For the moment, however, not even the most vociferous Irish critics of British imperial policy contemplated joining forces with America against Britain. For starters, even the burgeoning trade with America could not compete with the central importance of Ireland’s direct trade with Britain, a trade few wished to see disrupted. Ireland was also internally divided between the ruling Protestant Ascendancy, a growing minority of dissenting Presbyterians, centered in Ulster, and a disenfranchised Catholic majority. Despite the widely held belief that the imperial position, the grievances, and the fate of Ireland and the American colonies were closely tied and widely similar, few among the Irish political class considered themselves to be colonists or Ireland to be an English colony.
Instead of adopting an oppositional anti-English mindset, the Protestant Ascendancy viewed themselves as Englishmen, descendants of those Englishmen who had fought against the forces of Catholic despotism in the seventeenth century and the rightful inheritors of the rights and liberties that their forebears had won with their loyal sacrifice. As such, loyalty to the crown was central to their identity as Protestant Englishmen in an Irish Catholic country. Efforts at reform were thus initially couched in the language of “English liberties” and directed against the administration rather than against the crown of Britain itself. While America sought separation from Great Britain, Ireland sought only to “obtain just participation of her constitution.” Irishmen remained among the most vocal critics of Britain’s American policy and continued to press for reforms similar to those pursued by their American cousins, but they did so, at least initially, from within a framework of loyalism.6
When France declared war on Britain in 1778, it was not just Englishmen who began to quake at the prospect of French invasion. Ireland had long been seen as the Catholic back door into Britain. As recently as 1760, during the Seven Years’ War, the French had attempted an invasion of Ireland at Carrickfergus in Northern Ireland as a prelude to a larger invasion of England, and there was every reason to believe they would try it again. It was, after all, hardly surprising that France would see welcome allies among the Catholic-majority Ireland. Since England’s adoption of Protestantism in the sixteenth century, Irish Catholics had been restricted by a series of Penal Laws, laws that prevented them from holding property, serving in office, possessing weapons, or voting in elections. The disenfranchised Catholic majority had frequently resorted to insurrection in the past, and though there had not been a major Catholic rising in nearly a century, many in Ireland, Britain, and France still considered English rule as balanced precariously on a ledge of sectarian division. For the Protestant Ascendancy in particular, French invasion held more concrete and substantial terrors. As a precarious ruling class, and one knowledgeable regarding Ireland’s long and turbulent history of insurrection, there was every reason to think that a French invasion might well lead to a Catholic rebellion and the destruction of their rather fragile position. Britain had sought to secure Catholic manpower and Catholic loyalty by passing the Catholic Relief Bill in 1778, yet many Irish Protestants remained decidedly nervous about their position in the event of a French invasion.
To guard against just such an eventuality, the British had promised to maintain a force of 12,000 troops in Ireland for internal defense at all times, a figure increased to 15,000 in 1771. But these were not ordinary times, and by the time France entered war and made the threat to Ireland’s shores a potent reality, the latter’s defense force had been fatally depleted, siphoned off to fight in the American quagmire and the dizzying array of battlefronts around the globe. In 1775, 4,000 Irish soldiers—“armed negotiators” as Henry Flood, who opposed the move in Parliament, termed them—were sent to America with more Irish troops to follow. It was an unpopular policy, both because many Irishmen were sympathetic to the American cause and because they feared for the safety of their own island.7
At the outset, however, some Irishmen had been eager enough to join. Even a scion of one of Ireland’s first families of resistance to English rule enthusiastically joined the fray. Edward Fitzgerald, brother of the Duke of Leinster and descendant of the rebellious earls of Kildare, only 12 years old when the first Irish troops were sent across the Atlantic, secured a commission in the army as soon as he was old enough. He balked at the delays in shipping out, prayed that he would be sent to fight the colonials rather than to the defense of Gibraltar, and even turned down a comfortable commission for fear that it might mean missing out on the action in America. He was thrilled when he was sent to Charleston to aid in the defense of the city from the resurgent Patriots in the south. Young, energetic, and eager to prove himself, Fitzgerald represented a different strand of Irish opinion. He was more concerned with his own prospects for glory and advancement than the ideological principles that undergirded the war.8
