Cities of Empire

by Tristram Hunt

  These were the most celebrated buidlings, but across the city other parts of Georgian Dublin were being beautified and improved at a remarkable rate. There was the new King’s Hospital in Blackhall Place; the Green Street Courthouse; the Guinness’s Brewery; and the Royal Exchange, built in 1769–79 as part of the Wide Street Commissioners’ plans for improvement around Essex Bridge. ‘The inside of this edifice possesses beauties that cannot be clearly expressed by words,’ noted one contemporary.

  View of the Four Courts Looking Down the River Liffey, attributed to Henry Brocas Junior after Samuel Brocas (1818).

  The dome is spacious, lofty, and noble, and is supported by twelve Composite fluted columns, which, rising from the floor, form a circular walk in the centre of the ambulatory … Between two of the columns … on a white marble pedestal, is a statue in brass of his present Majesty George III., in a Roman military habit, crowned with laurel, and holding a truncheon in his hand.54

  Here was the King of Britain and of Ireland presiding as emperor, with Roman mien, over his emerging citadel. In April 1792 the Commissioners sent their surveyor Thomas Sherrard, ‘to obtain Elevations of such range of Buildings or others in London as he may Judge will be of advantage towards furnishing design for the new Streets and places in this City’.55 The Commissioners were always hungry for new maps of London or plans of prestigious schemes. And the flow of ideas and architects across the Irish Sea was extensive, with many of Dublin’s leading designers gaining their groundings in Palladian rules from their time with London patrons. Indeed, the parallels between the capitals of King George’s two kingdoms were made with gratifying frequency. John Gamble, an army surgeon from County Tyrone, expressing a common eighteenth-century refrain, was ‘forcibly struck with the strong likeness [Dublin] bears to London, of which it is a beautiful copy – more beautiful, in truth, in miniature than the gigantic original’.56

  Traditionally, this surge of development, the work of the Wide Street Commissioners and Dublin’s broader sense of civic spirit in the 1780s and ’90s have been interpreted as the product of the Grattan parliament and a renewed sense of Irish identity, the urban outflow of the cultural patriotism surrounding the ‘Constitution of 1782’, with its repeal of Poynings Law and cultural awakening of Irish nationalism. In fact, the Palladian designs, the iconography and the rhetoric show that Georgian Dublin was much more a robust expression of imperial affinity than Irish nationalism. From its colonial economy to its theatrical and literary culture to its civil society, Dublin was becoming more, not less, integrated with Britain during this period of so-called ‘colonial nationalism’ – and its cityscape said so. ‘The initiative for public building came predominantly from the loyal “supporters of government” in Ireland,’ explains the historian Murray Fraser, ‘who aimed to maintain a social order and a colonial relationship they believed to be the best guarantee for Ireland’s progress.’57

  But Ireland, as we know, was always more than just a colony – ‘rather an unruly palimpsest, on which, though much rewritten and scored out, could be discerned in an untidy jumble: “kingdom”, “colony”, “dependency”, and, faintly, “nation”’. And in 1798 all those contradictions resurfaced with bloody force in the rebellion of the United Irishmen.

  IRELAND OR EMPIRE?

  Behind the colonial grandeur of Georgian Dublin, political tensions within the Irish state were intensifying. The 1790s were a tough economic decade, with debts running high and the public finances further undermined by the outbreak of war between Great Britain and revolutionary France in 1793. More worrying for the British Empire was the fact that republican France seemed to be garnering an increasing number of sympathizers within Ireland, who came together in the Society of the United Irishmen in 1791. In some ways, these constitutional activists were the ideological descendants of the Irish Volunteers and the ‘patriot’ cause, but their political demands were altogether more expansive. They urged the immediate and radical reform of parliament to include Catholic representation and a reconfigured relationship with Britain based on a reduced role for the Protestant Ascendancy. Much of their inspiration came from Thomas Paine, the early years of the French Revolution and a broader, Enlightenment belief in separating religion off from politics. Throughout the early 1790s Dublin booksellers stocked an extensive array of French revolutionary tracts and radical pamphlets. The United Irishmen’s support was generally middle- rather than working-class (together with the odd aristocratic supporter, such as the Paine acolyte Lord Edward Fitzgerald of the Leinster clan), but also drew heavily upon a Presbyterian tradition of radical dissent. Nonetheless, at the core of the leaders’ – Theobald Wolfe Tone and Thomas Russell – demands was a total commitment to reform of the anti-Catholic laws, which still discriminated against the indigenous Irish population, as part of a broader modernization programme for the Irish state based upon national determination. They wanted Ireland liberated from the imperial bonds. ‘From my earliest youth I have regarded the connection between Ireland and Great Britain as the curse of the Irish nation, and felt convinced that, while it lasted, this country could never be free nor happy,’ as Wolfe Tone later put it. ‘In consequence, I determined to apply all the powers which my individual efforts could move, in order to separate the two countries.’

