The Protestant Ascendancy
In 1800 the population of Ireland comprised:- Roman Catholic Irish (3.1 million)
- Protestant Anglo-Irish (450,000)
- Presbyterians (900,000).
The eighteenth century was the period of the Protestant Ascendancy, buttressed by harsh penal laws. The mouthpiece of the Protestant ascendancy was the Irish Parliament in Dublin.
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| The Parliament House, Dublin Public domain |
The British government was represented by the Lord Lieutenant. The parliament was dominated by the Anglo-Irish, an exclusive group that monopolised political power and saw themselves as both English and Irish. Deprived of a political role, with land-owning made increasingly difficult, the Catholic gentry tended to go into trade. The largest grievance of the population as a whole was the poverty of the rural labourers (except in Ulster where there was a flourishing linen industry).
The Ulster Presbyterians had fewer grievances than Catholics, but until 1780 they were excluded from corporations, and though not legally barred from Parliament, only a few members were ever elected.
In the later eighteenth century the harshness of the penal laws was toned down. Catholic chapels were built and the land tenure laws were liberalised. It was relatively easy to soften the penal laws - harder to resolve Ireland's underlying economic problems.
The Volunteer Movement
One issue that united most Irish people was a desire for greater independence from Westminster. This case was taken up in the Irish Parliament by two MPs, Henry Grattan and Henry Flood. During the American War many Ulster Presbyterians enthusiastically took up the cause of the colonists; like them, they were angered by the taxation policy of the Westminster Parliament. In 1778, with French entry into the war, the Volunteer Movement began in Ulster and spread over the whole country. It was not a militia under government control but a national volunteer army, and exclusively Protestant. In 1779 the Volunteers paraded in Dublin with a decorated brass cannon with the placard: ‘Free trade - or else’. In response the British Parliament passed acts removing the restrictions on Irish trade and allowing Presbyterians to take up local appointments. In February 1782 a convention in Dungannon, addressed by Grattan and Flood, called for independence for the Irish Parliament. A new constitution was granted by the reluctant Rockingham government, giving more rights for Catholics and greater legislative independence for the Irish Parliament.The period of ‘Grattan's Parliament’ was the greatest period of independence Ireland ever knew under British rule. It was a fitting end to the eighteenth century and coincided with an upsurge in national pride - the setting up of the Bank of Ireland, the continuing transformation of Dublin into a showcase Georgian city. But it was a very partial independence. Catholics were still not allowed to vote or to stand for Parliament and the liberalising measures only served to emphasize their disabilities.
The United Irishmen
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| Theobald Wolfe Tone Public domain. |
The French Revolution had a profound effect on Ireland. In the 1790s the Volunteer movement revived, but support was now concentrated among shopkeepers and skilled urban workers - exactly the same classes as the corresponding societies in England and Scotland. In 1790-1, the Catholic Committee, a movement of members of the Irish Catholic middle class, began to campaign for the abolition of the penal laws. On 18 October 1791 the Belfast Society of United Irishmen was founded. Among the founders was Theobald Wolfe Tone (1763-98), a young Protestant lawyer from Dublin. For Tone radical political reform and nationalist identity went hand in hand, with no place for sectarian divisions. The first resolutions of the United Irishmen asserted
That the weight of English influence in the Government in this country is so great, as to require a cordial union, among ALL THE PEOPLE OF IRELAND. ... No reform is practicable, efficacious, or just, which does not include Irishmen or every religious persuasion.In his posthumously published autobiography, written in 1796, Tone described his aim as
To subvert the tyranny of our execrable Government, to break the connexion with England, the never-failing source of all our political evils, and to assert the independence of my country - these were my objects. To unite the whole people of Ireland, to abolish the memory of all past dissensions and to substitute the common name of Irishmen in the place of the denominations of Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter - these were my means.
His biographer, Marianne Elliott describes this as 'the most quoted passage of Irish history'.
The United Irishmen sought to forge a new political alliance between the middle-class politically-aware Presbyterians of Belfast and Dublin and the rural Catholic majority, though these two groups - the one non-sectarian, the other devoutly religious - were largely incompatible.
