Under these circumstances, Castlereagh went over to England in the autumn of 1799, by the direction of the Lord Lieutenant, to lay the case before Pitt and his colleagues; and he has himself, in a most important letter, described the result of his mission. ‘I stated,’ he says, ‘that we had a majority in Parliament, composed of very doubtful materials: that the Protestant body was divided on the question [of the Union], with the disadvantage of Dublin and the Orange societies against us; and that the Catholics were holding back, under a doubt whether the Union would facilitate or impede their object. I stated it as the opinion of the Irish Government, that, circumstanced as the parliamentary interests and the Protestant feelings then were, the measure could not be carried if the Catholics were embarked in an active opposition to it, and that their resistance would be unanimous and zealous if they had reason to suppose that the sentiments of Ministers would remain unchanged in respect to their exclusion, while the measure of Union in itself might give them additional means of disappointing their hopes.
‘I stated that several attempts had been made by leading Catholics to bring Government to an explanation, which had, of course, been evaded, and that the body, thus left to their own speculations in respect to the future influence of the Union upon their cause, were, with some exceptions, either neutral, or actual opponents—the former entertaining hopes, but not inclining to support decidedly without some encouragement from Government; the latter entirely hostile, from a persuasion that it would so strengthen the Protestant interest, as to perpetuate their exclusion.
‘I represented that the friends of Government, by flattering the hopes of the Catholics, had produced a favourable impression in Cork, Tipperary, and Galway; but that, in proportion as his Excellency had felt the advantage of this popular support, he was anxious to be ascertained, in availing himself of the assistance which he knew was alone given in contemplation of its being auxiliary to their own views, that he was not involving Government in future difficulties with that body, by exposing them to a charge of duplicity, and he was peculiarly desirous of being secure against such a risk before he personally encouraged the Catholics to come forward and to afford him that assistance which he felt to be so important to the success of the measure.
‘In consequence of this representation, the Cabinet took the measure into their consideration; and having been directed to attend the meeting, I was charged to convey to Lord Cornwallis the result…. Accordingly, I communicated to Lord Cornwallis, that the opinion of the Cabinet was favourable to the principle of the measure; that some doubt was entertained as to the possibility of admitting Catholics into some of the higher offices , and that Ministers apprehended considerable repugnance to the measure in many quarters, and particularly in the highest , but that, as far as the sentiments of the Cabinet were concerned, his Excellency need not hesitate in calling forth the Catholic support, in whatever degree he found it practicable to obtain it…. I certainly did not then hear any direct objection stated against the principle of the measure, by any one of the Ministers then present. You will, I have no doubt, recollect, that so far from any serious hesitation being entertained in respect to the principle, it was even discussed whether an immediate declaration to the Catholics would not be advisable, and whether an assurance should not be distinctly given them, in the event of the Union being accomplished, of their objects being submitted, with the countenance of Government, to the United Parliament, upon a peace. This idea was laid aside, principally upon a consideration that such a declaration might alienate the Protestants in both countries from the Union, in a greater degree than it was calculated to assist the measure through the Catholics, and accordingly the instructions which I was directed to convey to Lord Cornwallis were to the following effect: that his Excellency was fully warranted in soliciting every support the Catholics could afford; that he need not apprehend, as far as the sentiments of the Cabinet were concerned, being involved in the difficulty with that body which he seemed to apprehend; that it was not thought expedient at that time, to give any direct assurance to the Catholics, but that, should circumstances so far alter as to induce his Excellency to consider such an explanation necessary, he was at liberty to state the grounds on which his opinion was formed, for the consideration of the Cabinet.
‘In consequence of this communication, the Irish Government omitted no exertion to call forth the Catholics in favour of the Union. Their efforts were very generally successful, and the advantage derived from them was highly useful, particularly in depriving the Opposition of the means they otherwise would have had in the southern and western counties, of making an impression on the county members. His Excellency was enabled to accomplish his purpose without giving the Catholics any direct assurance of being gratified, and throughout the contest earnestly avoided being driven to such an expedient, as he considered a gratuitous concession after the measure as infinitely more consistent with the character of Government.’ 1
It was mainly by these assurances of the intentions of the English Cabinet, that the Catholics were restrained from throwing themselves heartily and as a body into the anti-Unionist movement in the spring of 1800, and that the overtures of Foster's party for an alliance were defeated. The transcendent importance of the result appears clearly from Lord Castlereagh's words, and it is amply confirmed by all the confidential correspondence of the Government. ‘All depends on the tone of the country,’ wrote Cooke; ‘if we can keep that right, I believe all may do well.’ The Opposition, he said, had failed ‘in exciting popular resistance.’ ‘Our adversaries … know that any attempt to move Government without a general cry of popular discontent is folly.’ ‘If the public out of doors can be kept quiet, I think we may now do well.’ ‘The Opposition still hope to inflame the country, but they have not effected their purpose yet.’ 1 The movement against the Union in this year was far more serious and extensive than any which the Government had been able to obtain in its favour, and many Catholics joined with the Protestants, but the great Catholic body did not throw themselves into it, and the Union was in consequence carried. ‘The Catholics,’ Cornwallis afterwards wrote, ‘in the late political contest on the measure of Union … certainly had it in their power to have frustrated the views of Government, and throw the country into the utmost confusion.’ 2
In spite of the reservations that had been made, their leaders considered that their cause was won when the Lord Lieutenant was authorised to ask their assistance, on the ground that the English Cabinet was in favour of their emancipation in an Imperial Parliament. They naturally inferred that the Ministers had unanimously resolved to carry it, and they made no question of their power. They knew that the existing Government had ruled England most absolutely for seventeen years; that the personal authority of Pitt had hardly been equalled by Walpole, and had been approached by no later Minister; that the Opposition in both Houses had sunk into insignificance. Difficulties on the part of the King, and a possible postponement of their triumph, had no doubt been hinted at, but the Catholic leaders had every reason to believe that Pitt could carry his policy, and they had no reason to believe the royal objections to be insuperable. When the King prorogued the British Parliament immediately after the Union, he described himself as ‘persuaded that nothing could so effectually contribute to extend to his Irish subjects the full participation of the blessings derived from the British Constitution,’ as the great measure which had been carried. What, it was asked, could such language mean, but that the mass of the Irish people were speedily to be admitted to that participation, by the removal of the one disqualification that excluded them from it?
It is well known how their hopes were disappointed, and the story is both a melancholy and a shameful one. Though the Catholic leaders probably knew that they had to encounter an indisposition on the part of the King, they did not know that he had already told his Ministers that he would consider his consent to Catholic emancipation a breach of his coronation oath, and that, on the appointment of Lord Cornwallis, he had expressly written to Pitt, ‘Lord Cornwallis must clearly understand that no indulgence can be granted to the Catholics farther than has been, I am afraid unadvisedly, done, in former sessions.’ 1 They did not know that the overtures that had been made to them were made entirely without the knowledge of the King, without any attempt to sound his disposition or to mitigate his hostility, without any resolution on the part of Pitt to make Catholic emancipation an indispensable condition of his continuing in office, without even any real unanimity in the Cabinet. At the time, indeed, when the Union was not yet carried, and when its success was very doubtful, Castlereagh had mentioned it to the Cabinet, and no one had objected; but when the Union had been safely accomplished, and Pitt, in the September of 1800, brought the Catholic question formally before his colleagues, the Chancellor, Lord Loughborough, for the first time struck a discordant note, objecting to any favour being granted to the Catholics except a commutation of tithes.
He had been staying at Weymouth with the King, and had probably convinced himself that the King's mind was as hostile as ever to the measure. He had long been notoriously aspiring to the position of ‘King's friend,’ which Thurlow had once held, and he had once before taken a very significant course on the question which was now pending. In 1795, when the King had consulted some leading lawyers about the compatibility of Catholic emancipation and the coronation oath, Lord Kenyon and Sir John Scott had assured the King that the alteration of the Test Act was perfectly compatible with the coronation oath; but Lord Loughborough, without definitely committing himself to the opposite opinion, had separated himself from the other lawyers, and answered much more doubtfully. 2 He now, without the knowledge of his colleagues, informed the King of the intentions of the Cabinet, drew up a paper of arguments against the proposed measure, and with the anti-Catholic party, of which his relative Lord Auckland was the chief, proceeded to influence the mind of the King still more against Pitt. The Archbishops of Canterbury and of Armagh, and the Bishop of London, were all made use of to confirm the King in his opposition.
