The New Irish Constitution Part 18

"The ocean," said Grattan, with reference to the connexion between Great Britain and Ireland, "protests against separation, and the sea against union." The protests of natural forces cannot be ignored, and the history of the relations between the two islands is filled with the efforts of statesmen to find a middle way between the horns of this dilemma, and to adjust the estranging drift of the Irish Channel, the Irish climate, and racial divergence to the bonds of common interest imposed by the Atlantic Ocean and foreign compet.i.tion upon the British Isles. After a brief eighteen years of uneasy legislative independence, the pendulum swung to the other extreme, and the Act of Union inaugurated a century of restless incorporation; but, for five out of the six and a half centuries of English parliamentary history, Ireland had a subordinate Parliament. Union has been the exception, not the rule, in the relations of the kingdoms.

The mere existence of an Irish Parliament was not, therefore, fatal to England's security or to the growth of its Empire. A Parliament sat at Dublin while England won the battles of Crecy and Agincourt, of Blenheim and the Nile, defied the menace of Rome, defeated the Spanish Armada, and laid the foundations of British dominion in India, in Canada, in the West Indies, and in South Africa. Spaniards, it is true, landed at Smerwick in 1579 and at Kinsale in 1601, and French troops landed at Carrickfergus in 1760 and at Kilala in 1798; but Spaniards also landed at Penzance in 1593, and Frenchmen landed on English soil countless times from the days of William the Conqueror to their descent at Fishguard in 1796. England has ever been saved by its navy and not by its parliamentary unions, and the attraction to foreign invaders has not been an Irish Parliament, but the existence of Irish discontent. No invasion of Ireland, in spite of the Irish Parliament, came so near to success as did the Jacobite risings after the Scottish Union.

The recapitulation of these facts is, perhaps, otiose, except to allay fears which sane politicians do not entertain; and it is more to the point to show that the causes of Irish dissatisfaction are historical, and are identical with those which, under similar conditions, produced a similar discontent in England. The notion that the Irish are naturally turbulent and disloyal, while the English are by nature the reverse, is one which could only have grown up after England had rid itself of those irritants which cause the Irish friction. Between the Norman Conquest and the Revolution of 1688 England rebelled against more than half its sovereigns: some were imprisoned, some were expelled, some were a.s.sa.s.sinated, and some were done to death in more decorous fashion; and English treason and turbulence were once quite as much bywords in Europe as ever Irish disloyalty was in England. The conventional English pictures of Irish disorder could easily be capped as late as the seventeenth century by French descriptions of English lawlessness and barbarity. A French guide-book, published in 1654, declared that England was inhabited by demons and parricides, and a few years later another Frenchman averred that the English were a cruel and ferocious race of wolves. The truth of the matter is that English and Irish alike prefer to manage their own affairs in accord with their own ideas, and are only contented and loyal when this condition obtains. The Revolution of 1688 placed its realisation within the reach of the English people, and there has been no English rebellion since. But the sovereign remedy for disaffection was refused the Irish and the American colonists: the latter rebelled, and, being distant, achieved their independence. The Canadians followed suit in 1837, but found peace and prosperity under a parliament of their own. South Africa was converted to the cause of empire by the same expedient; only the Irish, who are most at England's mercy, have been condemned to nurse their grievance and denied the conditions of loyalty.

The remedy does not apply, we are told, to Irish disorders, firstly because parliamentary inst.i.tutions are an exotic(122) unsuited to the Irish soil and temperament, and secondly because they have been weighed in Irish balances and found wanting. It is hard to see why they should be regarded as more exotic in Irish Dublin than in French Quebec: Sir Wilfrid Laurier cannot be termed a failure as a parliamentarian; British parties at Westminster have been inconvenienced by the parliamentary skill rather than by the parliamentary incompetence of Irish members; and the present menace to parliamentary inst.i.tutions does not come from Ireland. Nor, indeed, is the argument one which we can employ with any consistency, for there is hardly a word in our legal and const.i.tutional terminology that is not of foreign origin. Parliament itself is not of Anglo-Saxon derivation, and nearly all the things we cherish most have been imported from abroad-our racehorses and our religion, our alphabet and our algebra, our trial by jury and our vote by ballot. Pure-bred civilisations have been rare, inelastic, and unprogressive, and the test of a nation's political capacity lies not in its rigid adherence to its original stock-in-trade, but in its powers of a.s.similation and adaptability to its environment. It is no reproach to us that we have dethroned indigenous deities, nor to the Irish that they have appropriated our Parliamentary weapons; for it is a poor country which cannot borrow its neighbours' wisdom and profit by their experience.

