The Constitutional History of England from 1760 to 1860

lieutenant.-Influence of the American War on Ireland.-Enrolment of the Volunteers.-Concession of all the Demands of Irela

lative Union.-Establishment of Maynooth College.-Lord Edward Fitzgerald.-Arguments for and against the Union.-It passes th

the Irish Parliament first began to give vent to aspirations for equality with the English Parliament in audible complaints; and the Irish House of Commons, finding the kingd

quently enormously increased the influence of the patrons of boroughs, some of whom could return a number of members such as the mightiest borough monger in England could never aspire to equal.[125] The third difference, of scarcely inferior importance, was, that the Parliament only sat in alternate years. But, though these arrangements suited the patrons and the members of the House of Commons, it was not strange that the constituencies, whose power over their representatives was almost extinguished by them, regarded them with less complacency, and, at the general election which was the consequence of the accession of George III., pledges were very generally exacted from the candidates that, if elected, they would endeavor to procure the passing of a septennial act like t

Irish Parliament should only sit in alternate years, a practice wholly inconsistent with any proper idea of the duties and privileges of a Parliament such as prevailed on this side of the Channel; since a Parliament whose sessions were thus intermittent could not possibly exercise that degree of supervision over the revenue, either in its collection or its expenditure, which is among its most important duties. And the continued maintenance of this practice must be regarded farther as a proof that the English legislators had not yet learned to consider Ireland as an integral part of the kingdom, entitled in every particular to equal rights with England and Scotland. Indeed, it is impossible for any Englishman to contemplate the history of the treatment of Ireland by the English legislators, whether Kings, ministers, or Parliaments, for more than a century and a half, without equal feelings of shame at the injustice and wonder at the folly of their conduct. Not only was Ireland denied freedom of trade with England (a denial as incon

ces. No Roman Catholic could hold a commission in the army, nor be called to the Bar, nor practise as an attorney; and when it was found that a desire to devote themselves to the study of the law had led many gentlemen to acknowledge a conversion to Protestantism, a statute was actually passed to require them to prove their sincerity by five years' adherence to their

bes more or less open, which it was equally discreditable to ask and to grant; for one of the worst fruits of the system which had so long reigned throughout the island was the general demoralization of all classes. Mr. Fronde gives George III. himself the credit of being the first person who resolutely desired to see a change of the system, and to "try the experiment whether Ireland might not be managed by open rectitude and real integrity."[128] But his first efforts were baffled by the carelessness or incompetency of the Viceroys, since it was difficult to fin

sources for defence. It was as impossible to levy a force of militia as one of regular troops, for the militia could not be embodied without great expense; and the finances of the whole kingdom had been so mismanaged that money was as hard to procure as men. In this emergency several gentlemen proposed to the Lord-lieutenant to raise bodies of volunteers. The government, though reluctant to sanction the movement, could see no alternative, since the presence of an armed force of some kind was indispensable for the safety of the island. The movement grew rapidly; by the summer of 1779 several thousand men were not only under arms, but were being rapidly drilled into a state of efficiency, and had even established such a reputation for strength, that, when in the autumn the same privateers that had been so bold in Belfast Lough the year before reached the Irish coast, in the hope of plundering Limerick or Galway, they found the inhabitants of the district well prepared to receive them, and did not venture to attempt a descent on any part of the island. And, when the Parliament met in October, some of the

shackled their trade and manufactures. But the jealousy of the English and Scotch manufacturers was still as bitter, and, unhappily, still as influential, as it had proved in the time of William III. And, to humor the grasping selfishness of Manchester and Glasgow, Lord North met the demands of the Irish with a refusal of which every word of his speech on the propositions to America was the severest condemnation, and which he sought to mitigate by some new regulations in favor of the linen trade, to which the English and Scotch manufacturers made no objection, since they had no linen factories. The Irish, in despair, had recourse to non-importation agreements, of which the Americans had set the example, binding themselves not to import nor to use any artic

edy was only to be found in the restoration to the Irish Parliament of that independence of which it had been deprived ever since the time of Henry VII. They were encouraged by the visibly increasing weakness of Lord North's administration. Throughout the year 1781 it was evidently tottering to its fall. And on the 22d of February, 1782, Grattan brought forward in the Irish House of Commons a resolution, intended, if carried, to lay the foundation of a bill, "that a claim of any body of men other than the King, Lords, and Commons of Ireland to bind this kingdom is unconstitutional, illegal, and a grievance." This

