The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860

by Charles Duke Yonge

  Since Lord Rockingham's concessions, in 1782, the project of a legislative union between the two countries, resembling that which united Scotland to England, had more than once been broached. We have seen it alluded to by Fitzgibbon in the course of these discussions, and it was no new idea. It had been discussed even before the union with Scotland was completed, and had then been regarded in Ireland with feelings very different from those which prevailed at a later period. Ten years after the time of which we are speaking, Grattan denounced the scheme with almost frantic violence. Fitzgibbon (though after the Rebellion he recommended it as indispensable) as yet regarded it only as an alternative which, though he might eventually embrace it, he should not accept without extreme reluctance. But at the beginning of the century all parties among the Protestant Irish had been eager for it, and even the leading Roman Catholics had been not unwilling to acquiesce in it. Unluckily, the English ministers were unable to shake off the influence of the English manufacturers; and they, in another development of the selfish and wicked jealousy which had led them in William's reign to require the suppression of the Irish woollen manufacture, now, in Anne's, rose against the proposal of a legislative union.[133] In blindness which was not only fatal but suicidal also, "they persuaded themselves that the union would make Ireland rich, and that England's interest was to keep her poor;" as if it had been possible for one portion of the kingdom to increase in prosperity without every other portion benefiting also by the improvement.

  However, in the reign of Anne the union was a question only of expediency or of wisdom. The wide divergence of the two Parliaments on this question of the Regency transformed it into a question of necessity. The King might have a relapse; the Irish Parliament, on a recurrence of the crisis, might re-affirm its late resolutions; might frame another address to the Prince of Wales; and there might be no alternative between seeing two different persons Regents of England and Ireland, or, what would be nearly the same thing, seeing the same person Regent of the two countries on different grounds, and exercising a different authority.

  And if these proceedings of the Irish Parliament had wrought in the mind of the great English minister a conviction of the absolute necessity of preventing a recurrence of such dangers by the only practicable means open to him-the fusion of it into one body with the English Parliament by a legislative union-the occurrences of the ensuing ten years enforced that conviction with a weight still more irresistible. It has been seen how stirring an influence the revolutionary fever engendered by the overthrow of the French monarchy for a time exerted even over the calmer temper of Englishmen. In Ireland, where, ever since Sarsfield and his brave garrison enlisted under the banner of Louis XIV., a connection more or less intimate with France had been constantly kept up, the events in Paris had produced a far deeper and wider effect. More than one demagogue among the Volunteers had avowed a desire to see the whole country transfer its allegiance from the English to the French sovereign; and this preference was more pronounced after the triumph of democracy in the French capital. For the leaders of the movement, themselves nearly all men of the lowest degree, denounced the Irish nobles with almost as much vehemence as the English connection.

  Yet Pitt's policy, dictated partly by a spirit of conciliation, and still more by feelings of justice, was gradually removing many of the grievances of which the Irish had real reason to complain. Next to the restrictions on trade, nothing had made such an impression on his mind as the iniquity of the penal laws; and those he proceeded to repeal, encouraging the introduction of bills to throw open the profession of the law to Roman Catholics, to allow them seats on the magistrates' bench and commissions in the army, and to grant them the electoral franchise, a concession which he himself would willingly have extended by admitting them to Parliament itself. But these relaxations of the old Penal Code, important as they were, only conciliated the higher classes of the Roman Catholics. Most of the Roman Catholic prelates, and most of the Roman Catholic lay nobles, proclaimed their satisfaction at what had been done, and their good-will toward the minister who had done it; but the professional agitators were exasperated rather than conciliated at finding so much of the ground on which they had rested cut from beneath their feet. So desirous was Pitt to carry conciliation to the greatest length that could be consistent with safety, that he held more than one conference with Grattan himself; but he found that great orator not very manageable, partly, as it may seem from some of Mr. Windham's letters, through jealousy of Fitzgibbon, who was now the Irish Chancellor,[134] and still more from a desire to propitiate the Roman Catholics, for whom he demanded complete and immediate Emancipation; while Pitt, who was, probably, already resolved on accomplishing a legislative Union, thought, as far as we can judge, that Emancipation should follow, not precede, the Union, lest, if it should precede it, it might prove rather a stumbling-block in the way than a stepping-stone to the still more important measure.

