Part 7

Chatham's glory dazzled Ireland as well as England. But presently came the quarrel ending in war, with the American colonies, whose commercial grievances were the same in kind as those of Ireland, practically less severe. Ireland at once showed sympathy with American revolt. Presently the island was divested of troops by the demands of the war, and its coasts were left open to the attacks of privateers. There was no national militia. Under the leadership of Lord Charlemont a body of volunteers, almost entirely Protestant, was raised and reached at last the number of forty thousand. There was, no doubt, in the movement a good deal of claret and fanfaronade. But it included the leading gentry, and for its purpose was very strong. Formed ostensibly, at first really, for defence against the Americans, it presently fell politically into their track and demanded of the British government, now prostrated by misfortune in the war and by the combination of European powers against it, first freedom from the commercial restrictions, then legislative independence. North made commercial concessions; he would have made them on a much more liberal scale and possibly have satisfied the volunteers. But again monopolist greed, strong in the commercial cities of England, vetoed, and Burke lost his seat at Bristol for advocating the policy of free trade. The victories of Rodney and Eliot, had they come in time, might have strengthened the hands of the British government and saved it from an ignominious capitulation. As it was, the British government surrendered at discretion. First the commercial restrictions were swept away; then the legislative supremacy of England, embodied in the Poynings Act and the Act of the Sixth of George I., affirming the right of the British Parliament to legislate for Ireland, was renounced. Flood, the patriot with a bend sinister, insisted on pushing the humiliation of England still further and compelling her by a declaratory act solemnly to bind her own hands for the future, while Grattan, the patriot without reproach, took the more generous line. Thus England underwent the deepest humiliation in her history at the hands of an Irish party which owed its land, its ascendancy, probably its very existence, to her protecting power. Such was the condign punishment of a long course of ignorant, blundering, and corrupt misgovernment, a punishment not the less calamitous and degrading because it was deserved.

So Grattan in the Irish Parliament was able, in a transport of rhetorical rapture, to worship "the newborn nation," a nation which comprised a fraction of the people of the country, the rest being still political helots. Had he adored an uncontrolled Ascendancy, his deity would have been real.

The volunteers, having felt their strength, were inclined to vote themselves permanent, overawe Parliament, and enforce Parliamentary reform. Flood was so misguided as to take that line. But the incarnation of violent counsels was the bishop of Derry, an English nobleman holding an Irish bishopric, a most absurd figure, and probably half insane. His Right Reverence avowed that he looked forward to blood. He paraded before the door of Parliament in a coach and six, dressed in purple with long white gloves and gold tassels depending from them, and with a guard of horse, looking as if he meant to be king. But the Parliament was firm, and Lord Charlemont and other sane leaders were able to control the body, which was drawn, not from a Faubourg St. Antoine, but from the property-owning class under aristocratic leading. Still revolutionary excitement did not die.

What was now the state of things? There were two independent Parliaments, each with full powers of legislation, under the same Crown; that Crown not being invested with authority to control and harmonize the action of the two Parliaments, but being a Crown upon a cushion or little more. The commercial and even the international relations of the two Parliaments might point different ways. There might be a divergence on a question of peace or war; one Parliament declaring for war, the other refusing to vote the supplies. On general questions, such as commercial and criminal law, opposition was possible to any extent; and considering the feelings towards each other with which the partners set out, was not unlikely to occur. Ireland might even refuse currency to English coin. The monarchical link itself was not quite firm. On the question of the regency, when George III. went mad, the two Parliaments did actually fly apart; the Irish Parliament recognizing, while the British Parliament refused to recognize, the claim of the Prince of Wales to the regency by virtue of his birth. Only the king's recovery averted a collision. Adopted in haste and in a rush of revolutionary ardour, the system was in fact unworkable and must have ended in confusion. Grattan was unquestionably true to British connection. But Grattan was not Ireland, and even he had led in no very loyal attitude the defiance of the British Parliament on the regency question. His statesmanship can hardly have been profound if he fancied that the constitution of 1782 would work.

It is moreover always to be borne in mind that this Parliament was the Parliament of a Protestant ascendancy, representing not one-quarter of the people of Ireland, and that with all its high talk of independence, it still owed, and knew that it owed, to British protection its power, its privileges, its political pelf, perhaps even the safe possession under the Act of Settlement of lands on which the disinherited still cast a longing and vindictive eye.

How then was the policy of Ireland to be kept from breaking away from that of Great Britain? The practical answer was, by corruption, the means of which at the command of the Castle were, besides office, sinecures, some of them very rich; commands in the army; pensions; bishoprics, with other Church patronage; and peerages. The peerages, though lavishly created, seem to have retained their value. The Parliament, the body on which corruption had to operate, was a Parliament of rotten boroughs, the nominations for which were sold in open market. The House of Commons continued to swarm with placemen and pensioners, whose votes were at the command of government. In the House of Lords the Anglican bishops were strong.