he could procure a friendly hearing to his counsels. Once more they had increased their demands, requiring, besides the removal of the purely political grievances, a surrender of the right of appeal from the Irish to the English courts of law. But their new masters were inclined to grant everything which seemed requisite to the establishment of complete equality between the two kingdoms; and tho

s written in the book of fate that the felicity of Ireland should be short-lived."[129] And a similar shortness of existence was to be the lot of the separate independence of her Parliament. Even while framing instructions for the Lord-lieutenant, in his honest desire to inaugurate a system of just government for Ireland, George III. had warned him on no account to "summon a Parliament without his special command."[130] And, regarded by the light of subsequent events, it can hardly be denied that the prohibition displayed an accurate insight into the

eturn of the English army to Europe, the reason for their existence had passed away. But they refused to be disbanded, and established a convention of armed delegates, to sit in Dublin during the session of Parliament, and to overawe the Houses into passing a series of measures which they prescribed, and which included a Parliamentary Reform Bill of a most sweeping character. On this occasion, howe

t; and one cannot read without a feeling of shame that one or two of the bishops who were wont to be regarded as the proprietors of the seats for their diocesan cities, were not behind the most nameless lay boroughmongers in the resolution they evinced make a market of their support of the government. The consequence was that the government was unable to feel confident of its power to carry any measure except at a price that it was degrading to pay; while of those few members who were above all suspicion of personal corruption, many were so utterly wrong-headed, and had their minds s

f the measure which he introduced into the House of Commons. He avowed it to be the commencement of a new system of government for Ireland, "a system of a participation and community of benefits, a system of equality and fairness, which, without tending to aggrandize one portion of the empire or to depress the other, should seek the aggregate interest of the whole; it was a substitute for the system which had hitherto been adopted of making the smaller country completely subordinate to and subservient to the greater, of

wice b

that gives and h

"it was happy for Mr. Orde" (the Chief Secretary, who had introduced the measure into the Irish House of Commons) "that he was in a country remarkable for humanity. Had he proposed such a measure in a Polish Diet, he would not have lived to carry back an answer to his master. If," he concluded, "the gifts of Britain are to be accompanied with the slavery of Ireland, I will never be a slave to pay tribute; I will hurl back her gifts with scorn." Baffled by such frantic and senseless opposition, Pitt condescended to remodel his measure. In its new form it was not so greatly for the advantage of Ireland. He had been constrained to admit some limitation of his original liberality by the opposition which, it had met with in England also where Fox, at all times an avowed enemy of freedom of trade, had made himself the mouth-piece of the London and Liverpool merchants, who could not see, without the most narrow-minded apprehension, the monopoly of the trade with India and the West Indies, which they had hitherto enjoyed, threatened by the admission of Ireland to its benefits

erred others from following his example. And a rigorous example had become indispensable, since it was known to the government that Tandy and some of his followers were acting in connection with French emissaries, and that their object was the separation of Ireland from England, and, in the minds of some of them, certainly the annexation of the country to France; indeed, on one occasion Fitzgibbon asserted in the House of Commons that he had seen resolutions inviting the French into the country. The government would gladly have established a militia to supersede the Volunteers, but the temper of the Irish Parliament, in its newly-acquired independence, rendered any such attempt hopeless; and Mr. Grattan, with a perversity of judgment which his warmest admirers must find it difficult to reconcile with statesmanship, if not with patriotism,

rliament by the deranged condition of the King's health in 1788, and the necessity which consequently arose for the appointment of a Regency. Grattan was in London at the time, where he had contracted a personal intimacy with Fox, and had been presented by him to the Prince of Wales, whose graciousness of manner, and profession of adherence to the Whig system of politics, secured his attachment to that party. Grattan was easily indoctrinated by Fox with his theory of the indefeasible claim of the Prince to the Regency as his birthright, and is under

ouse of Commons, being prepared to conduct it through both Houses with all the despatch that might be consistent with a due observance of all the forms of deliberation. Grattan's object was to anticipate the decision of the English Parliament, so as to avoid every appearance that the Irish Parliament was only following it; and he therefore proposed

