by Neil Hegarty
Part Four
The Great Change
Chapter Seven
Union
In 1798, they [the Catholics of Ireland] were charged; in 1799, they were caressed; in 1800, they were cajoled; in 1801, they were discarded.1
In the momentous year of 1800 the Act of Union was passed by the parliaments at Dublin and London, abolishing the former and in the process ending Ireland’s brief era of ostensible legislative independence that had been inaugurated in 1782. In the aftermath of the tumult of 1798, such a move had become inevitable: a mere two days after Tone’s agonizing death, the chief secretary, Lord Castlereagh (1769–1822) had written to an ally: ‘I take the earliest opportunity of intimating to you in the strictest confidence that the incorporation of the two countries by legislative union is seriously looked to.’2 The authorities had become convinced now that the Anglo-Irish ruling caste could no longer be trusted to govern the country safely and efficiently.
This view had not simply emerged fully formed. The British prime minister William Pitt (1759–1806) had long been of the opinion that political union between Britain and Ireland was both inevitable and desirable. Since 1782, the nature of the relationship between the two kingdoms had become increasingly blurred: the British government was ever more reliant on an elaborate system of patronage to maintain control of Irish politics – but such methods were both inefficient and unacceptably expensive. Pitt had become convinced that union, combined with a judicious measure of Catholic emancipation, was the only means of bringing clarity to such an unsatisfactory situation. As early as 1792 he had raised the question with the Irish administration, noting that the two issues of union and emancipation went hand-in-hand.
Catholic emancipation was by no means desired as an end or a principle in itself. Pitt reasoned rather that it would be a potent tool if used in combination with political union: taken together, the two measures would solidify British authority and appease Catholic opinion in Ireland once and for all. Union would in fact limit the political impact of emancipation – for Catholic political freedoms would be granted within a political context in which they could pose no threat to the established order. In a note to Lord Westmorland, the anti-Catholic viceroy of the day, the prime minister had made his calculations explicit: ‘The admission of Catholics to a share of the suffrage could not then be dangerous – the protestant interest in point of power, property and church establishment would be secure because the decided majority of the supreme legislature would necessarily be protestant.’3 Emancipation, then, was an important symbolic and practical step to securing Irish Catholic loyalty to the Crown – while in return forfeiting little of substance.
By 1798, the Catholic sympathizer Lord Cornwallis was viceroy in Dublin; and although Pitt’s fundamental calculations had not changed, the political shifts in the wider world had helped render the prime minister desperate for a measure of peace and stability in Ireland.* The international situation had become grave for Britain: hastily assembled coalitions of European powers – Austria, Britain, Prussia, Russia – were being defeated again and again by a rampant France; Britain itself was living once more in fear of a French invasion; and the European wars in general were proving to be cripplingly expensive. And now Ireland had erupted once more into bloody conflict, adding instability to Britain’s western flank. As a result, it was now viewed as imperative to regularize the relationship between the two countries and, in the process, to end the system of patronage in Ireland. Pitt and Cornwallis were more than ever convinced that emancipation, combined with the removal of the Ascendancy’s political power, would be instrumental in establishing this new pax britannica in Ireland. Working on the principle that it was better to keep your friends close and your enemies closer, Pitt planned to gather Britain and Ireland together into a new united state.
But the issue of Catholic emancipation would prove too sensitive to be attached explicitly to the Act of Union bill. Instead, the measure would be introduced quietly once political union itself had been achieved – a course of action much preferred by the Catholic religious hierarchy, with its horror of any whiff of potentially revolutionary public disorder. But lay Catholics were equally pragmatic in accepting the government’s discreet promise: all sides understood clearly that a more public arrangement would be doomed to failure – not least at Westminster itself, where within the establishment a powerful current of anti-Catholic bias remained.
