A History of Ireland.

Volume 2

by Eleanor Hull

1931

XIII.—THE STRUGGLE FOR LEGISLATIVE INDEPENDENCE

The Government of the country after the Revolution became daily more obsequious to the Parliament of England. Two successive Protestant Primates of pronounced English sympathies were sent over "to manage" the country in the English interest. Hugh Boulter was translated from Bristol in 1724, and he made it his business during his period of office to put a stop to any appointments being given to men of Irish birth, whether in the church or in the law. He is horrified to find that "there is a majority of (Protestant) bishops here who are natives," and esteems it wise "gradually to get as many English on the episcopal bench as can decently be sent over." "It is absolutely necessary to His Majesty's service that the Archbishop of Dublin's place be filled by an Englishman." Equally is he anxious to purify the law courts. "The Mastership of the Rolls has been sold to a native," he complains; "and there is talk that the Attorney-General is to be made Lord Chancellor." He entreats that in filling up such places "a strict regard may be had to the English interest.[1] In the eighteenth century the Irish Parliament was "managed" by a set of magnates who were in close touch with the English Ministry and who were known in the country as "Undertakers;" their chief business being to pass supply, to prevent any interference with English trade, and to keep in check any signs of independence in the Irish Parliament.

[1] Hugh Boulter, Letters (1769), i, 15, 21-22, 157, 173-175, 196-197.
The great borough proprietors made their bargain with the Primate on condition of being allowed to monopolise all the lucrative offices of state. On these terms they left government to pursue its policy unopposed. Boulter came over when the excitement about the scandal of Wood's halfpence was at its height. The copper coinage was debased and insufficient, and silver being scarce, a patent had been secured for one William Wood by the Duchess of Kendal for the coinage of a large quantity of halfpence and farthings, out of which a very considerable profit was to be reaped by the interested persons. The clamour aroused by this extravagant job had the unexpected result that it united all classes in a common grievance. All alike refused to take the new coins, and in the view of the new Primate "it had a very unhappy influence on the state of the nation by bringing on intimacies between the Papists and Jacobites with the Whigs, who before had no correspondence with them." A still more alarming symptom to Boulter was that "some foolish and ill-meaning people" had "taken the opportunity of propagating a notion of the independency of this kingdom from that of England," though, he hastens to add, "those of best sense and estate here repudiate this idea, and esteem their security to lie in their dependency on England."[2] The disastrous effect that the new coinage would have on the already impoverished country was, in Boulter's eyes, a lesser evil than the birth of such sentiments; he was undoubtedly right in thinking that it would have less permanent effect on the course of Irish political life. The imposition of Wood's halfpence without the consent of the people was only one out of a number of causes of irritation which stirred even the subservient Irish Parliament to awake to its own interests; it brought the powerful advocacy of Swift to the people's aid; and the clamour gradually widened, as Boulter foresaw it would, into a demand for legislative independence.

[2] Hugh Boulter, Letters (1769), i, 4, 8-10.
Subservient, and English in its views, and purely Protestant as the Dublin Parliament had become, it had never explicitly parted with its rights as an independent legislature, and from time to time it roused itself to declare them afresh as the encroachments of the English Parliament became more apparent. It became a question whether the old constitution by which the sovereign reigned as King of Ireland, as distinct from his kingdom of England, with the assistance of the independent Irish Houses of Parliament, was to be maintained, or whether Ireland was to sink into a mere dependency of England, to be ruled entirely by its king and ministers. Ever since the date of Poynings' Law, passed in 1495, a claim had been made by England to the right to make laws for Ireland, and from time to time there had been voices raised in Ireland to repudiate the claim. The demand for legislative independence was rather an appeal for the restoration of lapsed rights than a demand for a new concession. During the ninety-three years that had elapsed between the enunciation in the Parliament of James II of the right of Ireland to govern itself by its own laws, made by its own Parliament, and the enactment of legislative independence in 1782, a series of fearless Anglo-Irishmen took up the cause, and it was not abandoned until the energy of Grattan carried the demand to its logical conclusion. The Catholics had little share in the struggle; without votes, representation, or power of assembly, they could take only a passive part in the contest; but the Catholic Remonstrance of 1642 had laid down this principle as clearly as did the Parliament of 1689.