Appended to a report made to Pitt on the political situation in Ireland is the following schedule of corruption:--

"H---- H----, son-in-law to Lord A----, and brought into Parliament by him. Studies the law; wishes to be a commissioner of barracks, or in some similar place. Would go into orders and take a living.

"H---- D----, brother to Lord C----. Applied for office; but, as no specific promise could be made, has lately voted in opposition. Easy to be had if thought expedient. A silent, gloomy man.

"L---- M----, refuses to accept L500 per annum; states very high pretensions from his skill in House of Commons management; expects L1,000 per annum. N.B.-- Be careful of him.

"J---- N----, has been in the army and is now on half pay; wishes a troop of dragoons on full pay. States his pretensions to be fifteen years' service in Parliament. N.B.--Would prefer office to military promotion; but already has, and has long had, a pension. Character, especially on the side of truth, not favourable.

"R---- P----, independent, but well disposed to government. His four sisters have pensions; and his object is a living for his brother.

"T---- P----, brother to Lord L----, and brought in by him. A captain in the navy; wishes for some sinecure employment."

XI

There was no lack, say apologists of the Irish Parliament, of useful legislation on subjects with which a landed gentry was qualified to deal. There was a fatal lack of legislation on one momentous subject with which a land-owning gentry ought to be qualified to deal, but from which the Irish Parliament resolutely turned its eyes. For half a century before the union, that body steadfastly abstained from inquiring into the causes of disaffection among the peasantry. It even repressed a report upon the subject which the chairman of the committee had begun to read.

The condition of the peasantry was still horrible and heartrending. The revolution of 1782, by loosening the fetters of trade, had brought increase of prosperity to the merchant and manufacturer. It had brought no relief to the tiller of the soil. A little before this Arthur Young had travelled in Ireland and had been shocked at seeing the insolent despotism of the petty country gentlemen, whom he called the vermin of the kingdom, over their serfs; the horsewhip freely used, the serf not daring to lift his hand in defence, the total denial of legal redress, since a justice of the peace presuming to issue a summons would at once have been called out. Landlords of consequence had assured Young that many of their cotters would think themselves honoured by having their wives and daughters sent for to the bed of their masters. He had even heard of the lives of people being made free with. The middleman and the tithe-proctor were ruthless as ever. To the payment of tithes a drop of bitterness had been added by the exemption, through an abuse of political influence, of the grazing farms, which left the whole burden of maintaining a hostile Church on the back of the cotter. The peasantry, on the other hand, maddened by suffering, took a fearful revenge on the oppressor or his agents. Agrarian murder and outrage prevailed. There were cruelties worse than murder. Middlemen and tithe-proctors were "carded"; that is, lacerated with boards full of nails drawn down their backs, buried up to their necks in pits full of thorns, made to ride on saddles stuck with spikes, their ears and noses cut off. A clergyman was met riding in great agony with his head wrapped up; his ears and cheeks were found nailed to a post. That the Irish when excited are capable of dark atrocities is a feature of their character which it is useless to disguise. Debility when excited is apt to be most cruel. The trait showed itself plainly in the hamstringing of soldiers and the houghing of cattle, as well as in the torturing of middlemen and tithe-proctors. Law and police were paralyzed. The peasantry were one vast conspiracy bound together by awful pledges, the betrayal of which was death. No evidence could be obtained though there might be plenty of eye-witnesses. Perjury in the common cause was no sin.

It was supposed that the Whiteboys had their meetings in Catholic chapels. But there is no ground for taxing the Catholic Church as a body with any share in the criminal part of the movement. The Catholic clergy of Ireland were then, as they are now, a peasant clergy, sympathizing with their class. They depended on that class for their stipends. Some of them their sympathy might betray into complicity, more or less active, with agrarian crime. More of them might be guilty of failure to exert their religious authority as ministers of the sacraments, the confessional, and death-bed absolution, on the side of law. But their record on the whole appears to have been as clear as, considering what persecution they had undergone, and that the law was their enemy as well as the enemy of the peasant, it was reasonable to expect.

The mansion of an unpopular landlord became a besieged fortress. Absenteeism of course increased. To a rather later date belongs the story of an agent who, having complained to his absentee landlord that his life had been threatened, received the reply, "Tell the villains that they need not hope to intimidate me by shooting you."

