On February 15, 1782, delegates from the Volunteer associations of Ulster gathered at Dungannon to discuss further action, aims, and tactics. That morning 200 “steady, silent, and determined” delegates, fully armed and clothed in the uniforms of their regiments, marched two by two into the church of Dungannon for a solemn meeting. After several hours of discussion and debate, the delegates emerged with a resolution that framed the “rights and grievances” of the Irish nation. They had first resolved that the existence of armed paramilitary groups did not mean rebellion or the forfeiture of any civil rights. Second, and most importantly, they resolved that “a claim of any body of men, other than the King, Lords, and Commons of Ireland, to make laws that bind this kingdom, is unconstitutional, illegal, and a grievance.” The delegates also resolved that Poyning’s Law was unconstitutional, as were the restriction of Irish trade and the dependence of Ireland’s judiciary. After voting support for the relaxation of the Penal Laws against Catholics and pledging to support reformers and reform efforts in Parliament, the delegates agreed to create a governing committee for Ulster and to send representatives to Dublin for a general convention of Volunteers.18
The Dungannon convention was a turning point in Irish history, its resolutions in many ways Ireland’s first Declaration of Independence. Other Volunteer groups quickly voted to adopt the Dungannon resolutions. The Dublin Volunteers, the most active and influential association outside Ulster, agreed to accept the resolutions within a matter of weeks. Barrington, whose father and brothers commanded four Volunteer regiments between them, was dragooned to compose resolutions for their regiments as well as an agreement to adopt the resolutions of Dungannon. This was Barrington’s “first essay,” but also, for the rest of his life, proof that he had been on the right side of history, firm in his support for constitutional independence. It was a transformative moment for both Barrington and the nation, a moment of popular ferment and radicalization. As one Leinster Volunteer put it, “Kings are, we now perceive but human institutions, Parliaments are but human institutions, Ministers are but human institutions, but Liberty is a right Divine, it is the earliest gift from heaven, the charter of our birth-right, which human institutions can never cancel, without tearing down the first and best decree of the Omnipotent Creator.”19
With the adoption of the Dungannon resolutions, as Jonah Barrington remembered, “the proceedings of the people without doors, now began to have their due weight on their representatives within,” and many within Parliament adopted the Volunteers’ resolutions and renewed their push for legislative independence. Their strategy was simple but effective. Remembering well their English history and the tactics of Parliament in its great seventeenth-century disputes with the king, reformers in Ireland’s Parliament resolved to use their control of the country’s purse strings to force further reform. As such, they refused to vote on a Money Bill to fund the government for more than six months until their grievances were addressed.
With the nation in arms, and the financial tap closed to a trickle, the administration once more began to listen to the rising chorus of Irish complaint. On April 14, 1782, the Duke of Portland arrived in Dublin as the new Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. The removal of the more intransigent Earl of Carlisle from office was a clear sign that the British ministry was wavering in their opposition to reform, hoping to appease Irish complaints by a change in government. The prospect of victory became even clearer when, in his opening address to Ireland’s Parliament, Portland declared that the “mistrust and jealousies” that had arisen in Ireland were in need of “immediate consideration” so that a “final adjustment” of the relationship between Ireland and Britain could be made. No one, however, was quite sure what “final adjustments” the British government had in mind. Some feared a union between Ireland and Britain similar to the 1707 union between Scotland and England, would follow, allowing for Irish representatives in Britain’s Parliament, but at the same time eliminating Ireland’s own Parliament.
The reformers refused to wait passively to see what Portland had in store. On April 16, 1782, “a multitude of people” crowded the streets outside Parliament in Dublin. Inside, the Members of Parliament waited in breathless anticipation for the entrance of Henry Grattan, the great champion of reform. He entered accompanied by a cadre of reformers, and, for the second time in three years, rose to address the chamber. There, he proposed a Declaration of Rights that outlined a new relationship between Ireland and Britain. In Grattan’s conception of this altered British empire, Ireland and Britain would share a monarch and a constitution, but Ireland would become an independent nation with an unquestioned right to legislate for herself, a nation with an independent Parliament, an independent judiciary, and an independent army. It was not, he argued, a question of Britain granting Ireland the privilege of independence, but Ireland’s natural right. “The question,” Grattan declaimed, “is not whether Ireland has a right to be free, but whether Great Britain has a right to enslave her. When the latter country asks what right have the Irish to make laws for themselves? Ireland will not answer, but demands, what right has England to make laws for Ireland—from nature she has none—nature has not given any one nation a right over another.” Britain, Grattan reasoned, had already conceded the point. In 1778, reeling from the defeat at Saratoga and the French entrance into the war, Britain had sent a peace commission, led by Ireland’s erstwhile Lord Lieutenant the Earl of Carlisle, to negotiate a peace with America. The terms they offered the rebellious colonies, including legislative independence, were well known in Ireland, and many there firmly believed that if Britain was willing to offer such concessions to people they had so vigorously castigated for rebellion, similar terms should be offered to loyal Ireland. That Ireland was engaging in what amounted to armed blackmail did not stop reformers and Volunteers from making the connection between loyalty and independence at the same time as they used the threat of rebellion to push their agenda.20
