allowed to grant them, would, Grattan thought, have averted the crisis.
They might have staved it off, but it would probably have come in another
form. That the new power thus called into being would be as loyal as
Grattan himself to British connection was a highly precarious assumption.
The course of the French Revolution would have not been stayed, nor would
the wild hopes which it excited have been extinguished. The aspirations of
Tom Paine's disciples at Belfast would not have ceased. The cotter's
hunger would not have been appeased nor would he have been reconciled to
the payment of tithe and Church cess. The blind hatred of British
connection as the supposed source of all evil to Ireland would have
continued to work. The State Church would at once have been attacked. The
Castle government, bereft of its two supports, nomination boroughs and
patronage, would inevitably have lost its hold. Chaos would then have
come. Material order might have been preserved by a sufficient military
force. Otherwise there was apparently nothing for it but union.
In Presbyterian Belfast, hatred of the State Church and the English
government which supported it, bred by Episcopal intolerance, had
developed, especially among the young men, into rationalism and acceptance
of the doctrines, both religious and political, of Tom Paine. The
connection of sympathy with the exiles in America had been kept up, and
the spirit of the American was combined with that of the French
Revolution. Thus was formed the circle of United Irishmen. The professed
aim of this association, perhaps originally its real aim, was only the
reform of Parliament. But it soon became revolutionary, aiming at
independence of England and the foundation of an Irish republic, to be
brought about by the aid of revolutionary France. Its soul was Wolfe Tone,
a young man of talent, literary and practical, and of generous instincts,
wild, dissipated, recklessly adventurous, burning with hatred of England.
Other leading members of the circle were Jackson and Emmett. Most of the
set were plebeian. But there was one recruit from the aristocracy, Lord
Edward Fitzgerald, son of the Duke of Leinster, fired, like Lafayette,
with the enthusiasm of liberty, but distinguished and made an object of
sentimental interest only by his rank and by his tragical end.
The outbreak was now imminent. Grattan, with his few steadfast adherents,
seceded from Parliament, where he had better have stayed to moderate as
far as he could the fury of repression. This he owed to the country on
which he had imposed the constitution of 1782, a system fraught, as he
might have seen, with disruption and capable of being worked only as it
had been worked, by Castle influence. The bond of loyalty to England,
which was strong in his own breast, he assumed to be general. Neither he
nor, with reverence be it said, Burke, excellent as the general principles
of both might be, correctly read the situation, which was one of a very
special kind. Burke's letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe on the subject of
religious emancipation is accounted one of the greatest of his works. But
Fitzgibbon might with reason have replied to it that of the real Irish
problem it offered no practical solution. It did not show how a national
Parliament of Ireland, with a great Catholic majority, and uncontrolled by
Castle patronage and influence, to which reform would have put an end,
could be kept in secure harmony with the Parliament of Great Britain.
Burke, however, now and then, glances timidly at the policy of union.
Grattan could think of nothing but his two Parliaments linked by eternal
affection. After Grattan's secession, the oligarchy closed its ranks, and
the Parliament thenceforth went thoroughly with the government, or even
beyond it, in the policy of repression.
The Castle understood its danger. In Irish conspiracies the informer is
never lacking. Besides, there were Catholics, who though patriots, wishing
to avert civil war, communicated with the government, and furnished it
with information for that purpose. Among these may fairly be numbered
Arthur O'Leary, on whose connection with the government and acceptance of
a small pension from it, lately revealed, prejudice pounces as a proof
that the best reputed and most eminent of Irish Liberals was a rogue.
Arthur O'Leary wrote well, and the spirit of his writings was thoroughly
liberal as well as loyal. Nothing seems to have been expected of him
beyond general information of Catholic tendencies and movements such as
one who desired to avert civil war might honestly give. By its secret
intelligence the government was enabled at a critical moment to seize some
of the leaders of the conspiracy, while Lord Edward Fitzgerald met his
death in resisting arrest.
The fire, smouldering everywhere, burst into a flame in Armagh, a
Protestant district into which Catholics had intruded by outbidding
Protestant holders of farms whose leases had expired. The Protestants,
banding together under the name of Peep o'Day Boys, proceeded to oust the
intruders, burning some of their houses. The Catholics combined for mutual
protection under the name of Defenders. Outrages were committed on both
sides. In a pitched battle, on a small scale, called the battle of the
Diamond, the Catholics were worsted and a number of them were killed. Many
Catholics were driven from their homes, and the fugitives spread through
the country the belief that the Protestants were bent on extermination.
The United Irishmen, disciples of Tom Paine, cared nothing for the
quarrels of sects. But disaffection of any kind was grist to their
revolutionary mill. They coalesced with Defenderism, and by superior
intelligence got control of the movement, which they organized as an
expectant army of revolution. Their task was made easy by the habits of
conspiracy formed among the peasantry in the agrarian war. There were
secret oaths, passwords, military gradations of command. There were even
reviews under pretence of digging the potatoes of patriots who were in
prison. Everything was ready for a rising as soon as French succour should
appear. All the blacksmiths were making pike-heads, the young trees were
being everywhere cut down for the shafts. Muskets in plenty would come
with the auxiliary army from France. Wolfe Tone had visited Paris, of
which in its revolutionary phase he gives a lively picture, and received a
promise of aid; Hoche, with whom he had an interview, being eager for the
enterprise.