  Unfortunately, space for progressive, liberal reform in 1790s Ireland was limited. First, the curse of sectarianism arose with the forming of Orange Order Lodges in the mid-1790s, ‘to support the King and his heirs as long as he or they support the Protestant Ascendancy’. In response, networks of Catholic Defenders emerged to protect their communities from the early morning raids which the Protestant ‘Peep o’Day Boys’ liked to launch. In 1796, Ireland lurched into a rumbling rebellion as the United Irishmen (who were outlawed in 1794) sought an alliance with revolutionary France to oust the British; Catholic and Protestant militia terrified the countryside with sectarian assaults; and the threat of foreign invasion became a realistic prospect. In 1798 the United Irishmen pushed Leinster into open revolt, with County Kildare and County Wexford producing scenes of brutality not witnessed since the early 1640s. ‘The 1798 rising was probably the most concentrated episode of violence in Irish history. Mass atrocities were perpetrated in circumstances of chaos and confusion, symbolized by the oddly assorted icons of the rosary and the “cap of liberty”.’58 By the end of the summer, the death toll stood at around 30,000 on both sides. Even the newly installed lord lieutenant, General Cornwallis, veteran of some of the bloodiest battles of the American War of Independence, was shocked to find a country ‘streaming with blood’. He lamented how ‘the only engines of government were the bayonet, the torch and the cat o’ nine tails’. He marvelled at the ‘bloodlust’ of loyalist troops and the ‘numberless murders which are hourly committed by our people without any process or examination whatever’. It only strengthened his deep, residual contempt for the colonial classes.59

  Equally shocking was how close the French were to a well-armed invasion of Ireland and thence presumably across the Irish Sea into England. In 1795 the United Irish rebel Arthur O’Connor was in Paris, holding talks with the Revolutionary army about a French invasionary force. In 1796 a French expedition of 14,000 soldiers almost made a landing at Bantry Bay in west Cork, but the storm and fog prevented them from putting ashore; in August 1798 the French put ashore a small force of 1,000 soldiers at Kilcumin in County Mayo, of whom Cornwallis made short work; and, finally, in October 1798 a further landing was attempted off Lough Swilly in County Londonderry. The sea battle was a triumph for the Royal Navy as seven of the ten French ships were captured, on board one of which was Wolfe Tone. In the end, no invasion could establish itself, but the repeated, dangerous assaults so close to the inner sanctum of Empire confirmed in the mind of the British prime minister, William Pitt, his own scheme for the future of Anglo-Irish relations.

  ‘The idea of the present fermentation gradually bringing both parties to think of an Union with this country has long been in my
mind,’ Pitt had written as early as 1792 to the then lord lieutenant, the Earl of Westmorland. ‘I hardly dare flatter myself with the hope of its taking place; but I believe it, though itself not easy to be accomplished, to be the only solution for other and greater difficulties.’ The multiple invasions along the Irish coast at a time of seismic military crisis on the European continent cemented his belief in the need for a constitutional union between Ireland and Britain. On grounds of national security alone, the freedoms of 1782 and the autonomy of Grattan’s parliament had to be superseded by direct control from Whitehall. Union with Ireland, Pitt explained to the House of Commons on 31 January 1799, ‘would increase the general power of the Empire … to a very great extent by a consolidation of the strength of the two kingdoms’.60