Grattan’s motion was passed, with even the ministry’s representatives in Parliament agreeing that the reformers’ demands needed to be addressed. Outside Parliament, the Volunteers continued to agitate, keeping up the pressure on the administration. Around the country Volunteer associations voted to adopt the positions Grattan had outlined and to support the cause of independence with their “lives and fortunes.” While the ministry considered its options, “the Irish nation was not idle.” According to Barrington, “No relaxation was permitted in the warlike preparations” of the Volunteers. They continued to hold reviews, to parade through Dublin, and to conduct military exercises in Phoenix Park. When Parliament reassembled in May, the Volunteers of Dublin again turned out in great numbers, at once a show of force and a warning. In an intimidating strategic display, Volunteer artillery under James Napper Tandy took up positions on the quays of the city, as well as all of the bridges connecting the army barracks to Dublin Castle. Units of infantry and cavalry were stationed throughout the city, lining the route to Parliament. They were, Barrington reported, awaiting the reply of the British government to the Declaration of Rights, and were fully prepared to either “return to their homes for peaceful enjoyment of their rights or instantly to take the field.”21
In another time such provocative insubordination might have been met with violence and repression, but by this point Britain was in no position to act. With her armies stretched thin and in retreat, with her finances drained by war without end, with opposition to the American War growing daily at home and abroad, it was the perfect time for Ireland to secure its independence. Henry Grattan made Britain’s precarious position forcefully clear and urged Ireland to seize this unprecedented opportunity to claw back its liberty and independence. “England now smarts under the lesson of the American war,” Grattan thundered:
The doctrine of imperial legislature she feels to be pernicious—the revenues and monopolies annexed to it, she found untenable. Her enemies are a host pouring upon her from all quarters of the earth—her armies are disp
ersed—the sea is not hers—she has no minister, no ally, no admiral, none in whom she long confides, and no general whom she has not disgraced. The balance of her fate is in the hands of Ireland. You are not only her last connexion—you are the only nation of Europe, that is not her enemy . . . Nothing can prevent your being free, except yourselves: it is not in the disposition of England, it is not in the interest of England, it is not in her force. What! can 8,000,000 Englishmen opposed to 20,000,000 of French, 7,000,000 of Spanish, to 3,000,000 of American’s reject the alliance of 3,000,000 of Ireland? Can 8,000,000 of British men thus outnumbered by foes, take upon their soldiers the expense of an expedition to enslave Ireland? Will Great Britain, a wise and magnanimous country, thus tutored by experience and wasted by war, the French riding her channel, send an army to Ireland to levy no tax, to enforce no law, to answer no end whatever, except to spoliate the characters of Ireland and enforce a barren oppression?
Given this state of affairs, all that was left was for Ireland to seize its destiny. “I wish for nothing,” Grattan concluded:
but to breathe in this our island, in common with my fellow subjects, the air of liberty. I have no ambition, unless it be to break your chain, and contemplate your glory. I never will be satisfied, so long as the meanest cottager in Ireland has a link of the British chain clanking to his rags: he may be naked, he shall not be in irons; and I do see at hand; the spirit is gone forth . . . and though great men should fall off, yet the cause shall live; and though he who after this should die, yet immortal fire shall outlast the humble organ who conveys it; and the breath of liberty, like the word of the holy man, will not die with the prophet, but survive him.22
In London, the British administration was no less clear about its position. Britain was beset by war with America and France, and by 1779 a movement for reform was building in Britain that threatened to bring down the ministry from within. Dissenters and radicals in London had been advocating for political reform since the days of Wilkes, but now the provinces were beginning to groan as well. The embargos and other disruptions of trade caused by the war had pushed Britain into a recession: unemployment soared and prices skyrocketed, while land values, wages, and stock prices plummeted. High taxes levied to pay for the war only made the economic squeeze worse. As in Ireland and America, government corruption, unscrupulous contractors, and a lack of adequate representation were held responsible for the worsening economic conditions and a disastrously mismanaged war.
