Nineteenth-Century Ireland (New Gill History of Ireland)

  New Gill History of Ireland

  Nineteenth-

  Century Ireland

  The Search for Stability

  REVISED EDITION

  D. George Boyce

  Gill & Macmillan

  To J. C. B.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title page

  Dedication

  Note on Terminology

  Introduction

  Map

  Chapter 1: The Union: Prelude and Aftermath, 1798–1808

  Chapter 2: The Catholic Question and Protestant Answers, 1808–29

  Chapter 3: Testing the Union, 1830–45

  Chapter 4: The Land and its Nemesis, 1845–9

  Chapter 5: Political Diversity, Religious Division, 1850–69

  Chapter 6: The Shaping of Irish Politics (1): The Making of Irish Nationalism, 1870–91

  Chapter 7: The Shaping of Irish Politics (2): The Making of Irish Unionism, 1870–93

  Chapter 8: From Conciliation to Confrontation, 1891–1914

  Chapter 9: Modernising Ireland, 1834–1914

  Chapter 10: The Union Broken, 1914–23

  Chapter 11: Stability and Strife in Nineteenth-Century Ireland

  References

  Bibliography to the Second Edition

  Bibliography to the First Edition

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  About the Author

  About Gill & Macmillan

  Note on Terminology

  The Irish Parliamentary Party was also known as the Home Rule Party, the Nationalist Party, or simply as the Irish Party. All these names are used interchangeably in this book.

  The terms ‘Nationalist’, ‘Liberal’, ‘Radical’ and ‘Conservative’ appear with an initial capital when they are used predominantly in the sense of denoting membership of specific political parties or groups. They appear in lower case when used predominantly in the sense of denoting allegiance to or support for each particular movement or ideology in general.

  The term ‘Protestant’ tended to be used by contemporaries (particularly in the earlier part of the nineteenth century) to apply exclusively to members of the Church of Ireland. In this book this sense of the word is retained in variations of the well-known phrase ‘Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter’, but is otherwise avoided. The terms ‘Anglican’ and ‘Episcopalian’ are instead used interchangeably to describe the Church of Ireland, which is also occasionally referred to (before 1871) as the Established Church.

  Introduction

  The period covered by this book (1798–1923) both began and ended with a rebellion followed by civil war. In between stretched the Union linking Ireland to Great Britain.

  One of the inescapable penalties of writing history is that the historian knows not only the starting-point of his or her journey but also the destination; and this knowledge invariably influences the choice of what are selected as important and significant events. The Union which was formally inaugurated with the creation of a United Kingdom parliament and a new Union flag on 1 January 1801 was broken in 1921 with the establishment of two new states, Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State. The failure of the Union colours subsequent perception of it. It is tempting to regard it as in some sense doomed to impermanence; and this sense of failure influences its interpretation. ‘Turning-points’ and ‘crises’ are selected on the basis of Ireland’s eventually giving notice of leaving the Union; and a false unity is imposed on the period: the British context of Irish history sets the framework of discussion, even among those who regard its inception as an imposition and its ending as a blessing.

  Certainly the political framework was very different. Ireland no longer had a parliament of her own, and was governed (through a species of administrative devolution) by Westminster. But Ireland, and therefore Britain, brought into the United Kingdom a whole set of special social, economic, political and religious developments, or half-developments, or suppressed developments, that make the dividing-line of 1800 less absolute than it at first sight appears. Irish society in the late eighteenth century was growing more complex, and certainly more volatile. Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter experienced new circumstances and explored different political options—options denied them in the more tranquil years after the Glorious Revolution. Protestants were obliged to defend their political privileges, not only against Presbyterian radicals but also against the hitherto dormant Roman Catholics, increasingly emboldened by the support afforded them by the British government in their campaign for the removal of penal disabilities. And these were not only matters of high politics, to be decided between London and Dublin; they involved real public political debate, and eventually the intervention of radical societies. And they spread beyond normal political activity, as Catholics, for their part, developed a sense of solidarity in the face of Protestant opposition and government repression. What followed can be summed up without doing too much injury to the complexity of the problem: Ireland in the 1780s and 1790s witnessed the weakening of deference among many of her peoples, not least among the Catholics who formed the vast majority of her population.

