The Whig Party, 1807 - 1812

Michael Roberts

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429620584
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Published in 1965: Thisbook is about the Period in which the Whig Party was in power between 1807 - 1812. It talks about Economics, Parliamentary reforms and wars.

CHAPTER I

IRELAND AND THE CATHOLICS

(a) The Fall of the Ministry of the Talents

IN 1806 Ireland was becoming gradually accustomed to the Union. The stream of absentee landlords was flowing steadily eastward; Miss Edgeworth was beginning her literary career; and Dublin was settling down, with resignation if not with contentment, into the situation of a mere provincial town. At Westminster the voice of Ireland was raised infrequently, for the difficulty of keeping Irish members at Westminster was presenting party Whips with a new problem;¹ but in Munster and Connaught it was to be heard in the subversive whispers of the Threshers, the latest manifestation of the anti-British element. The benefits as well as the disadvantages of the Union were just beginning to be obvious. Trade was on the increase; new canal schemes were providing at least temporary employment; and if Ireland’s agriculture was as uneconomic and as backward as ever, yet that distraction in her finances, which by 1811 had more than doubled her funded debt, was not yet become serious.² It was even considered by some observers that there was hope for Irish manufactures, though the less imaginative were content that Ireland’s economic function should be to complement England rather than to attempt to rival her.¹ Population was estimated at about 5,000,000; and of these the majority were represented by a Catholic observer as living in moderate prosperity and rude health.² There was even growing up a feeling of responsibility on the part of the landlords; and in 1808 an anonymous writer was to anticipate Thomas Drummond by laying it down that “a landlord is not a mere land merchant; he has duties to perform as well as rents to receive”.³

Still, when judged by English standards, the condition of Ireland was undoubtedly miserable. The grievous oppression of the tithes, which even Catholic Bishops had to pay,⁴ and the iniquities of an Orange magistracy, were alone sufficient to mar the prospect; and there were those who held that the Union had aggravated the condition of the country instead of alleviating it.⁵

Such a state of affairs gave ample and obvious opportunity for controversy, and might well have provided an Opposition with an easy line of attack and an arguable case. Ireland, however, was not interested in party politics. In Ireland there was neither Whig nor Tory; only Catholic and Protestant. In the view of some contemporary writers even this division did not express the real truth: the line of demarcation, they contended, was between those who desired, and those who repudiated, the British connection.⁶ However this may be, for practical purposes of politics and jobbery the Catholic and Protestant parties between them comprehended the Irish nation. Here and there a particularly saintly or a particularly irreligious man might stand outside either camp, but such men were rare; and though Bishop Jebb (who was of the former sort) could carry on a correspondence upon episcopal and ecclesiastical topics for thirty years without allowing it to appear that he was conscious of the existence of Roman Catholicism in the country, there were few on either side who could emulate his detachment.¹ The Irish voter was even more ignorant and bestial than his brother of England, though he had little chance of enjoying the pleasures and perquisites of an English election.² His political life lay therefore not in the exercise of a privilege which he was made to use at the discretion of his superiors, but in a constant struggle against the inferior status to which his religion condemned him. If he were a respectable tradesman, he supported a Catholic Committee to petition Parliament; if he were a peasant of the west country, he enlisted with the Threshers and burnt the corn of the tithe-owners. And if all other ways of venting his political exuberance were stopped up, he indulged in faction fights with his neighbour, and became a Shanavest or a Caravat.³ But when Whig and Tory politics for the moment coincided with the Catholic and Protestant controversy, then it was seen that Ireland had a public opinion which could speak decisively, and which paid but little attention to its official leaders.

At this time the leadership of the Catholic party in Ireland was in a state of transition. The former leader of the laity, John Keogh of Mount Jerome, “the first plebeian leader of the Irish Catholics”, was growing old, and was losing control of affairs. In his place James Ryan, a rich young Catholic merchant, was endeavouring, by the formation of a private junto which met at his house, to bring the management of Catholic affairs into his own hands.¹ Opposed to the Ryan faction were, besides the old supporters of Keogh, the great Catholic nobles, and particularly Lord Ffrench, who, with Lords Fingall, Gormanstown, and Trimleston, formed the nucleus of an “aristocratic” Catholic party. In general Keogh and the aristocrats were in favour of a cautious line of conduct, while Ryan and his friends were anxious to press the demand for Emancipation. At first Ryan’s policy prevailed, and in 1805 led to the presentation to Parliament of the first of many petitions for Catholic Emancipation.

