To Begin the World Over Again

by Matthew Lockwood

  Some among the Ascendancy feared that the armed threat of the Volunteers might usurp the sovereignty of Parliament, the proper representatives of the people, and become the real power in the state like “the pretorian legions of Rome.” To acquiesce to their demands now, just when the first independent Parliament was meeting for the first time, would set a dangerous precedent. Many, even among the Irish Patriot Party, had joined the government or accepted offices and had no desire to see their positions threatened or the new status quo undermined. The government of Britain had also changed, with the despised and defeated Lord North swept out and more amenable ministers rising in his place. Irish Patriots now found themselves looking across the Irish Sea at political allies, not enemies. With the encouragement of a new British administration, they now opposed further reforms that would separate the country from Britain more fully and finally. The Irish Patriot Party was also beginning to fracture internally over the question of Catholic suffrage, the viability of a standing army, economic cost-cutting, and the nature of Ireland’s future relationship with Britain. Most dramatically, Flood and Grattan, the two most prominent champions of 1782, fell out, leading to violently vituperative exchanges in the Irish House of Commons and an aborted duel.38

  Crucially, in 1783 the Volunteers also lacked a key component of their success in 1782, the support of Ireland’s Catholics. In 1782 a unified Irish nation had been able to force Britain to acquiesce to their demands for legislative independence. Convinced that an independent legislature would grant emancipation, Irish Catholics had been eager to support this movement. But the Relief of the Poor Act 1782 was a disappointment and Catholics remained largely shut out of the political nation. As such, they had little reason to care whether political representation was more evenly spread among the Protestant minority, and little reason to trust that a Protestant Parliament would ever grant full political equality to their Catholic neighbors. Instead of throwing their weight behind Flood and the Volunteers, in 1783 Ireland’s Catholics remained largely aloof, helping to undermine efforts for further reform.

  In the end, Flood was not even allowed to present his bill. The Ascendancy controlled the levers of power and they now closed ranks to protect their positions and ensure that reform would go no further. Barry Yelverton, the attorney-general, condemned the bill, charging that it had originated “in an armed assembly,” and was therefore “inconsistent with the freedom of debate” of a sovereign Parliament. That some of the same men who now opposed even hearing a bill backed by the Volunteers were among those who had praised the actions of the Volunteers in securing legislative independence just one year ago was an irony scarcely to be believed. Flood castigated his opponents as men who would willfully “conjure up a military phantom . . . to affright yourselves.” But opposition to the bill was steadfast. The Ascendancy had secured power for itself and now only desired to consolidate and maintain that power. A year earlier, in a letter to Henry Flood, Lord Charlemont had complained that stability rather than further reform was what Ireland needed most. “I wish to heaven that gentlemen would . . . let the country alone; suffer things to remain as they are, and not hazard the ruin of that growing coalescence, which . . . was beginning to take place between men of all persuasions.” Ireland had already seen all of the political change that the Ascendancy wished to see. Reform would go no further.39

  This oppositional, nationalist rhetoric had helped unite the country behind the Volunteers and the Irish Patriot Party of Grattan, Flood, and Charlemont, and thus helped Ireland secure free trade and legislative independence, but it also inspired Catholics and Dissenters, long shut out of the corridors of power, to imagine a more equal Ireland. Ireland’s entrenched political class, however, even members of the Volunteers and the Irish Patriot Party, were largely composed of members of the Protestant Ascendancy, men who sought Ireland’s independence in large measure as a means of asserting their own power and securing their own monopoly over the benefits of Ireland’s place in the British Empire. This was not, as some have suggested, a democratic revolution, nor a struggle for the broader political rights of the Irish people. It was instead a revolt against British imperial policy over the proper division of the economic and political spoils of empire clothed in the rhetorical robes of nationalism, democracy, and independence. It sought not the democratic rights of Ireland, but to replace metropolitan control with local control, to replace London with Dublin, and to exchange one group of ruling Protestant elites with another. As such, the Patriot Party was generally uninterested in either sharing the bounty of independence with their Catholic and Nonconformist neighbors or further severing their relationship with Britain and her empire.