A grave embarrassment was thus thrown in the path of the Government. In the judgment of Lord Malmesbury, ‘if Pitt had been provident enough to prepare the King's mind gradually, and to prove to him that the test proposed was as binding as the present oath, no difficulty could have arisen.’ If, on the other hand, as Pitt apparently desired, no communication had been made to the King until Catholic emancipation, accompanied with the necessary oath for the security of the Established Church, and with matured plans for the payment of the priests, and the commutation of tithes, could have been presented to him as the deliberate and unanimous policy of his Cabinet, there is little doubt that he must have yielded. But a cabal had been raised, while the question was still unsettled, and the King at once determined upon his course. At a levee which was held on January 28, he expressed to Dundas, in the hearing of a number of gentlemen who stood by, his vehement indignation at hearing of the proposal which Lord Castlereagh had brought over from Ireland, and declared in a loud tone, that it was ‘the most Jacobinical thing’ he had ever heard of, and that he would reckon any man ‘his personal enemy’ who proposed any such measure. 1 He wrote in the same strain and with no less vehemence to the Speaker, Addington, urging him to persuade Pitt not even to mention the subject. 2
The knowledge of the royal sentiments at once gave activity to the whole party of Auckland and Westmorland, and made an evident impression on the Cabinet. Lord Loughborough was no longer isolated. The Duke of Portland, Lord Liverpool, and even Lord Chatham, the brother of Pitt, began to veer towards the Opposition; and when Pitt wrote to the King on January 81, urging the admission of the Catholics and Dissenters to offices, and of the Catholics to Parliament (from which Dissenters were not excluded), subject to certain specified tests for the purpose of guarding against any danger to the Established Church, he was only able to describe this policy as ‘what appeared to be the prevailing sentiments of the majority of the Cabinet.’ He expatiated in the same letter on the nature and force of the test which he proposed, and he added that the measure should be accompanied by one for ‘gradually attaching the popish clergy to the Government, and for this purpose making them dependent for a part of their provision (under proper regulations) on the State, and by also subjecting them to superintendence and control.’ He added, too, that he desired a political pledge to be exacted ‘from the preachers of all Catholic or Dissenting congregations, and from the teachers of schools of every denomination.’ Such a policy, Pitt said, afforded ‘the best chance of giving full effect to the great object of the Union, that of tranquillising Ireland and attaching it to this country.’ ‘This opinion’ was ‘unalterably fixed in his mind, and must ultimately guide his political conduct,’ and he intimated that if not permitted to carry it into effect he must sooner or later resign. 1
The King at once answered, that his coronation oath prevented him from even discussing ‘any proposition tending to destroy the groundwork of our happy Constitution, and much more so that now mentioned by Mr. Pitt, which is no less than the complete overthrow of the whole fabric.’ He reminded Dundas, that he had expressed similar opinions during the vice-royalty of Lord Westmorland, and during that of Lord Fitzwilliam. He complained bitterly that he had not been treated by his Ministers with proper confidence, and he proceeded to give his own view of the merits and probable effects of the Union, in language which contrasts most curiously with that which during two eventful years his Ministers had been using in Ireland. ‘My inclination to an Union with Ireland,’ he said, ‘was principally founded on a trust that the uniting the Established Churches of the two kingdoms would for ever shut the door to any further measures with respect to the Roman Catholics.’ If Pitt would be content never to mention the subject, the King said he would preserve an equal silence. 2
It was becoming evident how gravely the Ministers had erred in failing to ascertain and modify the opinions of the King before they raised the question of the Union, and before they involved themselves in negotiations with the Catholics. As, however, the situation stood, it was, as it seems to me, the plain duty of Pitt at all hazards to persevere. It would be scarcely possible to exaggerate the political importance of his decision, for the success of the Union and the future loyalty of the Catholics of Ireland depended mainly upon his conduct; and beside the question of policy, there was a plain question of honour. After the negotiations that had been entered into with the Catholics, after the services that had been asked and obtained from them, and the hopes which had been authoritatively held out to them in order to obtain those services, Pitt could not without grave dishonour suffer them to be in a worse, because a more powerless position, than before the Union, or abandon their claims to a distant future, or support a Ministry which was formed in hostility to them.
There appears to me but little doubt that he could have carried his policy. It was utterly impossible, in the existing state of England, of the Continent, and of Parliament, that any Ministry could have subsisted, to which he was seriously opposed. The impossibility became the more evident, from the fact that the regular Opposition, under Fox and Grey, were openly in favour of Catholic emancipation. If he had persevered he must have triumphed, and the King must ultimately have submitted, as he did on several other occasions when his feelings were deeply affected, and in spite of his most vehement and unqualified protests. He had done so when he suffered Bute to be driven from his Government; when he acknowledged the independence of America; when he dismissed Thurlow; when he permitted Lord Malmesbury to negotiate with France; when he acquiesced in the recall of the Duke of York from the Netherlands; and he afterwards did so when he found it necessary to admit Fox into his councils. Even on his own principles, the question was not one excluding argument or compromise. He declared that it would be a breach of the coronation oath to assent to the abolition of the sacramental test, because it was the great bulwark of the Established Church, which he had sworn to defend. 1 But it was part of the scheme of Pitt to frame a new political test, including an explicit oath of fidelity to the established Constitution both in Church and State, and to impose it not only on all members of Parliament, and holders of State and corporation offices, but also on all ministers of religion and teachers of schools. 2 A test so wide and so stringent would surely be an adequate substitute for that which it was proposed to abolish, and it is not likely that, when the necessity arose, the conscience of the King would have been found inflexible. But a firm resolution on the part of Pitt to carry his policy was an indispensable condition.
He did indeed repeat his offer of resignation, declaring it to be based on his ‘unalterable sense of the line which public duty required of him.’ 3 and he afterwards defended his resignation in Parliament, on the ground that he and his colleagues deemed it equally ‘inconsistent with their duty and their honour’ to continue in office when they were not allowed to propose with the authority of Government, a measure which they deemed the proper sequel of the Union. 4 Dundas, Grenville, Windham, Cornwallis, and Castlereagh took the same course, and they were accompanied by a few men in minor places, among whom Canning was the most conspicuous. But Pitt only accepted the necessity of resigning with extreme reluctance, after much discussion, and probably in a large degree under the pressure of Grenville and Canning, and it was at once seen that, if he at present refused to lead an anti-Catholic ministry, he was at least perfectly prepared not only to support, but in a large measure to construct one. 5 The King applied to the Speaker Addington, as one who shared his opinions on the Catholic question, 6 and Addington at once applied to Pitt. On the strenuous recommendation, on the earnest entreaty of Pitt, Addington accepted the task, and Pitt not only promised his full parliamentary support, but also exerted all his influence to induce the great body of his own colleagues to continue at their posts. The resignation even of Canning took place contrary to Pitt's expressed desire. His own brother, Lord Chatham, was one of those who remained in office. 1
These proceedings were looked on in different quarters in very different ways. Wilberforce pronounced the conduct of Pitt to be ‘most magnanimous and patriotic' 2 Abbot, who succeeded Castlereagh as Irish Secretary, considered it mysterious that Pitt should have resigned at all upon a question on which he was not pledged, and which was not pressing; while many of Pitt's friends pronounced his resignation to be a grievous error, and most damaging to the public weal. 3 The Opposition on their side declared the whole transaction to be a mere juggle. It was perfectly evident, they maintained, that Addington would never have accepted office without a secret understanding with Pitt, and it was equally evident that he could only continue in it by Pitt's support. Pitt, they said, having entangled himself in an embarrassing engagement to the Catholics, was endeavouring to extricate himself by going through the form of resigning power into the hands of a dependant, from whom he could take it when he pleased. He did not mean to act fairly to the Catholics, or to press their cause with all his force, but he intended after a mock battle to come back again, and leave them in the lurch. By exerting himself to form an anti-Catholic Ministry, by assisting the adversaries of concession to adjourn the contest and consolidate their strength, he was preparing for himself a pretext for ultimately abandoning the question, while the inevitable recall which must soon follow his resignation would make him absolute in the Cabinet. 1 It was also a very general belief, that the Catholic question was not the real, not the main, or at least not the only reason for the resignation. It had become necessary to negotiate once more for peace, and any other minister was likely to do so with more chance of success and with less personal humiliation than Pitt. For his own party interest, it was asked, what could be more advantageous than to quit office during these negotiations, and to resume it when they were terminated? It may at once be said, that there is no evidence whatever in the confidential letters of Pitt and of his colleagues, that this last consideration was ever discussed, or stated by them as a reason for the resignation, though it was too obvious to have escaped the notice of Pitt, and may very probably have contributed to dispel his hesitation. That it was not, however, his main motive, is proved decisively by a single fact. He was perfectly ready to resume office before the peace negotiations had been concluded. 2
