Irish History And The Irish Question Part 4

Rural Ireland was a recruiting ground for the armies of the Continent. On some lonely hillside the recruiting agent reviewed the youth of the neighbourhood, picked out the strong, the flower of the population, and turned back the feeble to their miserable homes.

If anything was to be done for the extension of Protestantism, union among the Protestant minority was indispensable, and the enthusiasm of the Calvinist, sombre as it was, might have had its attractions for the Celt, as it had for the Celts of the Scottish Highlands, among whom it gave birth to the hill preachers, and for those of Wales with whom Calvinistic Methodism prevailed. But the bishops of the State Church hated the Presbyterian even more bitterly than they hated the Catholic. After their brief and hollow alliance with the Nonconformists, when their own interest was threatened, they had speedily relapsed into High Anglicanism, and under the not unsuitable leadership of the infidel Bolingbroke had taken to persecuting Nonconformity in England. They extended the persecution to Ireland, excluding by the Sacramental Test the defenders of Derry from munic.i.p.al office and military service. They imported the Schism Act, forbidding Nonconformists to open schools. They threatened interference with Presbyterian worship, Ireland having no Toleration Act. They disputed the validity of Presbyterian marriage. They thus set flowing a stream of Presbyterian emigration from the north of Ireland to the American colonies. The stream was afterwards swelled by the rapacity of Lord Donegal and other landed proprietors of Ulster, who, being owners of great estates, when the leases of their tenants ran out, instead of renewing them to the tenant, put them up to the highest bidder. Starving Catholics, in the desperate compet.i.tion for land, outbidding the Protestants, a number of Protestant families were driven from their homes. The consequence was, first, aggressive insurrection under the names of the Heart of Oak Boys and the Steel Boys, ultimately emigration to America.

Thus the Church and the landlord between them were charging the mine of American revolution.

X

Presently, too, inexorable nature made her voice heard, proclaiming that Ireland, with its rich pastures and watery skies, was in the main not an arable but a grazing country. There was a good market for meat.

Speculators began buying up land and throwing it into large grazing farms.

The cotter was ejected and driven to the bogs and mountains. This overtaxed even a cotter's submission, and there broke out an agrarian war, the most deadly perhaps in history, the canker and disgrace of British government, protracted in varying phases and with fluctuating intensity almost from that day to this. Companies of men, wearing white shirts over their clothes, and thence afterwards called Whiteboys, harried the grazing farms by night, and the stillness of the night air was broken by the bellowings and moanings of hamstrung cattle.

Irish outrage has been essentially agrarian, rather than religious. The division of churches coincided generally with the social division. The middleman was necessarily Protestant, since, under the penal law, no Catholic could acquire a beneficial lease; and the antagonism of religion and language emphasized and embittered that of cla.s.s and interest. But a Catholic generally suffered like a Protestant if he provoked the wrath of the people. A Protestant settling in a Catholic district, if he was in any way obnoxious, was especially liable to maltreatment. Later on there was a hideous instance of this in the case of a Protestant schoolmaster settling and opening his school in a Catholic district. He and his family were mangled with horrible cruelty.

Nor can it be said that the landlords as a cla.s.s were the objects of hatred and outrage apart from the agrarian quarrel. A landlord who resided and did not oppress his tenantry, especially if he were affable, jovial, and hospitable, was generally the object of a clannish affection, though his mansion might be a "Castle Rack-rent" and his serious duties might be very indifferently performed.

The commercial restrictions and the Navigation Acts were fatal to the prosperity of the whole island, while the penal inability of the Catholics to invest could not fail to lower the value of land. This would be felt by the conquering as well as by the conquered race and sect. Scotland, cut off by the repeal of Cromwell's union from trade with England and the dependencies, had so suffered commercially and industrially that she swarmed with vagrants, and the ardent patriot, Fletcher of Saltoun, proposed slavery as a remedy for the evil. The union, opening free trade with England, brought commercial prosperity in its train. The English in Ireland stretched out their hands to the British government for a union like that which was being made with Scotland, and were coldly repelled. To English protectionism the chief blame for the refusal no doubt is due. But unwillingness to incorporate a large Catholic population may also have played its part. Let the cause have been what it may, there is hardly anything in the records of British statesmanship more deplorable than this refusal of union to Ireland. Protectionism here again pleads the excuse of universal delusion, and in no case is the excuse more needed.