The misfortune for Ireland was that in the earlier stages of its development it borrowed so little, and retained so much of its primitive tribal decentralisation. England would have been no less unfortunate had William the Conqueror only succeeded in establishing a Norman Pale on this side of the English Channel, and had England retained its connexion with Normandy. As it was, the Normans and Angevins cured us of our primitive tribalism, and then left England to work out its own salvation. The severance of Normandy from England converted the descendants of William's companions from a Norman garrison into an English aristocracy, while the successors of Strongbow's followers were maintained by the English connexion as an alien garrison quartered in the barracks of a dwindling Irish Pale. At first, indeed, they had spread a thin veneer of Anglo-Norman conquest over the greater part of Ireland; but baronial feuds only added to the distraction of native septs; and when Edward I.'s premature imperialism provoked a general Celtic reaction under Robert Bruce in Scotland and Edward Bruce in Ireland, Anglo-Norman rule was doomed. The conquerors either threw in their lot with the natives and became more Irish than the Irish, or withdrew within the Pale and maintained a troubled existence by sowing division throughout the rest of the realm. Hence the Irish were always the enemies, seldom the subjects of the English Crown; and outside the Pale there was no English government of Ireland during the middle ages. Const.i.tutional relations only existed between England and the Pale; relations with Ireland outside the Pale were in that state of nature, in which, says Hobbes, the life of man is "nasty, short, brutish, and mean." The Government had not the means to govern; it felt and it acknowledged no obligations of duty or humanity towards its foes outside the Pale.

This Pale, about twenty miles broad and sixty miles long, was almost as narrow and quite as lawless as the Welsh Marches or the Scottish Borders; and it was the nursery of the English-seedling-parliament in Ireland. A sort of parliament containing knights from a dozen shires had been summoned in 1295; boroughs appear to have been represented first in 1310.

It was only designed to supply the financial needs of an English Government, and give statutory form to the edicts of Dublin Castle; and the statutes of Kilkenny (1367), which penalised everything Irish, were merely striking examples of the ferocity and the futility of its customary legislation. Nevertheless, it began to strike feeble roots in Irish soil, and when, in 1374, Edward III.'s deputy directed the clergy and laity of the Pale to send their representatives to Westminster, their const.i.tuents, while obeying, instructed them to reject all financial demands upon Ireland made at St. Stephen's. Demands made at Dublin were not, however, much more fruitful, and for thirty years in the fifteenth century only one Irish Parliament met. Spasmodic efforts by sovereigns and royal princes like Richard II., Lionel and Thomas (Dukes of Clarence), and Richard (Duke of York,) alternated with longer periods, during which the Crown abandoned the government to the greatest chieftain in the Pale, and made believe that the power he wielded was due to his royal commission. Richard of York, indeed, established a reputation for vigorous rule which won him the support of the Parliament of the Pale in his a.s.sertion of an independent kingship in Ireland after his defeat in England in 1459; and the Anglo-Irish, either out of grat.i.tude to him or of spite to the Tudors, afterwards discovered Yorkist features in every pretender to Henry VII.'s throne. Their favour to Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck precipitated Poynings' laws.

These famous enactments were aimed at Dublin Castle rather than at the Dublin parliament. The Crown had always controlled Irish legislation, but the control had been exercised through a deputy, who was often more powerful in Ireland than the Crown; this independence was to cease, and the control of Irish legislation was transferred from the Irish deputy to the English Privy Council. No Parliament was to be summoned in the Pale without the consent, and no legislation introduced without the approval, of that body. Acts previously pa.s.sed by the English Parliament were declared in force in Ireland, and in practice the English Parliament proceeded to legislate for, though not to tax, Ireland without the concurrence of its Parliament. Poynings also attempted to conquer the native Irish, and to rule the Pale according to English ways; but the expense proved greater than Henry VII. could bear, and, with the bit of Poynings' laws in his mouth, the Earl of Kildare was sent back to govern the Pale in the time-honoured fashion.

Ireland was one of the questions upon which Wolsey and Henry VIII.

disagreed. The Cardinal's policy was to neglect Ireland and save expenses in that direction in order to act as the paymaster and to pose as the arbiter of Europe, with the result that on the eve of his fall, England's hold on Ireland was said to be weaker than it had been since the conquest.

