This Sceptred Isle

by Christopher Lee

  To show that the Irish Anglican Church and the bishops were not left to flounder among other denominations, Article 5 established the position of the combined Churches:

  Article Fifth.

  That it be the fifth Article of Union, that the Churches of England and Ireland, as now by law established, be united into one Protestant Episcopal Church to be called, The United Church of England and Ireland; and that the doctrine, worship, discipline and government of the said United Church shall be, and shall remain in full force for ever, as the same are now by law established for the Church of England; and that the continuance and preservation of the said United Church, as the Established Church of England and Ireland, shall be deemed and taken to be an essential and fundamental part of the Union; and that in like manner the doctrine, worship, discipline and government of the Church of Scotland shall remain and be preserved as the same are now established by law, and by the Acts for the Union of the two kingdoms of England and Scotland.

  Anglican persuasion was established and controlled by political decree, not by doctrine. Doctrine was not an exceptional division in many of the Churches and even liturgies were not so far apart – even in the Established Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church. The true divisions and impressions were in what religion represented politically.

  The Protestant Ascendancy was not obnoxious because it was Protestant and obedient to the Established Church of England. It was offensive because it was a ruling majority class. The United Irishmen supporters were Presbyterians and Catholic Defenders, but this did not mean that all Presbyterians and Catholics were in republican rebellion. Yet, in late eighteenth-century Ireland exacting political party identity was a thing of the future. The Protestant Ascendancy was as much a label as any given to the supporters of the Defenders and the United Irishmen.

  Consequently, while religious faith was not an effect on political thought and action, religious denominational labelling had a long-lasting political influence. Ireland’s subsequent history carried on religious labelling. In the late twentieth-century Troubles in Northern Ireland, it became commonplace for political and paramilitary groups to be too easily labelled Catholic or Protestant. This convenience did little to help the cause of power-sharing. In late eighteenth-century Ireland and Britain, the opposite was true.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  1800–1805

  And so the nineteenth century, opened with Britain at war: the French Revolutionary War. Britain would cope with that affair and within fifteen years Napoleon would be defeated and on his way to his final exile on St Helena. A much longer term conundrum was gathering a new storm in Britain’s history and one which would continue to blow into the twenty-first century: Ireland. In the late eighteenth century, the rebellious nature of parts of Ireland and the prospect of the Catholic majority – 75 per cent of the population – caused the British to suspend the Irish Parliament and bring its authority back to Westminster. Pitt wanted to give the Catholics more rights and threatened to resign when George III said this was impossible because it would be against his Protestant Coronation Vows. As for the British Catholics, they were very much a gentle minority. Yet nothing could be settled easily in Ireland, nor had it ever been so since English conquest began with Henry II in 1155. His son, John, was called Lord of Ireland. During the next 150 years or so, the Irish took back some of their land, while the descendants of the invaders merged into Irish society. By the sixteenth century, England had no real control beyond the small area round Dublin called the Pale. Even so, Henry VIII took the title King of Ireland.

  Elizabethan Ireland became a military threat and it wasn’t until the end of the 1500s that some sort of English rule was established. Land was confiscated and given to the so-called new-English aristocracy which, of course, was Protestant. In Ulster, the Lowland Scottish Presbyterians arrived to take the confiscated lands.

  In 1641 there was an awful rebellion and it took the ruthless mind of Cromwell to once again bring order. Cromwellian terror added to the legend of English brutality. And so to 1654 and the Act for the Settlement of Ireland. Two-thirds of landed property was taken and given to Protestants. The dispossessed were transported to the far west of the island. In the Revolution of 1688, James II escaped to Ireland. He held a council to restore property. William of Orange then defeated him at the Battle of the Boyne and the property changed hands once more. James’s supporters had their land confiscated and handed over to personal friends of William.