The gradual growth of trade restrictions added urgency to the problem, and in 1698, only nine years after the date of James's Parliament, both countries were startled by the publication of a treatise entitled The Case of Ireland being bound by Acts of Parliament made in England, by William Molyneux, Member of Parliament for Dublin University, and a man of eminence in scientific pursuits. His chief object was to expose the hampering limitations under which Irish trade was labouring, and he showed that these restrictions were the result of laws made in England against Irish interests and without the consent of the Irish Parliament. In the course of his dissertation, he traced the history of the commercial and legislative dealings between the two countries; and he maintained the entire independence of the Irish Parliament and its right to make its own laws. The separate and distinct jurisdictions of the two legislatures were, as he showed, part of the original settlement between the two kingdoms, any claim of superiority on the part of the English Parliament having been "a great while ago strenuously opposed and absolutely denied by the Parliament of Ireland." Before the passing of Poynings' Law, he added, "we have not one single instance of an English Act of Parliament expressly claiming this right of binding us; but we have several Irish Acts expressly denying this subordination."[3] Neither Molyneux nor those after him who sought to re-establish the undoubted right of Ireland to legislative independence had any thought of repudiating the claims of the Crown. "It has ever been acknowledged," he says, "that the Kingdom of Ireland is inseparably annexed to the Imperial Crown of England...and we must ever own it our happiness to be so annexed. But though so annexed to the Crown of England, Ireland has always been looked upon as a kingdom complete within itself, and to have all jurisdiction belonging to an absolute kingdom, subordinate to no legislative authority on earth."[4] Such views, coming from such a quarter, aroused surprise and animosity; the reply of the English Parliament was to order the book to be burned by the common hangman. It was in this year that the most destructive of all the enactments against Irish trade was passed; it brought the weaving of Irish woollens to an end, closed the mills, threw out of work forty thousand industrious weavers, and seriously hampered the fishing and other forms of industry.

[3] Edition of 1725, p. 46.
[4] Ibid., p. 87.
It was the depressed state of the manufactures and the wretched condition of the poor that brought into the arena another advocate of independence, Jonathan Swift, Dean of St Patrick's. He refused to allow that he was Irish, even in his sympathies, though he had been born in Dublin in 1667 and educated in Trinity College. "I happened to be dropped here, and was a year old before I left it," he writes; "and to nay sorrow did not die before I came back to it again." "I am in a cursed, factious, oppressed, miserable country," he writes again; "not made so by Nature, but by the slavish, hellish principles of an execrable, prevailing faction in it."[5]

[5] Letters of Swift, ed. by Howard Williams (1886), pp. 265-266.
Though Ireland owes him a deep debt of gratitude for arousing her out of the slough of political servitude into which she was falling, and though in his latter years, as he writes to Pope, "a thousand hats and blessings upon old scores as I walk the streets of Dublin" showed him that his efforts were not forgotten, he disclaimed the name of patriot "as one he did not deserve." He declared that he was forced into action "owing to perfect rage and resentment, and the mortifying sight of slavery, folly, and baseness about me and among which I was forced to live." Unlike those of Molyneux, the writings of Swift were no measured dissertation on the historical grounds for the claim of an independent legislature. From his pen poured forth tract after tract, white-hot, scathing, bitter, attacking the corruption of the Government of his day and exposing the misery and servility that this corruption engendered among the people. To flout the imposition of the degrading and costly pension list imposed upon Ireland, he seized upon the occasion of Wood's halfpence and attacked the use of the coins in an exaggerated tirade. To rouse the nation to consider the disabilities on trade he wrote a pamphlet calling on the Irish to wear nothing but articles of home manufacture. To show that England had put a veto on every scheme for the benefit of the country he penned the terrible satire called A Modest Proposal. The condition of things that drew forth this shocking indictment is summed up in his scathing tract, Maxims controlled in Ireland, where he says: "At least five children in six who are born lie a dead weight upon us for want of employment...I confess myself to be touched with very sensible pleasure when I hear of a mortality in any country parish or village, where the wretches are forced to pay for a filthy cabin and two ridges of potatoes, treble their worth; brought up to steal or beg for want of work; to whom death would be the best thing to be wished for on account both of themselves and of the public."

The compassionate death that Swift's satirical pen "wished for" came in the years of famine that decimated the country during the eighteenth century, culminating in the great famine of 1845 and the following years. But even the least provocative of Swift's Drapier's Letters was, like the tract of Molyneux, found by the authorities to be a "seditious, factious and virulent libel," and his printer was imprisoned. The English answer to all such suggestions of thoughtful and far-seeing men, living amid the miseries of a degraded country, had been short and sharp. It was conveyed in the Act known as the sixth of George I (1719) which clearly asserted that the English King "by and with the consent of the Lords spiritual and temporal and Commons of Great Britain in Parliament assembled, had, hath, and of right ought to have full power and authority to make laws...to bind the people and kingdom of Ireland." The same Bill deprived the Irish House of Lords of the right to hear appeals, about which a test case had just been fought out regarding the property of Maurice Annesley. This Act was the deathblow to Irish independence; it made the Irish Parliament in law what it was slowly becoming in fact, a mere mouthpiece to register English decrees. It aroused a spirit of opposition which was later to take form in a definite demand for independence, and of which the most vigorous champion was at this moment the Dean of St Patrick's. Ringing phrases burst from him. "Were not the people of Ireland born as free as those of England?" he writes. "How have they forfeited their freedom?...Am I a freeman in England and do I become a slave in six hours in crossing the Channel?" Or again: "Those who come over hither from England, and some weak people among ourselves, whenever we make mention of liberty and property, shake their heads, and tell us that Ireland is a depending kingdom...I have looked over all English and Irish statutes without finding any law that makes Ireland depend upon England, any more than England does upon Ireland...I declare next under God, I depend only upon the king, my sovereign, and on the laws of my own country." In words that have become classic, he declared: "For, in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery; but, in fact, eleven men well armed will certainly subdue one single man in his shirt."