"I am well acquainted," said a statesman not oversensitive to popular wrongs, "with the Province of Munster, and I know that it is impossible for human wretchedness to exceed that of the miserable tenantry of that province. I know that the unhappy tenantry are ground to powder by relentless landlords. I know that far from being able to give the clergy their just dues, they have not food and raiment for themselves; the landlord grasps the whole. Sorry I am to add that, unsatisfied with present extortion, some landlords have been so base as to instigate the insurgents to rob the clergy of their tithes, not in order to alleviate the distresses of the tenantry, but that they might add the clergy's share to the cruel rack-rents already paid. Sir, I fear it will require the utmost ability of Parliament to come to the root of these evils. The poor people of Munster live in a more abject state of poverty than human nature can be supposed able to bear. Their miseries are intolerable; but they do not originate with the clergy; nor can the legislature stand by and see them take the redress into their own hands. Nothing can be done for their benefit while the country remains in a state of anarchy."

The miseries might not originate with the clergy, but the popular wrath did originate specially with the exactions of the tithe-proctor. Grattan proposed commutation. But then the tithe of pasture agistment, as it was called, could no longer have been evaded. That simple reform was put off for more than a generation, with the most calamitous results.

Dublin was gay, mansions rose, claret flowed, wit sparkled, the dance went round. Nor was there lack of social polish or of culture of the classical kind. On the other hand, there were extravagance, waste, and debt. Wild and spendthrift characters appear among the leaders and mirrors of society. Beauchamp Bagenal, as Sir Jonah Barrington tells us, "had visited every capital of Europe, and had exhibited the native original character of the Irish gentleman at every place he visited. In the splendour of his travelling establishment, he quite eclipsed the petty potentates with whom Germany was garnished. His person was fine, his manners open and generous, his spirit high, and his liberality profuse. During his tour, he had performed a variety of feats which were emblazoned in Ireland, and endeared him to his countrymen. He had fought a prince; jilted a princess; intoxicated the doge of Venice; carried off a duchess from Madrid; scaled the walls of a convent in Italy; narrowly escaped the Inquisition at Lisbon; concluded his exploits by a celebrated fencing match at Paris; and he returned to Ireland with a sovereign contempt for all continental men and manners, and an inveterate antipathy to all despotic kings and arbitrary governments."

Duelling was the social law. The attorney-general fought a duel; the provost of Trinity College fought a duel. Refusal of a challenge was social death. The viceroy's secretary, when challenged by a disappointed applicant for place, deemed it necessary to go to the field of honour. Robert Fitzgerald was so addicted to duelling that he wore a chain shirt under his vest.

What can have produced such characters? Was it anything in Irish blood or air, or was it the absence of the commercial element with its sobering influence? The story of Robert Fitzgerald, nephew of the bishop of Derry, seems to bespeak a wild domestic despotism exercised by the squires. Fitzgerald is said to have confined his father in a cave with a muzzled bear. He put to death one of his household, for which, however, he was hanged. The matrimonial adventurer from Ireland was also a figure well known in the sister isle.

Of intellectual fruit there was not much except oratory, pamphlets, and pasquinades. Swift was an Englishman born in Ireland and banished to the place of his birth. Burke's genius as well as his physiognomy was one-half Irish, and his Irish half had its share in that splendid but mischievous outburst, his essay on the French Revolution. His heart turned to Ireland, and some of his best thought was given to her case. But he hardly belongs to the Irish Pantheon.

Oratory, both Parliamentary and forensic, flourished. Grattan, Flood, Yelverton, Foster, Fitzgibbon (afterwards Lord Clare), Curran, are great names in their different ways. Nor was the oratory all in the style supposed to be Hibernian. Foster's style, for example, was grave and weighty. So generally was that of Flood.

In Parliament there were lively scenes. Grattan and Flood having parted company in politics, and Flood having defamed Grattan, Grattan poured upon Flood a furious torrent of the most personal invective; telling him that his talents were not so great as his life was infamous; that he had been silent for years and silent for money; that he might be seen passing the doors like a guilty spirit waiting the moment at which he might hop in and give his venal vote; that he was a kettledrum, battering himself into popularity to catch the vulgar; that he might be seen hovering over the dome like an ill-omened bird of night, with sepulchral note and broken beak (Flood having a broken nose); and winding up by telling him in the face of the country, before all the world, and to his beard, that he was not an honest man. Flood retorted with equal fury, and a wild scene ensued. It is not difficult to believe in the genius or the patriotism of these orators; but it is difficult to believe in their unimpassioned wisdom.

