AN IRISH PARLIAMENT
1750-1800
The movement of conciliation of its peoples that was shaping a new
Ireland, silent and unrecorded as it was, can only be understood by
the astonishing history of the next fifty years, when the spirit of a
nation rose again triumphant, and lesser passions fell before the love
of country.
The Protestant gentry, who alone had free entry into public life, were
of necessity the chief actors in the recorded story. But in the
awakening country they had to reckon with a rising power in the
Catholic Irish. Dr. Lucas, who in 1741 had begun to stir for reform
and freedom, had stirred not only the English settlers but the native
Irish. Idolised by the Irish people, he raised in his _Citizens'
Journal_ a new national protest. The pamphlet war which
followed--where men argued not only on free trade and government, but
on Ireland itself, on its old and new races, on its Irish barbarism,
said some, its Irish civilisation, said others--spread the idea of a
common history of Ireland in which all its inhabitants were concerned.
In parliament too, though Catholics were shut out, yet men of old
Irish race were to be found--men of Catholic families who had accepted
Protestantism as a means of entering public life, chiefly by way of
the law. They had not, save very rarely, put off their patriotic
ardour with their old religion; of the middle class, they were braver
in their outlook than the small and disheartened Catholic aristocracy.
If their numbers were few their ability was great, and behind them lay
that vast mass of their own people whose blood they shared.
It was an Irishman who first roused the House of Commons to remember
that they had a country of their own and an "Irish interest"--Antony
Malone. This astonishing orator and parliamentarian invented a
patriotic opposition (1753). A great sea in a "storm" men said of him.
Terror was immediately excited at his Irish origin and his national
feeling. Dublin Castle feared that he might mean emancipation from the
English legislature, and in truth the constitutional dependency upon
England was the object upon which Malone's eye was constantly fixed.
He raised again the protest of Molyneux for a free parliament and
constitution. He stirred "the whole nation" for "the last struggle for
Ireland." They and their children would be slaves, he said, if they
yielded to the claim of the government that the English privy council
could alter the money bills sent over by the Irish parliament, or that
the king had the right to apply at his will the surplus funds in the
treasury.
Malone was defeated, but the battle had begun which in thirty years
was to give to Ireland her first hopes of freedom. A fresh current of
thought poured through the House--free trade, free religion, a Habeas
Corpus Act, fewer pensions for Englishmen, a share in law and
government for Irishmen, security for judges, and a parliament elected
every seven years. Successors of Malone appeared in the House of
Commons in 1761--more lawyers, men said, than any one living could
remember, or "than appears in any history in this or any other kingdom
upon earth." They depended, not on confiscation, but on their own
abilities; they owed nothing to government, which gave all the great
posts of the bar to Englishmen. Some freedom of soul was theirs, and
manhood for the long struggle. In 1765 the issue was clearly set. The
English House of Commons which had passed the Stamp Act for the
American colonies, argued that it had the right to tax Ireland without
her consent; and English lawyers laid down the absolute power of
parliament to bind Ireland by its laws. In Ireland Lord Charlemont and
some other peers declared that Ireland was a distinct kingdom, with
its own legislature and executive under the king.
In that same year the patriots demanded that elections should be held
every seven years--the first step in Ireland towards a true
representation, and the first blow to the dominion of an aristocracy.
The English government dealt its counter-stroke. The viceroy was
ordered to reside in Dublin, and by making himself the source of all
favours, the giver of all gratifications, to concentrate political
influence in the English Crown. A system of bribery began beyond all
previous dreams; peerages were made by the score; and the first
national debt of nearly two millions created in less than thirty
years. The landowners who controlled the seats in the Commons were
reminded that "they held by Great Britain everything most dear to
them, their religion, their pre-eminence, their property, their
political power"; that "confiscation is their common title." "The
king's business," as the government understood it, lay in "procuring
the supplies which the English minister thought fit to ask, and
preventing the parliament from examining into the account of previous
years."
Meanwhile misery deepened. In 1778 thirty thousand Irishmen were
seeking their living on the continent, besides the vast numbers flying
to America. "The wretches that remained had scarcely the appearance of
human creatures." English exports to Ireland sank by half-a-million,
and England instead of receiving money had to send L50,000 for the
payment of troops there. Other dangers had arisen. George Washington
was made commander-in-chief of the forces for the American war in
1775, and in 1778 France recognised American independence. The shores
of Ireland lay open to attack: the country was drained of troops.
Bands of volunteers were formed for its protection, Protestant troops
led by landlords and gentry. In a year 40,000 volunteers were enrolled
(1779). Ireland was no longer unarmed. What was even more important,
she was no longer unrepresented. A packed parliament that had obscured
the true desires of the country was silenced before the voice of the
people. In the sense of a common duty, landlord and tenant, Protestant
and Catholic, were joined; the spirit of tolerance and nationality
that had been spreading through the country was openly manifested.
