Strafford fell, but the insurrection and ma.s.sacre of 1641 were the natural result of his intrigues with the Irish Parliament and the Irish chiefs. It was under the impression of this manifest danger that Cromwell--a century and a half before his time--abolished the Dublin Parliament and summoned Irish representatives to the first United Parliament at Westminster.
As the power of Spain declined, France came to be the chief menace to England and to the peace of Europe. Again Ireland instinctively allied herself with the enemy. Tyrconnel now played the part of Strafford, and with the aid of French troops and French subsidies, and a sympathetic Irish Parliament, endeavoured to destroy the Ulster Plantation, and make Ireland a jumping-off place for the invasion of England. The Irish Parliament, in the meantime, did its part by confiscating the estates of the settlers, driving out the Protestant clergy, and outlawing English sympathisers by name in "the hugest Bill of Attainder which the world has seen."[3] It was the successful defence of Derry and Enniskillen by the Scotch and English colonists that saved Ireland and gave King William and his troops the foothold that enabled them to save England, too, in the Irish campaign of the following year.
Not the least remarkable instance of the use to which separate Parliaments within the Kingdom could be put for the ruin of England occurred during the activity of James the Second"s son, the so-called "Old Pretender." In 1723 his chief adviser, the Earl of Mar, presented to the Regent of France a memorial setting out in detail a project for betraying Britain into the power of France by dismembering the British Parliament.[4] The Irish Parliament, in close alliance with a restored Scottish Parliament, was to be used to curb the power of England. "The people of Ireland and Scotland," according to Mar, "are of the same blood and possess similar interests," and they should thus always be allied against England and oppose their "united strength"--backed, of course, by that of France--to any undue growth of the English power. The scheme came to nothing, but if the Pretender had possessed a little more energy and capacity; if the French Court had been in earnest, and if Ireland and Scotland had each possessed a separate Parliament, "with an executive responsible to it," and with the control of a national militia, the story of 1745 might have ended differently.
It is necessary that these facts should be kept in mind when complaint is made of the oppressive and demoralising Irish Penal Code. That Code no one defends now, although it was lauded at the time by Swift as a bulwark of the Church against the Catholics on the one hand, and the Presbyterians on the other. It was the product of a cruel and bigoted age, and at its worst it was less severe than similar laws prevailing against Protestants in those parts of the Continent where the Roman Church held sway.[5] Spain and France were at that time vastly more powerful, populous, and wealthy countries than England: England was never free from the dread of foreign invasion, and to the would-be invader Ireland always held a guiding light and an open door.
Finally, it must also be remembered that at a time when the chances seemed fairly even, as between William and England on the one hand, and James and France on the other, the Prince of Orange, accustomed to the German way of settling such differences, had made formal offer to Tyrconnel of a working compromise--the free exercise of their religion to the Irish Catholics: half the Churches of the Kingdom: half the employments, civil and military, if they pleased, and even the moiety of their ancient properties. "These proposals," says the Chevalier Wogan, Tyrconnel"s nephew and confidant, who is our informant, "though they were to have had an English Act of Parliament for their sanction, were refused with universal contempt." In other words, the party which with the a.s.sistance of France still hoped to obtain all, refused to be content with half. It is true that Wogan, in the letter from which we have quoted,[6] after stating that the exiles, "in the midst of their hard usage abroad, could not be brought to repent of their obstinacy,"
justifies their refusal by the way in which the Articles of Limerick were afterwards disregarded by the Irish Parliament. But this is evidently an argument of retrospective invention, and it may fairly be argued that the position would have been very different if peace on equal terms had been made on the direct authority of the King before Aughrim rather than by his deputies after Limerick.
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.
And if the separatist theory has involved, as we have seen, such external dangers to the Empire, the case for the old Irish Parliament from the point of the "vital interests" of Ireland itself is even weaker. By it the bulk of the Irish people were treated for a century in a fashion described by an Irish Chief Secretary as "ingrafting absurdity on the wisdom of England and tyranny on the religion that professes humanity." It was conspicuous for its corruption even in a corrupt age, and, as was inevitable, it involved Ireland in constant conflicts with England, conflicts that were vexatious and injurious to both countries.
