Alice Stoppford Green (London: Macmillan & Co. 1879), 416, 56pp., ill. [4 lvs. of pls.: maps, some col.; 17cm.]
  • ed. The Conquest of England, by J. R. Green (London: Macmillan 1883), xxxv, 636pp.
  • The Paget papers: diplomatic and other correspondence of Sir Arthur Paget, 1794-1807 ... with two appendices 1808 & 1821-1829, arranged & edited by Sir Augustus B. Paget, with notes by Mrs. J. R. Green (London: Heinemann 1896), ill., ports. [25cm.].
  • Intro., Studies in Oxford History, chiefly in the eighteenth century: a series of papers by John Richard Green and Geo. Roberson, ed. C. L. Stainer [Oxford Historical Society, Vol. 41 (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1901), xx, xxiii, 382pp., ill. [2 lvs. of pls.: front., folded plans & part folded tab [Intro. signed Alice Stopford Green].
  • ed. Stray Studies, by J. R. Green [2nd. ser.] (London : Macmillan & Co. 1903), viii. 276pp.
  • ‘The Centralization of Norman Justice under Henry II’, in Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Vol. 1 (Cambridge 1907), p.111ff.  [See Copac online].
  • ‘Woman’s Place in the World of Letters’, in Nineteenth Century (June 1897), (London : Macmillan & Co. 1913), 31pp. [offprint; BL].
  • A Short History of the English People, with epilogue by Alice Stopford Green [rev. & enl. edn.] (London: [s.n.] 1921), and Do. [rep.] (London: J. M. Dent 1936).
  • contrib. “Memoir” to Forty Years in a Moorland Parish: reminiscences and researches in Danby in Cleveland, by J. C. Atkinson (London: Macmillan 1923).
  • Meanma Gaedhal, [Irish Nationality, in trans.,] Tomás De Nhial d’aistrigh on mBearla. (Baile Atha Cliath: Oifig Díolta Foilseacháin Rialtais, 1938), 190pp. [19cm. ]
Addendum

Oxford UL also holds University Extension Lectures: Syllabus of a course of lectures on English towns and how they won their freedom (London 1891).

Bibliographical details
The Making of Ireland and Its Undoing 1200-1600 (London: Macmillan 1908), xvi, 511pp. [rep. July & Sept. 1908; Jan. & Feb. 1909]. Two pages occupies by Eccles. 44.1-14 in Irish and in English version [vii-viii - viz., ‘Let us now praise famous men, our fathers who begat us’ - see further under Bishop Bedell - as supra]. CONTENTS: Pt. 1: Trade and Industries; Pt. II: Education and Learning.

OTHER EDNS.: Do. [2nd edn., with add. Appendix] (London: Macmillan [Oct.] 1909; rep. 1913), xxiv, 573pp.; Do. [another edn.] (Dublin: Maunsel, 1919), xixiv, 573pp., ill. [map; copies at Oxford ULs at Southampton UL]. Do. [another edn.] (London: Macmillan 1924), 573pp.; and Do. [rep. of 1st Edn.] (NY: Books for Libraries Press 1972), xvi, 511pp. [Note: Maunsel edn. held at Oxford and Southampton ULs - see COPAC online; 22.06.2024].

A. S. Green, Studies from Irish History (1926), reiss. as Irish History Studies (London: Macmillan 1927), 85pp. -in var. pagings] incls. Irishmen on the sea (14pp.); Old Irish homes; Old Irish farms (16pp., ill. [map]); An Irish school (15pp.); An Irish festival (14pp.; ill [map]);The old Irish peoples (17pp., ill. [map]).