  It is not very easy to determine what influence the "Emancipation," as it was rather absurdly called,[135] if it had been granted at that time, might have had in quieting the prevailing discontent. With one large party it would probably have increased it, for there was quite as great an inclination to insurrection in Ulster as in Leinster or Munster; and with the Northern Presbyterians animosity to Popery was at least as powerful a feeling as sympathy with the French Republicans. A subsequent chapter, however, will afford a more fitting opportunity for discussing the arguments in favor of or against Emancipation. What seems certain is, that a large party among the Roman Catholics of the lower class valued Emancipation itself principally as a measure to another end-a separation from England. Pitt, meanwhile, hopeless of reconciling the leaders of the different parties-the impulsive enthusiasm of Grattan with the sober, practical wisdom of Fitzgibbon-pursued his own policy of conciliation united with vigor; and one of the measures which he now carried subsists, unaltered in its principle, to the present day.

  There was no part of the penal laws of which the folly and iniquity were more intolerable than the restrictions which they imposed on education. To a certain extent, they defeated themselves. The clause which subjected to severe penalties a Roman Catholic parent who sent his child abroad to enjoy the benefits of an education which he was not allowed to receive at home, was manifestly almost incapable of enforcement, and the youths designed for orders in the Romish Church had been invariably sent to foreign colleges-some to Douai or St. Omer, in France; some to the renowned Spanish University of Salamanca. But the French colleges had been swept away by the Revolution, which also made a passage to Spain (the greater expense of which had at all times confined that resource to a small number of students) more difficult; and the consequence was, that in 1794 the Roman Catholic Primate, Dr. Troy, petitioned the government to grant a royal license for the endowment of a college in Ireland. Justice and policy were equally in favor of the grant of such a request. For the sake of the whole kingdom, and even for that of Protestantism itself, it was better that the Roman Catholic priesthood should be an educated rather than an ignorant body of men; and, in the temper which at that time prevailed over the western countries of the Continent, it was at least equally desirable that the rising generation should be preserved from the contagion of the revolutionary principles which the present rulers of France were so industrious to propagate. Pitt at once embraced the idea, and in the spring of the next year a bill was introduced into the Irish Parliament by the Chief Secretary, authorizing the foundation and endowment of a college at Maynooth, in the neighborhood of Dublin, for the education of Roman Catholics generally, whether destined for the Church or for lay professions. It is a singular circumstance that the only opposition to the measure came from Grattan and his party, who urged that, as the Roman Catholics had recently been allowed to matriculate and take degrees at Trinity College, though not to share in the endowments of that wealthy institution, the endowment of another college, to be exclusively confined to Roman Catholics, would be a retrograde step, undoing the b
enefits of the recent concession of the authorities of Trinity; would be "a revival and re-enactment of the principles of separation and exclusion," and an injury to the whole community. For, as he wisely contended, nothing was so important to the well-doing of the entire people as the extinction of the religious animosities which had hitherto embittered the feelings of each Church toward the other, and nothing could so surely tend to that extinction as the uniting the members of both from their earliest youth, in the pursuit both of knowledge and amusement, as school-fellows and playmates. If Mr. Froude's interpretation of the motives of those who influenced Grattan on this occasion be correct, he was unconsciously made a tool of by those whose real object was a separation from England, of the attainment of which they despaired, unless they could unite Protestants and Roman Catholics in its prosecution. The bill, however, was passed by a very large majority, and L9000 a year was appropriated to the endowment of the college. Half a century afterward, as will be seen, that endowment was enlarged, and placed on a more solid and permanent footing, by one of the ablest of Pitt's successors. It was a wise and just measure; and if its success has not entirely answered the expectations of the minister who granted it, its comparative failure has been owing to circumstances which the acutest judgment could not have foreseen.