  In 1707, the year of the Union with Scotland, the Irish House of Commons, in their loyal address to the then Queen, Anne, prayed, ‘May God put into your royal heart to add greater strength and lustre to your crown by yet a more comprehensive union.’ But by the 1770s and 1780s, political and economic stability had sent the Irish in completely the opposite direction, and there was an increasing demand for independence. But ideas of independence were Protestant ideas. The Roman Catholics were stripped of almost every chance to prosper. They could not vote, couldn’t become lawyers or join the army. They weren’t even allowed to own a horse of any value. And if they had property it could only be left to the eldest son if he became a Protestant.

  In 1782, Ireland received a new Constitution but the King could veto anything he didn’t like. And in London there was always the fear that a truly independent Ireland might endanger England’s security. It might even give too many concessions to the Catholics whose peasantry in the south was considered one of the two dangerous groups in Ireland, the other being the Protestants in the north. The Scottish settlers from Stuart times were the ancestors of the Ulster Protestants, and it was in Ulster that Wolfe Tone and his fraternity of United Irishmen campaigned for independence. The members of the Society of United Irishmen weren’t Catholics, they were Protestant radicals. Tone had helped set up the United Irishmen in 1791, in Belfast, but they were far more instrumental in the south than the north. Tone was outlawed and fled to France. Inspired with French Revolutionary zeal, he and his radicals organized a rebellion. Tone, who in fact had arrived too late for the fighting, was captured and sentenced to death. He committed suicide.

  This then is the briefest of backgrounds to the troubles at the turn of the century, and perhaps to others that followed. By 1800 Pitt had pushed through the Act of Union with Ireland. On 1 January 1801 it became law. The Act of Union did not settle the sense of unrest. In fact, there were many who believed it was a signal for more concessions. The notion that a French-style revolution could so easily inspire others to rebellion had not gone away, especially as the British still had the insecurity of being at war with France and understanding too well the history of French ambitions to use Ireland as a springboard to at least unsettle, if not invade, England. Moreover the Act of Union did not truly draw together the two peoples. Not even the fifth article of the Act of Union and its uncompromising settling of the status of the Established Church of England and Ireland could satisfy the religious conflict that seemingly remained an instinctive connection between religion and politics in Ireland and England for the entire nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

  But where was the Article for Catholic Emancipation? George III believed it unthinkable. ‘I shall reckon any man my personal enemy who proposes any such measure,’ he said.

  So the Act of the Union with Ireland immediately alienated the Catholics, but it did more than that. The wording of the fifth article that describes the United Church as ‘an essential and fundamental part of the Union’ meant that the Irish would have to pay dues to what they saw as some Established Heretical Institution.49 Furthermore, the Catholic priests would have to rely on their parishioners for money. So any radical, in almost any parish, had simply to encourage anti-British feeling on the most fundamental of grounds – religion.

  There is little evidence that the people of England supported Catholic Emancipation. In fact, the previous decades had seen a decline in Catholicism in Britain. A priest by the name of Joseph Berington (1743–1827), in his State and Behaviour o
f English Catholics written towards the end of the eighteenth century, observed that Catholics – from all walks of life – were giving up their religion and, in some counties, there were hardly any at all:

  In the West, in South Wales, and in some of the Midland counties, there is scarcely a Catholic to be found. After London, by far the greatest number is in Lancashire. In Staffordshire are a good many also . . . Excepting in the towns, and out of Lancashire, the chief situation of the Catholics is in the neighbourhood of the old families of that persuasion. They are the servants, or the children of servants, who have married from those families, and who chus [sic] to remain round the old mansion, for the convenience of prayers, and because they hope to reserve favour and assistance from their former master.

  The issue of Catholicism would never be far from Pitt’s mind. His failure to bring it forcibly to the minds of others over the Irish question had the inevitable consequence. Pitt the Younger, at the age of forty-two, resigned as Prime Minister. For half his life he had been an MP and for most of that time he had been Prime Minister. And now his stamina was almost gone. For nearly twenty years Pitt had struggled with the Irish problem. When the Irish Parliament was given apparent independence in 1782, there were those in power in London who believed, or said they believed, that the constitutional conflict was now settled but it was not. The French Revolution had inspired radical Irish opinion into believing that non-sectarian, independent government was a possibility. A rebellion in 1798 had needed to be put down.