Index of works available at Internet Archive with inks supplied by Clare County Library

The Making of Ireland and Its Undoing, 1200-1600, by Alice Stopford Green
Published in 1909, Macmillan (London)
Pagination: 511pp.
Subject: Ireland — Economic conditions — Intellectual life
Available at Internet Archive

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Criticism
  • R. B. McDowell, Alice Stopford-Green: A Passionate Historian (Dublin: Allen Figgis & Co. 1967), 116pp., ill.
  • Léon Ó Bróin, Protestant Nationalists in Revolutionary Ireland, The Stopford Connection (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1985), 234pp., index.
  • S. Holton, ‘Gender Difference, National Identity and Professing History: the Case of Alice Stopford Green’, in History Workshop Journal , Vol. 53, No. 1 ([Univ. of Adelaide] 2002), pp.118-27.

See also a biographical sketch in Charlotte O’Conor Eccles, ‘Some Irishwomen in London’, in Donohue, 54 (1905) [cited in Anne Brady, Women in Ireland (1988)]; Goddard Henry Orpen, review of The Making of Ireland and its Undoing, 1200-1600, by Alice Stofford Green, in English Historical Review (Jan. 1909), [6pp.].

See J. Anthony Gaughan, ed., Memoirs of Senator Joseph Connolly, 1885-1961: A Founder of Modern Ireland (IAP 1996) - For comments on A. S. Greene and others connected with the nationalist movement in Ulster.

Alice Stopford Green

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Commentary
Donal O’Sullivan, in The Irish Free State and Its Senate (London: Faber & Faber 1940): ‘The speech which Mrs. Green had intended to deliver on the occasion of the presentation was also read, in the form of a message to the Senate. There have been many Irish patriots who were also masters of the English tongue; but the lofty ideals for Ireland expressed in this message, and the passionate love of country which inspired them, can seldom have found expression in language at once so moving and so beautiful. As it is not fitting that this message should lie buried in the limbo of forgotten parliamentary records, it shall be reproduced here in full.’ (p.158; as infra.) O’Sullivan quotes the speech at length and adds: ‘By formal resolution, the Senate gratefully accepted the gift of the Casket on the conditions named by the donor; and it further resolved that, in addition to the vellum roll containing the names of the members, the message of Alice Stopford Green which is printed above should also be inscribed on vellum and enclosed within the Casket. The engrossment was executed, with illuminated capitals, by George Atkinson, esq., R.H.A., the head of the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art; and an ornamental silver band of Irish design was made by the same school, wherewith to enclose the vellums. (Senate Debates, III, 1140-45.) / Alice Stopford Green died on the 28th May 1929, and so did not live to see the end of the Senate on which she had set such high hopes.’ (p.159.)

Donal McCartney, in O[wen] Dudley Edwards & Fergus Pyle, eds., 1916: The Easter Rising (1968): ‘Gaelic Ideological Origins of 1916, ‘[...] a representative patriotic history like A. S. Green’s The Making of Ireland and its Undoing (1908) is worlds away from A. M. Sullivan’s The Story of Ireland (1867) [with its emphasis on Grattan’s Parliament as the high-point]; Mrs Green’s book completely ignores Grattan period but concentrated instead on the Gaelic age when Ireland was a-making, and that with the coming of the English Ireland commenced to be ‘undone’ (p.42); From Alice Stopford Green (who in her turn owed much that wa scholarly in her work to MacNeill), Connolly accepted a glorified picture of early Irish society. He was very impressed by what he described as Gaelic ideas of equality and democracy ... to Connolly’s way of thinking a socialist revolution in Ireland would be in certain respects a return to the early Gaelic system. (p.46).

Francis Byrne characterises Green’s History of the Irish State to 1014 as marred by the anachronistic nationalism of the title (see Irish Kings and Highkings, 1973, Bibliog.).

