Cities of Empire

by Tristram Hunt

  These tensions were magnified by the challenges confronting British imperialism in the later eighteenth century. As we saw in Boston, the extensive military expenditure necessitated by the Seven Years’ War had required new sources of income to fund the burdens of Empire. The colonies needed to start paying their way, so it was no surprise that the 1760s presaged a new determination to exert parliamentary sovereignty over the various colonial assemblies which dotted the Atlantic seaboard in order to extract some financial recompense. In Ireland, under the viceroyalty of Field Marshal Lord Townshend (1767–72), this took the form of new systems of ‘management’ by the imperial administration to curtail the increasingly autonomous aspirations of the Protestant Ascendancy, reaffirm the powers of Westminster and deliver more secure sources of revenue for the British armed forces. A residential lord lieutenant or viceroy was appointed and the colony made much more responsible for bearing the fiscal cost of Britain’s growing imperial commitments until, that is, a ‘tea-party this night’ in Boston starkly revealed the limits of London’s centralizing strategy. In its wake, Britain’s grand strategy for more direct imperial control came grinding to a halt. So after years of tight ‘management’, Ireland in the late 1770s and early 1780s enjoyed a period of relative autonomy and Ascendancy prowess.

  The politician who led the charge for greater self-government was Henry Grattan – gifted rhetorician, Member of the Irish Parliament for Charlemont and coming man of the so-called ‘Patriot’ cause. Working closely with the middle-class militia of the Irish Volunteers (ostensibly formed to defend Ireland during the absence of British troops fighting in America, but soon a shadowy military force behind the Irish Patriot cause), Grattan successfully used the post-1776 hiatus to marshal a programme for repatriating powers from London to Dublin. His first line of attack was the economic restrictions which Irish industry suffered thanks to the old bugbear of the Navigation Acts and the pejorative terms of trade Britain had demanded. While Ireland had enjoyed relatively favourable terms with Great Britain herself and enjoyed extensive imports of colonial goods, many of its industries were barred from exporting to the colonies except through British ports. In addition, the Irish wool, glass and beer industries were wholly excluded from competing with British exports. Grattan opened the 1779 Parliamentary session in Dublin demanding an end to these restrictive practices and the opening up of Irish ports ‘for exportation of all its manufactures’. In London, the prime minister, Lord North, was struggling to contain the effects of the American Revolution and had no power to oppose such demands. The result was an end to trade restrictions and the opening-up of colonial markets for Irish goods ‘upon equal conditions with Great Britain’.

  All well and good, but not enough for Grattan. His next step was political. In January 1780, Grattan told the Dublin Guild of Merchants that it was his intention to ‘strain every nerve to effectuate a modification of the Law of Poynings … [and] to secure this country against the illegal claims of the British Parliament’. Dating back to the 1490s, Poynings’ Law was just one part of the armoury of legislation – along with the Irish Mutiny Act and the Declaratory Act – designed to subjugate Ireland to Britain’s imperial interests. By it, Irish Catholics were prohibited from holding all public office, intermarriage with Protestants, owning land or holding commissions in the British army or navy. Grattan wanted the laws repealed and new commitments made on the independence of the Irish judiciary and the passing of a Habeas Corpus Act. All of which, Grattan assured King George III, could be granted without any diminution of Ireland’s place within the British imperial firmament. ‘The Crown of Ireland,’ he told the Irish parliament, was ‘an Imperial Crown, inseparably annexed to the Crown of Great Britain, on which connection the interests and happiness of both nations essentially depend … and … the people of this kingdom have never expressed a desire to share the freedom of England without declaring a determination to share her fate likewise within the British nation.’17 In London, Lord Rockingham had succeeded Lord North in 1782 but proved equally unable to contain the power of the Irish Patriot cause. Yorktown had fallen, America was lost, the Empire was in mortal danger, and no one wanted Ireland to go the same way. Grattan played his hand well and was granted almost all of his demands, the ‘Constitution of 1782’ giving Ireland an unprecedented degree of legislative independence while still under the banner of the British Crown. This was the high-point of Protestant or ‘colonial’ nationalism in Ireland. ‘A new order of things is commencing,’ noted Edmund Burke. ‘The old link is snapped asunder. What Ireland will substitute in the place of it to keep us together, I know not.’18