Swift lived in an age when rank materialism was the dominant note in English politics. The most shameless political corruption ran through the whole system of government in the age of Walpole. Backstairs influences and male and female favourites ruled even in military affairs and the promotion of officers. The sale of places and commissions was a public scandal and Parliament was "managed" by borough-mongers, some of whom commanded an immense number of votes. All this political, social, and moral corruption was to be reflected in its worst forms in the government of Ireland during the eighteenth century; the more so because none but Englishmen sent over for the purpose were allowed to have any effective voice in the government of the country. During the rule of Primates Boulter and Stone, from 1723 to 1764, the English ascendancy in Ireland was perfected in every particular. Offices, whether secular or religious, were alike filled by men sent over from the other side. To have the misfortune to have been born in Ireland rendered a man incapable of holding "any employment whatever above the degree of constable." This was equally true whether the applicant could or could not boast English ancestry or blood. Even Viscount Castlereagh was considered disqualified for the Chief Secretaryship because he was born in the country; but Cornwallis contended that an exception might well be made in his favour, because he was "so very unlike an Irishman."

Nevertheless, it proved difficult to persuade decent men to come over to fill Irish offices. Swift speaks of the "persons of second-rate merit in their own country, who, like birds of passage thrive and fatten here, and fly off when their credit and employments are at an end." His parable of the divines who, on their way to take up their posts in Ireland, were robbed and murdered by highwaymen on Hounslow Heath, who seized on their robes and patents and came over to be made bishops in their stead, was hardly too severe at a time when bishoprics were knocked down to the highest bidder and an Irish Protestant bishop dared not, in an Irish House of Lords, endeavour to promote the interests of his own country without losing all hope of future preferment. Dr. Theophilus Boulton, Bishop of Clonfert and afterwards of Elphin, to whom Swift appealed on various occasions to further the well-being of his country, excused himself on the ground that he could not afford to sacrifice all hope of advancement. But when he became an archbishop, he declared himself ready to "zealously henceforth promote the good of his country" as, being an Irishman, he could never hope to be promoted to the Primacy!

From the death of Swift in 1745 until the rise of the Volunteer movement in 1778, the question of Irish Parliamentary independence languished. Internally the country was deeply disturbed and the prevailing depression showed itself in outbreaks all over the land and in the formation of secret societies which terrorized the inhabitants. Exorbitant rents, low wages, and the exactions of middlemen had reduced the peasantry to a condition of grinding misery. The absenteeism of the owners, who looked upon their Irish estates simply in the light of income collected for them on the spot by agents, and for which they had no responsibility, added to the helplessness of the tenants, who seldom or never came into personal contact with their landlords. Even to give the wretched cottier a permanent interest in his mud-built habitation was held to be an infringement of the Penal Code and was believed to be fraught with danger to Church and State.[6] Any man who attempted to take the part of the unfortunate cottager was esteemed "little better than a Papist." "Misery is ever restless," as Lord Charlemont, a Protestant landlord who was witness of these evils, said, "and the man who is destitute both of enjoyment and hope can never be a good and quiet subject." "A rebellion of slaves is always more bloody than an insurrection of freemen."[7] But the formation of the Catholic Committee in 1760 by Dr. Curry, author of the Civil Wars in Ireland, with the help of Charles O'Conor of Belanagare and Thomas Wyse of Waterford, inspired some hope in the Catholics of future relief. It was, in fact, the nucleus from which later movements in favour of emancipation took their rise. It showed that, though not formally withdrawn, the Popery laws were in practice relaxing and better relations growing up between people of differing religious opinions, which was later to bear fruit in the efforts made by the Episcopalians in Parliament to pass measures of Catholic relief. Other great questions, such as Parliamentary Reform, freedom of the Press, and the right of the people to formulate their opinions through their representatives, were also in the air, and were being fought out simultaneously on both sides of the Irish Channel. In England Parliamentary Reform was not carried until 1832, though it had been agitated since 1760; the freedom of the Press was gained during the Wilkes agitation in 1769-71, and Catholic Emancipation passed the Commons in 1812, though it was rejected by the Lords. The Bill admitting Catholics to Parliament was finally passed under the Wellington administration in 1829. In Ireland these questions were to become of absorbing interest, and their discussion brought into the Parliamentary arena a number of men of exceptional ability, many of them well fitted to deal with constitutional affairs of importance.

[6] F. Hardy, Life of Lord Charlemont (1812) i, 372.
[7] Ibid., i, 173, 187.
It might cause surprise that any stirring of dead bones could take place in the Irish Parliament as then constituted. The Irish House of Lords, since its deprivation of the right of appeal in the reign of George I, had sunk into a condition so deplorable that men of independent mind refused to sit; some, like Lord Charlemont, even preferring a place in the Lower House. Lord Chesterfield had termed the Upper House in England "a hospital for incurables"; the records of the Upper House in Ireland at this period might well have gained for it the title of an asylum for imbeciles. Civil and obsequious whatever the occasion, its members seemed to have abandoned the right of private judgment. It was of little avail for the country to look for aid from any assembly whose records on many a critical question were summed up in the words: "Prayers. Ordered, that the judges be covered. Adjourned."[8] Lord Charlemont remarks that the Irish leaders were justly styled "undertakers," for, from education and habit, "they were well fitted to preside at the funeral of the commonweal."[9]