Moreover, the Protestants of Ireland, British in blood and, as lords over a subject race in their own country, more than British in pride, were denied the enjoyment of British freedom. A Parliament they had; but that Parliament could legislate only by grace of the English council and of a council named by the lord lieutenant in Ireland. Its control even of money bills was not recognized, while the Crown had a hereditary revenue which made it almost independent of Parliamentary grants. In the Upper House, owing to the large absenteeism of lay lords, the bench of bishops, nominees of the Crown and agents of the British interest, largely held sway. Of the three hundred seats in the House of Commons more than half were filled by nominees of the patrons of pocket boroughs, which the Crown had been always creating at its will, and the nominations were sold like common merchandise. The House, moreover, swarmed with placemen and pensioners. The Parliament was elected for a whole reign, so as to be scarcely responsible even to such a const.i.tuency as it had. The Irish Parliament of George II. continued for thirty-three years. There was a session only in every other year. The English House of Lords arrogated to itself the jurisdiction of final appeal. The judges held only during pleasure. There was no annual Mutiny Act. There was no Habeas Corpus.

There were large sinecures, instruments of corruption in the hands of the government. The pension list, swollen beyond bounds, was a privy fund for kings' mistresses and for jobs too dirty for the English list. The high appointments, ecclesiastical, administrative, and judicial, were treated as patronage by the English government and generally reserved for Englishmen. The face of their king the Irish never saw. The viceroy resided only during a small part of his term, and his place was filled in his absence by lords justices who were often bishops, English themselves, and bent above all things on securing the ascendancy of the English interest. Three archbishops in succession practically ruled Ireland.

Presbyterians and other Protestant Dissenters, victims of episcopal intolerance, had crying wrongs of their own.

Union with England had been refused, and the protection of England being no longer so manifestly indispensable to her garrison in Ireland as it had been, a craving for self-government took its place. Molyneux, and after him Lucas, alarmed and exasperated authority by writing in favour of the independence of the Irish Parliament. But a far more potent artificer of discord appeared in Swift, who, balked of preferment in England by the wreck of his political party, exiled to a native land which he abhorred, was eating his heart, and ripe for mischief, especially for any mischief which could avenge him on the Whig government, above all on Walpole, its chief, by whom it seems the path of this model Christian and pure writer to a bishopric had been crossed. That a feeling of justice and of pity for the sufferings of the Irish people, which Swift has vividly described, had their place in his heart beside malice and vengeance, may be true; though his sense of justice was not strong enough to prevent him, profane and really sceptical as he was, from vehemently upholding the Penal Code and the Sacramental Test; while his pity for the people led to no philanthropic effort of a practical kind, and was not very tenderly expressed in his satirical suggestion that they should appease their hunger by eating their babies. His proposal to exclude English goods would gratify his malice as well as his patriotism, and had it been adopted would probably have led to a large increase of smuggling.

One of the grievances of Ireland was that there was no Irish mint. A new copper coinage was needed. The contract was given by the English government to the king's mistress, and by her sold to Wood, a respectable manufacturer. As the coinage was approved by Sir Isaac Newton, then master of the mint, it can hardly have been very bad. But Irish jealousy cast suspicion upon its character. Then rose a storm of popular fury, improved by Swift into a whirlwind on which he rode in his glory. Swift's "Drapier Letters" are monuments of his genius for pamphleteering, his intense malice, and his freedom from the restraints of truth. They produced an immense effect, made him the idol of Dublin for the rest of his days, and forced Walpole to give way and call in the halfpence. Their author did not mention among the evils of an English connection that he and the members of his State Church were enabled by the support of the British power to set their feet upon the necks of four-fifths of the Irish people and to wring from the starving Catholic the income of the dean of St. Patrick.

The letters ranged far beyond the immediate occasion, and appealed strongly to the growing desire of independence, which we may be pretty sure that Swift, had he been nominated by Bolingbroke to an English bishopric, would have fiercely opposed. The Parliament to which his revolution would have consigned Ireland is described by himself as a den of thieves of which he devoutly desired the extirpation.

