HISTORY

OF THE

IRISH REBELLION

OF 1798.

INTRODUCTION-SOCIAL

CHAPTER I.

AND

POLITICAL

CONDITION OF THE IRISH PEOPLE DURING THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY-THE PENAL CODETHE LANDLORDS-THE WHITEBOYS.

WE intend, in the following pages, to lay before our readers a clear and succinct account of that tremendous national convulsion, known as the GREAT IRISH REBELLION of 1798; of the causes which remotely or proximately prepared it, of the objects which its authors had in view, of the agencies by which it was conducted, and of the means by which it was suppressed.

Many considerations might be adduced, as fitted to suggest and recommend such a work as this, of which we now offer to the public the introductory chapter; but there is one, compared with which all the rest sink into triviality. It is a history full of stirring incident; diversified by strange fortunes, sudden and startling vicissitudes, picturesque situations, hairbreadth escapes, remarkable men, great virtues and great crimes, and the excitement of all the varied passions of which our nature is capable, collected into one focus, and absorbed in one central interest. Yet the same

may be said of other histories; and, if mere excitement were what we wished to give the reader, fiction might, perhaps, answer the purpose better than any history. It is a history abounding in those lessons of political justice which constitute the moral of history, and the best part of its philosophy; it shows us oppression reacting in crime, and crime in weakness and misery-the seed of tyrannous injustice growing up into a harvest of rebellion, and the sins of the fathers descending on the sons and the sons' sons. Yet other histories show this likewise, and the trite and familiar moral needs not to be laboriously demonstrated anew. It is a history, too, which has long been waiting to be written, and of which the materials, scattered over a wide surface of literature, have not yet, so far as we know, been condensed into readable brevity and convenient cheapness for the mass of readers; yet there are many other such desiderata still un

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supplied, and we do not know that any mere abstract notion of the fitness of filling up a vacuum in popular literature would have directed our choice to this particular topic. We write the History of the Irish Rebellion—as we desire that it should be read—not for curiosity, but for use; to meet a present, practical, and most pressing want of the day and the hour. We write it, because we believe that the great multitude of reading Englishmen do not know the history of Ireland—do not know a hundredth part of the crimes that have been perpetrated against Ireland in their name and by their authority; and because we are sure it is high time they did know these things. Mr. O'Connell says, in his "Memoir on Ireland, Native and Saxon,"*"It has pleased the English people in general to forget all the facts in Irish history." Mr. O'Connell is mistaken. The English people in general are quite guiltless of forgetting that which they never knew. The English people in general are wofully ignorant of the facts of Irish history. The generality of educated Englishmen know more about the Punic and Peloponnesian wars than about the wars of Ireland, native and Saxon; are more at home in the siege of Troy than in the siege of Limerick; could give you a far better account of the expedition of Nicias to Syracuse than of the expedition of Hoche and Tone to Bantry Bay; and are infinitely better read in the laws of Solon and Lycurgus than in the Penal Code against the Irish Catholics. It is high time all this were changed. It is not safe for England to remain ignorant of Ireland, and of the facts of Irish history. The English people in general must inform themselves of the facts of Irish history, and of the state of things which has grown out of those facts, and of their own interests and duties relative to that state of things—or it will be worse for the English people in general. We must make ourselves acquainted with the wrongs which we have done, or caused and suffered to be done, against Ireland, that we may set ourselves with all diligence to undo them while there is time—if, indeed, the time be not already past. In order to do, or get done, that JUSTICE TO IRELAND which is every hour becoming a more and more pressing necessity for Great Britain, we must learn to understand Ireland; we must learn to put ourselves in the place of Irishmen, to enter into their feelings, to make their point of vision ours, and incorporate the facts of their history with our own most familiar knowledge. This is our purpose in writing the History of the Irish Rebellion. We cannot desire any surer guarantee for the dispassionate consideration, and the safe, wise and honest adjustment of all outstanding questions between Great Britain and Ireland, than that the English people in general should have a clear and comprehensive understanding of the rebellion of 1798, in all its causes, effects, circumstances and relations.

