X

quence of this affair was more serious, though less immediately apparent— viz., the deadly hostility of two most formidable and powerful enemiesthe King and Mr. Pitt. It was now understood what the adjustment of 1782 really meant-Great Britain and Ireland might, in a contingency, which had occurred, and might occur again, come to have two distinct executives. This regency question, coming on the back of the commercial question, settled, in the minds of the minister and his royal master, the question of the legislative union.*

As we are not writing the history of this period, but only sketching such a general outline of it as may prepare the reader to approach the events of 1798 and the years immediately preceding with a full understanding of their causes, we abstain from going further into the details of Irish parliamentary history during the years following the legislative independence. The general character of Irish legislation and government, as it affected the happiness and rights of the Irish people, may be sufficiently inferred from what we have already seen of the constitution of the legislature, and its relations to Great Britain. Independent Ireland was governed as a province, but far worse governed than provinces commonly are; for the mother country, destitute of imperial control, was obliged, in all things that did not touch her own interests, to accommodate and humour the colonial "House of Assembly," which had broken loose from her supremacy. From the year of independence, until the commencement of the French revolution, the political condition of Ireland grew steadily worse and worse. With the important exception of an increasing commercial activity and prosperity, consequent on the liberation of her trade from the shackles of British legislation, we know not of any one thing that she gained by the revolution which we retraced in the last chapter. From the hour that the Volunteers first became divided and enfeebled, every public abuse took deeper root, struck out lustier branches, and bore a more pestiferous fruit; acts of legislative and administrative oppression were multiplied and aggravated by the assured impunity of their perpetrators, and the efforts of the dwindling minority of honest men in parliament sank into a more confirmed and inveterate hopelessness. Every liberal, reasonable, and honest motion, however moderately worded, however palpable and enormous the grievance against which it might be directed, was unfailingly crushed by placed and pensioned majorities. Not a thing could the liberal minority do, or get done, during ten weary years of parliamentary effort. They could not obtain the common elementary securities for parliamentary freedom, as recognised in the constitution of Great Britain, nor the most gentle abatement of grievances unknown to Great Britain; not a pension bill, nor a place bill, nor a bill establishing ministerial responsibility for ministerial acts, nor a bill to prevent revenue officers and other small hangers-on of government from voting at elections, nor a bill to prevent offices and reversions of offices from being given to absentees, nor a bill for regulating the tithe of

It might have been thought that, at least, Ireland had made one fast friend by this affair. In the month of February, 1789, the Prince of Wales said to Mr. Pelham, who was writing to Grattan, "Tell Grattan that I am a most determined Irishman."-"Life of Grattan," vol. iii., p. 373.

The "determined Irishman" resisted, to the last moment to which resistance was safe or possible, the enfranchisement of the Catholic Irish people, and showed his Irish sympathies by crossing the channel, in 1821, with Castlereagh for his best-loved and honoured companion.

the miserable Munster peasant's potatoes. Every popular grievance, civil, political, and ecclesiastical, was industriously aggravated, till popular discontent reached rebellion point; and every tumult or disturbance which could, with any sort of decency, be designated rebellion," was industriously improved into a police bill, a Whiteboy act, or some other such piece of machinery for putting the largest possible quantity of arbitrary power into the worst possible hands.*

On the whole, we doubt whether history can show a worse governed country than Ireland during the years of her so-called independence, or a more corrupt, degraded, and mercenary legislative body, than the parliament which Volunteer bayonets had emancipated from British control.

This was THE DISAPPOINTMENT which expressed itself in those renewed popular efforts which eventually terminated in the Rebellion of 1798-such a disappointment as, coming after such a success, it has seldom been the historian's lot to record.

CHAPTER V.

RENEWED POPULAR EFFORTS-INFLUENCE OF THE FRENCH REVO-. LUTION ON IRELAND BELFAST POLITICS THEOBALD WOLFE TONE-FIRST SOCIETY OF UNITED IRISHMEN-THE MISTAKE OF 1783 CORRECTED — THE NEW CATHOLIC DEMOCRACY THE CATHOLIC QUESTION IN 1792-THE GRAND JURIES-THE BACK

LANE PARLIAMENT.

