Science, politics and society in early nineteenth-century Ireland

The Reverend William Richardson

Allan Blackstock

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780719085185
• eBook ISBN: 9781526111807
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: French History
• Index: History

This book examines the pivotal period immediately after the Irish Union from the unique perspective of the Reverend William Richardson (1740–1820). A clerical polymath, Richardson's activities ranged from Ulster politics to international scientific debates. His private correspondence adds to our knowledge of central Ulster before and during the 1798 rebellion and provides insights into the tensions between Irish provincial science and the metropolitan scientific world. The book is based on extensive primary research, including material new to Irish historiography, and follows the political and scientific themes of Richardson's career in a broadly chronological sweep, assessing the role of various shaping features, including religion, politics, personality and Enlightenment ideology, and analysing each theme in terms of its broad contemporary historical significance. This book will appeal to students and academics with an interest in the period, or politics, religion or science.

1

‘Virtue appears like an Oak’:¹ William Richardson’s family and background

This motto from the Richardson family crest is certainly appropriate, for William Richardson saw himself as a virtuous man. Yet everyone who knew him found a tenaciously, often belligerently, stubborn man. He conformed to the general eighteenth-century conception of the patriotic, public-spirited citizen being a virtuous man; but Richardson made a virtue from the necessity always to be right. This self-righteous trait revealed itself in a very strict sense of propriety. Richardson reacted to contradiction with explosive anger, sullen sulkiness or scathing sarcasm. He was not a man to cross lightly. Even his own family treated him cautiously. As a prominent pamphleteer, Richardson was a public character, but personality is vital in the formation of any such character. Richardson once admitted that ‘I love controversy’.² This opening chapter considers formative influences on Richardson’s personality, such as ancestry, upbringing and education, and reviews his actions before he stormed into the world of print. It argues that the pugnacious polemicist of the early nineteenth century was fully formed in the eighteenth.

The Richardson family

The Richardson family was solidly Protestant and deeply rooted in the Ulster soil. The seventeenth-century Plantation, which heralded major changes in landholding, indirectly brought William Richardson’s ancestors to Ireland. Plantation grants of 1,000 acres in the Precinct of Mountjoy, county Tyrone, were made to Bernard and Robert Lindsay from Haddington in Scotland in 1610. By 1618 these land grants had been transferred to another Scot who came from the same area, Alexander Richardson. Pynnar’s 1618 report on the Ulster Plantation noted that these lands contained a fortified stone bawn, a timber house and sufficient tenants to produce ‘39 men with arms’.³ Several of Richardson’s ancestors fought at the siege of Derry and were proclaimed traitors by the ‘Patriot Parliament’ in 1689.⁴ After the Jacobite defeat at the Boyne in 1690 had negated any land forfeiture made under the Act of Attainder, an Archibald Richardson sat for the Tyrone borough of Augher in the 1692 Williamite parliament. His brother, William, held the seat between 1737 and his death in 1755, when it passed to his son, St George Richardson, a professional soldier.⁵ The origins of the family’s county Londonderry connections are obscure, but strong links were developed with the Irish Society, comprised of London companies which had received Plantation grants. One source has Archibald’s brother William as managing agent for the Merchant Taylor’s Company estate near Coleraine. He purchased this estate in 1729 and became the Irish Society’s general agent for county Londonderry. He also leased the lucrative Bann fishery from the Irish Society in 1724 and appointed his neighbour, Hercules Heyland, to be chief fishing agent.⁶ These ancestral themes found their echo in the Reverend William Richardson, who, like his friend Humphry Davy, was a keen angler, and also he devised schemes to make the River Bann navigable. Richardson also inherited the family’s Protestantism, though more as a political cause than as a doctrinal position. But this was not the only legacy.

The Richardsons had longstanding clerical and literary traditions. William Richardson, the MP for Augher, was a friend and correspondent of Dean Swift.⁷ His brother, our William Richardson’s grandfather, John, was rector of Belturbet, county Cavan, and dean of Kilmacduagh. He also knew Swift and was a strong Protestant who had unsuccessfully tried to convert ‘the Popish natives’ by preaching in Gaelic. He travelled to London in 1711 to get backing for Irish translations of the New Testament, a catechism and Book of Common Prayer for parish schools to promote Protestantism.⁸ This enterprise bankrupted him and forced the sale of family lands at Orator, county Tyrone, worth £3,000 a year.⁹ Two of John Richardson’s sons, John and James, were also Trinity-educated clerics with livings in Tyrone and Londonderry. Another son, Charles Richardson, was married to Sarah or ‘Sally’, the daughter of Hercules Heyland of Castleroe. In 1740, they produced their only child, christened William after his grand-uncle, who would become the rector of Clonfeacle.¹⁰

Sally Richardson was widowed young in 1743. According to family legend, she was ‘very little, very pretty’ and had a noticeably vivacious personality, which earned her the revealing nickname of ‘the pocket Venus’. Significantly, Sally ‘devoted her life to her only son … the celebrated Dr Richardson’, an indulgence which undoubtedly influenced his personality.¹¹ This anxious maternal solicitude may have been exacerbated by his height. As a child, William Richardson seemed to have inherited his mother’s stature, being, in his own words, once considered ‘dwarfish’, though he continued growing until the age of twenty-three.¹² This early combination of spoiling and sheltering made the young man feel his singularity and importance, and his education enhanced this.

