But more than hill or valley, bird or moor,
More than the green fields of my river Suir,
I loved those hapless ones, the Irish poor,
All my life long.
Little I did for them in outward deed,
And yet be unto them of praise the meed,
For the stiff fight I waged ’gainst lust and greed.
I learnt it there
THOSE LINES were written by William Francis Butler, soldier and author, who died 100 years ago (on June 7th). He was born in 1838 in Ballyslateen, Co Tipperary, just across the Suir from Ballycarron, where his family had survived as Catholic landowners. He was one of many Irish people in the 19th century who saw no contradiction between love of Ireland and service in the burgeoning empire.
His career encompassed India, two treks across the Canadian prairies, a west African campaign, the attempt by Gladstone’s government to rescue Gen Charles Gordon from Khartoum, and command of the imperial forces in South Africa in 1898-99. The breadth and independence of his views set him at odds, however, with the jingoistic imperialism which pervaded the late Victorian period.
Butler's Canadian report of 1871 led to the formation of the North-West Mounted Police (the Mounties). He wrote 14 books, including The Great Lone Land, one of two volumes about Canada, which became a classic of 19th-century travel literature.
As the old order gave way to new, memories of Lieut Gen Sir WF Butler KCB faded, although two of his books were translated into Irish in the 1930s. His novel about "the solitary Sioux", Red Cloud, became a school text entitled Néall Dearg. It reflected his admiration for the courage and independence of Native Americans; their devastation, by smallpox and by white commerce, appalled him.
One of his earliest experiences had been a visit to Daniel O’Connell in Richmond Prison, Dublin, in 1844. The Liberator lifted him up in his arms and shouted: “Hurrah for Tipperary.” Butler was deeply affected by the sufferings he witnessed during the Famine, especially by the callous brutality of an eviction in 1850.
Seventeen years later his regiment was sent to Canada to forestall a threatened Fenian invasion. (In 1866 Irish veterans of the American Civil War had raided British North America.) He helped to quell a second incursion, but his imagination had been fired by Canada’s unspoilt wilderness. Asked to report on the state of law and order in Saskatchewan, he embarked on an exploratory trek of 2,700 miles from Quebec to the Rockies and back again. He undertook another journey across North America, reaching the Pacific coast. Sceptical of the benefits of 19th-century progress, he loved those solitary treks: “The things I did not want to see or know of were trains and steam-boats; the canoe or the prairie pony in summer, the snow-shoe and dog-sled in winter, one’s own feet and legs at all times – these were good enough for passing over the surface of God’s wonderful world.”
In 1888, while living in Delgany with his wife and family, he was invited by Parnell to join a grouse-shooting party in the Wicklow hills. He accepted with delight, regarding Parnell as the greatest political leader of his day. (Two years’ previously he had written, much to the annoyance of his military superiors, a letter to the Liberal government in support of Home Rule for Ireland.)
They stayed in Parnell’s shooting lodge at Aughavanagh (later a youth hostel). “In the evenings we had pleasant conversation. He spoke little of politics; said no ill about anybody . . . The quality in Parnell that most impressed me was the entire absence of sense or thought of superiority.”
Butler was ambitious, opinionated and at times inconsistent. He considered “war is the sum of all human wrongdoing”, yet relished its dangers and soldierly camaraderie. Although he fought for the British empire, he regarded its protestations of benevolence as a sham, and saw its aim as the ruthless exploitation of native peoples. He believed most of its wars had been fomented by the forces of international capitalism. The War Office found him an Irish Catholic troublemaker. He owed his advancement mainly to another plucky, intelligent Irishman, Col Garnet Wolseley.
In 1905 he retired to Bansha Castle, close to the home of his childhood. He took a keen interest in public affairs, often criticising the Irish passion for drink and sport. He became a senator of the newly-created National University of Ireland and a commissioner of the Board of National Education, which referred posthumously to his deep knowledge of Irish history (“illuminated by a genuine patriotism”) and to his love of children. He died on June 7th, 1910, and was interred in Killardrigh cemetery, at the foot of the Galtees.
Butler maintained there was more genuine philosophy in the Lord’s Prayer than in all the books ever written. He married the painter Elizabeth Thompson; her sympathies, too, lay with the poor and downtrodden. A biographer, Martin Ryan, concludes he was essentially an outsider. In a sense, people with his zest for life, inner strength, intellectual energy and generosity of spirit are always outsiders.