  However, Union promised more than just protection against Irish rebellion and French invasion. There was the economic argument for the ‘circulation of capital’ and ‘improved trade and commerce’ between London and Dublin as a way of alleviating Ireland’s deep-seated poverty. In return, Irish manpower and resources might be utilized more expansively through the Empire. And then there was the moral case for religious equity since, curiously enough, union with Protestant Britain offered the chance of solving the problem of Catholic emancipation in Ireland. By means of a single national parliament covering Great Britain and Ireland, the vast Irish Catholic vote – which so obviously threatened Protestant interests in a single Irish parliament – would be dissipated through a broader representative body. Catholics could vote and sit in an imperial parliament without becoming the majority. ‘The admission of the Catholics to the … suffrage could not then be dangerous,’ explained Pitt. ‘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; and the great ground of argument on the part of the Catholics would be done away, as compared with the rest of the Empire, they would become a minority.’61

  Such logical assurances about Ireland, Empire and the Catholic majority were not received well by the Protestant Ascendancy in Dublin. Henry Grattan certainly didn’t like to hear what he called ‘the novel and barbaric phraseology of empire’. But this was exactly what London had in mind: Ireland, like Scotland in 1707, was to move from kingdom-cum-colony to a true partner in Empire. ‘By an incorporation of our legislature with that of Great Britain, it would not only consolidate the strength and glory of the empire, but it would change our internal and local government to a system of strength and calm security, instead of being a garrison in the island,’ explained Pitt’s ally in the Irish parliament, the acting chief secretary for Ireland, Viscount Castlereagh. He later added: ‘it had been said that this measure would reduce Ireland to the state of a colony; was it by making her a part of the greatest and most powerful empire in the world? If I were called upon to describe a colony, I would describe it as something very like the present state of this country.’62 Union, by contrast, offered an altogether more dignified future as a fellow beneficiary in the greatest Empire on earth. As the former Irish chief secretary Sylvester Douglas put it, ‘Ireland, by an Union, no more becomes a province in any offensive sense of the word, than Great Britain: they both become provinces, or component parts of one whole and integrated Empire.’63

  For all the lofty rhetoric of shared identities and imperial concerns, the means of achieving this Union were far from dignified. The turn of the century witnessed quite the grubbiest display of parliamentary graft since the 1707 Act of Union between England and Scotland, as Castlereagh showered peerages, pensions, dinners and gifts on to wavering Members of the Irish Parliament in order to force through the Union. An avalanche of money – estimated at some £32,336 in cash bribes alone – did the job as the completed Union Bill passed the Irish House of Commons on 7 June 1800 (though without the much promised clauses promising Catholic emancipation). Ireland’s status as a separate kingdom or a separate colony – depending on your point of view – had come to an end. ‘I see her in a swoon, but she is not dead,’ was Grattan’s melodramatic verdict on the passing of the Bill, ‘though in her tomb she lies helpless and motionless, still there is on her lips a spirit of life, and on her cheek a glow of beauty.’64

  Was Dublin now a fully fledged City of Empire, standing alongside her imperial partner, London? It turned out that she indeed now entered a swoon. All the energy of late eighteenth-century Dublin, fostered by the Protestant Ascendancy’s sense of Irish pride and colonial affinity, faded away. ‘Where are we now? – What are we about? – Where are we going?’ asked The Dublin Magazine in the aftermath of Union.

  It might be answered – Not what we were twenty years ago. – We are an almost ruined people – we are doing worse than nothing … At the time of the Union … we then had a trade, flourishing in all its various directions … Now, what with the removal of our parliament, the absence of our nobility and gentry, the inundation of British articles, and the strange contempt for our home-manufactures, numbers wander meal-less in our streets, [and] the fatigued eye of charity meets beggars in every direction.65

  Prior to the Union, Dublin had been the regular residence of 271 peers and 300 Members of Parliament, as well as a powerful lord lieutenancy, and all the society and commerce that accompanied it. By 1821 there were only thirty-four peers, thirteen baronets and five Members of Parliament. Dublin felt their loss not so much on account of an absence of political leadership but because, as the army surgeon John Gamble put it, the ‘three hundred Bacchanals, whose sun daily set in claret, spending six months every year with their wives and children in Dublin, must have been of infinite service; and their loss would for a time be severely felt’.66 Visitors could not but comment on the straitened times facing the city. The travel writer James McGregor spoke of the ‘depress[ed]’ state of Dublin’s ‘Literature, Arts and Manufactures’.67 The novel Florence Macarthy, published in 1818 by the Anglo-Irish writer Lady Morgan, described how:

