1795. United Irishmen. Religious Discord.

Chapter II.

1795.

**Ireland in 1795 - My Father’s Settlement in France - Honours of the Church there - His Return to Ireland - Position of the Catholics - An Octogenarian student - Objects of the Irish Patriots after ‘82 - The French Invasion - Progress of Ireland - Hopes and Desires of the People - Parliamentary Reform - The Emancipated Irish Legislature - Traffic in Corruption - Efforts of the Patriots - Lord Strangford’s Pension - The United Irishmen - Catholic Emancipation - Protestant Liberality

Humility of the Catholics - The Fatal Enfranchisement of 1793 - Establishment of Religious Discord.**

Imbued with such feelings as I have described in the last chapter, I returned to Ireland in the year 1795, and entered at once into manhood, and what I may perhaps call my national life. Before, however, proceeding with my reminiscences of succeeding events, I will pause for a moment to call to mind the actual position of the country and of myself at that period.

My father, who was born about the termination of the first third of the 18th century, was one of the many Irish Roman Catholics who sought, in foreign countries, for liberty to enjoy those privileges of property and talent from which they were debarred in their native land. Very early in life he settled in France, upon a considerable estate, which he purchased at Galville, near Rouen; and there my elder sisters were born. He was not long, however, in finding out that they did not order things much better in France than in Ireland; and that although nominally equal to his neighbours in religious caste, the Church made invidious distinctions in the distribution of her honours among the faithful.

My father, probably having previously experienced more substantial annoyances, was finally so nettled at the partiality shown by the curé, in administering the honours of the censer to a neighbouring seigneur, whom he thought to have no right to be fumigated before himself, that he sold his estate and returned to Ireland, where he conformed to Protestantism, and became thereby qualified to hold a territorial stake in the country.

So far the French priest’s nationality was a fortunate matter for my father and his descendants. He found a good market for his chateau and lands, the ownership of which, 15 years later, would, in all probability, have cost him his head; and he made a good investment of the proceeds in his native country. His first possession in Ireland was the estate and borough of Rathcormac, in the county of Cork; but this he subsequently sold to the first Lord Riversdale, and bought the estates in Limerick, Kildare, and Dublin, which still remain in the family. To the active mind of my father, however, neither the duties nor the rights of landed property afforded sufficient occupation; and he accordingly entered, to a large extent, and with considerable success, into the banking and woollen trades. He also became a member of the Irish House of Commons, was created a baronet in 1776, and removed to the House of Peers in 1789.

This short sketch of my father’s career is, in fact, a practical commentary upon the position of the Irish nation during the latter half of the last century. By the operation of the penal laws, the most energetic and intelligent, and even wealthy Irishmen of the majority were driven into foreign lands, to seek a sphere for the employment of their activity and ability, and a field for the secure enjoyment of the property they inherited, or which those qualities enabled them to accumulate.

Abroad they became bitter foes to the dominant faction in their own country; or if they returned to the land of their birth, it was either as partisans of their former oppressors, to whom a hard necessity served to reconcile them; or as champions of the oppressed, from whose ranks they found themselves so lucky as to have risen. My father, notwithstanding the favours he obtained from the government, enrolled himself from the outset in the latter category; and during his parliamentary career, voted on most important questions upon the popular side.

The turn of his mind was certainly liberal by nature, although he was often influenced by his intimate friends and near neighbours, the first Earl of Clonmel, and John Lees of the Post Office. Under their advice, and probably swayed by a desire to serve me, who was, at the time, imprisoned in the Tower, he voted for the Union; but in the earlier struggles, by which the temporary independence of Ireland was won, as well as upon the question of parliamentary reform, by the failure of which it was subsequently lost, he was to be found fighting in the ranks of the patriots.

The tone of the circle of relatives and intimate acquaintances with which I was then surrounded, was pitched at the same key. My two grandfathers were both Roman Catholics, and smarted under the mortification that must naturally be felt by the most kindly-hearted men, when they find themselves debarred from the reasonable enjoyment of advantages of wealth and social standing, their claim to which they are not conscious of having forfeited by any personal shortcomings.

