by Neil Hegarty
There were clear differences, though, between Ireland on the one hand and Austria and France on the other. The Counter-Reformation had had the aid both of the wider Catholic Church in Europe and of the overwhelming power of the Hapsburg and Bourbon states; such conditions did not exist in Ireland, where the State simply did not possess the same cultural or military resources, apparatus of government, modern bureaucracy or police service. Nor, in the British State to which Ireland was now intrinsically connected, was there any longer the political will to attempt anything on such a scale. The Protestant ruling class in Ireland realized rapidly that it would have to settle for a situation in which papism must be borne as a persistent presence in the land – always provided that Catholics conducted themselves quietly and deferentially; assertiveness would not be tolerated. At the same time, in the first decades of the eighteenth century the Catholic Church in Ireland continued to develop some of the characteristics of an underground organization, its structures existing outside of, and in a sense against, the State.
In practical terms, however, the primacy of the Ascendancy seemed assured. Within two generations the Cromwellian troopers and planters who had settled across Ireland had become an aristocracy, and their scattered country seats – the so-called ‘big houses’ – were features in every corner of the Irish landscape. Many of these houses were relatively modest; others – in keeping with the spirit of the picturesque that typified the age – were grander and built in peerless locations across the country. The construction of many ‘big houses’ nearly bankrupted the families that lived in them – such mansions tended to be ruinously difficult to heat and maintain, and the walls of many an otherwise gracious drawing room ran with water in the course of an interminable Irish winter – but they were necessary and crucial statements of authority. They dominated the landscape as the Anglo-Norman keeps and castles of previous centuries had done.
At the same time, many parts of the country’s cities were rebuilt in a manner fit for the aspirations of this ruling class, and Dublin in particular became an architectural showcase boasting all the elements of a national capital: in particular, the foundation of the city’s glorious Parliament House in 1729 was symbolic of a new political energy. It was accompanied by a broader cultural dynamism, as befitted the eighteenth-century Age of Enlightenment. In philosophy and architecture, in economics, city planning and literature, Dublin now sparkled with energy. This vitality found expression in a host of ways: in a loud and boisterous theatrical life; in the great quadrangles of Trinity College, the Georgian set-pieces of Merrion and Mountjoy Squares, and the green copper domes of the Custom House and Four Courts reflected in the waters of the river Liffey; in the earnest salons and glittering balls of the city’s winter season; in the first performance, in April 1742, of Handel’s Messiah in the Music Hall. But such frenetic activity was viewed coldly by some observers, who regarded these Ascendancy families, for all their activity and influence, as mere arrivistes: the satirist Jonathan Swift, for example, scorned William Conolly (1662–1729) – owner of the splendid Palladian pile at Castletown in County Kildare, Speaker of the Commons and unrivalled dispenser of patronage – as a mere ‘shoe boy’. Yet there existed hitherto unsuspected common ground between men such as Swift and many members of this ruling class. Once again, the notion of acculturation was complicating Anglo-Irish affairs, as those who lived in Ireland began to question their cultural identity and to look askance at the treatment of Ireland by the ostensible mother country.
The Woollen Act, passed in 1699, is frequently taken to epitomize Ireland’s inferior status as a British dominion, its economic needs subjected to those of the mother country. The Act – it was a backbench measure, rather than one formulated by the government itself – expressly prohibited the export of Irish woollen materials, a measure designed to protect the British wool industry from Irish competition. The new law had the unexpected side effect of stimulating the infant linen industry in Ulster: in general, however, it led to considerable economic hardship in Ireland and helped to underscore the country’s position as an entity subordinate to British interests. After all, Poynings’ Law of 1494, which had made manifest the inferior status of the Irish parliament in relation to its English counterpart, had never been repealed; Ireland, since the reign of Henry VIII a kingdom in its own right, was being treated by the British government as a mere colony, a subservient appendage.
