Trinity College, Dublin has a library and chair of history named after him, and a statue of him in front square. There is a marble bust of him in St Patrick's Cathedral and his portrait by Sir John Lavery hangs in the National Gallery.
However, I doubt if W.E.H. Lecky, who died 100 years ago today, is well known in contemporary Ireland outside academic circles.
Conor Cruise O'Brien, in his biography of Edmund Burke, described Lecky as one of the most generous minded of Irish historians. Edward Martyn, first president of Sinn Féin,founder of the Irish Literary Theatre with Yeats and Lady Gregory, and the man who endowed Dublin's Pro-Cathedral with its Palestrina Choir, attributed his own conversion to Irish nationalism to his reading of Lecky. He described Lecky's History of Ireland in the 18th Century as "that terribly sober indictment of England's policy in Ireland".
William Edward Hartpole Lecky (1838-1903) was born in Newtown Park, Blackrock, Co Dublin, the son of an Anglo-Irish landowner. He was educated at Cheltenham College and at Trinity and was intended for the church. But writing interested him much more. A volume of poems (1859), The Religious Tendencies of the Age (1860) and The Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland (1861) were published anonymously but attracted little or no attention.
Lecky then set out on travels in Europe in 1862. The Declining Sense of the Miraculous (1863) became the first two chapters of A History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe (1865). The basic argument of the book is that progress is due to the spirit of rationalism and the tolerance demanded by reason, and that theological dogmatism and bigotry are always the enemies of rationalism. Few would dispute Lecky's assertion that "there is no wild beast so ferocious as Christians who differ concerning their faith". And his survey of European history had shown him that "whenever the clergy were at the elbow of the civil arm, no matter whether they were Catholic or Protestant, persecution was the result".
The book made Lecky famous and he followed it with The History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne (1869). Both of these works were widely accepted as perceptive and thought-provoking commentaries. The Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland, consisting of essays on Jonathan Swift, Henry Flood, Henry Grattan and Daniel O'Connell, was republished in an enlarged edition in 1871.
But Lecky's most ambitious research and writing were still to come. His magnum opus was A History of England in the 18th Century, published in eight volumes (via two-volume editions in 1878, 1882, 1887 and 1890). The work was extended to 12 volumes in 1892, of which the last four were devoted to Ireland. These were published separately (1892-96) as A History of Ireland in the 18th Century.
Lecky's work on Irish history has rightly been praised for its impartiality, all the more commendable when we remember that he was a convinced unionist. And it shines like a beacon when compared with his contemporary J.A. Froude's The English in Ireland in the 18th Century (1872-74). Froude's view of those who dwelt on this side of the Irish Sea was highly unflattering, and Lecky reprimanded him for his "calumnies on the Irish people".
He sought to refute Froude not from any nationalist motive but because he feared that Froude's ferocious racist attack would make the position of liberal unionists harder to maintain. As Roy Foster saw it, Lecky, as an Anglo-Irish unionist, feared that Froude's distortions by their very exaggeration would support the case being made by nationalists for Home Rule.
In his own preface he wrote that Irish history was "so steeped in party and sectarian animosity that a writer who has done his utmost to clear his mind from prejudice, and bring together with impartiality the conflicting statements of partisans, will still, if he is a wise man, always doubt whether he has succeeded in painting with perfect fidelity the delicate gradations of provocation, palliation and guilt".
In the second volume of his examination of Irish history in the 18th century, Lecky regretted the sort of history writing the country had become too familiar with. "That proportion of the national talent and scholarship which ought in every country to be devoted to elucidating the national history, has in Ireland not been so employed. Irish history has passed to a lamentable extent into the hands of religious polemics, of dishonest partisans, and of half-educated and uncritical enthusiasts."
Lecky sat as an MP for Trinity from 1895 to 1903. He was a supporter of Horace Plunkett's Co-operative Movement and of the campaign for a Catholic university. He was also a backer of the Irish Literary Theatre but resigned when Yeats condemned the Boer War. Elected a Fellow of the British Academy, he was awarded an Order of Merit in 1902. He died in London. In a tribute to him in his United Irishman, Arthur Griffith said his History of Ireland was admirable for its lack of prejudice and that he had achieved the highest honour as an historian.
J.J. Abraham, in his memoir Surgeon's Journey (1957), recalled Trinity students pushing Lecky in a wheelbarrow up Grafton Street, "his long legs sticking over the front of the barrow, with the élite of Dublin looking on, slightly puzzled but rather amused.
"He was nearly 60 at the time, must have hated it and probably was in some danger of being injured; but looking back on it now, I remember he showed no sign of discomposure whatever."