With one of these parents, then near 80 years old, but in the full vigour of a green old age, I took up housekeeping upon my return to Ireland, in 1795, in a small house in Merrion-row, close to my father’s residence; and a merry, hospitable house we kept: but in our late sittings after dinner (which were then the fashion) we seldom failed to have our political discussions, all tending in the same direction. My grandfather was, of course, a complainant; and I well remember the cordial sincerity with which he expressed his theory as to the primary cause of division and discord among Irishmen, and the consequent retardation of national prosperity, in his constant saying, “curtail the clergy.”

My father’s land-agent, Thomas Broughall, [Mr. Broughall was a man of great energy of mind and body. He had been educated, in his youth, at Douay; but feeling conscious of some provincialism in his accent, he took advantage of the peace of Amiens, and went to Paris, when close upon his 80th year, for the express purpose of correcting his pronunciation of the French language. Before he had made much progress, *la grippe *interfered with his studies, and carried him off.] and his solicitor, Matt. Dowling, were still more active patriots than my grandfather. They were both most zealous and faithful servants and good friends of my father; and so I was naturally upon terms of such close intimacy with them, as brought their sentiments and feelings into operation to confirm in my mind the opinions already planted there, with regard to the condition and prospects of my country

Nevertheless, 1 am firmly convined, that at the period of which I speak, the liberal opposition, which included so great a majority of the Irish people, was altogether untouched by treason. The men to whom I have referred - and they were fair types of the mass - were influenced by a desire to improve their own condition, to escape from bondage, by constitutional means, and by these alone. They belonged to the moral force party of that day; and that party, I sincerely believe, included in its ranks the vast majority of the nation; nor was a recourse to physical force or foreign aid thought of, until desperation succeeded to hope in the public mind.

For the still higher purity of the motives of the Protestant martyrs and champions in the cause of Irish liberty, I can answer with equal confidence. Of my dear friend, Edward Fitzgerald, of the Emmetts, and of Sampson, I can say, with not less certainty than of Grattan, Curran, Arthur O’Connor, and the late Duke of Leinster, that they were all, at the outset of their career, actuated by the most earnest love of the British constitution ; and that the truly patriotic object at which they aimed, was nothing else than the extension to Ireland of those blessings and guarantees of liberty, civil and religious, the principles of which are engrained in the texture of the constitutional monarchy of England.

If any of the excellent and single-hearted men whose names I have mentioned, not counting the cost of their enterprise, stepped out too boldly upon the foot-tracks of the founders of that monarchy, the blame of ill success, and of wrong estimation of the value of the tools with which they worked, must, indeed, be theirs; but in the merit of good intent, they must be permitted to share, on equal terms, with their English predecessors of 1688; while the infamy of having driven sincere lovers of their country from the position of parliamentary reformers to that of armed rebels, as equally lies upon the ministers of George III., as upon the personal royalty of James II.

Of the truth of these views of the actual position and dispositions of Irish politicians at the close of the 18th century, many incidents in my father’s life furnished no bad illustrations. He maintained a friendly and respectful intercourse with the viceregal court, and was upon terms of familiar intimacy with several viceroys, among whom I may mention the Marquis of Buckibgham and the Earl of Westmorland. With his sanction, I was the chief promoter of the Rathdown Association, a voluntary organization of noblemen and gentlemen, established for the purpose of maintaining the public peace, and protecting property in the populous district lying between Dublin and Bray - a purpose then but little served by the imperfect police of those days.

I was also, at the same time, an officer in a corps of yeoman cavalry, commanded by Colonel Corry, brother of the Chancellor of the Irish Exchequer, and acted with them at the time of the threatened French invasion, an incident connected with which I may mention as further bearing out my position. When the news of the landing at Bantry reached Dublin, there was an encampment at Loughlinstown, in the county of Dublin, from which it was desired to move the troops towards the seat of danger. The desire, however, was not backed by the means. There was not a farthing in the military chest. In this dilemma, application was made to my father for aid, and by an advance of £45,000 made by him, the government was enabled to break up the camp, and march its occupants southward. [The movement was* *made so suddenly, that there was not time to bury the body of a paymaster of one of the regiments, who shot himself on the morning of the breaking up of the camp, in consequence of the discovery of a defalcation in his accounts. The body was locked up in the hut occupied by the unfortunate man during life, and upon the return of the troops from the south, it was found to have been completely anatomized by rats. Nothing but the skeleton remained.]

