and subordinate landlords, was the principal cause of those disturbances they have met with from them. I have but too much reason to believe this remark was well grounded, from the observations I had an opportunity of making in the midst of the country where these insurgents have given the greatest disturbance. "The origin of their denomination of Whiteboys,' was from the practice of wearing their shirts withoutside of their clothes, the better to distinguish each other in the night-time. It happened that we were at Kilkenny, on our road to Waterford, at the very time of the last considerable insurrection of these unhappy wretches, in the south of Kilkenny county, not far from Waterford. I was naturally led to inquire into the cause of these insurrections, and the pretensions of the insurgents themselves for creating these disturbances. "From the people of easy and affluent circumstances it is natural to suppose the accounts would be very different from such as were given by those of the same class with the delinquents. By comparing these, however, with the obvious appearance of things in the country, I soon had sufficient reason to believe their disquiet arose, in general, from the severe treatment they met with from their landlords and the lords of the manors, and principally from their clergy. Our road to Waterford lay through the very midst of these unhappy insurgents, and we were consequently advised to take a different route. Why ?-whence should be the fear? We have neither deprived them of their common rights nor their potatoes. They have no quarrel with us, who have never injured them. Persuade your insatiable priests, of every denomination, to act themselves the precepts of charity and humanity they preach, and they will be as safe in their houses by night, as we shall probably be, in the midst of them by day. "We rode through the country, in which they were assembled in great numbers, but the very day before the last considerable engagement they had with the troops quartered at the towns in the neighbourhood, but met with no molestation from any of them. The very next day after we came to Waterford the news was brought of this engagement, about four or five miles from the town. The opinions and representations of the inhabitants of the town were various on the merits of the affair; but it was easy to distinguish the sentiments of the humane from the aggravated representations of those whose inveterate prejudices against these unhappy sufferers instigated them to set these disturbers of the peace of their country in the worst point of view, and, without any apparent candour in their representations, to place the rise of them in an idle, turbulent, and rebellious disposition of the insurgents. The very officers of the troops wished they would drive the whole fraternity of parsons out of the country; and with good reason; for, if the parsons cannot live here on the great tithes of the corn, and about which they have seldom any disputes with their parishioners, how is the unhappy peasant to subsist on the produce of ten or fifteen perches of potatoes, the whole provision, perhaps for a twelvemonth, for himself and family?-yet even the very tenth of these is demanded by the insatiable, unrelenting priest. "On the day after the engagement, we left Waterford for Carrick-on-Suir, and, in our way, met with some of the troops that had been engaged with the Whiteboys, and were asked if they had seen any of them lurking about in companies. But their inquiries were ill-directed; for we would sooner have headed them, and attacked the first parson's house we had met with, than discovered their retreat. "I made it my business to inquire, in the most friendly manner, of some of these unhappy sufferers of the lowest class, as they fell in my view, the reason of their exposing themselves to so much danger, by raising such disturbances in the country. To which their answers were invariably to this effect:-that their lives were of little value to them; that the severe and hard dealing they had met with from their priests and the lords of the manors had made them desperate; that the former wanted to reduce the small subsistence they had to live on, and the latter deprived them of the very few privileges and common rights they had, from time immemorial, enjoyed; that against these only were their resentments pointed, and to recover their long-standing privileges was the sole cause of their exposing themselves, or other people, to any danger, and not from any disposition to rebel against their king or the peace of their country. "I cannot but acknowledge, in favour of them, that the general civility of the people, with the apparent honesty and candour of their accounts, gave the greatest credit to their representations."* Bush's "Hibernia Curiosa," pp. 132-137. Such was Irish Whiteboyism-as such is Welsh Rebeccaism-a barbarous insurgency of nature against the more barbarous oppression of law; the Jacobinism of poverty taking wild vengeance on the Jacobinism of wealth and power. When the rich man steals the poor man's common, and tithes the poor man's potatoes, let the rich man see well to it that the poor man do not hough his cattle and burn his mansion. And what had the Protestant-landlord parliament to say to Whiteboyism and Whiteboys?-Why, the Protestant-landlord parliament appointed a select committee to inquire into the causes and progress of the POPISH INSURRECTION in the province of Munster.