Presently there arose a patriot party in the Irish Parliament. It found a leader in Flood, a man of solid ability and powerful in debate, while the purity of his patriotism was not so clear. At Flood's side, or rather perhaps, as the event proved, on his flank, there presently arose the far more ill.u.s.trious Grattan, whose purity and patriotism were unquestionable, whose oratory was brilliant, his admirers thought divine. The objects sought by the patriots were reduction of the duration of Parliaments, control of money bills, an annual Mutiny Bill, Habeas Corpus, tenure of the judges during life or good behaviour, reduction of the pension list, exclusion of placemen and pensioners from the House of Commons, taxation of the rents of absentees. On the first and most important point they succeeded through a bargain with the Crown on the amount of the military force. The duration of Parliament was cut down to eight years, that number being preferred to seven, because it was only in alternate years that Parliament sat. This was a very important change. War, with imperfect success, was waged on the question of money bills. On the other points reform made no way, the English government clinging obstinately to all its powers and using its veto, while the lord lieutenant was able to avert a crash by buying up a majority in the Irish Parliament. Taxation of the rents of absentees, a measure very popular and much pressed, was vetoed by the English government. The protest of the absentees against it was evidently the work of Burke, whose patron, Lord Rockingham, had an estate in Ireland. Burke argued that the double land-ownership was a link of union between the two countries; which it might have been if the residence as well as the proprietorship had been shared. The advocates of the tax might have cited the original character of land grants to which feudal service was annexed and which were forfeited by the failure of absentees to perform it. Chatham supported the tax. For a moment, unhappily for a moment only, his thoughts were turned to Ireland. A far greater service he would have rendered his country by pacifying Ireland as he pacified the Highlands than by his conquest of Canada, of which the loss of the American colonies was the result. In the background there was a growing sentiment in favour of independence, the flag of which was by Grattan presently unfurled.

It was not in Ireland as it was in England, where the regular party system prevailed and the minority changed with the majority in Parliament. The Castle called to the council whom it pleased, without regard to the existence of a political connection among them, though it was, of course, under the necessity of calling those who could bring it support at the time. The party tie was accordingly very loose and connections were shifting. Flood had no scruple in providing for himself, apart from his friends, by acceptance of a rich sinecure under the government. Hely Hutchinson, a free lance, could use his personal influence in forcing the government to make him provost of Trinity College.

For a time the Castle put itself into the hands of a junto of great lords and owners of Parliamentary boroughs, who undertook to supply it with a majority at the price of patronage and power. To break this ring and restore the free action of government, an effort was made by the Lord Lieutenant Townshend. But Townshend's boisterous energy, successful for a time, in the end failed, and the Castle fell back into the routine of government by intrigue and corruption, aided by viceregal dinners and b.a.l.l.s.

Chatham's glory dazzled Ireland as well as England. But presently came the quarrel ending in war, with the American colonies, whose commercial grievances were the same in kind as those of Ireland, practically less severe. Ireland at once showed sympathy with American revolt. Presently the island was divested of troops by the demands of the war, and its coasts were left open to the attacks of privateers. There was no national militia. Under the leadership of Lord Charlemont a body of volunteers, almost entirely Protestant, was raised and reached at last the number of forty thousand. There was, no doubt, in the movement a good deal of claret and fanfaronade. But it included the leading gentry, and for its purpose was very strong. Formed ostensibly, at first really, for defence against the Americans, it presently fell politically into their track and demanded of the British government, now prostrated by misfortune in the war and by the combination of European powers against it, first freedom from the commercial restrictions, then legislative independence. North made commercial concessions; he would have made them on a much more liberal scale and possibly have satisfied the volunteers. But again monopolist greed, strong in the commercial cities of England, vetoed, and Burke lost his seat at Bristol for advocating the policy of free trade. The victories of Rodney and Eliot, had they come in time, might have strengthened the hands of the British government and saved it from an ignominious capitulation. As it was, the British government surrendered at discretion.