We must now return to affairs in Ireland. The strange indifference to the question of the Union, which appears to have prevailed there in the last stages of its discussion, still continued. There were, it is true, in many parts of the country, dangerous bodies of banditti, and there was much systematic anarchy. It was greatly feared that a French invasion would be widely welcomed, and one of the first acts of the Imperial Parliament was to continue both martial law and the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, but it was not believed that the disturbances had any connection with the Union. ‘The quiet of the country at large on the subject,’ wrote Cornwallis, immediately after the measure had passed,’ and the almost good-humoured indifference with which it is viewed in the metropolis, where every species of outrageous opposition was to be expected, consoles us for the painful audiences we are obliged to give patiently to our discontented and insatiable supporters. 1 After spending nearly a month in the autumn, in travelling through the South of Ireland, he wrote, ‘I found no trace of ill humour with respect to the Union, and with the exception only of the county of Limerick, the whole country through which I passed was as perfectly tranquil as any part of Britain.’ 2 He at the same time uniformly contended that the Union would do little or no good unless it were speedily followed by a Catholic Relief Bill. He predicted that if his successor threw himself into the hands of the Orange party, ‘no advantage would be derived from the Union;’ that if Lord Clare and his friends had their way at this critical time, they would ruin British government in Ireland, and drive the country speedily into rebellion. 3 He believed that the confidence which the Catholics placed in his own disposition and intentions towards them, had contributed very largely to the present peace of Ireland and to the passing of the Union, and he declared that he could not, in consideration of his own character or of the public safety, leave them as he found them. 4
It is remarkable, however, how soon, in spite of the assurances he had been authorised to give to the Catholics, he began to distrust the disposition, or at least the determination of the Cabinet. In October 1800, he wrote to a very intimate friend, ‘I cannot help entertaining considerable apprehensions that our Cabinet will not have the firmness to adopt such measures as will render the Union an efficient advantage to the Empire. Those things which if now liberally granted might make the Irish a loyal people, will be of little avail when they are extorted on a future day. I do not, however, despair.’ He was much provoked at receiving, both from the King and from the Duke of Portland, letters urging him to make immediate arrangements for the consolidation of the Ordnance establishments in the two countries. It was a measure of centralisation, and a measure for the reduction of patronage, which seemed in itself very advisable, but it was certain to be unpopular, and he strongly urged that, ‘instead of standing alone as the first feature of the Union, it might be brought forward some months hence, accompanied by other arrangements of a more pleasing and palatable nature.’ Could it have been intended ‘to have run the hazard of agitating this island to a degree of madness, to have taken a step which everybody for the last century would have thought likely to produce a civil war—for what? To consolidate the two Ordnance establishments, which might have been done eight or nine years ago with the greatest ease, if the Duke of Richmond had been in the smallest degree accommodating?’ ‘Lord Castlereagh,’ he added, ‘will return soon to England, to try to persuade the Ministers to adopt manfully the only measure which can ever make the mass of the people of Ireland good subjects; but I suspect that there is too much apprehension of giving offence in a certain quarter.’ ‘My only apprehensions,’ he wrote in December, ‘are from the K—, from the cabal of the late Lord Lieutenant, and from the inferior Cabinet on Irish affairs, consisting of Lords Hobart, Auckland, &c., and the timidity of Ministers.’ 1
The letters of Lord Castlereagh from England in the last days of the year added much to his anxiety. ‘Believing,’ Cornwallis wrote, ‘as I do, that this great work may now be effected, and apprehending that if the opportunity is lost, it can never be regained, you … will not wonder at the anxiety that I suffer. Lord Loughborough, I find, is our most active and formidable opponent.’ ‘Whatever his opinion may be of the practicability of concession, he will in a short time, or I am much mistaken, find it still more impracticable to resist.’ ‘With almost all Europe leagued against us, we cannot long exist as a divided nation.’ 1
The dispute in England speedily developed, but at first the letters of Cornwallis and his colleagues in Ireland were sanguine about the issue. ‘If Mr. Pitt is firm, he will meet with no difficulty, and the misfortunes of the present times are much in his favour towards carrying this point, on the same grounds that the rebellion assisted the Union.’ ‘ Our Chancellor will bully and talk big, but he is too unpopular here to venture to quarrel with Administration.’ 2 ‘Everything depends on the firmness of the Cabinet. There is no Opposition to be appealed to, for they are a hundred times deeper committed upon the point in question than Mr. Pitt…. The difficulties of the times carried the Union; they will carry the present question.’ 3 All the signs seemed to show that Ireland was acquiescing in the Union, and that prompt Catholic concession would insure its success. ‘Notwithstanding the scarcity,’ wrote Cornwallis, ‘I hear nowhere of any symptoms of ill humour, and the Catholic question will operate so forcibly through the whole country, that I do not think if the French come, they will meet with many friends. Nobody would have believed three years ago that Union, Catholic emancipation, and the restoration of perfect tranquillity could have taken place in so short a time.’ ‘The calm, however, cannot be expected to last, if the evil genius of Britain should induce the Cabinet to continue the proscription of the Catholics. They are quiet now, because they feel confident of success. What a reverse must we not apprehend from their unexpected disappointment!' 4
In spite of the attitude of Lord Clare, and the violence of the Orangemen, no serious opposition was apprehended from the Irish Protestants. ‘You may be assured,’ wrote Cornwallis in December, ‘that all the most powerful opposers of the measure in favour of the Catholics, would join in giving their approbation as soon as it is effected.’ 5 Cooke, who was probably better acquainted than any other member of the Government with the political forces in Ireland, wrote two months later, ‘I am persuaded, from everything that I can collect, that the Protestant mind is made up to acquiesce in concession to the Catholics.’ ‘I can find no man of common sense and temper who does not think the concession may be safely made. In short, as far as I can learn, the public mind was made up to concession. I except Sir R. Musgrave, Duigenan, Giffard, and a few Orangemen.’ He believed that sixty-four out of the hundred Irish members in the Imperial Parliament, would vote in favour of the Catholics, though he feared that if the banner of Protestantism were displayed, as it had been displayed in 1792, ‘the Orange spirit’ might still ‘show itself in an almost universal blaze.’ 1 William Elliot was even more sanguine than Cooke about the dispositions in Ireland. Ninety-five out of a hundred Irish members, he believed, would have voted for the Catholics. 2
Under these circumstances, it may easily be conceived with what alarm, with what absolute consternation, the Irish Government received the news of the ministerial crisis which placed Addington in power. It was not simply that a measure which they believed vitally necessary to the peace of Ireland, and to the success of the Union, was defeated; it was that Pitt, so far from exerting his enormous power to force this measure through Parliament, was actually engaged in assisting Addington in the construction of an anti-Catholic Ministry. Castlereagh was then in England, and by the instruction, and under the direct superintendence of Pitt, he wrote to Cornwallis to soften the blow. The King, he said, was inexorably opposed to Catholic relief, and would not give way. The measure would have no chance of success in the Lords; even if it were carried through both Houses, the King would at all hazards refuse his assent; and even if he were compelled to yield, the measure would be so opposed as to lose all its grace. Under these circumstances, Pitt had determined not to press it, but he desired the Lord Lieutenant to represent to the Catholics that an insurmountable obstacle had arisen to the King's Ministers bringing forward the measure while in office; ‘that their attachment to the question was such that they felt it impossible to continue in administration under the impossibility of proposing it with the necessary concurrence, and that they retired from the King's service, considering this line of conduct as most likely to contribute to the ultimate success of the measure.’ Much was added about ‘the zealous support’ that the Catholics might expect from the outgoing Ministers, and especially from Pitt, but they were warned that any unconstitutional conduct, or any attempt to force the question, would be repressed, and that no specific time could be stated for the attainment of their objects. It was to be the part of the Lord Lieutenant to do all in his power to prevent any demonstration by the Catholics. 1
Cornwallis undertook to do what he could, but he at the same time declared that nothing would induce him to ‘linger for any length of time in office under the administration of men who have come into power for the sole purpose of defeating a measure which he considered to be absolutely necessary for the preservation of the Empire,’ and he complained bitterly that, when Catholic emancipation was acquiesced in by all the most important parties and classes in Ireland, and had become generally recognised as indispensably necessary for the safety of the country, a hostile influence arising in England had again defeated it. 2 Castlereagh and Cooke concurred with Cornwallis, both in the course which he adopted, and in the sentiments he expressed. ‘If Pitt does not so act as to make it demonstrative that he is really serious on the Catholic question,’ wrote Cooke, ‘his resignation will be attributed to other causes.’ He believed, however, that the eclipse of the question must be very brief. ‘To suppose that men who at such a crisis had given up their situations upon a principle of honour, because they could not bring forward the measures they thought necessary for the preservation of the Empire—I say, to suppose that they could again go back as Ministers without those measures being conceded, is absurd. It is supposing them destitute of sense, principle, integrity, honour, and even self-interest…. I think all still must come right…. The superiority of Mr. Pitt is so strongly felt, that no ministry will like to act without him. You can hardly form an idea how the public mind had come round to allow of concession to the Catholics.’ 1
Cornwallis was at this time on very confidential terms with the Catholic leaders, and acting upon his instructions, he succeeded in so far pacifying them, and convincing them of the good intentions of Pitt, that no addresses or demonstrations took place to disturb the Government. He attained this object chiefly by two papers, which he gave to Archbishop Troy and Lord Fingall to be circulated among the leading Catholics in the different parts of Ireland. The first paper was extracted almost verbally from the letter which Castlereagh had written under the supervision of Pitt. 2 It stated that the outgoing Ministers had resigned office because they considered this line of conduct most likely to contribute to the ultimate success of the Catholic cause; it urged the Catholics ‘prudently to consider their prospects as arising from the persons who now espouse their interests, and compare them with those which they could look to from any other quarter;’ and it continued, ‘They may with confidence rely on the zealous support of all those who retire, and of many who remain in office, when it can be given with a prospect of success. They may be assured that Mr. Pitt will do his utmost to establish their cause in the public favour, and prepare the way for their finally attaining their objects; and the Catholics will feel that as Mr. Pitt could not concur in a hopeless attempt to force it now, that he must at all times repress with the same decision, as if he held an adverse opinion, any unconstitutional conduct in the Catholic body.’ On these grounds the Catholics were urgently implored to abstain from doing anything which could give a handle to the opposers of their wishes.
