PETER PLYMLEY
_Peter Plymley's Letters_ are supposed to be written by a Londoner, who is
in favour of removing the secular disabilities of Roman Catholics, to his
brother Abraham, the parson of a rural parish. They proceed throughout on
the assumption that the parson is a kind-hearted, honest, and conscientious
man; but rather stupid, grossly ignorant of public affairs, and frightened
to death by a bogy of his own imagining. That bogy is the idea of a Popish
conspiracy against the crown, church, and commonwealth. Abraham
communicates his alarms to his brother Peter in London, and Peter's
_Letters_ are replies to these outpourings.
Letter I. begins by assuring Abraham that there is no truth in the rumour
that the Pope has landed on English soil, and has been housed by the
Spencers or the Hollands or the Grenvilles. "The best-informed clergy in
the neighbourhood of the metropolis are convinced that the rumour is
without foundation." Having set this fear at rest, Peter deals with
Abraham's argument.--
"You say that the Roman Catholics interpret the Scriptures in an
unorthodox manner, Very likely.... But I want soldiers and sailors for
the state; I want to make a greater use than I now can do of a poor
country full of men; I want to render the military service popular
among the Irish; to check the power of France; to make every possible
exertion for the safety of Europe, which in twenty years' time will be
nothing but a mass of French slaves: and then you, and ten thousand
other such boobies as you, call out--'For God's sake, do not think of
raising cavalry and infantry in Ireland! They interpret the Epistle to
Timothy in a different manner from what we do.... 'What! when Turk,
Jew, Heretic, Infidel, Catholic, Protestant, are all combined against
this country; when men of every religious persuasion, and no religious
persuasion, when the population of half the globe, is up in arms
against us; are we to stand examining our generals and armies as a
bishop examines candidates for holy orders? and to suffer no one to
bleed for England who does not agree with you about the Second of
Timothy!"
And then Peter disclaims the reproach of unfriendliness to the Established
Church.--
"I love the Church as well as you do; but you totally mistake the
nature of an Establishment, when you contend that it ought to be
connected with the military and civil careers of every individual in
the state. It is quite right that there should be one clergyman in
every parish interpreting the Scriptures after a particular manner,
ruled by a regular hierarchy, and paid with a rich proportion of
haycocks and wheat sheaves. When I have laid this foundation for a
national religion in the state--when I have placed ten thousand
well-educated men in different parts of the kingdom to preach it up,
and compelled every one to pay them, whether they hear them or not--I
have taken such measures as I know must always procure an immense
majority in favour of the Established Church; but I can go no farther.
I cannot set up a civil inquisition, and say to one--'You shall not be
a butcher, because you are not orthodox'; and prohibit another from
brewing, and a third from administering the law, and a fourth from
defending the country. If common justice did not prohibit me from such
a conduct, common sense would."
Persecution, Peter goes on to say, makes martyrs. Fanatics delight in the
feeling that they are persecuted for righteousness' sake; and, the more
they are harried, the more tenaciously they cling to their misbeliefs.--
"This is just the effect your disqualifying laws have produced. They
have fed Dr. Rees and Dr. Kippis;[41] crowded the congregation of the
Old Jewry[42] to suffocation; and enabled every sublapsarian, and
supralapsarian, and semipelagian, clergyman to build himself a neat
brick chapel, and live with some distant resemblance to the state of a
gentleman."
But, says Abraham, the King is bound by his Coronation Oath to resist the
emancipation of the Roman Catholics. Peter replies--
"Suppose Bonaparte were to retrieve the only very great blunder he has
made, and were to succeed, after repeated trials, in making an
impression upon Ireland, do you think we should bear anything of the
impediment of a Coronation Oath? or would the spirit of this country
tolerate for an hour such ministers and such unheard-of nonsense, if
the most distant prospect existed of conciliating the Catholics by
every species even of the most abject concession? And yet, if your
argument is good for anything, the Coronation Oath ought to reject, at
such a moment, every tendency to conciliation, and to bind Ireland for
ever to the Crown of France."
After a cursory reference to Abraham's fears about Popish fires and
faggots, and a reminder that "there were as many persons put to death for
religious opinions under the mild Elizabeth as under the bloody Mary,"
Peter concludes with these vigorous sentences--
"You tell me I am a party man. I hope I shall always be so, when I see
my country in the hands of a pert London joker[43] and a second-rate
lawyer.[44] Of the first, no other good is known than that he makes
pretty Latin verses; the second seems to me to have the head of a
country parson and the tongue of an Old Bailey barrister. If I could
see good measures pursued, I care not who is in power; but I have a
passionate love for common justice and for common sense, and I abhor
and despise every man who builds up his political fortune upon their
ruin."
Abraham's next objection to emancipation appears to have been that a Roman
Catholic will not respect an oath. "Why not?" asks Peter in Letter II.
"What upon earth has kept him out of Parliament, or excluded him from all
the offices whence he is excluded, but his respect for oaths? There is no
law which prohibits a Catholic to sit in Parliament. There could be no such
law; because it is impossible to find out what passes in the interior of
any man's mind.... The Catholic is excluded from Parliament because he will
not swear that he disbelieves the leading doctrines of his religion. The
Catholic asks you to abolish some oaths which oppress him; your answer is,
that he does not respect oaths. Then why subject him to the test of oaths?
The oaths keep him out of Parliament; why, then he respects them. Turn
which way you will, either your laws are nugatory, or the Catholic is bound
by religious obligations as you are."
From Roman Catholics in general, Peter now turns to the Roman Catholics of
Ireland.--
"The moment the very name of Ireland is mentioned, the English seem to
bid adieu to common feeling, common prudence, and common sense, and to
act with the barbarity of tyrants and the fatuity of idiots. Whatever
your opinion may be of the follies of the Roman Catholic religion,
remember they are the follies of four millions of human beings,
increasing rapidly in numbers, wealth and intelligence, who, if firmly
united with this country, would set at defiance the power of France,
and, if once wrested from their alliance with England, would in three
years render its existence as an independent nation absolutely
impossible. You speak of danger to the Establishment; I request to
know when the Establishment was ever so much in danger as when Hoche
was in Bantry Bay, and whether all the books of Bossuet, or the arts
of the Jesuits, were half so terrible?... Whatever you think of the
Catholics, there they are--you cannot get rid of them. Your
alternative is to give them a lawful place for stating their
grievances, or an unlawful one. If you do not admit them to the House
of Commons, they will hold their Parliament in Potatoe Place, Dublin,
and be ten times as violent and inflammatory as they would be in
Westminster. Nothing would give me such an idea of security as to see
twenty or thirty Catholic gentlemen in Parliament, looked upon by all
the Catholics as the fair and proper organ of their party. I should
have thought it the height of good fortune that such a wish existed on
their part, and the very essence of madness and ignorance to reject
it."