In the last chapter we completed our Introduction to the History of the Irish Rebellion of 1798. The reader is now in possession of the more material of those facts and relations of Irish history and politics which constitute the causes of that popular effort-or rather, that series of popular efforts of which the rebellion of 1798 was the explosive termination. In the social and political condition of the Irish Catholics under the execrable penal code-stripped of every civil franchise, injured and insulted in every domestic relation, cramped in every industrial pursuit (except the hewing of wood and drawing of water for their Protestant task-masters), branded with one universal, all-pervading attainder and outlawry, the very fact of their existence not recognised by the law, and their right to breathe contingent on the connivance of government-we have seen one of the two great elements of the social state and political history of Ireland in the eighteenth century; and in the gradual rise and progress, among the Irish Protestant people, of a spirit of nationality and independence as represented by the names of Molyneux, Swift, and Lucas, and expressed in a standing and growing parliamentary opposition to the British ministry and legislature, from about the middle of the century to

*If any of our readers wish for a brief compendious view of the way in which Ireland was governed at this period, they may read Grattan's speeches in 1788 and 1789, ou the Dublin Police Bill. The whole thing is there, in small-the wastefulness, the inefficiency, the extortion, the recklessness of personal and social rights, the love of oppression for oppression's sake.

the period of the American War-we have traced the development of the other. In the struggle of Ireland and her Volunteers against British supremacy, and the conquest of free trade and legislative independence, we have seen the partial and temporary union of these two elements, and noted the brilliant success that followed that first grand effort of united Irishmen. And in the years of wretched and wicked misgovernment that ensued; in the disappointment of every popular expectation, and defeat of every popular effort; in the continuance and aggravation, under a new name, of the worst evils of the old English ascendency, we have marked the consequences of that disunion which religious bigotry so soon effected between the two great sections of the Irish people. The Volunteers ceased to be formidable when they ceased to be just—they could not be free, because their definition of freedom included the slavery of their Catholic countrymen. By union, Ireland achieved the independence of her parliament; by disunion, she failed of achieving that reform of parliament, without which the independence could be nothing better than a nuisance with a fine name; she paid the penalty which nature ever allots to injustice, in the practical break-down of one of the noblest national efforts that history records.

We have seen that the experiment of the legislative independence turned out to be a failure. It failed of producing its expected fruits of peace, freedom, good government, wise laws, and honest administration. It failed, because the power that achieved the legislative independence could not, for lack of wisdom and virtue, go on to achieve legislative reform, but gave way on the first attempt, crippled by the party division consequent on religious animosities. Ireland was disappointed, and the disappointment was excellently well deserved. We are now to trace the history of those renewed efforts, which began when Irishmen found their mistake and set themselves resolutely to repair it-when the two great sections of the Irish people combined their several grievances in one common mass of discontent and agitation, and joined their several forces in one phalanx of UNITED IRISHMEN; and which went on and on, year after year, until, under the action of the irritants unsparingly applied by an incendiary government, the whole together exploded in the Rebellion of 1798.

At the commencement of the French Revolution, the political state of Ireland was at its lowest point of depression. The spirit of 1782 gave but few and feeble signs of its existence. The Volunteers still went on with their periodical exercisings and reviewings, but division had weakened, and disappointment had chilled them; their numbers had declined, and their old political vitality seemed extinct. The popular cause was altogether hopeless in a parliament bought and sold by British ministries, unless some new pressure from without could be brought to bear on its corruptions; and the materials of such pressure from without were as yet non-existent, or non-apparent. The energy of government was all expended in devising and adjusting the requisite bribes for an habitually obsequious, but occasionally refractory legislature, and in enacting police bills and Whiteboy acts for the people; and the strength of the nation was wasting itself in aimless local insurgency. In the south, Whiteboys and Rightboys were waging a barbarous war of nature against a yet more barbarous state of society and law, indulging themselves in the one last luxury which landlord and clerical exaction had

left within reach of the most miserable peasantry under the sun,* that of revenging themselves on the nearest authors of their misery, and getting their existence recognized by the light of midnight conflagrations; and the north was already disorganised by the feuds of Peep-of-Day Boys and Defenders,t who carried on, during many successive years, a cruel war of mutual plunder and bloodshed, in which the worst crimes were stimulated by the most savage passions, and sanctified by the holiest names. The mind of Catholic Ireland still lay prostrate under the debilitating operation of the accursed penal code; some partial and mincing modifications of which (in 1778 and 1782) had not yet produced their natural result, of giving its victims a keener sensitiveness to the oppressions which remained. And the Protestant Liberal party gave no other signs of life than perpetually introducing into Parliament certain small measures of reform, which were perpetually defeated, and instituting a paltry Whig Club, which made it a standing order to exclude all discussion of the Catholic Question. The famous Whig toast-" The Sovereignty of the People," was interpreted by these reformers as meaning the eternal slavery of five men out of every six.

Such was Ireland, when the FRENCH REVOLUTION burst like a thunder-clap on Europe; uprooting a monarchy of fourteen centuries' growth, decomposing all old ideas, and loosening the foundations of all old institutions, proclaiming the Rights of Man as the basis and legitimating principle of all law and polity, and turning the long-deferred hopes of nations, no more into heart-sickness, but into eager and exulting joy. It was the most potent stimulant that has ever been administered to

* Fitzgibbon (afterwards Lord Clare) is an unexceptionable authority on this point. In a debate of the 31st of January, 1787, he said that "he was well acquainted with the province of Munster, and that it was impossible for human wretchedness to exceed that of the miserable tenantry of that province, he knew that the unhappy tenantry were ground to powder by relentless landlords."