Swift, who, amongst those who have not read his works, pa.s.ses for an Irish patriot, is at his savagest when inveighing against this sham Parliament.[7]
Its members are, he says--
"...three hundred brutes All involved in wild disputes, Roaring till their lungs are spent Privilege of Parliament"!"
And if only the Devil were some day to come "with poker fiery red,"
and--
"When the den of thieves is full, Quite destroy the harpies" nest, How might then our Isle be blest!"
Capable observers, from Swift to Arthur Young, bear continuous testimony to the systematic and habitual corruption of the Irish Parliament.
Offices were multiplied and were distributed among clamorous applicants on the ground of family or personal influence, or political support--never by any chance on the ground of merit or capacity. Public money was squandered for private purposes. Sir George Macartney, himself an Irishman and a Member of Parliament, in his "Account of Ireland,"
speaking of the year 1745, says--[8]
"The House of Commons now began to appropriate a considerable part of the additional duties to their own use. This was done under pretence of encouraging public works such as inland navigation, collieries, and manufactories of different kinds; but the truth is that most of these public works were private jobs carried on under the direction and for the advantage of some considerable gentlemen in the House of Commons."
Arthur Young, whose careful and impartial study of the state of affairs in Ireland under the Dublin Parliament has become a cla.s.sic, speaks of the same cla.s.s of transaction,[9]
"The members of the House of Commons at the conclusion of the sessions met for the purpose of voting the uses to which this money should be applied: the greater part of it was amongst themselves, their friends or dependants, and though some work of apparent use to the public was always the plea, yet under the sanction there were a great number of very scandalous jobs."
Young admits that some useful public work was done, but that most of the money was misappropriated was matter of common report. After a reference to the construction of a certain ca.n.a.l he adds--
"Some gentlemen I have talked with on this subject have replied, "It is a job: "twas meant as a job: you are not to consider it as a ca.n.a.l of trade, but as a ca.n.a.l for public money!" ... Sorry I am to say that a history of public works in Ireland would be a history of jobs."
Money was voted, he says elsewhere, for--
"Collieries where there is no coal, for bridges where there are no rivers, navigable cuts where there is no water, harbours where there are no ships, and churches where there are no congregations."
And when the Union was finally on its way, Hamilton Rowan, one of the founders of the United Irishmen, then in exile in America, wrote home to his father: "I congratulate you on the report which spreads here that a Union is intended. In that measure I see the downfall of one of the most corrupt a.s.semblies, I believe, that ever existed."[10]
It is little wonder that men of good will in Ireland prayed to be delivered from such a Parliament. Molyneux, the first of the Irish Parliamentary patriots, whose book, "The Case of Ireland"s being Governed by Laws made in England Stated," was burnt by the common hangman, pleaded indeed for a reformed and independent Parliament, but only because fair representation in the English Parliament was at the time "a happiness they could hardly hope for." And a few years later the Irish House, in congratulating Queen Anne on the Union of England and Scotland, added, "May G.o.d put it into your royal heart to add greater strength and l.u.s.tre to your Crown by a yet more comprehensive Union."
The English Parliament, through sheer lethargy and carelessness, missed at this time an opportunity which would have peacefully launched Ireland on her career on an equality with Scotland and England, and must have profoundly modified the relations of the two countries. Immediate prosperity, in the case of a land wasted by a century of strife and bloodshed, was not indeed to be hoped for any more than in the case of Scotland, which had still two armed rebellions, and much bickering and jealousy in store before settling down to peaceful development. But if Ireland had been granted her pet.i.tions for Union in 1703 and 1707, and had thus secured equal laws and equal trading privileges, she would at any rate have emerged from her period of trial and discord not later than Scotland, and would have antic.i.p.ated the economic and social advantages predicted by Adam Smith,[11] when he says--
"By a union with Great Britain, Ireland would gain, besides the freedom of trade, other advantages much more important, and which would much more than compensate any increase of taxes that might accompany that union. By the union with England, the middling and inferior ranks of people in Scotland gained a complete deliverance from the power of an aristocracy which had always before oppressed them. By a union with Great Britain, the greater part of the people of all ranks in Ireland would gain an equally complete deliverance from a much more oppressive aristocracy, an aristocracy not founded, like that of Scotland, in the natural and respectable distinctions of birth and fortune, but in the most odious of all distinctions, those of religious and political prejudices....