recalled to the recollection of the House the act of William and Mary, which declares "the kingdom of Ireland to be annexed to the imperial crown of England, and the sovereign of England to be by undoubted right sovereign of Ireland also;" and argued from this that Mr. Grattan's proposal was contrary to the laws of the realm and criminal in the extreme. "The crown of Ireland," as he told his hearers, "and the crown of England are inseparably united, and the Irish Parliament is totally independent of the Bri

n appointing the Prince of Wales Regent before it was known whether he would accept the Regency of England, it was manifestly not impossible "that they might be appointing a Regent for Ireland being a different person from the Regent of England; and in that case the moment a Regent was appointed in Great Britain, he might send a commission under the Great Seal appointing a Lord-lieutenant of Ireland, and to that commission the Regent o

n that, till the Regency Bill should be passed in England, the address was not only improper but treasonable, he found his warning equally disregarded. And when the Lord-lieutenant refused to transmit the address to England, on the avowed ground of its illegality, Grattan proposed and carried three resolutions: the first, that the address was not illegal, but that, in addressing the Prince to take on himself the Regency, the Parliament of Ireland had exercised an undoubted right; the second, that the Lord-lieutenant's refusal to transmit the address to his Royal Highness was ill-advised and unconstitutional; the thi

the scheme with almost frantic violence. Fitzgibbon (though after the Rebellion he recommended it as indispensable) as yet regarded it only as an alternative which, though he might eventually embrace it, he should not accept without extreme reluctance. But at the beginning of the century all parties among the Protestant Irish had been eager for it, and even the leading Roman Catholics had been not unwilling to acquiesce in it. Unluckily, the English ministers were unable to shake off the influence of the English manufacturers; and they, in

King might have a relapse; the Irish Parliament, on a recurrence of the crisis, might re-affirm its late resolutions; might frame another address to the Prince of Wales; and there might be no alternative between

has been seen how stirring an influence the revolutionary fever engendered by the overthrow of the French monarchy for a time exerted even over the calmer temper of Englishmen. In Ireland, where, ever since Sarsfield and his brave garrison enlisted under the banner of Louis XIV., a connection more or less intimate with France had been constantly kept up, the events in Paris had produced a far deeper and wider effe

to Parliament itself. But these relaxations of the old Penal Code, important as they were, only conciliated the higher classes of the Roman Catholics. Most of the Roman Catholic prelates, and most of the Roman Catholic lay nobles, proclaimed their satisfaction at what had been done, and their good-will toward the minister who had done it; but the professional agitators were exasperated rather than conciliated at finding so much of the ground on which they had rested cut from beneath their feet. So desirous was Pitt to carry conciliation to the greatest length that could be consistent with safety, that he held more than one conference

Presbyterians animosity to Popery was at least as powerful a feeling as sympathy with the French Republicans. A subsequent chapter, however, will afford a more fitting opportunity for discussing the arguments in favor of or against Emancipation. What seems certain is, that a large party among the Roman Catholics of the lower class valued Emancipation itself principally a

dy of men; and, in the temper which at that time prevailed over the western countries of the Continent, it was at least equally desirable that the rising generation should be preserved from the contagion of the revolutionary principles which the present rulers of France were so industrious to propagate. Pitt at once embraced the idea, and in the spring of the next year a bill was introduced into the Irish Parliament by the Chief Secretary, authorizing the foundation and endowment of a college at Maynooth, in the neighborhood of Dublin, for the education of Roman Catholics generally, whether destined for the Church or for lay professions. It is a singular circumstance that the only opposition to the measure came from Grattan and his party, who urged that, as the Roman Catholics had recently been allowed to matriculate and take degrees at Trinity College, though not to share in the endowments of that wealthy institution, the endowment of another college, to be exclusively confined to Roman Catholics, would be a retrograde step, undoing the benefits of the recent concession of the authorities of Trinity; would be "a revival and re-enactment of the principles of separation and exclusion," and an injury to the whole community. For,