We are not going in these pages to write the politics of 1843, under the name of the history of 1798. If the politics of the day have given us a subject, they will not (consciously to ourselves) influence our mode of treating it. We shall not attempt to make out a case either for or against the Repeal of the Union. Neither on this nor on any other question of contemporaneous politics have we here any "case" to make. What we desire is, to accustom Englishmen to study, understand, and sympathise with Ireland; to get people to see-what it is so wonderful any people

*Preface, p. viii.

should not see-that (next to the food-and-work question) the first question of the day-the question of questions-is the Irish question. Clear it is, that Irish politics are destined to become, more and more with every advancing month, the subject of discussion and legislation; and we believe nothing can better ensure the sobriety of the discussion, and the beneficence and wisdom of the legislation, than the putting the English people in general in possession of some of those facts in past Irish history, out of which the perplexities and trials of our present Irish politics have mainly

arisen.

No

To write intelligibly the History of the Irish Rebellion of 1798, it will be necessary, first of all, to review at some length the condition of the Irish people, and the general course of Irish history, during the seventy or eighty years preceding that outbreak. Effects never come without causes, and are not to be understood without the knowledge of their causes. people ever rebelled yet, without something to rebel for; and to detail the mere marchings and counter-marchings, the sieges and battles of a civil war, without a previous understanding of the social and moral state of things out of which civil war grew, would be to begin at the end—to commence with the conclusion. The Rebellion of 1798 did not begin with the year 1798; it had been getting ready generations before it was no sudden whimsey of popular caprice or passion, but the last result of ages of oppression and misrule; it was the violent crisis of a chronic disease—it was the fifth act of a tragedy. To write or to read truly the history of the Irish Rebellion of 1798, we must go back to the previous state of Ireland, the condition of her people, the spirit of her laws, the constitution and character of her government, legislative and administrative, during the earlier part of the century whose closing years have written their annals in blood and fire; we must inform ourselves of the social and political condition of the Irish people during the eighteenth century, or we cannot understand the civil convulsion with which the century closed.

And yet such is the monstrous anomalousness of everything in and about Irish history-we find, at the very outset, the need of a new vocabulary to express truly the social facts and relations which we have to do with; even the seemingly so simple and common-place combination of words in which we have phrased the subject of this preliminary chapter requires correction and qualification. "Social and political condition of the Irish people during the eighteenth century!"-Why, during the greater part of the eighteenth century there was, in strictness, no such thing as an Irish people. There were in Ireland, during the eighteenth century, Two PEOPLES―a tyrant-people and a slave-people-existing in physical and local juxta-position on the same superficies of soil, but without moral or social community; severed by a wide gulf of religious hatred, political exclusion, social enmity, and legal proscription. "Irish people," during the eighteenth century, there was not. Of that which, for want of another name, we must still continue to call the people of Ireland, five-sixths stood, both in law and in fact, to the remaining one-sixth, in the relation at once of slaves and enemies-as slaves, despised; as enemies, hated—a degraded, excluded, proscribed, alien, villein caste. The combination was of fearful consequence. Had they been only slaves, they might have counted on such kindness as merciful and prudent owners exercise towards slaves; had they been only enemies, the laws of war would have left them a chance of fair

and honourable terms of peace; but the complication of servitude with enmity produced a result such as no other time or country than Ireland in the eighteenth century can match: they were the hated slaves and the scorned foes of an oligarchy, which occupied the seat, and wielded the powers of government, in the spirit of a garrison in an enemy's country. The law and constitution of Ireland in the eighteenth century formally ignored the existence of these five-sixths of the Irish people. In the year 1759 it was ruled in the Four Courts of Dublin, that "the law did not presume a Papist to exist in the kingdom, nor could they breathe without the connivance of government." And this atrocious legal fiction both the

makers and administrators of the law did their best to realise as a fact. Five-sixths of the Irish people, during the greater part of that century, were, under the name of Papists, aliens in their own country. They were excluded from every privilege, every office, every emolument, every civil trust, every corporate right, every political franchise. They were excluded from the navy, from the army, from the magistracy, from the law. They were excluded from parliament, from juries, from elections. They could not buy land, they could not bear arms, they could not educate their children, they could not intermarry with Protestants, they could not so much as ride good horses. The law did not presume them to exist, nor could they "breathe without the connivance of government."