Education

Little is known about Richardson’s early education, except that he attended Derry Diocesan School (then known as the Derry Free School) under the Reverend John Torrens. This school was originally endowed in 1617 by Matthew Springham of the Irish Society and had strong links with the Church of Ireland and Trinity College Dublin. Torrens was recommended to his position by Derry Corporation as ‘an eminent scholar’ whose ‘excellent’ school ‘rose to fame under his management’. Richardson and Torrens had a shared past, which encouraged a close relationship – both had ancestors at the siege of Derry. Richardson certainly received much individual attention, which fed his sense of his own significance. Even under Torrens’s successor, the school accommodated only four boarders and sixteen day scholars. Richardson’s lifelong love of classical literature possibly reflected Torrens’s influence, as Trinity instructed school principals on the recommended texts for prospective entrants.¹³ However, it was Richardson’s time at university which really moulded his mind and established his status.

In the eighteenth century, Trinity College Dublin was at the pinnacle of the Irish education system and its fellows (mostly clergymen) ‘presided over the intellectual and cultural formation’ of Anglican clerics and the broader Protestant community.¹⁴ Richardson entered the College in April 1759 and, though older than most junior freshmen, who were in their mid to late teens, he would have appeared younger than his nineteen years due to his small stature. Like most students, he entered as a ‘pensioner’. There was a strict social hierarchy, ranging from ‘sizars’, through ‘pensioners’, who paid £7.10.0 per half year, to ‘fellow commoners’, who paid bi-annual fees of £15 and sons of noblemen who paid £30.¹⁵ Pensioners were usually ‘sons of persons of moderate income’. Wolfe Tone was a Trinity pensioner whose father was a respectable coach-maker who could afford a substantial house and servants.¹⁶ Richardson’s family background was landed; however, with his father long dead, being a pensioner represented his widowed mother’s economic position rather than perceptions of rightful social status. The social category difference was tangible and marked by dress and privilege. Fellow commoners and ‘noblemen’, as Tone enviously remarked, wore a gown even more splendid than a fellow’s, being ‘as full of tassels as a livery servant’s’. Pensioners had their privileges too. They could dine together, wear a fine gown with ‘hanging sleeves and tassels’, have access to the gallery in the Irish House of Commons and recognition as gentlemen in Dublin. Students could be elevated to ‘scholars’, as Richardson was in 1761, but the process was exacting. Edmund Burke became a scholar in 1746 only after two days’ examination by the fellows in Greek and Roman authors.¹⁷

Undergraduates were divided into year classes, junior and senior freshmen and junior and senior sophisters, with each group having separate lectures. Junior freshmen traditionally began studying rhetoric and logic and deepened these studies as senior freshmen. Natural science was introduced for junior sophisters, followed by ethics in the fourth year.¹⁸ The courses were originally prescribed in the statutes by Archbishop Laud, but in 1761 were modified to reflect the needs of the time.¹⁹ The curriculum was dominated by John Locke in epistemology and politics and by Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle’s experimental philosophy in science.²⁰ In genuinely Whiggish spirit, the new elements sat comfortably with the old. A new logic text, Richard Murray’s Artis logicae compendium, was still purely Aristotelian. In Richardson’s time the subjects were classical learning, oriental, ancient and modern languages, criticism, history, oratory, logic, ethics and metaphysics, natural and experimental philosophy, anatomy, botany, chemistry, mathematics, civil and canon law, theology and ecclesiastical history.²¹ The BA curriculum reflected the enlightened Zeitgeist. Senior sophisters studied ethics but read only one book on theology, John Conybeare’s Defence of revealed religion (1732).²² Yet change did not come fast enough for everyone. Jonah Barrington (who entered in 1773) described the curriculum as ‘learned’ but ‘ill arranged’. Most entrants were teenagers and Barrington reckoned they studied Locke on human understanding before they were sufficiently mature to have developed their own. He also believed the curriculum favoured ‘abstruse sciences’ like optics, natural philosophy, astronomy, mathematics and metaphysics without the leavening of belles-lettres, history and geography. This dyspeptic view may reflect Barrington’s indifferent academic performance.²³ Moreover, subjects not covered by the official curriculum were available from the College Historical Society, formed in 1770 ‘for the cultivation of historical knowledge and the practice of the members in oratory and composition’.²⁴ The curriculum privileged the classics, which even Barrington conceded formed ‘essential parts of a gentlemen’s education’.²⁵ Students were expected to read over twenty authors, from Homer to Justinius, and to know the entire Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid.²⁶ Classics overlapped with science as they were seen as providing an understanding of the natural world. Oliver Goldsmith traced his interest in nature to reading Pliny.²⁷

Richardson completed his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1763, an exacting process involving oral examinations in classics and science and the disputing of syllogisms. In 1766 he took his Master of Arts degree and was elected a fellow.²⁸ The fellowship examination, said his contemporary Patrick Duigenan, was ‘the severest and most solemn … on any part of the earth’. Hyperbole aside, the procedure was undoubtedly daunting: four hours of questioning spread over four days, conducted publicly before learned citizens and university dons. The Provost and senior fellows sat opposite the applicant and quizzed him on logic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 ‘Virtue appears like an Oak’: William Richardson’s family and background
• 2 William Richardson: popular loyalism and the politics of Protestant Ascendancy
• 3 ‘The scattered remnants of a diminished world’: William Richardson and geology
• 4 The man of grass: agricultural improvement and public opinion
• 5 Richardson and Malthus
• 6 Richardson and provincial science
• 7 Conclusion: Richardson’s historical significance
• Select bibliography
• Index