Leinster, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, a man of very slender capacity, who, at his first entrance into Parliament, when scarcely more than of age, had made himself remarkable by a furious denunciation of Pitt's Irish propositions; had married a natural daughter of the Duke of Orleans, a prince, in spite of his royal birth, one of the most profligate and ferocious of the French Jacobins; and had caught the revolutionary mania to such a degree that he abjured his nobility, and substituted for the appellation which marked his rank the title of "Citizen Fitzgerald." He had enrolled himself in a society known as the United Irishmen, and had gone to France, as its plenipotentiary, to arrange with Hoche, one of the most brilliant and popular of the French generals, a scheme for the invasion of Ireland, in which he promised him that, on his landing, he should be joined by tens of thousands of armed Irishmen. Hoche entered warmly into the p

fortune, and education, and still more were clergy-showing a ferocity and ingenuity in cruelty which the worst of the French Jacobins had scarcely exceeded; one of the saddest circumstances of the whole rebellion being, that the insurgents, who had burnt men, women, and children alive, who had deliberately hacked others to pieces against whom they did not profess to have a single ground of com

members,[137] so long as Ireland had a separate Parliament. Not, indeed, that Pitt required the argument in favor of a Union which was thus furnished. The course adopted by the Irish Parliament on the Regency question was quite sufficient to show how great a mistake had been made by the repeal of Poynings' Act. But what the rebellion proved was, that the Union would not admit of an instant's

on of any desire to stimulate the Parliament to such action; while the Roman Catholic Church, which had many more adherents in England than the Presbyterian Church had ever had, was quite powerful enough to exact for itself the maintenance of its rights, and the minister was quite willing to grant equal securities to those which, at the beginning of the century, had been thought sufficient for the Church of Scotland. A third reason which our great historical critic puts forward for the disfavor with which the Union was at the time regarded by many high-minded Scotchmen, he finds in "the gross prostitution with which a majority sold themselves to the surrender of their own legislative existence." That similar means were to some extent employed to win over opponents of the government in Ireland cannot, it must be confessed, be denied, though the temptations held out to converts oftener took the shape of titles, promotions, appointments, and court favors than of actual money. The most recent historian of this period-who, to say the least, is not biassed in favor of either the English or Irish government of the period-pronounces as his opinion, formed after the most careful research, that the bribery was on the other side. "Cornwallis and Castlereagh" (the Lord-lieutenant and the Chief Secretary) "both declared it to be within their knowledge that the Opposition offered four thousand pounds, ready money, for a vote. But they name only one man who was purchased, and his vote was obtained for four thousand pounds. From the language of Lord Cornwallis, it is certain that if money was spent by the government in this way it was without his knowledge; but many things may have been done by the inferior agents of the government, and possibly by Castlereagh himself, which they would not venture to lay before the Lord-lieutenant. It appears, however, from the papers which have recently come to light, that

The Scotch Estates, therefore, had absolutely regarded the possible separation of the two kingdoms as a contingency which might become not undesirable; and, though it was too ticklish an argument to bring forward, it may very possibly have occurred to Pitt that a similar vote of the Irish Parliament was not impossible. The claim which Grattan, following Fox, had set up on behalf of the Prince of Wales, was one of an indefeasible right to the Regency; and, as far as right by inheritance went, his claim to the crown, if, or whenever, a vacancy should occur, was far less disputable. But, as has been mentioned in the last chapter, a question had already been raised whether his Royal Highness had not forfeited his right to the succession, and it was qu

ence, as has been seen in a former chapter, had been fully discussed when Mr. Pitt's father denied the power of Parliament to tax the American Colonies; and that question may fairly be regarded as having been settled at that time. It is equally clear that the denial that, on any question whatever, the House of Commons must be taken to speak the sentiments of the constituencies, whether the proposal of such question had been contemplated at the time of their election or not, is the advancement of a doctrine wholly inconsistent with our parliamentary constitution, and one which would practically be the parent of endless agitation and mischief. To expect that the members could pronounce on no new question without a fresh reference to their constituents, would be to reduce them from the position of representatives to that of delegates; such as that of the members of the old States-general, in France, whose early decay is attributed by the ablest political writers in no small degree to the dependence of the members on their constituents for precise instructions. Another argument on which Mr. Grey insisted with great earnestness is worth preserving, though subsequent inventions have destroyed its force; he contended that the example of the Scotch Union did not, when properly considered, afford any argument in favor of an Irish Union, from the difference of situation of the two countries. Scotland was a part of the same island as England; "there was no physical impediment to rapid and constant communication; the relative situation of the two countries was such that the King himself could administer the executive government in both, and there was no occasion for a separate establishment being kept up in each." But the sea lay between England and Ireland, and the delays and sometim