The political journey of Swift himself exemplifies the evolving nature of the Anglo-Irish relationship. He was born in Dublin in 1667, spent much his life travelling between Ireland and England, and was at all times ambivalent in his feelings towards the land of his birth. In 1714, however, he settled at Dublin, taking up an appointment as Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral. He returned reluctantly, disappointed and embittered that his Tory political connections in England had not sufficed to advance a metropolitan career. (Queen Anne was reputed to have taken a cordial dislike to both him and to his Tale of a Tub, and to have blocked his career at every turn.) Once established on the Dublin social scene, however, Swift had leisure to consider the society around him and its place in a wider empire – and his response was to move towards an ever closer identification with the city. Indeed, he could scarcely have avoided questioning his situation: St Patrick’s lay in the middle of some of the city’s most appalling slums; deprivation and poverty pressed all around. Dublin’s social scene may have been glittering indeed, but only for the few: poverty, want and hunger remained facts of life for the great majority of the city’s population.*
Swift became ever more critical of the imperfections of the British control of Ireland, and of its negative impact on Irish affairs. He could not fail to realize that the colonial model being mapped on to Ireland was simply not working; and many of his subsequent writings were informed by this realization. His Drapier Letters, for example, written in the guise of a Dublin shopkeeper in 1724 and 1725, savaged British economic and political policies in Ireland. In urging his fellow Irishmen to burn everything English except coal, Swift was giving voice to a version of Irish patriotism. The tracts consequently caused fury in government circles, though his identity as their author was never revealed.
He was equally scathing in his analysis of how the colonial relationship impacted on the poorest in society. A succession of failed harvests in the late 1720s created famine conditions, with Ulster being particularly stricken. Swift responded with A Modest Proposal, which suggested that the children of the Irish poor be sold off in order to bring in valuable income for Irish families reduced to desperation by British economic policies; the skins of Irish babies would make ‘admirable Gloves for Ladies, and Summer Boots for fine Gentlemen’.4 Alternatively, their flesh could be sold: ‘A young, healthy child is…a most delicious, nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked or boiled.’ The satire underlying Swift’s proposal was not detected by all.
Irish nationalists in later times – including many cut from a very different cloth – spoke of him as a precursor, as someone who articulated this separate cultural and political consciousness in his writings. He was a Janus-faced character: a conflicted loyalist, anguished by the mediocrity that characterized the English presence in Ireland and aware that it amounted to little more than profiteering; in the end, therefore, a kind of nationalist too. Ultimately, perhaps, Swift’s writings were fuelled by the bitter realization that the gap of understanding between Ireland and England could not now be adequately bridged. His work was both a scathing diagnosis of past failure and a warning of events to come.
Swift’s criticisms, then, accorded with the spirit of the times: more and more voices – not least among the mass of Irish parliamentarians – were calling for greater measures of autonomy and self-determination. And yet the Irish parliament, beautifully housed, vigorous and energized though it may have been, was in no way a national debating chamber. On the contrary, it remained an institution dominated by Ascendancy interests and absentee landlords; and the changes it
wished to enact did not include extending representation to the country’s Catholic and Presbyterian majority. Irish society remained profoundly divided: the question of reform was a pressing issue, but it seemed destined always to be viewed through the prism of a fraught and violent sectarian history.
Indeed, such reform as materialized came from an ostensibly unlikely quarter: faced with war after exhausting war and anxious to tap abundant Irish manpower for its overstretched military, the British government began to introduce measures of Catholic political freedom, repealing aspects of the penal laws. Such changes were proposed in the teeth of bitter opposition from the powerful conservative lobby in parliament, which wanted any reform solely on its own terms: ‘We consider the Protestant ascendancy to consist of a Protestant king in Ireland, a Protestant parliament, a Protestant hierarchy, Protestant electors and government, the benches of justice, the army and revenue, through all their branches and details, Protestant. And this system supported by a connection with the Protestant realm of Britain.’5 Catholics, however, could never be wholly excluded from the military: quite simply, they were numerically too important to be discarded. Recruiting parties for the army, therefore, began moving through overwhelmingly Catholic Munster, Leinster and Connacht; the British government offered to raise a column of three thousand Irish Catholics for its oldest ally, Portugal; and thousands of Catholic Irishmen were among the British troops who sailed for British North America in the course of the Seven Years War of 1756–63.