Union itself, of course, was never going to be simply waved through: indeed, in Ireland it spawned improbable coalitions in opposition. Elements within the Ascendancy understood that Union would mean the end of political control and patronage: as a result, they made common cause with Henry Grattan and his fellow proponents of Irish legislative independence, for whom the measure represented an act of absorption, rather than union. Others noted that the colonial framework that had characterized the relationship between Britain and Ireland would stay intact: a British representative would remain at Dublin Castle, answering to a distant parliament and government. A small group of educated Catholics, meanwhile, rejected on principle any diminution of Irish independence, emancipation or no emancipation.
But a body of opinion also existed in favour of Union: an influential constituency within Irish Catholicism perceived that emancipation was on balance more likely to be granted by a Westminster parliament than by one sitting at College Green; and while many Presbyterians found the idea of Catholic emancipation difficult to countenance, they certainly shed no tears over the prospective passing of an Anglican Ascendancy that had done so much to limit their political and religious freedoms. It was also the case, of course, that the great majority of the population was always more occupied with the matter of earning and growing enough to live on than with the devising of new constitutional arrangements: whether or not the Act of Union was passed, it would do little to help the crops. And the harvest of 1799 was indeed poor, diminishing even further the appetite of the mass of the Irish people for the minutiae of politics.
A first vote on Union failed in a hostile Irish parliament in January 1799. The measure’s opponents argued, convincingly enough, that all dangers were now past: the state had crushed the 1798 rebellion, and nothing of its ilk was likely to occur again. In the light of this reversal Pitt, Cornwallis and Castlereagh understood that the government’s pockets would have to be turned out: the stick that had been used to crush the rebellion must now be replaced by the carrot, and the good will of the Irish parliamentarians acquired – for the last time, perhaps – by the time-honoured methods of bribery, horse-trading and endless application of patronage. As a result, the remainder of the year was devoted to the assiduous buying up of parliamentary seats and promising of pensions to those whose administrative jobs would vanish with Union. The result was that when parliament met on College Green on 15 January 1800 a variety of crucial alliances had been locked into place and victory for Pitt and his ministers was all but assured. In the meantime, the prime minister had opined aloud – and a trifle optimistically – that a time was coming when ‘a man can not speak as a true Englishman, unless he speaks as a true Irishman; nor can he speak as a true Irishman, unless he speaks as a true Englishman.’4
Not that the opponents of Union were prepared to concede without a fight. The debate continued through the night; early the following morning Grattan, who had purchased the Wicklow parliamentary seat the previous evening, arrived on College Green clad dramatically in his old blue Volunteer uniform, in order to lambast the supporters of the Union. Having secured permission to speak from his seat – for he was too ill to stand – Grattan addressed a chamber packed with political allies and foes. Chief among the latter was Castlereagh, who had undertaken a remarkable political journey in his own right, moving from his Ulster Presbyterian roots towards Anglicanism and a place at the heart of the establishment; he would later carve out a substantial political career in Britain and become hated by many in the process.5 For the moment, however, he was the object of Grattan
’s specific loathing: on this day in Dublin, the old parliamentarian pointed at his enemy and claimed that he and his cronies were striving ‘to buy what cannot be sold – liberty…. Against such a proposition, were I expiring on the floor, I should beg to utter my last breath and record my dying testimony.’
Grattan’s words, though impassioned, were too late, for the deal had already been done: an amendment designed to reject Union was defeated by a substantial majority and on 7 June – after more months of favours promised, compensation paid, bribes doled out and the government’s own laws broken – the Irish parliament voted itself out of existence. An identical bill asserting that the two islands ‘shall…for ever be united into one kingdom’ passed at Westminster; both bills received royal assent from George III; and the Act of Union came into effect on 1 January 1801. At Belfast, the News Letter hailed the Union: ‘Yesterday Morning a union flag was hoisted at the Market House and at one o’clock a Royal salute was fired by the Royal Artillery in garrison…it is now become an interest as well as a duty…to bury, if possible, all political differences…one people united in interest as in dominion.’6 The first Irish members – there were one hundred of them in the Commons as part of the new deal – and peers took their seats at Westminster on 22 January. The glorious Parliament House on College Green, meanwhile, became an art gallery and then a barracks. In the summer of 1803, however, the building was sold to the Bank of Ireland on condition that it was remodelled internally to remove traces of its original function as a parliament; the Commons chamber was therefore broken up, although the House of Lords remained intact.
