Part 9

What was the feeling in Ireland at large it is very hard to determine. There were addresses and declarations on both sides, but we cannot tell how they were got up. Cornwallis made a canvassing tour. His opinion at first was that Dublin was furiously opposed but the rest of the country was favourable. This estimate changed as the struggle went on. Dublin, of course, was the centre of excitement. At the outset it was the scene of a riot. The capital could not like to lose the seat of government and the social centre; nor could the Irish bar like the transfer of the supreme jurisdiction to Westminster, or the severance of the Parliamentary from the forensic career; the two, while Parliament sat in Dublin, having been habitually, and often brilliantly, combined. Cork, on the other hand, was flattered with the prospect of becoming a second Glasgow. It seems strange that the Orangemen should then have been against the union, of which they have since been the staunchest supporters. But they no doubt scented the approach, with the union, of Catholic emancipation. The Catholic hierarchy, headed by Archbishop Troy, was strongly for the union, and unquestionably drew with it a large following both of clergy and laity. The hope was undoubtedly held out of Catholic emancipation, possibly accompanied by a provision for the Catholic priesthood, as a sequel to the union; though no positive pledge was or could be given. At the same time it is to be borne in mind that the general sympathy of a Catholic priesthood would be with the British government as the chief antagonist of an atheist France. The terrible tension of '98 had probably been followed in many quarters by collapse and readiness to acquiesce in anything that could hold out to life and property the protection of a strong government. The "Annual Register" for 1802 says that at the first election of Irish members to the United Parliament no supporter of the union lost his election or was even upbraided on that account; that in the county of Dublin alone did a candidate think his opposition to the union such a claim to popular favour as to make it worth his while to allude to it; and that some of the largest and most independent counties returned strong supporters of the union. Cornwallis reports that in Dublin, the chief centre of opposition, when at last the royal assent was given to the bill, not a murmur was heard nor, as he believed, was there any expression of ill-humour throughout the whole city.

The Established Church of Ireland would be willing to support a measure which, by identifying it with the English establishment, converted it from the Church of a small minority into a limb of the Church of a great majority, thus giving it a tenable ground of existence and a pledge of support which it fondly hoped would never fail.

The campaign of opinion, at all events, was conducted on both sides with perfect freedom. There is no pretence for alleging that the union was carried by military force. The affair at Dublin was a street riot, for the repression of which it was necessary to call in the troops. Nothing like military terrorism in fact is alleged. Twelve months before the passing of the union, and in the middle of the struggle, Cornwallis said that "the force remaining in Ireland was sufficient to maintain peace, totally inadequate to repel foreign invasion."

There were historic debates in the Irish Parliament. Grand speeches were made in the nationalist and patriotic vein by opponents of the union. Grattan, the author of the constitution of 1782, came in his volunteer uniform to bedew its hearse with his oratoric tears. The dramatic effect was enhanced by the bodily infirmity of the great patriot and orator, which obliged him to speak sitting. Plunket put forth to the utmost those powers of debate which led Lord Russell to pronounce him of all the many speakers whom he had heard the most convincing. Foster produced a profound effect by his mastery of commercial and financial detail, though in this part of the field he had to contend with the supreme and unclouded judgment of Adam Smith left on record in favour of union. As strong an argument as any was that Ireland would be in danger of losing her leading men, who would be drawn away to England. But absenteeism was already rife, and was likely to be in the main diminished rather than increased by any measure which made Ireland a happier abode. To the spirit of nationality telling appeals could not fail to be made; but to what the nationality amounted, whether it was nominal or real, of the heart or merely of local boundary, had with terrible clearness appeared. In the speeches of the opposition there seems to have been much more of political argument of a general kind and of patriotic sentiment than of reference to the actual working of the Constitution of 1782 and the consequences to which it had led.

Of all the opponents of the union on the high patriotic ground, the most fervid was Plunket. "For my own part," he exclaimed, "I will resist it to the last gasp of my existence, and with the last drop of my blood, and when I feel the hour of my dissolution approaching I will, like the father of Hannibal, take my children to the altar and swear them to eternal hostility against the invaders of their country's freedom." It is to be hoped that Plunket's children, if they took the oath, found absolution; for the father soon afterwards, sitting in the united Parliament of which he was a distinguished member, had so far changed his sentiments as to say of the union; "As an Irishman I opposed that union; as an Irishman I avow that I did so openly and boldly, nor am I now ashamed of what I then did. But though in my resistance to it I had been prepared to go the length of any man, I am now equally prepared to do all in my power to render it close and indissoluble. One of the apprehensions on which my opposition was founded, I am happy to say, has been disappointed by the event. I had been afraid that the interest of Ireland, on the abolition of her separate legislature, would come to be discussed in a hostile Parliament. But I can now state--and I wish when I speak that I could be heard by the whole of Ireland--that during the time that I have sat in the united Parliament I have found every question that related to the interests or security of that country entertained with indulgence and treated with the most deliberate regard."

