by Neil Hegarty
In the years immediately following Union, the anti-papist sentiment at the centre of the British establishment was fully exposed by further attempts to return emancipation to the political agenda. Following the return of Pitt to power in 1804, meetings were held at Dublin to sound out the state of Catholic opinion; the result was a petition – an unwise petition, in the view of both Catholic pragmatists and the Pitt administration – for emancipation that was carried to Westminster in the spring of the following year. Pitt duly rejected the petition; the Whig opposition showed itself favourably inclined, but to no avail; and the measure was debated in the House of Commons and rejected, by a huge majority, in May 1805.
The measure had always been doomed to failure, and not merely by the opposition of the government. George III was still on the throne and would be until his death in 1820; and antipathy towards Catholicism and mistrust of its allegiance to Rome had by no means vanished from the British body politic. In purely political terms, meanwhile, it was understood in London as well as in Ireland that the desire for emancipation was merely one thread in a rather larger political tapestry involving Irish Catholic society, its Church and the eventual destiny of Ireland itself: tug just one of these threads, it was feared, and the picture in its entirety might begin to alter. The Catholic deputation, then, returned home empty-handed: the following years would see renewed petitions, occasional concessions from Westminster and a good deal of querulous debate on the status of Irish Catholicism – but little of substance; the question of emancipation became a running sore.
The wider issue of the relationship between Westminster and Ireland was also moulded by such events as the Napoleonic Wars that lay beyond the control of any of the interested parties. When the pendulum swung away from Britain and its continental allies (as it so frequently did during these tumultuous years), the government became anxious to allay Catholic fears, the better both to quieten Ireland and to enlist once again valuable Irish manpower in the British armed forces. As events began moving away from French control, however, the need to appease was much less pressing – and this became increasingly so following Napoleon’s disastrous invasion of Russia in the winter of 1812–13 and the subsequent collapse of French military dominance in Europe.
Yet there was more to this period than a mere fractious relationship between the British State and its new subjects in Ireland; and the Napoleonic Wars – or, rather, their culmination on the battlefield at Waterloo in June 1815 – provide an excellent illustration of a more complex Irish stake in British affairs. For, as Irish troops had served in North America in the course of the Seven Years War in the previous century, so now did they, in ever-increasing numbers, serve a British State that in this new century was intent on rebuilding and expanding its empire. Military service had always held the prospect of adventure and a possible route out of poverty, isolation and economic stagnation, and in the early nineteenth century it was no different: in the first half of the century, Irish-born soldiers provided over 40 per cent of the manpower of the British army.
At Waterloo the 27th Inniskilling Regiment, having been instructed to hold its vital position on the field in the face of an enemy surge, was cut to ribbons by French cannon fire. By the end of the battle, some five hundred of the seven hundred Inniskillings had been killed. The regiment earned a glowing mention from the British commander, Arthur Wellesley, first Duke of Wellington, one of the foremost military figures of the day and a man normally sparing in his praises. By 1815 Wellington already had a glittering career behind him, with successful campaigns in India and against Napoleonic France in the Peninsular War, as a result of which he had been ennobled; he would later carve out a political career too, becoming prime minister in 1828. And, like his faithful Inniskillings, he was Irish, born into an Ascendancy family with estates in counties Kildare and Meath. Famously, he did not like to be reminded of the fact – though his insights into Irish culture and politics would prove useful later. The vital roles of such Irish figures as Wellington and the Inniskillings in what was an iconic British victory indicate the extent to which the destiny of the two countries was now intertwined. As a later rhyme had it:
There was a man named Wellington,
Who fought at Waterloo.
So never let yourself forget,
That you are Irish too.12
Nor was it only on the battlefield that an Irish presence could be found: while Wellington was performing on the European military stage, an Irish poet and singer named Thomas Moore was making himself at home in the most elegant salons of London society. Moore’s Irish airs and ballads – his so-called Melodies, ten collections of songs that were published between 1808 and 1834 – charmed the city’s aristocratic circles; and Moore himself became one of the most popular poets of the era. His success was all the more remarkable given that he held mildly nationalist views – although this did not stop him receiving the patronage of the Prince Regent – and that he was a Catholic, born over his father’s grocery shop in the centre of Dublin. Moore attended Trinity College – one of the first Catholics to do so – as a contemporary of Robert Emmet; and although his travels took him to North America and Bermuda, he returned to Ireland frequently throughout his life. Yet much of that life was spent at the heart of the British establishment: Moore’s portrait was painted for the Royal Institution by Sir Thomas Lawrence, and Moore himself died at his cottage in the depths of the Wiltshire countryside.