Léon Ó Bróin, Protestant Nationalists in Revolutionary Ireland, The Stopford Connection (Gill & Macmillan 1985): ‘The phenomenon of men and women of English stock becoming more Irish than the Irish themselves was repeated many times during the last hundred years ... The Stopfords ... obtained forfeited Ulster and [in 1740s] and added to it by speculation ... Edward Stopford, 18th c. bishop of Meath; his son Edward Adderly, Archdeacon of Meath, supported Gladstone and worked with him at Hawarden [sic]; Alice, b. 1848, called ‘untrained intellectual’ by R. B. McDowell [see Alice Stopford-Green, A Passionate Historian, Dublin 1967]; met John Richard Green in the house of her cousin Stopford Brooke; author of the Short History of England (Macmillan), which ran to 20 eds., Green became a consumptive; she edited his Conquest of England posthumously; he left her with £1800 p.a.; bought house at Kensington Sq.; known as Mrs Johnny Green to Beatrice Potter [Webb], who wrote, “She has the originality which springs from a lonely, unhappy and self-absorbed youth, from the enforced independence of a friendless womanhood. Bred in a remote part of Ireland in a poverty-stricken home, she struggled at self-culture against every imaginable adverse circumstance. A brief married life with a man of talent ... Now she has climbed up the social ladder [on his account] ... She aims at a position to be gained by personal merit.’ [Cont.]

Léon Ó Bróin (Protestant Nationalists in Revolutionary Ireland, 1985) - cont.: Later entries in Webb’s Diary, Vol 1. (ed. MacKenzie, 1982) show her warming in admiration towards Mrs Green. JF Taylor, Alice’s ‘devoted Irish lawyer’ (Webb); in 1879 she met Douglas Hyde; her Irish family address at Bushy park Rd.; brother Jemmett died of typhoid, 1902; his family settled in London; Alice assimilated the idea of ‘an immemorial identity of old Ireland’ [Tierney] from Eoin MacNeill; for her controversy with Robert Dunlop, see Dunlop [supra]. ‘An admirer of Collins, she paid a tribute in print to the efficiency of his intelligence service; her house at St. Stephen’s Green was a salon to Russell, Stephens, Best, George Gavan Duffy, James Douglas, Erskine Childers, Mary Spring-Rice, Desmond Fitzgerald, and Collins, whose tall bicycle was frequently seen in the hall by Mary Comerford while he was still on the run.’ (p.167.) Further: she started Irish Book Shop on Dawson St., with others; suspected by British; pleased with truce; identifies with Treaty; elected Senator; work in the Senate; appeals for reconciliation; has heart attack; holds dinner parties; attitude to women [edged them out of limelight in her social life]; her view of Irish nation [a brotherhood of adoption as well as of blood ... hospitality to men of good-will [who] had become faithful members of the Irish people (phrases from a speech on reception of silver casket in Senate). [See O’Bróin, op. cit. index.]

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Roy Foster, Modern Ireland (London: Allen Lane 1988), ‘... the origins of Gaelic society retained the romantic gloss endowed by zealots like Alice Stopford Green.’ (p. 447; the only reference).

Roy Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch (London: Penguin/Allen Lane 1993), prefatorily citing A. S. Green, ‘History is more backward in Ireland than in any other country [...] Here alone there is a public opinion which resents its being freely written, and there is an opinion, public or official, I scarcely know what to call it, which prevents its being freely taught ... Here history has a peculiar doom. It is enslaved in the chains of the Moral Tale - the good man (English) who is prospered, and the bad man (Irish) who came to a shocking end’ The Old Irish World, Dublin & London 1912; Foster, p.1); Foster considers her as a historian who ‘set herself, not to produce a scientific or a poetic history, but simply to reverse the moral of the story; and with the establishment of the Irish Free State ... events seemed gratifyingly to show that the good had come into their kingdom.’ (Foster, p.1). [Cont.]