[8] F. Hardy, Life of Lord Charlemont (1812), i, 372.
[9] Ibid., i, 217.
Even the presence of patriotic and independent noblemen like the Duke of Leinster, Lord Moira and Lord Powerscourt could have little effect in an assembly that believed itself to exist merely to register the acts of ministers. But in the Lower House life was not yet extinct, and in the struggle for its own independence, on which it was now embarking, men arose who were yet to prove by their conduct that "it was not for slavery they contended at the Boyne." The first to brave the anger of his government for having asserted the independence of the Irish Parliament was Dr. Lucas, a skilled Dublin physician who, after a violent struggle with the Castle authorities, was returned as member for Dublin. But he was more effective in his efforts to check the mismanagement of the Dublin Corporation than as a debater in Parliament. He had the boldness of Swift without his genius, and he attacked not only abuses but individuals. But he took a leading part in the struggle for the shortening of the duration of the Irish Parliaments. These had become accustomed to sit without prorogation until the death of a king; by the Octennial Bill of 1768 their duration was limited to eight years. Lucas's Pamphlets and public letters also helped to push forward the freedom of the Press in Ireland before the cry of "Wilkes and Liberty" had been heard in England. He established the Citizen's Journal to support his views.

Two questions of the day gave an opportunity to the House to assert its constitutional rights. These were a Money Bill and the Mutiny Bill. Submissive as it had become, the House of Commons still clung to its claim to be the sole originator of Money Bills, and the guardian of the public funds. But when, in 1753, there was a surplus in the Treasury of nearly £200,000, a precedent was set which was held to bind Ireland. This occurred under the dictatorship of Primate George Stone, known as "the Wolsey of Ireland," who was appointed in 1747, and whose determination to govern independently of the "undertakers" led him into violent conflict with Boyle, soon to be created Earl of Shannon, whom he tried to oust from the Speakership of the House. The question of the disposal of the surplus was to these individuals merely an incident in their struggle for personal power, but it involved a question of vital importance to the country. Stone supported the claim of the Crown to have the disposal of the surplus, while Boyle headed a popular or Whig party which upheld the right of the Irish Commons to allocate the money to Irish uses as they thought fit. In 1749, the English Parliament had held that the Irish Parliament had not even the right to entertain such a question. They asserted that it lay in the Crown to dispose of all surplus revenues, and that nothing could be done without the King's consent; thus the Commons of Ireland saw the last remnant of their independence slipping from them into English hands. For the moment the matter was settled by the money being handed over by the King to the reduction of the national debt, Boyle being bought over by a peerage, with a pension of £3,000 a year for thirty-one years; his supporter, Malone, was made Chancellor of the Exchequer. Servants of the Crown who opposed the King's claim were dismissed from their posts. But the main crux of the matter remained in doubt, and so great was the interest aroused in the Commons in this important constitutional question that a borough sold in 1754 for three times as much as was given for it in 1750. Lord Hartington, son to the Duke of Devonshire, who had been sent over by Fox as Viceroy to negotiate this business, brought about a momentary harmony; but Lord Charlemont, who was employed as negotiator between the parties, remarks that this was only the first instance out of thousands that he lived to witness in which men like Boyle and Malone, popularly known as "the Patriots," assumed "the mask of patriotism to disguise self-interest and ambition," the path of opposition being used as the surest road to office.[10]

[10] F. Hardy, Life of Lord Charlemont, i, 94.
The purchase of these "Patriots" by the gift of high offices of State aroused public attention to the whole question, and efforts were made to reduce the pension list, then amounting to an annual expenditure of £28,103; though only partially successful, the agitation served the purpose of laying bare the rottenness of the Irish Government. It also brought into the arena new advocates, of whom Flood was one of the ablest. He was active, ardent, and persevering, and, though at times formal and laboured in his manner of speaking, his speeches were replete with just argument, and he was unrivalled in driving home his point. Flood and Lord Charlemont, both of them young men, now formed a junction to oppose the tyranny of administration. Lord Townshend, who had been sent over as Viceroy in 1767, had not dared to question the right of the Irish Parliament to originate its own Money Bills, and on this point alone bribery failed to secure him a following. When, in October 1769, a Money Bill was sent over by the English Privy Council it was rejected "because it had not its origin in that House." Great excitement prevailed. The Commons were summoned to the bar by the Viceroy, who blamed their proceedings in the strongest terms and hastily prorogued Parliament, which did not meet again until March, 1771, when Lord Townshend carried a majority, though with great difficulty, in the House of Commons. But a series of protests, "breathing a language most earnest and constitutional," were signed by some sixteen or eighteen peers, led by the Duke of Leinster; and while peerages and pensions were being poured forth to buy the people through their representatives, the people themselves were awakening to their responsibilities.