In Yorkshire, in December 1779, Christopher Wyvill, a clergyman and country gentleman, convened a large public meeting to debate the structural deficiencies of Britain’s government, refocusing criticism from Lord North’s ministry to the more general problems with the state as it existed. Like his Irish and American counterparts, Wyvill believed that the English constitution had been degraded since the days of the Glorious Revolution. The political system had become “deranged,” and the only solution was for the people of Britain to take matters into their own hands to reform the government. “When dangerous disputes have arisen between the Executive Power and the Parliament,” Wyvill declared, “the People are the UMPIRE to whose judgment alone they can be referred, and by whose decision they can be happily adjusted.” It was up to the people, or at least England’s provincial landowners, to step in to fix what ailed the country.23
The result of Wyvill’s Yorkshire meeting was a petition calling for an end to the inefficiencies and corruptions of the current system. From Yorkshire, the movement spread rapidly. As many as forty county Associations were formed across England and Scotland, creating a national network. The new movement united the interests of the county gentry with those of the provincial cities to form a broad-based coalition that petitioned for the end of rotten boroughs, the extension of the franchise, a secret ballot, and the rooting out of corruption, placemen, and other government abuses that placed too much power in the hands of the crown. In the shadow of the American Revolution, the mood of the country had shifted, with opposition to the ministry and king growing.24
The Association movement was a dangerous development for Lord North’s administration. They represented England’s county gentry, the backbone of the English electorate and the core constituency for both the ministry and the war. Their opposition threatened to turn the tide against the government at a crucial juncture. They also espoused ideas and used language that seemed awfully close to that of the American rebels and the Irish Patriots. And this was not coincidental. Not only were the Associators influenced by the same strands of Enlightenment thought as the reformers in London, America, and Ireland, but they also consciously adopted the rhetoric and tactics of these other groups. Many argued that America was better governed, its government more popular and less expensive than Britain’s, and sought to emulate it through internal reform rather than resorting to revolution. The example of Ireland was also instructive. Even before the first meeting was held, Wyvill and others looked to the Volunteer movement for inspiration. From the first, Wyvill hoped to create a nationwide alliance of county Associations with a national convention to pressure the government. The Irish, the Associators realized, faced the same problems of corruption and recession as England, but the Irish had scorned “the humility of supplication” and instead had “taken up arms to defend herself,” leading to success “ten times more” than had been achieved in England. “The account given by the Volunteers,” Wyvill noted, “exhibits abuses exactly similar to those which deform the Parliament of Britain; and, if not corrected by National Interposition in each country, appear but too likely to increase; till they become the destruction of every valuable end for which parliaments were originally ordained.” With this precedent in mind, there was from the beginning a veiled threat of violence around the Associations. The initial Yorkshire meeting was explicitly timed to coincide with a muster of Yorkshire’s militia, commanded by the very same men who now gathered to debate reform.25
By 1780, the county Associations began to take on a more menacing aspect. They formed a “congress” or national convention of representatives from every Association, swore not to pay any taxes until their grievances were addressed, and sent a mountain of petitions to Parliament. They now voted themselves the right to debate and decide on issues pending in Parliament, demanded regular parliaments, the addition of 100 new Members of Parliament, and an end to the “civil war” with America. They also began to arm, with the Devonshire Association first voting to create a fund to purchase weapons in January and others, including Yorkshire, quickly following suit. The Yorkshire Association threatened “redress” if their concerns continued to be ignored, and some among the movement began to argue that if Parliament would not act, the delegates of the counties should seize control. Some moderate reforms, many championed by Edmund Burke, began to wend their way through Parliament in an attempt to appease the Associations. But their great success came in April 1780 when they secured a parliamentary resolution, stating that “the influence of the crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished.” The resolution represented not just a condemnation of royal power, but also a change in the mood of the country and a shift in the balance of power between the North ministry and the opposition.
The government was horrified. It seemed to many as if the Volunteer movement had been transported from Ireland to England. Indeed, Wyvill and the Associations were in direct contact with the Ulster Volunteers, exchanging advice and tactics for “destroying, restraining, or counter-acting this Hydra of corruption.” Horace Walpole, no friend of the ministry himself, thought the movement was a “mutiny” of county gentlemen—men who supported the war when they thought it was in their interests, but now turned against the administration when they felt their pockets pinched. When the crown asked for his advice on the matter, he warned that it was a disastrous moment to “experiment” with government:
when we are at war with America, France, and Spain, and when we are in danger of seeing Ireland separate itself from this country. Alas!
it is unhappy that by the enormities of the Court, and the incapacity of our present Governors, the nation should be forced to enter into such discussions, the very attention to which doubles our danger; for when the Opposition think of nothing but vanquishing the Court, and the Court can think of nothing but defending itself at home, no plans can be formed abroad, nor does either side think of attacking or defending the country from France.
The specter of civil war now invaded the minds of Englishmen, distracting focus from the struggle in America and ensuring that Irish demands were seen in a new, more conciliatory light. France threatened to invade, America seemed all but lost, and even Englishmen were up in arms in a state of near revolt. There was little the British ministry could do in the face of Irish threats but acquiesce. “Reform alone,” many now concluded, “might prevent a civil war.”26
And so it was that on May 27, 1782, Lord Lieutenant Portland informed Ireland’s Parliament that their demand for legislative independence had been met. New Catholic Relief bills were also passed, allowing Irish Catholics to purchase land and Catholic landowners to vote. So great was the perceived need to placate Ireland that, in the face of strong British opposition led by Lord Gordon’s Protestant Association, Parliament had even refused to repeal the Catholic Relief Act of 1778, touching off the spectacular violence of the Gordon Riots, but helping to prevent insurrection in Ireland. It was, or so many believed, the birth of the Irish nation, a birth of Irish independence that, once granted, could never be relinquished. It was a moment of joyous celebration, but the festive atmosphere and the Irish nation would both prove to be short-lived.
To Begin the World Over Again Page 13