  But it seems certain that neither the concession nor the refusal of any demands put forward by any party in Ireland could have prevented the insurrection which broke out shortly afterward. There were two parties among the disaffected Irish-or it should, perhaps, rather be said that two different objects were kept in view by them-one of which, the establishment of a republic, was dearer to one section of the malcontents; separation from England, with the contingency of annexation to France, was the more immediate aim of the other, though the present existence of a republican form of government in France to a great extent united the two. As has been mentioned before, the original movers in the conspiracy were of low extraction, Dublin tradesmen in a small way of business. Napper Tandy was an ironmonger, Wolfe Tone was the son of a coach-maker. But they had obtained a recruit of a very different class, a younger son of the Duke of Leinster, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, a man of very slender capacity, who, at his first entrance into Parliament, when scarcely more than of age, had made himself remarkable by a furious denunciation of Pitt's Irish propositions; had married a natural daughter of the Duke of Orleans, a prince, in spite of his royal birth, one of the most profligate and ferocious of the French Jacobins; and had caught the revolutionary mania to such a degree that he abjured his nobility, and substituted for the appellation which marked his rank the title of "Citizen Fitzgerald." He had enrolled himself in a society known as the United Irishmen, and had gone to France, as its plenipotentiary, to arrange with Hoche, one of the most brilliant and popular of the French generals, a scheme for the invasion of Ireland, in which he promised him that, on his landing, he should be joined by tens of thousands of armed Irishmen. Hoche entered warmly into the plan, was furnished with a splendid army by the Directors, and in December, 1796, set sail for Ireland; but the fleet which carried him was dispersed in a storm; many of the ships were wrecked, others were captured by the British cruisers, and the remnant of the fleet, sadly crippled, was glad to regain its harbors. Two years afterward another invading expedition had still worse fortune. General Humbert, who in 1796 had been one of Hoche's officers, did succeed in effecting a landing at Killala Bay, in Mayo; but he and the whole of his force was speedily surrounded, and compelled to surrender; and a month afterward a large squadron, with a more powerful division of troops, under General Hardy, on board, found itself unable to effect a landing, but fell in with a squadron under Sir John Warren, who captured every ship but two; Wolfe Tone, who was on board one of them, being taken prisoner, and only escaping the gallows by suicide.

  This happened in October, 1798. But it is difficult to conceive with what object these last expeditions had been despatched from France at all; for in the preceding summer the rebellion of the Irish had broken out, and had been totally crushed in a few weeks;[136] not without terrible loss of life on both sides, nor without the insurgent leaders-though many of them were gentlemen of good birth, fortune, and education, and still more were clergy-showing a ferocity and ingenuity in cruelty which the worst of the French Jacobins had scarcely exceeded; one of the saddest circumstances of the whole rebellion being, that the insurgents, who had burnt men, women, and children alive, who had deliberately hacked others to pieces against whom they did not profess to have a single ground of complaint beyond the fact that they were English and Protestant, found advocates in both Houses of the English Parliament, who declared that the rebellion was owing to the severity of the Irish Viceroy and his chief councillors, who denied that the rebels had solicited French aid, and who even voted against granting to the government the re-enforcements necessary to prevent a revival of the treason.

  The rebellion was crushed with such celerity as might have convinced the most disaffected of the insanity of defying the power of Great Britain; but it was certain that the spirit which prompted the rebellion was not extinguished, and that, as it had been fed before, so it would continue to be fed by the factious spirit of members of the Irish House of Commons, and of those who could return members,[137] so long as Ireland had a separate Parliament. Not, indeed, that Pitt required the argument in favor of a Union which was thus furnished. The course adopted by the Irish Parliament on the Regency question was quite sufficient to show how great a mistake had been made by the repeal of Poynings' Act. But what the rebellion proved was, that the Union would not admit of an instant's delay; and Pitt at once applied himself to the task of framing a measure which, while it should strengthen England, by the removal of the necessity for a constant watchfulness over every transaction and movement in Ireland, should at the same time confer on and secure to Ireland substantial advantages, such as, without a Union, the English Parliament could scarcely be induced to contemplate.