Grattan's speeches about this time, on the tithe grievance, show that there were grinders of the poor more "relentless" even than the landlords.

Of these Peep-of-Day Boys and Defenders we shall have more to say further on, when the latter assumed a more permanent form, took a more definite and extensive organization, and became an element of the Rebellion of 1798. For the present, it may be enough to quote the following general account of these insurgent associations from Dr. Madden :

"Vast numbers of Protestant tenants emigrated from Ireland, and chiefly from Ulster, to America, just before the commencement of the revolutionary war. Their place was chiefly supplied by Catholics, who appeared ready to work as labourers for lower wages, and to pay higher rents as tenants. The Protestants of Ulster felt themselves injured by these new competitors in the labour and land-market, and they resolved to drive the Catholics back to Connaught. Armed bodies, under the name of 'Peep-of-Day Boys,' attacked the houses of the Catholics, ill-treated their persons, burned their houses, and wrecked their property. On the other hand, the Catholics formed an association for self-protection, under the name of 'Defenders,' and the two parties engaged in a desultory and murderous warfare, in which it is obvious that the name of religion was a mere pretext, by which the parties disguised their real objects from others, and even from themselves. This social war excited a rancorous animosity between the lower ranks of Protestants and Catholics."-"United Irishmen," vol. i., p. 29.

Of all these agrarian and peasant outbreaks, under the various names and forms which they have from time to time assumed-White Boys, Right Boys, Oak Boys, Heart-of-Steel Boys, Peep-of-Day Boys, Defenders, Whitefeet, Blackfeet, and Ribbonmen—the reader will find a full account in the valuable work of Mr. G. C. Lewis." On Local Disturbances in Ireland, and the Irish Church Question."

popular aspiration and effort. In that "era of hope," it seemed as if king-ridden and priest-ridden man had but to arise in the majesty of nature, and all his shackles would drop off in the twinkling of an eye; it was like the breaking-up of a frost of centuries, and the commencement of an eternal spring. Ireland could not long remain unmoved in the general waking-up of nations. The effect of the French Revolution on Ireland was rapid and decisive, in rousing the different sections of the Irish people from the stupor into which they had sunk since the failure of the Volunteer Reform Convention of 1783. It attracted the sympathies and kindled the zeal of the Dissenter of the north, who was already, in virtue of his creed, more than half a republican; it breathed new life into the Catholic of the south, whose long-standing religious predilections and political traditions had always laid him peculiarly open to French influence; it was a practical demonstration that " Popery was no more necessarily connected with "Slavery," than with brass money and wooden shoes ;* it brought Protestant and Catholic together, into a union based on common rights and interests, and cemented by a common nationality, and gave occasion to that Association of United Irishmen, whose history will, from this point, occupy the central place in our narrative.

The influence of the French Revolution on Ireland appeared first in Belfast, the metropolis of northern dissent and liberalism. The politics of Belfast are an important element of Irish history at this epoch. This town had been the source and centre of the Volunteer movement; it was now again to take the lead in stirring and guiding the public mind of Ireland. We have already seen something of the character of these dissenting Protestants of the north. Scotch by descent, though thoroughly rish by adoption; Presbyterian by religion; manufacturers and traders by occupation; and, since the Voluntee time, citizen-soldiers by discipline and habit-the Belfast people were fully imbued with the speculative republicanism, and the practical democratic and reforming tendencies which naturally arise from such a combination. Such men never would be slaves, nor would they always remain bigots. With all the selfacting, self-relying spirit of Protestantism, they would be the first to rid themselves of its sectarian narrowness, and to subordinate the little Protestant interest to the great Irish interest. The men of Belfast had not participated in the blunder of 1783; and, now that all its consequences had developed themselves, they would not be slack in proclaiming and repairing it. The Belfast Volunteers had specially instructed their delegates to the Dublin Convention of that year (they were almost alone in their liberality) to support the right of Catholics to an equality with Protestants in all the franchises of Irishmen; and nowhere were the results of the most pernicious error which then ruined the cause of reform, and broke the strength of reformers, better understood or more keenly felt than in this town.

The political republicanism and religious liberalism of Belfast remained unimpaired, during the years of disappointment that followed the epoch of the Volunteer struggle. In the summer of 1789, we find the good,

The old Protestant toast of the "Pious and Immortal Memory" glorifies King William as a "Deliverer" from these four mischiefs.