The diabolical character of this law, which presumed the non-existence of five-sixths of the people subject to it, cannot be adequately understood from these generalities. To do justice to the hateful thing, we must track it, step by step, through the various stages of its growth, as it was gradually matured by the inventive malice-the refined, cold-blooded, lawyer-like atrocity-of many successive parliaments, premising that it had its origin in a deliberate breach of faith. The whole thing together was a violation, laboriously prolonged and aggravated through three-quarters of a century, both of the letter and the spirit of a public treaty.

On the 3rd of October, 1691, the Irish army of James II., then in occupation of the city of Limerick, surrendered to the commander-in-chief of the English forces of King William, on the terms of a treaty duly signed, and afterwards enrolled in Chancery; which treaty guaranteed to the Catholics of the kingdom of Ireland the continuance of all their then existing civil, political and social rights (which included nearly every thing the law now gives them), with the express promise, in the first article, of "such further security as might PRESERVE THEM FROM ANY DISTURBANCE UPON THE ACCOUNT OF THEIR SAID RELIGION."†

Now, how was this treaty performed? On the principle of keeping no faith with heretics.

On the 27th of August, 1695, King William summoned a parliament at Dublin; and in his royal speech, by the mouth of his Lord Deputy, he recommended them to "lay hold on the opportunity then put into their hands, of making such a lasting settlement that it might never more be in the power of their enemies to put England to expense of blood and treasure.”‡`

*Plowden's History of Ireland, vol. ii., p. 126.

See the whole Treaty in Parnell's "History of the Penal Laws against the Irish Catholics," pp. 5-12.

Commons' Journals, vol. ii., p. 644.

The Protestant parliament evinced no lack of zeal in the work of “ settling" themselves against their enemies. The fruits of their industry soon appeared on the statute-book, as follows:

By 7 W. III., c. 4., they deprived "Papists" of the power of educating their own children.

By 7 W. III., c. 5, they deprived "Papists" of the right of bearing arms. By 9 W. III., c. 1., they banished all the "regulars of the Popish clergy." And then, with a whimsical and cruel irony, by 9 W. III., c. 2, they confirmed the treaty of Limerick, OMITTING the first, fourth, seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth articles, and falsifying and mutilating all the others. Lest, however, the Protestant interest should be endangered by too much conciliation, they went on, by 9 W. III., c. 3, to prevent Protestants from intermarrying with Papists; and, by two further acts of the next year, they restrained Papists from practising as solicitors, and from being employed as gamekeepers.

The Protestant interest seems not to have prospered according to expec tation under this moderate incipient persecution. It was found necessary to abandon the homeopathic regimen of intolerance, and administer larger and more vigorous doses. On the 4th of March, 1704, the royal assent was given to the " Act to prevent the further growth of Popery ;"* which act restrained the Popish father, if blessed with a Protestant son, from selling, mortgaging, or otherwise disposing of his estate-deprived him of the custody of his own child, of whatever age (should the little thing fancy or pretend itself a Protestant)-prohibited Papists from buying, or even renting land for more than thirty-one years-and incapacitated the Popish son from inheriting under a Protestant father.

Still, the "further growth of Popery" was not "prevented;" and the Protestant interest clamoured for more protection. In 1707, the Irish Commons met their Lord Lieutenant with thankful acknowledgments of the "benefits they enjoyed in that happy opportunity of meeting under his Excellency's government, to enact such laws as were yet wanting to strengthen the Protestant interest of the kingdom;" and they assured his excellency, that they were met "with firm resolutions to improve that opportunity to the utmost of their power." The promise was better kept than legislative promises commonly are kept. By 8 Anne, c. 3, " for explaining and amending an Act to prevent the further growth of Popery," they provided (inter alia) that any conforming Protestant child might file a bill in Chancery against his Popish father, to reduce the Popish father's estate in fee simple to a life-tenancy (subject to a rent-charge for the Protestant child's "sufficient maintenance"), with remainder in fee to the young knave of a convert; thus sowing distrust and dissension in every Catholic family in Ireland, setting the father against the son, and the son against the father, and holding out a legislative premium to the basest hypocrisy and the blackest ingratitude. The same act offered the douceur of a 30%. pension to converted Popish priests; and provided for the better discovery of recusant Popish clergymen and schoolmasters, by a curiously arranged sliding scale of duties, ranging from 107. for the usher, up to 50l. for the archbishop.

These acts of Queen Anne, reinforced by some minor ones of the same

* 2 Anne, c. 6.

† Commons' Journals, vol. iii., pp. 368-9.