  Mr. Hallam, in one of the last chapters of his work,[138] while showing by unanswerable arguments the advantages which Scotland has derived from her Union with England, has also enumerated some of the causes which impeded the minister of the day in his endeavors to render it acceptable to the Scotch members to whom it was proposed. The most apparently substantial of these was the unprecedented character of the measure. No past "experience of history was favorable to the absorption of a lesser state, at least where the government partook so much of the republican form, in one of superior power and ancient rivalry." But, in the case of the present measure, what had thus been a difficulty in the Scotch Union might have been expected to be regarded as an argument in its favor, since the keenest patriots among the Scotch had long been convinced that the Union had brought a vast increase of prosperity and importance to their country, and what was now confessed to have proved advantageous to Scotland might naturally be expected to be equally beneficial to Ireland. Another obstacle had been the fear of the danger to which the Presbyterian Church might be "exposed, when brought thus within the power of a Legislature so frequently influenced by one which held her, not as a sister, but rather a bastard usurper to a sister's inheritance." But here again experience might give her testimony in favor of an Irish Union, since it was incontestable that those apprehensions-which, no doubt, many earnest Scotchmen had sincerely entertained-had not been realized, but that since the Union the Presbyterian Church had enjoyed as great security, as complete independence, and as absolute an authority over its members as in the preceding century; that the Parliament had never attempted the slightest interference with its exercise of its privileges, and that the Church of England had been equally free from the exhibition of any desire to stimulate the Parliament to such action; while the Roman Catholic Church, which had many more adherents in England than the Presbyterian Church had ever had, was quite powerful enough to exact for itself the maintenance of its rights, and the minister was quite willing to grant equal securities to those which, at the beginning of the c
entury, had been thought sufficient for the Church of Scotland. A third reason which our great historical critic puts forward for the disfavor with which the Union was at the time regarded by many high-minded Scotchmen, he finds in "the gross prostitution with which a majority sold themselves to the surrender of their own legislative existence." That similar means were to some extent employed to win over opponents of the government in Ireland cannot, it must be confessed, be denied, though the temptations held out to converts oftener took the shape of titles, promotions, appointments, and court favors than of actual money. The most recent historian of this period-who, to say the least, is not biassed in favor of either the English or Irish government of the period-pronounces as his opinion, formed after the most careful research, that the bribery was on the other side. "Cornwallis and Castlereagh" (the Lord-lieutenant and the Chief Secretary) "both declared it to be within their knowledge that the Opposition offered four thousand pounds, ready money, for a vote. But they name only one man who was purchased, and his vote was obtained for four thousand pounds. From the language of Lord Cornwallis, it is certain that if money was spent by the government in this way it was without his knowledge; but many things may have been done by the inferior agents of the government, and possibly by Castlereagh himself, which they would not venture to lay before the Lord-lieutenant. It appears, however, from the papers which have recently come to light, that the prevalent belief of the Union having been mainly effected by a lavish expenditure of money is not well-founded; still it is certain that some money was expended in this way." Besides actual payment for votes, he adds that a very large sum-a hundred thousand pounds-is said to have been expended in the purchase of seats, the holders of which were, of course, to vote against the measure; and names Lord Downshire as subscribing L5000, Lord Lismore and Mr. White L3000 each, while the government funds were chiefly expended "in engaging[139] young barristers of the Four Courts to write for the Union." But, even if it were true that corruption was employed to the very utmost extent that was ever alleged by the most vehement opponent of the measure and of the government, it may be feared that very few of the last century Irishmen would have been so shocked at it as to consider that fact an objection to the Union, especially, it is sad and shameful to say, among the upper classes. The poorer classes, those who could render no political service to a minister, as being consequently beneath official notice, were unassailed by his temptations; but the demoralization of the men of rank and property was almost universal, and few seats were disposed of, few votes were given, except in return for favors granted, or out of discontent at favors refused. And it cannot be denied that the tendency to political jobbery had not been diminished by the concessions of 1782, if, indeed, it may not be said that the increased importance which those concessions had given to the Irish Parliament had led the members of both Houses to place an increased value on their services. Certainly no previous Lord-lieutenant had given such descriptions of the universality of the demands made on him as were forwarded to the English government by those who held that office in the sixteen years preceding the outbreak of the Rebellion.