An Irishman's Diary

I’M NOT SURE how best to mark National Tree Week, which starts tomorrow. One option, I suppose, would be to visit some of Ireland’s 742 specimens newly designated, because of the lore attached to them, as “heritage trees”: the famous Muckross Yew in Killarney being an example. But if all else fails, I might just celebrate the occasion with a pint in my local Dublin pub, which is called, after all, the Royal Oak.

Like the many pubs so named, albeit perhaps unconsciously, the Royal Oak in Kilmainham commemorates an English monarch: Charles II. Indeed, it commemorates an English tree. The latter – also known as the “Boscobel Oak”, near Wolverhampton – saved the life of the former, when he climbed it to escape from Cromwellian troops in 1651.

He spent an entire day there, while the Roundheads searched the area. As he later told the diarist Samuel Pepys, a soldier even passed directly beneath him at one point. But his hiding place went undiscovered, and the rest was royalist history.

Charles survived; the monarchy was restored; and pub signs featuring an oak with the king in it were soon sprouting everywhere.

Not that monarchists have any monopoly over the oak as a species. It was also popular during the French revolution, when it was designated the “Liberty Tree”. And even in monarchical England, oaks have not always been the preserve of the establishment. On the contrary, one of the most famous surviving examples is a rebel tree. The Boscobel Oak is long gone, a victim of its own fame. Patriotic visitors were so given to tearing strips off it that it was already dead by the late 1800s. Whereas an oak that predated it by a century as a symbol of revolt against the crown was still alive then, and remains so.

Kett’s Oak in Norfolk is among the many arboreal superstars of Britain and Ireland featured in Thomas Pakenham’s book, Meetings with Remarkable Trees. It derives its name from Robert Kett, a tanner and landowner who, in 1549, addressed a crowd underneath it, protesting against the enclosure of common land, and then led them in a march on Norwich Castle.

En route, their numbers swelled to 20,000 and their demands – for reform of church and state – multiplied too. But to cut a long story short, the rebellion was crushed and Kett was hanged. The tree, by contrast, thrived. It was called the Reformation Oak, in honour of its martyr: and as such became a place of pilgrimage for radicals, who seem to have treated the shrine better than the monarchists did theirs.

More than a century later, the same Charles II’s tree adviser, John Evelyn, mentioned the Reformation oak disapprovingly in a famous book on forestry. Eveyln was especially fond of oaks, but he cites this one as the solitary example of “the goodly tree [being] abused to cover impious designs”. Despite which infamy, the oak is one of only three trees mentioned in Evelyn’s book that are still standing today.

BUT SPEAKING of impious designs, it was in another Royal Oak – also in Dublin – that one of the more notorious plots of Irish history was hatched. The plotters were the Invincibles; their plan the Phoenix Park murders of Cavendish and Burke, in May 1882. And although The Royal Oak in this case was across the Liffey, on Parkgate Street, Kilmainham did feature prominently in the story.

In fact, Parnell had just agreed the Kilmainham Treaty, so-called because he negotiated it while incarcerated in the prison there. Now released, but shocked by the murders, he offered to resign until Gladstone dissuaded him. And, of course, Kilmainham Jail is where most of the Phoenix Park plotters ended up, and where five of them were hanged.

Among those who escaped with mere imprisonment was James “Skin the Goat” Fitzharris. The driver of one of the getaway cabs, Fitzharris refused to implicate any of the gang, even though there was a £10,000 reward. So he was sentenced to hard labour for life, although he was eventually released after 15 years.

In later years, he served a further sentence of sorts: performing community service as a “well-known Dublin character”. This involved mention – almost inevitably – in James Joyce’s Ulysses. He also found a job as a watchman for Dublin Corporation, before ending his days in the workhouse, where he died 100 years ago, in 1910.

But where was I? Oh yes: oaks. And getting back to the royal one in Kilmainham, just one final point of note, vis-a-vis the monarchy.

Despite its name (and although people have been known to spend a day in it, occasionally) my local pub would not be a good hiding place for a king. It’s so small, you couldn’t swing a cat in it without potentially injuring half a dozen customers.

And in the unlikely event that Charles II did walk in one night, pursued by roundheads, he would have another reason to be nervous. In a strange coincidence, the Royal Oak is only 200 yards away from a street called “Cromwell’s Quarters”.

fmcnally@irishtimes.com