The second paper expressed Cornwallis's own sentiments. It impressed on the Catholics how injurious it would be to their cause, if they took part in any agitation or made any association with men of Jacobinical principles, and thus forfeited the support’ of those who had sacrificed their own situations in their cause.’ ‘The Catholics,’ it continued, ‘should be sensible of the benefit they possess by having so many characters of eminence pledged not to embark in the service of Government, except on the terms of the Catholic privileges being obtained.’ 1
No one who has read the correspondence, and understood the character of Cornwallis, will doubt that these words were written with the most perfect honesty, and they made an impression in Ireland which was hardly equalled by the pamphlet which Lord Fitzwilliam had written upon his resignation, or by the letter in which Lord Downshire and his olleagues called on the country to support them against the Union. 2 Yet no words were ever more unfortunate or more deceptive. Cornwallis was obliged to acknowledge that he had never’ received authority, directly or indirectly, from any member of Administration who resigned his office, to give a pledge that he would not embark again in the service of Government, except on the terms of the Catholic privileges being obtained.’ 3 What he wrote was merely an inference the natural inference of a plain and honourable man drawnfrom the situation.’ The papers which were circulated among the Catholics,’ he afterwards wrote,’ have done much good. It would perhaps have been better not to have inserted the word pledge; it was, however, used in a letter which I received from Mr. Dundas at the same time with the communication from Mr. Pitt through Lord Castlereagh, and it could not by any fair construction be supposed to convey any other meaning, than that persons who had gone out of office because the measure could not be brought forward, would not take a part in any administration that was unfriendly to it.’ 4 How little right Cornwallis had to use the language he employed, is sufficiently shown by one simple fact. In February, Pitt’ resigned office because he could not introduce the Catholic relief as a Minister of the Crown. In March he sent a message to the King, promising that whether in or out of office he would absolutely abandon the question during the whole of the reign, and he at the same time clearly intimated that he was ready, if Addington would resign power, to resume the helm, on the condition of not introducing Catholic emancipation, and not suffering it to pass. 1
In my opinion, it is impossible by any legitimate argument to justify his conduct, and it leaves a deep stain upon his character both as a statesman and as a man. Explanations, however, are not wanting. The King had just had a slight return of his old malady. On February 14, he seems to have caught a severe cold, and at first no other complication appeared, but about the 21st there were clear signs of mental derangement, and they continued with little abatement till March 6. When the illness took place, Addington had made the arrangements for the formation of his Cabinet, but the necessary formalities had not yet been completed, and Pitt in the mean time was conducting the business of the House. The King, on recovering, at once ascribed his illness to the agitation which Pitt had caused him. He appears to have said this to Dr. Willis, and to have repeated it to Lord Chatham, and it naturally came to the ears of Pitt. 2 Pitt, according to his apologists, was so profoundly affected, that he at once, under the impulse of a strong and natural emotion, sent the King an assurance that he would never during his Majesty's reign again move the Catholic question. He made no secret to his immediate friends of the change in his attitude, and many of them then declared that his resignation had no longer an object. The one point of difference was removed; all obligation to the Catholics was discarded; a new state of things had arisen; why then should he not return to power?’ On the grounds of public duty, at a time of public danger,’ Pitt reconciled himself to doing so. He refused, indeed, to take the first step, to make any kind of overture, but he gave it clearly to be understood through the Duke of Portland, that he would not be found inexorable, if Addington voluntarily resigned, and if the King thought fit to apply to him. On finding, however, that neither the King nor Addington desired the change, he declined to take any further step, and for a time he loyally supported the new Government. 1
This is the most charitable account of his conduct. It is hardly, I think, the most probable one. It must be remembered, that at the time of the recovery of the King, the crisis had been surmounted; the Ministry of Addington was virtually constituted, and there was therefore absolutely no occasion for any declaration of policy from Pitt. No English statesman had exhibited during his long career a more austere and rigid self-control; no statesman was less swayed by uncalculating emotion, less likely to be betrayed into unguarded speech or hasty action; and though he had served the King for seventeen years, his relations to him had always been cold, distant, and formal. He had resigned office with great reluctance, and, although he had long been disposed to a liberal Catholic policy, he had always shown himself both less earnest and less confident on the question than some of his principal colleagues, and most ready to postpone it at the pressure of difficulty. It was at all times the infirmity of his nature to care more for power than for measures; and when the war broke out, he was very desirous of adjourning difficult internal questions till its close. The moment of his resignation was a very terrible one. Marengo and Hohenlinden had shattered all immediate hopes of restraining the ascendency of Napoleon on the Continent. Turkey, Naples, and Portugal were the only Powers that remained inalliance with England; and Russia, Sweden, Denmark, and Prussia had just revived the armed neutrality, directed against her maritime claims, which had proved so formidable in the days of Catherine II. There were not wanting statesmen who urged that, at such a time, a strong hand should be at the helm; that the resignation had been a great mistake; that Pitt had given, and could therefore break, no positive pledge to the Catholics; that the Catholic question was not one requiring an immediate solution. It was intolerable to him to abandon the power he had wielded so skilfully and so long, and he was extremely indisposed to enter, in the midst of the war, into a formidable conflict with the King and with the Church, for the sake of a question in which he felt no deep interest. The illness of the King gave him an unlooked-for pretext for extricating himself with some colour of magnanimity from his difficulty, and by deserting the Catholics he removed the greatest obstacle in his path. It is a memorable fact that he took this momentous step without having given Lord Gren-ville, or, it is said, any other of his colleagues except Dundas, the smallest intimation of his intention. 1
If Pitt's policy of adjourning great organic changes till the peace, had been consistently carried out, the embarrassment would never have arisen, for the Union would not have been carried. The evil of carrying it, and then failing to carry the measure which was its natural sequel, was irreparable. With different circumstances the Fitzwilliam episode was reproduced. Once more the hopes of the Catholics had been raised almost to the point of certainty, and then dashed to the ground. Once more assurances, which honourable statesmen should have deemed equivalent to a pledge, had been given, and had not been fulfilled. Once more the policy of Clare prevailed.
It does not appear, however, that in this last episode the Irish Chancellor bore any considerable direct part. His stormy career was now drawing to a close, and his relations with the English Government after the Union were very troubled. The assurance which Cornwallis had been instructed to convey to the Catholic leaders, in order to obtain their acquiescence in the Union, had been concealed from him; and when he discovered that Catholic emancipation was intended to be the immediate consequence of the measure which he had done so much to carry, his indignation was unbounded, and he bitterly accused Castlereagh of deception. 2 Cooke, who had hitherto been closely identified with his policy, tried to pacify him by a long and admirable letter. He urged that the concessions already made, rendered the ultimate triumph of Catholic emancipation inevitable, and that it was most important that it should not be postponed till after a long and irritating struggle; that the introduction into an Imperial Parliament of a few Catholic gentlemen could not possibly endanger the Constitution, and might permanently attach to it three millions of subjects; that the Established Church was amply guaranteed by the solemn pledge in the Act of Union, and by the adhesion to its doctrines of the great majority of the now United Empire. The Union, he said, was likely to prove’ the greatest possible measure for the British Empire, because it gave that Empire power to satisfy all the fair demands of all its subjects, without the slightest danger to its own security,’ and it would be madness in the existing state of Europe to pronounce an eternal interdict against concession, based upon an irrevocable principle, and excluding all possibility of hope. 1
This letter, however, was far from effecting its object, and Cornwallis, who had for some time completely abandoned his first impression of the right-mindedness and moderation of the Chancellor, now looked upon Clare as one of the most dangerous men in Ireland. The brutal murder of one of his servants in the county of Limerick probably tended to exasperate his feelings; and immediately after the Union, Clare did his utmost in the Imperial House of Lords to defeat every effort of conciliation. In a speech in favour of the continuation of martial law in Ireland, he described Ireland as now wholly in the hands of a wild and fierce democracy, with which civil government was entirely unable to cope, and maintained that nothing but longcontinued martial law could give security, to the property, laws, and religion of the loyal inhabitants, or prevent them from falling under the dominion of’ unprincipled and merciless barbarians,’ ‘spurred on by a pure love of blood.’ Having given a most extravagantly over-coloured picture of the barbarism of Ireland, he warned the House, that it was an absurd and a calamitous thing to think of repressing this spirit by concession and indulgence. The violence of his denunciations of his countrymen, and the boldness with which he apologised for the use of torture in the rebellion, scandalised his audience, and on one occasion he was called to order for introducing into a discussion a wholly irrelevant attack on Catholic emancipation. Ninety-nine out of a hundred Catholics, he said, were perfectly indifferent to it. 1
His policy triumphed on the downfall of Pitt, but he never regained his old ascendency. He resented it bitterly, and soon quarrelled with Hardwicke, the new Viceroy, and with Abbot, the Chief Secretary. ‘The death of Lord Clare, in the month of January 1802,’ wrote Abbot in his journal,’ delivered the Irish and also the British Government from great trouble. He had rendered signal service to his country in a crisis of great violence, but his love of power and the restlessness of his temper made him unfit for the station of Chancellor, when no longer coupled with the overruling authority which he had exercised as Minister before the Union.’ 2 His funeral, as is well known, was the occasion of disgraceful rioting, and of insults much like those which afterwards followed the hearse of Lord Castlereagh in England, but the significance of the demonstration has been exaggerated, for it appears to have been the carefully organised outrage of a few men. 3
Lord Hardwicke urged the Government to appoint an Irishman to the vacant post, and recommended Lord Kilwarden, as combining in a rare degree the requisite gifts, both of intellect and character; but the Government followed the advice of Lord Eldon, and Sir John Mitford, who had been Speaker of the House of Commons since the resignation of Addington and who was now made Lord Redesdale, became Irish Chancellor.
