It was at just this moment that the French Revolution worked upon the situation in Ireland, both to agitate and to transform it. It created enormous pressure to reform established institutions and to rebalance relations between London and Dublin. More significantly, however, it played upon the provincial nationalism of the Protestant Dissenters of Ulster and, most dangerously of all, it generated reform ambitions among sections of the Catholic population. It was these newer political objectives which, in the end, led to the rising of 1798. The rising was not the culmination of decades of exploitation and intolerance but the consequence of the politics of the 1790s and new ideologies of republicanism and separatism.
These were at first distant and unlikely goals. Wolfe Tone and a group of middle-class reformers founded the society of United Irishmen in Belfast in October 1791, whose initial objectives included greater independence for Ireland and religious toleration. The Belfast society was originally largely Protestant; that in Dublin, founded in November 1791 by Napper Tandy, was predominantly Catholic. Even in its early stage the Dublin society expressed social as well as political objectives. ‘Give the poor a country,’ it warned the rich in 1793, ‘or you will lose one yourselves.’16 In the background, too, the ominous threat of peasant violence was intensifying. Pitt was forced to make concessions. Under his influence, in 1792 the British administration at Dublin Castle passed an Irish Catholic Relief Act, which lifted some of the more important restrictions on Catholics: to hold legal and judicial positions, to carry arms, to own property, to serve on juries and to enter universities. In 1793 another relief act gave Catholics the vote in municipal and parliamentary elections. This was as far as Pitt was prepared to go in wartime. When Earl Fitzwilliam, who became Lord Lieutenant in 1795 as a consequence of the Pitt–Portland coalition, dismissed some of the existing ministers at the castle and indicated his willingness to discuss proposals for Catholic emancipation he was immediately removed by London. Dublin, politicized by the United Irishmen and driven by local rural secret societies such as the Defenders, exploded into violence. The British government now threw its weight solidly behind the Ascendancy.
The Catholic majority now had nothing to hope for from the British government, but they were open to the appeal of the United Irishmen. By the end of 1795 the Ulster middle-class Dissenters who had been at the heart of the United Irishmen in its early years were being challenged by lower-middle-class Catholics, angered by the recall of Fitzwilliam, with an agenda of conspiracy and revolution. The Catholic Church itself was seriously divided; the hierarchy, impressed with the concession by the government of the establishment of a seminary at Maynooth in 1795, was inclined to be cautious about the call for further agitation.
Political resolutions were one thing. Even more serious, Catholic grievances were rendered more acute by worsening economic hardship, which culminated in systematic rural violence. Among the Catholic majority, groups of Defenders were formed, these were secret, oath-taking societies which invested in conspiratorial, sectarian violence against Protestants, who retaliated by forming ‘Peep O’Day’ societies. Defenderism enabled large numbers of local grievances to be welded together into a national campaign for democracy and justice and even national independence. As early as 1792 the Defenders had been contemplating a rising with French support and had even made overtures to the French. This was going much too far for the United Irishmen. Moreover, horrified Protestants were outraged by Defenderism. They were already concerned at the relief legislation of 1792–3, indeed, by the general drift of concessions to Catholics made since the 1770s. As religious divisions worsened the traditional social and religious controls began to break down. In September 1795 the ‘Peep O’Day’ boys inaugurated the Orange Society to commemorate William III’s victories. The brutality and violence with which the Orange lodges and the government put down Defenderism and other forms of Catholic protest was, perhaps, to be explained by the fears and needs of wartime. To the Catholics, however, together with the fact that an exclusively Protestant yeomanry was formed to suppress these disturbances, this was final proof that the Protestant Ascendancy and the British government were at one in their wish to exploit the masses and to subjugate the old faith.
By 1796 even the United Irishmen had committed themselves to a platform of republican independence with French assistance. Tone went to France in that year to plan and coordinate the coming insurrection. The United Irishmen were strong in the Dublin and Belfast areas; elsewhere they had to coordinate their actions with groups of Defenders. The only prospect of success for the United Irishmen and the Defenders lay in a rising occurring simultaneously with a French invasion. In December 1796 a French fleet with 14,000 troops under Hoche reached Bantry Bay but was unable to effect a landing. The benefit of hindsight allows us to ponder some possibilities. Had the French landed there would have been little to stop them: there were very few regular soldiers in Ireland. If the French had marched on Dublin, how much support would they have attracted as liberators of the Irish nation? If a republic had been proclaimed, could it have survived? Such questions make for fascinating speculation. What matters is that the failure of the French to land gave the British forces of order time to organize. Ulster was disarmed in 1797 with ruthless violence and torture, while the more moderate leaders of the United Irishmen were seized. In the south a government spy network penetrated the organization of the rebels. Moreover, the Catholic Church came out against the United Irishmen (only 70 priests out of 1,800 were ultimately to be involved in the rising). Consequently there was little support among the peasantry for the rising when it came in May 1798. The rebels did not wait for the French. In the north, the Presbyterian farmers of Antrim and Down rose without much coordination with the Catholic rebels south of Dublin and the small farmers and labourers of Carlow, Wexford and Wicklow. But the west, where a small French force ultimately appeared in 1798, remained quiet. Most important of all, Dublin had been secured by the authorities in a series of pre-emptive strikes. The rising was ended by the bitter defeat of the rebels at Vinegar Hill and by subsequent savage military reprisals. Altogether the rising cost 12,000 Irish lives.