A noble lord--his name unluckily has perished--had attempted to salve his
own conscience and that of his colleagues in hostility to the Roman claims,
by affirming that exclusion from civil office was not persecution; and
Peter handles him with delighted vigour, in a passage which, more than
eighty years later, was quoted with enthusiasm by Mr. Gladstone.[45]--
"A distinction, I perceive, is taken by one of the most feeble
noblemen in Great Britain, between persecution and the deprivation of
political power; whereas there is no more distinction between these
two things than there is between him who makes the distinction and a
booby. If I strip off the relic-covered jacket of a Catholic and give
him twenty stripes, I persecute. If I say, 'Everybody in the town
where you live shall be a candidate for lucrative and honourable
offices but you, who are a Catholic,' I do not persecute! What
barbarous nonsense is this! As if degradation was not as great an evil
as bodily pain, or as severe poverty; as if I could not be as great a
tyrant by saying, 'You shall not enjoy,' as by saying, 'You shall
suffer.'... You may not be aware of it, most reverend Abraham, but you
deny their freedom to the Catholics upon the same principle that Sarah
your wife refuses to give the receipt for a ham or a gooseberry
dumpling. She values her receipts, not because they secure to her a
certain flavour, but because they remind her that her neighbours want
it--a feeling laughable in a priestess, shameful in a priest; venial
when it withholds the blessings of a ham, tyrannical and execrable
when it narrows the boon of religious freedom."
Letter III. gives utterance to a genuine alarm inspired by Bonaparte's
uninterrupted progress. England is confronted by the most formidable
adversary whom she has ever known, and her defence is entrusted to Canning
and Perceval. Canning's armoury contains nothing more serviceable than
"schoolboy jokes and doggerel rhymes, an affronting petulance, and the
tones and gesticulations of Mr. Pitt." Perceval, instead of looking after
the national defences,
"will bestow the strictest attention on the smaller parts of
ecclesiastical government. In the last agonies of England he will
bring in a bill to regulate Easter offerings; and he will adjust the
stipends of curates, when the flag of France is unfurled on the hills
of Kent.[46]... Whatever can be done by very mistaken notions of the
piety of a Christian, and by very wretched imitations of the eloquence
of Mr. Pitt, will be done by these two gentlemen";
but these are no adequate defences against the genius and ambition of
Bonaparte. "There is nothing to oppose to the conqueror of the world but a
small table-wit, and the sallow Surveyor of the Meltings."[47]
Abraham, terrified by those prognostics, asks Peter if he thinks it
possible for England to survive the recent misfortunes of Europe. Peter
replies that if Bonaparte lives, and a great deal is not immediately
conceded to the Roman Catholics, England must perish, and perish in
disgrace.--
"It is doubly miserable to become slaves abroad, because we would be
tyrants at home; and to perish because we have raised up worse enemies
within, from our own bigotry, than we are exposed to without from the
unprincipled ambition of France."
Then he goes on to a famous apologue. England is a frigate, attacked by a
corsair of immense strength and size. The rigging is cut, there is water in
the hold, men are dropping off very fast, the peril is extreme. How do you
think the captain (whom we will call Perceval) acts? Does he call all hands
on deck and talk to them of king, country, glory, sweethearts, gin, French
prisons, wooden shoes, old England, and hearts of oak--till they give three
cheers, rush to their guns, and, after a tremendous conflict, succeed in
beating off the enemy?--
"Not a syllable of all this: this is not the manner in which the
honourable commander goes to work. The first thing he does is to
secure twenty or thirty of his prime sailors who happen to be
Catholics, to clap them in irons, and set over them a guard of as many
Protestants. Having taken this admirable method of defending himself
against his infidel opponents, he goes upon deck, reminds the sailors,
in a very bitter harangue, that they are of different religions;
exhorts the Episcopal gunner not to trust to the Presbyterian
quartermaster, issues positive orders that the Catholics should be
fired at upon the first appearance of discontent; rushes through blood
and brains, examining his men in the Catechism and xxxix. articles,
and positively forbids every one to sponge or ram who has not taken
the Sacrament according to the Church of England.... Built as she is
of heart of oak, and admirably manned, is it possible with such a
captain to save this ship from going to the bottom?"
Abraham's next argument against a policy of concession is that it would
only lead to further demands in the future. In reply to this Peter makes
vigorous use of Spencer Perceval's official career. Perceval had held a
sinecure for several years; at the time of writing he was Chancellor of the
Exchequer; and he had just attempted, and been defeated in attempting, a
most nefarious job, by which the revenues of the Duchy of Lancaster were to
have been secured to him for life.
"Suppose the person to whom he applied for the Meltings had withstood
every plea of wife and fourteen children, no business, and good
character, and had refused him this paltry little office, because he
might hereafter attempt to get hold of the revenues of the Duchy of
Lancaster for life; would not Mr. Perceval have contended eagerly
against the injustice of refusing moderate requests, because
immoderate ones may hereafter be made? Would he not have said (and
said truly), 'Leave such exorbitant attempts as these to the general
indignation of the Commons, who will take care to defeat them when
they do occur; but do not refuse me the Irons and the Meltings now,
because I may totally lose sight of all moderation hereafter'?"
Letter IV. begins with a reply to those who contended that England ought
not to pay for the education of the Roman Catholic clergy in Ireland.
"The whole sum now appropriated by Government to the religious
education of four millions of Christians is £13,000--a sum about one
hundred times as large being appropriated in the same country to about
one-eighth part of this number of Protestants. When it was proposed to
raise this grant from £8000 to £13,000, its present amount, this sum
was objected to by that most indulgent of Christians, Mr. Spencer
Perceval, as enormous; he himself having secured for his own eating
and drinking, and the eating and drinking of the Master and Miss
Percevals, the reversionary sum of £21,000 a year of the public
money,[48] and having just failed in a desperate and rapacious attempt
to secure to himself for life the revenues of the Duchy of Lancaster;
and the best of it is, that this Minister, after abusing his
predecessors for their impious bounty to the Catholics, has found
himself compelled, from the apprehension of immediate danger, to grant
the sum in question."