In those times of hope and terror men's minds on both sides moved
quickly. The collapse of the English system was rapid; the government
saw the failure of their army plans with the refusal of the Irish to
give any more military grants; the failure of their gains from the
Irish treasury in the near bankruptcy of the Irish state, with the
burden of its upkeep thrown on England; the failure of the prodigious
corruption and buying of the souls of men before the new spirit that
swept through the island, the spirit of a nation. "England has sown
her laws in dragons' teeth, and they have sprung up in armed men,"
cried Hussey Burgh, a worthy Irish successor of Malone in the House of
Commons. "It is no longer the parliament of Ireland that is to be
managed or attended to," wrote the lord-lieutenant. "It is the whole
of this country." Above all, the war with the colonies brought home to
them Grattan's prophecy--"what you trample on in Europe will sting you
in America."
The country, through the Volunteers, required four main reforms. They
asked for justice in the law-courts, and that the Habeas Corpus Act
should be restored, and independent judges no longer hold their places
at pleasure. They asked that the English commercial laws which had
ruined Irish industry and sunk the land in poverty and idleness should
be abandoned; taught by a long misery, Irishmen agreed to buy no
manufactures but the work of Irish hands, and Dublin men compelled
members to swear that they should vote for "the good of Ireland," a
new phrase in politics. A third demand was that the penal laws which
divided and broke the strength of Ireland should cease. "The Irish
Protestant," cried Grattan, "could never be free till the Irish
Catholic had ceased to be a slave." "You are now," said Burke,
"beginning to have a country." Finally a great cry for the
independence of their parliament rose in every county and from every
class.
The demands for the justice of free men, for free trade, free
religion, a free nation, were carried by the popular passion into the
parliaments of Dublin and London. In three years the Dublin parliament
had freed Protestant dissenters from the Test Act and had repealed the
greater part of the penal code; the English commercial code had fallen
to the ground; the Habeas Corpus Act was won. In 1780 Grattan proposed
his resolutions declaring that while the two nations were inseparably
bound together under one Crown, the King, Lords, and Commons of
Ireland could alone make laws for Ireland.
The claim for a free parliament ran through the country--"the epidemic
madness," exclaimed the viceroy. But the Irish had good reason for
their madness. At the first stirring of the national movement in 1778
"artful politicians" in England had revived a scheme favourably viewed
there--the abolition of an Irish parliament and the union of Ireland
with England. "Do not make an union with us, sir," said Dr. Johnson to
an Irishman in 1779; "we should unite with you only to rob you." The
threat of the disappearance of Ireland as a country quickened anxiety
to restore its old parliament. The Irish knew too how precarious was
all that they had gained. Lord North described all past concessions as
"resumable at pleasure" by the power that granted them.
In presence of these dangers the Volunteers called a convention of
their body to meet in the church of Dungannon on Feb. 15, 1782--to
their mind no unfit place for their lofty work.
"We know," they said, "our duty to our sovereign and our loyalty; we
know our duty to ourselves and are resolved to be free." "As
Irishmen, as Christians, and as Protestants" they rejoiced in the
relaxation of penal laws and upheld the sacred rights of all to
freedom of religion. A week later Grattan moved in the House of
Commons an address to the king--that the people of this country are a
free people; that the crown of Ireland is an imperial crown; and the
kingdom of Ireland a distinct kingdom with a parliament of her own,
the sole legislature thereof. The battle opened by Molyneux a hundred
years before was won. The Act of 1719, by which the English parliament
had justified its usurpation of powers, was repealed (1782). "To set
aside all doubts" another Act (1783) declared that the right of
Ireland to be governed solely by the king and the parliament of
Ireland was now established and ascertained, and should never again be
questioned or questionable.
On April 16, 1782, Grattan passed through the long ranks of Volunteers
drawn up before the old Parliament House of Ireland, to proclaim the
victory of his country. "I am now to address a free people. Ages have
passed away, and this is the first moment in which you could be
distinguished by that appellation.... Ireland is now a nation. In that
character I hail her, and bowing in her august presence, I say _esto
perpetua!_" The first act of the emancipated parliament was to vote a
grant for twenty thousand sailors for the English navy.
That day of a nation's exultation and thanksgiving was brief. The
restored parliament entered into a gloomy inheritance--an authority
which had been polluted and destroyed--an almost ruined country. The
heritage of a tyranny prolonged through centuries was not to be got
rid of rapidly. England gave to Ireland half a generation for the
task.