Grattan too sat in the united Parliament enjoying a Nestorian dignity and at first, Parliamentary reformer though he was, for a nomination borough. He voted for one of those measures of coercion, the necessity for which unhappily soon made itself felt. The most telling speech of all against union in the Irish Parliament was that of Foster; and Foster too sat in the united Parliament, was reconciled to Pitt, was by him made chancellor of the Irish exchequer, and became a peer of the United Kingdom.

The cause of the union in debate was pleaded by Clare and Castlereagh, inferior to their opponents in eloquence, though Clare was a very formidable speaker as well as a very strong man.

Through the British Parliament the union was carried by overwhelming majorities, though opposed by Grey, who afterwards, as prime minister, became its firm upholder, and by Sheridan, far less sage than brilliant, while Fox refused to attend the debates, throwing out a hint that he preferred something in the way of federation; what, he did not say. In the Irish Parliament at first the measure was defeated. It was carried at length by dead-lift effort on the part of Clare and Castlereagh, who, leading for the government, did unquestionably make unlimited and by no means scrupulous use of such expedients as in those days were more freely employed by governments to push vital measures through the House. That such expedients should have prevailed is to be deplored as a stain on the origin of the union. At the same time it proves the rottenness of the assembly then on trial for its life. Nor should it be forgotten that on the side of opposition to the union were arrayed purely local and personal interests not more respectable in themselves than were the methods by which their resistance was overcome.

Let Irish patriots, when they bewail the extinction of the independent Parliament of Ireland, remember that its last days had been marked by eager support of the most ruthless and sanguinary measures of repression.

No serious exception appears to have been taken to the political bargain which gave Ireland one hundred representatives in the House of Commons and thirty-two representatives, including four bishops sitting by rotation, in the House of Lords. The party system has never been constitutionally recognized, and it was not observed that the representative peers, elected by their own order, would always be Tory, to the total exclusion of the other party. About the fiscal bargain questions are raised. These affect not the political issue.

Viceroyalty, with Castle executive, was retained. This may be said to be a relic of dependence. But the need of a separate administration unfortunately has never ceased. When, in 1850, it was moved to abolish the lord-lieutenancy, Ireland protested, and in deference to her veto the measure was withdrawn. Ireland retained her separate judiciary and for some time her separate department of finance.

It was in regard to the religious question that the union was for the time a failure. Pitt kept his word. He proposed Catholic emancipation to his cabinet and pressed it on the king. He was foiled by the rogue and sycophant Wedderburn, who for his personal ends played on the king's morbid conscience and was aided in his work by the influence of two archbishops, through whom a state church once more rendered its political service to the nation. Pitt paid the debt of honour by resignation. It is said that if he had persevered he would have prevailed, and the king would have submitted, as he did in other cases, such as the acknowledgment of American independence, the dismissal of Thurlow, the permission to Lord Malmesbury to treat with France, the recall of the Duke of York, and the admission of Fox to the government. But not one of these was a case of religious conscience, nor in one of them had the king a great body of national sentiment on his side, as he had, and knew that he had, in his resistance to Catholic emancipation. He afterwards turned out the Grenville ministry, which proposed to admit Catholics to military command, and in so doing was manifestly sustained by the nation. After all, Pitt must have known best what could be done with the king. That his resignation was less of a sacrifice, because he thus escaped the necessity of treating for peace with France, is conjecture, and does not affect the actual propriety of his course. The king having in consequence of the excitement been threatened with a recurrence of his malady, Pitt waived the Catholic question for the king's lifetime, and, when called by the extreme need of the country, returned to power on that understanding. He would have done little good, and not have gratified the nation by driving the king mad and transferring the government in the midst of the great war to the Prince of Wales as Regent and the revellers of Carlton House. In criticising the action of public men at this period, we must always bear in mind the overmastering exigencies of the war. Pitt, though he waived his principle on the subject of Catholic emancipation, never renounced it. It passed to his pupil Canning, and within a generation prevailed.

The only concession made at this time to the Catholics was the endowment of Maynooth as a seminary for the Catholic priesthood of Ireland, cut off from the seminaries of the continent by the war.