Among the people generally the rebellion was agrarian rather than
religious, religious only as the Catholic peasantry believed that they saw
in Protestantism a badge of general enmity. But that belief made the war
between the sects internecine. It does not appear that any but a few of
the lowest and coarsest of the priesthood took an active part in the
rebellion. The order, as a whole, could hardly look with pleasure for the
conquest of Ireland by an atheist revolution. The French, in fact, had
they become masters of Ireland for a time, would probably in the end have
found themselves there, as in Spain, confronted by a hostile priesthood
carrying with it the people.
In the extremity of danger, surrounded by gathering rebellion, Castle
government had now to strike or fall. It struck, practically proclaiming
martial law. But it was without the only safe means of military
repression. Of regular soldiers it had few. Those few behaved well. Some
of them earned by their conduct the blessings of the people. But in the
main repression had to be entrusted to yeomanry and fencibles, little
controlled by discipline, and infected, as a militia is always apt to be,
and as in this case they were in an extreme degree, by the passions of the
hour. These men, sent forth to disarm the people, in their search for
concealed arms burned, slew, pitch-capped, flogged without stint or mercy,
and turned a great district of the north and midland into a hell. The
people retaliated with equal atrocity where they had the power. A large
number of suspects were arbitrarily shipped on board the fleet, where it
was believed they helped by their infection to beget the mutiny at the
Nore. Lord Moira, a patriot Irish nobleman, protested vehemently in the
House of Lords, but his exaggeration and partiality broke the force of his
appeal. To control the excesses of repression and restore military
discipline, the gallant Abercrombie was put in command; but he lost his
self-control, reviled the troops in an imprudent manifesto, broke with the
government, and left matters worse than they had been before.
In Ulster, fraternities of strong Protestants, which had existed
informally since 1689, were now formally organized as Orange Lodges. They
embodied an intensely sectarian feeling and committed their share of
outrages, but they lent the government powerful aid.
Conspicuous among the ruthless agents of repression was the head of the
Beresfords, whose riding-house at Dublin was a daily scene of torture.
Conspicuous also was Judkin Fitzgerald, the field of whose operations was
Tipperary. Fitzgerald's apologists plead that his policy was successful.
It might be so, but the cause of public order does not gain in the end by
outraging that law of natural justice on respect for which public order
must ultimately depend. Fitzgerald, savagely flogging a man on whom he had
found a note in the French language, which not knowing French himself he
could not read, was presently assured by one who could read the note that
it was perfectly harmless. He nevertheless continued the torture of the
lash till the victim nearly expired. Such a case seems to defy apology.
Fitzgerald, however, was not only protected from question by an Act of
Indemnity, but rewarded with a title. On both sides all hearts were fired
with the satanic madness of civil war.
French aid had been promised. To the unspeakable discredit of the British
admiralty, it came. An expedition which had long been in preparation under
Hoche was allowed to sail from Brest and unopposed to make the coast of
Ireland at Bantry Bay. A storm which prevented a landing, the bad
seamanship of the French, whose naval service had been shattered by the
revolution, and the separation of the frigate which had the general on
board from the rest of the fleet, saved Ireland from temporary conquest
and Great Britain from the consequences of that disaster. It is remarkable
that the peasantry in the neighbourhood of Bantry Bay received the
soldiers of the government well and shared their potatoes with them. Was
this loyalty or fear? Had the French landed, would the potatoes have been
still more hospitably shared? An expedition afterwards fitted out in
Holland, now a vassal of France, at the very crisis of the mutiny at the
Nore, was weatherbound till the mutiny was over and was then crushed by
Duncan at Camperdown. A small French force under Humbert afterwards
landed, and at Castlebar put the militia to shameful flight. But it was
presently surrounded by superior numbers and forced to surrender. There
were still some faint demonstrations, in one of which the arch-enemy of
England, Wolfe Tone, met his doom. He imprudently betrayed his identity to
his captors. His French commission availed him not. He escaped the gallows
by suicide. He was a genuine enthusiast, and he was at all events on one
of the only two practicable lines of action. Separation was the sole
alternative to union. But had Tone got the upper hand, with his fanaticism
and a savage peasantry thirsting for Protestant and English blood at his
back, the political millennium in Ireland, as in France, would have opened
with a reign of terror.
Disappointed of aid from France, the rebellion took the field by itself.