One Member, the Speaker of the House, John Ponsonby, refused to present an obsequious address to the King in 1771 to thank him for continuing Townshend in office. He preferred to resign. He was succeeded by Edmond Sexton Pery, afterwards Lord Pery, who, though he had hitherto acted with the Government, showed himself henceforth the friend of all good movements for Ireland, such as the Corn Laws, the Tenantry Bill, the Tithe Regulations, and Free Trade. Pery was a man of exceptional stability and strength of purpose, and his advice was resorted to by both parties. In a corrupt circle he was incorruptible, and his gravity and foresight were of great service in the House. Some years before Grattan came into public view, he had the courage to announce boldly that" the Parliament of Great Britain had no right to make laws for Ireland."[11] Signs of independent judgment such as this were not welcomed in England. But they were not easily put down. An article in the Public Advertiser calling on the authorities to suppress "the spirit of seditious obstinacy" shown in Ireland was ordered to be publicly burned in Dublin, and Townshend was lampooned in a series of papers by Sir Hercules Langrish called Baratariana. He was recalled in 1772, and Lord Harcourt replaced him, but this brought no cleaner system into politics; his ministry was one of sinister influence, and that of his successor, Lord Buckinghamshire, of acknowledged incapacity. But in Lord Harcourt's time the movement for freedom of trade was begun by a speech of the Speaker in 1773 at the bar of the House of Lords; on this speech all the subsequent proceedings in favour of the extended commerce of Ireland were founded.

[11] F. Hardy, Life of Lord Charlemont, i, 157-161 ; Life of Grattan, by his son i, 104-112.
In 1775 Grattan entered Parliament for the borough of Charlemont. Unfortunately, at a moment when it was urgent that all enlightened men should unite to bring to an end a vicious system of government, Flood allowed himself to be bought over by the devices of Lord Harcourt's secretary, Sir John Blaquiere, who courted and flattered him and at length induced him to take office. He became Vice-Treasurer with a salary of £3,500 a year. We may believe, with the friends of Flood, that he accepted office from a conviction that he could thus better influence those in power in favour of reforms; but if this were so he was speedily undeceived. In later life, when a Member of the English Parliament, he complained that every one to whom he had entrusted a Parliamentary motion or plan of conduct for the session had almost uniformly betrayed him.[12]

[12] F. Hardy, Life of Lord Charlemont, i. 359.
When Grattan first entered the House of Commons the great struggle of America with England, which was to end in the Declaration of American Independence less than one year later (July 4, 1776), was at its height. "A voice from America shouted to liberty," said Flood in 1782. The struggle was watched with intense interest in Ireland, especially in Ulster, a large number of whose exiled sons were fighting and dying on the side of America against England. The war had its effect both on the question of Irish independence and on that of Catholic freedom. The strong opposition in Ireland to the action of England in America was increased by a vote under the Harcourt administration for four thousand Irishmen to be raised as an addition to the English army in America. Flood termed them "armed negotiators." But it was the carrying through of this measure that gave birth to the Irish Volunteers, a body of armed citizens, self-paid and self-disciplined, which was destined to be a chief agent in the advance of liberty, prosperity and security at home.

Belfast had not forgotten that in 1760 a small detachment of French troops had succeeded in entering Carrickfergus Bay under the command of Thurot, and that it was only the dissensions between the leaders of the expedition which had prevented their march on Belfast. The town now applied for protection to the Government, which was gradually denuding the country of troops at a time when French privateers swarmed in the Channel. The reply of Sir Richard Heron, the Irish Secretary, was that no troops could be spared. Belfast, which had previously raised a small body of men to resist the French invasion, now set about organising itself for the purpose of the defence of the country. With extraordinary rapidity the movement spread, and in little more than a year the numbers amounted to forty-two thousand men. No landlord dare meet his tenants, no member of Parliament his constituents, who was not willing to serve with his armed countrymen. The Duke of Leinster, the Earl of Clanricarde, and in the north Lord Charlemont, became their leaders and commanded in their own parts of the country. The Volunteer army was at first wholly Protestant, but their aims were applauded and supported by their Catholic fellow-countrymen, who liberally contributed to the expenses of a body which the laws forbade them to join. The organisation gave force to the appeals for Free Trade, Catholic Emancipation, and the independence of Parliament. But it did more than this, for it made the nation as a whole feel their unity as they had never before felt it, and it was with a united people that Britain had now to deal. No charges of insubordination were made against the Volunteers; their discipline was perfect and their obedience complete; they became the pride of their commanders and the hope of the poor.

