Nineteenth-Century Ireland (New Gill History of Ireland) Page 4
As bees, on flowers alighting, cease their hum,
So, settling upon places, Whigs grow dumb.
But Tories were the main target of his verse:
But, oh poor Ireland! if revenge be sweet
For centuries of wrong, for dark deceit
And with’ring insult—for the Union thrown
Into thy bitter cup, when that alone
Of slavery’s draught was wanting—if for this
Revenge be sweet, thou hast that daemon’s bliss;
For, sure, ‘tis more than hell’s revenge to see
That England trusts the men who’ve ruin’d thee
All that devoted England can oppose
To enemies made friends and friends made foes,
Is the rank refuse, the despis’d remains
Of that unpitying power, whose whips and chains
DroveIreland first to turn, with harlot glance,
Tow’rds other shores, and woo th’ embrace of France.
Another version of the poem put the message of the last two lines even more fiercely:
Made Ireland first, in wild, adulterous trance,
Turn false to England’s bed and whore with France.
Moore’s savage indictment of English perfidy and policy revealed that, despite his dislike of the demagoguery and intolerance of Irish politics, he was capable of, as he put it, ‘giving new forms to claims and remonstrances’ which had been urged more eloquently before and ‘would long ere now have produced their effect, but that the minds of some of our statesmen, like the pupil of the human eye, contract themselves the more, the stronger light there is shed upon them’.29
The method used by Moore—of addressing his poems ‘to an Englishman’—was a common means of pamphleteering in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; it was used, for example, by Burke in his famous Reflections on the Revolution in France. It was also used by another celebrated writer of the day, who was able to combine the service of Ireland with a popularity in England. Lady Morgan (Sydney Owenson) contributed to the case of Ireland against English misconceptions, and to the idea of a lost ‘Celtic’ Irish identity—an identity more convincing to the English than the Irish (but which the Irish were adept at using when it suited them). Lady Morgan was something of a literary and social adventuress; her father had been an actor-manager at the Theatre Royal in Fishamble Street; and she claimed (in London) to be ‘from the barony of Tireragh in the province of Connaught’ and of an aristocratic line. Whatever the truth or falsehood of this, she was fascinated by what she saw as the feudal trappings of the west of Ireland; and when she came to write about this society in 1806, she chose a romantic subject: the ‘Wild Irish Girl’ Glorvina, the daughter of Myles MacDermott, ‘Prince of Connaught’. This heroine’s mysterious Celtic charm won the heart of Horatio Mortimer, a young man ‘sent to a country against which I have a decided prejudice’, and one which he supposed ‘semi-barbarous, semi-civilised’. But Irish liberality, Irish wit, Irish learning, and the strange and glorious landscape soon dispelled his prejudice, and Mortimer ended up defending the country against all the calumnies of people like himself—Englishmen ignorant of Ireland. The story was related in a series of letters written by Mortimer to a friend; but equally significant were the references, taken from contemporary sources and printed at the foot of the page, describing traits and manners of the Irish, as noted by various learned observers. The author thus addressed the reader on two levels: on the fictional, through the plot; and on the factual, through the plentiful discussion and quotation that formed such a large part of the work.
