Ireland and Anglo-Irish Relations since 1800: Critical Essays

Volume I: Union to the Land War

N.C. Fleming, Alan O’Day, Alan O'Day

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138358201
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351155304
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The Act of Union, coming into effect on 1 January 1801, portended the integration of Ireland into a unified, if not necessarily uniform, community. This volume treats the complexities, perspectives, methodologies and debates on the themes of the years between 1801 and 1879. Its focus is the making of the Union, the Catholic question, the age of Daniel O'Connell, the famine and its consequences, emigration and settlement in new lands, post-famine politics, religious awakenings, Fenianism, the rise of home rule politics and emergent feminism.

Part I
The Beginnings of the Union

[1]
Popular Politics in Ireland and the Act of Union

By James Kelly

READ 10 SEPTEMBER 1999 AT THE PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE OF NORTHERN IRELAND

THE most striking features of the popular political response in Ireland to the attempts between mid-1798 and mid-1800 to bring about the legislative union of Britain and Ireland are its comparative unevent-fulness and traditional character. On first encounter, this observation may appear provocative since it is still commonly perceived, the work of G.C. Bolton notwithstanding,¹ that the Act of Union was imposed upon a reluctant parliament and an antipathetic people. Moreover, it does not sit easily with what we know of popular anti-unionism in eighteenth-century Ireland, the most celebrated manifestation of which was the anti-union riot of 3 December 1759 when the Dublin mob invaded both houses of parliament and assaulted a number of leading officeholders arising out of a rumour that a legislative union was intended.² Arising out of such manifestations of popular attachment to a domestic Irish parliament, and the high level of political, social and criminal violence during the 1790s, it is hardly surprising that leading figures in the Irish administration anticipated that serious public disorder would be a feature of the opposition to a union in 1798–1800. In point of fact, the decisive defeat of the 1798 rebellion and the strenuous efforts of United Irish leaders to minimise the extent of their revolutionary involvement thereafter ensured that there was no overt popular resistance from a quarter which, during the 1790s, treated every reference to a union with disdain.³ As a consequence, Lord Castlereagh noted with satisfaction in January 1799 that ‘the lower orders are naturally indifferent to the question. Whether a populace, the extent of whose politicisation, it is now commonly argued, increased greatly in the 1790s, were quite as disinterested as he and Lord Cornwallis, who was equally persuaded that ‘the people neither think or care about the matter’, averred is contestable.⁴ James Woodford, a percipient military officer who saw service in Ireland in the late 1790s, suggested that ‘the people’ scarce gave ‘the question of union’ any thought because they had another agenda; they were ‘persuaded … of the French making another and successful invasion’.⁵ The pervasiveness of this conviction remains to be established, but there is no gainsaying that the failure of the rebellion, by enfeebling radicalism and discrediting the republican ideology it presented, ensured there was no popular resistance to a union from that quarter in the late 1790s.

Nor were radicals the only political interest with a diminished capacity to generate a vigorous popular response to the proposal to abolish the Irish parliament. The credibility of the whig-patriots was weakened by the withdrawal from the House of Commons in 1797 of a number of their most eminent voices, as well as by revelations of their contacts with leading United Irishmen. As a result, the patriots were ill-positioned organisationally and politically to spearhead a successful campaign to ensure the survival of the parliament whose legislative authority they had done so much to increase. This was true also of the Catholic interest had they been so-minded. The potential political influence of Catholics was greatly augmented by the extension to them of the franchise in 1793 and by the emergence subsequently of what was termed ‘Catholic emancipation’ as a political aspiration. However, the dissolution of the Catholic Committee and the question marks posed against Catholic loyalty as a consequence of the 1798 Rebellion put the Catholic leadership so firmly on the defensive they did not even consider recreating the popular ferment that had proved so advantageous in 1792–3, to extract concessions as part of a union settlement.⁶

The cumulative effect of recent events, therefore, was either to negate or to confine the capacity of radicals, whig-patriots and Catholics to orchestrate a popular response to the proposal to unite the British and Irish parliaments. Of the three interests, the whig-patriots were possessed of the greatest room to manoeuvre because of the continuing appeal of their arguments in favour of Irish parliamentary government. However, they were obliged to contend for the political limelight with ideological conservatives, whose political star was in the ascendant in the late 1790s, and whose grounds for opposing a union differed from theirs in several fundamental respects. If, as a result, popular opposition to a union lacked ideological coherence, it also meant that it followed a familiar eighteenth-century pattern, and that it is to the ancien regime world of aggregate meetings, resolutions, petitions and addresses rather than to the revolutionary world of mass protests, public disorder and political intrigue that one must look to establish the impact on popular politics of the implementation of the Act of Union.