  The capital of Ireland, since the Union, has become a mere stage of passage to such of its great landholders as occasionally visit the kingdom for purposes of necessity. They consider this beautiful city only as a pendant to Holyhead; and take up their temporary lodging to await the caprice of wind and tide, in those mansions where a few years ago they spent a large part of their great revenues, drawn from their native soil.68

  The fulcrum of power had crossed the Irish Sea: the capital’s dynamism vanished, absenteeism returned and the big houses lost their patrons. ‘Behold the reciprocity which Pitt has bequeathed to you by the union – to eat the crumbs which have fallen from the rich man’s table,’ thundered a Dublin pamphleteer in 1811.69 Parliament House was offered up to the Bank of Ireland; the Royal Horticultural Society took over the Rotunda for annual exhibitions; Powerscourt House became the Stamp Office; Lord Castlereagh’s house in Merrion Square was let to the Irish Canal Board; Lord Cloncurry sold Mornington House in 1801 for 30 per cent of what he had bought it for in 1791; and Leinster House itself – the epicentre of Georgian Dublin, the residence that had signified the city’s renaissance – was sold to the Dublin Society, with a third of the price knocked off.

  Similarly, the semi-autonomous, colonial culture of the Protestant Ascendancy was superseded by a more obviously aggrandizing, militaristic imperialism. On 8 November 1805 news of Vice Admiral Horatio Nelson’s victory and death at the Battle of Trafalgar reached Dublin. The City Assembly swiftly met to prepare an address of congratulation to King George III, but also to call a public meeting to discuss rising popular demand for a monument honouring the ‘immortal memory’ of Nelson. On 15 February 1808, to mark the anniversary of Nelson’s victory at the Cape St Vincent in 1797, the foundation stone of the 22-metre column (and 4-metre high statue) was laid amid huge, enthusiastic crowds.70 ‘The testimonials of national gratitude and admiration to the memory of this favourite naval hero are already numerous in the British dominions. That erected by public subscription in Dubl
in is perhaps the greatest of any of them,’ noted one Dublin history of the city’s newly carved Nelson’s Pillar.71 Built at a cost of £7,000 and officially opened in 1809, the Pillar joined the Wellington Monument, the new Viceregal Lodge in the Phoenix Park, improvements to the decaying Dublin Castle and, above all, the bombastic, magnificent General Post Office on Sackville Street as part of a new architecture of Empire celebrating the historic Union with Great Britain. The political and diplomatic clout of the capital might have disappeared, but the citizens of Dublin could now enjoy all the icons of British imperialism in their midst. The meaning of this architecture would not be lost on the Irish nationalist instigators of the 1916 Easter Rising, who used the GPO as the headquarters of their struggle against British rule, or the Irish Republican Army volunteers who partially destroyed Nelson Pillar in March 1966 as an unwanted residue of the colonial past.*

  In the early 1800s, however, such anti-imperialism was a long way off. In fact, the talk was all of how the Irish would benefit from Empire. ‘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,’ Pitt the Younger waxed at the peak of his unionist enthusiasm.72 After Union, ‘the voice of Irishmen,’ predicted Henry Dundas, the British war secretary, ‘would be heard, not only in Europe but in Asia, Africa and America’.73 And so it proved, with the Irish revealing themselves to be as enthusiastic proponents of Empire – as soldiers, traders, missionaries, sailors, civil servants, engineers and doctors – as the Scottish. What was more, Empire proved remarkably unsectarian: both Irish Catholics and Protestants benefited from the career opportunities it offered. Surreptitiously, the East India Company had long been recruiting Irish Catholics in the south and west of the island for military service, but now the pace of employment multiplied. By 1813 the Company had established recruiting offices in Dublin, Belfast, Enniskillen and Limerick, which went on to supply almost 50 per cent of the Bengal army’s European recruits in the period 1815–50.74 Meanwhile, among the industrious Irish middling sort there emerged a more global, British affiliation to compete with romantic notions of national identity – and Dublin, with its Nelson Pillar and Wellington Monument, only affirmed such imperial, rather than colonial, empathies. Here was ‘the friendly union of Britannia and Hibernia, with good consequences relating to Ireland’. For a brief period, the Anglo-Irish imperial relationship was not perhaps quite as foreign and oppressive as Friedrich Engels and later Irish nationalists would descrie.