Without a union with Great Britain, the inhabitants of Ireland are not likely, for many ages, to consider themselves as one people."
Pitt, who was proud to proclaim himself the pupil of Adam Smith in politics and in economics, found himself, a quarter of a century after these words were written, in a position to carry out, in face of great difficulties and dangers at home and abroad, the beneficent reform advocated by his great master--a reform which, as we have seen, could have been carried a century earlier without any difficulty whatever. But the century that had been wasted involved many concurrent miseries and misfortunes: social and economic stagnation, an intensification of religious and racial bitterness, conspiracy, and invasion; savage outbreaks savagely repressed. When the time comes to measure up the rights and wrongs of those dark days, the judgment on England will a.s.suredly be that her fault was not the carrying of the Union, but the delaying of that great measure of reform and emanc.i.p.ation until it was almost too late.
The story of the Union has been told and retold in the utmost detail throughout the century. The present writer has attempted quite recently to summarise it,[12] and there is little to add. The charge that it was carried by corruption is simply another way of saying that it had, const.i.tutionally, to be pa.s.sed through the Dublin Parliament, that body which, from the days of Swift"s invective to those of its final condemnation, lived and moved and had its being solely in and by corruption. As Lord Castlereagh, who had charge of the Bill in the Irish House of Commons, put it, the Government was forced to recognise the situation and its task was "to buy out and secure to the Crown forever the fee simple of Irish corruption, which has so long enfeebled the power of Government and endangered the connection."
THE UNION.
The Irish Parliament had run its course, and had involved the unhappy country in chaos, bankruptcy, revolution, and bloodshed. Lord Clare--a late and reluctant convert to the policy of the Union--said in the Irish House of Lords (Feb. 10, 1800)--
"We have not three years of redemption from bankruptcy, intolerable taxation, nor one hour"s security against the renewal exterminating civil war. Session after session have you been compelled to enact laws of unexampled rigour and novelty to repress the horrible excesses of the ma.s.s of your people: and the fury of murder and pillage and desolation have so outrun all legislative exertions that you have been at length driven to the hard necessity of breaking down the pale of munic.i.p.al law, and putting your courage under the ban of military government--and in every little circle of dignity and independence we hear whispers of discontent at the temperate discretion with which it is administered.... Look to your civil and religious dissensions. Look to the fury of political faction and the torrents of human blood that stain the face of your country, and of what materials is that man composed who will not listen with patience and good will to any proposition that can be made to him for composing the distractions and healing the wounds and alleviating the miseries of this devoted nation?"
Lord Clare"s words--unanswered and unanswerable then and now--const.i.tute a sufficient comment on the foolish fable of later invention, that Ireland was a land of peace and harmony, of orderly government and abounding prosperity, when a wicked English minister came and "stole away the Parliament House"--since which all has been decay and desolation. The halcyon period is generally made to coincide with that of "Grattan"s Parliament"--of the semi-independent and quite unworkable Const.i.tution of 1782, which had been extorted from England"s weakness when Ireland was denuded of regular troops, and at the mercy of a Volunteer National Guard, when Cornwallis had just surrendered at Yorktown, and Spain and France were once more leagued with half Europe for the destruction of the British Empire.
It is quite true that the latter part of the eighteenth century was, on the whole, a time of considerable prosperity to certain cla.s.ses in Ireland--a prosperity varied by periods of acute depression and distress. But that prosperity, such as it was, neither began with Grattan"s Parliament nor ended with it--had, indeed, no more connection with the Irish Parliament in any of its phases than had the Goodwin Sands with Tenterden steeple. With the exception of the respite between the Treaty of Versailles and the outbreak of the French Revolution, England was almost constantly at war, or feverishly preparing for war.
Simultaneously came the unprecedented increase of urban industry, following on the invention of the steam-engine and spinning machinery.
The result was an enormous and growing demand for corn, beef, and pork, sailcloth, stores of all kinds for our armies and fleets, a demand which England, owing to the growth of her town population and the consequent growth of the home demand, was unable adequately to meet.