  But what Pitt saw as the fundamental challenge went unanswered: he had argued for Catholic Emancipation; he wanted to give Catholic freeholders the vote, but this was unacceptable to King George. Irish Catholics were seen as a threat to the security and the social and political structure of Ireland and England. Pitt fully understood that his liberal ideas could not survive the legislative process at Westminster. The waverers, so necessary to Pitt’s ambition, would not challenge the King.

  Pitt must have been at a low mental and physical ebb. It is very possible that he was already suffering from the cancer from which he would perish five years later. And he was up against the most experienced politician in England – the King. Pitt must have known that there was little chance of creating legislation that would satisfy Dublin, London and, most important of all, the court. That he could not rely on his Cabinet did not signify disloyalty in the way it would today. The administration – the government ministers – had a clear understanding of constitutional duty. Ministers would probably accept what would now be called collective responsibility on defence, foreign and economic policy, but on other matters they would expect to make their own judgements. Catholic Emancipation was as much a matter of conscience as of politics. Furthermore, George III’s victory over Pitt (and that’s what it was) reinforced his belief that he had the right to appoint and dismiss anyone he wished. Most politicians of the time accepted this right to some extent. So, at the start of the nineteenth century, the monarch remained an essential part of the institution of government.

  The war with France was a matter of foreign policy, so the Prime Minister could expect collective responsibility in the Cabinet, but the question of how to bring the war to an end split the Cabinet. At that time, Henry Dundas was Pitt’s closest colleague in government and, in a memorandum, Dundas set out the reason for the Cabinet division: on one side there were those who wanted to restore the Bourbon monarchy; on the other were the realists who were saying that however much the British disliked what was happening in France, they had to accept that the new French administration was in control of the country. The French were still in a revolutionary state and so control on a wide scale was essential, certainly uncompromisingly desirable. Britain, in spite of the contradictions between religion and politics within the islands, was by and large a stable State.

  The government, however, was in itself less than that. When Pitt went, so did Dundas, and the following year he was created the first Viscount Melville. Henry Addington (Pitt’s successor who would become the first Viscount Sidmouth) was not a great inspiration in politics. In fact Dundas had thought Addington so lightweight that he could never expect him to hold together a Cabinet, whatever its constitutional loyalties. Despite the sceptics at Westminster, Addington, who had been Speaker of the House of Commons for the previous two years, did become Prime Minister and Pitt’s resignation had not meant a sweeping change in the administration of British political life. This was not a collective Cabinet dismissal, rather what would now be called a Cabinet reshuffle. True, Dundas, Grenville, Castlereagh, Cornwallis, and Canning all went with Pitt but the Cabinet’s patronage was limited and most owed their jobs to the Sovereign. The internal politics meant that many went, returned and went again. The constant was the threat that Napoleon would be brave and assured enough to invade southern England. His preparations to build his invasion embarkation port at Boulogne may have been more successful if he had accomplished six major tasks: understood better the size and vessel construction needed for his invasion fleet; listened to advice from those who knew how to dredge Boulogne, build the port and deploy the shallow-drafted but keeled vessels he would need to invade and resupply the invasion; stuck to one or two plans rather than produce more than a dozen that could not come to anything anyway; thought of a way to break Cornwallis’s blockade of Brest where the French Channel fleet was stuck; chosen better admirals – including perhaps being bold enough to make a Spaniard commander of his fleet instead of Villeneuve; understood that his attention and resources should be concentrated on what he really understood, land armies.

