FLOOD'S LEADERSHIP—STATE OF THE COUNTRY BETWEEN 1760 AND 1776.
England was engaged in two great wars during the period of Flood's
supremacy in the Irish Parliament—the seven years' war, concluded by
the peace of Paris in 1763, and the American war, concluded by the
treaty of Versailles, in 1783. To each of these wars Ireland was the
second largest contributor both as to men and money; and by both she
was the severest sufferer, in her manufactures, her provision trade,
and her general prosperity. While army contracts, and all sorts of
military and naval expenditure in a variety of ways returned to the
people of England the produce of their taxes, the Irish had no such
compensation for the burdens imposed on their more limited resources.
The natural result was, that that incipient prosperity which
Chesterfield hailed with pleasure in 1751, was arrested in its growth,
and fears began to be seriously entertained that the country would be
driven back to the lamentable condition from which it had slowly and
laboriously emerged during the reign of George II.
The absence of employment in the towns threw the labouring classes more
and more upon the soil for sustenance, while the landlord legislation
of the period threw them as helplessly back upon other pursuits than
agriculture. Agrarian injustice was encountered by conspiracy, and for
the first time in these pages, we have to record the introduction of
the diabolical machinery of secret oath-bound associations among the
Irish peasantry. Of the first of these combinations in the southern
counties, a cotemporary writer gives the following account: "Some
landlords in Munster," he says, "have let their lands to cotters far
above their value, and, to lighten their burden, allowed commonange to
their tenants by way of recompense: afterwards, in despite of all
equity, contrary to all compacts, the landlords enclosed these commons,
and precluded their unhappy tenants from the only means of making their
bargains tolerable." The peasantry of Waterford, Cork, and other
southern counties met in tumultuous crowds, and demolished the new
enclosures. The oligarchical majority took their usual cue on such
occasions: they pronounced, at once, that the cause of the riots was
"treason against the state;" they even obtained a select committee to
"inquire into the cause and progress of the Popish insurrection in
Munster." Although the London Gazette, on the authority of royal
commissioners, declared that the rioters "consisted indiscriminately of
persons of different persuasions," the Castle party would have it
"another Popish plot." Even Dr. Lucas was carried away by the passions
of the hour, and declaimed against all lenity, as cowardly and
criminal.
A large military force, under the Marquis of Drogheda, was accordingly
despatched to the south. The Marquis fixed his head-quarters at
Clogheen, in Tipperary, the parish priest of which was the Rev.
Nicholas Sheehy. The magistracy of the county, especially Sir Thomas
Maude, William Bagnel, John Bagwell, Daniel Toler, and Parson Hewitson,
were among the chief maintainers of the existence of a Popish plot, to
bring in the French and the Pretender. Father Sheehy had long been
fixed upon as their victim: largely connected with the minor gentry,
educated in France, young, popular, eloquent and energetic, a stern
denouncer of the licentious lives of the squires, and of the exacting
tithes of the parsons, he was particularly obnoxious. In 1763 he was
arrested on a charge of high treason, for drilling and enrolling
Whiteboys, but was acquitted. Towards the close of that year, Bridge,
one of the late witnesses against him, suddenly disappeared. A charge
of murder was then laid against the priest of Clogheen, and a
prostitute named Dunlea, a vagrant lad named Lonergan, and a convicted
horse stealer called Toohey, were produced in evidence against him,
after he had lain nearly a year in prison, heavily fettered. On the
12th of March, 1765, he was tried at Clonmel, on this evidence; and
notwithstanding an _alibi_ was proved, he was condemned, and beheaded
on the third day afterwards. Beside the old ruined church of
Shandraghan, his well-worn tomb remains till this day. He died in his
thirty-eighth year. Two months later, Edward Sheehy, his cousin, and
two respectable young farmers, named Buxton and Farrell, were executed
under a similar charge, and upon the same testimony. All died with
religious firmness and composure. The fate of their enemies is
notorious; with a single exception, they met deaths violent, loathsome,
and terrible. Maude died insane, Bagwell in idiocy, one of the jury
committed suicide, another was found dead in a privy, a third was
killed by his horse, a fourth was drowned, a fifth shot, and so through
the entire list. Toohey was hanged for felony, the prostitute Dunlea
fell into a cellar and was killed, and the lad Lonergan, after
enlisting as a soldier, died of a loathsome disease in a Dublin
infirmary.
In 1767, an attempt to revive the plot was made by the Munster
oligarchy, without success. Dr. McKenna, Bishop of Cloyne, was arrested
but enlarged; Mr. Nagle, of Garnavilla (a relative of Edmund Burke),
Mr. Robert Keating, and several respectable Catholic gentlemen, were
also arrested. It appears that Edmund Burke was charged by the
ascendancy party with having "sent his brother Richard, recorder of
Bristol, and Mr. Nagle, a relation, on a mission to Munster, to levy
money on the Popish body for the use of the Whiteboys, who were
exclusively Papists." The fact was, that Burke did originate a
subscription for the defence of the second batch of victims, who,
through his and other exertions, were fortunately saved from the fate
of their predecessors.
Contemporaneous with the Whiteboys were the northern agrarians, called
"Hearts of Steel," formed among the absentee Lord Downshire's tenants,
in 1762; the "Oak Boys," so called from wearing oak leaves in their
hats; and the "Peep o' Day Boys," the precursors of the Orange
Association. The infection of conspiracy ran through all Ireland, and
the disorder was neither short-lived nor trivial. Right-boys,
Defenders, and a dozen other denominations descended from the same evil
genius, whoever he was, that first introduced the system of signs, and
passwords, and midnight meetings, among the peasantry of Ireland. The
celebrated society of United Irishmen was the highest form which that
principle, in our politics, ever reached. In its origin, it was mainly
a Protestant organization.
From the first, the Catholic bishops and clergy strenuously opposed
these secret societies. The Bishop of Cloyne issued a reprobatory
pastoral; Father Arthur O'Leary employed his facile pen against them;
the Bishop of Ossory anathematized them in his diocese. Priests in
Kildare, Kilkenny, and Munster, were often in personal danger from
these midnight legislators; their chapels had been frequently nailed
up, and their bishops had been often obliged to remove them from one
neighbourhood to another to prevent worse consequences. The infatuation
was not to be stayed; the evil was engrafted on society, and many a
long year, and woeful scene, and blighted life, and broken heart, was
to signalize the perpetuation of secret societies among the population.
These startling symptoms of insubordination and lawlessness, while they
furnished plausible pretexts to the advocates of repression, still
further confirmed the Patriot party in their belief, that, nothing
short of a free trade in exports and imports, and a thorough system of
retrenchment in every branch of the public service, could save the
nation from bankruptcy and ruin. This was Flood's opinion, and he had
been long recognized as the leading spirit of the party. The aged
Malone, true to his principles of conciliation and constitutionalism to
the last, passed away from the scene, in the midst of the exciting
events of 1776. For some years before his death, his former place had
been filled by the younger and more vigorous member for Kilkenny, who,
however, did not fail to consult him with all the deference due to his
age, his services, and his wisdom. One of his last official acts was
presiding over the committee of the whole House, which voted the
American contingent, but rejected the admission of German troops to
supply their place.