Richard Martin “Humanity Dick” (1754-1834)

See also Item VIII: ‘Speech of Richard Martin, Esq. in the House of Commons, on May 21, 1800, for leave to bring in the union bill’, in Tracts on the Subject of an Union, between Great Britain and Ireland. Volume the ninth (Dublin: Sold by J. Milliken, 32, Grafton-street 1800)..(Dublin: Sold by J. Milliken, 32, Grafton-street 1800).

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Criticism
Shevaun Lynam, Humanity Dick: A Biography of Richard Martin MP, 1854-1834 (London: Hamilton 1975), and Do. [reiss. as] Humanity Dick Martin: “King of Connemara” 1754-1834 (Dublin: Lilliput Press 1989), xvii, 300pp., ill. [16pp. of pls.]; Peter Phillips, Humanity Dick, The Eccentric Member for Galway: The Story of Richard Martin, Animal Rights Pioneer, 1754-1834 (Kent: Parapress 2003), 208pp.

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Commentary
Chevalier de Latocnaye: ‘I have never in my life been the house of a rich man who appeared to care so little for the things of this world as Richard Martin.’ (Quoted in P. J. Kavanagh, Voices in Ireland, 1994, p.236.)

T. Colville Scott, Diary for 1853, issued as ‘Connemara after the Famine: Journal of a Survey of the Martin Estate’ (ed. Tim Robinson; Dublin 1995), gives details of the family property, an estate comprising 196,540 acres which was offered for sale in 1849 on the basis that the ‘contain[s] within itself’ everything necessary to render it ideal for development ‘but capital’; reaching from Lough Corrib to the western seaboard, its extended from Oughterard to Roundstone and from Carna to Moycullen, as well as incorporating Lough Inagh and outlying sections at Bunowen and adjacent to the Clifden peninsula; the Martins were prominent among the Norman families who dispossessed the O’Flahertys; ‘not for nothing was the head of the Martin family a lawyer known as Nimble Dick’; by adroit dealing the Martins bobbed to the surface, after fifty years of religious strife [after Cromwellian times], as the largest landowners in either Britain or Ireland.’ Further, ‘The outside world, lifting its eyes from the pages of Sir Walter Scott, found the idea of the Martin kingdom immensely appealing, with its high-spirited defiance of civil law, the devotion of its wild clansmen to their master, its fabled hospitality floated on a sea of smuggled brandy, and its backdrop of trackless wastes and stormy skies. Lever used Ballynahinch as the setting of a novel, and Maria Edgeworth and Thackeray were among those who visited Richard’s son Thomas Martin in the days when he was called the King of Connemara and his daughter Mary its Princess. [...] This veil of romance was torn away by the Great Famine, revealing a death’s-head landscape.’ (p.13.) Estate put up for sale and purchase cheaply by Law Life Insurance Society of London, 1849, and later taken by Richard Berridge, a London brewer, for £230,000. (See History Ireland (Summer 1996), pp.12-16.)

A. M. Sullivan testifies to the humanity of Dick Martin, ‘prince of Connemara ... who caught fever while acting as a magistrate.’ (Sullivan, New Ireland, 1877, q.p.; see also Edith Somerville’s Irish Memories, London: Longmans, Green 1917).

W. B. Yeats: Yeats told a story of Dick Martin’s winning a law suit arising from his wife’s adultery and distributing the proceeds to the poor of Galway in an address printed in Richard Ellmann, The Identity of Yeats (1954; rep. 1983), pp.205-06; copied in A. N. Jeffares , A New Commentary on the Poems of W. B. Yeats (1984), pp.393-94, citing S. J. Maguire, ‘NotesL Martin v. Petrie’, in The Galway Reader, IV (Winter 1954), pp.122-23; James Berry, Tales of the West. Recollections of Early Boyhood (q.d.) pp.72-74; and ‘Tim O’Harte and Col. Martin’, in Seán Mac Giollarnáth, Annála Beaga o Iorrus Aithneach (1941), pp.197-99; also A. E. S. Martin, Genealogy of the Family of Martin of Ballinahinch Castle (1890). The story is also told in Lady Gregory’s Kiltartan History Book (1926).