When Wolsey was gone, Henry's imperialism found vent in Ireland as well as in other spheres, and it was stimulated by the appearance as early as 1528 of Spanish emissaries at the courts of Irish chiefs. But the brutal hatred which later conflicts engendered did not inspire the Irish efforts of Henry VIII. His warfare in Ireland was less ferocious than that which he waged on Scotland, or on the monks of England. If he confiscated the lands of Irish monasteries, he shared the spoils with Irish chiefs, and he also confiscated the lands of habitual absentees; and if he proscribed the Earl of Kildare, he gave earldoms to O'Neill, O'Brien, and MacWilliam. Whatever plans for the expropriation of the Irish clans were propounded to his ears, his own policy was not expropriation, but the conversion of Irish chiefs into Irish peers holding their lands of him as their king; and by the common testimony of English and Irish alike, the land enjoyed greater peace and prosperity at the end of his reign than it had within living memory. The destruction of papal jurisdiction was no grievance to the Irish, for pope after pope had prohibited their preferment and restricted Irish sees to men of English race. Even Edward VI.'s Acts of Uniformity, which were applied to Ireland without the authorisation of its Parliament, evoked no Irish rebellion; and so mild was religious conflict that there was no Irish martyr under Protestant Edward VI. or under Catholic Mary.

The permanent schism between the two races was, indeed, due neither to politics nor to religion, but to the expropriation of the Irish from their land. At the middle of the sixteenth century the antagonism between English and Irish was slighter than that between English and Scots, or that between Britons and Boers in 1900. Men can heal the wounds of the conquered, but those of the disinherited fester for ever, unless the race dies out or rest.i.tution is made. The Irish are the only white race that the English have evicted in modern times. They ate up the land piecemeal because there was no Irish State to be subdued by political conquest; because their arts of division, which failed against Scottish national feeling, succeeded against Irish septs; because the English conquest of Ireland was, in fact, a barbarian conquest achieved by a more or less civilised race centuries after the normal age of white barbarian conquests had closed. No conquered States pay ransom with the wholesale confiscation of the lands of private individuals; that is a price which is only exacted from the disorganised and the defenceless.

This process began with an Act of Philip and Mary, supported by the Roman Catholic Church, which was still the Church of the English rulers rather than that of the Irish people; and the Lord-Deputy Suss.e.x was required to permit the Primate to "exercise and use all manner of ecclesiastical censures against the disordered Irishry." Leix and Offaly, where the O'Conors and O'Mores had rebelled under Edward VI., were confiscated to the Crown and converted into King's and Queen's Counties. They were to be planted partly with English settlers and partly with such Irish as would abjure their native language, laws, and customs. But it took more than half a century to carry out the plantation, and eighteen rebellions broke out before the natives could be eradicated from the soil; even when the miserable remnants had been transplanted to Kerry, many of them straggled back to live as hirelings on lands that had been their own. Such was the new model on which Ireland was to be moulded into "civility and good government;" and in 1622 a Royal Commission p.r.o.nounced this plantation to have been well begun and prosperously continued.

Literally, it was a war of extermination, which spread into other parts of Ireland, and brought political and religious issues in its train. A year after the Plantation Act, but before Mary Tudor's death, Suss.e.x wrote that the native Irish were denying England's right to Ireland, and preparing to a.s.sist the French and Scots. The events of Elizabeth's reign taught them to look rather to Spain and to the Papacy, and by degrees Philip II., after whom King's County and its capital, Philipstown, had been named, became the patron of the Irish who suffered from the plantation. Religion, too, came into play. The first Jesuit missionaries had returned in despair from their labours on the unresponsive Irish soil. But expropriation left the peasants with little solace save religion, and their religion would not be that of their oppressor; to them Protestantism meant plantation.

The links between English Government and Roman Catholic hierarchy had been broken; and Catholicism, which has no natural affinities with nationalism, became the advent.i.tious ally of the Irish people in their resistance to the intruding imperialism of their English foes.

This coalition of hostile forces supplied the English Government with what it considered convincing arguments for persisting in its course; fresh Jesuit missions to Ireland, and intrigues between Irish chiefs and Spanish amba.s.sadors sped the policy of plantation by provoking rebellion in Munster. The way seemed to have been prepared by the death of 30,000 Irish from starvation in that province within six months, and the pick of England's aristocracy, Raleigh, Grenville, Herbert, Spenser, and Norris, undertook the work of civilisation. They performed it mostly by bailiffs, who let the land at rack-rents to its former proprietors; and the whole fabric vanished in the rebellion which flamed out in 1598 on the news of Tyrone's victories in Ulster. With the a.s.sistance of Spain, Tyrone shook English rule in Ireland almost to its foundations; but they remained firm, embedded in the sea. The Spanish squadrons were annihilated in Kinsale and Castlehaven Harbours, and Tyrone was granted terms of peace. Ireland was conquered as it never had been before, but England had not yet learnt how to pacify a conquered country. Four years later Tyrone and Tyrconnell fled to Spain; the claims of their natural successors were set aside; and their lands were divided among the Scottish and English founders of modern Ulster. Thousands of natives, however, remained as tenants on the land of which they had been robbed, "hoping," wrote the Lord-Deputy, "at one time or other to find an opportunity of cutting their landlords' throats." The unique character and the success of the Ulster plantation were due less to the original planters than to the Calvinistic Scots who found there a refuge from Laud and the Stuarts, and like the Pilgrim Fathers regarded themselves as a people chosen to root out the Amalekite and Philistine natives. Like the founders of New England, too, their relations with the natives were far worse than those of the southern planters in Ireland, and the southern planters in North America.