Pitt and Ireland
The outbreak of war with France caused republicans like Wolfe Tone, Napper Tandy and Robert Emmet to pin their hopes on a French invasion to coincide with a home-grown rebellion. This made the United Irishmen a potentially subversive body. One of their leaders, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, first cousin of Charles James Fox, had corresponded with the English radical, Thomas Paine in 1792. |
| Lord Edward Fitzgerald aristocratic revolutionary Public domain. |
Both the French and the British knew that the weakest link in Britain's defences was going to be Ireland. In 1784 the Duke of Rutland, Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, had told Pitt,
‘Ireland is too great to be unconnected with us, and too near to be dependent on a foreign state, and too little to be independent.’In order to conciliate the Catholic majority, Pitt introduced a Catholic Relief Bill in 1793 which gave Catholics the vote on the same terms as Protestants, permitted them to bear arms, and allowed them to occupy most civil and military posts. There was now only one major disability facing Catholics: exclusion from membership of Parliament. These measured did not tilt the balance of power significantly, but in 1798 one promising young Catholic lawyer was called to the Irish bar: Daniel O'Connell.
With war and the threat of revolution, Pitt came to the reluctant conclusion that he had to strengthen the grip of the Protestant ascendancy. In 1795 following his coalition with the Portland Whigs in the previous summer, he sent the Portland-ite Earl Fitzwilliam to Ireland as Chief Secretary. Fitzwilliam rapidly went native: without any authority from Westminster he promised full Catholic emancipation (the right of Catholics to take their seats in Parliament). As a result he was recalled and replaced, and his dismissal ended hopes of legitimate reform in Ireland.
In disgust, Tone left for America and then headed for France to seek French aid, arriving there in February 1796. He took the nom de guerre of citoyen Smith in a vain attempt to elude Pitt's spies, and entered into negotiations with Lazare Carnot, one of the Directors who governed France at this time. In a memorandum produced for French agents he described Ireland as
‘a conquered and oppressed and insulted country’where
‘the name of England and her power is universally odious.'
Sectarian tensions
Even while Fitzwilliam was trying to implement his reforms, sectarian passions were rife in parts of Ireland as Catholic ‘Defenders’ clashed frequently with Protestant ‘Peep O’ Day Boys’ who sought to terrorise Catholics and frighten them off their land. Both sides employed secret oaths, maimed cattle, terrorised juries and murdered those who infringed their codes.After some particularly vicious fighting in 1795, which reached its climax in September in the Battle of the Diamond (a piece of ground near Armagh) the Peep O’ Day Boys formed an Orange Society. The initial oath reflected a highly conditional loyalism: ‘To support the King and his heirs as long as he or they support the Protestant Ascendancy’.
Subversion
Ireland was now a vital part of French strategy. On 16 December 1796, an expedition of a forty-three ship fleet and 15,000 men under General Lazare Hoche, accompanied by Wolfe Tone, was beaten back by storms, but it was clear that the French would try again. The British government could not relax, and the number of troops in Ireland increased to 65,000, though they had to be scattered over the whole country.In Ulster General Gerard Lake ruled with extreme harshness, carrying out martial law, free quarterings, house burnings and floggings on the flimsiest of suspicions. The United Irishmen then turned to desperate action: they would have to rebel, with or without French aid and in preparation they forged pikes and concealed guns and ammunition. Links between Irish exiles in Paris and Britain with subversive forces in Ireland were maintained by a Catholic priest, James Coigly, who was arrested along with two members of the London Corresponding Society as he prepared to cross from Margate to France in 1798. He was tried in May and executed on 12 June 1798. Following Coigly’s arrest, virtually all the leading members of the United Irishmen in Britain and the LCS were arrested and, following a new suspension of Habeas Corpus, were kept in prison until 1801.
1798
The rising of 1798 has been described by Roy Foster as‘probably the most concentrated episode of violence in Irish history’.The rising was finally fixed for 23 May with Edward Fitzgerald commander in chief. However on 19 May he was betrayed by a government spy, arrested and fatally wounded as he was captured. He died on 4 June. The Catholic Church promptly dissociated itself from the rebellion.
Meanwhile Dublin and the adjacent counties rose on 24-25 May. On 30 May the rebels captured Wexford town. The Dublin outbreak was controlled in a week but Wexford, an area of poor Catholic/Protestant relations, with a higher than average proportion of Protestant settlers, saw ferocious fighting. The insurgents took Enniscorthy and attempted to spread out the rebellion into Wicklow, but failed. The campaign was marked by horrific atrocities on both sides. The United Irishmen set up a camp on Vinegar Hill outside the town and on an old windmill there set up a green flag. A hundred Protestant prisoners were massacred in a barn at Scullabogue. The main part of the rebellion ended with the rout of the insurgents on Vinegar Hill and the capture of Wexford on 21 June. One of those rounded up and executed was Father John Murphy, who was hanged; his body was burned in a tar barrel and his head was set on a pike. By this stage the rebellion seemed to have become a straightforward Catholic-Protestant conflict.
On 21 August the French General Jean Humbert landed at Killala Bay in County Mayo with a force of 900 men. He defeated a numerically superior English force under General Lake at Castlebar (‘the races of Castlebar’) on 23 August and set up a provisional government in Connaught. He recruited and armed many thousands of Irish peasants and was halfway on the road to Dublin when he was surrounded at Ballinamuck by two numerically superior armies of English and loyal Irish under the newly appointed commander-in-chief, Lord Cornwallis. He surrendered on 8 September.
On 6 September another French fleet of one flagship, eight frigates and 3000 men sailed from Brest, with Tone on board. Unaware that the English knew of their movements the fleet headed for Lough Swilly in Co Donegal, where they found eight British frigates waiting for them. At the end of a five hour battle on 12 October the French commander surrendered and Tone was captured. He claimed that he was a French officer and at his court martial he appeared in French uniform. In spite of this, on 10 November he was sentenced to be hanged – an indignity he had not anticipated. On 12 November he cut his throat with a penknife and died seven days later on the 19th.
The deaths of Fitzgerald and Tone (and of Robert Emmet in 1803) established a potent Irish martyrology. Look at W.B. Yeats's poem, September 1913. For the first time the idea of an independent Irish republic had been planted.
The legal mopping-up operation continued until 1801. Courts martial tended to punish the leaders harshly but to give amnesties to the followers. Many were transported to Australia, exiled to the United States or made to serve in regiments in the unhealthy West Indies. Roy Foster estimates the death-toll on both sides from various causes as 30,000 - a figure comparable to the deaths in the Reign of Terror.
Aftermath: the Act of Union and the resignation of Pitt
The events of 1798 confirmed Pitt’s opinion that the Dublin parliament could not provide the order necessary for British as well as Irish security. He was convinced that it was essential to find a political solution; as it was, far too much of Britain’s increasingly stretched resources were put into the defence of her back door when they could be deployed more effectively in Europe, North Africa or the Caribbean.He believed that the political solution was the union of the British and Irish parliaments and he argued the case in a Commons speech on 31 January 1799. He bribed the Dublin parliament into surrendering its authority. In July 1800 the Act of Union, creating a United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland received the royal assent and came into operation on 1 January 1801. Thirteen new Irish peers were created and 100 seats in the Irish Lower House were transferred to Westminster, adding to the existing 558 in the British House of Commons. Twenty-eight peers and four bishops were added to the Lords. The system of government and administration for Ireland was largely retained, with a Chief Secretary appointed by the Crown, acting as chief executive.
For the Chief Secretary of Ireland, Viscount Castlereagh, the Act was a disappointment, as it did nothing to resolve Catholic grievances. Here, the great obstacle was the king. At a levée on 28 January 1801 George III announced that he would look on anyone who voted for Catholic Emancipation as ‘personally indisposed’ towards him. In February Pitt resigned and the king appointed the Speaker of the House, Henry Addington as prime minister. His father had been the Pitt family doctor - something that seemed astonishing in such a hierarchical society. The politician, George Canning expressed the general astonishment when he wrote: ‘Pitt is to Addington/As London is to Paddington’.
Conclusion
- The events of 1798 exposed the fragility of Britain's hold on Ireland - something the French were very ready to exploit.
- The revolt convinced Pitt of the need to unite the London and Dublin parliaments and to create a new political entity, the United Kingdom.
- The question of Catholic Emancipation now rose to the top of the political agenda and would remain so until Catholics were allowed to be admitted as MPs.