Since the union, there has been much that was deplorable in the state of Ireland and in the relations of the two islands, the main source of which, however, as will presently appear, was not political. There has been a hateful series of coercion acts. But there have been no Tudor hostings; there has been no 1641; no 1689; no 1798. No fleet of an invader has anchored in Bantry Bay. Belfast, once the seed-plot of revolution, has prospered and been content. Two years afterwards revolution flamed up again for a moment in the abortive rising of Emmet. Then it died down, to break forth seriously, at least as civil war, no more.

The union must be taken to have been a union in the full sense of the term, putting an end to separate identity, not merely a standing contract between two parties, each of which retained the right of enforcing the contract against the other. On this understanding Parliament has acted, and is likely again to act in the case of the representation, as well as in the disestablishment of the Irish Church. The United Kingdom cannot be hide-bound forever by the terms which, necessarily having reference to the circumstances of its formation, must, like those circumstances, have been deemed liable to change.

It is unfortunate that no common name for the united nationality could be found. "British" excludes the Irish, "English" both the Irish and the Scotch, and separatist sentiment is fostered by the retention of the old national name.

Victory over the French Revolution and Napoleon was accompanied by an ascendancy of Toryism, which kept Liverpool at the head of the government for fourteen years. In this both islands fared alike. But the Cabinet was divided on the subject of Catholic emancipation. Plunket, still a Liberal though now a Unionist, showed his power as a debater in the Catholic cause. Castlereagh and Canning were on the Liberal side. Emancipation was carried in the Commons, thrown out in the lords, while old Eldon drank to the thirty-nine peers who had saved the Thirty-nine Articles, little thinking how soon he was to be smitten in the house of his friends. On Liverpool's death there were a few months of Canning and a brief interlude of Goodrich. Then power reverted to the Tory and anti-Catholic section of the Liverpool combination, at the head of which were Wellington and Peel. Peel, in whom hereditary Toryism was combined with natural openness of mind and practical sagacity, as well as with supreme skill in administration, seemed specially sent to carry England safely by the bridge of Conservatism over the gulf between the old era and the new. He had been one of the anti-Catholic section of the Liverpool government, and in that character had been elected to Parliament by the clerical and then Protestant University of Oxford. But he had administered Ireland for six years; had seen the state of things there; had been impressed and shown symptoms of a change of sentiment. He dealt liberally with Catholics in the matter of patronage. He and Wellington now acquiesced in the relief of the Dissenters by the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts. Probably they were hesitating on the brink of Catholic emancipation when they were impelled by a new force. The Catholic cause had found for itself a first-rate leader, organizer, and orator, Daniel O'Connell.

XIII

Daniel O'Connell, whose figure fills the next page in Irish history, was a Dublin barrister who, having gained a unique reputation as a skilful or more than skilful winner of verdicts, passed from the forensic to the political field. He was of pure Irish blood, Irish in physiognomy, typically Irish in character. Nature had endowed him with all the gifts of a popular leader, bodily as well as mental; for he had a voice of unrivalled power and compass as well as extraordinary tact in dealing with the masses and skill in the conduct of agitation. His oratory was such as never failed to tell with his Irish audience, while its violent exaggeration, its disregard of truth and offensiveness of expression too often excited the just resentment of those whom he assailed and repelled all moderate and right-minded men. At the same time he knew how to play the courtier, as he showed when George IV. visited Ireland. He entered public life without the blessing of the veteran Grattan, who accused him of setting afloat the bad passions of the people, venting calumny against Great Britain, and making politics a trade. That his motives were mixed is probable. But of his Irish patriotism there could be no doubt. O'Connell was a most devout Catholic, enjoyed the hearty confidence of the priesthood, and was able to make full use of its influence in calling out and marshalling the people. He thus opened a new era in the history of Irish agitation. In return, he supported the priesthood in its extreme pretensions; notably in defeating a proposal for the admission of Catholics to political power subject to securities for the loyalty of their Church which conflicted with high priestly pretensions, though it had been favourably entertained at Rome. It was on this point that he and Grattan broke. O'Connell, with the aid of his priestly fuglemen, formed a great Catholic association to overawe the government. On the other side, the Orangemen, now heartily Unionist, rushed to arms. A fierce conflict ensued in Ireland, with some danger to the peace. In the course of it the Duke of York, heir presumptive to the Crown, electrified the country and filled the heart of Eldon and true blue Protestantism with joy by a solemn declaration that if he became king he would veto Catholic emancipation. After trying his power by carrying some elections, O'Connell determined to bring the conflict to a head by himself standing for Parliament in defiance of the law by which, as a Catholic, he was excluded. He carried his election for Clare against the candidate of the gentry by the votes of the Catholic peasantry, the forty-shilling freeholders; the influence of the Church with its sacraments being openly employed in his support. Peel and Wellington now gave way and carried the admission of the Catholics to Parliament, only tempering the shock to their Tory supporters by the abolition of the forty-shilling freehold; no great blow to liberty, since the only question was whether the forty-shilling freeholder should be the tool of the landlord or of the priest. The refusal to O'Connell of the rank of king's counsel, to which he had become eligible, was defended as another sop to the Tories; but it really was a mark of resentment, very unwise as well as undignified, though partly excused by the offensiveness of O'Connell's bearing and language. It may have been unwillingness to confess change of opinion that led Wellington and Peel to ascribe the concession of Catholic emancipation to fear of civil war. O'Connell could not have put into the field any force capable of making head against the forces of the government, Ulster, the Orangemen, and the Irish gentry. He was himself utterly unwarlike, and there was no foreign power to come to his aid. The measure was a concession of right demanded not only by the Irish Catholics themselves, but by a large party in England which included the best intelligence of the country and the most powerful organs of the press, without the help of which it could not have been carried. Unhappily it was made to appear as a concession of fear.