He was an excellent lawyer, and a very amiable and upright man, but his first and last idea on the great question of Irish policy was, that the main object of English government should be to Protestantise Ireland. ‘The Catholics of Ireland,’ he wrote, ‘must have no more political power. They have already so much as to be formidable.’ ‘Nothing, in my opinion, can be more despicable than the conduct of the Roman Catholics, with a few exceptions, and nothing more abominable than the conduct of their priests. The canting hypocrisy of Dr. Troy … is, to me, disgusting…. I am decidedly of opinion that you cannot safely grant anything; that you must raise the Protestant, not the Roman Catholic Church. To make them [the priests] your friends, is impossible. The college of May-nooth vomits out priests ten times worse than ever came from the Spanish colleges. I would withhold all supply to that establishment, and were I Minister, would abolish it.’ ‘The general profligacy of this country, derived partly from the corruption of their Parliament, and partly from the corruptions of the Catholic Church, which is less reformed here than in any Catholic country in Europe, is astonishing to an Englishman.’ Ireland, he thought, should be governed for some years as despotically as France, but in a more honest spirit, and with a real desire to put down the inveterate jobbing of the country, and this could never be achieved unless all the chief posts of influence and power were filled by Englishmen. The legislative Union was still but a ‘rope of sand,’ and much more was needed to consolidate it. Looking back to all the tangled and inconsistent negotiations which had taken place during the last few years, and especially during the Union struggle, he owned himself utterly unable to explain the conduct of the English Ministers, ‘without supposing that men of great talents, of great experience, of great political knowledge, acted without reflection, or without integrity, or from mere caprice, or that they were deceiving, and endeavouring to overreach each other, some meaning one thing, some the direct contrary.’ 1
The opinions of Lord Redesdale were well known; he himself brought them into full relief, in a very injudicious correspondence with Lord Fingall, and he remained Chancellor during the short Ministry of Pitt that followed. The Lord Lieutenant governed in the same spirit, though with more discretion of language. ‘Lord Hardwicke's,’ it was boasted, ‘is the only Administration that has never given the heads of the Catholic clergy an invitation to the Castle; he in no way recognises them further than the law admits them to be priests.’ 1 This was the end of all the confidential intercourse that had taken place between the Government and the bishops before the Union; of all the hopes that had been held out; of all the services the bishops had rendered in carrying the Union. Pitt, at last tired of opposition, joined with the different sections hostile to the Ministry, and drove Addington from power in the spring of 1804, though he was obliged soon after to admit him to his own Ministry; but the Catholics gained nothing by the change, and the question which, in 1800, seemed almost won, was adjourned to a distant future.
These things did not produce in Ireland any immediate convulsion, and in the strange and paradoxical history of Irish public opinion, the Addington Ministry can hardly be counted even unpopular. Lord Redesdale, indeed, said that the country for some time could only be held as a garrisoned country; that the Jacobin spirit, though seldom openly displayed, was still prevalent, and that it was most manifestly increasing in the Catholic population. 2 Lord Hardwicke, in a paper drawn up at the close of the summer of 1801, expressed his fear lest ‘the aversion to the Union which obtained very strongly in many parts of Ireland, and still continues unabated,’ might ‘be unhappily confirmed, to the incalculable injury of the Empire;' 3 but when, in the June of 1802, a general election at last took place, no such aversion was displayed. The saying of Lord Clare, that the Irish are ‘a people easily roused and easily appeased,’ was never more clearly verified. Though this was the first occasion since the Union, in which the constituencies had the opportunity of expressing their opinion of the conduct of their representatives on that great question, the Union appears to have borne no part whatever in the election, and it is stated that not a single member who had voted for it was for that reason displaced. 1 In Ireland, even more than in most countries, good administration is more important than good politics, and the mild, tolerant, and honest administration of Lord Hardwicke, gave him considerable popularity. Under Cornwallis orders had been given for rebuilding and repairing, at Government expense, the Catholic chapels which had been burnt or wrecked after the rebellion, and this measure was steadily carried on, 2 while persistent and successful efforts were made, especially by the Chancellor, to put an end to jobbing and corruption.
The short rebellion of Emmet, in 1803, was merely the last wave of the United Irish movement, and it was wholly unconnected with the Union and with the recent disappointment of the Catholics. It was suppressed without difficulty and without any acts of military outrage, and it at least furnished the Government with a gratifying proof that the Union had not broken the spring of loyalty in Dublin, for the number of yeomen who enlisted there, was even greater than in 1798. 3 Grattan had refused to enter the Imperial Parliament at the election of 1802, but he watched the signs of the time with an experienced eye, and the judgment which this great champion of the Catholic claims formed of Lord Hardwicke's Administration, is very remarkable. He wrote to Fox that, without a radical change of system, it would be impossible to plant in Ireland permanent, unfeigned loyalty; that the Union had not been carried, for although a loyal Parliament had been destroyed, ‘equality of conditions, civil or religious, had not even commenced;’ but he added, ‘without any alteration in the legal condition of this country, and merely by a temperate exercise of the existing laws, the present chief governor of Ireland has more advanced the strength of Government and its credit, than could have been well conceived,’ and ‘from the manner in which this last rebellion was put down, I incline to think that if Lord Hardwicke had been Viceroy, and Lord Redesdale Chancellor, in ‘98, the former rebellion would have never existed.’ 1
But from this time the Catholic question passed completely beyond the control of the Government. In Ireland the utter failure of the gentry and the bishops to procure emancipation by negotiations with the Government, speedily threw the energetic elements of the Catholic body and the lower priesthood into a course of agitation which altered the whole complexion of the question, and enormously increased its difficulty and its danger. 2 In 1799 the Catholic bishops had, as we have seen, fully accepted the proposal of giving a veto on episcopal appointments to the Government, and not only Pitt, but also Grattan, had strongly maintained that emancipation could only be safely carried, if it were accompanied by such restrictions on ecclesiastical appointments and on intercourse with the Holy See, as existed in all Protestant and in all Catholic countries throughout Europe. 3 In opposition to Grattan, to the Catholic gentry, to the English Catholics, and even to a rescript from Rome, O'Connell induced the great body of the Irish Catholics, both lay and clerical, to repudiate all such restrictions, and to commit themselves to an agitation for unqualified emancipation. The panic and division created by this agitation in Ireland, and the strong spirit of ecclesiastical Toryism that overspread England after the death of Pitt, combined to throw back the question. In 1800 the conscientious objections of the King seemed to form the only serious obstacle to Catholic emancipation, The establishment of the Regency in 1812 removed that obstacle, but the Catholic hopes appeared as far as ever from their attainment. The later phases of this melancholy history do not fall within my present task. It is sufficient to say, that when Catholic emancipation was at last granted in 1829, it was granted in the manner which, beyond all others, was likely to produce most evil, and to do least good. It was the result of an agitation which, having fatally impaired the influence of property, loyalty, and respectability in Catholic Ireland, had brought the country to the verge of civil war, and it was carried avowedly through fear of that catastrophe, and by a Ministry which was, on principle, strongly opposed to it.
Pitt, as we have seen, intended that the Union should be followed by three great measures the admission of Catholics into Parliament, the endowment of their priesthood under conditions that gave a guarantee for their loyalty, and the commutation of tithes. Each measure, if wisely and promptly carried, would have had a great pacifying influence, and the beneficial effect of each measure would have been greatly enhanced by combination with the others.
The first measure had been abandoned, but, of the three, it was probably, in reality, the least important, and there was no insuperable reason why the other two should not have been pressed. The King, it is true, had very lately declared himself opposed to the payment of the priests, but he had not placed his opposition on the same high and conscientious grounds as his opposition to emancipation, 1 and Lord Grenville, who was far more earnest on the Catholic question than Pitt, strongly maintained that the payment of the priests was a measure which might be, and ought to be, carried. 3 The Government had offered endowment on certain conditions to the bishops in 1799, and the offer and the conditions had been accepted, and a report of the position of the different orders of priesthood in Ireland had been drawn up, which clearly showed how sorely it was needed. 1 The supreme importance, both moral and political, of raising the status and respectability of this class of men, of attaching them to the Government, and of making them, in some degree, independent of their flocks, was sufficiently obvious, and has been abundantly recognised by a long series of the most eminent statesmen. In an intensely Catholic nation, where there is scarcely any middle class, and where the gentry are thinly scattered, and chiefly Protestant, the position of the priesthood was certain to be peculiarly important, and the dangers to be feared from a bad priesthood were peculiarly great. Individuals often act contrary to their interests, but large classes of men can seldom or never be counted on to do so; and in Ireland, neither interest nor sentiment was likely to attach the Catholic clergy to the side of the law. Drawn from a superstitious and disloyal peasantry, imbued with their prejudices, educated on a separate system, which excluded them from all contact, both with the higher education of their own country and with the conservative spirit of continental Catholicism, they have usually found themselves wholly dependent for all temporal advantages - for popularity, for influence, and for income - upon the favour of ignorant, lawless, and often seditious congregations. Such a clergy, if they remained wholly unconnected with the Government of the country, were not likely to prove an influence for good, and if, as is undoubtedly true, the Catholic Church has, in some most important respects, conspicuously failed as a moral educator of the Irish people, this failure is to be largely ascribed to the position of its priesthood.
The moment was peculiarly favourable for reforming this great evil. The bishops, though they could hardly press the claims of the clergy, after the great disappointment of the laity, were still ready to accept endowment with gratitude; 2 the clergy had not yet been transformed by agitation into political leaders, and the poor would have welcomed with delight any measure which freed them from some most burdensome dues. Addington appears to have been fully convinced of the policy of the measure, but Pitt, having once moved the Catholic question out of his way, would take no steps in its favour, and without his powerful assistance, it would have been hopeless to attempt to carry it. The golden opportunity was lost, and the whole later history of Ireland bears witness to the calamity.