Abraham now goes on to plead that our present relations with the Roman
Catholics date from the Revolution of 1688, and that laws passed at that
period are unalterable. To this Peter replies:--
"When I hear any man talk of an unalterable law, the only effect it
produces upon me is to convince me that he is an unalterable fool....
Besides, it happens that, to the principal incapacities under which
the Irish suffer, they were subjected _after_ that great and
glorious Revolution, to which we are indebted for so many
blessings.... The Catholics were not excluded from the Irish House of
Commons, or military commands, before the 3rd and 4th of William and
Mary, and the 1st and 2nd of Queen Anne."
Then he goes on to cite the example of Scotland. There the English
government had, in times past, tried to force the national conscience in
matters of faith and worship. The government had failed, as it deserved to
fail, for Scotland was resolute and rebellious. Then "the true and only
remedy was applied. The Scotch were suffered to worship God after their own
tiresome manner, without pain, penalty, and privation." And Scotland had
become a contented, loyal, and profitable part of the United Kingdom.
Exactly the reverse was happening in Ireland. A vehement hostility to the
Union was spreading through all parts of the country and all classes of the
people.
"The Irish see that their national independence is gone, without
having recovered any single one of those advantages which they were
taught to expect from the sacrifice. All good things were to flow from
the Union; they have none of them gained anything. Every man's pride
is wounded by it; no man's interest is promoted. In the seventh year
of that Union, four million Catholics, lured by all kinds of promises
to yield up the separate dignity and sovereignty of their country, are
forced to squabble with such a man as Mr. Spencer Perceval for five
thousand pounds with which to educate their children in their own mode
of worship; he, the same Mr. Spencer, having secured to his own
Protestant self a reversionary portion of the public money amounting
to four times that sum.... Our conduct to Ireland, during the whole of
this war, has been that of a man who subscribes to hospitals, weeps at
charity-sermons, carries out broth and blankets to beggars, and then
comes home and beats his wife and children. We have compassion for the
victims of all other oppression and injustice, except our own."
It is of no use for statesmen to ignore the Irish question. It is much too
urgent and too dangerous a topic to be long suppressed.--
"A man may command his family to say nothing more about the stone, and
surgical operations; but the ponderous malice still lies upon the
nerve, and gets so big that the patient breaks his own law of silence,
clamours for the knife, and expires under its late operation. Believe
me, you talk folly when you speak of suppressing the Irish question. I
wish to God that the case admitted of such a remedy ... but, if the
wants of the Catholics are not heard in the manly tones of Lord
Grenville, or the servile drawl of Lord Castlereagh, they will be
heard ere long in the madness of mobs, and the conflicts of armed
men."
In Letter V. Peter turns upon Abraham, who cannot believe that England will
ever be ruined and conquered, and says:--
"Alas! so reasoned, in their time, the Austrian, Russian, and Prussian
Plymleys. But the English are brave? So were all these nations. You
might get together an hundred thousand men individually brave; but,
without generals capable of commanding such a machine, it would be as
useless as a first-rate man-of-war manned by Oxford clergymen or
Parisian shopkeepers. I do not say this to the disparagement of
English officers: they have had no means of acquiring experience. But
I do say it to create alarm. We do not appear to me to be half alarmed
enough, or to entertain that sense of our danger which leads to the
most obvious means of self-defence. As for the spirit of the
peasantry, in making a gallant defence behind hedgerows and through
plate-racks and hencoops, highly as I think of their bravery, I do not
know any nation in Europe so likely to be struck with panic as the
English; and this from their total unacquaintance with the science of
war. Old wheat and beans blazing for twenty miles round--cart-mares
shot--sows of Lord Somerville's[49] breed running wild over the
country--the minister of the parish wounded sorely in his hinder
parts--Mrs. Plymley in fits--all these scenes of war an Austrian or a
Russian has seen three or four times over. But it is now three
centuries since an English pig has fallen in fair battle upon English
ground, or a farm-house been rifled.... But whatever was our
conduct--if every ploughman was as great a hero as he who was called
from his oxen to save Rome from her enemies--I should still say that,
at such a crisis, you want the affections of all your subjects in both
islands. There is no spirit which you must alienate, no heart you must
avert. Every man must feel he has a country, and that there is an
urgent and pressing cause why he should expose himself to death."
Although Peter is so seriously concerned about the military disasters which
will fall on England unless she behaves more wisely to her Roman Catholic
population, he is not the least afraid of any dangers arising from the
Roman Catholic religion. England has done with it, once for all--
"Tell me that the world will return again under the influence of the
smallpox; that Lord Castlereagh will hereafter oppose the power of the
court; that Lord Howick and Mr. Grattan will each of them do a mean
and dishonourable action; that anybody who has heard Lord Redesdale
speak will knowingly and willingly hear him again; that Lord Eldon has
assented to the fact of two and two making four, without shedding
tears, or expressing the smallest doubt or scruple; tell me any other
thing absurd or incredible, but, for the love of common sense, let me
hear no more of the danger to be apprehended from the general
diffusion of Popery. It is too absurd to be reasoned upon; every man
feels it is nonsense when he hears it stated, and so does every man
while he is stating it."
No, the only real danger which Peter sees--and this he sees with startling
clearness--is that Ireland will be absorbed by France, and will welcome her
deliverance from England; that the civil existence of England will be most
seriously imperilled; and that the Irish themselves will, in the long-run,
suffer grievously by the change,--
"Who can doubt but that Ireland will experience ultimately from France
a treatment to which the conduct they have experienced from England is
the love of a parent or a brother? Who can doubt that, five years
after he has got hold of the country, Ireland will be tossed by
Bonaparte as a present to some one of his ruffian generals, who will
knock the head of Mr. Keogh against the head of Cardinal Troy, shoot
twenty of the most noisy blockheads of the Roman persuasion, wash his
pug-dogs in holy water, and confiscate the salt butter of the Milesian
Republic to the last tub? But what matters this? or who is wise enough
in Ireland to heed it? or when had common sense much influence with my
poor dear Irish? Mr. Perceval does not know the Irish; but I know
them, and I know that, at every rash and mad hazard, they will break
the Union, revenge their wounded pride and their insulted religion,
and fling themselves into the open arms of France, sure of dying in
the embrace.... In the six hundredth year of our Empire over Ireland,
have we any memorial of ancient kindness to refer to? any people, any
zeal, any country, on which we can depend? Have we any hope, but in
the winds of heaven and the tides of the sea? any prayer to prefer to
the Irish, but that they should forget and forgive their oppressors,
who, in the very moment that they are calling upon them for their
exertions, solemnly assure them that the oppression shall still
remain?"