As for the promise of Catholic emancipation: this could not, in the end, be delivered. Pitt’s credibility was now on the line – but he and his allies had failed to take into account the views of one crucial figure. George III – ‘old, mad, blind, despised and dying’7 – had been for over a decade drifting in and out of a state of insanity; at the idea of emancipation, however, he was outraged. For the monarch, emancipation was not simply a question of pragmatics and politics; it was a religious and personal bottom line, in that the admission of Catholics to public office would run counter to his sacred vow to defend and uphold the Anglican faith. So the monarch – ‘considering the oath that the wisdom of our forefathers has enjoined the kings of this realm to take at their coronation’ – refused his consent. In the face of royal displeasure Pitt had no option but to resign, which he did in February 1801.8
This failure to carry the emancipation measure had in a moment thrown away the nascent loyalty of Ireland’s Catholic middle class. Had it come to pass – had tangible benefits begun to flow from the very act of Union – Catholic opinion might have committed decisively to the new status quo. Instead, the great majority of the Irish population was denied access to the benefits of membership of this new United Kingdom – and the promise that Union would bring in its wake full religious liberties and civil rights had proved to be hollow. Figures such as Cornwallis, dedicated to the stability and success of the new polity so recently brought into existence, recognized that the seeds had already been sown for years of future instability and that the course of future events had been altered. The Catholic lobby might have been neutralized and its power dispersed – instead, however, new life had been breathed into the notion that the English, in their dealings with Ireland, simply could not be trusted. ‘What, then, have we done?’ he wrote. ‘We have united ourselves to a people whom we ought in policy to have destroyed.’9
Catholic Ireland, an entity that might have been quietened with kindness, would now have to navigate an alternative route towards a state of political, religious and commercial liberty; it would begin to assume an adversarial attitude that would require only a focus and a leader to spark it to life. The episode provides yet another ‘what if’ moment in Irish history: if Catholic emancipation had been coupled with the Union, it is possible that Irish identity would have evolved on Scottish lines, with a sturdy carapace of nationalist sentiment surviving alongside a unionist reality. The economic development of Scotland in the course of the eighteenth century had, after all, cemented that country into the Union, the failed uprisings of 1715 and 1745 notwithstanding: this expansion would continue in the course of the nineteenth century, in the shape of the booming shipyards and factories of Glasgow that exported to the world.
Indeed, in Ireland itself a similar model was already evolving: and the industrial growth witnessed in Ulster in the course of the eighteenth century continued into the new age. The populations of Belfast, Derry and a host of smaller market towns began to rise steadily; the textiles sector and the linen industry evolved; and as the century went on, Belfast developed a shipbuilding reputation to rival its Scottish counterpart on the Clyde. The province was being increasingly drawn into a larger British and imperial economy – and this was a sign to many that the Union could succeed in tangible and practical ways. Presbyterian culture in Ireland would continue to provide a home to both liberals and conservatives, to both progressive and reactionary wings – but those same middle-class political and cultural figures that had impelled the expansion of the United Irishmen would, in the course of the new century, move to accept the Union. This was in part a pragmatic decision: they could increasingly see no other course of action open to them, and the brutal suppression of the rising of 1798 had taught a lesson not readily forgotten. As the nineteenth century went on, however, it would also become evident that the Union was fulfilling Presbyterian commercial instincts and aspirations – and the consequences of this profound cultural change would in time ripple far beyond the bounds of Ulster itself.