The question of relief for the Catholics was making slow but sure progress. From the death of Primate Boulter in 1742 the Penal Code was somewhat relaxed. Boulter had himself put the finishing touches to that infamous code of disabilities by getting passed the Irish Acts depriving Catholics of the franchise and by excluding them from the legal profession.[13] But the feeling of the majority of the Protestants in the country was slowly changing towards their Catholic fellow-subjects. Many of these were making for themselves positions of wealth in the only avenues of activity left open to them, as merchants and agriculturists, and the Protestants began to realise the injustice of keeping them out of all posts of communal and political activity. The friendly interest taken by the Catholics in the welfare of the Volunteers, from whose ranks the laws prohibiting their possession of arms excluded them, also had weight, and from 1772 onward, by slow steps, relief began to be conceded. In that year a Bill was passed securing to them the repayment of money lent to Protestants on mortgage, though it was only carried by a majority of two; in 1774, they were permitted to take mortgages on land, and in the same session a Bill proposed by Mr. (afterwards Sir Hercules) Langrishe, a brilliant and witty debater and a broadminded man, was passed, permitting Catholics to take leases not exceeding fifty square perches in any city or market-town, and in the country of under fifty acres. The Catholic owner, however, must still "gavel" or subdivide his property among his successors at his death, and any member of his family who conformed as a Protestant was to receive the largest share. This Bill, curiously styled "a Bill for the better encouragement of persons professing the Popish religion to become Protestants," was held at the time to be a great act of liberality; it was not till 1778 that a real property Act was passed in the Popish Relief Bill, which allowed land to be taken by Catholics for a term of 999 years or five lives, and did not oblige them to "gavel" or divide it at death. This was soon followed by an Act permitting them to possess and inherit land absolutely, the conforming clauses, in many ways the worst feature of these laws, being at the same time repealed. Between 1702 and 1773 the number of those who had conformed was shown to be 4,055 persons; some of these, no doubt, were tempted by the prospect of becoming possessed of their fathers' lands, thus making the father a tenant only for life. The chief speakers on behalf of these measures were Sir Hercules Langrishe, Flood and Walter Hussey Burgh, who later became Chief Baron of the Exchequer, and whose support of enlightened measures gained him the affection of friends and the hatred of the Irish Government. On one occasion, after speaking in the House on the Parliamentary rights of Ireland, he remarked to Grattan: "I have now, nor do I repent it, sealed the door against my own preferment and made the fortune of the man opposite to me." A Relief Bill for Presbyterians followed, repealing the Test Act, which was carried by large majorities in both Houses.

[13] 1 George II, ch. ix (1727); and 1 George II, ch. xx; 7 George II, ch. v. (1733).
Matters were approaching a crisis when, in 1775, Grattan first entered Parliament. His mind had only slowly turned to the idea of a public career. Born on July 3, 1746, in Dublin, where his father was Recorder for the city, Henry Grattan was educated at Mr. Young's school in Abbey Street, and entered Trinity College, Dublin, where he came into contact with many of his future political associates. John Foster, who became Speaker of the Irish House of Commons and a warm defender of the principle of Free Trade, was one of them. Another was Fitzgibbon, then carrying all before him, who was later, as Lord Clare, to exert his immense influence in carrying the Union. From Dublin University Grattan passed on to the Middle Temple in London, and was entered in the autumn of 1767 as student of law. But he was not enamoured of the profession, and a disposition to despondency which marked his youth found its best relief in the solitudes of Windsor Forest or the debates in the British Parliament, where the power and eloquence of Chatham's speeches delighted and impressed him. In the glades of Virginia Water he practised aloud a similar oratory. He was called to the Irish Bar in Hilary Term, 1772, but he returned to Dublin with regret. "Here," he writes, "there is nothing new, nothing interesting; a noisy Four Courts, a lazy metropolis, and a childish public spirit." "I am tired of Dublin," he writes later, "with all its hospitality and all its claret. Upon our arrival it seemed a town hung in mourning, swarming with poverty and idleness. We feel relaxation growing upon us as soon as we arrive, as we watch the epidemic sloth of the luxurious capital." The "contagious laziness" of Dublin was, however, stirred by the presence of many men of energy and talent. The Club known as the Society of Granby Row, contained among its members a group of men of wit and education, the friends and associates of Lord Charlemont, around whom all that was best in Anglo-Irish society gathered, and whose fine house was a centre for literary and artistic people.

But young Grattan found the debates in the House insipid, "everyone speaking, nobody eloquent," and "the Four Courts of all places the most disagreeable"; while "the sociable disposition of the Irish will," he complains, "follow you wherever you fly, and in every barren spot of this kingdom you must submit to a state of dissipation or hostility." It was on the death of Lord Charlemont's brother that Grattan entered public life as Member for the borough which Francis Caulfeild had hitherto represented in Co. Tyrone. He immediately flung himself into the debates, and his long studies in oratory and his admiration for Chatham's Parliamentary style bore fruit in his new career. His first speeches were attacks on the lucrative sinecures often given to absentees; on the unconstitutional attempts of the Crown to suspend the law, and on the embargo laid upon free trade. He took the opportunity thus afforded him to condemn the policy of Great Britain with regard to America. Fox, who, when in Dublin, heard one of Grattan's early speeches, was struck by his facility of style and soundness of argument, and an introduction to him resulted in a sincere friendship. The town was in a miserable state of poverty, in spite of the outward luxury of the rich; the unemployed paraded the streets; the Treasury, formerly possessed of an annual balance, was at this moment empty ; and the "desperate political gamblers" who had squandered the revenues of the State had to apply to La Touche's private Bank for £20,000 to prevent collapse. Soon afterwards the Government had to borrow £50,000 from the Bank of England to pay the army.[14]