Roy Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch (London: Penguin/Allen Lane 1993) - cont.: See also Foster’s extended discussion of Green, ‘daughter of an archdeacon in County Meath ..’, which ensues on p.14ff., and incl. a passage contrib. to Catholic Bulletin that envisages the average ancient Irish catholic family discussing Thomism and life matters by the cottage fire, p.14ff.) Foster educes a Freudian explanation involving blindness and memory, giving rise to her concept of ‘Irish national memory’, a recurrent phrase in her writings; Mrs Green’s pre-invasion Ireland was a classless egalitarian ‘Commonwealth’, where ‘the earliest and the most passionate conception of “nationality” flourished’, bibl., The making of Ireland and Its Undoing (1908); Irish Nationality (1911); A History of the Irish State to 1014 (1925). See also remarks on the Ordnance Survey team which Alice Stopford Green ‘interpreted [...] team grandiloquently as “a kind of peripatetic university, in the very spirit of the older Irish life”, and believed that their work magically “revealed the soul of Irish Nationality and the might of its repression” and was accordingly suppressed.’ (The Old Irish World, 1912, p.56-61; Foster, op. cit., p.6.)

Angus Mitchell, ‘Ireland, South America, and the Forgotten History of Rubber’, in History Ireland (July/Aug. 2008), pp.41-45: In England a young journalist, E. D. Morel, bgan to speak out against the atrocities [involved in the rubber trade] and was mentored and guided in his efforts by the Irish historian Alice Stopford Green. Green facilitated the necessary introductions that helped to establish Morel as an active coice condemning the destruction and inhumanity. She helped finance several projects, introduced him to her netowrk of radical friends and had his articles placed in journals where she had influence. / In 1904 Morel and Green found a new ally in the British consular official Roger Casement, author of an official report condemning Leopold’ s rubber-hungry regime. Casement took his crusade to Latin America.’ (p.43; see further under Roger Casement, supra.)