It was clear to Pitt and his cabinet colleagues that the Protestant Ascendancy was no longer a reliable basis for keeping Ireland both politically and militarily secure during the Napoleonic wars. Sizeable measures of parliamentary reform might just have satisfied the Catholic majority, but they would only have horrified the Protestants, and might even have led to a Catholic-dominated Irish Parliament opting for independence, and to a violent Protestant backlash. The sentiments and the interest of the Protestant minority and the Catholic majority could only be contained, and even perhaps reconciled, and the interests of Great Britain preserved, through a policy of Union. In 1800 the Act of Union passed the British Parliament with no difficulty, but more persuasion was needed in Ireland. Pitt held out hopes of some measure of further emancipation for the Catholics, and promised that compensation would be paid for those who suffered by the act. But it was not so much financial persuasion as a growing political recognition that there was no alternative to Union which convinced enough members of the Ascendancy to vote for it. Few individuals changed their stated opinions on Union in 1799–1800. On the other hand, the prospect of compensation must have convinced many fence-sitters. One and a quarter million pounds were spent on compensating borough proprietors. Underlying such persuasions was the feeling among the Ascendancy that their position could best be guaranteed through incorporation with Britain. Many Catholics, too, supported Union because it promised reform and an administration which would treat them with less brutality than they had recently endured.
In 1800 the Irish Parliament voted for its own extinction by passing the Act of Union of the two parliaments, to take effect from 1 January 1801. By the act 100 Irish MPs were to be added to the British House of Commons and twenty-eight Irish peers and four bishops to the House of Lords. The two Anglican churches of England and Ireland were to be amalgamated and the
legal administrations of the two countries unified. Ireland received considerable economic benefits from Union: free trade with Britain, twenty years of protection for the Irish textile industry and an independent exchequer until 1817. In return, however, Ireland had to pay 12 per cent of the costs of the British budget.
The Act of Union had serious consequences for the Irish. Pitt was unable to persuade either the king or the majority of his cabinet of the necessity for Catholic emancipation, and on this issue he submitted his resignation in February 1801. It was a closely run situation. George III was ready, in fact, to accept legislative union but he felt himself bound by his Coronation Oath to maintain the established church which would undoubtedly have been compromised by emancipation. Had Pitt been able to pass emancipation, perhaps accompanied by other measures of economic and social reform, the history of Ireland in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries might have been very different. On the other hand, if emancipation had been a condition for Union, then Union would probably not have passed the English Parliament. Pitt’s hope was that Union might be followed by some degree of emancipation, by commercial development, by prosperity and by the subsequent softening of denominational tensions. His resignation put an end to all these possibilities. Later historical tradition that Pitt deliberately misled the Irish over emancipation has little validity in fact, but the Irish Catholics had every reason to feel cheated.
With the benefit of hindsight, the Union established a framework for the development of Ireland in the nineteenth century which was to have tragic consequences, but these could not possibly have been anticipated in 1800. Nevertheless, the introduction of free trade in the nineteenth century weakened Irish industry and devastated the rural scene at a time of rapid population increase. After the Union the Irish gentry began to leave their estates, and even their country. In the long term, too, the Irish Catholic Church, with the final discrediting of the United Irishmen, emerged as the sole and uncontested champion of Catholic Ireland, a fact that was to have enormous repercussions for Ireland in and after the 1820s. Such development lay decades in the future. When George IV visited Dublin in 1821 he received a fulsome and genuine welcome, the sort of welcome that he was to receive on his royal visit to Scotland a year later. There was, even then, some reason to believe that Ireland would not be a nation lost to Britain.
AN IMPERIAL AND COMMERCIAL NATION
The second half of the long eighteenth century is remarkable for the speed of its economic growth and the mounting effect of economic change in many areas of British life. There is not space to do justice here to these developments in a work more specifically directed to political themes and their background, but they clearly should not be ignored. It will be useful at least to identify some of these changes and to indicate their relationship to the imperial, and to some extent to the political, circumstances of the period.
One of the primary causes of economic growth was the extraordinary population increase. In England and Wales, population steadily grew from an estimated 5.3 million in 1701 to 6.5 million in 1751 and then more rapidly to 9.2 million in 1801 and 13.9 million in 1831. Scotland’s population grew rather slowly than that of England and Wales, from an estimated 1.04 million in 1701 to 1.25 in 1751, 1.60 in 1801 and 2.40 million in 1831. The population of Ireland grew much more swiftly than that of Scotland, from 2.54 in 1801, 3.12 in 1751, 5.20 in 1801 and 7.8 million in 1831.17 The existence of more mouths to feed encouraged agricultural producers to grow food more efficiently. The development, moreover, of a steadily expanding consumer market stimulated British manufacturers to increase their levels of production and exerted pressure on them to improve their efficiency. In general a growing population, increasingly concentrated in urban centres – between 1700 and 1850 the percentage of the population of England and Wales living in towns increased from about one-quarter to about one-half – made it immensely profitable for people to improve production and services. These developments prompted the most extensive changes in transport which Britain had experienced since Roman times.