The Penal Code had ere this lost much of its cruelty. Time, security, and intercourse had softened the feeling of the Protestants against the Catholics, whose passive loyalty had been proved by their inaction when Great Britain was twice invaded by Stuart pretenders. The most odious enactments of the code, those which involved personal degradation and outrage on family affection, had fallen into desuetude or been evaded. Protestant friends would hold land for a Catholic in confidential trust, and ostensibly assume the guardianship of his children, leaving the real guardianship to the kin. The attempts of informers to take advantage of forfeitures were discouraged by the courts. Protestant fanaticism was dying out everywhere except in rural Ulster, and was giving way among the educated to indifference and even to scepticism. The spirit of Voltaire was abroad. Chesterfield, as viceroy, brought it with him, laughing at religious intolerance, and saying that the only Catholic of whom he was afraid was the reigning beauty of Dublin. The whole system of the Catholic Church, though still nominally subsisting only by connivance, was openly and securely carried on. Conspicuous Mass houses were built. The Catholic hierarchy and priesthood were forming friendly relations with a government which had once designated all Catholics as enemies. Catholics of the upper class educated in France came back from the land of the Encyclopaedists tinctured with its liberalism. Catholics were admitted by connivance into Trinity College. A central committee had been formed to guard Catholic interests, which in the penal era would have been treason. After 1782, relief bills were passed. Catholicism was recognized by law. All restrictions upon the maintenance of the hierarchy, freedom of ordination, or additions to the priesthood were abrogated. Catholics were made capable of acquiring property in land, though under the guise of leases for nine hundred and ninety-nine years. The Gavelling Act, passed to break up their estates, was repealed. It was unfortunately too late to restore the Catholic gentry, which had been decimated by the Penal Law. In 1783 a bill was passed opening to Catholics the profession of the law in all its branches and grades except the rank of king's counsel and the judicial bench, repealing the law against the intermarriage of Catholics with Protestants, that against foreign emigration, that making an Anglican license necessary for schools, and that restricting the number of apprentices permitted in Catholic trade. The laws against the possession of arms and the exclusion from command in the army were left. Otherwise of the Penal Code the political disabilities almost alone remained.

The principal relief bill was introduced by Sir Hercules Langrishe, the friend and correspondent on Irish politics of Burke, who pleaded the cause of the Irish Catholics with all the vehemence of his nature, a measure of sympathy with the religion probably mingling in his heart with love of freedom and justice. Burke had less feeling for the grievances of Protestant Dissenters or of Anglican clergymen liberally inclined, who sought the relaxation of tests. He afterwards sent his son, whose ability he fondly overrated, as his representative to Ireland, in the affairs of which the aspiring youth meddled, and with farcical results.

The Presbyterians of Belfast had before this been relieved of the Test Act and their other religious bonds and humiliations. But the relief had come too late to turn them into good friends of the Anglican Church or of British connection. Revolutionary and republican sentiment had, with religious scepticism, taken root in Belfast.

The revolution of 1782 had not been democratic. The Volunteers were property holders and their leaders were peers. But the withdrawal of the Volunteers was not followed by political calm. Among the populace of Dublin, especially, excitement continued and showed itself detestably by hamstringing British soldiers. The cry was now for two drastic measures of change: the political emancipation of the Catholics, and a reform of Parliament substituting freedom of election for nomination and clearing the legislature of pensioners and placemen. The two combined evidently meant death to Protestant ascendancy and to oligarchy, both of which naturally shrank from suicide.

The struggle grew fierce, and now not only was the American Revolution fresh in recollection, but the French Revolution, advancing with thunder tread, was filling the minds of the people everywhere, and especially those of the oppressed and suffering, with vague visions and hopes of change. Even to the hovel of the Irish serf, a vague hope, not of a society regenerated on the principles of Rousseau, but of deliverance from the middleman, from the tithe-proctor, and from the English connection, which he thought was at the bottom of all his sufferings, had begun to make its way.

Of reform, the leader was Grattan. Opposition to reform found a mighty champion in Fitzgibbon, afterwards Lord Clare, a strong man, fearless as he was able, and a very powerful speaker, but violent and overbearing, as well as reactionary to a degree which charms the reactionary historian. Fitzgibbon had a very coarse but rather effective shield-bearer in Dr. Duigenan, the son of a Catholic farmer intended for the priesthood, but captured by the Protestant clergyman of his parish.

Grattan and the reform party failed to get admission for Catholics to Parliament. They failed to purify the House itself by substituting free election for nomination boroughs, or by the effective exclusion of pensioners and placemen from the House. They succeeded in extending the electoral franchise to all holders, whether Catholic or Protestant, of forty-shilling freeholds. Unfortunately, they could hardly have done worse than by giving political power to the mass without its natural leaders. Protestant demagogues playing for the Catholic vote were certain to appear. Another bad effect of the measure was the multiplication of cotter holdings by land-owners who would absolutely control the cotter's vote. On the other hand, to ask the Protestant oligarchy to part with its exclusive possession of Parliament was to ask it, not only to resign power, but even to cast a shadow on its property, for the Act of Settlement had hardly even yet become perfectly sacred as the title-deed of proprietary right. Not all the advocates of Parliamentary reform were in favour of Catholic emancipation. Flood among others was opposed to it.