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Quotations

The Making and Undoing of Ireland, 1200-1600 (London: Macmillan 1909)
Preface

Many reasons have prevented the writing of Irish history. The invading people effaced the monuments of a society they had determined to extirpate, and so effectively extinguished the memory of that civilization that it will need a generation of students to recover and interpret its records. “Lhe people of the soil have been in their subjugation debarred from the very sources of learning, and from the opportunities of study and association which are necessary for the historical scholar. The subject too has transcended the courage of the Irish patriot. Histories of nations have been inspired in times of hope and confidence, when the record of triumph has kindled the writers. and gladdened the readers. The only story of a “decline and fall” was composed when the dividing width of Europe, with the span of a dozen centuries, and the proud consciousness of the heir of the conquering race, encouraged the historian to describe the catastrophe of a ruined State.
 Thus the history of the Irish people has been left unrecorded, as though it had never been; as though indeed, according to some, the history were one of dishonour and rebuke.
 It is the object of these studies to gather together some records of the civilization of Ireland before the [x] immense destruction of the Tudor wars; to trace her progress in industry, in wealth, and in learning; and to discover the forces that ruined this national life. Three reasons have led me to undertake this work.
It was the fashion among the Tudor statesmen, very confident of their methods, to talk of “the godly conquest,” “the perfecting of Ireland.” The writers of triumphant nations are enabled to give the story of their successes from their own point of view; but from this partial tale not even the victorious peoples can learn what the warfare has implied, nor know how to count the cost nor credit the gain. The present state of Europe is the result of vast destructions and vast obliterations. The aspect of its troubled civilization may one day lead to a new and more searching study of the conditions of such destructions, with their interminable penalties both to the conqueror and the conquered. In the history of Ireland we may learn to measure the prodigious and endless waste of a “godly conquest” and of the “perfecting” of one race by another.
 There is no more pious duty to all of Ireland birth than to help in recovering from centuries of obloquy the memory of noble men, Irish and Anglo-Irish, who built up the civilization that once adorned their country. To them has been meted out the second death,—the lot feared beyond all else by men of honour. ‘They have been buried by the false hands of strangers in the deep pit of contempt, reproach, and forgetfulness— an unmerited grave of silence and of shame.
 The Irish of to-day have themselves suffered by the calumny of their dead. They, alone among the nations, [xi] have been taunted with ancestors sunk in primitive disorders, incapable of development in the land they wasted. A picture of unrelieved barbarism “hateful to God” served to justify to strangers the English extirpation of Irish society; and has been used to depress the hearts of the Irish themselves. For their birthright — they have been told —they have inherited the failings of their race, and by the verdict of the ages have been proclaimed incapable of success in their own land, or of building up there an ordered society, trade, or culture, and have indeed ever proved themselves a people ready “to go headlong to the Devil” if England “seek not speedy remedy to prevent the same.” Thus their energy has been lowered, and some natural pride abated. It is in the study of their history alone that Irishmen will find this just pride restored, and their courage assured.
 In this effort however Irishmen are confronted with a singular difficulty. In no other country in the world has it been supposed the historian’s business to seek out every element of political instability, every trace of private disorder, every act of personal violence, every foreign slander, and out of these alone, neglecting all indications of industry or virtue, to depict a national life. Irish annals are still in our own days quoted by historians as telling merely the tale of a corrupted land — feuds and battles, murderings and plunderings; with no town or church or monastery founded, no law enacted, no controversy healed by any judgment of the courts. If the same method had been followed for England, what an appalling story we should have had of that mediaeval [xii] time, of its land-thefts, its women-lifting, its local wars, the feuds handed on from father to son with their countless murders and atrocities, devastating for generations whole country sides. In Germany or Italy or France the picture of anarchy would appear like hell let loose on earth. In all other histories however than that of Ireland a certain convention has been observed. Men by some high instinct of faith have agreed amid all disorders to lay stress on every evidence of reason, humanity, justice, and to leave out of the record the tale of local barbarities, the violences of the rich, the brutalities of the ignorant and the starving. No human society could endure in fact if these made up in any nation the sole history of the people. In our country alone the common convention has been reversed, and the comparison of its culture with that of other lands has thus been falsified at the outset. “No man,” cried a learned Irishman as the torrent of accusation swelled against his countrymen, “can be so inveterately attached to vice as not to break its chains occasionally, and perform some virtuous action.” [Cambrensis Eversus, iii, 247.]
 Ireland indeed not only shared in the sufferings and confusions of the whole mediaeval world, but had moreover to contend with a ceaseless war of conquest. But in Ireland not less than elsewhere, side by side with mediaeval violence the forces of learning and piety and humanity were maintaining the promise of better things. This was the justification of its patriotic sons in the passion of their sorrow at the destruction of their national civilization. [Ibid. i, 109.] “So are we all impelled, [xiii] by an instinct of nature,” wrote one in the hour of her darkest ruin, “to centre all the affections of our souls on the land that gave us birth. In solitude it engrosses all our thoughts; in society it is our favourite topic; and even when the clouds of woe have closed over it it still commands our sympathies.”

Alice Stopford Green.
36 Grosvenor Road, London, S.W.

There are few workers, as will be seen, in this period of Irish history, One student, H. Egan Kenny, has for some years made a laborious study from firsthand sources of the commercial and industrial life of Ireland throughout the Middles Ages; and I give him my sincere thanks for the valuable help he has most kindly given me, both in suggestions and in corrections.

Available at Internet Archive - online; accessed 23.06.2024.
 
The Tudor Attack (page-header - p.372)