  This posed an important question: would the new habits of thought and behaviour find some sort of accommodation within the eighteenth-century Irish constitution? Or would they drive Ireland towards yet another confrontation, setting her divided people at each other’s throats and plunging the country into political crisis? It is possible to argue that the existing Irish constitution might have provided a framework within which a healed and settled constitution might have been created; that gradual reform (or even the speedier pace of reform that was seen from the late 1780s) would have brought within the boundaries of the political system those elements, mainly of middle-class status, from Catholic and Dissenter society that were foremost in demanding political change. But this is to ignore two important circumstances. The British government’s desire to push reform onwards, even to the point of compelling the Irish parliament to pass a measure of Catholic Emancipation, collapsed in mutual recrimination in 1795.1 Catholic hopes, raised and then suddenly dashed, created an unstable political environment. This was worsened by the growing disorder in the Irish countryside, as Catholic Defender clashed with Protestant Peep o’ Day Boy and his like, especially in the border counties of Ulster. Long before the 1798 rebellion large areas of Ireland were seething with discontent, with groups of people either successfully standing their ground or being dislodged by their enemies. This enmity was inspired by the desire of local groups to dominate, to stake their claim to territory, and to drive their foes from their areas; but it was based on the old enmities between Protestant and Catholic; and in these volatile times even the would-be Presbyterian radical might find himself switching his allegiance from radical United Irish Society to Protestant Orange Society—sometimes belonging to both at the same time.

  When, in 1798, these crises came to a head, they resulted in a succession of bloody and confused events, dominated by a series of insurrections, local in nature, lacking in central co-ordination or unified aim, but administering a shock to the whole Irish political system. Britain felt that the confusion was not to be borne, and determined that the Irish parliament must be wound up and Ireland merged in the wider context of a United Kingdom. This would have the double advantage of restoring order to Ireland, while at the same time ensuring that she would not again offer a threat to British security in time of danger. It might also provide a remedy for that political deficit that Ireland always seemed to carry forward, namely her failure to discover what Edmund Burke called the ‘ground-work’ of a constitution:2
a settled form of government based upon shared political perceptions. If the Union were accompanied by Catholic Emancipation (the right of Catholics to sit in parliament), then Catholics would reconcile themselves to its permanence, and Protestants of whatever kind would feel secure in a political arrangement that would leave them still a majority—a majority, that is, in the overwhelmingly Protestant United Kingdom with its Protestant king and constitution.

  The Union, in this view, would place Irish Catholics rather in the position of the Protestant Huguenots in France; they would be a minority and therefore at the behest of the majority of British citizens. They could be advanced to full political rights. Or, then again, perhaps they might not be thus advanced. For if they were indeed like the Huguenots in France, then they might be regarded as an alien body, responsible in the past for civil war, insurrection and maybe even revolution: an ‘unassimilable minority’.3 All this rendered the making of a settled constitution by no means certain or easy to attain. Yet there was confidence that the Union would indeed attain it. In Ireland Catholics were in proportion to Protestants as three to one; in the United Kingdom they would be as three to eleven. This would persuade Catholics that they could not get rid of Protestants, and Protestants that they need not fear Catholics. ‘Strength and confidence’, Lord Castlereagh predicted, would produce ‘liberality’.4