Thirty years later the natives of Ulster found their opportunity, and wreaked on their landlords, in the ma.s.sacre of 1641, vengeance for a generation of robbery and oppression. There ensued a decade of indescribable confusion, in which native Irish, Anglo-Irish, Ulster Scots, English parliamentarians, and Royalists fought one another, until Cromwell repaid the ma.s.sacre of 1641 by those of Drogheda and Wexford, and by a further process of expropriation called the Cromwellian Settlement. More than two-thirds of Irish land had now pa.s.sed into the hands of Englishmen; and although the Cromwellians had to disgorge a part of their spoil at the Restoration, it was estimated by Sir William Petty in 1664 that not more than one-third of the land belonged to the native Irish, including in that category the descendants of Anglo-Norman families; of the remainder, about half belonged to Elizabethan and Jacobean planters, and half to the Cromwellians. Nor was the process yet complete: the new expropriation was followed in 1689-90 by yet another attempt on the part of the Irish to recover their inheritance, and the failure of that attempt by further confiscation. At the beginning of the eighteenth century three-quarters of the land was owned by the English garrison, and the progress of the century was marked by fresh evictions. Political reasons had ceased, but economic causes supplied their place; and wide stretches of pasture were needed in order that the landlords might turn _their_ property to the most profitable grazing purposes. Only land that would not do for cattle was left to the Irish peasants; from the bogs there looked up, from the barren hills there looked down, the Roman Catholic disinherited upon the smiling meadows of their Protestant supplanters.

Upon this broadening basis of plantation was developed the Irish Parliament, a Parliament doomed from the first by the very conditions of its being to a sterile and troubled existence. Here and there from the days of Elizabeth a native name may be traced in the lists of its members, but it was almost exclusively the Parliament of a caste, the instrument of oppression. Ten counties only sent representatives to Elizabeth's Parliament of 1560; plantation increased the number to twenty-seven in 1585; and the tale was fairly complete when, after the plantation of Ulster, James I. next summoned a Parliament in 1613. But the "Irish interest" which struggled therein against the "English interest"

represented only the Anglo-Irish families, who had struck some roots in the soil and resented the dictation of English officials. The "native interest" had no voice in Parliament until O'Connell's triumph in 1828.

Hence the pitiful impotence of this Parliament, the emptiness of the sound and fury of its const.i.tutional debates. The beneficiaries of conquest could not in logic use the armoury of consent. The dependence of the colonists upon England placed their Parliament at the mercy of the English Government. They relied upon English force to expropriate the native Irish and to proscribe the Roman Catholic religion; and this reliance deprived them of moral and material grounds of resistance to the political, commercial, and industrial tyranny of their masters. The power which gave the planters their land could laugh at their const.i.tutional pretensions.

So the Dublin Parliament idly strove to emulate its exemplar at Westminster, and clamoured in vain for responsible government, for control of the Irish Executive. In spite of its Irish Parliament, Ireland has never been given the chance of governing itself.

But nothing could eradicate the "protest of the sea" against union with England, or the tendency of dwellers on Irish soil to become Irishmen. The Anglo-Normans had grown _Hibernis ipsis Hiberniores_ in the middle ages, and nothing short of the Tudor Conquest would have perpetuated English dominion; for even the gentry of the Pale rebelled in Elizabeth's reign against "cess," a form of arbitrary taxation compared in its const.i.tutional bearings with ship-money. In their turn the Tudor planters were gripped by the Irish soil, and resisted the rule of Strafford; and a fresh immigration of Cromwellian settlers alone enabled William of Orange to hold Ireland against Tyrconnell and James II. Even their descendants, too, became part of the "Irish interest" in the eighteenth century; and Pitt's Act of Union was England's final effort to circ.u.mvent the insinuating strength of Irish nature.