* As if a man could not rise up in natural revenge against unnatural oppression, without believing in transubstantiation and seven sacraments! We do not want the Evidence of the official declaration in the " London Gazette" (May, 1762) to assure us that "the authors of those riots consisted indiscriminately of persons of different persuasions, and that no marks of disaffection to his Majesty's person or government appeared in any of those people." Whiteboy and Rebecca riots come not of the Popish persuasion, nor the Wesleyan persuasion-but of the "persuasion" that unjust and cruel law is a nuisance, to be abated and put down. The "Popish Insurrection" fully answered the purpose of its inventors. There quickly followed that which, in Ireland, always has followed agrarian insurgency-not redress of old grievances, but infliction of new ones; coercion acts, year after year (by one of which, 11 and 12 George III., c. 5, men were to be hanged, under certain circumstances, WITHOUT TRIAL); perjury, bought and paid for; terrorism, reduced to system, and conducted secundum artem by ministers of law and gospel: and all the other incidents of a Popish plot of the genuine Titus Oates sort. Dr. Curry, writing in 1786, says of this Whiteboy time: "Such, during the space of three or four years, was the fearful and pitiable state of the Roman Catholics of Munster, and so general did the panic at length become-so many of the lower sort were already hanged, in gaol, or on the informer's lists, that the greater part of the rest fled through fear; so that the land lay untilled for want of hands to cultivate it, and a famine was with reason apprehended. As for the better sort, who had something to lose (and who, for that reason, were the persons chiefly aimed at by the managers of the prosecutions), they were at the utmost loss how to dispose of themselves. If they left the country, their absence was construed into a proof of their guilt; if they remained in it, they were in imminent danger of having their lives sworn away by informers and approvers, for the subborning and corrupting of witnesses on that occasion was frequent and barefaced to a degree almost beyond belief. The very stews were raked, and the goals rummaged, in search of evidence; and the most notoriously profligate in both were selected and tampered with, to give information of the private transactions and designs of reputable men, with whom they never had any dealing, inter. course, or acquaintance; nay, to whose very persons they were often found to be strangers when confronted at their trial."+ Of these abominations we need not speak further now. These witnesses of the stews and goals-bought and paid for with the people's money, clothed and fed at the people's cost, drilled in Dublin Castle, and marshalled by *Commons' Journals, vol. vii., p. 154. "Historical and Critical Review of the Civil Wars in Ireland” (1786), vol. ii., p. 282. In the case of Nicholas Sheehy, parish priest of Clogheen, we have a complete exhibition of the government of that hateful time.-See Madden's "United Īrishmen," Second Series: Historical Introduction. castle officials into a regular Battalion of Testimony-we shall meet again some thirty years later. Such was the social and political condition, during the greater part of the eighteenth century, of the people whom law and government" did not presume to exist." A sufficient introduction this will ever be, while men are men, to rebellions, fierce and bloody even as that of 1798. CHAPTER II. INTRODUCTION CONTINUED-IRISH PARLIAMENT AND PARLIAMENTARY POLITICS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY-THE PROTESTANT OPPOSITION-WOOD'S HALFPENCE-DOCTOR LUCAS-THE UNDERTAKERSTOWNSEND'S GOLDEN DROPS-THE AMERICAN WAR-MR. RICHARD HERON. WE must again ask leave to detain the reader for awhile on the threshold of our history. In the preceding chapter we have reviewed the social and political condition, during the greater part of the eighteenth century, of that Irish Catholic people whom the law did not presume to exist, and who breathed only under favour of government connivance. We have traced the growth and progress of the savage penal code, and done justice to the "vicious perfection" of that happy constitution in Church and State which indulged the "domineering aristocracy of five hundred thousand Protestants with the sweets of having two millions of slaves." We have followed the domineering aristocracy from the business of law-making into private life, and have seen the grand collective and incorporated tyranny of a Protestant legislature distributing itself over the land, in the countless little individual tyrannies of Protestant landlords-producing a state of things which reacted in the crimes of Whiteboy insurgency, and the yet blacker crimes of a perjurious and partisan administration of justice. Still, we have not yet written the introduction to the History of the Irish Rebellion of 1798. That rebellion was not a Catholic rebellion; was not, mainly and directly, the outbreak of Catholic discontents; was only partially and indirectly related to the abominations of the penal code. It would be nearer the truth to say, with Lord Plunket, that it was a "Protestant rebellion;" inasmuch as the organisation in which it took its origin began not in the Catholic south, but in the Protestant north, and its ultimate aim-not Catholic ascendancy, but Irish independence-was pointed by the Protestants by whom the rising was first planned. The whole truth of the matter is, however, as we shall afterwards find, that it was neither a Catholic nor a Protestant, but an Irish rebellion; with Protestants for its directing head, Catholics for its executive members, and Irish national independence for its object. The rebellion of 1798 was the confluence of two streams of political discontent, of which the Catholic, although the widest, was not the deepest nor the most rapid; and to write its history, truly and fully, we must trace each of the streams from its source, down to the point at which their several currents met and mingled in the Society of United Irishmen. The united Irish movement, with the insurrection in which it exploded, was not a movement of Catholics against Protestants, nor of Protestants against Catholics, but of Irishmen against Great Britain. Its genealogy runs thus:-The first Society of United Irishmen grew out of the ashes of the Volunteers, and the disappointed hopes of the legislative revolution of 1782; and the Volunteers grew out of that parliamentary and popular Opposition to British misgovernment, which had shown itself at intervals almost from the beginning of the century, and had gone on steadily widening and deepening from the accession of George III. to the American war. In order, therefore, to be quite at home in the causes of the Irish rebellion of 1798, we must review now the political relations, not of one section of the population of Ireland