John Hamilton of Donegal 1800-1884: This Recklessly Generous Landlord [Illustrated] (Paperback)

From the second eleven of the Irish aristocracy (related to the Duke of Wellington), he was a well-educated and well-travelled man for his time, attending Cambridge University. Whilst there he was unimpressed by Charles Simeon (a leading Anglican evangelical of the time based in Cambridge) but he developed a sincere, if somewhat unorthodox evangelical faith, much influenced by the Moravians (who were very important in the conversion of John Wesley a generation earlier).
This background goes some way to explaining how this Irish landlord was different from most of the others. He was resident on his estate, and took a personal interest in his tenants, regarding them primarily as his "friends". He was indeed recklessly generous, and was proud that there was only one person on his estate (to his knowledge) who had died of starvation during the famine of 1845-47, and hardly any went to the workhouse. He encouraged his tenants to improve their holdings, not least by growing crops other than potatoes. His descendants maybe felt he was too generous, impoverishing his estate in the process.

His tenants, in their turn loved and respected him, and when he built a new house for himself on the small island of Saint Ernan's, the tenantry - both Protestant and Roman Catholic - outdid each other in zeal to help build a causeway to the mainland. The description of how this was done makes gripping reading.

Although a resident landlord, he did spend a lot of time away from home, most famously a long tour of the continent (chiefly Germany and Switzerland), partly to see Moravian settlements there. His journals include a harrowing account of his teenage daughter's death on the journey and her burial in Karlsruhe.

An old-fashioned Irish Unionist, Hamilton was no party man, and had no time for the Orangemen, or their Nationalist equivalents. The Parish Priest of Donegal, although an ardent nationalist, was one of Hamilton's stoutest defenders when he was attacked in the press along with the generality of landlords. This book reminds us that not all landlords in 19th century Ireland were like the notorious Adair of the Glenveagh estate. But the picture is more complicated even than this - not all absentee landlords were wicked, and not all resident landlords were good.

Read this book, not just for an insight into the Irish history of the time, but also for a glimpse of a Christian home life of a forgotten age - happy, but also full of "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune".