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Daniel O'Connell
by Bernard Mulrenin
National Portrait Gallery
Public domain
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The Catholic question
This question was a running sore in the politics of the late teens and early 1820s. It involved a range of important problems:- the royal prerogative
- the nature of civil rights
- the place of religion in the constitution
- the government of Ireland.
On 9 May 1817 the Commons debated a motion to open up all government posts to Catholics, except for that of Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Robert Peel, at that time the Chief Secretary for Ireland, was the main speaker on the Protestant side. He argued that Catholics owed allegiance to a foreign power and that he was not prepared to allow the pope to be a 'fourth estate of the realm'. Thanks in part to his eloquence, the motion was defeated 221/245. ‘Orange’ Peel was now the head of the Protestant party and as a reward he was offered the seat of Oxford University, the most Anglican in the country.
A further attempt was defeated in 1819. However in 1821 , the Commons had given a small but decisive majority for a bill by the Dublin University MP, William Plunket, to relieve Catholic disabilities. The Lords threw it out.
While the Commons might be moving towards Emancipation, George IV was deeply hostile, backtracking on his days as a Foxite Whig. When he became king he told Castlereagh (a supporter of Emancipation) that ‘once I take that oath I am for ever a Protestant King, a Protestant upholder, a Protestant adherent’.
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| George IV in 1821, no longer glamorous. He had abandoned his earlier support for Catholic Emancipation |
But the balance of opinion in the cabinet was shifting. When Sir Francis Burdett's bill passed its third reading by twenty-one votes in May 1825, the cabinet nearly fell apart. Peel offered to resign, but he was told that his resignation would bring Lord Liverpool's government down. Ministers were saved when the Lords rejected the bill, but for how long could the Lords be allowed to frustrate the wishes of the Commons?
There would have been less of a problem if the question had been confined to England where Catholics were a tiny minority, socially isolated and politically passive. Both Peel and Liverpool supported moves to enfranchise them. But the question involved Ireland and the nature of its relationship with Britain.
The Catholic Association
The position of Irish Catholics was especially anomalous. In 1793 Pitt's government had given the Catholic Irish forty- shilling freeholders. But they could only vote for Protestants.The County Clare election
In January 1828 the Duke of Wellington became prime minister, with Peel his Home Secretary. In an effort to reconstruct his cabinet, he appointed a new President of the Board of Trade, the landowner, William Vesey Fitzgerald, who represented Co. Clare. By a parliamentary convention not finally abandoned until 1926 his taking office meant that he had to submit himself to his constituents for re-election. Since he was a popular landlord, a supporter of Catholic emancipation and on close terms with the hierarchy for whom he had negotiated a special Maynooth grant, there seemed little danger of his defeat. In the by-election he was challenged by O'Connell, who, as a Roman Catholic could legally stand for election but could not take his seat. This presented the government with a huge dilemma. If Catholic emancipation were refused, it would provoke disorder in Ireland; but, if granted it would tear the Tory party in two and provoke outrage throughout mainland Britain.In July 1828, in a carnival (though drink-free!) atmosphere, O’Connell won the election by an overwhelming majority (2,057/982). The Catholic voters were following their priests rather than their landlords. It was now clear that the Catholic Association was set to achieve similar victories in other Irish counties at the next general election, putting Britain’s ability to maintain order in Ireland in grave doubt. Fitzgerald wrote to Peel:
The organisation exhibited is so complete and so formidable that no man can contemplate without alarm what is to follow in this wretched country.The election showed that the Irish landowners were losing political power to the priests.
The Catholic Relief Act
With the threat of rebellion mounting in Ireland Peel told Wellington that the government faced a choice of evils. During the summer and autumn, while the government seemed paralysed, the Catholic Association continued to hold meetings for the peasantry, organized in semi-military fashion with banners, music, green sashes and cockades. In Ulster the response was to multiply the formation of Brunswick clubs, financed by small subscriptions in imitation of the Catholic rent and led by prominent members of the gentry and aristocracy. On 24 October, rival crowds faced each other at a mass meeting on Penenden Heath, near Maidstone.On 16 November, Wellington told the King,
‘No-one can answer for the consequences of delay’.The essential point as far as the duke was concerned, was not to resist emancipation at all costs, but to ensure that there were adequate provisions to safeguard the interests of the Irish Protestants.
In January 1829 Peel told crossed his personal Rubicon when he told Wellington that he would be prepared to stay in office even if Catholic Emancipation became law. The whole cabinet was now unblocked, and on 5 February Wellington and Peel announced their support, to the dismay of many of their followers.
In February Peel resigned his seat at Oxford University and offered himself for re-election. He was defeated (755/609) by the Ultra Tory, Sir Robert Inglis and had to take instead a pocket borough offered him by a wealthy Jewish borough-monger. It was a great personal humiliation for him. The former ‘Orange Peel’ was now branded as a turncoat, and he never fully regained the trust of the Tories; the damage to his reputation was permanent.
On 4 March the king wrote to Wellington that
as I find the country would be left without an administration, I have decided to yield my opinion [my italics] that that which is considered by the Cabinet to be for the immediate interest of the Country.This was an important moment in the history of the monarchy.
On 5 March Peel, now back in Parliament, introduced the bill to the Commons in a speech of four and a half hours’ length:
I will hope for the best. … But if these expectations are to be disappointed, if unhappily civil strife and contention shall survive the restoration of political privilege; if there be something inherent in the spirit of the Roman Catholic religion which disdains equality and will be satisfied with nothing but ascendancy; still I am content to run the hazard of the change.142 members voted against it. It passed the Lords on 10 April and received the reluctant royal assent on 13 April. The Act admitted Catholics to all offices except those of Lord Lieutenant and Lord Chancellor. Catholic were still excluded from the throne, and as an anti-democratic safeguard, the Irish freehold qualification was raised from 40s to £10.
To the end the Protestant party fought a passionate rearguard action. They saw themselves as fighting to prevent the overthrow of the 1688 settlement. They were quite right to regard this as a hugely significant change. It was a great shock to many Protestant Tories that the iron duke should ‘betray’ the country in this way. The dowager duchess of Richmond filled her drawing room with stuffed rats; George IV complained that
‘everything was so revolutionary ... and the peers and the aristocracy were giving way to it’.At one point in the debates Lord Winchilsea charged Wellington with having previously supported the foundation of King's College London, the Anglican response to University College London, as a cloak for his dark design of introducing 'popery' into every department of the state. Wellington promptly issued a challenge and the two men fought a duel in Battersea Fields on 21 March (neither was wounded). The press turned on Wellington. Petitions were sent to Parliament and mass meetings held throughout the country.
The first Catholic to take his seat in Parliament was the Earl of Surrey, heir of the duke of Norfolk, elected for the family pocket borough of Horsham. (The government refused to make the Act retrospective, so O’Connell had to fight his seat again. This time he was elected unopposed.)
Conclusion
- The opponents of Catholic emancipation were quite right to say that it marked a fundamental change in the constitution. Many of them never forgave Wellington and Peel for betraying the principles of the Glorious Revolution.
- Paradoxically, Catholic emancipation could only have been carried by an unreformed Parliament. A Parliament more alive to public opinion would not have been able to pass it.
