the imperial country. But her position was worse than that of the
colonies, in which commercial restrictions generally were loosely
enforced, and which, when strict enforcement was attempted by Grenville,
rose in arms. The colonies, moreover, were regarded with pride and
affection. Popish Ireland was regarded with contempt and hatred.
The lawful trade in wool with foreign countries England had suppressed.
Its place was partly taken by a smuggling trade, for which the inlets of
the Irish coast afforded the best of havens, and which had the people
everywhere for confederates. Thus, in every line, religious, social,
educational, and commercial, the Irishman found the law his inveterate
enemy. Could he fail to be an inveterate enemy of the law?
Cut off from manufactures and from trade, the people were thrown for
subsistence wholly on the land, and land for the most part better suited
for pasture than for tillage. For the land they competed with the
eagerness of despair, undertaking to pay for their little lots rents which
left them and their families less than a bare subsistence. On such a scene
of misery as the abodes of the Irish cotters the sun has rarely looked
down. Their homes were the most miserable hovels, chimneyless, filthy. Of
decent clothing they were destitute. Their food was the potato; sometimes
they bled their cattle and mixed the blood with sorrel. The old and sick
were everywhere dying by cold and hunger, and rotting amidst filth and
vermin. When the potato failed, as it often did, came famine, with disease
in its train. Want and misery were in every face; the roads were spread
with dead and dying; there were sometimes none to bear the dead to the
grave and they were buried in the fields and ditches where they perished.
Fluxes and malignant fevers followed, laying whole villages waste. "I have
seen," says a witness, "the labourer endeavouring to work at his spade,
but fainting for want of food, and forced to omit it. I have seen the
helpless orphan exposed on the dunghill, and none to take him in for fear
of infection. And I have seen the hungry infant sucking at the breast of
the already expired parent."[2] There was an enormous amount of vagrancy
and mendicity, as there was in Scotland before the union. This was under
the government of the first of free nations, and in the era of Newton,
Addison, and Pope.
Reduced to living like beasts, the people multiplied their kind with
animal recklessness. The result was fatal overpopulation, the pressure of
which, aggravated by occasional failures of the treacherous potato, could
be relieved only by the tragic remedy of emigration on an immense scale.
Of the landowners, who might have had compassion on their serfs, many were
absentees; residence in Ireland, especially when agrarian war began, being
hardly pleasant. Their place was taken by the middleman, through whose
ruthless agency they extorted their rents and who frequently sublet,
sometimes even three or four deep, so that the cotter groaned under a
hierarchy of extortion. From the ranks of the middlemen were partly drawn
the upstart gentry, or squireens, a roistering, debauched, drinking, and
duelling crew, whose tyrannical insolence scandalized Arthur Young,
ruling with the horse-whip a peasantry cowering under the lash and
hopeless of redress by the law. The peasantry still largely spoke Erse,
another badge of their social inferiority, and a further barrier between
them and the ruling class.
To the extortion of the middleman was added that, even more hated, of the
tithe proctor. The Protectorate had at all events relieved Ireland of the
Anglican State Church. That incubus the monarchy reimposed, and the
peasant was compelled out of the miserable produce of his potato field or
patch of oats, besides the exorbitant rent, not only to provide for his
own priest, but to pay tithe to a clergy whose mission was to extirpate
the peasant's religion. The Anglican bishoprics were rich. The rectories
for the most part were miserably poor, so that pluralism might be
necessary to make an income. But pluralism of the most scandalous kind
also prevailed, and we have a dean holding two groups of livings, fourteen
livings in all, one group twelve miles away from the other. Some of the
clergy, on the plea that there were no glebe houses for them, were drawing
their tithes in the pump room and at the card tables of Bath. Bishops were
sometimes non-resident as well as scandalously secular and inert. Most of
them were English, and appointed to keep up the English interest. There
were bright exceptions, such as Bolter, King, above all Berkeley, but they
were few. Swift could say of Irish bishops that government no doubt
appointed good men, but they were always murdered on Hounslow Heath by the
highwaymen, who took their credentials, personated them, and were
installed in their place. There have been worse institutions than the
State Church of Ireland; there was never a greater scandal. Even if
Anglicanism had been less alien to the Irish heart, what chance would such
missionaries as these have had against the devoted emissaries of Rome?
