CH. XXVIII. MARTIAL LAW IN ULSTER. 285 a great loyal, united, constitutional, and national movement, guided by the gentry of the country, like that of 1778 and the four following years, was wholly impossible. It was certain that the Government would not consent to a movement on the lines of the old volunteers, and even if it had been otherwise all the conditions out of which that movement grew had altered. Jacobinism, Defenderism, and Orangism had changed the whole course of Irish sentiments, had left Irish life with rifts and fissures that could never again be filled. It was becoming more and more evident, that while an enrolment of the loyal was absolutely necessary for the safety of the country, such an enrolment would place arms chiefly in the hands of men who were fiercely opposed to a great portion of the citizens. On the 9th of March, Camden wrote a very important letter to the Government in England, announcing a new and momentous step. He began by describing the alarming condition of the North. 'The most outrageous and systematic murders have been committed in the counties of Down and Donegal.' A farmer had been murdered for having joined the yeomanry, and many others had been obliged by terror to resign their posts in that body. He mentioned the murder of Dr. Hamilton, and added that it was the system of the United Irishmen to prevent the magistrates from acting and the yeomen from assembling. Several districts, on the requisition of the magistrates, had been placed under the Insurrection Act, and there was an almost unanimous voice in the country that no mild measures could eradicate the disease. 'The endeavour to arrest the progress of this system,' he added, 'if it be possible, is the more necessary as infinite pains are taken to spread its influence over other parts of the kingdom. In the counties of Fermanagh, Louth, Kildare, and in the King's County it has appeared, and also in the county of Mayo, and if effectual means are not taken to stop it, I think that the North of Ireland will not be the only part of this kingdom in a state little short of rebellion.' Under these circumstances, General Lake was ordered to disarm the districts in which outrages have taken place. Patrols were to arrest all persons assembling by night, and all assemblies were prohibited. 'If,' he adds, 'the urgency of the case demands. a conduct beyond that which can be sanctioned by the law, the General has orders from me not to suffer the cause of justice to be frustrated by the delicacy which might possibly have actuated the magistracy.'1 This letter, as it appears to me, scarcely describes in adequate terms the gravity of the step that had been taken, which was, in effect, to place the whole of Ulster under martial law. On March 3, Pelham had written to General Lake an official letter of instructions, describing at the same time the nature and magnitude of the evil. In the counties of Down, Antrim, Derry and Donegal, secret and treasonable associations still continued to an alarming degree, attempting to defeat by terror the exertions of the well disposed, and threatening the lives of all who gave any evidence against the seditious. There were constant nocturnal assemblings and drillings; peaceful inhabitants were disarmed; the magistrates were openly resisted, and many kinds of outrage were perpetrated. The depredators had collected vast stores of arms in concealed places; cut down innumerable trees on the estates of the gentry to make pike handles; stolen great quantities of lead to cast bullets; prevented numbers by intimidation from joining the yeomanry. They refuse,' he continued, 'to employ in manufactures those who enlist in said corps, they not only threaten, but ill-treat the persons of the yeomanry, and even attack their houses by night, and proceed to the barbarous extremity of deliberate and shocking murder: . . . and they profess a resolution to assist the enemies of his Majesty if they should be enabled to land in this kingdom.' The General was accordingly commanded to disarm all persons who did not bear his Majesty's commission; to employ force against all armed assemblages not authorised by law; to disperse all tumultuous assemblages, though they may be unarmed,' without waiting for the sanction and assistance of the civil authority,' if such a course appeared to him necessary or expedient, and finally to consider those parts of the country where the outrages took place, as requiring all the measures which a country depending upon military force alone for its protection would require.' Lake was therefore fully empowered to act as in a country under martial law, and he was authorised to call on all loyal subjects to assist him. On the 13th, Lake accordingly issued a procla 1 Camden to Portland, March 9, 1797. CH. XXVIII. PROCLAMATION OF LAKE. 287 mation at Belfast, ordering all persons in that district who were not peace officers or soldiers, to bring in their arms and ammunition, and inviting information about concealed arms.' This proclamation was made the subject of elaborate debates, in both the Irish and English Houses of Commons; Grattan taking the most conspicuous part in the one, and Fox in the other. In the strange evolutions and transformations of Irish history, it is curious to observe how the active, energetic, dangerous sedition against which the proclamation was directed, was represented as essentially Northern and Protestant. As yet only portions of Ulster had been proclaimed, and they were, for the most part, portions which were emphatically Protestant. 'Who are the people,' said Grattan,' whom the Ministers attaint of treason, and consign to military execution? They are the men who placed William III. on the throne of this kingdom.' 'The Government have declared they will persist in proscribing the Catholics, and they now consign the Protestants to military execution.' 