The Melodies tapped into a wave of growing interest in nostalgia and folk history that was rising across Europe in these years; and Moore’s mingling of traditional Irish airs and lyrics with patriotic and nostalgic themes was popular not merely in rarified London social circles but in all classes. To the British, they represented an acceptably romantic view of the exotic other island – and yet it is clear that Moore intended to be disingenuous in his Melodies, which if attended to carefully (rather than merely listened to now and again) might provide much to alarm. The Ireland in these songs was more than merely fey and a little wild: it was also heroic, grave, substantial and possessed of a golden age that was past but still potent. Nor was Moore above evoking contemporary events, as when he glanced at Emmet’s pre-execution speech:
Oh breathe not his name, let it sleep in the shade,
Where cold and unhonour’d his relics are laid;
Sad, silent, and dark, be the tears that we shed,
As the night-dew that falls on the grass o’er his head.
But the night dew that falls, tho’ in silence it weeps,
Shall brighten with verdure the grave where he sleeps,
And the tear that we shed, though in secret it rolls,
Shall long keep his memory green in our souls.13
Little wonder, then, that Moore’s songs had their critics. ‘Several of them,’ grumbled the Anti-Jacobin Review, ‘were composed with a view to their becoming popular in a very disordered state of society, if not in open rebellion…. The effect of such songs upon the distempered minds of infuriated bigots may easily be imagined.’14
These were years of steadily increasing political repression and social unrest, as the impact of the European conflicts, the requirements of a war economy and the economic depression that followed the final defeat of Napoleon marked the fabric of this new United Kingdom. Social distress, vagrancy and destitution became part and parcel of the lives of the poor; agrarian crime, want and hunger grew following a disastrous collapse in agricultural prices. The Anglo-Irish novelist Maria Edgeworth, who steadily recorded the Irish scene through the first half of the century, notes just such conditions close to her family lands in County Longford: in January 1816, she notes that Jane Austen has just sent her a copy of the newly published Emma; and that ‘a man near Granard robbed a farmer of thirty guineas and hid them in a hole in the wall. He was hurried out of the country by some accident before he could take off the treasure, and wrote to the man he had robbed and told him where he had hid the money. “Since it can be of no use to me, you may as well ha
ve it…”’ 15
Not all such tales, though, ended so happily. In particular, tension between landlords and tenant farmers – never an easy relationship in the Irish context – became commonplace. It was generated by any number of factors, including rent disputes, reorganizations of the land and the application of tithe to families that could ill afford to pay it; and violence and intimidation became prominent features of rural life. These incidents were very frequently flavoured with sectarianism, directed sometimes by the Ribbonmen (yet another secret system of oath-bound Catholic conspirators) and sometimes by their Orange counterparts, especially in Ulster.* But on occasion these attacks were more class-based: assaults, for example, by poor Catholics on their wealthier co-religionists were far from uncommon.
The desperate human poverty that darkens these years in Europe was chronicled in Ireland too – and frequently with that same note of prurience that marked eighteenth-century accounts. Wretchedness abounds in such reports. The dispiriting account of a representative of the Fishmongers’ Company of London, who was sent to assess the values of the guild’s holdings – now two hundred years old – in the former Plantation county of Derry, is typical:
In the course of the day we entered…many very wretched hovels, called cabins. The following picture will apply with variations to most of them. On entering the cabin by a door thro’ which smoke is perhaps issuing at the time, you observed a bog-peat fire, around which is a group of boys and girls, as ragged as possible, and all without shoes and stockings, sometimes a large pig crosses the cabin without ceremony, or a small one is lying by the fire, with its nose close to the toes of the children. Perhaps an old man is seen or woman, the grandfather or grandmother of the family with a baby in her lap; two or three stout girls spinning flax, the spinning wheels making a whirring noise, like the humming of bees, a dog lying at his length in the chimney corner; perhaps a goose hatching her eggs under the dresser; and all this in a small cabin, full of smoke, an earth floor, a heap of potatoes in one corner, and a heap of turf in another; sometimes a cow; sometimes a horse occupies a corner.16
Such dispatches were circulated and reported in Britain, and they helped to feed a developing sense of Ireland in general (and rural Ireland in particular) as an unrelentingly primitive and backward society. They were also, of course, nothing if not consistent: Giraldus Cambrensis had written in an identical vein six centuries previously.
The full picture was a little more nuanced. For one thing, observers and proto-tourists not infrequently went specifically in search of such scenes of misery – and made certain they found them; and in general, the situation was in some ways a little less persistently grim than these reports suggest. The great bulk of the population certainly lived at subsistence level, in Ireland as in other European countries. But the Irish poor continued to have certain factors in their favour, in particular an abundance of dairy produce and miraculously nourishing potatoes to sustain them. Irish life expectancy at the beginning of the nineteenth century was on a par with that of England, and notably higher than it was in much of Europe.