Since the days of Henry VIII the Irish parliaments had been shaped and
compacted to give to England complete control. The system in this
country, wrote the viceroy, did not bear the smallest resemblance to
representation. All bills had to go through the privy council, whose
secret and overwhelming influence was backed by the privy council in
England, the English law officers, and finally the English cabinet.
Irish proposals were rejected not in parliament, but in these secret
councils. The king had a veto in Ireland, not in England. The English
cabinet, changing with English parties, had the last word on every
Irish bill. There was no Irish cabinet responsible to the Irish
Houses: no ministry resigned, whatever the majority by which it was
defeated. Nominally elected by about one-fifth of the inhabitants, the
Commons did not represent even these. A landlords' assembly, there was
no Catholic in it, and no merchant. Even the Irish landlords were
subdued to English interests: some hundred Englishmen, whose main
property was in England but who commanded a number of votes for lands
in Ireland, did constantly override the Irish landlords and drag them
on in a policy far from serviceable to them. The landlords' men in the
Commons were accustomed to vote as the Castle might direct. In the
complete degradation of public life no humiliation or lack of public
honour offended them. The number of placemen and pensioners equalled
nearly one-half of the whole efficient body: "the price of a seat of
parliament," men said, "is as well ascertained as that of the cattle
of the field."
All these dangers might with time and patience be overcome. An Irish
body, on Irish soil, no matter what its constitution, could not remain
aloof from the needs, and blind to the facts, of Ireland, like
strangers in another land. The good-will of the people abounded; even
the poorer farmers showed in a better dress, in cleanliness, in
self-respect, how they had been stirred by the dream of freedom, the
hope of a country. The connection with England, the dependence on the
king, was fully accepted, and Ireland prepared to tax herself out of
all proportion to her wealth for imperial purposes. The gentry were
losing the fears that had possessed them for their properties, and a
fair hope was opening for an Ireland tolerant, united, educated, and
industrious. Volunteers, disciplined, sober, and law-abiding, had
shown the orderly forces of the country. Parliament had awakened to
the care of Ireland as well as the benefit of England. In a few years
it opened "the gates of opulence and knowledge." It abolished the
cruelties of the penal laws, and prepared the union of all religions
in a common citizenship. It showed admirable knowledge in the method
of restoring prosperity to the country, awakening its industrial life,
increasing tillage, and opening inland navigation. Time was needed to
close the springs of corruption and to bring reform to the parliament
itself.
But the very success of parliament woke fears in England, and alarm in
the autocratic government of Ireland. Jealous of power, ministers set
themselves to restore by corruption an absolute authority, and recover
by bribery the prerogative that had been lost.
The first danger appeared in 1785, in the commercial negotiations with
England. To crush the woollen trade England had put duties of over L2
a yard on a certain cloth carried from Ireland to England, which paid
5-1/2d. if brought from England to Ireland; and so on for other goods.
Irish shipping had been reduced to less than a third of that of
Liverpool alone. Pitt's proposal of free trade between the countries
was accepted by Ireland (1785), but a storm of wrath swept over the
British world of business; they refused Pitt's explanation that an
Ireland where all industries had been killed could not compete
against the industrial pre-eminence of England; and prepared a new
scheme which re-established the ascendency of the British parliament
over Irish navigation and commerce. This was rejected in Ireland as
fatal to their Constitution. Twice again the Irish parliament
attempted a commercial agreement between the two countries: twice the
Irish government refused to give it place; a few years later the same
ministers urged the Union on the ground that no such commercial
arrangement existed. The advantages which England possessed and should
maintain were explained by the viceroy to Pitt in 1792. "Is not the
very essence of your imperial policy to prevent the interest of
Ireland clashing and interfering with the interest of England?... Have
you not crushed her in every point that would interfere with British
interest or monopoly by means of her parliament for the last century,
till lately?... You know the advantages you reap from Ireland.... In
return does she cost you one farthing (except the linen monopoly)? Do
you employ a soldier on her account she does not pay, or a single
ship more for the protection of the British commerce than if she was
at the bottom of the sea?"
The Catholic question also awakened the Castle fears. The penal laws
had failed to diminish the "Papists": at the then rate of conversion
it would take four thousand years to turn the people into Protestants.
A nobler idea had arisen throughout Ireland. "The question is now,"
Grattan said, "whether we shall be a Protestant settlement or an Irish
nation ... for so long as we exclude Catholics from natural liberty
and the common rights of man we are not a people." Nothing could be
more unwelcome to the government. A real union between religious
bodies in Ireland, they said, would induce Irish statesmen to regulate
their policy mainly by the public opinion of their own country. To
avert this danger they put forth all their strength. "The present
frame of Irish government is particularly well calculated for our
purpose. That frame is a Protestant garrison in possession of the
land, magistracy, and power of the country; holding that property
under the tenure of British power and supremacy, and ready at every
instant to crush the rising of the conquered."