What must have been the feelings of the Irish peasant when of his crop of
potatoes, all too scanty for him and his children, the tithe proctor came
to claim a tenth part in the name of a Christian minister?
There were prelates of a better stamp who sought to do well by the people.
Under their auspices were set up the chartered schools, to give poor Irish
children an industrial education. But the work of charity was marred by
bigotry. The children were taken from their Catholic parents and forcibly
brought up as Protestants, whereby the heart of the Catholic parent was
filled with anguish, and more bitter offence, it seems, was given than by
any other kind of repression. The schools at last became a sink of abuse,
inhumanity, and corruption.
Rural Ireland was a recruiting ground for the armies of the Continent. On
some lonely hillside the recruiting agent reviewed the youth of the
neighbourhood, picked out the strong, the flower of the population, and
turned back the feeble to their miserable homes.
If anything was to be done for the extension of Protestantism, union among
the Protestant minority was indispensable, and the enthusiasm of the
Calvinist, sombre as it was, might have had its attractions for the Celt,
as it had for the Celts of the Scottish Highlands, among whom it gave
birth to the hill preachers, and for those of Wales with whom Calvinistic
Methodism prevailed. But the bishops of the State Church hated the
Presbyterian even more bitterly than they hated the Catholic. After their
brief and hollow alliance with the Nonconformists, when their own interest
was threatened, they had speedily relapsed into High Anglicanism, and
under the not unsuitable leadership of the infidel Bolingbroke had taken
to persecuting Nonconformity in England. They extended the persecution to
Ireland, excluding by the Sacramental Test the defenders of Derry from
municipal office and military service. They imported the Schism Act,
forbidding Nonconformists to open schools. They threatened interference
with Presbyterian worship, Ireland having no Toleration Act. They disputed
the validity of Presbyterian marriage. They thus set flowing a stream of
Presbyterian emigration from the north of Ireland to the American
colonies. The stream was afterwards swelled by the rapacity of Lord
Donegal and other landed proprietors of Ulster, who, being owners of great
estates, when the leases of their tenants ran out, instead of renewing
them to the tenant, put them up to the highest bidder. Starving Catholics,
in the desperate competition for land, outbidding the Protestants, a
number of Protestant families were driven from their homes. The
consequence was, first, aggressive insurrection under the names of the
Heart of Oak Boys and the Steel Boys, ultimately emigration to America.
Thus the Church and the landlord between them were charging the mine of
American revolution.
X
Presently, too, inexorable nature made her voice heard, proclaiming that
Ireland, with its rich pastures and watery skies, was in the main not an
arable but a grazing country. There was a good market for meat.
Speculators began buying up land and throwing it into large grazing farms.
The cotter was ejected and driven to the bogs and mountains. This
overtaxed even a cotter's submission, and there broke out an agrarian war,
the most deadly perhaps in history, the canker and disgrace of British
government, protracted in varying phases and with fluctuating intensity
almost from that day to this. Companies of men, wearing white shirts over
their clothes, and thence afterwards called Whiteboys, harried the grazing
farms by night, and the stillness of the night air was broken by the
bellowings and moanings of hamstrung cattle.
Irish outrage has been essentially agrarian, rather than religious. The
division of churches coincided generally with the social division. The
middleman was necessarily Protestant, since, under the penal law, no
Catholic could acquire a beneficial lease; and the antagonism of religion
and language emphasized and embittered that of class and interest. But a
Catholic generally suffered like a Protestant if he provoked the wrath of
the people. A Protestant settling in a Catholic district, if he was in any
way obnoxious, was especially liable to maltreatment. Later on there was a
hideous instance of this in the case of a Protestant schoolmaster settling
and opening his school in a Catholic district. He and his family were
mangled with horrible cruelty.
Nor can it be said that the landlords as a class were the objects of
hatred and outrage apart from the agrarian quarrel. A landlord who resided
and did not oppress his tenantry, especially if he were affable, jovial,
and hospitable, was generally the object of a clannish affection, though
his mansion might be a "Castle Rack-rent" and his serious duties might be
very indifferently performed.