Yet there were looming issues specific to Ireland, in particular an exploding population (which topped 8 million by the spring of 1845) subsisting on ever-smaller plots of land. As early as 1808, Maria Edgeworth was observing unsustainable conditions in the Longford countryside: ‘My father and mother have gone to the Hills to settle a whole clan of tenants whose leases are out, and who expect that because they have all lived under his Honour, they and theirs these hundred years, that his Honour shall and will continue to divide the land that supported the people among their sons and sons’ sons, to the number of a hundred….’17 Teamed with this was the steadily increasing over-reliance on the potato, with calamitous results when the harvest failed. Its failure in 1822, for example, led to widespread hunger; famine conditions were averted only by State intervention and by the workings of private – and often English – charity.
The response of some commentators to this narrow escape, however, was less thankful than furious: ‘English generosity has interposed and sent relief, and what relief is it? Some of the food that, in our poverty early this season, we were obliged to send away, even though we knew we would want it this spring’.18 This, of course, was the beginning of an argument that would be given a thorough airing several decades later: the extent to which the market should be permitted to operate freely at times of social distress. By the third decade of the nineteenth century, the dangers of dependence on the potato crop had become fully evident. In the late spring and early summer of most years, when the winter store of potatoes was exhausted and the new crop was not yet ready, a period of hunger arrived for an ever-larger proportion of the population.
Nor did the agrarian distress in Ireland go unnoticed by the wider world. In 1825, Sir Walter Scott – whose appetite for things Irish had been whetted in the course of a long correspondence with Edgeworth – had received a rapturous welcome during a tour of the country. The experience, however, had also shocked him: of the Irish peasantry, he wrote that ‘their poverty has not been exaggerated: it is on the extreme verge of human misery’; following his visit, Scott became a convert to the cause of emancipation.19 A decade and more later, the French penal reformer and Catholic liberal social commentator Gustave de Beaumont visited Ireland and was shocked by what he witnessed. In his treatise L’Irlande (published in 1839 to instant acclaim in France and elsewhere), he professed his admiration for the British system of government in general – but was nevertheless forced to concede that in Ireland at least, this same system, characterized as it was by stark divisions between the very rich and very poor, was demonstrably not working. Arguing that the indigenous social structure was unsustainable, and observing the ‘wretched hovel’ with walls of mud that many a peasant family called home, Beaumont wrote:
I have seen the Indian in his forests, and the negro in his chains and thought, as I contemplated their pitiable condition, that I saw the very extreme of human wretchedness, but I did not then know the condition of unfortunate Ireland…. In all countries, more or less paupers may be discovered but an entire nation of paupers is what was never seen until it was shown in Ireland. 20
Ireland was indeed increasingly marked by sharp divisions between wealth and poverty, stagnation and energy. Nor was economic distress to be found only in the countryside: a profound agrarian depression was mirrored in, for example, the continuing economic decline of Galway; and the legislation of 1824 that created a United Kingdom-wide free trade area resulted in the abrupt failure of many of the country’s industries. One answer that presented itself was emigration: to leave behind the privations of the Old World and strike out to embrace the possibilities of the New. Successive waves of Atlantic migrants had up to this point been predominantly Presbyterian: in the years 1769–74 alone, some forty thousand individuals had set sail from Ulster for a new life and a new experience of religious freedom on the other side of the Atlantic.* This flow of emigrants continued into the nineteenth century; and the newcomers would leave a deep cultural imprint on both the United States and Canada. This Presbyterian migration, however, became but one element in a much larger phenomenon: over a million Irish departed for North America in the period from the Act of Union to 1845. Such migrants tended now to be Catholic and unskilled; they tended too to leave on their own account, rather than as part of a move sponsored by either state or private agencies.
Many of these early nineteenth-century Catholic migrants – unlike later arrivals – tended not to settle principally in large communities on the eastern seaboard. Although the later Irish centres of Boston, New York and Philadelphia were inevitably among their first ports of call, many newcomers moved west and south as the United States itself expanded towards the Pacific; and as they did so, they assimilated into wider American society in a manner that became less common later in the century. Their swelling numbers began to bring political clout: Irish Catholics naturally gravitated towards the new Democratic Party; and th
e presidency in particular of Andrew Jackson (1829–37) – though he was himself of Ulster Presbyterian stock – was notable for its effective harnessing of Irish political energies. This contributed to the rise of anti-Irish and anti-Catholic sentiment in North America: newspapers and pamphlets, for example, alleging the existence of Catholic political conspiracies and secret societies now began to circulate. For these new waves of immigrants, such accusations proved difficult to counter: acclimatization to their new lives was indeed accompanied, in general terms, by a consistently strong emotional bond with the land they had left behind, the affairs of which they continued to follow closely – and this continuing attachment would leave them open to accusations of divided loyalties.