Neither fiction nor ‘fact’, as it happened, bore much resemblance to the Ireland of Lady Morgan’s day. But at least she gained for Ireland a sympathetic audience in England. Her book was published by the celebrated Sir Richard Phillips. Her readership responded to the sentimental side of Irish life (as it was later to respond to the gentle and gently nationalist ballads of Thomas Moore). It read about the loyalty of the Irish to their sovereigns, the Stuart kings. And it learned too about a dying or dead civilisation, one which touched its heartstrings in ways in which the reality of Irish life could not. Romantic Ireland was born as the Irish enlightenment drew to its close in rebellion. And the idea that there was indeed a ‘fair Hibernia’ that might be rescued from the clutches of conspirators, moonlighters, cruel peasants, irresponsible national leaders and the Roman Catholic Church exercised a certain fascination over the minds of many English people, including some politicians. The book even cast its spell over the ladies of the viceregal court, who commissioned jewellers to manufacture Glorvina brooches, despite Dublin Castle’s reservations about its ‘subversive’ moral; and it ran through seven editions in two years.30
All this was far removed from the recent bloody and divisive rebellion, with its trail of burnings, hangings and shootings. Lady Morgan’s rural arcadia might be located somewhere in Ireland; peasants were doubtless the generous and colourful people that were depicted in the pages of The Wild Irish Girl. But there was a peasant Ireland of the fact as well as of the mind, that was to engross the British authorities as they established themselves in Dublin Castle in 1801. For many of the poorest people in rural Ireland life was a steady struggle for existence, an existence always threatened by their social superiors armed with the full support of the law. Shortly after the Union there was a recrudescence of the violence perpetrated by secret societies whose presence had been endemic since the late eighteenth century: Threshers, Rockites and other clandestine groups whose ability to terrorise parts of the countryside, though it must not be exaggerated, was what most astonished English observers of Ireland. The targets of these societies were farmers, tithe-proctors who collected money due to the Church of Ireland, and on occasion priests whose demand for dues was considered unreasonable, sometimes even landlords, though they were a more remote and formidable prospect. Secret societies were organised by those at the bottom of the social scale, namely labourers or very poor tenants. They first resurfaced in 1806–7 in Connacht, and, though not political in outlook, they were a source of trouble to the government until the foundation of a professional police force by Sir Robert Peel in 1814 enabled the authorities to begin to gain the upper hand.31
Agrarian crime was carried forward into the new century; but the British government felt that at least it had scotched the radicalism of the United Irishmen. They were perhaps premature in their complacency. In 1803 Robert Emmet sought to raise the flag of rebellion again, this time without the help of the French. He planned to seize Dublin Castle and other important buildings, and then wait for the people to rally to the cause. On 23 July Emmet led a small force into the streets of the capital, engaged in a fight with some soldiers, and then fled, to be captured, tried and executed. He made an impressive speech from the dock, the first of the political performances that would later be repeated by the Fenians in 1867, by Roger Casement in 1916, and by others in the republican tradition: ‘Let my character and my motives remain in repose in obscurity and peace, till other times and men can do them justice. Then shall my character be vindicated. Then may my epitaph be written.’32 Emmet, like Lady Morgan, struck a chord not only in certain kinds of Irish but also English public opinion. As late as 1931 Raymond Postgate wrote that:
As we think of the character of Robert Emmet we seem to be holding in our hands a prism of white, very clear glass. There is no distortion in it; the pellucid devotion to one idea prevents the many-coloured play of mixed motives. . . . Those who in their youth have been wholly devoted to a cause or an ideal, can see in young Emmet the boy that they once were, or, at least, hope that they once were. Nothing disturbed or distracted his devotion to Ireland; there were no distorting interests to flaw the clearness of the light.33
Emmet’s recovery of insurrection from what another English admirer of a later age called the ‘dismal period of violence, hatred, debauchery and self-interest’34 seemed to have little relevance in the Ireland of 1803. But radicalism was not yet extinguished, at least amongst the lower orders. There were groups of rebels still operating in parts of the country. In County Kildare they numbered thousands. But they lacked organisation, and there was no rising to compare with the dangerous days of 1798. Trees of Liberty were planted; the rebel resistance at Vinegar Hill was praised;35 but republicanism as a serious popular force, if not dead, was dying.