O'Connell's victory made him the idol and the master of Catholic Ireland. A large revenue, called his "rent," was thenceforth raised for him by annual subscription. On this his enemies did not fail to reflect. He defended it as the necessary compensation for the sacrifice of a large professional income to the service of the country. At his ancestral mansion of Darrynane, on the wild, thoroughly Celtic, and Erse-speaking coast of Kerry, the "Liberator" held a rustic court profusely hospitable, amidst a circle of devoted adherents, with an open table at which as many as thirty guests were sometimes seated; thus presenting probably the nearest possible counterpart of the head of a great sept in the tribal days. To Darrynane a pilgrimage was made by Montalembert, who fondly hoped that he had found in its master that union of devotion to the Church with liberty which was the ideal of the liberal Catholic school.

Would Catholic emancipation pacify Ireland? Its authors expected that it would. Even Macaulay appears to think that if the popular religion of Ireland had been treated at the union as the popular religion of Scotland was treated, all in Ireland, as in Scotland, might have been well. The result was disappointing. The Irish cotter had voted and shouted for Catholic emancipation at the bidding of the priests and the platform; but what he wanted and hoped to get by a revolution of any kind was, not so much political or religious change, as more oats and potatoes. His real grievances were hunger and nakedness. To afford those myriads a treacherous food, the behest of nature had been too much disregarded; lands destined for pasture had been turned into potato and oat plots. The millions, reduced to an animal existence, had gone on multiplying with animal recklessness. The increase was greater since rebellion and devastation were at an end. In this sense alone the consequences of the union may be said to have been evil. The priest enjoined marriage on moral grounds, perhaps not without an eye to fees. Between 1801 and 1841 population increased by three millions. More than ever, the homes were filthy hovels shared with swine, the beds litters of dirty straw, the dresses rags, the food the potato, while there was frequent dearth and sometimes famine. Eviction increased, since, the forty-shilling freehold franchise having been abolished, the landlord cared no longer to multiply holdings for the sake of votes. The land system, with its tiers of middlemen, was as cruel as ever. Tithe, the most odious of all imposts, was still collected in the most odious manner. As a consequence, peasant Ireland was still the scene of a vast agrarian war waged by a starving people against the landlord and the tithe-proctor. Arson, murder, carding and mutilation of middlemen and tithe-proctors were rife. Victims leaping from the windows of their burning houses were caught on pitchforks. The nation was undergoing a baptism of lawlessness and savagery. All the peasants were in the league of crime and screened the assassin. Law was powerless. Prosecution was hopeless. Murder was committed in open day and before a number of witnesses, all of whom, if brought into court, would perjure themselves in the common cause. A deep impression had been made upon Peel by the horrors of the agrarian war. He had been particularly moved by a case showing the transcendent height which social passion had attained. A party of Whiteboys entered a house in which there were the man whom they came to murder, his wife, and their little girl. The man was in a room on the ground floor. His wife and their little girl were in a room above, with a closet, through a hole in the door of which the room could be seen. The woman heard the Whiteboys enter and knew their errand. She put the child into the closet, saying to her, "They are murdering your father below, then they will come up and murder me. Mind you look well at them and swear to them when you see them in court." The child obeyed. She looked on while her mother was murdered. She swore to the murderers in court, and they were hanged upon her evidence.

The evil had reached such a height that society in Ireland was almost on the point of dissolution. Ordinary coercion acts, of which there had been a series, failed and the Liberal government of Grey was compelled to have recourse to martial law.