  The failures of reform in 1782 and 1783 proved to be a watershed. Grattan’s vision of a unified Irish nation began to disintegrate. The failure of further reform spelt the end of the Volunteers as a powerful, national movement. Despite their armed threats, they accepted their defeat peacefully, refusing to go beyond intimidation in their quest for greater political equality. In part, this decision to abjure violence was a result of its membership. The Volunteers, outside of Ulster, were largely members of the Protestant Ascendancy, and thus many were already skeptical of the more radical elements within the organization, and few wished to risk civil war in the pursuit of greater rights for Catholics and Dissenters. But the failure to back up their threats was also the result of changing international circumstances. By 1783, the American War was over, the British crisis passed, and a militia of regular troops once more stationed in Ireland. The moment for armed reform was gone, the raison d’être of the Volunteers no more, and with no power to push reform and no invasion threat to oppose, the Volunteers began to disintegrate.

  The Ascendancy, wary of sectarian unrest and calls for further reform, began to crack down on dissent. Instead of completing the revolution begun in 1782, they now sought to freeze reform where it stood and protect the Ascendancy’s landed interests. With legislative independence, Ireland’s courts, previously lax in their dealings with libel, began cracking down on perceived critics of the Ascendancy and its government. In 1786 a bill proposing the creation of a new police force in Dublin was introduced. Its primary purpose was not to combat crime but, in the words of Attorney-General Fitzgibbon, to curb the “frequency of those tumultuous assemblies called aggregate meetings . . . restrain licentiousness, and to teach those citizens a due deference for the laws of their country.” The political establishment was increasingly concerned about social and political unrest and moved to increase the power of the executive as a result. The new magistrates would be appointed by the Lord-Lieutenant—making them crown appointments—and the new constables granted the power to “break into any house under warrant of information” alone. As sensitive to the despotic dangers of a government-controlled constabulary as their English counterparts, Grattan and others opposed the bill, arguing that the new police would be a standing army by another name. Such a force, Grattan warned, was simply “an army in the state,” a “mercenary army,” a “ministerial army,” “assassins of liberty feeding on the vitals of the constitution.” The administration already “approaches too near an arbitrary government to have an armed rabble under the influence of the crown.” Few heeded Grattan’s words; the bill passed by a majority of four to one.40

  A year later, Parliament went a step further and proposed a new bill “to prevent tumultuous risings and assemblies; and for the more effectual punishment of persons guilty of outrage, riot, and illegal combinations, and the administering and taking of unlawful oaths.” Modeled on the English Riot Act, the 1787 bill was designed to give the government greater power to suppress the very activities that had secured the success of the 1782 revolution. The new law would make disorderly or unlawful gatherings illegal and make it a felony to “write, print, publish, send, or carry any message, letter or notice tending to excite insurrection.” In the face of growing Catholic unrest in the south and west, the bill also proposed that any Catholic meetinghouse th
at held an illegal assembly should be pulled down. As usual, Grattan’s faction opposed the measure as an increase in arbitrary government, but by 1787 even Grattan had to concede that the country had a “cast of lawlessness” and that “shabby mutiny and abortive rebellion” required strong measures. Thus even the most radical Members of Parliament now sought merely to temper the worst excesses of the bill. They succeeded in having the clause about the destruction of Catholic meetinghouses removed, but the bill passed with overwhelming support. Major Doyle, one of the bill’s few opponents, responded to its passage with a lament and a prescient warning. “Who could have thought that within five years from the glorious Revolution of 1782, toleration would stand in need of advocates . . . I will say, that by toleration alone Ireland can continue free and independent; by being united you recovered your constitution. Suffer yourselves to be disunited and you will recover your chains.” Time would prove Doyle right.41