Who founded the RSPCA

Wikipedia writes: In 1821 letters were exchanged by various correspondents in periodicals raising concerns about the maltreatment of animals, which included one written by Rev. Arthur Broome that was published in The Kaleidoscope on 6 March 1821.[21] Broome attempted to bring together the patronage of persons who were of social rank and committed to social reforms and he chaired a meeting that was held in November 1822 to create a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. This initial attempt however faltered and a fresh attempt to launch the Society was organized by Broome at a meeting on 16 June 1824 at Old Slaughter’s Coffee House, London. Broome invited various clergy, lawyers and parliamentarians to vote on the resolution to create the Society and among those present were Thomas Fowell Buxton MP (1786-1845), William Wilberforce (1759-1833), Richard Martin, Sir James Mackintosh MP, Basil Montagu, William Mudford, Rev. George Avery Hatch (1757-1837), Rev George Bonner (1784-1840), Sir James Graham, T. G. Meymott, John Ashley Warre and Lewis Gompertz. Broome was elected as the Society’s first honorary secretary.  Due to Martin’s profile as a politician and as the drafter of the anti-cruelty legislation, a public perception developed that he was the initiator and creator of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. At the Society’s first anniversary meeting Martin set the public record straight and gave credit to Rev Broome by stating: “I have nothing at all to do with it,” he said “it is quite a child of Mr. Broome’s and he has acted the part of a good father to it.” During 1826 the Society’s debts became greater than its revenue, and Broome as the Society’s guarantor was sentenced by the Kings Bench to the debtors’ prison, and Martin and Gompertz raised funds to cover the debts and obtain Broome’s release. Martin maintained an interest in the Society even after he left England and resettled in France.

On family "landlord" record

Despite his nickname he was considered a very harsh landlord in Ireland. On his death in 1834 his son Thomas became his heir. A workhouse was built on his estate during the Irish famine. Although the workhouse was an apparent pledge to help the poor suffering from starvation, it is agreed that Thomas and his family did little to help and approximately 150,000 people died on their land during this period from starvation and fever. Most of Martin's estate (approx. 200,000 acres) was in the west of Ireland and this area had one of the highest death tolls during the Famine. [Bibl.: Lynam, Humanity Dick Martin, 1975, pp.233-35; 282.)

—See Wikipedia - online; accessed 09.09.2023.

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References
Peter Kavanagh, The Irish Theatre (Tralee: The Kerryman 1946), copies a letter from Galway: ‘[...] a few nights ago the tragedy of The Fair Penitent was performed at Mr Richard Martin’s private theatre in this town, before a splendid audience [which] consisted principally of Gentlemen of the Bar ... the part assigned for the audience contains about one hundred persons ...’ (Hibernian Journal, May 12 1786).

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Notes
A portrait of Richard Martin is included in the keyed engraving of House of Commons of 1790, now preserved in Bank of Ireland (College Green) with copies in the St. Stephen’s Green Club, &c. [as figure No.5 in key].

Kith & Kin (1)?: John Martin (Cornelius the Irishman), was garrotted by the Spanish Inquisition in Mexico City. Martin was born in Cork, son of a sacristan, and later step-son of a tailer who moved to Padstow in England after great privations; on the death of the latter, Martin led hi blind mother from door to door as a beggar, before himself joinging John Hawkin’s naval expedition of 1567-68 as a cabin-boy. Patrick O’Sullivan writes: ‘Had he betrayed his Irish Catholic faith when he settled in  “Lutherite” England? What the inquisitors wanted to know from John Martin was abject submission expressed in a consistent narrative and this he was unable to supply. He was garrotted and his body burnt at the auto-da-fé in Mexico City on 6 March 1975’. (See Blackwell Companion to Modern Irish Culture, ed. W. J. McCormack, 1999, pp.375-76; bibl. incls. P. E. H. Hair, ’An Irishman before the Mexican Inquisition, 1574-75’, in Irish Historical Studies, XVII, 67, March 1971.)

Kith & Kin (2)?: R. M. Martin issued Ireland Before and after the Union with Great Britain (London 1843), in which he wrote: ‘What enabled these distinguished [Irishmen and women] to inscribe their names to the Scroll of Fame, and to add to the honor and to the welfare of their country? The wide and noble field of British enterprise.’ (p.188; quoted in Rolf Loeber & Magda Loeber, A Guide to Irish Fiction, 1650-1900, Dublin: Four Courts Press 2006, p.lviii.)

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