Back in Ireland, however, Britain’s desperate, unquenchable need for troops left the island undefended, vulnerable, and terrified. Pleas were made to the British authorities to fulfill their promise to maintain Ireland’s defenses, Militia bills were proposed in Parliament, and offers were made by wealthy elites to raise regiments of militia. There were no soldiers to spare, however, and no money to fund the recruitment or arming of militia. When these pleas fell on deaf ears, leaving the country exposed and defenseless, the Irish resolved to take up their own defense. “Ireland,” Jonah Barrington lamented, “without money, militia, or standing army . . . almost abandoned by England, had to depend solely on the spirit and resources of her own natives.”9
It began in Ulster, a stronghold of Protestantism and dissent currently in the throes of a catastrophic recession caused by the war’s disruption of its vital linen trade. As early as 1778, when John Paul Jones’s raid on British ships at Carrickfergus first brought the war to Ireland, Ulster had been calling out for protection. A year later, in May 1779, reports of an imminent French invasion of Northern Ireland engendered widespread panic. The authorities of Belfast and Carrickfergus sent word of the rumored invasion to the Lord Lieutenant, the Earl of Buckinghamshire, at Dublin Castle, imploring him to send troops to their aid. Buckinghamshire was sympathetic, but could only spare about sixty soldiers for the defense of Ulster, and so, as the alarmed Lord Lieutenant wrote to his superiors in London, the people of Belfast and Carrickfergus began to arm themselves, “and, by degrees, formed themselves into two or three companies” to repel the invaders. From these initial outbreaks, these popular militias or “Volunteers” began to crop up around the country. “The spirit” of the Volunteers “quickly diffused itself into different parts of the kingdom, and the number became considerable,” Buckinghamshire reported until perhaps as many as 60,000 Irishmen were under arms. The Volunteer corps consisted of middle-class Protestants organized into local units led by Protestant elites. Catholics, forbidden to hold arms and distrusted by both government and their Protestant neighbors, were not generally allowed to join the Volunteers but showed their support for the movement, and opposition to French incursion, by sending aid and messages of support to the Volunteers.10
The authorities in Dublin could do little but offer rather disingenuous thanks and gently discourage the trend where they could. The Earl of Buckinghamshire did not dare antagonize the Volunteers. Moreover, he knew full well that seizing so many arms would be almost impossible in a country in which the arm of the law was weak at the best of times and where the right of Protestants to bear arms had been enshrined in law since the seventeenth century. Furthermore, the Lord Lieutenant argued, it would be churlish to refuse Irish Protestants the right to arm themselves at the very moment when new freedoms had been granted to Catholics, “a denomination of men, whom they so long had deemed their inveterate enemies.” Besides, Ireland was in a vulnerable position. In case of an invasion, these men would be needed to defend the coast and protect the rest of the country from the prospect of Catholic insurrection. In such an unenviable position, the Irish authorities outwardly tolerated and even praised the Volunteers, going so far as to hee
d requests to send arms and supplies to some of the units.11
Like many Irishmen of his day, 19-year-old Jonah Barrington was swept away by the spirit of the times. Born in 1760 at his father’s country seat of Knapton in Queen’s County, Barrington was a member of the minority Protestant gentry, the so-called “Ascendancy,” that ruled over Ireland’s Catholic majority. Like Barrington’s family, the Ascendancy were descendants of English settlers who had arrived in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, had sided with Britain during the crisis of the Glorious Revolution, and viewed themselves first and foremost as Protestant Englishmen, the hereditary governors of Britain’s empire in Ireland. With such loyalist bona fides, when Britain and Ireland were threatened with foreign invasion in 1779, Barrington was seized by the contagious desire to defend his homeland from the attack that everyone was sure would come.