  When it became clear that many of the heroes of 1782 were not interested in expanding the political nation beyond the bounds of the Protestant Ascendancy, old divisions within Irish society were once more driven to the surface. Betrayed by the revolution they had done so much to create, disaffected Patriots, Catholics, and Dissenters began to move in more radical directions. Catholics still striving for full emancipation and Patriots and Dissenters still pushing for political reform began to coalesce into a new movement and plot a new revolution. Centered on the Dissenters in the north, and a small contingent of urban radicals in Dublin and Belfast, new, more radical groups of agitators began to emerge: armed, revolutionary groups modeled on the Irish Patriot Party and the Volunteers but committed to achieving further reform by any means necessary. Foremost among these new radical groups was the Society of United Irishmen, formed by a core of disappointed radicals inspired by the American Revolution, the Volunteer Movement, and the reform movement of 1782.

  The years after reform’s final defeat in 1784 had seen the growth of a variety of Whig clubs in Dublin and Belfast, but a more concerted movement was born when Belfast Volunteers, inspired by the French Revolution and Thomas Paine’s outstandingly popular The Rights of Man, coalesced into the United Irishmen at a celebration marking the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille in Belfast in 1791. Led by an Anglican barrister named Theobald Wolfe Tone, the United Irishmen were committed to an end to British interference in Irish affairs, full parliamentary reform along the lines of Flood’s 1783 bill, and a democratic union of Catholics, Anglicans, and Dissenters. Initially, the United Irishmen were limited to a small group of Protestant radicals in Dublin and Belfast, but the precedent for a democratic, nationalist armed resistance had been set during the years of the American War. In the 1790s this precedent would transform into a revolutionary movement that would shake Ireland to its core. In their opposition to Britain, the Patriots and Volunteers had set the stage for religious factional violence, rebellion, or reconquest by Britain. In the end they got all three.

  Neither was everyone in Ireland satisfied with the religious reforms secured in 1779 and 1782. Despite the universalist, nationalist rhetoric of Volunteers like Barrington and Patriots like Grattan, there were still deep divisions in Irish society, divisions that were only exacerbated by the reform movement. The reformers and the Volunteers had provided a collective rhetoric and a tempting example of the power of a nation under arms to force political change, and they had helped to create a nascent sense of Irish nationalism in opposition to imperial Britain but they had not created a settled or accepted definition of just who constituted the Irish nation. Among Irish Catholics even ancillary participation in the reform and Volunteer movements secured practical gains through the Catholic Relief Acts, but also provided scope and precedent for political action, for their own redefinition of the Irish nation as one in which Catholics would play an important and growing role. As such, when some of the Penal Laws were rolled back, land-starved and land-hungry Catholics quickly flooded what had previously been a relatively restricted property market. Rural Protestants, especially in areas of more evenly mixed settlement like Ulster, were alarmed by this new Catholic competition, for land was not only the source of economic power, but political authority as well. The confessional competition was only intensified by a period of economic stagnation and steep rises in rental prices that racked Ireland in the late eighteenth century. Economically vulnerable, horrified by the new world Catholic Relief presaged, and terrified by the threat of foreign Catholic invasion, rampant rumors of Catholic priests gushing into Ireland, and the recent example of mass, armed political agitation, Protestants in Ulster began to gather together to combat what they saw as the growing threat of Catholic independence.

  The trouble began in Armagh, where Catholics and Protestants lived in relatively equal numbers. Fearful of growing Catholic power and angered by the Catholic economic competition initiated by the reform movement, in 1784 a group of Protestant partisans from Portnorris banded together in a gang called the Nappach Fleet to harass local Catholics. The Portnorris Volunteers were rumored to have allowed Catholics to join their ranks, an alarming prospect for local Protestants conditioned to fear the idea of armed Catholics in their neighborhood. As commander of the Volunteers, Lord Charlemont had opposed the decision to allow Catholics into the Portnorris association, a fact that the Nappach Fleet gang interpreted as a justification for seizing Catholic arms. With this rationalization the Nappach Fleet began raiding Catholic houses in search of weapons. Armagh’s Catholics, however, were not willing to take this new persecution lying down. For the defense of their homes and communities, Catholics began to form their own gangs, starting with the Bunker’s Hill Defenders in Portnorris. The creation of opposing armed factions led inevitably to conflict and violence, first sporadic brawls, raids, and cattle maiming, but eventually confrontations more closely resembling pitched battles.42

