On a mild spring evening in Dublin in 1882, two distinguished gentlemen strolled down the wide avenue that bisects Phoenix Park, a vast green space in Ireland’s capital. One was the newly appointed Chief Secretary of Ireland, Lord Frederick Cavendish – the younger son of the Duke of Devonshire and a relative by marriage of the Prime Minister – who had arrived that morning to take up his post. The other was Permanent Secretary of State Thomas Burke, a professional civil servant. Burke had been in office for more than a dozen years; a resident of the park, a child named Winston Churchill, later recalled that Burke had given him a toy drum.
Cavendish and Burke returned to their respective residences, elegant lodges in the park. At 7:17 p.m., two men, Tim Kelly and Joe Brady, assisted by a team of nearby conspirators and armed with surgical knives, slipped out of the shadows and pounced on the officers, slitting and stabbing both of them. In a matter of moments, the victims were dead on the floor, their blood seeping into the dirt.
The attackers were members of the Invincibles, a federal terrorist organization committed to the violent overthrow of British rule in Ireland. After centuries of English occupation, Ireland was formally part of the United Kingdom with the Act of Union in 1801; the exclusively Protestant parliament in Dublin was abolished and Ireland was instead represented by 100 MPs in Westminster. Almost three decades later, and far too late, the Catholic Emancipation Act allowed members of the majority religion in Ireland to serve in Parliament for the first time.
But this representation did not prevent the devastation of the Great Famine of 1845-52, in which a million Irish people died of starvation or disease and another million were forced to emigrate. Ireland’s feudal system, with Anglo-Irish landowners presiding over vast estates where local farmers scraped a meager life on tiny parcels, resulted in the displacement of tenants and untold suffering. The laissez-faire shibboleths of the time and the ubiquitous racist animus against the Irish prevented a successful British relief effort.
These tragic events are told in a lively and exciting way in Julie Kavanaghs “The Irish Assassins: Conspiracy, Revenge, and the Murders in Phoenix Park That Baffled Victorian England” (Atlantic Monthly, 473 pages, $ 28). Ms. Kavanagh, a former New Yorker editor and writer of “Nureyev: The Life,” skillfully outlines the conspiracy to kill Burke (Cavendish was an accidental victim; at the last moment he had decided to go home instead of taking a car ); the subsequent trial of the assassins; and the bloody, vengeful aftermath of the trial. But the Phoenix Park murders are just the hinge of a flowing, well-researched study of Anglo-Irish relations in the Victorian era.
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