Of the numerous Irish Catholic Bishops the most important were Archbishop Troy of Dublin and Bishop Moylan of Cork. They endeavoured to maintain a conciliatory bearing towards the Government, and were considered by the more extreme of their brethren, and by many of their flock, as “Castle” men. The Primate, O’Reilly of Armagh, was old, weak, and unimportant.²

Such was the situation which Ireland presented to the Talents when they came into office. Their accession to power was received with satisfaction and hope in Ireland; their fall from it was viewed with contemptuous indifference. How was it that men so well-meaning and, on the whole, so friendly to Ireland came to be distrusted by the people they had intended to serve?

From the outset the Talents were unfortunate in their treatment of the Irish problem. They had hardly been in office a month before they gave a severe blow to the confidence which the Catholic party had previously felt in them. The new progressive Catholic party in Ireland, headed by James Ryan, entered into unofficial communication with Fox, and announced their intention of petitioning Parliament, in the full expectation of receiving his support. But Fox judged, quite rightly, that the situation of the country demanded that he should not wreck his Ministry by wilfully bringing forward this question; and he wisely suggested that the petition should be abandoned. In exchange, he promised to do his best for them. They should have better magistrates, quicker promotions in the Army, and no more emergency legislation. Ryan accepted these terms, and at once laid himself open to a damaging attack from his rivals. An aggregate meeting on 13 March 1806 reversed his decision, broke up the Ryan domination, and led to the forming of a Catholic association in which was to be comprised “the full respectability of the Catholic body”.¹

The Whigs were not fortunate in their choice of an Irish Administration. The Duke of Bedford was amiable and well-intentioned; but his Lord Chancellor, George Ponsonby, and his Chief Secretary, William Elliot, were not popular. Ponsonby’s services to Ireland dated from as early as 1782, when he had assisted Grattan, and he was, of course, a member of the well-known Irish family of that name. As Lord Chancellor, however, he was not a success. Elliot was regarded by many as little better than an Orangeman.² The old champions of the Irish cause were slighted. Grattan, who had no desire for office, was not even consulted; and Curran, whose claims to the office of Attorney-General were of long standing, was fobbed off with the unsuitable post of Master of the Rolls, an appointment which actually involved him in pecuniary loss.¹ More serious than the wounded feelings of individuals was the indignation of the country at the continuance in office of many of the men who were associated in the popular mind with the worst and most bigoted elements of the Castle system:

The friends and co-operators of Lord Redesdale, the Attorney- and Solicitor-General, retained their situations and confidence: Mr. Alexander Marsden, the secret adviser and machinist to the late administration, was not displaced. The whole of the Orange magistracy remained undisturbed in the commission of the peace. Even Major Sirr was still seen, as the tutelary guardian of the Castle-yard.²

The failure to remove the more glaring offenders among the Protestant magistracy, or to put leading Catholics into the Commission, was indeed the heaviest charge against the Bedford Administration; and the matter came to a head when Mr. Wilson, a Protestant magistrate of Armagh, was unable to secure a proper investigation of grave charges against two of his colleagues on the bench, and in consequence published his correspondence with the Government.³ Some attempt was indeed made towards the end of the Administration to remodel the notorious Commission of Co. Wexford; but in general so little was done that even Whigs suspected that Ponsonby was acting with an eye rather to electoral influence than to the dispensation of justice.⁴ When to these errors are added the personal indiscretions of which Ponsonby was guilty, and the aloofness of manner both of himself and of Elliot, it is not surprising that the Government was unpopular. The Protestants were hostile, the Catholics disappointed; and, in short, under the “cold-blooded, temporizing, timid, left-handed policy of Mr. Ponsonby … all were disaffected and dissatisfied”.¹ It was partly to allay this dissatisfaction, at all events among the Catholics, and partly perhaps from honest conviction, that in February 1807 the Talents embarked upon the enterprise which brought them to the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Prefatory Note
• Introduction
• Chapter I Ireland and the Catholics
• Chapter II The Whigs and the War
• Chapter III The Whigs and Reform
• Chapter IV The Leadership in the Commons
• Chapter V In or Out?
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Bibliography
• Index