  By 1785, the Nappach Fleet had expanded greatly, rebranding itself the Peep O’Day Boys for their penchant for raiding Catholic homes at dawn. The targets of their raids had shifted and broadened as well. Where once they justified their attacks by focusing on the confiscation of illegal arms, now they widened their violence to include attacks on religious symbols and buildings, and on the economic livelihood of Catholics. Chapels were razed, houses looted, crops burnt, and looms destroyed as the logic of Protestant violence shifted from self-preservation to economic competition. It was no longer enough to prevent a Catholic rising, now the Peep O’Day Boys and their allies wished to eliminate Catholic economic competition and drive Catholics out of the county.

  These Protestant paramilitary attacks alarmed the authorities in Dublin, but local law enforcement, judges and juries were, as Protestants, often more sympathetic toward the Peep O’Day Boys than to their victims. As a result, few of the partisans were arrested, let alone convicted, forcing Armagh’s Catholics to rely on their own for protection. At Grangemore, local Catholics organized their own armed faction, named the Irish Defenders, and began to patrol Catholic territories and raid Protestant houses for guns. Over the years after 1785, they transformed from a series of autonomous defense groups to a unified secret organization of cells or lodges spread across Ulster. The result was that by 1786, clear Protestant and Catholic paramilitary factions had emerged and spread, increasing the frequency and intensity of violence.

  It was the most intense sectarian violence Ireland had seen in generations. The failure of the local authorities to contain the strife meant that alternative peace-keepers were needed. With few resources at their command, the authorities in Dublin turned to the Volunteers. Though they had petered out in most of Ireland, in Ulster, the Volunteers retained their numbers and influence. As such, they were now sent into Armagh to restore order. The Volunteers, however, were hardly the neutral peace-keepers Armagh needed. Still made up of Protestants, many Volunteers openly supported the actions of Armagh’s Protestants. Some had even gone so far as to join the Peep O’Day Boys, and many Peep O’Day Boys scrabbled to join th
e Volunteers. Unsurprisingly, instead of keeping order, the Volunteers only exacerbated the problems. The arrival of the Volunteers signaled a new phase of more open, concerted violence between Protestants and Catholics. At Tillysaran in 1788, the Benburb Volunteers intentionally antagonized Catholics by disrupting their worship with marching and anti-Catholic songs. When the outraged Catholics attempted to prevent a second march through their village, the Volunteers opened fire, leading to a cycle of retaliation and reprisal. At Forkhill in 1791, Catholics cut out the tongue of a Protestant schoolmaster, cut off his teenage son’s calf, and removed several of his wife’s fingers.

  The escalation of raid and riot eventually led to open battle between Catholic and Protestant. In September of 1795, at a crossroads known as the Diamond near Loughgall, several hundred armed Peep O’Day Boys faced off against perhaps three hundred Defenders. In the battle that followed the Peep O’Day Boys struck a crushing blow. Well armed and well defended on a hilltop, they managed to kill thirty or forty Defenders with no casualties of their own. After they drove their enemies from the field, they repaired to a local tavern to celebrate their victory, where they once more changed their name and solemnly formed the Orange Order to defend “the King and his heirs so long as he or they support the Protestant Ascendancy.” Fittingly, members of the Volunteers helped form the core of the new order. By 1795 the sectarian divisions, the Orange Order, and the Irish Defenders that would trouble Northern Ireland for the next two hundred years had been set. The American War had brought about the introduction and legitimation of the paramilitary faction’s central place in Ireland’s politics; it had given national identity and political aspiration to downtrodden Catholics and emergent Dissenters; it had created the context and conditions in which old authorities were challenged and old animosities intensified; it gave birth to the Irish nation, but also sowed the seeds of its division and destruction.