[14] The Bank of Ireland was established in 1783 ; hitherto La Touche's had been the only bank of importance in the country.
It was the low condition of commerce that gave Grattan his first real opening in Parliament and proved to be the beginning of his career. In a debate on an address to the Sovereign at the opening of the session on October 12, 1779, he succeeded in securing the approval of members of the Government to an amendment pressing for an immediate consideration of the state of the country, with a view to assisting its trade and manufactures. Hussey Burgh, who was then Prime Serjeant, proposed "Free export and import," and Grattan adopted the words. "Say simply Free Trade," whispered Flood, and the House, struck by the unaccustomed sight of an agreement between members of the Government and the independents, passed the amendment with only one dissentient vote. The words "Free Trade" spread like a watchword through the country. When the address was brought up to the Castle by the entire House the Volunteers, commanded by the Duke of Leinster, lined the streets and presented arms to the Speaker. The next day, Thomas Conolly, brother-in-law to the Viceroy, moved a vote of thanks to the Volunteers, which was carried unanimously. Thus, for the first time in their history, a large body of the people was brought into direct and sympathetic touch with their Parliament. The Government was alarmed, and the King answered evasively; but the Volunteers determined that the country should not be duped; they stopped the carriages of their representatives and tendered to them the oath that they would vote for Free Trade and a short Money Bill. On November 4, they paraded round the statue of William III on College Green, and a placard affixed to two field-pieces was inscribed: "A Free Trade—or this." "The glorious Revolution" became a party watchword; but at this moment Williamite and Jacobite were in complete accord, and the cheers of Protestant and Catholic mingled in the streets. The military were called out, but the people refused to disperse; some rioting occurred, until the lawyers' volunteer corps, mingling with the people, induced them to return to their homes.

The effect of the national awakening was seen in the Irish House of Commons. Resolutions "that this time it would be inexpedient to grant new taxes," and "that the appropriated duties should be granted for six months only," were carried in spite of the exertions of the Castle party. It was in this latter debate that Hussey Burgh electrified the House by his brilliant speech, concluding with the famous words: "Talk not to me of peace; Ireland is not in a state of peace; it is smothered war. England has sown her laws like dragons' teeth, and they have sprung up in armed men." The House rose as one man and cheered him repeatedly, but the Government cleared the galleries, and the Prime Serjeant lost his office. But on December 13, Lord North submitted to the British Parliament three propositions admitting Ireland to the colonial trade on terms of equality of dues and customs, and allowing the free exportation of Irish wool and woollen manufactured goods and of Irish glass. Within a few months, and with little opposition, these measures were passed in England, and they were received in Ireland with the greatest enthusiasm. At the close of 1779, Buckinghamshire, the Viceroy, wrote: "The satisfaction of Ireland seems final and complete," and, indeed, the effect upon the trade and industries of the country was at once seen. But the very fact that it lay in the power of England either to restrict or to relieve the trade of Ireland, proved beyond doubt that the liberties of the Irish Parliament, long shackled, had now in practice, ceased to exist. Measures bestowed by the British Parliament as acts of concession were dependent only on goodwill and were at any time liable to be repealed by the same power; a free Parliament was needed in order to ensure the permanence of free trade. Thus the conferring of trade liberties upon Ireland led directly to the demand for an independent Parliament to regulate and control that trade.

The years from 1777 to 1781 were among the most disastrous in English history. The declaration of American Independence in 1776, had been followed by the surrender of the English army on the heights of Saratoga, and France and Spain had joined America against England. Chatham was dead and with him all hope of a federal union with the revolting colony.

The weakness of the Ministry and the dogged obstinacy of the King left the country helpless in the face of a disturbed Europe and with her proudest dominion rent from her. In 1781 the series of disasters was completed by the capture of the army of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown. "It is all over," Lord North exclaimed wildly, as he paced up and down his room, and he sent in his resignation. As Britain grew weaker Ireland increased in strength. On April 19, 1780, Grattan had made in Parliament his "Declaration of Irish Rights," inspired directly by the action of America. He moved "That the King's most excellent Majesty and the Lords and Commons of Ireland, are the only power competent to make laws to bind Ireland." The debate lasted for fifteen hours, and the Lord-Lieutenant was obliged to report with the utmost concern "that the sense of the House against the obligation of any statutes of the Parliament of Great Britain within this kingdom is represented to me to have been almost unanimous." The strength of this feeling was tested by the question of the Mutiny Bill which it was proposed to make perpetual. It was declared that the English Mutiny Act was not binding in Ireland, and magistrates in the country refused to put it in force. Buckinghamshire resigned and was succeeded by Lord Carlisle.

Meanwhile, the Volunteer organization was gathering fresh strength, fully thirty thousand men having been enrolled in 1780, and it became a definitely political force in the country.

