How much of this is based in fact? Well, it’s probably best to take the series-opening disclaimer seriously: “This Fiction is Inspired by True Stories.” The Freeman’s Journal, a Dublin newspaper whose sympathies tilted toward the nationalist rather than the unionist cause, described Guinness as “an eminent citizen and much lamented gentleman” whose funeral was “attended by every mark of respect, shown by men of every rank and station of every shade of political and religious belief.” But that’s not the stuff of compelling drama, right? And it’s not as if newspapers always get every detail right, or that the Guinness story doesn’t overlap with all the hot-button political issues roiling Ireland at the time and in the years that followed. The disclaimer makes clear this will be a “print the legend” (and sometimes an “invent the legend”) endeavor. It might be best just to go with it.
It’s May 27, 1868, the day of Benjamin Guinness’s funeral. Anyone expecting a quiet time of mourning and reflection is sure to be surprised. The son of Arthur Guinness II and grandson of Arthur Guinness, founder of the famed brewery located at Dublin’s St. James Gate, Benjamin became the wealthiest man in Ireland after assuming control of the company upon his father’s death. He also served as Lord Mayor of Dublin and restored St. Patrick’s Cathedral at his own expense. But, as the first episode of House of Guinness, a Steven Knight-created miniseries inspired by the Guinness family, opens, it looks like poor Benjamin might not even make it to the grave in one piece.
Not one mob but two awaits him as his casket rolls out of the factory gates. On one side are evangelistic followers of the Temperance movement, whose objections to the Guinness family don’t really need to be explained. On the other hand, there’s the Fenians, the unruliest of the factions pushing for Irish independence from Great Britain. Sure, Benjamin Guinness might have made great beer, but he was also a unionist and a Protestant. As a Fenian rabble rouser, we’ll later learn, is named Patrick Cochrane (Seamus O’Hara), puts it, there will be no peaceful burial when “it’s his machine of the Protestant gentry that makes us Irish suffer at the hands of the British.” Fortunately, Sean Rafferty (James Norton), soon to be revealed as a kind of all-purpose fixer for the Guinness family (among other duties), has a solution, albeit a crude one. If Guinness’s workers want to see him buried, and they do, they’ll need to grab a “means of persuasion” and take to the streets.