Letter VI. begins with one of those vivacious apologues in which Sydney
Smith excelled. Abraham Plymley has been talking of the concessions which
Roman Catholics hare already received, and their shameless ingratitude in
asking for more. To the cry of ingratitude Peter thus replies.--There is a
village, he says, in which, once a year, the inhabitants sit down to a
dinner provided at the common expense. A hundred years ago the inhabitants
of three of the streets seized the inhabitants of the fourth street, bound
them hand and foot, laid them on their backs, and compelled them to look on
while the majority were stuffing themselves with beef and beer--and this,
although they had contributed an equal quota to the expense. Next year the
same assault was perpetrated. It soon grew into a custom; and, as years
went on, the village came to look on the annual act of tyranny as the most
sacred of its institutions. Unfortunately, however, for the tyrannical
majority, the inhabitants of the persecuted street increased in numbers,
determination, and public spirit. They murmured, protested, and resisted,
till the oppressors, "more afraid of injustice, were now disposed to be
just." On the next occasion of the annual dinner, the victims were unbound.
The year after, they were allowed to sit upright. Then they got a bit of
bread and a glass of water. Finally, after a long series of small
concessions, they grew so bold as to ask that they might sit down at the
bottom of the table, and feast with their grander neighbours. Forthwith, a
general cry of shame and scandal.--
"Ten years ago, were you not laid upon your backs? Don't you remember
what a great thing you thought it to get a piece of bread? How
thankful you were for cheese-parings? Have you forgotten that
memorable æra, when the lord of the manor interfered to obtain for you
a slice of the public pudding? And now, with an audacity only equalled
by your ingratitude, you have the impudence to ask for knives and
forks, and to request, in terms too plain to be mistaken, that you may
sit down to table with the rest, and be indulged even with beef and
beer. There are not more than half a dozen dishes which we have
reserved for ourselves; the rest has been thrown open to you in the
utmost profusion; you have potatoes, and carrots, suet dumplings, sops
in the pan, and delicious toast-and-water, in incredible quantities.
Beef, mutton, lamb, pork, and veal are ours; and, if you were not the
most restless and dissatisfied of human beings, you would never think
of aspiring to enjoy them."
Is not this, says Peter, the very nonsense and the very insult which you
daily practise on the Roman Catholics? I, though I am an inhabitant of the
village and live in one of the three favoured streets, have retained some
sense of justice, and I most earnestly counsel these half-fed claimants to
persevere in their just demands, till they are admitted to their just share
of a dinner for which they pay as much as the others.
"And, if they see a little attenuated lawyer[50] squabbling at the
head of their opponents, let them desire him to empty his pockets, and
to pull out all the pieces of duck, fowl, and pudding which he has
filched from the public feasts, to carry home to his wife and
children."
Before ending his letter, Peter has a fling at the Home Secretary, Lord
Hawkesbury, "the lesser of the two Jenkinsons."[51] Lord Hawkesbury has
said that "nothing is to be granted to the Catholics from fear." Why not,
asks Peter, if the thing demanded is just?
"The only true way to make the mass of mankind see the beauty of
justice is by showing them in pretty plain terms the consequences of
injustice. If any body of French troops land in Ireland, the whole
population of that country will rise against you to a man, and you
could not possibly survive such an event three years. Such, from the
bottom of my heart, do I believe to be the present state of that
country; and so little does it appear to me to be impolitic and
unstatesmanlike to concede anything to such a danger, that if the
Catholics, in addition to their present just demands, were to petition
for the perpetual removal of the said Lord Hawkesbury from his
Majesty's councils, I think the prayer of the petition should be
instantly complied with. Canning's crocodile tears should not move me;
the hoops of the Maids of Honour should not hide him. I would tear him
from the banisters of the Back Stairs, and plunge him in the fishy
fumes of the dirtiest of all his Cinque Ports."[52]
Letter VII. begins with a rebuke to brother Abraham for placing all his
hopes for the salvation of England in the "discretion" and "sound sense" of
Mr. Secretary Canning.--
"To call him a legislator, a reasoner, and the conductor of the
affairs of a great nation, seems to me as absurd as if a butterfly
were to teach bees to make honey. That he is an extraordinary writer
of small poetry, and a diner-out of the highest lustre, I do most
readily admit.... The Foreign Secretary is a gentleman--a respectable
as well as a highly agreeable man in private life; but you may as well
feed me with decayed potatoes as console me for the miseries of
Ireland by the resources of his 'sense' and his 'discretion.' It is
only the public situation which this gentleman holds that entitles me
or induces me to say so much about him. He is a fly in amber: nobody
cares about the fly; the only question is, How the devil did it get
there? Nor do I attack him from the love of glory, but from the love
of utility, as a burgomaster hunts a rat in a Dutch dyke, for fear it
should flood a province."
Under the rule of Canning and his colleagues, Ireland has become utterly
disloyal.--
"The great mass of the Catholic population, upon the slightest
appearance of a French force in that country, would rise upon you to a
man. There is no loyalty among the Catholics: they detest you as their
worst oppressors, and they will continue to detest you till you remove
the cause of their hatred. It is in your power in six months' time to
produce a total revolution of opinions among these people.... At
present see what a dreadful state Ireland is in! The common toast
among the low Irish is, 'The Feast of the _Pass-over_.' Some
allusion to Bonaparte, in a play lately acted at Dublin, produced
thunders of applause from the pit and the galleries; and _a
politician should not be inattentive to the public feelings expressed
in theatres_. Mr. Perceval thinks he has disarmed the Irish. He has
no more disarmed the Irish than he has resigned a shilling of his own
public emoluments. An Irish peasant fills the barrel of his gun full
of tow dipped in oil, butters the lock, buries it in a bog, and allows
the Orange bloodhound to ransack his cottage at pleasure. Be just and
kind to the Irish, and you will indeed disarm them; rescue them from
the degraded servitude in which they are held by an handful of their
own countrymen; and you will add four millions of brave and
affectionate men to your strength."