First the commercial restrictions were swept away; then the legislative supremacy of England, embodied in the Poynings Act and the Act of the Sixth of George I., affirming the right of the British Parliament to legislate for Ireland, was renounced. Flood, the patriot with a bend sinister, insisted on pushing the humiliation of England still further and compelling her by a declaratory act solemnly to bind her own hands for the future, while Grattan, the patriot without reproach, took the more generous line. Thus England underwent the deepest humiliation in her history at the hands of an Irish party which owed its land, its ascendancy, probably its very existence, to her protecting power. Such was the condign punishment of a long course of ignorant, blundering, and corrupt misgovernment, a punishment not the less calamitous and degrading because it was deserved.

So Grattan in the Irish Parliament was able, in a transport of rhetorical rapture, to worship "the newborn nation," a nation which comprised a fraction of the people of the country, the rest being still political helots. Had he adored an uncontrolled Ascendancy, his deity would have been real.

The volunteers, having felt their strength, were inclined to vote themselves permanent, overawe Parliament, and enforce Parliamentary reform. Flood was so misguided as to take that line. But the incarnation of violent counsels was the bishop of Derry, an English n.o.bleman holding an Irish bishopric, a most absurd figure, and probably half insane. His Right Reverence avowed that he looked forward to blood. He paraded before the door of Parliament in a coach and six, dressed in purple with long white gloves and gold ta.s.sels depending from them, and with a guard of horse, looking as if he meant to be king. But the Parliament was firm, and Lord Charlemont and other sane leaders were able to control the body, which was drawn, not from a Faubourg St. Antoine, but from the property-owning cla.s.s under aristocratic leading. Still revolutionary excitement did not die.

What was now the state of things? There were two independent Parliaments, each with full powers of legislation, under the same Crown; that Crown not being invested with authority to control and harmonize the action of the two Parliaments, but being a Crown upon a cushion or little more. The commercial and even the international relations of the two Parliaments might point different ways. There might be a divergence on a question of peace or war; one Parliament declaring for war, the other refusing to vote the supplies. On general questions, such as commercial and criminal law, opposition was possible to any extent; and considering the feelings towards each other with which the partners set out, was not unlikely to occur. Ireland might even refuse currency to English coin. The monarchical link itself was not quite firm. On the question of the regency, when George III. went mad, the two Parliaments did actually fly apart; the Irish Parliament recognizing, while the British Parliament refused to recognize, the claim of the Prince of Wales to the regency by virtue of his birth. Only the king's recovery averted a collision. Adopted in haste and in a rush of revolutionary ardour, the system was in fact unworkable and must have ended in confusion. Grattan was unquestionably true to British connection. But Grattan was not Ireland, and even he had led in no very loyal att.i.tude the defiance of the British Parliament on the regency question. His statesmanship can hardly have been profound if he fancied that the const.i.tution of 1782 would work.

It is moreover always to be borne in mind that this Parliament was the Parliament of a Protestant ascendancy, representing not one-quarter of the people of Ireland, and that with all its high talk of independence, it still owed, and knew that it owed, to British protection its power, its privileges, its political pelf, perhaps even the safe possession under the Act of Settlement of lands on which the disinherited still cast a longing and vindictive eye.

How then was the policy of Ireland to be kept from breaking away from that of Great Britain? The practical answer was, by corruption, the means of which at the command of the Castle were, besides office, sinecures, some of them very rich; commands in the army; pensions; bishoprics, with other Church patronage; and peerages. The peerages, though lavishly created, seem to have retained their value. The Parliament, the body on which corruption had to operate, was a Parliament of rotten boroughs, the nominations for which were sold in open market. The House of Commons continued to swarm with placemen and pensioners, whose votes were at the command of government. In the House of Lords the Anglican bishops were strong.

Appended to a report made to Pitt on the political situation in Ireland is the following schedule of corruption:--

"H---- H----, son-in-law to Lord A----, and brought into Parliament by him. Studies the law; wishes to be a commissioner of barracks, or in some similar place. Would go into orders and take a living.

"H---- D----, brother to Lord C----. Applied for office; but, as no specific promise could be made, has lately voted in opposition. Easy to be had if thought expedient. A silent, gloomy man.

"L---- M----, refuses to accept 500 per annum; states very high pretensions from his skill in House of Commons management; expects 1,000 per annum. N.B.-- Be careful of him.