The more Ireland's Parliament succ.u.mbed to Irish ideas, the more it was flouted by England, and the greater the efforts made to secure in it the predominance of the English interest. England, in spite of itself, was creating an Irish nation. It had destroyed the system of septs which it could divide and play off against one another; by imposing on all a grinding tyranny it had crushed out local distinctions and family feuds, and had evoked a national spirit which could not be corrupted by bribes or disarmed by division. Poynings' Laws were the first attempt at the new methods of control which led to the Act of Union. They were soon found insufficient. Not only must Irish legislation be curbed by the English Privy Council; the English Parliament must also have the power of initiating and pa.s.sing laws for Ireland; and this practice grew up against which Molyneux vainly protested in 1694. In 1719 the practice was confirmed by an English statute, which transferred to the British House of Lords the appellate jurisdiction claimed by the Irish peers, and expressly a.s.serted the right of the British Parliament to legislate for Ireland and override Irish laws. Similarly the Irish electorate was more and more rigidly restricted to the English interest; members of both houses were, by an English statute of William and Mary, required to be Protestants, and in 1727, by an English statute of George II., Catholics, who numbered four-fifths of the Irish people, were excluded from the franchise.

The same fear of a nascent Irish nationalism was the real motive for the Irish penal code, which a.s.sumed its worst features under Anne, and was largely extended under George I. and George II., although no Jacobite rebellion in Ireland threatened those sovereigns, and the only provocation was the silent growth of Irish national feeling. That its cause was not religious is clear, for there was little religious persecution, and the penal code in Ireland was at its worst in the heyday of English lat.i.tudinarianism. The design was really to shut out the Irish by means of their religion from political and social influence. Hence their exclusion from the legal and teaching professions, from the university, from the army and the navy, from corporations, grand juries and vestries; hence the barbarous laws by which a son converted to Protestantism could reduce his Catholic father to a mere life-tenant, by which no Catholic could buy or bequeath land or inherit or receive it as a gift from Protestants, by which he could not act as a guardian, a constable, or a gamekeeper, possess a horse worth more than 5, or keep more than two apprentices. A Protestant husband who married a Catholic wife fell under this penal code; a Protestant wife who married a Catholic husband was deprived of her inheritance; and an Act of George II. declared that mixed marriages should be null, and that the priests who made them should be hanged. Some knowledge of Irish history is required in order to appreciate the virtuous indignation roused by the Pope's _Ne Temere_ decree. In the eighteenth century, wives were bribed by the law to turn against Catholic husbands, and children against their Catholic fathers; the fractious wife, the unnatural son had only to feign conversion in order to secure immunity and reward for undutiful conduct, and to deprive those whom they had injured of the management and disposal of their estates. Such was the system begotten by force and fraud through the breach of the Treaty of Limerick, when William III.'s generals, in order to pacify Ireland, guaranteed to the Irish people the enjoyment of their religious liberties. The arts which earlier English Governments had used to set chief against chief and clan against clan, were now employed on a more generous scale to set a dominant caste against the people they ruled, and to place at the absolute disposal of an alien garrison the lives, the liberties, the conscience, the property, and the domestic happiness of the nation it had robbed, maltreated, and betrayed.

Dominion, however, was not in the eighteenth century an end in itself, but a means for securing wealth. The age of commercial rivalry had set in during the latter half of the seventeenth century, and English traders, who had clamoured for the destruction of the Protestant Dutch, valued their hold over Catholic Ireland as a means for exploiting its markets and crushing its compet.i.tion. One after another of Ireland's infant industries was ma.s.sacred to satisfy English jealousy. Strafford's boasted encouragement of Irish linen was a blind to cover his campaign against Irish woollens. In the reign of Charles II. the importation of Irish cattle into England was prohibited because it lowered English rents, and Ireland's magnificent harbours were kept empty by its exclusion from the Navigation Acts, lest its incipient colonial trade should compete with England's. Deprived of their market for cattle, the Irish developed sheep-rearing and woollen manufactures; in 1699 the English Parliament accordingly prohibited the export of Irish manufactured wool to any country whatever. The hypocritical plea was anxiety to stimulate Irish linen, which the English Parliament thereupon practically excluded by a duty of 30 per cent. Having thus impoverished Ireland, Englishmen based their case against Irish claims to self-government on the thriftlessness of its people.

