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measure was withdrawn.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.
The tide of reform, however, which began to flow in 1830, before it ebbed,
brought to Ireland, besides her share in reform of the Parliamentary
representation, the opening of the municipal councils, which had been
universally close and corrupt, and after Catholic emancipation still
excluded Catholics. It brought commutation of tithe, a measure of immense
value, far too long delayed, which shifted the burden of payment from the
shoulders of the cotter to those of the landlord. It brought a poor law,
cruelly needed in the midst of multiplying evictions. Furthermore, it
brought in 1831-1833 the momentous gift of public education, national and
undenominational, in the inauguration of which the Anglican primate,
Archbishop Whateley, reconciling his advanced liberalism with his
anomalous position, took a leading part. Ireland thus in national
education preceded England by many years. Whateley had fellow-workers in
liberal Catholics, ecclesiastical as well as lay, but the weight of Roman
authority and influence was, as it always has been, and still is, against
free education. The State Church of the minority succeeded in repelling
attack; but it underwent some internal reform, including the suppression
of ten superfluous bishoprics; a sacrilegious act of the state which
helped to give birth to sacerdotal reaction at Oxford. After the abolition
of the tithe-proctor, the State Church had become less odious to the
people. The Castle administration was growing more liberal.
Lords-lieutenant tried to be fair in distribution of patronage. A Liberal
secretary, a man of mark, Drummond, warned the Irish landlords that
property had its duties as well as its rights. Peel, as Irish secretary,
had laid the foundation of the Irish constabulary, that noble force of law
and order which combines independent intelligence with the discipline of
the regular soldier. Drummond rendered a most important service by
completing the institution. The Irish constabulary has naturally in the
main been composed of Protestants. But the Catholic policeman in Ireland
has in a marked way resisted seditious influence and been true to the
government and his duty. The Irishman follows his commander. Attempts to
seduce Irish soldiers from fidelity to the colours seem to have generally
failed.
O'Connell, with his following, helped to carry the Parliamentary Reform
Bill of 1832, which, in fact, could not have been carried without their
vote. He lent a general though not hearty or unwavering support to the
Whig ministry of Grey, which, though it paid him some deference, was too
strong to be under his control. But on the passing of a drastic coercion
bill directed against political as well as agrarian disturbance, there was
an angry rupture, and the Whigs became "base, bloody, and brutal," like
all others who crossed O'Connell's will. O'Connell was not handsomely
treated. His eminence as a lawyer, combined with his influence in Ireland,
entitled him to a high place. But his blustering violence, his unmeasured
vituperation, his venomous abuse of England, and the changefulness of his
moods made him a dangerous ally for any government. Cobden said,
"O'Connell always treated me with friendly attention, but I never shook
hands with him or faced his smile without a feeling of insecurity; and as
for trusting him on any public question where his vanity or passions might
interpose, I should have as soon thought of an alliance with an Ashantee
chief."
The Melbourne and Russell ministry was weak and fain to lean on O'Connell
with his Irish brigade for support and to allow him a voice in
appointments, though it suffered greatly in English eyes by the alliance.
O'Connell shouted with joy when that government was snatched from death
and restored to a feeble existence by the refusal of the queen to change
her bed-chamber women on Peel's demand. But the advent of Peel to power,
with a strong government, filled him with rage and despair. The two men
had quarrelled in Ireland, a challenge had passed between them, and Peel
was the object of O'Connell's bitterest hatred. In principle the new
government was hostile to O'Connell, and its strength placed it wholly
beyond his influence. His power was threatened with extinction. His rent,
moreover, since there had been a lull in agitation, was rapidly falling
off, and he was in pecuniary distress. The last, some think, was not his
least urgent motive for embarking in another agitation. This time it was
for a repeal of the union, of which he had before only thrown out fitful
hints. He now raised the standard of repeal and issued his mandate to the
priesthood to call out the peasantry in that cause. The priesthood
joyfully obeyed. Monster meetings were held and were addressed by
O'Connell in his most violent strain, with ostensible respect for
constitutional methods, but with constant appeals to national hatred and
suggestions of military force. The priests consecrated the meetings and
the sentiments, celebrating Mass on the grounds. It is surely idle to
contend that a priesthood acting thus and having its centre in Rome is
only a Christian ministry, not a power of political disturbance. An
outbreak appeared to be at hand, when the government took direct issue
with the agitator by proclaiming a monster meeting which he had appointed
to be held at Clontarf; a scene suggestive of military force as it had
been the field of the great Irish victory. O'Connell, who, if he was not
pacific, was unwarlike, shrank from the conflict and called off the
meeting. The government followed up the blow by indicting the agitator for
sedition. There was a monster trial at Dublin, in the course of which, to
preserve the Irish character of the scene, the attorney-general challenged
the counsel on the other side to a duel. O'Connell was found guilty, but
the verdict was afterwards quashed on appeal to the House of Lords, for
irregularity in the panel, by the judgment of three Whigs against one Tory
and the independent Brougham, though it had been upheld by seven of the
nine judges to whom the case was referred. O'Connell was set free. But the
spell of his ascendancy had been broken. By shrinking from the appeal to
force he had forfeited the respect of the fighting section of his party.
The Conservative government was invincibly strong. O'Connell's health and
physical force had broken down. Thus ended the great Liberator's career.
He bequeathed his body to Ireland and his heart to Rome. There can be no
question about his devotion to either, whatever motives may have mingled
with his devotion to Ireland. Whether he did more good to the Irish cause
by his patriotism than harm by the passions which he excited and the
enmities he created, is a question about which different opinions have
been formed. His blind attachment to the Church, had he been victorious,
would have put Ireland under the control of a reactionary priesthood.
For some time before his death, O'Connell, by shrinking from force, had
been losing the hearts and the adherence of a party of force on his own
side called "Young Ireland," a set of young men, some highly gifted as
journalists or poets, whose aim was not repeal but national independence,
and who in their organ, _The Nation_, preached rebellion and revelled in
the memory of '98.