"J---- N----, has been in the army and is now on half pay; wishes a troop of dragoons on full pay. States his pretensions to be fifteen years' service in Parliament. N.B.--Would prefer office to military promotion; but already has, and has long had, a pension. Character, especially on the side of truth, not favourable.

"R---- P----, independent, but well disposed to government. His four sisters have pensions; and his object is a living for his brother.

"T---- P----, brother to Lord L----, and brought in by him. A captain in the navy; wishes for some sinecure employment."

XI

There was no lack, say apologists of the Irish Parliament, of useful legislation on subjects with which a landed gentry was qualified to deal.

There was a fatal lack of legislation on one momentous subject with which a land-owning gentry ought to be qualified to deal, but from which the Irish Parliament resolutely turned its eyes. For half a century before the union, that body steadfastly abstained from inquiring into the causes of disaffection among the peasantry. It even repressed a report upon the subject which the chairman of the committee had begun to read.

The condition of the peasantry was still horrible and heartrending. The revolution of 1782, by loosening the fetters of trade, had brought increase of prosperity to the merchant and manufacturer. It had brought no relief to the tiller of the soil. A little before this Arthur Young had travelled in Ireland and had been shocked at seeing the insolent despotism of the petty country gentlemen, whom he called the vermin of the kingdom, over their serfs; the horsewhip freely used, the serf not daring to lift his hand in defence, the total denial of legal redress, since a justice of the peace presuming to issue a summons would at once have been called out.

Landlords of consequence had a.s.sured Young that many of their cotters would think themselves honoured by having their wives and daughters sent for to the bed of their masters. He had even heard of the lives of people being made free with. The middleman and the t.i.the-proctor were ruthless as ever. To the payment of t.i.thes a drop of bitterness had been added by the exemption, through an abuse of political influence, of the grazing farms, which left the whole burden of maintaining a hostile Church on the back of the cotter. The peasantry, on the other hand, maddened by suffering, took a fearful revenge on the oppressor or his agents. Agrarian murder and outrage prevailed. There were cruelties worse than murder. Middlemen and t.i.the-proctors were "carded"; that is, lacerated with boards full of nails drawn down their backs, buried up to their necks in pits full of thorns, made to ride on saddles stuck with spikes, their ears and noses cut off. A clergyman was met riding in great agony with his head wrapped up; his ears and cheeks were found nailed to a post. That the Irish when excited are capable of dark atrocities is a feature of their character which it is useless to disguise. Debility when excited is apt to be most cruel. The trait showed itself plainly in the hamstringing of soldiers and the houghing of cattle, as well as in the torturing of middlemen and t.i.the-proctors. Law and police were paralyzed. The peasantry were one vast conspiracy bound together by awful pledges, the betrayal of which was death. No evidence could be obtained though there might be plenty of eye-witnesses. Perjury in the common cause was no sin.

It was supposed that the Whiteboys had their meetings in Catholic chapels.

But there is no ground for taxing the Catholic Church as a body with any share in the criminal part of the movement. The Catholic clergy of Ireland were then, as they are now, a peasant clergy, sympathizing with their cla.s.s. They depended on that cla.s.s for their stipends. Some of them their sympathy might betray into complicity, more or less active, with agrarian crime. More of them might be guilty of failure to exert their religious authority as ministers of the sacraments, the confessional, and death-bed absolution, on the side of law. But their record on the whole appears to have been as clear as, considering what persecution they had undergone, and that the law was their enemy as well as the enemy of the peasant, it was reasonable to expect.

The mansion of an unpopular landlord became a besieged fortress.

Absenteeism of course increased. To a rather later date belongs the story of an agent who, having complained to his absentee landlord that his life had been threatened, received the reply, "Tell the villains that they need not hope to intimidate me by shooting you."