Coupled with the general feeling of dissatisfaction with the past, there existed in Ireland during the last decade of the 18th century, a strong desire for national progress, rendered active and impatient by the successes of ‘82, and by some degree of disappointment at the still incomplete development of that prosperity which was too sanguinely looked for as the direct and immediate consequence of political advancement. That an immense progress in material prosperity did take place during the 18 years that preceded the Union, is a fact now rendered but too striking by the depression that succeeded that fatal measure, and that has permanently kept down the country during half a century; but the “before and after” of the political courtship were not then visible to the people; and not knowing how miserable a contrast was soon to be opposed to their existing state, men, feeling within them a new sense of power, became discontented that its products did not come to use more promptly, and in greater abundance.

Having acquired freedom of trade, our merchants and manufacturers thought they should at once see Liverpools, Bristols, and Manchesters springing up in the land, and forgot by how slow degrees and through how long an enjoyment of the liberty of industry such results were attained to in the sister kingdom. Then recurred the idea of the Volunteers and their noble work; and, dazzled with the splendour of that victory, the people looked for the improvement of their material condition too much to political changes, and too little to the more certain means of patient and farseeking industry. Here the popular impatience gave an important advantage to those who desired nothing less than either the commercial prosperity or political advancement of Ireland. English statesmen were enabled to point to it as a proof that the nation was unfitted for self-government; that the extension of their franchises but served to render them less reliant upon their own resources, and more disposed to adopt political agitation as a trade. The argument was used with skill and power, when the destruction of Irish independence became the great object of England.

By the higher classes of Irishmen, the same end - their own political inhumation - was, by another course, not less actively approached. When the legislative freedom of the Irish Parliament was established, the more forward and farseeing of the patriots at once perceived that, unless the legislature was pure as well as free, its independence could not endure. The English minister must have the support of a majority in the Irish as well as in the English House of Commons: it was not to be expected that he would seek to secure this by popular measures, if the easier alternative of commanding it by corruption should lie within his reach. That alternative was provided by the existence of upwards of eighty patronage boroughs, and by the restriction of the elective franchise to a minority of the people.

To new struggles for the emancipation of the Roman Catholics, and for the reform of the representative system, the patriot leaders therefore turned their arms as soon as they had achieved the victory of ‘82. It was these all-important questions that, during the ensuing 18 years, divided Irishmen, and ultimately rendered them up a weakened and easy prey to their common enemy.

The first step of the victors of ‘82 was an endeavour to purify the representation; the next, an attempt to obtain Catholic Emancipation. “We moved,” said Grattan, “a reform of parliament, which should give a constitution to the people, and the Catholic Emancipation, which should give a people to the constitution.” [In his address to the citizens of Dublin, on retiring from parliament in 1797.] The former measure was obstinately and successfully resisted; the latter was partially conceded, but in such a manner as to entail upon the country that mass of moral and physical misery that now renders Ireland a spectacle to the nations.

Both the resistance and the concession actively co-operated in bringing about the distractions of 1797, and the disastrous Rebellion of 1798, and as these events materially influenced my own personal fortunes, I will dwell a little longer upon their causes.

The first in order of the two causes of Irish discord and ruin to which I refer, was the question of Parliamentary Reform. When it was pressed upon the consideration of the House of Commons by the Convention of Volunteers in 1783, the zeal - perhaps a little exceeding discretion - evinced by some members of that celebrated body, and the caution-perhaps much exceeding prudence-of others, created an occasion for difference of opinion between many excellent Irishmen who, up to that point, had stood shoulder to shoulder in the patriot ranks. The appearance in the house, upon the celebrated night of the 29th November, 1783, of the advocates of reform, in the uniform and arms which they wore as delegates to the Convention, naturally alarmed many men who, while they earnestly desired the independence of their country, wished to seek it through the use of those constitutional means whereby the recent victory had been gained:-