It was dying, not only because the French were no longer ‘on the sea’, but because it could not offer any unifying ideology either to Catholics or to Presbyterians as it had in the years 1795–8. The experience of ’98 had burned itself deeply into both the Presbyterian and Catholic consciousness, but in ways that were adverse to its repetition. Presbyterians were already shedding their radicalism before the rebellion: of 14,000 loyal yeomanry in Tyrone, Fermanagh, Down and Armagh, some 10,000 were Presbyterians, and, as one historian of their denomination put it, ‘Not one of them was known to violate his oath of allegiance, as was done in other districts by some Roman Catholic members of this force.’36 James McKey of Belfast wrote to the Marquis of Downshire that ‘To see Presbyterian ministers, with rich republican [i.e. radical Presbyterian] shopkeepers, sitting in the guardroom at daylight in the morning with their guns, had, in my eyes, a wonderful appearance.’37 The judge who tried the United Irish leader, Thomas Russell, noted with satisfaction in October 1803 that Ulster Presbyterians ‘had got it into their heads that the present scheme of rebellion has originated with the papists exclusively, and that idea together with a conviction that, should Bonaparte [sic] succeed in his design, there would be no republic, but on the contrary, despotism and pillage secures their support in the present crisis’.38 The sectarian warfare of the south caused them, in the words of a later commentator, to ‘think it better
to bear the oppression of landlords than to be piked by Papists. . . . Four generations had come and gone since the massacre of 1641, which was then almost forgotten; but fresh massacres in the South raised again the fears and excited the anger of the sturdy Ulster Presbyterians.’39 The ‘oppression of landlords’ was, in time, to arouse again a spirit of radicalism in Presbyterian breasts; but it was of a different stamp from that of the United Irishmen, and was related to specific grievances rather than to the grievances of all Irish underdogs; and it could flourish—indeed, could only flourish—within the political context of the United Kingdom.
Catholics were also affected by the disaster of ’98; and they, for the most part, did ‘fear to speak’ of it. Republicanism was an uneasy mixture of sectarian hatred and humanitarian philosophy; it had no clearly articulated political goal beyond that of making Ireland free, and even the nature of that freedom was not clearly defined: for some it meant the separation of Ireland from England, but others would have settled for less. And the rising star of Catholic politics, Daniel O’Connell, lost no opportunity to vilify the men of ’98 and to characterise them as irreconcilably violent republicans.40 But apart from O’Connell’s efforts to prevent a repetition of the rebellion, there was the simple fact that ’98 had produced enough horrors to frighten and offend the bulk of the Catholics of Ireland, who were far removed in sentiment from the Gothic bloodlust frequently attributed to them in the frenzied months of the rising.
Nevertheless, the Catholic role in the ’98 rising was too tempting a target to be ignored by Protestant historians, intent on rewriting history that would conform to the old idea of the eternal enemy against whom all Protestants must be ever vigilant. One of the earliest writers in the field, Sir Richard Musgrave, aspired to blacken the entire Catholic community (while discreetly ignoring the Presbyterian role in the rising) in his Memoirs of the Different Rebellions in Ireland from the Arrival of the English, published in 1801 and quickly reissued. Musgrave, an M.P. for a Waterford borough in the Irish parliament, declared that the concessions made to Catholics for nearly twenty years, might reasonably have been expected to attach them to the state and to their Protestant fellow-countrymen. But this was far from the case, for not only the ’98 rebellion but also ‘incidents which daily occur’ afforded proof ‘that the tenets of their religion, and the conduct of their priests, will always make it impracticable’. Such tenets, infused into the minds of the population, ‘have been a fruitful source of discord and rebellion ever since the introduction of the reformation’. Musgrave excepted from his strictures the Catholic nobility, gentry and business classes, who were ‘loyal, generous and humane’; but these were an ‘inconsiderable part of the community’; and the Roman Catholic religion was irreconcilably opposed to civilised government. Catholics should be satisfied with toleration and must not interfere in the government of the kingdom, ‘as such interference would be incompatible with the Protestant ascendancy, which we have resolved with our lives and fortunes to maintain’. Catholic and Protestant could live side by side in perfect amity in Germany; but different circumstances prevailed in Ireland, in that Catholics were taught to keep alive the hope of recovering their forfeited estates.41