to another, but of Ireland itself to Great Britain; and trace the action and re-action of that system of venality, wastefulness, oppression, teasing restriction, and shameless corruption which England inflicted on Protestant Ireland, as the price of helping Protestant Ireland to enjoy the sweets of tyranny over its millions of Popish slaves. For the present, then, we take leave of the Irish Catholic people— those five-sixths of the people of Ireland that were not a people. The penal code did its work; making its victims, for the greater part of a century, a perfect social nonentity, without political action or influence, without political existence-in a word, dead in law. It is truly said by Plowden "The reign of Queen Anne established a most important, though a much unheeded principle of observation, which the impartial investigator of the Irish annals cannot lose sight of. The numerical body of the people having been effectually excluded from taking an active part in the affairs of the nation, every important or embarrassing question that has arisen between Great Britain and Ireland, affecting the political situation of the two nations, from the revolution to the accession of his present Majesty, has been as completely cleared and disembarrassed of any interference, interest, or influence of the body of Irish Roman Catholics, as if they had no actual existence. All national differences, complaints, and grievances have been from Protestants to Protestants. It is a political paradox, though an historical truth, that in the agitation of every national question during the last century, the sense, the interest, or the influence of the majority of the nation, has not thrown the weight of a scruple into the scales."* * ** Leaving, therefore, the Irish Catholic people in their condition of political impotence and torpor-with the nota bene that they are not dead, but sleeping, and that they and their wrongs will rise up again in the day of national reckoning-we shall speak now of the "differences, complaints, and grievances" which arose during the eighteenth century between Protestant Ireland and Protestant England, and which gradually created that spirit of Anglo-Irish nationality which, after years of unavailing parliamentary conflict, effected a legal revolution in 1782, and attempted a military revolution in 1798. The revolution of 1688-in Ireland we should call it rather, dating from the surrender of Limerick, the revolution of 1691-placed the Protestant Anglo-Irish colony in a condition of servitude and vassalage to Great Britain, hardly more tolerable than that which the Protestant colony at the "Historical Review of the State of Ireland," vol. i., p. 221. 66 same time imposed on their Catholic fellow-countrymen. Ireland had then a domestic parliament," so called; but it was a slave, as well as a tyrant parliament, impotent for all purposes but those of domestic corruption and oppression. It was a parliament which did not possess either the full power, or the sole power, of legislating for the country which it nominally governed, The parliament of Ireland, under Poyning's Law,* had no proper and effectual initiative. It could only frame what were called heads of bills, which heads of bills must first be submitted to the Lord Lieutenant and his privy council, who might, or might not, at their discretion, transmit them to England for the approval of the English crown and privy councilwhence they might, or might not return, altered or unaltered, at their discretion; and only after this double process of filtration could any net residuum of legislation begin to be realised. The Irish House of Commons was at full liberty to debate and vote what had been debated and voted twice over already in the Irish and English councils. This singular sort of domestic legislature had not even a veto on Irish legislation. The British parliament claimed and exercised the right of legislating at pleasure, over the heads of the despised and powerless assembly in College Green-cramping Irish trade, regulating the Irish church, directing the sale of the forfeited estates of Irish rebels, and, in all matters, managing Irish business according to their own liking, as if Ireland had had no parliament of her own at all. And, on the right being feebly and hesitatingly contested by the Irish peers, early in the reign of George I., all doubts were quickly cleared away by a declaratory act (6 George I., c. 5) extinguishing the appellate jurisdiction assumed by the Irish House of Lords, and establishing the right (or the might) of the British legislature to make laws for Ireland, and levy taxes on Ireland, as for and on any other colonial dependency of the British crown. Really, one feels a sort of pleasure in recording this. It was a fit and fair retribution: as the Irish parliament ignored the existence of the Irish people, the English government ignored the existence of the Irish parliament. 66 This claim of Great Britain to legislate for Ireland was not a theoretical and barren claim; it was fruitful of practical results, systematically aimed at the degradation and impoverishment of all that part of the Irish people whose degradation and impoverishment were not already sufficiently provided for by the domestic legislature. "The parliament of England," says Lord Clare, in his speech on the Union, seems to have considered the permanent debility of Ireland as the best security of the British crown, and the Irish parliament to have rested the security of the colony upon maintaining a perpetual and impassable barrier against the ancient inhabitants of the country." For this "permanent debility" the British parliament made a very early and effectual provision, by crippling the trade of Ireland. In the year 1698, the English House of Lords, in their address to the crown, lament and complain of "the GROWING manufacture of cloth in Ireland, both by the cheapness of all sorts of necessaries of life, and goodness of materials for making all manner of cloth" (just as an English House of Lords might complain now of the growing agriculture of Ohio or Tamboff, both by the cheapness of all sorts * Sir Edward Poyning was the Attorney-General of Henry VII. |