“Military ardour,” Barrington remembered, had seized the whole country. Across Ireland men were banding together into Volunteer companies to repel the expected invasion. As a member of the local Protestant gentry, Barrington’s father and brother raised and commanded their own Volunteer corps, and Jonah, though still very young, joined one of his family’s companies. “I found myself a military martinet and a red-hot patriot,” he later recalled, and, as a “university man,” took a central role in drawing up the orders and resolutions of the region’s Volunteer units.12
It did not take long for Irish reformers to realize the potential of a nation in arms. Since at least 1720, Irish Protestant supporters of the British Whig Party, and especially the Patriot faction of the Whig Party, had begun to coalesce into an opposition movement advocating for reform of Ireland’s political and economic systems. Called the “Irish Patriot Party,” this group advocated for the independence of Ireland’s Parliament, greater control over Irish economic policy, and the elimination of other British abuses of Ireland’s government. Over the eighteenth century, they pushed for autonomy from Britain, relaxation of the Penal Laws against Catholics, the independence of Ireland’s justice system, and the repeal of the laws that made Ireland’s Parliament subordinate to Britain’s. Previous attempts at reform had mostly failed, but by the 1770s, inspired by British reformers and American revolutionaries, the Irish Patriot Party, led by Henry Flood in the House of Commons, and Lord Charlemont in the House of Lords, were ready to seize any opportunity presented by Britain’s imperial crisis to demand reform. The Volunteer movement presented exactly the opportunity the Irish Patriots were looking for.
The Volunteers had done much to unify the country, to create a new sense of Irishness, and provide the momentum and zeal necessary to pressure the government. In an era when government and people were seen to be connected by a series of mutual obligations, Britain, by failing in its obligation to protect and aid Ireland, had forfeited its rights over Ireland, removing Ireland’s reciprocal obligation of obedience. And so, when Parliament opened in 1779, Henry Grattan, a reform-minded lawyer of little note, but blessed with great powers of rhetoric and awe-inspiring oratory, addressed the chamber, offering an amendment to the government’s opening address. In “fiery, yet deliberative language,” Grattan beseeched the king to take note of the distressed condition of his Irish kingdom, arguing that “the constant drain to supply absentees, and the unfortunate prohibition of our trade, have caused such a calamity, that the natural support of our country has decayed, and our manufacturers are dying for want; famine stalks hand in hand with hopeless wretchedness; and the only means left to support . . . this miserable part of your Majesty’s dominions, is to open a free export trade.”13
While Grattan called for free trade within Parliament, outside the public began to press for reform as well. Petitions were sent to the administration at Dublin Castle detailing the suffering of Irish commerce and the Irish people. Buckinghamshire received a deputation of representatives of the linen industry who informed him of the economic destruction of their crucial industry, describing warehouses full of unsold linens. A government inquiry found that Ireland’s merchant community, especially those at Dublin and Limerick, had been devastated by the war and the embargo, with “numbers of them ruined.” In Parliament Grattan castigated the government, arguing that the taxes imposed on Ireland to fund Britain’s war, combined with the restrictions placed on Ireland’s linen and provisions trades, had caused the immiseration of thousands. It was claimed that “ten thousand of them were thrown out of employment,” and that “the streets of Dublin were paraded by numerous bodies of starving manufacturers, who displayed a black fleece as a token of their distress and despair.”14