At the time therefore when the Tudor attack on learning definitely opened, Ireland was full of intellectual activity, adding European knowledge to Irish lore, founding schools of modern study in addition to the old, and creating the beginnings of an Irish university. While the country schools were multiplying their translations and manuscripts, while the chiefs’ sons were studying under the learned teachers of Waterford and Limerick, while the Catholic Irish shut out from Trinity were begging their way to the classes at Galway, Bacon called on the Earl of Essex to march with confidence [373] to war on the Irish people, “the goodness and justice of which is hardly to be matched in any example; it being ... a recovery of them not only to obedience but to humanity and policy from more than Indian barbarism.”
 For the more vigorous and progressive was Irish culture the more necessary was it for the conquerors to root it out. Learning like commerce must come to the “subject” race only by English hands and at their sole discretion, and freedom of education was considered as dangerous as freedom of trade. The same precautions were therefore taken against education as against industries. The paralysing of intellectual vivacity, the prevention of its growth, and the denial of its existence, remained among the accredited means of governing Ireland.
  The “spoiling of the rhymers” began under Henry VIII, Robert Cowley “;the plovertaker” urging that thus the ruin of the Kildares could be finally completed. “Harpers, rhymers, Irish chroniclers, bards, and ishallyn [sic] commonly go with praises to gentlemen in the English Pale, praising in rhymes otherwise called danes their extortioners, robberies, and abuses as valiantness, which rejoiceth them in that their evil doings, and procure a talent of Irish disposition and conversation in them, which is likewise convenient to be expelled.”
 So far as the power of the deputy and the council went, poets should no longer sing the fame of great men and the history of Ireland: they should not “be suffered to come among the English men; for by their Irish gifts and minstrelsy they provoketh the people to an Irish order.” The imprisonment of Teige O’Coffey the Chief Preceptor of the poets, opened the final war. Bards, rhymers, and common idle men and women . making rhymes, were to be spoiled of their goods and put in the next stocks. “Barbarous marauders in many places vent their vandal fury on every harp which they meet, and break it in pieces.”
  [...]

Note: Ftn. on p.372 lists Irish scholars of the period [c.1600]: Ware’s Writers, [p.]103. Among the names of scholars, these are some of the writers who occupied themselves with Irish history —Thady Dowling, Thomas Russell, John Wading a secular priest of Wexford, David Rothe, Henry FitzSimons, Connell MacGeoghegan, Geoffrey Keating, Donat Mooney, Peter Lombard, Florence MacCarthy, Thomas Messingham, Philip O’Sullivan, Michael Cantwell, Hugh Ward, Patrick Fleming, Michael O’Clery, Bonaventura Hussey, Stephen White, Duald MacFirbis, Dr. John Lynch, Roderick O’Flaherty. v. Cam. Ev. i. 95, 97.

Green particularly disparages the line of Conor O’Brien, son of Donough the Fat who “ had taken a title to rule from the English king alone” and who was a “ harrier of his own race and kind” and had “ taken service under the English against his own people.” (pp.374-75):

“ But Earl Donough in taking English pay had entered on a thankless service. He finished the work of Donough the Fat and assisted at the ruin of the principality of Thomond. It was his sole reward, and the glory of the O’Briens and the race of the old Irish poets were extinguished together.” (p.375.)

[...]

Elizabeth had marked the Irish schools for destruction, town and country, Irish and Anglo-Irish, all alike tainted with patriotism. She appointed commissioners to root, them out, destroy their books, scatter masters and pupils, and wipe away their remembrance. One Commission followed another, to suppress “the evil education and instruction of children by schoolmasters in Ireland” [Brady, St. Pat., p.34], “to enquire of all schoolmasters and public teachers, and their manner of teaching and religion, and to place and displace them as to the commissioners shall be thought meet for the good of the present State.” [C.S.P. 1592, p.406.] From this time the way of the Irish scholar was marked by outlawry, starvation, and death. Soldiers ravaged the homes once consecrated to learning. Planters seized the termon lands. The teachers were left destitute, flung into poverty.
 The leaders of the schools answered with defiance. They carried a brave heart. “To be in threadbare mantles,” the poet sang, “is no disgrace to sons of learning: to be somewhat run to decay is not a shame to any so long

as his science is progressive.’

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Viking raids: ‘What was the effect of this new peril [and] attack from Europe from the sea? In the first place the highways of the sea, never before closed, were barred by the Scandinavian freebooters. [...] The terrors of the sea journey drove travellers to the land route, and the way across England to the continent became so important that clerics of the tenth century could not imagine that any other way had ever been possible […]. Scholars and Christian monks fled from the heathen barbarians, carrying to Europe their treasures and manuscripts.’ (The Old Irish World, p.77; cited in in George A Little, Dublin Before the Vikings, 1957, p.138.)