"I am well acquainted," said a statesman not oversensitive to popular wrongs, "with the Province of Munster, and I know that it is impossible for human wretchedness to exceed that of the miserable tenantry of that province. I know that the unhappy tenantry are ground to powder by relentless landlords. I know that far from being able to give the clergy their just dues, they have not food and raiment for themselves; the landlord grasps the whole. Sorry I am to add that, unsatisfied with present extortion, some landlords have been so base as to instigate the insurgents to rob the clergy of their t.i.thes, not in order to alleviate the distresses of the tenantry, but that they might add the clergy's share to the cruel rack-rents already paid. Sir, I fear it will require the utmost ability of Parliament to come to the root of these evils. The poor people of Munster live in a more abject state of poverty than human nature can be supposed able to bear. Their miseries are intolerable; but they do not originate with the clergy; nor can the legislature stand by and see them take the redress into their own hands. Nothing can be done for their benefit while the country remains in a state of anarchy."

The miseries might not originate with the clergy, but the popular wrath did originate specially with the exactions of the t.i.the-proctor. Grattan proposed commutation. But then the t.i.the of pasture agistment, as it was called, could no longer have been evaded. That simple reform was put off for more than a generation, with the most calamitous results.

Dublin was gay, mansions rose, claret flowed, wit sparkled, the dance went round. Nor was there lack of social polish or of culture of the cla.s.sical kind. On the other hand, there were extravagance, waste, and debt. Wild and spendthrift characters appear among the leaders and mirrors of society. Beauchamp Bagenal, as Sir Jonah Barrington tells us, "had visited every capital of Europe, and had exhibited the native original character of the Irish gentleman at every place he visited. In the splendour of his travelling establishment, he quite eclipsed the petty potentates with whom Germany was garnished. His person was fine, his manners open and generous, his spirit high, and his liberality profuse. During his tour, he had performed a variety of feats which were emblazoned in Ireland, and endeared him to his countrymen. He had fought a prince; jilted a princess; intoxicated the doge of Venice; carried off a d.u.c.h.ess from Madrid; scaled the walls of a convent in Italy; narrowly escaped the Inquisition at Lisbon; concluded his exploits by a celebrated fencing match at Paris; and he returned to Ireland with a sovereign contempt for all continental men and manners, and an inveterate antipathy to all despotic kings and arbitrary governments."

Duelling was the social law. The attorney-general fought a duel; the provost of Trinity College fought a duel. Refusal of a challenge was social death. The viceroy's secretary, when challenged by a disappointed applicant for place, deemed it necessary to go to the field of honour.

Robert Fitzgerald was so addicted to duelling that he wore a chain shirt under his vest.

What can have produced such characters? Was it anything in Irish blood or air, or was it the absence of the commercial element with its sobering influence? The story of Robert Fitzgerald, nephew of the bishop of Derry, seems to bespeak a wild domestic despotism exercised by the squires.

Fitzgerald is said to have confined his father in a cave with a muzzled bear. He put to death one of his household, for which, however, he was hanged. The matrimonial adventurer from Ireland was also a figure well known in the sister isle.

Of intellectual fruit there was not much except oratory, pamphlets, and pasquinades. Swift was an Englishman born in Ireland and banished to the place of his birth. Burke's genius as well as his physiognomy was one-half Irish, and his Irish half had its share in that splendid but mischievous outburst, his essay on the French Revolution. His heart turned to Ireland, and some of his best thought was given to her case. But he hardly belongs to the Irish Pantheon.

Oratory, both Parliamentary and forensic, flourished. Grattan, Flood, Yelverton, Foster, Fitzgibbon (afterwards Lord Clare), Curran, are great names in their different ways. Nor was the oratory all in the style supposed to be Hibernian. Foster's style, for example, was grave and weighty. So generally was that of Flood.

In Parliament there were lively scenes. Grattan and Flood having parted company in politics, and Flood having defamed Grattan, Grattan poured upon Flood a furious torrent of the most personal invective; telling him that his talents were not so great as his life was infamous; that he had been silent for years and silent for money; that he might be seen pa.s.sing the doors like a guilty spirit waiting the moment at which he might hop in and give his venal vote; that he was a kettledrum, battering himself into popularity to catch the vulgar; that he might be seen hovering over the dome like an ill-omened bird of night, with sepulchral note and broken beak (Flood having a broken nose); and winding up by telling him in the face of the country, before all the world, and to his beard, that he was not an honest man. Flood retorted with equal fury, and a wild scene ensued. It is not difficult to believe in the genius or the patriotism of these orators; but it is difficult to believe in their unimpa.s.sioned wisdom.