All cla.s.ses in Ireland, Catholics and Protestants, landlords and tenants, traders and farmers, were, however, involved in this common misfortune, which in its helpless position the Irish Parliament was powerless to avert; and in spite of the discord sown with malignant ingenuity between the English, the Irish, and the native interests, in spite of the perverted skill of viceroys and primates in maintaining the English faction by purchasing boroughs and corrupting parliaments, a common impulse began to pervade the carefully dislocated members of the Irish body politic. Scandals like "Wood's Halfpence" provoked a national protest in Swift's "Drapier's Letters"; a common feeling began to mitigate the ferocity of the penal code, and to inspire a united demand for Irish freedom from English oppression. The opportunity came with the War of American Independence. Formed to provide a defence which England could not afford, the Irish Volunteers demanded the price for their services, and England had to pay it in Grattan's Parliament. The history of Ireland's packed and bribed and muzzled Parliament affords no proof of Ireland's incapacity to rule itself; rather it shows the lengths of cruelty and violence to which English Parliaments, in spite of their political genius, of their "glorious Revolution" of 1688, of their vaunted love of civil and religious liberty, have been driven by fruitless efforts to govern a gifted people against its will. England sought, and inevitably failed, to rule Ireland on principles the reverse of those on which were based its own proud liberties and democratic Empire.

X.-Ireland, 1782 And 1912(123) BY LORD FITZMAURICE

The events of 1782 will always loom large in history, and the views of the members of the Rockingham Ministry on the proper relations to be established between Great Britain and Ireland, and the possible course of events had they met with a negotiator less intractable than Grattan, are subjects of more than merely historical interest.

In that ministry the Duke of Portland was Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, and he took with him Colonel Fitzpatrick as Chief Secretary; Mr. Fox was Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs; Lord Shelburne was Secretary of State for the Home and Colonial Departments, and as such was responsible for the government of Ireland.

The recognition of the claim of Ireland to be a distinct Kingdom, with a right to a separate Legislature of her own for all purposes, was the object of the movement of which Grattan was the leader. That this claim was founded on historic right, and had also on grounds of expediency to be accepted, was admitted by the Whig statesmen of the time in England. But they also saw that there were subjects which the geographical position of the two countries, their past history, and their industrial interests, rendered it desirable and indeed necessary should be recognized as common property. Ireland, in their opinion, was too near to be a separate State with safety to the external relations of Great Britain; she was too distant to be altogether incorporated with due regard to the efficient management of her own internal affairs.

The Ministry of Lord Rockingham came into office on March 27th, 1782. The moment was one of the gloomiest in English history. The nation had just been stunned by the news of the great surrender at York Town; it was an open question whether the intelligence of the surrender of Gibraltar might not be expected to follow; the power of the fleet to cope successfully with the combined navies of France, Spain, and Holland, was doubtful; an invasion was discussed in every household in the land as a serious possibility, and the resources of the country to meet it were disputed by competent judges. The new Prime Minister was himself a dying man, though the dangerous character of his illness was concealed; the two Secretaries of State were separated by mutual suspicions which were rapidly ripening into estrangement. Ireland was in the hands of the armed Volunteers, and England's difficulty was, as usual, Ireland's opportunity. "The liberties of America were inseparable from ours," Grattan said in 1799, referring to this period; "they were the only hope of Ireland, and the only refuge of the liberties of mankind."(124) The satisfaction of Ireland was therefore, in 1782, the first condition of the safety of England, and imposed itself on the Ministers as their most imperious duty.

The four grievances of Ireland were, in the words of Grattan, "a foreign legislature, a foreign judicature, a legislative Privy Council, and a perpetual army,"(125) and they were set forth in the Amendment to the Address carried by him in the Irish Parliament on April 17th.(126)

"My opinion," Fox wrote to Fitzpatrick, on April 28th, "is clear for giving them all they ask; but for giving it them so as to secure us from further demands, and at the same time to have some clear understanding with respect to what we are to expect from Ireland in return for the protection and a.s.sistance which she receives from those fleets which cost us such enormous sums and her nothing. If they mean really well to their country, they must wish some final adjustment which may preclude further disputes; if they mean nothing but consequence to themselves, they will insist upon these points being given up simply, without any reciprocal engagement; and as soon as this is done, begin to attack whatever is left, in order to continue the ferment of the country. In one word, what I want to guard against is Jonathan Wild's plan of seizing one part in order to dispute afterwards about the remainder."(127)

Lord Rockingham, writing in an exactly similar strain, said: "that the essential points of the Irish demands having first been conceded, it would be the duty of both countries to consider how finally to arrange, settle, and adjust all matters, whereby the union of power and strength, and mutual and reciprocal advantage, might be best permanently fixed;" and he spoke favourably of the appointment of "Commissioners" on both sides, to draw up the heads of an agreement between the two countries.(128) Of a similar character was the language of Lord Shelburne.