'The character of the people who inhabit the North of Ireland,' said Fox, 'has been severely stigmatised. It is said that these men are of the old leaven. They are indeed of the old leaven that rescued the country from the tyranny of Charles I. and James II. . . . the leaven which kneaded the British Constitution.2 It was contended that the Proclamation of General Lake was plainly and palpably illegal-as illegal as the recent conduct of Lord Carhampton-so illegal, that Grattan declared that 'any person who broke into a house and took out arms under this order was guilty of felony.' This proposition was not seriously disputed. Something, indeed, was said by a lawyer, of a judgment of Lord Mansfield, during the Gordon riots, to the effect that it was perfectly legal for the executive authority to call forth the military power to suppress treason and rebellion, when the civil power was overborne, and the magistrates were either intimidated or unwilling to do their duty,' and something by a member who was not a lawyer, about the prerogative of the Crown to act according to discretion for the public good, without the direction of the law, and sometimes even against it.'3 1 Seward, iii. 188-190. 2 Parl. Hist. xxxiii. 151. 3 Irish Parl. Deb. xvii. 133. 3 The But the Government soon abandoned this line of defence. Attorney-General and the Chief Secretary frankly acknowledged 'that the prerogative was extended beyond the letter of the law,' but they contended that it was justified by the most powerful necessity,'' by that supreme law (salus populi suprema lex), that extreme necessity which supersedes every particular obligation.'1 Much was said in illustration of this view. Papers had been seized, one Northern member observed, expressing the determination of the rebels 'to abolish all taxes and tithes, and reduce all rents to a certain standard, ten shillings an acre for the best land, and so downwards, and to continue in arms till these things were accomplished.' The law in the province of Ulster could not be executed.' 'The United Irishmen, it was notorious, had more influence than the Government,' and Beresford, in some imprudent words which were afterwards much repeated, said, 'They must have recourse to arms, . . . he wished they were in open rebellion-then they might be opposed face to face." Similar language was held by at least one other member, and it was severely reprobated by Grattan. "The French threatening to invade you, the Catholics refused their claims, and the Protestants of the North informed that it is wished they should rise in rebellion that Government itself might act upon them at once!' Such a policy, he maintained, could lead only to ruin, and he strongly urged that the irritation of Ulster would never have risen to its present height, but for the flagrant corruption of the Irish Parliament, and the obstinate resistance of the Government to the most moderate reform. Grattan, as we have seen, more than once supported strenuous measures of exceptional coercive legislation directed against crime, but he now maintained that the whole course of the Government policy relating to Ulster, was essentially wrong. He censured the proclamation of martial law; the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act; the Convention Act, and the Insurrection Act. He described the Government policy in a skilful phrase as 'lawmaking in the spirit of law-breaking,' and he formally pledged himself never to connect himself with any Government which did not support the total emancipation of the Catholics, and a radical reform of the representatives of the people.' Irish Parl. Deb. 144, 146. CH. XXVIII. GRATTAN'S APPEAL TO ENGLAND. 289 Camden noticed that the tone of Grattan's speech evidently showed that he was acting in conjunction with Fox, and it was clear that he now looked forward eagerly to the downfall of the Ministry. A curious illustration of his changed attitude was the encouragement he gave to Fox to bring forward the discussion of Irish affairs in the British Parliament. No one, it may be boldly said, would a few years before have reprobated such a course more vehemently as, in spirit if not in letter, a plain violation of the Constitution of 1782. But he now spoke with scorn of those who described as unconstitutional' an inquiry by a British Parliament into a conduct which tends to bring the connection into danger, and which derives its principle of motion from the British Ministry, as if the connection were not a question of empire, or a question of empire were not a question for a British Parliament.' He appears indeed to have been at this time firmly convinced that an invasion accompanied by a rebellion would lead Ireland to absolute ruin; that without a complete reversal of the Government policy, such a catastrophe was extremely probable, and that even if it did not take place, the most intelligent and most energetic portion of the nation was drifting rapidly into Republicanism. The mismanagement of the war, the dissolution of the confederacy against France, the isolation of England, and the overwhelming triumph of French arms, filled him with unfeigned alarm, and he believed that, unless Protestant Ulster could be conciliated, neither Ireland nor the Empire would weather the storm. In the Irish Parliament, he was at last convinced that nothing could be done. The scornful name of 'the seven wise men,' which was now given to the Opposition, sufficiently revealed their impotence, and there was only one division during the session in which a body approaching fifty votes could be rallied against the Government.1 In the British Parliament, Fox dilated on the familiar topics of the subservience to which the Irish Parliament had been reduced by the enormous accumulation of Crown influence; the consequent alienation of a Northern population, as well informed, as intelligent, as enlightened as the middle classes in Great This very interesting debate took place in the Irish House of Commons on March 20. |