  The answer was a new cultural relationship between Ireland and Britain, much of which was manifested in the cityscape of Dublin. A new and different imperial identity was emerging within the Protestant Ascendancy: a sense of Irish nationhood which allowed for expressions of patriotism while still swearing fealty to the imperial British Crown. As ever, there were confusions and contradictions in this Anglo-Irish sensibility; it was also the product of a narrow urban elite. Nonetheless, the energy and ambition, the speed and purpose of the building works which raced along the River Liffey in the 1780s and ’90s spoke to the renewed enthusiasm for a colonial relationship based upon greater equality and clear commercial advantage. ‘You who were here so lately would scarcely know the city, so much is it improved, so rapidly is it continuing to improve,’ was one Englishman’s response to Dublin’s rapid development in 1785. ‘After the talk of the misery of the people in our Parliament, and in the Parliament here, I cannot but feel daily astonishment at the nobleness of the new buildings and the spacious improvements hourly making in the streets … In a word, there never was so splendid a metropolis for so poor a country.’19 The advantages of Empire were helping to fund the development of one of Britain’s finest colonial cities.

  DUBH LINN

  Like so many cities of Empire, Georgian Dublin was layered upon previous colonial accretions. The Vikings began the development of modern Dublin in the ninth century. The dark bog waters provided the name ‘black pool’ – Dubh Linn in Irish, or Dyfflin in Norse – while the River Poddle gave a further boundary and natural clump of raised land that was a perfect setting for the construction of a castle. A bustling Viking fort and trading post emerged, with slaves and silver underpinning much of the commerce, all enriched by raiding parties cruising the Irish littoral. Under the Anglo-Normans in the twelfth century, the medieval city had the castle at its military and economic core. Always a successful commercial centre, Dublin retained its medieval fabric and relatively limited urban reach until the advent of the Tudor state in the sixteenth century and the beginnings of more extensive British intervention.

  More important from an economic perspective was the arrival of French Huguenot artisans in the late seventeenth century and the transformation of the linen and woollen trade. The excellence of Irish wool and the cheapness of labour – combined with Huguenot artisan skill – nurtured a globally successful export trade. For all the restrictions of the Navigation Acts, managed trade with Britain’s foreign colonies (with produce re-exported through British ports) and direct commerce with other foreign markets steadily lifted the Irish economy during the eighteenth century. From 1705, certain kinds of Irish linen were allowed to be directly shipped to the colonies, helping to take cloth exports up to 292,000 yards (267,000 metres) by 1768. But that was nothing compared to the agricultural economy. Barred by another series of protectionist measures from exporting cattle to England, Ireland started selling its beef around the world – with the American and Caribbean plantations being particularly strong markets for salted-beef products. Dublin took full advantage of its historic positions as a port and distribution centre. From the warehouses along the Liffey, dockers winched tons of linen as well as thousands of barrels of salted beef, butter, pork and cheese on to ships bound for those colonists in Bridgetown and Boston, Kingston and Philadelphia missing some of the old-country food. The Royal Navy proved t
o be among Ireland’s best beef customer. Despite accounts of Irish agricultural poverty in the eighteenth century, there were also real-terms increases to butter prices, improvements in the dairy industry and quickening colonial demand. In the last three decades of the eighteenth century, Irish butter exports to Britain doubled, and those of pork increased eightfold. Other commodities for the colonial markets included candles, fishing tackles, Kilkenny marble, soap, silk handkerchiefs, ink and iron products.20