Supporters of the ministry objected to Grattan’s amendment, but the young reformer convinced many of the justness of his resolution. Henry Flood, long among the most vocal and influential advocates of reform, voiced his firm support as did other members of the opposition. However, the tide truly changed when Walter Hussey Burgh, Prime Sergeant and thus a prominent member of the ministry, rose and exclaimed that he could not support any measure that “fraudulently concealed from the King the right of his people.” With Burgh and other members of the government refusing to oppose Grattan’s amendment, the measure passed. Though the amendment had no actual teeth in it, its effects were immediate and striking. The Volunteers saw the measure as a vote of support for their movement and considered Parliament’s adoption of their grievances to be a visible sign of the effective power of the Volunteer Movement to drive real political change. In Dublin, Jonah Barrington, who had been present for Grattan’s momentous speech, looked on while the local Volunteers lined the streets leading to Dublin Castle and provided military honor guards for members of the opposition, a memory, he related, that could “never be effaced.” Around the country, people encouraged by Parliament’s perceived support, rushed to join the Volunteers, swelling their ranks.15
Across the Irish Sea in England, notice was taken of both the Volunteers and Grattan’s speech. Irish peers like Lord Shelburne attempted to introduce the issue of Ireland’s grievances in Britain’s Parliament but were defeated in their effort to resolve the growing crisis. With the failure of Britain to alleviate the suffering of the Irish, it became increasingly evident that Irish problems would require Irish solutions. Mirroring the efforts and tactics of their American cousins during their quarrels with Britain, the Irish, led once more by the Volunteers, resolved to boycott British goods and trade with Britain until the trade restrictions on Irish exports to America were lifted. Volunteer groups, town corporations, and individuals pledged, in the words of “the Freemen and Freeholders of the City of Dublin” at a public meeting, “That we will not, from the date hereof, until the grievances of this country shall be removed, directly or indirectly import or consume ANY of the manufactures of Great Britain; nor will we deal with any merchant, or shopkeeper, who shall import such manufactures.” The protest spread rapidly around the country, enforced, as it was in America, by “popular retribution,” violence and intimidation cowing any who contravened the ban or wavered in their support for the cause.16
With growing numbers and expanding political power, the Volunteer Movement began to adopt measures to formalize their organization, improve their collective direction, and encourage unity of action. Leaders were selected to coordinate their activities, starting with the Volunteers of Dublin who coalesced under the command of the Duke of Leinster, Ireland’s preeminent nobleman and, as a member of the Fitzgerald family, a man with impeccable credentials to lead opposition to British tyranny. As aides-de-camp, Leinster chose prominent parliamentary reformers such as Henry Grattan, Barry Yelverton, and Hussey Burgh. In Ulster, the Volunteers selected another prominent nobleman and moderate reformer, the Earl of Charlemont, who helped lead the effort to secure redress in Ireland’s Parliament. With these innovations, the Volunteers were transformed from an ad hoc body of militia into something approaching a formal Irish army, though one commanded by Irishmen rather than Britons.
With a more unified organizational structure came more
concerted action, and the Volunteers now began more radical and more vocal demands for reform. Placards calling for “Free Trade” appeared throughout the county. In Dublin, the Volunteer artillery, commanded by James Napper Tandy, affixed a dire warning to the mouths of their cannons, parading guns labeled “Free Trade or speedy Revolution” on the very doorstep of Dublin Castle. The regular army, stationed in Dublin to cow the Irish, conspicuously avoided offending or provoking the Volunteers, well aware of their greater numbers and the fact that a large proportion of the regular army and navy were themselves Irish. Faced with such concerted opposition and the very real threat of a second revolution in the British Empire, concessions were granted and Ireland’s trade restrictions were lifted.17
Many in Ireland feared that the concessions to Irish trade—granted at a moment of extreme distress, of imperial crisis—would be repealed as soon as the American War was over and Britain could once more focus on Ireland. With this concern in mind, reformers and Volunteers began to agitate for legislative independence, arguing that a sovereign Irish Parliament and the right of Ireland to create her own laws were the only safeguards against future British treachery. The success of the drive for free trade, the ability to force reform at the barrel of the gun, encouraged many to adopt a new aim, an independent Irish Parliament. Once more, the Volunteers were central to this agitation.
To Begin the World Over Again Page 12