“Blessed,” said Mr. Yelverton, “with a free trade and a free constitution - our peers restored to their rights and to their lawful authority - our judges rendered independent - the manacles fallen from our commons - all foreign control abolished - we take our rank among nations as a free state. And is this a time to alter that constitution, which has endured so many storms, and risen superior to all oppression? Will the armed associations, wise as they may be, be able to form a better though they reject this? Before they have for a single session entered into the enjoyment of it, like children, they throw away the bauble for which, with all the eagerness of an infantine caprice, they have struggled ; or; like spendthrifts, they would make away with their inheritance before they enter into possession of it.”

The borough proprietors gladly availed themselves of such help as was afforded in this argument, and of such defenders as Yelverton, and Daly, and Conolly, and that night the fatal blow was inflicted upon the independence of Ireland by the unanimous adoption, by Lords and Commons, of an address to the crown, declaring “perfect satisfaction in our present happy constitution.”

The Irish legislature, at that time, consisted of a House of Lords, of which 53 peers nominated 123 members of the other branch; and of a House of Commons of 300 so-called representatives of the people, scarcely one-third of whom were freely and fairly returned by popular election. That such a body could have achieved so much as they did in ‘82, was truly wonderful; but that they should feel perfect satisfaction with their own share in the benefits of that achievement, was only natural. They had indeed vindicated freedom of trade and judicial independence for the masses of their fellow-countrymen, but they had also secured for themselves a monopoly of the pleasures and profits of legislative power.

Even at that early period that monopoly had begun to bear golden fruits for its owners. Possessing an uncontrolled power of using the public purse, the Irish government had set themselves to counterwork the popular progress of the past year, by an extension of the system of corruption which, a few years previously, was in such active operation as to warrant an attorney-general in avowing that a single address of thanks to Lord Townshend, had cost the nation half a million of money. [This infamous avowal was made in the House of Commons on the 25th of February, 1789, upon the occasion of Mr. Grattan’s motion for a short supply.] The House of Commons had bought their country, and the House of Peers had sold it, and both meaning to pursue the infamous traffic, with activity increased in proportion to the increased value of the subject of their bargains, felt “perfect satisfaction” in the happy constitution that made them the masters of so prosperous a commerce.

Very different, however, were the feelings of the people; and the proceedings prior to the attainment of the political and commercial independence of Ireland having been the means of training them in a course of agitation, and having also inspired them with confidence in the success of popular exertion, the satisfaction of their *quasi *representatives with the existing state of things, but served to render them more anxious for a change. Accordingly, the parliamentary proceedings of 1783, to which I have alluded, only stimulated the zeal of the Reformers, and they continued, during the ensuing two years, to agitate the subject of the purification of the legislature, through the medium of public meetings, conventions, and congresses, all of which movements were met by the government by increased restrictions on freedom - the steps necessary to the imposing of which being, in every case, an advance in the career of parliamentary corruption.

Nevertheless, it was not until the crisis of the plague of venality and bribery was reached in 1791, that the people appear to have abandoned the hope of succeeding in their object by strictly constitutional methods. In that year Mr. Grattan made his splendid but fruitless effort, upon the “Responsibility Bill;” and a vigorous struggle against the increase of ministerial influence and corruption, begun by him on the first night of the session, was energetically carried on by Messrs. George Ponsonby, Conolly, and Forbes; and by Lord Portarlington and the Duke of Leinster in the House of Lords. But the war was waged with unequal forces: on the one side, indeed, was the noblest patriotism, backed by the most brilliant genius; on the other, the purse of the nation, and the power of the minister to open it to the servile partisan, and to close it against the justest claims of the patriot, whom his conscience pressed more closely than his poverty

In the same year, 1791, Mr. Grattan also moved an amendment to the address, deprecating “the great increase of ministerial influence and corruption, and requesting his Majesty to apply a remedy to the growing evil, by abolishing unnecessary and burthensome places and establishments.” It was, however, rejected by a large majority, as was a similar proposition brought before the House of Lords by Lord Portarlington. My excellent friend, however, again returned to the charge, upon the occasion of the creation of two new Commissioners of the Revenue, when his motion for an address to the King was seconded by Mr. Conolly, but rejected by a majority of more than 50 votes.