The commercial restrictions and the Navigation Acts were fatal to the
prosperity of the whole island, while the penal inability of the Catholics
to invest could not fail to lower the value of land. This would be felt
by the conquering as well as by the conquered race and sect. Scotland, cut
off by the repeal of Cromwell's union from trade with England and the
dependencies, had so suffered commercially and industrially that she
swarmed with vagrants, and the ardent patriot, Fletcher of Saltoun,
proposed slavery as a remedy for the evil. The union, opening free trade
with England, brought commercial prosperity in its train. The English in
Ireland stretched out their hands to the British government for a union
like that which was being made with Scotland, and were coldly repelled. To
English protectionism the chief blame for the refusal no doubt is due. But
unwillingness to incorporate a large Catholic population may also have
played its part. Let the cause have been what it may, there is hardly
anything in the records of British statesmanship more deplorable than this
refusal of union to Ireland. Protectionism here again pleads the excuse of
universal delusion, and in no case is the excuse more needed.
Moreover, the Protestants of Ireland, British in blood and, as lords over
a subject race in their own country, more than British in pride, were
denied the enjoyment of British freedom. A Parliament they had; but that
Parliament could legislate only by grace of the English council and of a
council named by the lord lieutenant in Ireland. Its control even of money
bills was not recognized, while the Crown had a hereditary revenue which
made it almost independent of Parliamentary grants. In the Upper House,
owing to the large absenteeism of lay lords, the bench of bishops,
nominees of the Crown and agents of the British interest, largely held
sway. Of the three hundred seats in the House of Commons more than half
were filled by nominees of the patrons of pocket boroughs, which the Crown
had been always creating at its will, and the nominations were sold like
common merchandise. The House, moreover, swarmed with placemen and
pensioners. The Parliament was elected for a whole reign, so as to be
scarcely responsible even to such a constituency as it had. The Irish
Parliament of George II. continued for thirty-three years. There was a
session only in every other year. The English House of Lords arrogated to
itself the jurisdiction of final appeal. The judges held only during
pleasure. There was no annual Mutiny Act. There was no Habeas Corpus.
There were large sinecures, instruments of corruption in the hands of the
government. The pension list, swollen beyond bounds, was a privy fund for
kings' mistresses and for jobs too dirty for the English list. The high
appointments, ecclesiastical, administrative, and judicial, were treated
as patronage by the English government and generally reserved for
Englishmen. The face of their king the Irish never saw. The viceroy
resided only during a small part of his term, and his place was filled in
his absence by lords justices who were often bishops, English themselves,
and bent above all things on securing the ascendancy of the English
interest. Three archbishops in succession practically ruled Ireland.
Presbyterians and other Protestant Dissenters, victims of episcopal
intolerance, had crying wrongs of their own.
Union with England had been refused, and the protection of England being
no longer so manifestly indispensable to her garrison in Ireland as it had
been, a craving for self-government took its place. Molyneux, and after
him Lucas, alarmed and exasperated authority by writing in favour of the
independence of the Irish Parliament. But a far more potent artificer of
discord appeared in Swift, who, balked of preferment in England by the
wreck of his political party, exiled to a native land which he abhorred,
was eating his heart, and ripe for mischief, especially for any mischief
which could avenge him on the Whig government, above all on Walpole, its
chief, by whom it seems the path of this model Christian and pure writer
to a bishopric had been crossed. That a feeling of justice and of pity for
the sufferings of the Irish people, which Swift has vividly described, had
their place in his heart beside malice and vengeance, may be true; though
his sense of justice was not strong enough to prevent him, profane and
really sceptical as he was, from vehemently upholding the Penal Code and
the Sacramental Test; while his pity for the people led to no
philanthropic effort of a practical kind, and was not very tenderly
expressed in his satirical suggestion that they should appease their
hunger by eating their babies. His proposal to exclude English goods would
gratify his malice as well as his patriotism, and had it been adopted
would probably have led to a large increase of smuggling.