Musgrave’s provocative essay did not go unanswered; it brought forth a series of histories which set out to refute his version of the remote and recent Irish past. Among these was the Rev. James Gordon’s History of the Rebellion in Ireland (1803). Gordon in his preface expressed his disapproval of ‘catholicity’, but he ‘rejoiced in the repeal of penal statutes’ and declared that ‘Whenever the government shall have manifestly shewn a resolution for the concession for the catholics, counterfeit loyalists ... will be seen completely changing sides, and courting those against whom they now rail, with marked assiduity.’ These counterfeit loyalists, like over-zealous Catholics, were, Gordon proclaimed, the enemies of impartial history; and his efforts to counsel them to cultivate mutual friendship brought forth ‘the opposite of thanks from both’. But he felt some degree of comfort in the reflection that those who formerly boasted of their shocking atrocities now felt contrition for these acts.42 He hoped, in conclusion, that
One of the happiest consequences reasonably expected to arise, in course of time, from the abolition of our national distinctiveness, the removal of our local parliament, and its incorporation with that of Britain, is the subsidence of that rancorous spirit of religious animosity, which has been the parent of so much mischief to this island.43
Francis Plowden, an English Catholic lawyer, also urged a proper union to counteract Musgrave and his like; and William Parnell in his Historical Apology for the Irish Catholics (1807) argued that the 1641 rising had broken out because of injustice to the Catholics. Dublin Castle, for its part, did not approve of Musgrave’s attack on the loyalty of Catholics, or rather their disloyalty, through the ages, for it wished to ensure that past animosities would indeed be buried in the past. The Catholic historian Denis Taaffe, while attacking Musgrave, struck an otherwise conciliatory note urging that the Union be given a chance to justify itself.44
The Scottish Union, in this sense, had ‘justified’ itself, in that it had provided a framework within which Episcopalians could live in a toleration which they would not have enjoyed in an independent Scottish kingdom; and the hope was that, outside the narrower confines of the kingdom of Ireland, the same kind of toleration would ensue. James Gordon did not doubt that in the imperial parliament, ‘as in a truly protestant assembly, the question will be decided in the spirit of liberality, justice, and true policy; overruling by an august determination the ominous croakings of little bigots’. He also listed some important reforms that were necessary to settle Ireland, notably the granting of long tenures to the peasants so as to encourage them to improve their tenancies, and also a fair and equitable commutation of tithes ‘or such modification of them as would relieve the industrious cultivator, by obliging the lazy grazier, and the idle esquire, to bear a just proportion of the burthen’.45 The Dowager Marchioness of Downshire, writing in 1804, feared that ‘Without the interference of well-informed, independent Irish members ... little can be done for Ireland, on account of the general want to particular information and knowledge of its interests, which the English members cannot be supposed to possess.’ But she took consolation from the reflection that ‘No disposition in the government or parliament is wanting to meet and relieve all its wants, and much good is to be hoped for and expected.’46
This would be the real test of the Union. Not the manner of its passing, which later generations dismissed as ‘corruption’, but which was perfectly consistent with the political behaviour of the time; not the terms of the act itself, which were as fair and generous as the terms of union between England and Scotland more than a century before, despite the fact that the Scottish Union was negotiated between the two governments (though the Scottish Union, like the Irish, was regarded by Scottish Unionists as simply the lesser of two evils; lesser than standing alone as a satellite state).47 Scotland did not, any more than Ireland, gain immediate economic benefits from her union with England. In Scotland trade and manufacture were on the fringe of a predominantly rural economy. The Scots were no more welcome in England after the 1707 act than were the Irish after 1801. And certainly the Irish had been more popular (or at least less unpopular) than the Scots in the eighteenth century. Dr Johnson noted that there was a ready hand of friendship for the Irish in England, whereas the Scots were held up to ridicule, their thick accents and their tendency to stick together derided.48 It was not until the end of the eighteenth century that England and Scotland moved towards what A. V. Dicey and Robert S. Rait called ‘moral unity’.49 Yet even as late as 1781 Charles Macklin’s dramatic masterpiece had as its central character Sir Pertinax MacSycophant, a hypocritical Scottish adventurer.50