There was a great rising in Wexford, headed by Father Murphy, a fighting
priest, a compound of Wat Tyler and John Ball, who gave himself out as a
supernatural personage, and persuaded the people that he could catch
bullets in his hands. The father showed a natural genius for war. His
peasants fought desperately, and the Irish pike proved a formidable weapon
in their hands. The rebels gained one or two successes in the field, and
took the city of Wexford. They perpetrated fiendish cruelties. At
Scullabogue they burned or butchered a barn full of Protestants. At
Wexford they dragged their prisoners to the bridge, stripped them naked,
hoisted them up on the points of their pikes, and threw them into the
river. At Vinegar Hill, a name of ghastly memory, the rebel headquarters,
a batch of Protestants was every day brought out after a mock trial to be
massacred. The people being here under priestly leadership, the character
of a religious crusade was given to their warfare, and every Protestant
was a mark for their murderous fury. On the other hand, Protestants in the
north who at the outset had been revolutionary, seeing the rebellion
assume the character of a Catholic crusade, passed to the side of
government and repression. One or two men of property were forced into
leadership by the rebels; otherwise property was entirely on the side of
the government.
After Scullabogue, Wexford, and Vinegar Hill, there could not fail to be
a terrible outpouring of vengeance. It came in full measure, as we learn
from the correspondence of Cornwallis, a soldier of high distinction and
character, who was sent in place of Camden as viceroy to close the scene.
He is much afraid, he says, that any man in a brown coat who is found
within several miles of the field of action is butchered without
discrimination. The Irish militia, he says, are totally without
discipline, contemptible before the enemy when any serious resistance is
made to them, but ferocious and cruel in the extreme when any poor
wretches either with or without arms come within their power. In short,
murder appears their favourite pastime. The conversation of the principal
persons of the country all tends to encourage the system of blood, and the
conversation even at his own table, where he does all he can to prevent
it, always turns on shooting, burning, hanging. If a priest has been put
to death, the greatest joy is expressed by the whole company. "Who fears
to speak of '98?" said a patriot bard in other days. The answer is, every
one who is not utterly lost to reason and humanity. These militia men, it
is to be borne in mind, were Irish, not English, and their murderous
enmity was the enmity of one section of Ireland to another.
XII
Pitt now resolved on a legislative union of Ireland with England and
Scotland, thus reverting to the policy of the Commonwealth. But union had
been the ideal of Molyneux, and since the revolution of 1782 it had found
many advocates, among them Adam Smith. An Irish government of sectarian
ascendancy and oligarchy combined, controlled, and held in precarious
subordination to the government of Great Britain by intrigue and
corruption, had ended in murderous and ruinous conflict of political
parties, social classes, and religious sects. In its realm people had been
refusing to eat pork because the swine might have fed on human flesh.
Foreign invasion had been invited. It had come, and only by repeated
miracles had Great Britain as well as Ireland been saved in the last
extremity of peril. Nor had that peril ceased. It was much to be deplored
that Pitt could not, like Cromwell and the Council of State, effect the
union by simply calling representatives of Ireland to the Parliament at
Westminster. Situated as Pitt was, he had, as Castlereagh laconically put
it, "to buy the fee simple of Irish corruption." The price he paid was
compensation in money to the owners of pocket boroughs and profuse grants
of peerages. The process was not edifying. Cornwallis, who had come at
once to put an end to havoc and to carry the union, having a strict sense
of honour, might well recoil from his task. Bribery with money has not
been brought home to the government, though in one case at least it has
been brought home to the opposition. From that stain the union is free. A
pretty large sum was needed to tune the press and for campaign expenses.
Pocket boroughs in those days were deemed property, and had been so
treated in Pitt's Reform Bill for England. The compensation paid the
owners of boroughs was not above the market price, and it was paid to the
opponents as well as to the supporters of the union; Lord Downshire, the
most powerful opponent of the union, as it happened, receiving the largest
sum of all. Foster, who made the greatest speech in Parliament against the
union, received seventy-five hundred pounds for his half share of a pocket
borough. In the absence of such compensation the owners of pocket boroughs
and the purchasers of seats for them would have been virtually bribed by
their private interest apart from any political consideration to oppose
the bill. Something was needed to induce a powerful and selfish oligarchy
to part with the field of its ascendancy and its ambition. For that
purpose the lavish creation of peerages was used. It cost the nation
nothing, and titles which had been openly used as bribes were not capable
of much degradation. Pitt is upbraided for not having taken the sense of
the nation by means of a general election. The sense of a nation of which
at least three-quarters were not eligible to Parliament! The sense of the
proprietors of nomination boroughs on the question of depriving them of
their property and its influence! The sense of a nation, the passions of
which had not had time to cool after a furious civil war, a civil war the
ashes of which still fiercely glowed and might by the excitement of a
general election have been fanned again into a flame! It is ever to be
lamented that the thing could not have been done in a simpler and less
questionable way. But it had to be done. Venality was venal, and, its
consent being necessary to the salvation of the state, had to be bought.
The purity of Pitt's motives or of those of his colleagues cannot be
questioned. The idea that he had provoked rebellion to make way for union
is a slander which only political frenzy could fabricate or believe.
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.