Public Announcement (Sinn Féin, Belfast Executive; q.d.): ‘Fellow Gaels! If you are anxious to defeat the English government, / in its policy of preventing the Irish people from learning the true history of our country come to the Lecture on “Ireland, England and the Spanish Armada”, to be delivered by A. Stopford Green / (Author of Idea of a Nation, The Making of Ireland and Its Undoing, Old Irish World, Irish Nationality, &c. &c.), in St. Mary’s Hall, on Thursday, 13 Oct. at 8 o’clock. Admission 3d & 6d. A limited number of reserved seats. Educate that you may be Free.’ [vide Charles Gavan Duffy.]

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The Casket - a speech by Alice Stopford Green intended to accompany presentation of a silver casket to the Senate for its Constitution:

I ask leave to send a few words as to the casket which I offer to the Seanad.
Senators will agree that we should place no emblem before us in this Assembly that is not of Ireland, in spirit and in workmanship, carrying in it the faith both of the Old Irish world and of the New. I have insisted, therefore, that the form of the casket should go back in direct descent to the “shrines” designed by the Irish over a thousand years ago. The artist has magnificently proved the power of that spiritual inheritance which has been bequeathed to us from an Old Ireland; and has shown that a really living art has no need to copy in slavish routine, and can to-day be as free and original and distinguished as in the times of ancient renown, supposed to have been lost.
 Thus the shrine in its intense vitality carries to us its own message. That if we want to revive here an Irish nation we must dig our roots deep into its soil, and be nourished by that ancient earth. In Old Ireland, a land of many peoples, it was not privileges of race that united Irishmen in one country and under one law. It was a common loyalty to the land that bore them. “This then is my foster-mother, the island in which ye are, even Ireland . Moreover, it is the mast and the produce, the flower and the food of this island that have sustained me from the Deluge until to-day.” This feeling was the refrain of Irish nationality, the loyalty of a people made one by their sonship to the land that bore them, an early and passionate conception of nationality. A sudden and brief outburst by an Irish poet of the old time has no parallel in European mediaeval history -  “The counsels of God concerning virgin Eriú are greater than can be told.”’[158]
 From the beginning, Ireland has been rich in her hospitality to men of good-will coming within her borders. And at all times there have been incomers who have honourably responded to that generosity, and have become faithful members of her people. She has had her reward among the strangers who under her wide skies have felt the wonder of the land, and the quality of its people, and have entered into her commonwealth.
 Through the long record of wars and assaults, in every generation in turn, men who came as warriors, even the roughest of them, remained as men of Ireland. They took their share in defence of their new home, and endured, if need were, in evil times outrage, ruin and death in the cause of Irish freedom and independence. No real history of Ireland has yet been written. When the true story is finally worked out - one not wholly occupied with the many and insatiable plunderers - it will give us a noble and reconciling vision of Irish nationality. Silence and neglect will no longer hide the fame of honourable men. We shall learn the ties which did in fact ever bind the dwellers in Ireland together. Whether we are of an ancient Irish descent, or of later Irish birth, we are united in one people, and we are bound by one lofty obligation to complete the building of our common nation. We have lived under the breadth of her skies, we have been fed by the fatness of her fields, and nourished by the civilization of her dead. Our people lie in her earth, and we ourselves must in that earth await our doom. We have shared our country’s sorrows, and we expect her joys. “The mother that has nursed us is she, and when you have looked on her she is not unlovely.” To Ireland we have given our faith. In Ireland is our hope.

Journal of Proceedings of the Irish Senate (1924), pp.298-99; quoted in Donal O’Sullivan, in The Irish Free State and Its Senate (London: Faber & Faber 1940), pp.158-59; see O’Sullivan’s remarks, under Commentary, supra.)