I

When the idea of a legislative union was floated by William Pitt following the outbreak of rebellion in late May 1798, he was assured of a positive response from the leading people’ in Ireland, many of whom had concluded in 1792–3, when the question of Catholic enfranchisement was at issue, that this offered the best long-term security for the Irish ‘Protestant interest’.⁷ This was not, as Pitt acknowledged at the time, sufficient to neutralise the formidable opposition to any such initiative that would ensue from the anticipated coalition of metropolitan, popular and parliamentary interests that would gather to defend their historical right to make law for Ireland, who continued to argue during the early and mid-1790s that a union was not in Ireland’s strategic, political or economic interest.⁸ At the same time, he and other proponents of a legislative union could take comfort from the fact that the heightened revolutionary activity in Ireland from 1795 increased the parliamentary appeal of a union above the figure of eighty MPs claimed following Lord Fitzwilliam’s dramatic recall in February 1795.⁹ Despite this, Pitt would not have contemplated terminating his policy of governing Ireland by ‘expedients’ in favour of a union but for the outbreak of rebellion on 23 May 1798. Convinced that a union alone provided the basis for a ‘permanent settlement, which may provide for the internal peace of the country and secure its connection with Great Britain’, he promptly set matters in train to make his decision reality.¹⁰ Significantly, his decisiveness was not mirrored by public and political opinion in Ireland. There, the rebellion dominated the political horizon, and with ‘extermination’ and ‘disqualification’ foremost on the minds of a majority of Protestants, there was no groundswell of public support for a union though it was favoured by what the Rev. Charles Warburton termed ‘the sensible party’ as the means most likely to ensure long term ‘peace and security’.¹¹

As this suggests, the most significant short-term effect of the rebellion upon Protestant political opinion in Ireland was to strengthen its already powerful conservative strand. Sensitised by the regular recollection of the events of 1641, reports from Counties Wicklow and Wexford of ‘massacres’ perpetrated upon Protestants by rebels, fixed Protestant perceptions of the rebellion as a sectarian effusion inspired by an unholy combination of Catholic thirst for ‘heretic blood’ and ‘the adoption of French principles’.¹² Arising out of this, it took no great leap of imagination to present the rebellion as ‘a monstrous combination of anarchy and religious bigotry’ and to conclude that events vindicated conservatives like the MP for Dublin city, John Claudius Beresford, who maintained that it was ‘folly’ either ‘to temporise or to maintain a war of half measures with conspirators’. By extension, most felt reflexively that condign punishment should, as a matter of justice, be meted out to those responsible.¹³ They also found ideological comfort in substantial numbers in conservatism, as manifested by the detectable increase in support, most observable in Dublin, during the summer of 1798 for the rhetoric of Protestant ascendancy.

Throughout the eighteenth century, Irish Protestants of all political hues demonstrated a near-pavlovian eagerness to express their commitment to uphold the ‘Protestant constitution in church and state’. Such professions attained heightened ideological potency as a result of the elaboration of the language of ‘Protestant ascendancy’ in the mid-1780s. This became so well-established during the 1790s that it had many adherents in the summer of 1798.¹⁴ In one aspect, it is identifiable in the preparedness of bodies like Dublin Corporation and the Aldermen of Skinner’s Alley to honour known conservatives with complimentary addresses and approbatory resolutions.¹⁵ Another, more significant, manifestation central to an understanding of the antipathy with which many conservatives regarded a union is detectable in their readiness to profess their commitment to the maintenance intact of the Protestant constitution. This was defined as their object by the Orangemen of Dublin when, towards they end of June, they called upon all ‘loyal subjects’ to ‘rally round the constitution’.¹⁶ As the timing and content of this pronouncement emphasise, the horizon of those who shared this outlook was dominated by the desire to restore to Protestants the rights afforded them by their ‘inestimable constitution’. In other words, they assumed that the defeat of the rebellion was about maintaining the status quo. Indeed, in so far as the future of the Irish parliament was even contemplated, the impression generated by conservative champions such as George Ogle and John Claudius Beresford was that ‘a Protestant House of Commons’ was as intrinsic to the maintenance of their ‘happy establishment in Church and State’ as a Protestant monarchy.¹⁷ Some, the Protestant inhabitants of Bandon most notably, went a step further and pronounced explicitly against ‘the fatal love of innovation’. They justified this stand by reference to the desolation revolutionaries had brought to the continent of Europe and ‘traitors’ to the Irish countryside. And it was a short step from there to the conclusion that since they possessed a constitution that approached ‘perfection’, it was incumbent upon them, as the corporation of Dublin pronounced, to ensure its ‘preservation and protection’.¹⁸ The strength of this conviction was affirmed by the conclusion of the parliamentary committees of inquiry into the rebellion that the United Irishmen had aspired to the subversion of ‘the existing establishments in church and state’, and by continuing disorder in the countryside.¹⁹ As fat as popular Protestant opinion, as expressed in the summer and autumn of 1798, was concerned, Irish Protestants had by their recent actions demonstrated their commitment to the preservation of the constitution and the British connection,²⁰ and priority must be given to penalising those who threatened them. This certainly was the view of Dublin Corporation, which responded to the evidence in the report of the Commons’ committee that Henry Grattan was au fait with United Irish plans by disfranchising him and others implicated in ‘the late horrid rebellion’. This punitive disposition was further demonstrated during the exceptionally animated celebration of the anniversary of William of Orange’s birthday on 4 November, when the sole piece of green silk in evidence among the profusion of orange ribbons decorating the statue of King William on College Green was placed under the feet of his mou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series Preface
• Introduction
• Chronology of Events
• PART I THE BEGINNINGS OF THE UNION
• PART II THE CATHOLIC QUESTION AND EMANCIPATION
• PART III THE AGE OF O’CONNELL IN THE 1830s AND 40s, REPEAL
• PART IV THE GREAT FAMINE
• PART V POLITICS IN THE 1850s AND 60s
• PART VI ISAAC BUTT AND THE RISE OF HOME RULE
• PART VII DEMOGRAPHY AND SOCIAL CONDITIONS
• PART VIII RELIGION AND SOCIETY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY IRELAND
• PART IX DIASPORA, EMIGRATION, IMMIGRANTS
• PART X WOMEN
• Name Index