One of the grievances of Ireland was that there was no Irish mint. A new
copper coinage was needed. The contract was given by the English
government to the king's mistress, and by her sold to Wood, a respectable
manufacturer. As the coinage was approved by Sir Isaac Newton, then master
of the mint, it can hardly have been very bad. But Irish jealousy cast
suspicion upon its character. Then rose a storm of popular fury, improved
by Swift into a whirlwind on which he rode in his glory. Swift's "Drapier
Letters" are monuments of his genius for pamphleteering, his intense
malice, and his freedom from the restraints of truth. They produced an
immense effect, made him the idol of Dublin for the rest of his days, and
forced Walpole to give way and call in the halfpence. Their author did not
mention among the evils of an English connection that he and the members
of his State Church were enabled by the support of the British power to
set their feet upon the necks of four-fifths of the Irish people and to
wring from the starving Catholic the income of the dean of St. Patrick.
The letters ranged far beyond the immediate occasion, and appealed
strongly to the growing desire of independence, which we may be pretty
sure that Swift, had he been nominated by Bolingbroke to an English
bishopric, would have fiercely opposed. The Parliament to which his
revolution would have consigned Ireland is described by himself as a den
of thieves of which he devoutly desired the extirpation.
Presently there arose a patriot party in the Irish Parliament. It found a
leader in Flood, a man of solid ability and powerful in debate, while the
purity of his patriotism was not so clear. At Flood's side, or rather
perhaps, as the event proved, on his flank, there presently arose the far
more illustrious Grattan, whose purity and patriotism were unquestionable,
whose oratory was brilliant, his admirers thought divine. The objects
sought by the patriots were reduction of the duration of Parliaments,
control of money bills, an annual Mutiny Bill, Habeas Corpus, tenure of
the judges during life or good behaviour, reduction of the pension list,
exclusion of placemen and pensioners from the House of Commons, taxation
of the rents of absentees. On the first and most important point they
succeeded through a bargain with the Crown on the amount of the military
force. The duration of Parliament was cut down to eight years, that number
being preferred to seven, because it was only in alternate years that
Parliament sat. This was a very important change. War, with imperfect
success, was waged on the question of money bills. On the other points
reform made no way, the English government clinging obstinately to all its
powers and using its veto, while the lord lieutenant was able to avert a
crash by buying up a majority in the Irish Parliament. Taxation of the
rents of absentees, a measure very popular and much pressed, was vetoed
by the English government. The protest of the absentees against it was
evidently the work of Burke, whose patron, Lord Rockingham, had an estate
in Ireland. Burke argued that the double land-ownership was a link of
union between the two countries; which it might have been if the residence
as well as the proprietorship had been shared. The advocates of the tax
might have cited the original character of land grants to which feudal
service was annexed and which were forfeited by the failure of absentees
to perform it. Chatham supported the tax. For a moment, unhappily for a
moment only, his thoughts were turned to Ireland. A far greater service he
would have rendered his country by pacifying Ireland as he pacified the
Highlands than by his conquest of Canada, of which the loss of the
American colonies was the result. In the background there was a growing
sentiment in favour of independence, the flag of which was by Grattan
presently unfurled.
It was not in Ireland as it was in England, where the regular party system
prevailed and the minority changed with the majority in Parliament. The
Castle called to the council whom it pleased, without regard to the
existence of a political connection among them, though it was, of course,
under the necessity of calling those who could bring it support at the
time. The party tie was accordingly very loose and connections were
shifting. Flood had no scruple in providing for himself, apart from his
friends, by acceptance of a rich sinecure under the government. Hely
Hutchinson, a free lance, could use his personal influence in forcing the
government to make him provost of Trinity College.
For a time the Castle put itself into the hands of a junto of great lords
and owners of Parliamentary boroughs, who undertook to supply it with a
majority at the price of patronage and power. To break this ring and
restore the free action of government, an effort was made by the Lord
Lieutenant Townshend. But Townshend's boisterous energy, successful for a
time, in the end failed, and the Castle fell back into the routine of
government by intrigue and corruption, aided by viceregal dinners and
balls.
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.