The pension-list was next attacked by Mr. Forbes, who was also beaten. Mr. George Ponsonby then came to the rescue, but with no better success; he, too, was defeated by a large majority, on his motion to represent to his Majesty “that his faithful Commons, having taken into consideration the growth of public expense in the last year, could not but observe many new and increased salaries annexed to offices granted to members of that house, no fewer in number than 14; that so rapid an increase of places, together with the number of additional pensions, could not but alarm the house, and though they could never entertain a doubt of his Majesty’s affection and regard for his loyal kingdom of Ireland, yet they feared that his Majesty’s servants may, by misinformation, so far have abused his Majesty’s confidence, as to have advised such measures for the purpose of increasing influence.”

But a climax was set upon the fabric of corruption by the withdrawal of a pension of £400 a-year from Lord Strangford, on account of certain independent votes given by him in his place in Parliament - an event which led to the proposal in the House of Lords, by the Duke of Leinster, of the following remarkable resolution:- “Whereas the Lord Viscount Strangford has been deprived of a pension which, at the request of this house, his Majesty was graciously pleased to grant him until an adequate provision should be made for him in his own line of profession: and whereas no cause has been suggested or communicated to the noble lord for such mark of his Majesty’s displeasure: the house, therefore, has every ground to believe, that the same had reference to his conduct in parliament in the last sessions; and declare and resolve that the adviser of the measure acted disrespectfully to this house, unconstitutionally, and undutifully to his Majesty.” This motion was rejected by a majority of 20 peers, and became the subject of a manly protest, which was signed by the Duke of Leinster, the Bishops of Cork and Clonfert, and by Lords Moira, Arran, Farnham, Charlemont, and Portarlington.

With these transactions of 1791 appear to have ended the hopes of the people, that the desired object of representative reform could he attained by constitutional efforts in parliament, and in that year, accordingly, the Society of United Irishmen was originated; conceived, says Arthur O’Connor, in the memoir to government signed by him and his fellow-prisoners, Thomas Addis Emmett and Dr. M’Nevin, in “the idea of uniting both sects (Catholics and Protestants) in pursuit of the same objects, a repeal of the penal laws, and a reform, including in itself an extension of the right of suffrage to Catholics.” Nothing beyond these objects was at first thought of by the originators of that organization.

“During the whole existence of the Society of United Irishmen of Dublin” (I quote from the memoir just referred to), “we may safely aver, to the best of our knowledge and recollection, that no such object as separation from England was ever agitated by its members, either in public debate or private conversation; nor until the society had lasted a considerable time, were any traces of republicanism to be met with there. Its views were purely and in good faith what the test of the society avows.”

That test I took on becoming a United Irishman, before the society was rendered illegal by a coercive statute. It was then unaccompanied by any obligation to secrecy, and bound the taker as follows:- “To promote a union of friendship between Irishmen of every religious persuasion, and to forward a full, fair, and adequate representation of all the people in parliament.”

Coincidently with the struggle for representative reform, that for the emancipation of the Roman Catholics was ardently prosecuted by the Irish patriots, and (the fact is a remarkable one) with infinitely more vigour and zeal by the Protestants than by those with whom they proposed to share their exclusive privileges. Thus, while the representatives of 143 corps of Protestant volunteers at Dungannon resolved (with two dissentient voices), “That they held the right of private judgment in religion to be equally sacred in others as in themselves, and that, therefore, as men and as Irishmen, as Christians and as Protestants, they rejoiced in the relaxation of the penal laws against their Roman Catholic fellow-subjects, and conceived the measure to be fraught with the happiest consequences to the union and prosperity of the inhabitants of Ireland” - while these noble sentiments were expressed by the dominant class, that which was oppressed declared through their representatives in the general committee of Roman Catholics, that they would be content with such maimed and halting concessions as the following

Admission to the profession and practice of the law.
Capacity to serve in county magistracies.
A right to be summoned and to serve on grand and petty juries.
The right of voting in counties only for Protestant members of parliament, in such a manner, however, as that a Roman Catholic freeholder should not vote, unless he either rented and cultivated a farm of £20 per annum, in addition to his 40-shilling freehold, or else possessed a freehold of £20 a-year.