Note: The Casket Speech was quoted by Sean O’Faolain, in ‘This is Your Magazine’, The Bell [first editorial], 1940 - as follows: ‘From the beginning, Ireland has been rich in her hospitality to men of goodwill coming within her borders. And at all times there have been incomers who have responded honourably to that generosity and have become faithful members of her people. She has had her rewards among the strangers who, under her wide skies, have felt the wonder of the land, and the quality of its people, and have entered into her commonwealth.’ To this quotation he added the remark: adding: ‘Whatever you are, then O reader, Gentile or Jew, Protestant or Catholic, priest or layman, Big House or Small House - The Bell is yours’) [See full text of the speech - supra.]

 

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References
Justin McCarthy, gen. ed., Irish Literature (Washington: University of America 1904); gives extract from Mrs. J. R. Green, Town Life in the 15th c. [1894]. See also Irish Book Lover, 4, 7; Also ‘A Castle at Ardglass’ [non-title excerpt from The Old Irish World], in Sophia Hillan King and Sean MacMahon, eds., Hope and History: Eyewitness Accounts of life in Twentieth-Century Ulster (Belfast: Friar’s Bush Press 1996), pp.23-25.

Seamus Deane, gen. ed., The Field Day Anthology Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day Co. 1991): selects no part of her works, but cites in a foot-note (Vol. 3, ftn 9, 497) as best-known works, The Making of Ireland and its Undoing (1908), and the pamphlet Ourselves Alone and [sic] Ulster (1918).

Cathach Book. (Cat. 12) lists The Making of Ireland and Its Undoing 1200-1600 (London: Macmillan 1908), Do., with Appendix to 2nd edn. (1909); [Whelan 32; Hyland 214, 220]; Ourselves Alone in Ulster (1918).

Emerald Isle Books (1997) lists The Making of Ireland [&c.] (London: Macmillan 1908), 511pp. [Commerce, Trade, Learning, the Bards and Brehons, &c.] another edn. (Macmillan 1924), 573pp. [Part I: Trade and Industries, pp.1-203; Pt. II: Education and Learning, pp.235-557]

Belfast Public Library holds no fiction; hist. works incl. Fragments (1920); History of the Irish State to 1014 (1925); Irish Nationality ([1912]; Loyalty and Disloyalty, what it means in Ireland (n.d.); The Old Irish World (1912); Ourselves Alone in Ulster (1918) [var?1915, Cathach Bks. Cat. 12]. MORRIS holds History of the Irish State (1925) 437p.; Irish National Tradition (1917) 24p.; Irish Nationality (1919) 256p.

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Notes
Hill of Uisneach: Green’s Irish Nationality (1912), called a survey of early Irish ‘nationhood’ and bearing a dedication ‘To the Irish Dead’ makes reference to the fourfold division centred at the Hill of Usnech [sic], where ‘all meet in the middle of the island [and where] the Stone of Division still stands.’ She speaks of ‘the unchanging intention - the taking of Irish land’ as the mark of English history in Ireland, and ends with an aspiration towards ‘the natural union [which] approaches the Irish nation’. (q.p.)

Romantic charm: Alice Stopford Green comments on the derogatory view of Irish topography in C. L. Falkiner’s Essays Relating to Ireland, &c. (1909): ‘How was it that these Englishmen left none of their “romantic charm” there? What strange history lies hidden behind this saying?’ (‘The Way of History’, in The Old Irish World, Gill, 1912, p.16; cited in Luke Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture, Field Day/Cork UP 1996, p.5.)

John Richard Green - b. Oxford, 1837; d. Menton, 1883; Anglican clergyman and librarian at Lambeth palace; while in Lambeth, he spent much of his time writing; his most famous work A Short History of the English People (1874); his books, many with personal bookplates, were donated by his widow to the UCD Library in the 1920s and are held in Special Collections - online.

Auction: In July 1951 Sotheby’s (London) included parts of Alice Stopford Green’s library in their auction catalogue - viz., ‘association copies of writings of modern Irish poets and prose authors, with a series of Henry James, the property of the late Alice Stopford Green’. (Copy in V&A Libraries; see COPAC [online]; defunct 22.06.2024; replaced with Discover Libraries [online].)

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