  This proposition was soon to be tested in the great struggle over Catholic Emancipation. The long and ultimately successful campaign revealed for the first time how British and Irish politics could interact, with significant results, in the new context created by the Union. Daniel O’Connell has, justly, been given the accolade of ‘Liberator’ because of his powerful and dynamic leadership of the Catholic cause. But that cause could not have triumphed but for the steady erosion of British public opposition through the efforts of Emancipationists in the British House of Commons. These supporters held it axiomatic that the Union was now permanent. This was the view of Henry Grattan, the doyen of Protestant Irish patriotic feeling in the late eighteenth century.5 But O’Connell implicitly, and later explicitly, challenged this idea, or at least the basis of the idea. For Grattan had always held that Roman Catholic freedoms were compatible with Protestant security, and he always assured the Irish parliament that he would not otherwise have supported the Catholic demand. O’Connellism held that, notwithstanding the Act of Union, the Catholics were the real majority in Ireland, and that the Protestants were an ‘artificial’ ascendancy in view of the fact that they depended for their position on the support and encouragement of Great Britain.

  This would reverse the poles of Irish politics, for it would relegate the Protestants into the position of the Huguenots. They would be the minority, dependent upon the sufferance of the Catholic majority. And yet, if Protestants denied this and clung to the Union, with its Protestant and British majority, then Catholics would continue to fulfil the Huguenot role. This great central question lay at the heart of Irish political life in the nineteenth century; its character and its resolution—or lack of resolution—helped to shape not only Irish but British politics under the Union.

  It would be wrong to imply that the outcome of the conflict must be union or separation. The choices were never as simple as that. O’Connell himself pointed the way to another alternative in his practice of co-operating with the Whigs in the 1830s; and this policy of working within the context of the United Kingdom to create special local Catholic institutions was adopted by later generations of Irish political and religious leaders; religious, for in the course of the nineteenth century another great central force emerged: the Roman Catholic Church, which assumed the role not only of moral and religious teacher to its people, but also of its political mentor and its guide, if never its driver. The church was prepared to negotiate on behalf of the Irish Catholic, and to negotiate also with any political movement that purported to represent his interests. This meant in practice that Irish political leaders, from O’Connell to Redmond (and beyond), had to make a concordat with the church. It also meant that they had to bargain with British governments, since separatism was unsupported by the people, opposed by the hierarchy, and denied by the British, until the revolutionary era ushered in by the Great War. It was therefore not the least of the many skills demanded of nationalist politicians that they acquire the ability to prepare their people for disappointing news.

  This gave Irish politics a particular style. Rhetorical battles had to be won even when real political causes were lost or temporarily overthrown. The Irish Parliamentary Party, which represented Catholic Ireland for some fifty years from the 1870s, did so because it was able to maintain its hope of a promised land—a self-governing, majority-ruled Ireland—and because it negotiated real and tangible benefits for its people, and especially for the church, and for the solid core of its supporters, namely the tenant farmers. Yet it would be misleading to assert that political leadership in Ireland always came from the top, or that it was merely a question of manipulating the machinery of high politics. Ireland was a country where political leaders had to maintain the closest possible contact with their followers. For the fact that Irish political demands were put into the Westminster political system must not obscure the vitality of local political life. Irish Catholics, Protestants and Dissenters had clear and definite views about what they wanted, especially on the central issue of their livelihood—the question of the land.

  Ireland in the nineteenth century was an overwhelmingly rural country. It was so not only in the sense that most of its people gained their living from the land, but also in the sense that rural values and ways of life shaped the thinking of the vast bulk of its people. In 1800 Ireland’s population was about 5 million, or one-fifth of the total population of the British Isles. This was to alter radically in the course of the century as the Great Famine and the ongoing process of emigration took their toll. Irish towns in 1800 were small. Dublin was the largest with a population of nearly 200,000. Outside Dublin, the next largest was Cork with 80,000; Limerick with 60,000; Belfast with 20,000; Drogheda and Waterford with the same.6 The balance shifted during the course of the century, and the great industrial city of Belfast rose to put Dublin into second place as the main port of Ireland. But this did not alter the fact that Ireland was the land of the small town; and the town acted as the market for the surrounding agricultural population, and the supplier of its needs. Town and country were not opposites, despite the efforts of romantic nationalists to depict them as such; they were complementary, and when rural areas faced recession or crisis, so did urban dwellers, or at least those of them who counted for most—shopkeepers, publicans and the like—as farmers sold less and spent less.