"If," he said, writing to the Duke of Portland, on the day following that on which Fox had addressed the Chief Secretary, "the ties by which the two kingdoms have been hitherto so closely united are to be loosened or cut asunder, is your Grace yet prepared to advise whether any, and if so what, subst.i.tutions are thought of for the preservation of the remaining connection between us? If by the proposed modification of Poynings' Law, so much power is taken from the two Privy Councils as they are now const.i.tuted, are we to look for any agreement in any new inst.i.tution of Council, which may answer the purpose of keeping up the appendancy and connection of Ireland to the Crown of Great Britain, and of preventing that confusion which must arise in all cases of common concern from two Parliaments with distinct and equal powers, and without any operating centre."(129)

On May 11th, Fox, in another letter to Fitzpatrick, explained his views; what he intended, he said, was to grant the "concession of 'internal legislation' as a preliminary, accompanied with a modification of Poyning's Law and a temporary Mutiny Bill;" and he hoped that, having made these concessions, "they might be able to treat of 'other matters' so amicably as to produce an arrangement that would preserve the connection between the two countries."(130) The other matters were the Final Judicature and the question of the contribution of Ireland to Imperial expenses. Shelburne suggested the formal negotiation of "the articles of a treaty," for as such, he said, he regarded his proposals;(131) and he urged a little judicious temporizing in the hope that the situation abroad might in the interval improve. But Grattan, recognizing the immense advantage which this situation gave him in negotiating with Great Britain, refused to entertain any idea of compromise. There was not only, he said, to be no "foreign legislature, but there were to be no commissioners" to negotiate a treaty,(132) and there was, above all, to be no delay in granting all the demands of Ireland. With this information before him, the Duke of Portland, who from the time of his arrival in Dublin had up till this moment encouraged both the Secretaries of State to believe that Grattan would come into their views, and might even make concessions(133) in regard to the final appeal in judicial matters, now informed them that the claims of Ireland on all the four princ.i.p.al demands must be conceded, and conceded at once, as the whole country was in a state of the wildest excitement, and was rapidly escaping control.(134) The concession of all the Irish demands was accordingly decided upon. The preliminary steps were taken on May 17th, by a resolution in both Houses of the British Parliament, for effecting the repeal of the 6th of Geo. I., c. 5, the Act by which the right of the British Parliament to legislate for Ireland was declared; and the necessary Bill was then introduced and rapidly pa.s.sed into law.

At the same time, however, another resolution was adopted in the following terms:

"That it is the opinion of this House that it is indispensable to the interest and happiness of both kingdoms that the connection between them should be established by mutual consent upon a solid and permanent footing; and that an humble address be presented to His Majesty, that His Majesty will be graciously pleased to take such measures as His Majesty in his royal wisdom shall think most conducive to that end."

On these resolutions Fox commented as follows:

"Ireland," he said, "would have no reason to complain; the terms acceded to by England were proposed by herself, and all her wishes would now be gratified in the way which she herself liked best.

But as it was possible that if nothing more was to be done than what he had stated to be his intention, Ireland might, perhaps, think of fresh grievances and rise yearly in her demands, it was fit and proper that something should be done towards establishing on a firm and solid basis the future connection of the two kingdoms. But that was not to be proposed by him here in Parliament: it would be the duty of the Crown to look to that; the business might be first begun by His Majesty's servants in Ireland, and if afterwards it should be necessary to enter into a treaty, Commissioners might be sent from the British Parliament or from the Crown, to enter upon it and bring the negotiation to a happy issue, by giving mutual satisfaction to both countries, and establishing a treaty which should be sanctified by the most solemn forms of the Const.i.tution of both countries."(135)

For the moment, however, the hope of commencing negotiations with these objects had to be abandoned, and when, on May 27th, the Royal Message conveying the intention of His Majesty to concede all the demands of the Irish Parliament was delivered in Dublin, the Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant announced that no measures were then intended to be grounded on the second English resolution of May 17th. For a time, however, the Duke of Portland continued to hope against hope, and to nourish the vain expectations with which from the beginning he had buoyed himself up, and had misled his colleagues. During the month of June he allowed himself to be persuaded by Mr. Ogilvy, the husband of the d.u.c.h.ess of Leinster, and stepfather to Lord Edward Fitzgerald, that Grattan was not really so intractable as he seemed to be, and in a secret and confidential despatch, written on June 6th, he urged that the Irish Parliament should not be at once prorogued, in order to give time for a possible arrangement in regard to common affairs. But on June 22nd he was reluctantly compelled to express his disappointment and mortification at finding that his hopes had proved entirely fallacious, and that Mr. Ogilvy was a person not to be relied upon. The prorogation of the Irish Parliament was accordingly suffered to take place on July 27th, and here the matter ended.(136) "Thus," exclaimed Grattan to his applauding audience-"thus have you sealed a treaty with Great Britain; on her side the restoration of the final judicature; the extinction of her legislative claim; of her Privy Council; of her perpetual Mutiny Bill; the repeal of the Act of legislative supremacy; on your side satisfaction! And thus are the two nations compacted for ever in freedom and peace."(137)