Of this poverty of spirit among the Roman Catholics the government did not fail to take advantage, and finding that portion of the nation so willing to be made use of, they determined to qualify it to he employed in the work of corruption. In this spirit the Relief Bill of 1793 was passed - that fatal measure to which I have already pointed as the ultimate cause of every succeeding calamity of Ireland. By this act, the lower classes of Roman Catholics were endowed with the elective franchise, while the wealthier and more intelligent

[Resolutions entered into by the Roman Catholic Committee, on the 4th of February, 1792, upon the occasion of the introduction of Sir Hercules Langrishe’s Relief Bill. (It’s unclear where this footnote fits in - somewhere between “laws against their Roman Catholic fellow-subject” and “the more intelligent” KF))]

members of the body were excluded from seats in either house of parliament. The inevitable consequences of so mischievous an absurdity were clearly foreseen and predicted at the time by many patriotic men. They were not developed in their maturity until the visitation of the famine of 1846 vindicated the paramount authority of the laws of nature, and exhibited to the world a signal instance of retributive punishment of their violators.

The concession of the forty-shilling franchise to the Roman Catholics had the immediate effect of stimulating to an extraordinary degree the progress of parliamentary corruption. A new trade sprung up in the country; men speculated on the multiplication of forty shilling freeholders, as they ought to have done in the breeding of sheep. The minister opened the national purse wider and wider, and the Protestant squires strove for its contents, each backed by as large a following of servile voters as it was possible for his lands to maintain.

In the prosecution of such a slave-traffic, the productive powers of the potato afforded invaluable aid. By the use of no other species of food could so large a number of human beings be raised upon so small an area of soil. This was the consummation to he desired when every adult male was a unit in the price of a peerage or baronetcy, or equally available towards the purchase of the more substantial benefit of a well-endowed sinecure. The potato was grown, and freeholders were bred until the former wore out the soil, and the latter multiplied from droves of useful and obedient slaves into swarms of hungry, restless vermin. The work of their destruction was then taken in hand with as little regard to justice or mercy as was shown at their creation.

The forty-shilling franchise was abolished in 1832; [It must not be forgotten that this reaction upon the measure of 1793, by which the accomplishment of its fatal effects was hastened, was the work of Mr. O’Connell. The forty-shilling freeholders of Clare forced him into parliament, and thereby brought upon themselves the vengeance of their former masters; he assented to their political destruction (the forerunner of their personal annihilation) within three years after the date of the Clare election.] but the forty-shilling freeholders remained to encumber the laud, and to torment, to the second and third generation, those who called them into a miserable existence.

The laws of nature are immutable and inevitable; the political monopoly of 1793 contained within itself the elements of the dissipation of those unlawful gains, for the accumulation of which it was devised. The substance of many a lord and squire of high degree, made out of the voices of his forty-shilling voters, has been eaten up during the two years that have passed, by the mouths of the children of those serfs whom his progenitors had chained to the soil.

Thus, no sooner had the Irish legislature secured its own independence of England than it sold itself again to the English minister by private contract. The nation witnessed the bargain, and striving to break it by the agency of representative reform, the struggle divided the people from the parliament. The latter, aided for their destruction by the English government, sought to strengthen themselves by again dividing the people: they bought the Catholics with a niggard price, and having once separated them from the grand national army, and erected distinct standards for Catholic Emancipation and for Reform, they rendered a new junction all but impossible, by subsidizing the Protestants.

By an exclusive distribution among these of the public patronage, they joined them to their own ranks as a mercenary body-guard of corruption. The events of the rebellion of 1798 widened the breach between the two sets of religionists, and the catastrophe of the miserable story was the Union, the consummation of which, it must never be forgotten, was the direct result of the religious discord, whose rise and growth I have thus slightly sketched.

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