Lord Cornwallis, at this time, wrote the following characteristic and pathetic lines to Marsden, who had aided him so powerfully in carrying the Union. ‘Before I left London, I spoke several times to Mr. Addington, on the subject of a provision for the Catholic clergy, and told him that, from an interview which I had with Dr. Moylan, I found that they were new willing to accept of it. He seemed to be fully impressed, with the necessity of the measure, especially as the Regium Donum to the Presbyterian ministers was to be increased, and assured me that he would take an early opportunity of representing it to his Majesty. I have no doubt of Mr. A.’ s sincerity, but I am afraid that the August Personage whom I have mentioned, is too much elated by having obtained his own emancipation, to be in a humour to attend much to any unpleasant suggestions from his purest confidential servants. If this point, at least, is not carried, no hope can be entertained of any permanent tranquillity in Ireland, and we, who so strenuously endeavoured to render that island the great support and bulwark of the British Empire, shall have the mortification to feel that we laboured in vain.’ 1
The proposed commutation of tithes was abandoned in the same manner, and for the same reasons. year after year the English Government had been told, not only by Grattan, but also by the chief members of the Irish Administration, that the existing tithe system was the most fertile of all the sources of Irish anarchy and crime, and that a wise and just system of commutation was a matter of supreme importance. Lord Loughborough, who chiefly defeated Catholic emancipation, had himself drawn up a Tithe Commutation Bill. Lord Redesdale, who represented the most exaggerated form of anti-Catholic Toryism, had declared that such a measure was absolutely necessary, and that without it, the country would never be sufficiently quiet for the general residence of a Protestant clergy. 1 But nothing was done, and Ireland was left for a whole generation seething in all the anarchy arising from this most prolific source. The agitation at last culminated in a great organised conspiracy against the payment of tithes, accompanied and supported, like all such conspiracies in Ireland, by a long and ghastly train of murder and outrage. The fatal precedent was set, of a successful and violent revolt against contracts and debts. The Protestant clergy, who were for the most part perfectly innocent in the matter, and who formed perhaps the most healthy, and certainly the most blameless section of Irish life, were over large districts reduced to the deepest poverty, and a vast step was taken towards the permanent demoralisation of Ireland. At last, after some abortive measures, the two great English parties concurred in the outlines of a scheme of commutation, and in 1835 the Government of Sir Robert Peel introduced his Tithe Bill, commuting tithes into a rent charge to be paid by the landlords with a deduction of 25 per cent. The general principle had already been adopted by the Whig Opposition in the preceding year, but they perceived that, by bringing forward an amendment uniting Peel's Bill with the wholly different question of the appropriation of the surplus revenues of the Irish Church to secular purposes, they could defeat the Government, and themselves climb into power. With the support, and in a large degree under the influence of O'Connell, they took this course; but they soon found that, though the House of Lords was ready to carry the tithe composition, it was inexorably hostile to the appropriation clause, and, at last, having cursed Ireland with three more years of tithe agitation, the Whig Ministry carried in 1838 the very Bill which Sir Robert Peel had been driven out of office for proposing.
It was a tardy measure, discreditably carried, but it proved of inestimable benefit to Ireland, and it is one of the very few instances of perfectly successful legislation on Irish affairs. It could not, however, efface the evil traces of the preceding thirty-eight years of anarchy and outrage, and it is impossible not to reflect with bitterness, how different might have been the course of Irish history if even this one boon had accompanied or immediately followed the Union.
The reader who considers all this, may justly conclude that the continued disaffection of Ireland was much less due to the Union, or to the means by which the Union was carried, than to the shipwreck of the great measures of conciliation which ought to have accompanied it, and which were intended to be its immediate consequence. The policy which Pitt proposed to himself was a noble and a comprehensive, though a sufficiently obvious one; but when the time came to carry it into execution, he appears to me to have shown himself lamentably deficient both in the sagacity and in the determination of a great statesman. Nor is it, I think, possible to acquit him of grave moral blame. However culpable was the manner in which he forced through the Union, there can at least be no reasonable doubt that his motives were then purely patriotic; that he sought only what he believed to be the vital interest of the Empire, and not any personal or party object. There was here no question of winning votes, or turning a minority into a majority, or consolidating a party, or maintaining an individual ascendency. It is difficult to believe that the alloy of personal ambition was equally absent, when he cast aside so lightly the three great Catholic measures on which the peace of Ireland and the success of the Union mainly depended. It is indeed probable that he disguised from himself the presence of such motives, and that they were in truth largely blended with public considerations. The difficulties of his position were very great-the strain of a gigantic and disastrous war; an obstinate and half-mad King; a hostile Church; a divided Cabinet. He may easily have persuaded himself, that it was a great public interest that he should continue at the helm while the storm was at its height, and that he. would be able in a near future to accomplish his designs. His genius was far more incontestable in peace than in war, and according to all the precedents of the eighteenth century, a war which had lasted seven years could not be far from its end. When the Union was carried, Pitt was only forty-one - twenty-one years younger than the Sovereign whose resistance was the greatest obstacle in his path. His constitution, it is true, was much broken, but it is probable that he still looked forward to another long pacific Ministry, and if he had obtained it, it is scarcely possible that he would have left the great group of Irish questions unsolved.
But if this was his hope, it was doomed to bitter disappointment. The war had still fourteen years to run. and his own life was drawing fast to its early close. He regained office in 1804, but he never regained power, and his last miserably feeble, struggling and divided Ministry was wholly unfit to undertake the settlement of these great questions. In a speech in March 1805, he spoke in language which was not without its pathos, of his abiding conviction that in an United Parliament concessions, under proper guards and securities, might be granted to the Catholics which would bring with them no danger and immense benefit to the Empire; he said that if his wish could carry them, he saw no rational objection; and Canning afterwards declared from his own knowledge, that Pitt's opinions on that subject were to the very last unchanged. 1 But both in England and Ireland the auspicious moment had passed, and moral and political influences were rising, which immensely added to the difficulties of a wise and peaceful solution.
It would have been far wiser to have deferred the Union question till the war had terminated, and till the English Ministers had arrived at a well-grounded certainty that it was in their power to carry the measures that could alone have made it acceptable to the majority of the nation. Another evil which resulted from carrying the Union in time of war, was that its financial arrangements completely broke down. I do not propose to enter into the extremely complicated and difficult questions, that have been raised, relating to those arrangements between the two countries in the years that followed the Union. 1 They belong to the historian of a later period of Irish history, and they deserve his most careful attention. Pitt and Castlereagh, as we have seen, had fixed two-seventeenths as the proportion of Ireland's contribution to the general expenditure of the Empire; and if the peace of Amiens had been a permanent one, it is possible that this proportion might not have been excessive. But the best Irish financiers had almost with one voice predicted that it would prove so; and with the vast expenditure that accompanied the last stages of the long French war, their prediction was speedily verified. It was at once seen that Ireland was totally incapable of meeting her obligation, and the prospect which Castlereagh had held out of diminished expenditure, soon vanished like a mirage. It is a somewhat remarkable fact, that it has been pronounced by the best authorities impossible to state with complete accuracy the net liabilities of the two countries, either at the time of the Union, or at the time of amalgamation of the Exchequers in 1817. 2 According to the figures, however, which were laid before Parliament in 1815, the separate funded debt of Ireland in 1801 was 26,841,219 l ., while that of Great Britain was 420,305,944 l . But every year after the Union, and in spite of an immense increase of the revenue raised in Ireland by taxation, 3 the Irish debt increased with a rapidity vastly greater than in the period before the Union, vastly greater in proportion than that of Great Britain.
In 1817 the separate funded debt of Ireland had increased to 86,838,938 l ., while that of England had only risen to 682,531,933 l ., and the proportion between the two, which at the Union was about 1 to 15.5, had become in 1816 about 1 to 7.8. The unfunded debt of Ireland in the same period rcso from 1,699,938 l . to 5,304,615 l . and that of Great Britain from 26,080,100 l to 44,650,300 l 1 The Act of Union had provided that if the debts of the two countries ever bore to each other the same ratio as their contributions, they might be amalgamated; and in 1817, this time had more than come, the prediction of the anti-Unionists was verified, and the debts of the two countries were consolidated.