Ireland reaped the benefit. As a largely agricultural country, she was as yet little influenced by the discoveries of Watt, of Hargreaves, of Arkwright, or of Crompton. But her long-rested soil could produce in apparently unlimited quant.i.ties those very products of which the British forces stood most in need. The fleets were victualled and fitted out at Cork, and they carried thence a constant stream of supplies of all sorts for our armies in the field. Indeed, so keen was the demand that it was soon discovered that not only our own troops, but those of the enemy, were receiving Irish supplies, and smugglers on the south and west coasts reaped a rich harvest.
The result was obvious. Cattle graziers and middlemen made enormous profits, rents were doubled and trebled. Dublin, Cork, Waterford, Limerick and Belfast flourished exceedingly on war prices and war profits. But there is no evidence that the ma.s.s of the people in their degraded and debased condition shared to any extent in this prosperity.
It was at this very period that Arthur O"Connor spoke of them as "the worst clad, the worst fed, the worst housed people in Europe."
Whiteboyism, outrage and lawlessness spread over the face of the country, and, as Lord Clare reminded Parliament, "session after session have you been compelled to enact laws of unexampled rigour and novelty to repress the horrible excesses of the ma.s.s of your people." It has been made a charge against the Union that during some disturbed periods of the nineteenth century the United Parliament had to pa.s.s "Coercion"
Acts at the rate of nearly one every session. The complainants should look nearer home and they would find from the records of the Irish Legislature that during the "halcyon" days of "Grattan"s Parliament"--the eighteen years between 1782 and the Union--no less than fifty-four Coercion Acts were pa.s.sed, some of them of a thoroughness and ferocity quite unknown in later legislation. The close of the nineteenth century and the opening of the twentieth were, in reality, in spite of a certain amount of agrarian crime, organised and subsidised from abroad, a period of much greater peace and more widespread prosperity than the bloodstained years that marked the close of the eighteenth century--and of the Irish Parliament.
Another fiction regarding the Union may perhaps be worth notice. It has sometimes been suggested that it was carried by a venal oligarchy in opposition to the will of the great ma.s.s of the population, of the Roman Catholic population in particular. This is precisely the reverse of the truth. The oligarchy controlled the Parliament, and it therefore followed that the uniformly corrupt traditions of the Irish Parliament had to be observed in carrying the Union as in carrying every other Government Bill throughout the century. But, so far from the Act of Union being carried by landowners and Protestants against the will of the Catholics, it was, as a matter of fact, carried with the ardent and unanimous a.s.sent and support of the Catholic hierarchy, and against the embittered opposition of the old ascendancy leaders, who feared the loss of their influence of power.
The evidence on this point is doc.u.mentary and precise. Indeed, no one thought of doubting or challenging it at the time; Grattan contented himself with denouncing the Catholic Bishops as "a band of prost.i.tuted men." Dr. Troy, Archbishop of Dublin, was, as his correspondence shows, a warm, consistent and active supporter of the Union. Dr. Dillon, Archbishop of Tuam, wrote in September, 1799, that he had had an opportunity during his recent visitation "of acquiring the strongest conviction that this measure alone can restore harmony and happiness to our unhappy country." His neighbour, Dr. Bodkin, Bishop Galway, wrote that the Union was the only measure to save "poor infatuated Ireland"
from "ruin and destruction." Dr. Moylan, Bishop of Cork, was equally emphatic. "I am perfectly satisfied," he says, "that it is impossible to extinguish the feuds and animosities which disgrace this Kingdom, nor give it the advantages of its natural local situation, without a Union with Great Britain. G.o.d grant that it may soon take place!"
As for the feeling of the rank and file of the electors--under a very widely extended franchise--two examples will suffice. In two cases--in the County of Kerry and the borough of Newry--both open const.i.tuencies--by-elections occurred during the pa.s.sing of the Union legislation. In both instances the Roman Catholic vote predominated, and in both the feeling was so strong in favour of the Union that no opponent dared to face the poll. In after years Mr. Maurice Fitzgerald, the Knight of Kerry, recounted his experiences. "Having accepted office," he says, "as a supporter of the Union, I went to two elections pending the measure and was returned without opposition in a county where the Roman Catholic interest greatly preponderated, and a declaration almost unanimous in favour of the Union proceeded from the County of Kerry. One of my most strenuous supporters in bringing forward that declaration was Mr. Maurice O"Connell, uncle of Mr. Daniel O"Connell, and my most active partisan was Mr. John O"Connell, brother of Mr. Daniel O"Connell."