The reviews of 1781 and 1782 showed its discipline, and when threats of a French landing were made the Ulster corps instantly placed themselves at the disposal of the Viceroy, in conjunction with the regular army, to march to the South and meet it. But, on the other hand, some of the warmest supporters of the Volunteer movement began to feel alarm at its growing influence in politics. The Duke of Leinster, hitherto the colonel of the Dublin corps, suddenly withdrew. He said that he "had been long enough a slave to popularity; he had no idea of constitutional questions being forced by the bayonet." Lord Charlemont succeeded to the general command, but he was too strong a supporter of the British connection to be more than a timid advocate of independence, while he was directly opposed to Catholic relief. The time was not far off when he and Grattan, who had for so long worked in concert, were to become estranged from want of sympathy on these points. There was, indeed, some danger at this moment that the delegates of the Volunteers would form themselves into a body to overawe Parliament, and so place themselves in an unconstitutional position; but the wisdom of their leaders averted this possibility. In their Convention which met on February 15, 1782, in the parish Church at Dungannon, 145 representatives of the Ulster corps assembled, and a number of resolutions were passed, calling for the modification of Poynings' Law, condemning the unlimited Mutiny Bill, and demanding the independence of the judges. They subscribed to a resolution "that the claim of any other body of men other than the King, Lords, and Commons of Ireland to make laws to bind this kingdom is unconstitutional, illegal, and a grievance." Lastly, they accepted a motion proposed by Grattan that the right of private judgment in matters of religion was held by them to be equally sacred in others as in themselves, and that they conceived the relaxation of the Penal Laws against their Catholic fellow-subjects to be fraught with the happiest consequences to the union and prosperity of Ireland. Thus was the cause of the Catholics taken up by their Episcopal and Presbyterian countrymen, and the various bodies brought together for the coming struggle. The resolutions were sent through the country and everywhere adopted by the Volunteers, by the grand juries, and by meetings of freeholders.

On February 22, 1782, Grattan, in a stirring speech, brought forward the question of the rights of Ireland. He moved, in the form of an address to the Crown, a series of propositions, assuring the Sovereign of the sincere and unfeigned attachment of the Irish people to his Majesty's person and Government; but he contended that the people of Ireland was a free people, and that the crown of Ireland was an Imperial crown. The kingdom of Ireland, he further asserted, was a distinct kingdom with a Parliament of its own, the sole legislature thereof; so that the subjects of this kingdom, by the fundamental laws and franchises, cannot be bound or affected by any other legislature, "a privilege treasured by them as their lives and the very essence of their liberty."[15] There was, at this time, no idea of separation from England; rather, the address assured the King that, "next to our liberties we value our connection with Great Britain, on which we conceive...the happiness of both kingdoms intimately depends," a sentiment the reality of which had recently been proved in a remarkable manner by the spontaneous offer of the Volunteers to fight in the British army if there was a French invasion. "The Volunteer," said Grattan, "had no objection to die by the side of England, but he must be found dead with her charter in his hand." The subject was taken up by Flood in a different form on February 26, and adjourned on both occasions. But it was at this critical moment, after the fall of the Ministry of Lord North, that the Irish Secretary, William Eden, later Lord Auckland, who hastily crossed over to London to tender the resignation of Lord Carlisle, found to his surprise that a new Ministry was in process of formation under Lord Rockingham, and that the Viceroy's resignation had been forestalled.

[15] Speeches of the Right Hon. Henry Grattan, ed. D. O. Madden (1854), pp. 54-69.
Eden gave an alarmist account of affairs in Ireland; he urged the House to agree to all the measures proposed by the Volunteers, with a partial repeal of the 6th Act of George I, declaring that if he did not return the next day with the promise of these measures all would be too late. On April 14 Lord Portland arrived in Dublin, and two days later Grattan, in a great speech, brought forward his motion for a Declaration of Rights. The excitement was at its height; the city was full of Volunteers and the galleries of the House were crowded Grattan was ill, but determined. He lived opposite to the Castle, and his doorsteps had been crowded all day with anxious Members. The House was breathless as he rose, looking worn and harassed, to utter the memorable words:—"I am now to address a free people...I found Ireland upon her knees, I watched over her with a paternal solicitude; I have traced her progress from injuries to arms and from arms to liberty. Spirit of Swift! Spirit of Molyneux! your genius has prevailed. Ireland is now a nation!...Bowing in her august presence, I say Esto perpetua."[16] The House then adjourned to give the new Government time to decide on the exact measures to be proposed, while addresses of support flowed in from all sides. In England, Fox agreed to all the propositions. "Unwilling subjects," he said, "are little better than enemies." He had no objection so to word the Act Repeal of the 6th of George I as to contain an explicit renunciation of England's rights, which Burke also approved.

[16] Speeches of Grattan, p. 70.
The Act of Repeal received the Royal Assent on June 21, and with it the restoration of the appellant jurisdiction. Flood was not yet satisfied; he considered that simple repeal not sufficient, and that the British Parliament should make a positive renunciation of all right to bind Ireland. The English Government brought in a Bill to meet this objection and the Act of Renunciation of 23 George III, ch. xxviii expressly resigned all right of the English over the Irish Parliament. Thus was this great question settled, as was then supposed, finally. A vote of £100,000 to the Government and twenty thousand men to the navy testified to the gratitude of the Irish nation to Britain; and a similar grant of money of which he accepted half, showed the admiration felt for the exertions of Grattan. Volunteer bodies proffered their services to Great Britain across the Channel. They declared that now they were free "they would stand or fall with England."

END OF CHAPTER XIII