Finally the pressing question of reform, passionately demanded by
Protestant and Catholic for fifteen years, was resisted by the whole
might of the Castle. "If," wrote the lord-lieutenant to Pitt, "as her
government became more open and more attentive to the feelings of the
Irish nation, the difficulty of management had increased, is that a
reason for opening the government and making the parliament more
subservient to the feelings of the nation at large?"
To the misfortune both of Ireland and of England the Irish government
through these years was led by one of the darkest influences known in
the evil counsels of its history--the chancellor Fitzgibbon, rewarded
by England with the title Earl of Clare. Unchecked by criticism,
secret in machinations, brutal in speech, and violent in authority, he
had known the use of every evil power that still remained as a legacy
from the past. By working on the ignorance of the cabinet in London
and on the alarms and corruptions of Ireland, by using all the secret
powers left in his hands through the privy council, by a system of
unexampled bribery, he succeeded in paralysing the constitution which
it was his business to maintain, and destroying the parliamentary
rights which had been nominally conceded. The voice of the nation was
silenced by the forbidding of all conventions. In the re-established
"frame of government" Fitzgibbon was all-powerful. The only English
viceroy who resisted him, Lord Fitzwilliam, was recalled amid the
acclamations and lamentations of Ireland--all others yielded to his
force. Government in his hands was the enemy of the people, parliament
a mockery, constitutional movements mere vanity. Law appeared only as
an instrument of oppression; the Catholic Irish were put out of its
protection, the government agents out of its control. The country
gentry were alienated and demoralised--left to waste with "their inert
property and their inert talents." Every reform was refused which
might have allayed the fears of the people. Religious war was secretly
stirred up by the agents of the government and in its interest,
setting one part of the country to exterminate the other. Distrust
and suspicion, arrogance and fear, with their train of calamities for
the next hundred years distracted the island.
A system of absolute power, maintained by coercion, woke the deep
passion of the country. Despair of the constitution made men turn to
republicanism and agitation in arms. The violent repression of freedom
was used at a time when the progress of the human mind had been
prodigious, when on all sides men were drinking in the lessons of
popular liberties from the republics of America and France. The system
of rule inaugurated by Fitzgibbon could have only one end--the revolt
of a maddened people. Warnings and entreaties poured in to the Castle.
To the very last the gentry pleaded for reform to reassure men
drifting in their despair into plots of armed republicanism. Every
measure to relieve their fears was denied, every measure to heighten
them was pursued. Violent statesmen in the Castle, and officers of
their troops, did not fear to express their sense that a rebellion
would enable them to make an end of the discontented once for all, and
of the Irish Constitution. The rising was, in fact, at last forced by
the horrors which were openly encouraged by the government in 1796-7.
"Every crime, every cruelty, that could be committed by Cossacks or
Calmucks has been transacted here," said General Abercromby, sent in
1797 as commander-in-chief. He refused the barbarities of martial rule
when, as he said, the government's orders might be carried over the
whole kingdom by an orderly dragoon, or a writ executed without any
difficulty, a few places in the mountains excepted; and demanded the
maintenance of law. "The abuses of all kinds I found here can scarcely
be believed or enumerated." "He must have lost his senses," wrote
Clare of the great soldier, and "this Scotch beast," as he called him,
was forced out of the country as Lord Fitzwilliam had been. Abercromby
was succeeded by General Lake, who had already shown the ferocity of
his temper in his command in Ulster, and in a month the rebellion
broke out.
That appalling tale of terror, despair, and cruelty cannot be told in
all its horror. The people, scared into scattered risings, refused
protection when their arms were given up, or terms if they
surrendered, were without hope; the "pacification" of the government
set no limits to atrocities, and the cry of the tortured rose
unceasingly day and night.
The suppression of the rebellion burned into the Irish heart the
belief that the English government was their implacable enemy, that
the law was their oppressor, and Englishmen the haters of their race.
The treatment of later years has not yet wiped out of memory that
horror. The dark fear that during the rebellion stood over the Irish
peasant in his cabin has been used to illustrate his credulity and his
brutishness. The government cannot be excused by that same plea of
fear. Clare no doubt held the doctrine of many English governors
before him, that Ireland could only be kept bound to England by the
ruin of its parliament and the corruption of its gentry, the perpetual
animosity of its races, and the enslavement of its people. But even in
his own day there were men who believed in a nobler statesmanship--in
a union of the nations in equal honour and liberties.