  Alongside the booming docks, commerce and industry flourished in the south-west of Dublin. Here were the breweries and the distilleries, the soap manufactories and ceramicists, the silver-ware makers and glass houses, the carrion houses and slaughterhouses. The work was for the most part filthy, dangerous and exploitative; but it created an increasingly vibrant urban economy. The prosperity was reflected in the demography as Dublin’s population climbed from some 100,000 in the early 1700s to reach 180,000 by latter half of the century. Added to this were the civic, professional and political advantages which the city enjoyed as the site of Dublin Castle (the intermittent residency of the lord lieutenant or viceroy, Britain’s imperial administrator), the national legislature, the seat of the judiciary, Trinity College, the Church and the official bodies encircling them. ‘The curse of absenteeism was little felt in Dublin,’ noted Lecky, ‘where the Parliament secured the presence of most of the aristocracy and of much of the talent of the country; and during the residence of the Viceroy the influence of a Court, and the weekly balls in the winter time at the Castle, contributed to the sparkling, showy character of Dublin society.’21 All of which underwrote an expanding service and retail economy and, with it, increasingly obvious signs of consumer affluence. Late eighteenth-century Dublin could boast some 25 coach builders, over 30 gold and silversmiths, nearly 50 cabinet makers and a rich choice of tea-houses and coffee-shops.22

  This was the economic underpinning of the Protestant Ascendancy’s manifestations of colonial confidence – a process of mutual affirmation enacted through dinners, drinks parties, dances, races, charitable events, gambling, eating, duelling and declarations of Protestant identity. ‘Dublin, the second city in the British Empire, though it yields in extent, yields not in architectural beauty to the metropolis of England,’ wrote one account of the capital at the end of the eighteenth century. ‘Its progress was excessive – the locality of the parliament – the residence of the nobility and commons – the magnificence of the viceregal court – the active hospitality of the people – and the increasing commerce of the Port, all together gave a brilliant prosperity to that splendid and luxurious capital.’23 ‘High living is too much the fashion here,’ commented another. ‘You are not invited to dinner to any private gentleman of £1,000 a year or less, that does not give you seven dishes at one course, and Burgundy and Champagne; and these dinners they give once or twice a week.’24

  Certainly, there were some who expressed astonishment at Dublin’s excesses in a country still mired in poverty. ‘A city, which contains in miniature every thing to be met with in the great capital of the British empire, is an object of attraction, to the wealthy, the idle, and the dissipated,’ thought the philanthropist Edward Wakefield.25 High-minded critics like Wakefield were particularly perturbed by the coexistence in Dublin of conspicuous consumption with a growing proletariat. An American visitor, Edward Melville, was shocked by the ‘half starved, half naked children [who] everywhere meet your eye!’ It regrettably led him to conclude that ‘a great deal of the pomp, splendour and high living, which struck me with such admiration and pleasure on my first arrival lays the foundation for a large share of the wretchedness every feeling heart must deplore’.26 Mass rural immigration into the city, overcrowding and unemployment were producing some ugly social consequences. ‘The vast inferiority of the lower ranks in Dublin, compared even with those of the country towns in England, is very striking,’ remarked one chronicler. ‘In a morning, before the higher classes are up, you would imagine that half the prisons in Europe had been opened, and their contents emptied into this place.’27 On one of those early mornings, the Reverend James Whitelaw took a stroll through some of the ancient parts of Dublin. ‘I have frequently surprised from ten to sixteen persons of all ages and sexes, in a room not fifteen feet square, stretched on a wad of filthy straw, swarming with vermin, and without any covering, save the wretched rags that constituted their wearing apparel.’ And the sanitary conditions were even worse. ‘Into the back yard of each house, frequently not ten feet deep, is flung from the windows of each apartment, the odour [sic] and other filth of its numerous inhabitants, from whence it is so seldom removed, that I have seen it nearly on a level with the windows of the first floor.’ ‘When I attempted, in the summer of 1796, to take the population of a ruinous house in Joseph’s Lane, near Castle Market, I was interrupted in my progress by an inundation of putrid blood, alive with maggots, which had from an adjacent slaughter yard burst the door, and filled the hall to the depth of several inches.’ Finally, in the garret, ‘I found the entire family of a poor working shoemaker, seven in number, lying in a fever, without a human being to administer to their wants.’28 The contrast of such poverty to the affluence of Merrion Square and Sackville Street, combined with a growing reputation for violence and robbery, led commentators time and again to compare Dublin to Naples – a city of swarthy, unstable Catholic extremes.