But instead of these wise remedies, Mr. Secretary Canning only offers the
Irish people his incessant, unseasonable, and sometimes indecent jokes.--
"He jokes upon neutral flags and frauds, jokes upon Irish rebels,
jokes upon northern and western and southern foes, and gives himself
no trouble upon any subject.... And this is the Secretary whose
genius, in the estimation of brother Abraham, is to extinguish the
genius of Bonaparte. Pompey was killed by a slave, Goliath smitten by
a stripling; Pyrrhus died by the hand of a woman. Tremble, thou great
Gaul, from whose head an armed Minerva leaps forth in the hour of
danger; tremble, thou scourge of God, for a pleasant man is come out
against thee, and thou shalt be laid low by a joker of jokes."
Abraham comforts himself with his reflection that Bonaparte has no ships or
sailors. But, says Peter, there are quite enough remains of the navies of
France, Spain, Holland, and Denmark, for such a short excursion as would be
needed for the capture of Ireland. And Bonaparte can increase his forces
every day. With all Europe at his feet, he can get timber and stores and
men to any conceivable amount. "He is at present the despotic monarch of
above twenty thousand miles of sea-coast, and yet you suppose he cannot
procure sailors for the invasion of Ireland." Ireland is still the burden
of the song. Conciliate Ireland and all will be well. Tyrannize over her
and we are undone.
"If Ireland was friendly, we might equally set at defiance the talents
of Bonaparte and the blunders of his rival Mr. Canning: we could then
support the ruinous and silly bustle of our useless expeditions, and
the almost incredible ignorance of our commercial Orders in
Council.[53] Let the present administration give up but this one
point, and there is nothing which I would not consent to grant them.
Perceval should have full liberty to insult the tomb of Mr. Fox, and
to torment every eminent Dissenter in Great Britain. Lord Camden
should have large boxes of plums; Mr. Rose receive permission to
prefix to his name the appellation of Virtuous; and to the Viscount
Castlereagh a round sum of ready money shall be well and truly paid
into his hand.[54] Lastly, what remains to Mr. George Canning, but
that he ride up and down Pall Mall glorious upon a white horse, and
that they cry out before him, 'Thus shall it be done to the statesman
who hath written _The Needy Knife-Grinder_'?"
Letter VIII. begins with the statistics of Ireland, its area, population,
trade, manufactures, exports and imports. "Ireland has the greatest
possible facilities for carrying on commerce with the whole of Europe. It
contains, within a circuit of 750 miles, 66 secure harbours, and presents a
western frontier against Great Britain, reaching from the Firth of Clyde
north to the Bristol Channel south, and varying in distance from 20 to 100
miles; so that the subjugation of Ireland would compel us to guard with
ships and soldiers a new line of coast, certainly amounting, with all its
sinuosities, to more than 700 miles--an addition of polemics, in our
present state of hostility with all the world, which must highly gratify
the vigorists and give them an ample opportunity of displaying that foolish
energy upon which their claims to distinction are founded. Such is the
country which the Chancellor of the Exchequer would drive into the arms of
France."
Religious freedom, continues Peter, is the strongest safeguard of states.
France has it, and is victorious over Europe; England lacks it, and is in
imminent peril. "How sincerely and fervently have I often wished that the
Emperor of the French had thought as Mr. Spencer Perceval does upon the
subject of government; that he had entertained doubts and scruples upon the
propriety of admitting the Protestants to an equality of rights with the
Catholics, and that he had left in the middle of his empire these vigorous
seeds of hatred and disaffection. But the world was never yet conquered by
a blockhead. One of the very first measures we saw him recurring to was the
complete establishment of religious liberty. If his subjects fought and
paid as he pleased, he allowed them to believe as they pleased. The moment
I saw this, my best hopes were lost. I perceived in a moment the kind of
man we had to do with. I was well aware of the miserable ignorance and
folly of the country upon the subject of Toleration; and every year has
been adding to the success of that game which it was clear he had the will
and the ability to play against us."
Abraham has suggested that the Emperor is not a religious man, and that his
tolerance is the fruit of indifference. But, says Peter, "if Bonaparte is
liberal in subjects of religion because he has no religion, is this a
reason why we should be illiberal because we are Christians? If he owes
this excellent quality to a vice, is that any reason why we may not owe it
to a virtue? Toleration is a great good, and a good to be imitated, let it
come from whom it will."
And now Peter turns upon Lord Sidmouth,[55] who has been prophesying woe
and destruction from the emancipation of the Roman Catholics. Such
prophecies, he says, will, in the process of time, become matter of
pleasantry even to "the sedulous housewife and the Rural Dean." There is
always a copious supply of Lord Sidmouths in the world, and they have
always uttered the most dismal predictions about every improvement in the
lot of mankind.--
"Turnpike roads, navigable canals, inoculation, hops, tobacco, the
Reformation, the Revolution--there are always a set of worthy and
moderately-gifted men who bawl out death and ruin upon every valuable
change which the varying aspect of human affairs absolutely and
imperiously requires."
The only contention of poor Abraham which Peter will in the slightest
degree accept, is that the emancipation of the Roman Catholics will
alienate the Orangemen. But, even if this be the result of a just act, it
is far less formidable than the result of continued injustice. Brother
Abraham, "skilled in the arithmetic of Tithe," must perceive that it is
better to have four friends and one enemy, than four enemies and one
friend; and, the more violent the hatred of the Orangemen, the more certain
the reconciliation of the Catholics. Even supposing, for the sake of
argument, that the Orangemen carry their disaffection to the point of
resistance, and brave the discipline of the law, the prospect has no
terrors for Peter Plymley.--
"My love of poetical justice does carry me as far as that--one
summer's whipping, only one; the thumb-screw for a short season; a
little light, easy torturing between Lady Day and Michaelmas; a short
specimen of Mr. Perceval's rigour. I have malice enough to ask this
slight atonement for the groans and shrieks of the poor Catholics,
unheard by any human tribunal, but registered by the Angel of God
against their Protestant and enlightened oppressors."
Letter IX. opens with an enumeration of offices not tenable by adherents of
the Roman faith.