In Newry an attempt was made to put up an anti-Unionist candidate, but the Roman Catholic Bishop, Dr. Lennan, met and repulsed the intruder in militant fashion. "Mr. Bell," he reports to Archbishop Troy, "declined the poll, and surrendered yesterday. The Catholics stuck together like the Macedonian phalanx, and with ease were able to turn the scale in favour of the Chancellor of the Exchequer."
To the Irish Catholic at the time of the Union, the Dublin legislature was, indeed, in the words of Mr. Denys Scully, a leading Catholic layman, "not our Parliament, for we had no share in it, but their Club-house."
The summing up of the whole matter is perhaps best expressed in the measured judgment of Mr. John Morley in his study of the life of Edmund Burke. Burke, in an evil moment for himself and for Ireland, had lent himself in 1785 to what Mr. Morley called the "factious" and "detestable" course of Fox and the English Whig leaders in destroying Pitt"s Commercial Propositions.
"Had it not been for what he himself called the delirium of the preceding session" (writes Burke"s biographer)[13] "he would have seen that Pitt was in truth taking his first measures for the emanc.i.p.ation of Ireland from an unjust and oppressive subordination and for her installation as a corporate member of the Empire--the only position permanently possible for her.... A substantial boon was sacrificed amid bonfires and candles to the phantom of Irish Legislative Independence. The result must have convinced Pitt more firmly than ever that his great master, Adam Smith, was right in predicting that nothing short of the Union of the two countries would deliver Ireland out of the hands of her fatuous chiefs and of their too worthy followers."
What would Mr. John Morley, the historian who wrote those words in the prime of his intellectual strength and judgment, have said if any one had told him that in his old age Lord Morley, the politician, would have been actively engaged in a.s.sisting another generation of "fatuous chiefs" and still more worthy followers to sacrifice the true interests of Ireland in the pursuit of "the phantom of Irish Legislative Independence"?
AFTER THE UNION.
That the Union to some extent failed in the beneficent effects which it was calculated to produce in Ireland is only another instance of the working of the "curse of mis-chance" which has so often, before and since, interposed to thwart the intentions of statesmen in their dealings with the two countries. Pitt, Castlereagh, and Cornwallis, the three men chiefly concerned in planning the change, were all agreed in explaining that the Union was not a policy complete in itself, but was only the necessary foundation upon which a true remedial policy was to be based. As Lord Cornwallis said at the time, "the word "Union" will not cure the ills of this wretched country. It is a necessary preliminary, but a great deal more remains to be done." Catholic Emanc.i.p.ation, a series of parliamentary, educational, financial, and economic reforms, and the abolition of the Viceroyalty, the visible symbol of separatism and dependence, were all essential portions of Pitt"s scheme. But Pitt was destined to sink into an early grave without seeing any of them materially furthered. Treacherous colleagues and the threatened insanity of the King blocked the way of some of them: England"s prolonged struggle for existence against the power of Napoleon, involving as it did financial embarra.s.sment and a generation of political reaction, accounted for the rest.
Pitt and Castlereagh resigned on the King"s refusal to accept their advice, "and so," as Lord Rosebery says,[14] "all went wrong." It was "like cutting the face out of a portrait and leaving the picture in the frame. The fragment of policy flapped forlornly on the deserted mansions of the capital." A generation of agitation, strife, and discontent was to pa.s.s before Emanc.i.p.ation was carried, and the reforms had to wait still longer. Meanwhile a wonderful change of front had taken place. The leading opponents of the Union--Plunket, Foster, Beresford--even Grattan himself--came to accept it, and, in some cases, figured as its warmest defenders. And the Catholic Party, whom we have seen so strongly supporting the Union, gradually grew into opponents. Daniel O"Connell, whose brother and uncle were the leading supporters of the Union candidate for Kerry, started a formidable agitation first for Emanc.i.p.ation and then for Repeal of the Union. In the former he succeeded because enlightened public opinion in both countries was on his side: in the latter he failed utterly, both parties in Great Britain and a large section in Ireland being inflexibly opposed to any such reactionary experiment. In the end O"Connell died disillusioned and broken-hearted, and the Repeal movement disappeared from the field of Irish politics till revived many years later in the form of Home Rule.