  Rural Ireland was itself divided into different, and indeed contrasting, sets of people. At the top were the landlords, forming 0.2 per cent of the population in 1861 but owning the vast bulk of the land;7 twenty years after the famine some 2,000 of them, each with 2,000 acres or more, held two-thirds of the land of Ireland.8 Landed property was to decline as a valued resource (political and economic, but not perhaps social) in the course of the century; but it was a long and slow decline, and even as late as the 1870s landlords could still envisage a future where their property provided them with a substantial living. This was less certain in the case of the tenant farmers, whose interests were at the centre of most political debate in the nineteenth century. The Great Famine opened up a more hopeful future for the tenant farmer, in that it encouraged the consolidation of his holdings and greatly depleted the ranks of the labourer and the cottier. Cottiers held small areas of land under a tenant; labourers held only cabins, usually without plots, though occasionally with very small plots of perhaps an acre or less in extent.9 Labourers became marginal figures after the famine, and although their smaller numbers often enabled them to negotiate better wages, yet their political influence was negligible. Their gaining of the vote in the franchise reform of 1884–5 made no difference in the south; only in the north, where the nationalist thr
eat called for Protestant solidarity, did their membership of the Orange Order and their electoral influence elicit at least promises (if little else) from the Unionist leadership.

  The decline in the cottier class after the famine enabled tenant farmers to consolidate holdings of land; and while tenant farmers themselves varied greatly in their wealth and position, being substantial in some areas such as Munster and poor in the west, yet their interests were placed in the forefront of Irish life, for they formed a reasonably homogeneous and identifiable set of people, whose votes counted above all others. Even in the north, where sectarianism was most influential, the wishes of Episcopalian and Presbyterian tenant farmers could not be ignored, and not least by Protestant and Unionist leaders intent upon creating a solid front against the threat of Catholic domination.

  The tenant farmers formed a kind of political and social ballast, and after 1882 became an increasingly dominating force in Ireland. The heady days of the Land League seemed to promise some sort of social revolution in Ireland; but its issue was a stabilising one, as farmers won, and then consolidated, their gains: first in the shape of rent rebates, then through land purchase. This gave Ireland a core of social stability; yet political stability eluded her. For the great central question remained unresolved: if Ireland were to have self-government, which of the major groups in Ireland was to inherit the future?

  This question was different in kind from the controversies aroused by land reform, the reform of the Church of Ireland, municipal reform, educational reform. It was true that it was perhaps implicit in these other issues, in that they all raised in some degree the question of which tradition was to prevail in Ireland. The disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, for example, was treated by both Protestants and Catholics as a kind of ‘national’ question, one with implications for the future mastery of the country. But self-government, or ‘Home-Rule’, was of a different order. It threatened to deprive Irish Protestants of their status; and, what is crucial, it was a threat that touched all Protestants, the middling tenant farmer in County Cork, the working-class labourer in Derry, the skilled artisan in Belfast. It was not merely a matter of economics, though Protestants held that their prosperity depended upon the maintenance of the Union; nor did it involve religion alone, though again Protestants insisted that they would suffer religious persecution under a Dublin parliament. It included all these considerations, yet the whole of the opposition to Home Rule was greater than the sum of the parts. Protestants knew that it was at bottom a challenge to their whole identity and survival; and they knew it was so because Home Rule would degrade them to the unenviable status of the permanent minority in Ireland. This would mean a real revolution, for it would affect not only their long-term future, but their immediate self-concept: that of a people who had wrested victory from the jaws of defeat in 1690 and who now stood on the brink of another round of the old struggle, when their lives and liberties were to be placed at the mercy of those whose own experience hardly disposed them towards sentiments of liberality and tolerance. It was, then, the same predicament as that summed up in the words of Archbishop William King in 1688: ‘There was no medium, but that we or they must be undone.’10