"No Catholic can be chief Governor or Governor of this Kingdom,
Chancellor or Keeper of the Great Seal, Lord High Treasurer, Chief of
any of the Courts of Justice, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Puisne
Judge, Judge in the Admiralty, Master of the Rolls, Secretary of
State, Keeper of the Privy Seal, Vice-Treasurer or his Deputy, Teller
or Cashier of Exchequer, Auditor or General, Governor or Custos
Rotulorum of Counties, Chief Governor's Secretary, Privy Councillor,
King's Counsel, Serjeant, Attorney, Solicitor-General, Master in
Chancery, Provost or Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin,
Postmaster-General, Master and Lieutenant-General of Ordnance,
Commander-in-Chief, General on the Staff, Sheriff, Sub-Sheriff, Mayor,
Bailiff, Recorder, Burgess, or any other officer in a City, or a
Corporation. No Catholic can be guardian to a Protestant, and no
priest guardian at all: no Catholic can be a gamekeeper, or have for
sale, or otherwise, any arms or warlike stores; no Catholic can
present to a living, unless he choose to turn Jew in order to obtain
that privilege; and the pecuniary qualification of Catholic jurors is
made higher than that of Protestants."
Out of that splendid list of unattainable posts, Peter Plymley chooses, to
illustrate his theme, the offices of Sheriff and Deputy-Sheriff in Ireland.
No one he says, who is unacquainted with that country, can conceive the
obstacles to justice which exclusion from these offices entails. The lives,
liberties, and properties of the Roman Catholic population are at the mercy
of the Juries, and the Juries are nominated exclusively by Protestants--and
this in a country where religious animosities are peculiarly inflamed.--
"A poor Catholic in Ireland may be tried by twelve Percevals, and
destroyed, according to the manner of that gentleman, in the name of
the law, and with all the insulting forms of justice. I will not go
the length of saying that deliberate and wilful injustice is done. I
have no doubt that the Orange Deputy-Sheriff thinks it would be a most
unpardonable breach of his duty if he did not summon a Protestant
panel. I can easily believe that the Protestant panel may conduct
themselves very conscientiously in hanging the gentlemen of the
Crucifix; but I blame the law which does not guard the Catholic
against the probable tenour of those feelings which must unconsciously
influence the judgments of mankind. I detest that state of society
which extends unequal degrees of protection to different creeds and
persuasions; and I cannot describe to you the contempt I feel for a
man who, calling himself a statesman, defends a system which fills the
heart of every Irishman with treason."
If then the Courts of Assize are, by the very nature of the case,
instruments of injustice, it is the Grand Juries which are the great scene
of Jobbery. They have the power of levying a county rate for roads,
bridges, and other public accommodations. Milesian gentlemen, attendant on
the Grand Inquest of Justice, arrange these little matters for their mutual
convenience.--
"You suffer the road to be brought through my park, and I will have
the bridge constructed in a situation where it will make a beautiful
object to your house. You do my job, and I will do yours."
And so, as far as the Protestant gentry are concerned, all is well. But
there is a religion even in jobs; "and it will be highly gratifying to Mr.
Perceval to learn that no man in Ireland who believes in Seven Sacraments
can carry a public road, or bridge, one yard out of its way, and that
nobody can cheat the public who does not expound the Scriptures in the
purest and most orthodox manner.... I ask if the human mind can experience
a more dreadful sensation than to see its own jobs refused, and the jobs of
another religion perpetually succeeding?"
And then again there is the grievance which consists in exclusion from the
higher posts of the Professions.--
"Look at human nature. Your boy Joel is to be brought up to the Bar:
has Mrs. Plymley the slightest doubt of his being Chancellor? Do not
his two shrivelled aunts live in the certainty of seeing him in that
situation, and of cutting-out with their own hands his equity
habiliments? And I could name a certain Minister of the Gospel who
does not, in the bottom of his heart, much differ from these opinions.
Do you think that the fathers and mothers of the holy Catholic church
are not as absurd as Protestant papas and mammas? The probability I
admit to be, in each case, that the sweet little blockhead will in
fact never get a brief. But I venture to say that there is not a
parent from the Giant's Causeway to Bantry Bay, who does not conceive
that his child is the unfortunate victim of the exclusion, and that
nothing short of positive law could prevent his own dear, pre-eminent
Paddy from rising to the highest honours of the State. So with the
army, and Parliament. In fact, few are excluded; but, in imagination,
all. You keep twenty or thirty Catholics out, and lose the affections
of four millions."
And then Peter turns to the war-cry of No Popery, which had been so
vigorously and successfully raised at the General Election of 1807, and
derides the loyal indignation then directed against the Ministers who had
the heart to worry George III. with plans of redress for Roman Catholics.--
"The general cry in the country was, that they would not see their beloved
monarch used ill in his old age, and that they would stand by him to the
last drop of their blood." This ebullition of ill-judging loyalty reminds
Peter of an accident which once befell the Russian Ambassador in London.
His Excellency fell down in a fit when paying a morning call. A doctor was
summoned, who declared that the patient must be instantly bled; and he
prepared to perform the operation. "But the barbarous servants of the
Embassy, when they saw the gleaming lancet, drew their swords, threw
themselves into an attitude of defiance, and swore they would kill the man
who dared to hurt their beloved master."
Peter's own remedy for Irish disaffection was, first, to remove all civil
penalties for religious faith, and then to subsidize the Roman Catholic
bishops and clergy in Ireland, and pay for the maintenance of their schools
and churches. He calculated that this would cost £250,000 a year. The
clergy should all receive their salaries through the Bank of Ireland; the
salaries were to be proportioned to the size of the congregations; and all
patronage should be lodged in the hands of the Crown.--
"Now I appeal to any human being, what the disaffection of a clergy
would amount to, gaping after this graduated bounty of the Crown; and
whether Ignatius Loyola himself, if he were a living blockhead instead
of a dead saint, could withstand the temptation of bouncing from £100
a year in Sligo, to £300 in Tipperary. This is the miserable sum of
money for which the merchants, and landowners, and nobility of
England, are exposing themselves to the tremendous peril of losing
Ireland."
If all these schemes of conciliation were rejected as dangerous and
impracticable, there remained of course the time-honoured remedy of
Coercion. This had been demanded by Spencer Perceval, when attacking the
conciliatory administration of "All the Talents," and it provoked Peter
Plymley to a characteristic outburst:--
"I cannot describe the horror and disgust which I felt at hearing Mr.