equence was, that in February of this year both the Irish Houses accepted it by sufficient majorities;[143] and, therefore, he now felt able to lay the details of the measure before the English Parliament. To take them in the order in which he enumerated them, that which had appeared to the Irish Parliament "the first and most important, was the share which the Irish constituencies ought to have in the representation of the House of Commons." On this point, "the Parliament of Ireland was of opinion that the number of representatives for Ireland ought to be one hundred." And he was not disposed to differ from the conclusion to which it had come. He regarded it, indeed, as "a matter of but small importance whether the number of representatives from one part of the united empire were greater or less. If they were enough to make known the local wants, to state the interests and convey the sentiments of the part of the empire they represented, it would produce that degree of general security which would be wanting in any vain attempt to obtain that degree of theoretical perfection about which in modern times they had heard so much." He approved of "the principle which had been laid down upon this part of the subject in the Parliament of Ireland-a reference to

n ought to be made on this subject" in the arrangements for the new Parliament. At present, among the representatives of the counties and great commercial towns, whose seats were to be preserved in the new united Parliament, there were not above five or six who held offices; and, though it was impossible to estimate the pos

ment of Great Britain;" and Pitt urged that this was "a far better mode of treatment than had been adopted for the nobility of Scotland; so that a nobleman of Ireland, if not representing his own order, might be chosen as a legislator by a class of inferior rank, which he was so far from regarding as improper, that he deemed it in a high degree advantageous to the empire, analogous to the practice as well as friendly to the spirit of the British constitution." And he enforced his argument by pointing out with honest pride the advantage which in that respect the spirit and practice of our constitution gave to our nobility over the nobles of other countries. "We know full well," he continued, "the advantage we have experienced from having in this House those who, in the course of descent, as well as in hopes of merit, have had a prospect of sitting in our House of Peers. Those, therefore, who object to this part of the arrangement" (for, as he had previously mentioned, it had been made a subject not only of objection, but of ridicule) "can only do so from the want of due attention to the true character of our constitution, o

alification, and not disqualified by sex or profession, who were absolutely excluded from the opportunity of distinguishing themselves and serving their country in Parliament. How great the practical benefit to the House of Commons and the country the clause he was recommending was calculated to confer, was shown in a remarkable manner the very year of his death, when an Irish Peer was returned to the House of Commons, who, retaining his seat for nearly sixty years as

e subserviency to the minister which the Irish members might be expected to exhibit, and therefore moved an amendment to reduce the number of Irish representatives to eighty-five; but, to obviate the discontent which such a reduction might be expected to excite in Ireland, he proposed to diminish the number of English members als

by the terms of the Scotch Union the King was forever debarred from creating any new Scotch peerages. But it was pointed out that the greater antiquity of the Scotch peerages, and the circumstance that in Scotland the titles descended to collateral branches, were calculated to make the extinction of a Scotch peerage an

tance to the next resolution, that it w

regulations as to election and qualification as are at present by law established with respect to the like orders of the Church of England; and that the doctrine, worship, discipline, and government of the said united Church shall be preserved as now by law established for the Church of England, saving to the Church of Ireland all the rights, privileges, and jurisdictions now thereunto belonging; and that the doctrine, worship

to make some provision in this respect as a fence beyond any act of their own that could at present be agreed on." But, while he thus showed his conviction that the permanent prosperity of the Irish Church was essential to the welfare of the kingdom, he was by no means insensible to the claims of the Roman Catholic Church (as founded not more in policy than in justice) to be placed in some degree on a footing of equality with it; not only by a recognition of the d