It must, however, be added, that this consolidation did not for a long period lead to an equality of taxation. The poverty of Ireland made this impossible. Irish taxation in the years that followed the Union was chiefly indirect, and the small produce of the duties that were imposed, clearly showed the real poverty of the country. 2 Long after the consolidation of the Exchequers, Great Britain bore the burden of many important taxes which were were not extended to Ireland, and even now Ireland enjoys some exemptions. It was not until 1842 that Sir R. Peel made some serious efforts to equalise the taxation. He abstained, indeed, from imposing on Ireland the income tax, which he then imposed on Great Britain, but he added one shilling in the gallon to the duty on Irish spirits, and he equalised the stamp duties in the two countries. The policy was not altogether successful. The additional duty on spirits was repealed in 1843; the additional revenue derived from the stamps was lost in the reduction of the stamp duties both in Great Britain and Ireland. But the project of equalising taxation was soon carried out with far greater severity and success by Mr. Gladstone, who in 1853 extended the income tax to Ireland, which was then just rising out of the deep depression of the famine; and another great step was taken in 1858, by the assimilation of the duties on English and Irish spirits. By these successive measures the equalisation of taxation was nearly effected. In ten years the taxation of Ireland was increased 52 per cent., while that of Great Britain was only increased 17 per cent., and the proportion of the Irish to the British revenue, which in the first sixteen years of the century was between one-thirteenth and one-fourteenth, rose in the ten years after 1852 to one-tenth or one-ninth. 1
It is no part of my task to discuss the wisdom or propriety of these measures, or to examine what would have been the financial condition of Ireland, if she had retained her separate Parliament, or if the clause in the Act of Union relating to the contribution had been drawn as Beresford desired. 2 But the contrast between the hopes held out in the speech of Castlereagh and the actual course of events cannot be denied, and it exercised an unfortunate influence on the history of the Union. Nor was it possible for an Empire which was crippled by the strain of a gigantic war, and during many subsequent years almost crushed by the burden of its colossal debt, to assist Irish development, as it might have done in happier times. In our own day, the Imperial Parliament has conferred an inestimable benefit on Ireland, by largely placing at her service the unrivalled credit of the Empire; by lending immense sums for purposes of public utility at a much lower rate of interest than any purely Irish fund could possibly have borne; but it was only after an Act which was passed in the fifth year of Queen Victoria, that this policy was to any considerable extent adopted. 1
These considerations are sufficient to show, under what unfavourable and unhappy circumstances the great experiment of the Irish Union has been tried. They are, however, far from representing the whole chain of causes which have retarded the pacification of Ireland. Very few countries in an equal space of time have been torn by so much political agitation, agrarian crime, and seditious conspiracy; have experienced so many great economical and social revolutions, or have been made the subject of so many violent and often contradictory experiments in legislation. The tremendous fall of prices after the peace of 1815, which was especially felt in a purely agricultural country; the destruction by the factory system of the handloom industry, which once existed in nearly every farmhouse in Ulster; an increase of population in the forty-seven years that followed the Union, from little more than four and a half to little less than eight and a half millions, without any corresponding progress in manufacturing industry or in industrial habits; a famine which exceeded in its horrors any other that Europe has witnessed during the nineteenth century; the transformation, in a period of extreme poverty and distress, of the whole agricultural industry of Ireland, through the repeal of the corn laws; the ruin of an immense portion of the old owners of the soil; the introduction under the Encumbered Estates Act of a new class of owners, often wholly regardless of the traditions and customs of Irish estates; a period of land legislation which was intended to facilitate and accelerate this change, by placing all agrarian relations on the strictest commercial basis, and guaranteeing to the purchaser by parliamentary title the most absolute ownership of his estate; another period of legislation which broke the most formal written contracts, deprived the owner not only of all controlling influence, but even of a large portion of what he had bought, and established a dual and a confused ownership which could not possibly endure; an emigration so vast and so continuous, that, in less than half a century, the population of Ireland sank again almost to the Union level; all these things have contributed in their different times and ways to the instability, the disorganisation, and the misery that swell the ranks of sedition and agitation.
Other influences have powerfully concurred. The British Constitution has passed under the democratic movement of the century, and it has been assumed that a country in which a majority of the population are disaffected, and which is totally unlike England in the most essential social and political conditions, can be safely governed on the same plane of democracy as England, and its representation in the Imperial Parliament has been even left largely in excess of that to which, by any of the tests that regulate English and Scotch representation, it is entitled. The end of every rational system of representation is to reflect, in their due proportion and subordination, the different forms of opinion and energy existing in the community, giving an especial weight and strength to those which can contribute most to the wise guidance and the real well-being of the State. In the representation of the British Empire, the part which is incontestably the most diseased has the greatest proportionate strength, while the soundest elements in Irish life are those which are least represented. About a third part of the Irish people are fervently attached to the Union, and they comprise the great bulk of the property and higher education of the country; the large majority of those who take any leading part in social, industrial, or philanthropic enterprise; the most peaceful, law-abiding, and industrious classes in the community; nearly every man who is sincerely attached to the British Empire. In three provinces, such men are so completely outvoted by great masses of agricultural peasants, that they are virtually disfranchised; while in the whole island, this minority of about a third commands only a sixth part of the representation. A state of representation so manifestly calculated to give an abnormal strength to the most unhealthy and dangerous elements in the kingdom, is scarcely less absurd, and it is certainly more pernicious, than that which Grattan and Flood denounced. To place the conduct of affairs in the hands of loyal, trustworthy, and competent men, is not the sole, but it is by far the most important end of politics. No greater calamity can befall a nation, than to be mainly represented and directed by conspirators, adventurers, or professional agitators, and no more severe condemnation can be passed upon a political system than that it leads naturally to such a result. We have seen how clearly Grattan foresaw that this might one day be the fate of Ireland.
It was under these conditions or circumstances, that the great political movement arose which forms the central fact of the modern history of Ireland. The Fenian conspiracy, which sprang up in America, but which had also roots in every large Irish town, was not directed to a mere repeal of the Union; it aimed openly and avowedly at separation and a republic, and it differed chiefly from the Young Ireland movement in the far less scrupulous characters of its leaders, and in its intimate connection with atrocious forms of outrage, directed against the lives and properties of unoffending Englishmen. Growing up chiefly in the comparatively prosperous population beyond the Atlantic, being skilfully organised, and appealing for contributions to a wide area of often very honest credulity, it obtained command of large financial resources; but its leaders soon found that unassisted Fenianism could find no serious response among the great mass of the Irish people. Like the Young Ireland movement, its supporters were almost exclusively in the towns. In the country districts it was received with almost complete apathy. The outbreaks it attempted proved even more insignificant than that of 1848, and altogether contemptible when compared with the great insurrection of the eighteenth century. In spite of the impulse given to the conspiracy, when the author of the Act for disestablishing the Irish Church publicly ascribed the success of that measure mainly to a murderous Fenian outrage, it is not probable that Fenianism would have had much permanent importance, if it had not taken a new character, and allied itself with a great agrarian movement.
We have had in these volumes abundant evidence of the vast place which agrarian crime and conspiracy have played in Irish history, but it was only very gradually that they became connected with politics. The Whiteboy explosions of the eighteenth century appear to have had no political character, but some connection was established when the United Irish movement coalesced with Defenderism, and it was powerfully strengthened in the tithe war of the present century. Later agrarian crime had an organisation and a purpose which made it peculiarly easy to give it a political hue, and we have seen how many influences had conspired to isolate the landowning class, to deprive them of different forms of power, and to cut the ties of traditional influence and attachment by which they were once bound to their people.
The keynote of the modern alliance is to be found in the writings of Lalor, one of the least known, but certainly not one of the least important of the seditious writers of 1848. He taught that a national movement in Ireland would never succeed, unless it were united with a movement for expelling all loyal owners from the soil. ‘The reconquest of our liberties,’ he wrote, ‘would be incomplete and worthless without the reconquest of our lands, and could not on its own means be possibly achieved: while the reconquest of our land would involve the other, and could possibly, if not easily, be achieved…. I selected as the mode of reconquest, to refuse payment of rent, and resist process of ejectment.’ ‘Our means, whether of moral agitation, military force, or moral insurrection, are impotent against the English Government, which is beyond their reach; but resistless against the English garrison who stand here, scattered and isolated, girdled round by a mighty people.’ ‘The land question contains, and the legislative question does not contain, the materials from which victory is manufactured.’ ‘You can never count again on the support of the country peasantry in any shape or degree on the question of repeal. Their interest in it was never ardent, nor was it native and spontaneous, but forced and factitious.’ ‘In Ireland unluckily there is no direct and general State tax, payment of which might be refused and resisted.’ Rent is the one impost which can be so resisted; a struggle against it is the one means of enlisting the great mass of the farming classes in the army of sedition, and kindling in them a strain of genuine passion. ‘There is but one way alone, and that is to link repeal to some other question, like a railway carriage to the engine, some question possessing the intrinsic strength which repeal wants, and strong enough to carry both itself and repeal together; and such a question there is in the land…. Repeal had always to be dragged.’ ‘There is a wolf dog at this moment, in every cabin throughout the land, nearly fit to be untied, and he will be savager by-and-by. For repeal, indeed, he will never bite, but only bay, but there is another matter to settle between us and England.’ ‘The absolute ownership of the lands of Ireland is vested of right in the people of Ireland…. All titles to land are invalid not conferred or confirmed by them.’ 1
These doctrines were at once adopted by a much abler man. John Mitchel, who wasted in barren and mischievous struggles against the Governments, both of his own country and of the United States, talents that might have placed him almost in the foremost rank of the writers of his time, embraced the creed of Lalor with all the passion of his hard, fierce, narrow, but earnest nature, and he has contributed probably more than any other past politician, to form the type of modern Irish agitation. Speaking of his relations to Smith O'Brien, who aspired to a purely Irish Government, but who steadily opposed every form of robbery and outrage, Mitchel wrote: ‘Our difference is, not as to theories of government, but as to possibilities of action; not as to the political ideal we should fight for, but by what appeals to men's present passions and interests, we could get them to fight at all. I am convinced, and have long been, that the mass of the Irish people cannot be roused in any quarrel, less than social revolution, destruction of landlordism, and denial of all tenure and title derived from English sovereigns.’ 2
It was on these lines, that a great agrarian organisation was created, connected with, and largely paid by the Fenian conspirators, and intended to accomplish the double task of drawing into sedition, by appeals to self-interest, multitudes who were indifferent to its political aspects, and of breaking down the influence and authority of the class who were the most powerful supporters of the Union and the connection. A period of severe agricultural depression, some real abuses, and much modern English legislation assisted it, and the conspiracy soon succeeded in establishing, over a great part of Ireland, what has been truly termed an ‘elaborate and all-pervading tyranny,’ 1 accompanied by perhaps as much mean and savage cruelty, and supported by as much shameless and deliberate lying, as any movement of the nineteenth century. It would be difficult to exaggerate the extent to which it has demoralised the Irish people, and destroyed their capacity for self-government, by making cupidity the main motive of political action, and by diffusing the belief, that outrage, and violence, and dishonest and tyrannical combinations against property, contracts and individual liberty, are the natural means of attaining political ends. A parliamentary representation, subsidised by the same men who paid agrarian conspiracy and dynamite outrages, 2 supported it; and the Fenian leaders, without abandoning any of their ulterior objects, consented, after a short period of hesitation, to make the attainment of an Irish Parliament their proximate end, under the persuasion, that, in the existing state of Ireland, the establishment of such a Parliament would be in effect to confer legislative powers on the National League, and that it would furnish the conspiracy with an immensely improved vantage ground, or leverage, for working out its ultimate designs. 1 In this manner, the old social type over a large part of the kingdom, has been broken up, and ninety years after the Union, the great majority of the Irish members are leagued together for its overthrow.