Perceval call for measures of vigour in Ireland. If I lived at
Hampstead[56] upon stewed meats and claret; if I walked to church
every Sunday morning before eleven young gentlemen of my own
begetting, with their faces washed, and their hair pleasingly combed;
if the Almighty had blessed me with every earthly comfort--how awfully
would I pause before I sent forth the flame and the sword over the
cabins of the poor, brave, generous, open-hearted peasants of Ireland!
How easy it is to shed human blood! How easy it is to persuade
ourselves that it is our duty to do so, and that the decision has cost
us a severe struggle! How much in all ages have wounds and shrieks and
tears been the cheap and vulgar resources of the rulers of mankind!
How difficult it is to govern in kindness, and to found an empire upon
the everlasting basis of justice and affection!"
Letter X. begins with some observations on the Law of Tithe in Ireland. "I
submit to your common sense, if it is possible to explain to an Irish
peasant upon what principle of justice he is to pay every tenth potato in
his little garden to a clergyman in whose religion nobody believes for
twenty miles round him, and who has nothing to preach to but bare walls."
Let the landowner pay the tithe, and charge the labourer a higher rent.
This, Peter seems to think, will meet all the difficulties of the case, and
yet not impoverish the Established clergy. And he is more than ever
persuaded that the best way to check the predominance of the Roman Church
in Ireland is to deliver the Romanists from every species of religious
disability. On this theme Peter harps in a vein which, if he were a
clergyman writing over his own name, would be justly described as
cynical.--
"If a rich young Catholic were in Parliament, he would belong to
White's and to Brookes's; would keep race-horses; would walk up and
down Pall Mall; be exonerated of his ready money and his constitution;
become as totally devoid of morality, honesty, knowledge, and
civility, as Protestant loungers in Pall Mall; and return home with a
supreme contempt for Father O'Leary and Father O'Callaghan.... The
true receipt for preserving the Roman Catholic religion is Mr.
Perceval's receipt for destroying it: it is to deprive every rich
Catholic of all the objects of secular ambition, to separate him from
the Protestants, and to shut him up in his castle with priests and
relics."
However sound this estimate of theological results may be, Abraham thinks
that a period of universal war is not the proper time for innovations in
the Constitution. This, replies Peter, "is as much as to say that the worst
time for making friends is the period when you have made many enemies; that
it is the greatest of all errors to stop when you are breathless, and to
lie down when you are fatigued."
Abraham, and those who think with him, hold that concession to Roman
Catholics ought to be refused, if for no other reason, because King George
III. dislikes it. This is an argument which Peter cannot away with. He
respects the King as a good man, and holds that loyalty is one of the great
instruments of English happiness.--
"But the love of the King may easily become more strong than the love
of the Kingdom, and we may lose sight of the public welfare in our
exaggerated admiration of him who is appointed to reign only for its
promotion and support.... _God save the King_, you say, warms your
heart like the sound of a trumpet. I cannot make use of so violent a
metaphor; but I am delighted to hear it, when it is a cry of genuine
affection: I am delighted to hear it when they hail not only the
individual man, but the outward and living sign of all English
blessings. These are noble feelings, and the heart of every good man
must go with them; but _God save the King_, in these times, too often
means--God save my pension and my place, God give my sisters an
allowance out of the Privy Purse--make me Clerk of the Irons, let me
survey the Meltings, let me live upon the fruits of other men's
industry, and fatten upon the plunder of the public."
This brings us again to the "sepulchral Spencer Perceval," as he is called
in another place, with his enormous emoluments from the public purse, his
dream of pacifying Ireland by converting its inhabitants to Protestantism,
and his fantastic policy of the Orders in Council.--
"He would bring the French to reason by keeping them without rhubarb,
and exhibit to mankind the awful spectacle of a nation deprived of
neutral salts. This is not the dream of a wild apothecary indulging in
his own opium; this is not the distempered fancy of a pounder of
drugs, delirious from smallness of profits--but it is the sober,
deliberate, and systematic scheme of a man to whom the public safety
is entrusted, and whose appointment is considered by many as a
masterpiece of political sagacity."
And now, having exhausted the "Catholic Question" as it presents itself in
England and Ireland, Peter Plymley (who has already called attention to the
religious liberty established in France) cites the cases of Switzerland and
Hungary as illustrating the civil strength of nations free from the
legalized animosities of religion. Did Frederick the Great ever refuse the
services of a Catholic soldier? There is a Catholic Secretary of State at
St. Petersburgh. There was a Greek Patriarch associated with a
Vicar-Apostolic in the government of Venice. A Catholic Emperor has
entrusted the command of his guard to a Protestant Prince. But what
signifies all this to Spencer Perceval? He looks at human nature from the
top of Hampstead Hill, and has not a thought beyond the sphere of his own
vision. And so we reach the conclusion of the whole matter.--
"I now take a final leave of this subject of Ireland. The only
difficulty in discussing it is a want of resistance--a want of
something difficult to unravel and something dark to illumine. To
agitate such a question is to beat the air with a club, and cut down
gnats with a scimitar: it is a prostitution of industry, and a waste
of strength. If a man says, 'I have a good place, and I do not choose
to lose it,' this mode of arguing upon the Catholic Question I can
well understand. But that any human being with an understanding two
degrees elevated above that of an Anabaptist preacher should
conscientiously contend for the expediency and propriety of leaving
the Irish Catholics in their present state, and of subjecting us to
such tremendous peril in the present condition of the world, it is
utterly out of my power to conceive. Such a measure as the Catholic
Question is entirely beyond the common game of politics. It is a
measure in which all parties ought to acquiesce, in order to preserve
the place where and the stake for which they play. If Ireland is gone,
where are jobs? where are reversions? where is my brother, Lord
Arden?[57] where are 'my dear and near relations'? The game is up, and
the Speaker of the House of Commons will be sent as a present to the
menagerie at Paris. We talk of waiting, as if centuries of joy and
prosperity were before us. In the next ten years our fate must be
decided; we shall know, long before that period, whether we can bear
up against the miseries by which we are threatened, or not: and yet,
in the very midst of our crisis, we are enjoined to abstain from the