  By the summer of 1805 Napoleon had abandoned his invasion plan and would never revive it. However, the British could not be certain of this. Moreover, they had much more on their political minds than a land war on the Continent over which they had little influence. For while doors in the corridors of Westminster and Whitehall opened and slammed on the hypothesis of a newly emerging political science, there were danker alleys and closets rarely if ever seen by the likes of Addington, Dundas and Pitt. They ran through that nineteenth-century institution of horror: the workhouse. Perhaps there is a connection. Addington, Dundas, Pitt and their political friends may not have recognized the conditions the workhouse rules were meant to maintain, but the disciplinarians of the workhouses may have recognized what it would take to maintain law and order at Westminster during the coming decade.

  It was now the year 1805 and one of the most celebrated battles of the nineteenth century, the Battle of Trafalgar, was about to take place. To the Royal Navy it was, and is still, its finest moment. The enemy was vanquished and Nelson was killed, and he became a national hero for ever. The significance of what happened on 21 September 1805 has continued to this very day.

  The peace treaty that was signed to end the French Revolutionary War, the Treaty of Amiens, was, in military and indeed political terms, not a peace agreement but a truce. Another war with France was inevitable. The treaty was signed on 27 March 1802 but it was simply a recognition that France controlled the land and Britain the seas. Napoleon did not withdraw his troops from the Italian regions. He appeared determined to renew his ambitions in Egypt and what is now called the Middle East. And so Britain did not withdraw her troops from Malta, the pivotal point of Mediterranean power. It was, to paraphrase a future Prime Minister, George Canning, the peace everyone wanted and of which no one was proud. Incidentally, in the wording of the document, for the first time in hundreds of years, an English king was not described as King of France. That point of principle had finally been abandoned.

  War broke out again in 1803 and about 10,000 British tourists, those who had travelled to ‘gaze upon the scenes of Revolution’, were interned, accused of spying. In Paris in the following year Napoleon had the Pope crown him Emperor of the French.

  In London, the hapless Prime Minister Addington, who had reduced the navy while restructuring the army, must have recognized that his administration lived on borrowed time. On 26 April he told th
e King that he was resigning. The King was persuaded that Pitt should be brought back. But Pitt believed Fox should be in his administration if there were to be an all-party government to manage the war. The King refused to accept Fox.

  On 2 May 1804, Pitt wrote to the Lord Chancellor, Eldon. In effect he was writing to the King:

  The present critical situation of this country, connected with that of Europe in general, and with the state of the political parties at home, renders it more important and essential than perhaps at any other period that ever existed, to endeavour to give the greatest possible strength and energy to His Majesty’s Government, by endeavouring to unite in his service as large a proportion as possible of the weight of talents and connections, drawn without exception from parties of all descriptions, and without reference to former differences and divisions. There seems the greatest reason to hope that the circumstances of the present moment are peculiarly favourable to such an union, and that it might now be possible (with His Majesty’s graces approbation) to bring all persons of leading influence either in Parliament or in the country to concur heartily in a general system formed for the purpose of extricating this country from its present difficulties, and endeavouring if possible to rescue Europe from the state to which it is reduced.

  Effectively Pitt wanted the right to choose his own Cabinet and to demonstrate this right by having Fox in it. He was saying that the country was in bad shape and threatened, therefore the best people should be in government – for that reason alone, it should include Fox. The collection of people described in his letter would be a Ministry of All the Talents – something that could not be achieved until after Pitt’s death in 1806 when there was a hiatus, with no party in a position to form a government. George III did not care for Fox’s behaviour by attending what the King believed to be ‘factious meetings’. He sent Fox packing from the Privy Council and so was ‘astonished that Mister Pitt should one moment harbour the thought to bring such a man before his royal notice’. George III did not like innovators in his form of politics. Few did. The age of reform was not so far-fetched from the age of rebellion. Moreover, the King and his advisers were not being so unreasonable given Fox’s objections to any further war, together with his open dislike of Addington. Fox appears to have become tired of the whole affair and told his friends that they should join the administration without him. So Pitt, in spite of his belief that the Prime Minister should be able to choose his own Cabinet, respected the King’s wishes, returned to office and went about reorganizing Britain’s defences.