That no Parliament, resembling Grattan's Parliament, could ever again exist in Ireland, had long become evident, and the men who most strongly opposed the Union in 1800, speedily perceived it. As early as 1805, Foster himself warned the Imperial House of Commons that the introduction of the Catholics into Irish political life, might be followed by a struggle for the repeal of the Union; that the Parliament which a Catholic democracy would demand, would not be one in which loyalty or property would prevail, and that in the struggle, the seeds of separation might be sown, and Ireland might one day be torn from her connection with Britain. 2 Plunket, who was as friendly to the Catholics, as he had once been hostile to the Union, was equally emphatic. He spoke with indignation of those who, having themselves rebelled against the Irish Parliament in 1798, made the abolition of that Parliament a pretext for a new rebellion, and he implored Parliament to beware of any step that could paralyse the Union settlement, and thereby shake the foundations of public security, and the connection between the two countries. 3 Grattan, it is true, took a somewhat different view. In 1810, the grand jury, the common council, and a meeting of the freeholders and freemen of Dublin, passed resolutions deploring the effects of the Union, and they requested Grattan, as one of the representatives of the city, to present a petition for its repeal. Grattan answered, that he would present their petition; that he shared their sentiments, but that no movement should be ever undertaken for the repeal of the Union, without ‘a decided attachment to our connection with Great Britain, and to that harmony between the two countries, without which the connection cannot last,’ and unless it was called for, and supported by the nation 1 —a phrase in which he undoubtedly included the Protestants of Ireland, and the great body of her landed gentry. Among English opponents of the Union, Fox was conspicuous. In 1806, on the occasion of a vote for a monument to Lord Cornwallis, he expressed his belief, that the Union, ‘with all the circumstances attending it,’ was one of the most disgraceful acts in English history, but he also disclaimed any wish or intention of repealing it, for, ‘however objectionable the manner, under all the circumstances, under which it was carried, it is impossible to remedy any objections which might have originally existed against it, by its repeal.’ 2 Grey, who, of all Englishmen, took the foremost part in opposing the Union, lived to be Prime Minister, during the early stages of the repeal agitation of O'Connell; he drew up the King's speech of 1833, which pledged the Sovereign and the Whig party to employ all the means in their power to preserve and strengthen the legislative Union, as being ‘indissolubly connected with the peace, security, and welfare’ of the nation, and he expressed his own emphatic opinion, which was echoed by the leaders of both the great parties in the State, that its repeal ‘would be ruin to both countries.’
The attitude of classes on this question has been even more significant than the attitude of individuals. The descendants of the members of Grattan's Parliament; the descendants of the volunteers; the descendants of that section of the Irish people among whom, in 1799 and 1800, the chief opposition to the Union was displayed, are now its staunchest supporters. Grattan was accustomed to look to Protestant Ulster as the special centre of the energy, intelligence, and industry of Ireland, 3 and since the Union its industrial supremacy has become still more decisive. The prediction so often made in the Union discussions, that in Ireland, as in Scotland, the declining importance of the political capital would be accompanied or followed by the rise of a great industrial capital, has? come true; but the Glasgow of Ireland has not arisen, as was expected, in Catholic Munster, but in Protestant Ulster. The great city of Belfast and those counties in Ulster, which are now the strongest supporters of the legislative Union, form also the portion of Ireland which, in all the elements of industry, wealth, progress, intelligence and order, have risen to the greatest height, and have attained to the full level of Great Britain; and, unless some political disaster drags them down to the level of the remainder of Ireland, their relative importance must steadily increase. The Presbyterians of the North, who, during the greater part of the eighteenth century, formed the most dangerous element of discontent in Ireland, have been fully conciliated; but the great majority of the Catholic populalation, whose ancestors in 1800 had accepted the Union with indifference or with favour, are now arrayed against it. Yet even in the Catholic body, the landed gentry, a majority of the Catholics in the secular professions, and an important and guiding section of the Catholic middle class, are as much attached to the Union as the Protestants; while the peace of the country has been mainly kept during its many agitations by a great constabulary force largely drawn from the ranks of the Catholic peasantry. The utter feebleness of every attempted insurrection, and the impotence of all political agitation that is not united with an agrarian struggle, and largely subsidised from abroad, show clearly how much hollowness and unreality there is in Irish sedition.
Powerful influences at the same time have been strengthening the Union. Steam has brought Ireland vastly nearer to England; has made her much more dependent on England; and has removed some of the chief administrative objections to the Union. The chances, both of foreign invasion and of successful insurrection, have greatly diminished. The whole course and tendency of European politics is towards the unification, and not the division of states. The relative position of the two islands has essentially changed, the population of Great Britain having trebled since the Union, while that of Ireland has probably not risen more than 200,000 or 300,000. Economically, too, the free-trade system has greatly lessened the dependence of England upon Ireland, while it has left England the only market for Irish cattle. Imperial credit at the same time has acquired an increasing importance in the material development of Ireland. Commercial, financial, and social relations between the two countries have immensely multiplied. Disqualifications and disabilities of all kinds have, with scarcely an exception, been abolished. English professional life in all its branches is crowded with Irishmen, many of them in the foremost ranks, while Irishmen have of late years probably borne a more considerable proportionate part than the inhabitants of any other portion of the Empire, in the vast spheres of ambition and enterprise, which Imperial policy has thrown open in India and the colonies.
These last advantages, it is true, though of priceless value, have not been without their shadow, for they have contributed, with causes that are more purely Irish, to a marked and lamentable decline in the governing faculty of the upper orders in Ireland. No one who has followed with care the history of Ireland in the eighteenth century, and especially the part played by the Irish gentry when they organised the volunteers in 1779, and the yeomanry in 1798, will question the reality of this decline; nor is it difficult to explain it. All the influences of late years have tended, fatally and steadily, to close the paths of public life and of healthy influence, in three provinces of Ireland, to honourable, loyal, and intelligent men, and the best and most energetic have sought—not without success—in other lands a sphere for their talents.
With a diminished population, material prosperity has at last arrived, and the standard of comfort has been greatly raised. Of ordinary crime there is very little, and although agrarian conspiracy has never been more rife, it may at least be said that the savage and unpunished murders which have at all times accompanied it, have in the present generation become less numerous. But the political condition has certainly not improved, and the difficulty of Irish government has not diminished. The elementary conditions of national stability, of all industrial and political prosperity, are in few countries more seriously impaired. The Union has not made Ireland either a loyal or an united country. The two nations that inhabit it still remain distinct. Political leadership has largely passed into hands to which no sane and honourable statesman would entrust the task of maintaining law, or securing property, or enforcing contracts, or protecting loyal men, or supporting in times of difficulty and danger the interests of the Empire. At the same time, through the dissolution or enfeeblement of the chief influences on which the connection of the two countries has hitherto depended, English statesmen are confronted with one of the gravest and most difficult of all political problems. It is that of creating, by a wide diffusion and rearrangement of landed property, a new social type, a new conservative basis, in a disaffected and disorganised nation.
But of all the anticipations held out in 1800, none has been so signally falsified as the prediction that the Union would take Irish affairs out of the domain of English faction. There has scarcely been a period since its enactment, in which Irish questions or Irish votes have not been made the chief weapons in party conflicts; and with the appearance in the Imperial Parliament of a separate Irish party, ostentatiously indifferent to the great interests of the Empire, the evil has been immensely aggravated. Its effects have most assuredly not been confined to Ireland. It has produced coalitions and alliances, to which the worst periods of English party politics in the eighteenth century can afford no adequate parallel; apostasies and transformations so flagrant, so rapid, and so shameless, that they have sunk the level of public morals, and the character and honour of public men, to a point which had scarcely been touched in England since the evil days of the Restoration or the Revolution.
There is no fact in modern history more memorable than the contrast between the complete success with which England has governed her great Eastern Empire, with more than 200,000,000 inhabitants, and her signal failure in governing a neighbouring island, which contains at most about 3,000,000 disaffected subjects. Few good judges will doubt that the chief key to the enigma is to be found in the fact that Irish affairs have been in the very vortex of English party politics, while India has hitherto lain outside their sphere, and has been governed by upright and competent administrators, who looked only to the well-being of the country. The lessons which may be drawn from the Irish failure are many and valuable. Perhaps the most conspicuous is the folly of conferring power where it is certain to be misused, and of weakening, in the interests of any political theory or speculation, those great pillars of social order, on which all true liberty and all real progress ultimately depend.