Ireland 1798: 'the Year of the French'

This post owes a great deal to R.R.Foster's classic Modern Ireland, 1600-1972 (Penguin, 1988) and to Marianne Elliott's Wolfe Tone. Prophet of Irish Independence (Yale, 1989). 

The Protestant Ascendancy

In 1800 the population of Ireland comprised: 

1.  Roman Catholic Irish (3.1 million) 
2.  Protestant Anglo-Irish (450,000)
3.  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. 

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

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. 

A nation at war: poverty, politics, finance

Hannah More's Cheap Repository Tract,
'The Riot',
published in 1795

Wartime hardship

The summer of 1794 was one of prolonged drought and intense heat, and the result was a disappointing though not a disastrous harvest. This was followed by a severe winter, creating a grain shortage in early 1795. The spring saw rapid price rises. Shortages intensified in the summer, with garrison and naval towns suffering particularly. Bread rioters set fire to mills, sometimes they attacked those whom they believed to be hoarders or selling short measure; at other times they tried to prevent grain from leaving an area. At other times they commandeered goods and sold them at what they regarded as a fair price. This was not thuggery, but what the historian, E. P. Thompson, described as 'moral economy': a traditionalist attempt to rectify what were seen as injustices in the pricing and sale of goods.

Women were prominent in these riots. They felt so strongly because they were trying to feed their families under difficult conditions. They also benefited from the law which regarded married women as acting under the direction of their husbands - could they therefore be punished as independent agents?

Solutions to poverty?

The newspapers recommended recipes such as rice or potato bread. The rich were urged to stew their meat rather than roast it. The royal family tried to give a lead by reducing its consumption of white bread and eating more brown bread. The poor were urged to cook rice puddings - but the problem was that they did not have the ovens to cook them. They were also encouraged to eat potatoes rather than bread, but proved resistant. 

The imposition of excise duty on hair powder (with a £20 fine for those caught breaking the law) was designed to lessen the use of flour. Legislation forbade the use of wheat in distilling and in making starch. It is not clear that anyone starved to death during the shortage - but it must have had a devastating effect on health. 

One solution to rural poverty was found by the magistrates of Speenhamland in Berkshire in May 1795. This provided variable amounts of relief according to the size of a labourers’ family and the prevailing price of bread. It was bitterly attacked by political economists as encouraging large families and encouraging farmers to pay the lowest possible wage. It was also criticised for failing to discriminate between the idle and the industrious worker. However the system was quite widely adopted in the southern counties.

Pitt the Younger

William Pitt the Younger,
by Thomas Gainsborough
Burrell Collection, Glasgow
Public domain

The 'schoolboy prime minister'

William Pitt was born in 1759, the fourth child and second son of William Pitt the Elder, Earl of Chatham. His early talents clearly destined him for political life. He was educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge. His father died in 1778, encumbered with debts, leaving his younger son with lifelong money problems. In January 1781 he entered Parliament for Sir James Lowther’s pocket borough of Appleby, where he attached himself to the followers of the Earl of Shelburne. In July 1782, at the age of 23, he became Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Earl of Shelburne’s short-lived government, but he resigned in March 1783 on the formation of the Fox-North coalition. In December 1783, the king dismissed the coalition and Pitt became prime minister. There was much mockery of the 'schoolboy prime minister' and many observers believed that his administration could not last. 

However, in the general election of the following year, he was returned with a majority of 120, having gained about seventy seats. He was thus that rare eighteenth-century creature – a prime minister returned to power in a landslide election victory. 

Political principles

Pitt was always to insist that he was not a party man and his description of himself as an ‘independent Whig’ was simply an assertion of his support for the principles of the Glorious Revolution. It was only retrospectively that he was seen as a Tory.

Free trade: Influenced by the ideas of Adam Smith, he signed a modest free-trade treaty with France in 1786. Until destroyed by war, the treaty allowed French wines to enter Britain at preferential rates while the French market was open to British manufactured goods in a general tariff reduction. Through the Nootka Sound dispute with Spain in 1789–90, he secured British whaling interests in the Pacific Ocean and opportunities also for trade with Asia.

A nation at war: the military dimension

A soldier in the
Derbyshire Militia, 1780

The long war

The Revolutionary Wars, which became the Napoleonic Wars after 1799, turned out to be the greatest and most costly conflict Britain had ever fought. Pitt saw it as a war against an expansionist France that was breaking treaties and destroying the peace of Europe, and also as a war against home-grown subversion. Most believed that the war would be short. In fact, it lasted for twenty-three years.

During this long war, Britain was France’s most consistent enemy. It was a war described by Napoleon as the war of the elephant and the whale: France could not defeat Britain at sea, but the British could only defeat the French on land by coalition-building, an expensive and frequently unreliable strategy. It took six coalitions to bring about the final defeat of France. 

Britain entered the war from a position of weakness. Pitt had rehabilitated the national finances partly at the expense of military expenditure. In particular, the army was too small – 15,000 men in the British Isles with perhaps twice as many again deployed to India and the West Indies.

Pitt as war leader

This raises the question: was Pitt a good war-time Prime Minister? Arguably not. Britain entered the war unprepared and undermanned. The strategy was ill thought out, and Fox was right to pick out the confusion of war aims. Furthermore, Pitt's financial measures rested on his mistaken assumption that the war would be short. He underestimated French fighting capability and France’s sense of patriotic identity. However, he has acquired a reputation as a great war-time leader because Britain was not defeated and because his allies after his death praised him as ‘the pilot who weathered the storm’.

Britain’s attempt to defeat revolutionary France in the 1790s rested on three strategic pillars: 

1. supporting the European allies with cash and troops; 
2. using the navy to pick off French colonies, especially in the Caribbean; 
3. offering practical aid to opponents of the Revolution within France.

1 and 2  had been the policy followed by Pitt’s father in the Seven Years' War. However, the new war refused to follow this pattern - in the short term at least.