With the Act of Union now a reality, the government’s principal wish was to allow the new constitutional arrangements to settle down and become part of the fabric of life. A mere three years passed, however, before the new order was challenged in what proved to be the last flicker of revolutionary activity from the United Irishmen. Robert Emmet, born in Dublin into a prosperous Protestant family, had been twenty years old in 1798. He had imbibed revolutionary principles of liberty and freedom from his ostensibly respectable father; and his elder brother, Thomas Addis Emmet, had been a friend and ally of Wolfe Tone. Robert himself, though academically brilliant, was expelled from Trinity College as a result of his political sympathies, being condemned by the college as ‘one of the most active and wicked members of the United Irishmen’.10 After the failed uprising he had left the country for France, seeking assistance for a further rebellion against British rule. But it was to no avail: the French would fund no more Irish adventures. Nothing daunted, however, Emmet returned home in the autumn of 1802 and set about planning a revolt.
Although he was essentially an idealist, he did make considerable efforts at military preparedness: he organized, for example, the stockpiling of thousands of pikes (collapsible, the better to be safely stored), rockets and explosives in depots in central Dublin; and he planned an assault on Dublin Castle, with its store of arms and supplies and potent symbolic associations. His blueprint for rebellion, however, came to naught, for ultimately it pivoted on factors that were incalculable: in capturing the castle complex, Emmet believed that he would tap into a vein of latent anger across Ireland and ignite a spontaneous uprising that could simply not be controlled. On the morning of 23 July 1803, the fragile foundations of his plan crumbled: the thousands of men whom Emmet had hoped to summon had dwindled to a mere eighty, some of whom were drunk; Emmet was jeered for his youth and idealistic rhetoric; and the fuses for the stockpiled rockets were mislaid. The castle was not stormed and the revolt degenerated into scenes of violence in central Dublin, in the course of which the lord chief justice, Lord Kilwarden, was pulled from a passing carriage and piked to death. It was all over in a matter of hours; Emmet himself became a fugitive, hunted through Dublin and the Wicklow mountains before being captured in September.
Before his execution, Emmet delivered the famous oration that, more than his deeds and or the events of the rebellion itself, earned h
im a place in Irish history: ‘When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then, and not until then, let my epitaph be written. I have done.’ His fame, built on idealism, enthusiasm, oratory and youthful energy, was thus secured; and it spread in the years to come. Set against this was the fact of his slender achievements: later, such figures as James Joyce mocked his developing cult; in The Old Lady Says No! Denis Johnston portrayed Emmet unflatteringly as deluded and violent, and the Dublin that had so conspicuously failed to succour him in his time of need as a ‘wilful, wicked old city…. Strumpet city in the sunset.’11
The authorities, however, were alarmed by the fact that Emmet’s abortive rising had – after a fashion – been carried through. Allegations soon circulated that the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, John Thomas Troy, had known of Emmet’s plans in advance but had neither alerted the authorities nor used his own influence to end the uprising. Given the social and political conservatism of the Catholic hierarchy, these claims were almost certainly incorrect: Troy was anxious above all to maintain the strength and position of the Church in the aftermath of the period of the penal laws; neither he nor his colleagues could be accused of being secret revolutionaries. In the matter of public loyalty, indeed, Troy had considerable form: in 1789, on the (temporary) recovery of George III from ill health, he had brought together at Dublin the highest ranks in society, both Protestant and Catholic, in a Te Deum to give thanks for the monarch’s deliverance; another service had been held following the failed French landings at Bantry Bay at Christmas 1796. Throughout his career, he had been consistent and loud in his abuse of events in France and of any form of civil unrest in Ireland itself. He and his colleagues in the Irish hierarchy were not about to jeopardize their institution’s hard-won place in society for the sake of a doubtfully planned and poorly executed revolutionary plot. Granted, some Irish priests were certainly Jacobin sympathizers and a handful of them were indeed active in, for example, the events of 1798; to Troy, this minority was ‘scum’, but he could not alter what was a bald and uncomfortable truth.