In the 1770s, British military might was stretched almost to breaking point by the American War of Independence – and now a ‘patriot’ faction in parliament, led by the charismatic lawyer Henry Grattan, saw its opportunity to carve out a version of political autonomy. It began agitating for legislative independence: for an Ireland that was able to make its own laws and that was linked to Britain by the monarchy alone. At the same time, a heavily armed Volunteer movement emerged across the country, its membership mainly but certainly not wholly Protestant. In theory, it existed to defend Ireland from a possible French or Spanish invasion; in practice, however, it provided the patriot faction with a good deal of public political muscle. In November 1779, for example, these armed Volunteers rallied at College Green in central Dublin – and an alarmed administration in Dublin Castle was quick to read the signs and to grant Ascendancy Ireland a degree of self-rule.
By 1782, therefore, the era of formal subordination to the British parliament had ended. London would in practice continue to control the political process in Ireland – but largely now by means of patronage, a cumbersome and expensive method. It was a signal moment in an evolving Irish patriotism – but when the dust of legislative independence settled, it revealed a parliament still deeply corrupt and governed by patronage and privilege; a Catholic and Presbyterian majority that still had no political rights; and a population that was now armed to the teeth. Once more the country was tinder-dry, only awaiting a spark to set it alight.
The storming of the Bastille in Paris, on 14 July 1789, provided that spark – and not only in Ireland. ‘Like the dew of heaven,’ the Belfast Northern Star later proclaimed, the French Revolution ‘inspires all Europe, and will extend the blessing of liberty to all mankind as citizens of the world, the creatures of one Supreme Being’.6 What was taking place in France – the bloody destruction of an imperium – was watched avidly in Britain and Ireland, and responses varied from horror at the prospect of classless anarchy to excitement at the cry of ‘Liberté, égalité, fraternité!’ In 1782, legislative independence had conceived of two kingdoms linked by a common crown – but now the revolution enabled different ideas to begin to circulate in Ireland: separatism became imaginable; and for the first time, a movement began to evolve with the avowed aim of breaking the link both with Britain and with the monarchy and creating in its place a secular republic in Ireland.
This revolutionary sentiment sank its deepest roots into the Presbyterian bastion of Belfast. In one way, it was an unlikely location: the Protestant population of the city and its industrializing hinterland had been raised with a vivid collective memory of Catholic massacre and betrayal. But other facets of Presbyterian culture made this society highly receptive to the radical ideas now emanating from Paris. Presbyterianism was rooted firmly in the idea of religious freedom, private judgement and individual conscience against coercion in matters of faith. The very structure of its Church was a model of democracy in comparison with either Anglicanism or Catholicism: it spurned hierarchies of bishops and instead emphasized egalitarianism. And of course the Presbyterians of Ireland had been excluded from power throughout the century: they could not hold political office until 1780; they were forced to pay tithes to the established Church; and they had very little influence in parliament. This experience of powerlessness merely served to reinforce what was already an ingrained Presbyterian culture of anti-authoritarianism.