Subsequently at the time of the Union a controversy arose in regard to these events. Mr. Pitt a.s.serted that the adjustment of 1782 was not considered by the British Ministers by whom it was effected as final in its character; but that, on the contrary, they were fully convinced of the necessity of adopting some further measures to strengthen the connection between the two countries, and he produced the correspondence which had pa.s.sed in 1782-extracts from which have been given above-as a reply to the lame attempt of General Fitzpatrick, who was still in Parliament, to deny that any such negotiation had been desired by the members of Lord Rockingham's Ministry. General Fitzpatrick had declined to admit more than that the Duke of Portland, during his residence in Ireland, might have entertained a vague idea of some farther arrangement for consolidating the connection with Ireland, but had soon given it up; and Grattan in the Irish Parliament openly accused Lord Shelburne and the Duke of having concealed their views from their colleagues, and said that, above all, Mr.

Fox knew nothing of the project contained in the despatch of June 6th.(138) The truth is, that the Rockingham Ministry was in June a house divided against itself, owing to differences of opinion as to the peace negotiation with France and the United States, and was almost in the actual throes of dissolution. From a letter written by Fox in 1799 to Fitzpatrick, it certainly appears that the so-called "Ogilvy" negotiation never was communicated to him.(139) But the a.s.sertion of Mr. Pitt went far beyond the Ogilvy negotiation-if negotiation it can be called. What Mr.

Pitt a.s.serted was, not that the correspondence proved that in June, 1782, the Ministers were actually intending to enter on any such negotiation, but that the Prime Minister, the Lord-Lieutenant, and both Secretaries of State, from the very commencement of the correspondence in April, considered the arrangement insisted on by Grattan deficient, and lacking in finality, and were only prevented by the stress of adverse circ.u.mstances and the impracticable character of the Irish leaders, from trying to negotiate an agreement, by which Ireland should acknowledge that "the superintending power and supremacy were where Nature had placed them"-viz., in the Government of Great Britain.

What, then, was the view which the British Ministers in 1782 took of the relations which it was desirable to establish between Great Britain and Ireland-the relations which, had events been more favourable, they would have established? Evidently it was not a legislative union, though they wished to retain the final judicial appeal in London. The object of the Duke of Portland, as he explained in the secret despatch of June 6th, was that an Act of Parliament should be pa.s.sed by the Legislatures of the respective kingdoms, by which "the superintending power and supremacy" of Great Britain in all matters of State and general commerce would be virtually and effectively acknowledged; by which also a share of the expense in carrying on a defensive or offensive war, either in support of our dominions or those of our allies, should be borne by Ireland in proportion to the state of her abilities; and that she should adopt every such regulation as might be judged necessary by Great Britain for the better ordering and securing her trade and commerce with foreign nations, or her own colonies and dependencies; consideration being duly had to the circ.u.mstances of Great Britain. "This plan," Lord Shelburne explained during the debates of 1799, "had nothing to do with a legislative union."(140) "It related," he said, "to what might be called the expense of the system which was carried on under the two Parliaments, in Army, Navy, commerce and finance, and in the great establishments of Church and State; and it did not imply 'bringing the two Parliaments together.' "(141)

From these pa.s.sages it appears that what the Whig statesmen aimed at in 1782 was to obtain, in the first place, a clear acknowledgment of the Imperial supremacy, or, as they would have said in the language of the time, of the power of Great Britain in "external" as distinct from "internal" legislation; and, in the next place, a contribution from Ireland to the expenses of external administration and policy: the Fleet, the Army, and the diplomatic and commercial establishments. "I humbly conceive," said Burke, who was a member of the Rockingham Government, and the trusted adviser of his official chief, "that the whole of the superior, and what I should call Imperial politics, ought to have its residence here [in London]; and that Ireland, locally, civilly and commercially independent, ought politically to look up to Great Britain in all matters of peace or war, and, in a word, with her to live and die. At bottom, Ireland has no other choice-I mean no other national choice."(142)

Very different were the views of the Irish Parliamentary leaders: not of Grattan only, but of his rival, Flood, as can be gathered from the perusal of the debates in the Irish Parliament, which culminated in the famous struggle between Flood and Grattan on October 28th, 1782, when Flood, having denounced Grattan as a "mendicant patriot," and Grattan having retorted by likening his rival "to a bird of prey with an evil aspect and a sepulchral note," the two leaders left the House in order to solve their differences by a duel, and were only prevented meeting in deadly combat by the interposition of the Speaker, who wisely issued his warrant to apprehend them both.