There can be little question that these changes were demand-led because the construction of turnpikes and canals involved few great technical difficulties: they could have been built fifty years earlier had the demand for them existed. Similarly, they could have been financed much earlier because the financial institutions and the capital surpluses which their construction required already existed. When they came, the changes in transport were monumental in their significance. They linked areas and regions hitherto remote and separate, they facilitated contact and communications of all types, they cheapened the transportation of goods and they thus encouraged agriculture, commerce and industry and, not least, political developments. What is often forgotten is that they assisted the frequent transmission of news, information and postal communications which went far towards unifying the political nation. In 1751 it took two days to travel by coach from London to Oxford. In 1828 it took six hours. In 1740 one coach a week travelled between Birmingham and London; in 1783 that single coach had become thirty; by 1829 there were thirty-four a day. By the 1820s no fewer than fifty-five coaches were leaving Cheltenham each day not only for local destinations but also for London, Exeter, Liverpool and even Holyhead. Such examples could be multiplied indefinitely.
Transport by road was improved by the establishment of turnpike trusts, which financed and maintained improvements to particular routes. The trusts were administered by formal bodies of statutory commissioners, usually local or regional landowners, merchants and other property owners. They raised revenue from road users, which was added to the mandatory parochial contribution in labour and in kind. The number of turnpike trusts grew slowly in the first half of the eighteenth century; on average, eight acts of Parliament per year established trusts. Between 1750 and 1770 the number shot up to forty, and after a relaxation in growth between 1770 and 1790 the annual average figure rose to fifty-five and, from 1800 to 1830, to over eighty. By the 1830s there were over 1,100 trusts responsible for over 22,000 miles of road. (This compared with over 100,000 miles of parish highways.) By 1830 the principal networks of roads had been built, not only in England but also in Scotland and Ireland. Turnpike acts are an excellent example of the facilitating role that Parliament played in response to local economic initiatives. So long as local sponsors could agree on the establishment of a turnpike, its approval by Parliament was normally a matter of course. Moreover, if in England road-building was left to private initiative, in Scotland and Ireland the state took a much more prominent role. The earlier network of military roads built in the Highlands under General Wade between 1725 and 1737 and after the ‘45 by Major Caulfield was modernized by Telford in the early years of the nineteenth century under the auspices of the commissioners for Highland Roads and Bridges in 1803. Under its terms the state paid half the cost of road-building and maintenance. Elsewhere in Scotland, turnpikes connected the major centres, particularly after 1790; by the 1840s a modern network of roads was in place. In Ireland in 1822 parliamentary grants aided road-building and in 1831 a Board of Works was established which assumed responsibility for roads, canals and public works. Without such political approval and state sponsorship, road improvements would have been much less comprehensive.
Political sponsorship was somewhat less in evidence in the case of the canal-building of the eighteenth century, but political endorsement was no less essential. Canal-building proceeded steadily throughout the century but with particular rapidity during two periods of low interest rates, the early 1750s and the late 1780s and early 1790s. In the earlier period many canals were cut in the north-west and the Midlands, of which the Bridgewater Canal was the most notable example. Later cuts linked the emerging canal system to the great rivers. For example, in 1772 the Mersey was linked to the Severn at Stourport and in 1778 to the Trent; in 1790 it was joined up to the Trent and the Thames. The Grand Junction, started in 1793, finally linked the Midlands with London in 1805. Most canal-building was privately initiated
and funded; occasionally, however, the government might step in, as it did with the financing of the Caledonian Canal, which rendered unnecessary the dangerous and unpleasant sea journey around the north of Scotland. Canal-building petered out in the 1830s. By then the canal mania was over and 4,000 miles of navigable waterway were in existence.
MAP 12: Roads and navigable rivers of England, circa 1830.
The importance of canals has perhaps been exaggerated. They are best treated as a regional phenomenon. They were of the first importance to the opening up of the north-west and the Midlands but somewhat less important elsewhere. There were relatively few canals in much of southern and eastern England, and their number and function in the north-east was usually confined to the transportation of bulky and heavy loads. They also tended to be slow to navigate in hilly districts and in poor weather conditions. Nevertheless, they transported coal and iron and certain other heavy manufactured products not only more cheaply but also over much greater distances than had ever been the case before. British civil engineers were confronted with large-scale engineering problems. Their skills in solving them and the accumulation of experience which they acquired were to be of considerable importance in the railway age of the 1840s.
The Long Eighteenth Century Page 63