Not all of Ireland’s Presbyterians had been prepared to remain in their homeland under such unpromising circumstances, preferring to seek religious and political liberty elsewhere. The eighteenth century witnessed the first mass emigration in Irish history: between 1717 and 1776, a quarter of a million Presbyterians sailed from Belfast, Derry and the smaller ports of Ulster for a new life in North America. Some made for Canada, leaving a lasting imprint on the culture and politics of Ontario in particular; the majority, however, chose to settle in the United States, where they came to be known as the Scots-Irish. Landing for the most part at Philadelphia, these migrants found the fertile lowlands already cultivated by English colonists: nothing daunted, they moved wave by wave into inland Pennsylvania and Virginia, fanning out in time across the Appalachians and into the South. And, when the American Revolution erupted in the 1770s, this same emigrant society gravitated towards the cherished cause of freedom and liberty. In October 1780, for example, Scots-Irish men played a pivotal role in the crucial revolutionary victory at Kings Mountain on the border of North and South Carolina.
In Ireland, meanwhile, their co-religionists had followed the progress of the American war with keen interest. They rejoiced in the formation of the United States – in the creation of a polity that was democratic and overtly republican, and that rejected the notion of a connection between Church and State; and when the American Declaration of Independence was printed in July 1776 (by John Dunlap, a Presbyterian emigrant from County Tyrone), the Belfast News Letter was the first foreign newspaper to publish it. Belfast, still a small city in the second half of the eighteenth century, was referred to repeatedly as the Boston of Ireland in recognition of its pro-Americanism; its deeply felt disloyalty to the Crown; and its status as a centre of political ferment, radical ideas, subversion and potential revolution.
Unlike Boston, however, Belfast was a Presbyterian island in a Catholic sea. It was for this reason that the French Revolution was so important: France had traditionally been one of Europe’s most prominent Catholic powers; it had supported the Jacobite cause in Ireland and Scotland; and it had brutally suppressed its own Huguenot minority. If Catholic France could become so radically enlightened – so the thinking went in certain circles in Presbyterian Belfast – then there was potential for Catholic Ireland to do likewise. Dour introspection might have been Belfast’s special trademark, but now there was an unexpected energy in the air. In the early 1790s, for example, it was becoming tentatively fashionable for Catholics and Presbyterians to mix socially. Belfast was a city that could surprise, as would soon become apparent.
In September 1791, the young Dublin barrister called Theobald Wolfe Tone (1763–98) published a pamphlet entitled Argument on Behalf of the Catholics of Ireland. Articulate, vivacious, born into the Church of Ireland and educated at Trinity College, Tone had seemed a natural member of the Irish political elite. He was deeply attracted by the prospect of a military life – in his teens, he had watched enthusiastically as the Volunteers had drilled in central Dublin – and only his father’s objections forced him to alter his pla
ns and study instead for the law. But he remained fascinated by the prospects offered by the expanding world into which Ireland was increasingly connected: he had read James Cook’s journals of his Pacific discoveries, for example, and as a result had petitioned the authorities to allow him to establish a British military colony in what are now the Hawaiian Islands.
But Tone was also sensitive to the political climate in which he lived: he was appalled by the thickets of aristocratic patronage through which he was required to pass in order to advance his career, and disgusted by the general corruption of the Irish system. He was also a committed atheist and convinced of the need – as a first step – for unity and equality between the principal religions of Ireland. Although his mother had converted from Catholicism when Tone was eight years old, he knew little about the mass of the Catholic poor; he knew enough about Dublin’s ambitious and increasingly restless Catholic middle class, however, to understand that its members were not unlike him in outlook and ambition.*
English Catholics had begun petitioning for relief in 1788; three years later, their demands were met with a bill that removed many of the remaining restrictions on their activities. Tone’s pamphlet, then, was in part a response to the new mood of the times: it called for emancipation for Ireland’s Catholics and, while it was ostensibly directed at a Protestant audience, its target was principally the Dissenters – the Presbyterians of Ulster who were themselves oppressed but nonetheless hesitant at the notion of papist political liberty. ‘No reform,’ Tone argued, ‘can ever be obtained which shall not comprehensively embrace Irishmen of all denominations.’ Tone’s argument hit its target: very soon he was invited by a group of young Presbyterian men to a meeting in Belfast. The result, in October 1791, was the formation of the Society of United Irishmen.