most certain means of increasing our strength, and advised to wait for
the remedy till the disease is removed by death or health. And now,
instead of the plain and manly policy of increasing unanimity at home,
by equalizing rights and privileges, what is the ignorant, arrogant,
and wicked system which has been pursued? Such a career of madness and
of folly was, I believe, never run in so short a period. The vigour of
the ministry is like the vigour of a grave-digger--the tomb becomes
more ready and more wide for every effort which they make.... Every
Englishman felt proud of the integrity of his country; the character
of the country is lost for ever. It is of the utmost consequence to a
commercial people at war with the greatest part of Europe, that there
should be a free entry of neutrals into the enemy's ports; the
neutrals who carried our manufactures we have not only excluded, but
we have compelled them to declare war against us. It was our interest
to make a good peace, or convince our own people that it could not be
obtained; we have not made a peace, and we have convinced the people
of nothing but of the arrogance of the Foreign Secretary: and all this
has taken place in the short space of a year, because a King's Bench
barrister and a writer of epigrams, turned into Ministers of State,
were determined to show country gentlemen that the late administration
had no vigour. In the mean time commerce stands still, manufactures
perish, Ireland is more and more irritated, India is threatened, fresh
taxes are accumulated upon the wretched people, the war is carried on
without it being possible to conceive any one single object which a
rational being can propose to himself by its continuation; and in the
midst of this unparalleled insanity we are told that the Continent is
to be reconquered by the want of rhubarb and plums. A better spirit
than exists in the English people never existed in any people in the
world; it has been misdirected, and squandered upon party purposes in
the most degrading and scandalous manner; they have been led to
believe that they were benefiting the commerce of England by
destroying the commerce of America, that they were defending their
Sovereign by perpetuating the bigoted oppression of their
fellow-subjects; their rulers and their guides have told them that
they would equal the vigour of France by equalling her atrocity; and
they have gone on wasting that opulence, patience, and courage, which,
if husbanded by prudent and moderate counsels, might have proved the
salvation of mankind. The same policy of turning the good qualities of
Englishmen to their own destruction, which made Mr. Pitt omnipotent,
continues his power to those who resemble him only in his vices;
advantage is taken of the loyalty of Englishmen to make them meanly
submissive; their piety is turned into persecution, their courage into
useless and obstinate contention; they are plundered because they are
ready to pay, and soothed into asinine stupidity because they are full
of virtuous patience. If England must perish at last, so let it be;
that event is in the hands of God; we must dry up our tears and
submit. But, that England should perish swindling and stealing; that
it should perish waging war against lazar-houses and hospitals; that
it should perish persecuting with monastic bigotry; that it should
calmly give itself up to be ruined by the flashy arrogance of one man,
and the narrow fanaticism of another; these events are within the
power of human beings, and I did not think that the magnanimity of
Englishmen would ever stoop to such degradations."
So ends this vivid argument on behalf of political justice and social
equality. Lord Grenville saw the resemblance to Swift, and Lord Holland
kindly reminded the anonymous satirist that "the only author to whom he
could be compared in English, lost a bishopric for his wittiest
performance." In later years Lord Murray[58] said, "After Pascal's
_Letters_, it is the most instructive piece of wisdom in the form of Irony
ever written." Macaulay declared that Sydney Smith was "universally
admitted to have been a great reasoner, and the greatest master of ridicule
that has appeared among us since Swift." Even now, after a century of
publishing, _Peter Plymley's Letters_ retain their preeminence. The
unexpurgated edition of the _Apologia_ may rank with the _Provincial
Letters_;[59] but the creator of Peter and Abraham Plymley stands alone.
[41] Abraham Rees, D.D. (1743-1825), and Andrew Kippis, D.D. (1723-1795),
were Presbyterian ministers of great repute.
[42] The meeting-house in Old Jewry was built in 1701 and destroyed in
1808. It "covered 2600 square feet, and was lit with six bow windows."
Dr. Rees was its last minister.
[43] George Canning (1770-1827).
[44] Spencer Perceval (1762-1812).
[45] When it was proposed to exclude King's College from the re-constituted
University of London.
[46] Spencer Perceval brought in several bills to compel non-resident
incumbents to pay their curates a living wage.
[47] Spencer Perceval obtained the sinecure office of Surveyor of the
Meltings and Clerk of the Irons in 1791.
[48] Spencer Perceval procured the reversion of his brother's office of
Registrar to the Court of Admiralty, and burked a parliamentary
inquiry into reversions generally.
[49] John Southey, 15th Lord Somerville, President of the Board of
Agriculture.
[50] Spencer Perceval.
[51] Robert Bankes Jenkinson (1770-1820), 2nd Earl of Liverpool, was Lord
Hawkesbury from 1796 to 1808.
[52] Lord Hawkesbury was appointed Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports at a
salary of £3000 a year.
[53] "The allusion is to the Orders in Council under which Mr. Perceval
endeavoured to retaliate on Napoleon's Baltic decree by regulating
British trade with the Continent. Under these orders the exportation
of all goods to France was prohibited which were not carried from this
country and had not paid an export-duty here. But there were certain
articles which the Minister decided that the Continent should have on
no terms, and amongst others quinine, or Jesuit's Bark, as it was
called. Sydney Smith, writing as Peter Plymley, said, 'You cannot
seriously suppose the people to be so degraded as to look for their
safety from a man who proposes to subdue Europe by keeping it without
Jesuit's Bark.'"--SIR SPENCER WALPOLE, _Life of Lord John
Russell_.
[54] In 1839 Sydney Smith pronounced this "a very unjust imputation on Lord
Castlereagh." Robert Stewart (1769-1823), Viscount Castlereagh, became
Marquis of Londonderry in 1821.
[55] Henry Addington (1757-1844), created Viscount Sidmouth in 1805.
[56] Spencer Perceval had recently taken a villa on Hampstead Heath, for
the benefit of his wife's health.
[57] Spencer Perceval's elder brother, Charles George Perceval (1756-1840),
was created Lord Arden in 1802.
[58] John Archibald Murray (1779-1859), a Judge of the Court of Session.
[59] In October 1844 Eugène Robin, reviewing Sydney Smith in the _Revue
des Deux Mondes_, wrote as follows:--"Caché sous le pseudonyme de
Peter Plymley il adresse ces nouvelles _provinciales_ à un
révérend pasteur, qui est bien le parfait modèle de la sottise
protestante, la quintessence des docteurs Bowles et des archidiacres
Nares."