  Arthur Young approached the city with greater emotional detachment. ‘The town life at Dublin is formed on the model of that of London,’ he explained. ‘Every night in the winter there is a ball or a party, where the polite circle meet, not to enjoy but to sweat each other; a great crowd crammed into 20 feet square gives a zest to the agréments of small talk and whist.’ Nevertheless, it made for ‘a very good society in Dublin in a parliament winter; a great round of dinners, and parties, and balls and suppers every night in the week, some of which are very elegant’. When the young, romantic hero of Ned Evans enters the Dublin townhouse of the Anglo-Irish peer ‘Lord Ravensdale’ (a thinly disguised Duke of Leinster) he marvelled at the luxury. ‘The room was 44 feet long, 34 feet wide, and 30 feet high: – it was hung with silk damask of an azure blue, chairs, sophas, and window curtains of the same … The ceiling and cornices were the finest stucco … from the centre hung a luster of cut glass, with branches for thirty-six candles.’29 Among the most elegant of settings was that provided by Lord Charlemont’s townhouse at the top of Rutland Square (now Parnell Square). Today it houses the admirable collection of the Dublin City Modern Art Gallery, and even in the late eighteenth century the rooms were already bristling with fine art:

  the apartments large, handsome, and well disposed, containing some good pictures, particularly one by Rembrandt … In the same room is a portrait of Caesar Borgia, by Titian. The library is a most elegant apartment of about 40 by 30 feet, and of such a height as to form a pleasing proportion; the light is well managed, coming in from the cove of the ceiling, and has an exceeding good effect; at one end is a pretty ante-room, with a fine copy of the Venus de Medicis.30

  At the apex of high society was the viceroy’s court and the colonial calendar set by Dublin Castle. In the 1770s, much of the crumbling, medieval castle was refitted to provide the right spaces for viceregal entertainment. ‘The Court has nothing remarkable or splendid in it,’ thought Young, ‘but varies very much, according to the private fortunes or liberality of disposition in the Lord Lieutenant.’ Charles Manners, fourth Duke of Rutland, was appointed in 1784 – on a salary of £20,000 p.a. – and certainly had the private fortune and disposition to support Dublin society, although he himself was not immediately enthusiastic about his posting. ‘This city is in a great measure under the dominion and tyranny of the mob,’ he wrote back concernedly to the prime minister, William Pitt the Younger, in 1785. ‘Persons are daily marked out for the operation of tarring and feathering; the magistrates neglect their duty … the state of Dublin calls loudly for an immediate and vigorous interposition of Governme
nt.’31 This meant, in Rutland’s case, excessive displays of Dublin hospitality and the introduction of all-night balls at Dublin Castle. ‘The utmost magnificence signalled the entertainments of the viceregal court, and the duke and duchess were reckoned the handsomest couple in Ireland.’ His dining-out was epic, his claret consumption unrivalled, and his ability to eat seven turkey eggs for breakfast might have assisted his untimely death from incurable liver disease in 1787.32 The social baton was only intermittently taken up by his successors. In the early 1800s, one English visitor was impressed by the flummery attached to a visit by the viceroy, the Duke of Richmond, to Dublin’s Theatre Royal. ‘The cavalcade consisted of three carriages, with the servants in superb liveries, and the horses very richly decorated with ribbons, etc. Behind the first carriage were two footmen, the second three, and the last, in which were the Duke and Duchess, four, the same number as attend their Majesties upon similar occasions, in London.’33