, and one productive of the worst consequences, if the doctrine were admitted that any Parliament could make an unchangeable law and bind its successors forever; and, moreover, since the very words of this article do clearly imply the power of Parliament over the Church, the power asserted, to "make some provision for the permanence of its prosperity," clearly involving a power to make provisions of an opposite charac

t, on the whole, the communication between the two kingdoms should in spirit be free; that no jealousy should be attempted to be created between the manufacturers of one place or the other upon the subject of 'raw materials' or any other article; for it would surely be considered very narrow policy, and as such would be treated with derision, were an attempt made to create a jealousy between Devonshire and Cornwall, between Lancashire and Durham.... He said, then, that the principle of the Union on this head should be liberal and free, and that no departure from it should ever take place but upon some point of present unavoidable necessity." He was even able to add (and he must have felt peculiar satisfaction in making the statement, since the change in the feelings of the English manufacturers on the subject must have been mainly the fruit of his own teaching, and was a practical recognition of the benefits which they had derived from his commercial policy taken as a whole), that "the English manufacturers did not wish for any protective duties; all they desired was free intercourse with all

details; the more so as the arrangement proposed was of a temporary character. After a long and minute discussion, Pitt's appraisement was admitted to come as near to strict fairness and equity as any that could be made; the separat

ecclesiastical, should remain in their existing condition, subject, of course

to be prudent to venture on a general election, and it was, consequently, ordained that the members for the Irish counties and for those Irish boroughs which had been selected for the retention of representation should take their seats in the united Parliament on its ne

t by the Union that subordination was terminated forever. The character of the Union-of the conditions, that is, on which the two countries were united-was one of perfect and complete equality on all important points, indeed, in all matters whatever, except one or two of minor consequence, where some irremovable difference between them compelled some trifling variations. It was not a connection of domination on the one side and subordination on the other, where every concomitant circumstance might tempt the one to overbearing arrogance, while

d compelled him to leave the Union incomplete in a matter of such pre-eminent importance, that it may be said that all the subsequent disquietudes which have prevented Ireland from reaping the full benefit he desired from the Union are traceable to his disappointment on that subject.[147] We have seen that he contemplated, as a natural and necessary consequence or even part of the Union, an extensive reform of the laws affecting the Roman Catholics. Indeed, the understanding that he was prepared to introduce a measure with that object had no small weight in conciliating in some quarters support to the Act of Union. Accordingly, when describing the arrangements which he had in view fo

te

Beresfords-returned a majority of the House of Commons ("English in Ireland," ii., 5); and besides those peers,

d not be transported from one province to another without payment of a heavy duty; but Colbert had

ry of England," vol.

The English in I

in Ireland," ii., 345. He does no

130: Ibid.

131: See

or the campaign in which he engaged of renovating an Irish nationality."-English in Ireland, ii., 448. But, however on many points we may see reason to agree with Mr. Froude's estimate of the superior wisdom of Fitzg

ude, "English in I

er of Mr. Windham's. quoted by Lord

icable. "Emancipation meant that a slave was set free. The Catholics were not slaves. Nothing

n was at Prosperous, County Kildare, May 24. General

e Lord-lieutenant, Lord Camden, the Chancellor Fitzgibbon, and the Commander-in-chief, Lord Carhampton, was signed by the Dukes of Norfolk, Devonshire, and Leinster; Lords Fitzwilliam, M

nstitutional Histo

of England," iv., 397 (quoting

Stanhope's "Reign of

mons by 158 to 115; in the House o

o maintain "an independent Legislature, as estab

mmons the majority was 158 to 115

om, which was taken the next year (1801), showed that Ireland was considerably more populous than its own represen

..................

.................

..................

.................

---

................

..................

itain, as compared with that of Ireland, only ex

anuary 31, 1801, quoted by Lord Stanhope in the ap

Union, and his concurrence in opinion with Mr. O'Hara that it ought to be rescinded. Mr. Fox repeated his disapprobation, but disclaimed ever having expressed an opinion or ente

eat and practical mischiefs, among which he placed in the front "the keeping up in people's minds the notion of a separate kingdom; the affording a hotbed of faction and intrigue; the presenting an image of Majesty so faint and so feeble as to be laughed at and scorned. Disaffection to the English Lieutenancy is cheaply shown, and it paves the way toward disaffection to the English crown." And he imputed its continued retention to "the ignorance which prevails in England of the state of feeling in Ireland."-Journals and Conversations Relating to Ireland, by W.N. Senior, ii., 130, 251, and passim. And it is worthy of observation that a similar view is expressed by a Scotch writer of great ability, who, contrasting the mode in which Scotland is governed with that which prevails In Ireland, farther denounces the Viceroyalty "as a distinct mark that Ireland is not directly under