Addison would not necessarily have been disabused of such pre judices by his friendship with Steele, who once remarked the Irish were ‘more harmless’ but also ‘more stupid’ than other races.15
The Anglo-Irish nobility had been suffering an identity crisis since the 1690s. The greater sharing of sovereignty between the Crown and Parliament since England's constitutional changes of 1689 meant it was more awkward for Irishmen to argue that their loyalty was to the English (now British) Crown, not the Westminster Parliament. Addison observed that the Irish were always harking back to the ancient pacts between the English and Irish kings, hating to have it thought that ‘they are a conquered and dependent kingdom’.16
But conquered and dependent was what they were. Lord Lieutenants like Wharton were answerable not to the Irish Parliament but to Westminster and the Queen, so there was less need for a Kit-Cat Club equivalent in Dublin to jerk the strings of electoral influence. Wharton could convene and prorogue the Irish Parliament, and though that institution could submit Bills to Westminster for approval, and could still obstruct the granting of war supplies, it had no control over amendments the Privy Council in London might then make.
England resisted full legislative union with Ireland, however, on economic grounds, preferring to protect its own markets. After the Treaty of Union with Scotland, the English treated Ireland as an even more subordinate colony, filling places in the Irish government with Englishmen—like Wharton and Addison—rather than with locally born Anglo-Irish. The only bright side of this colonialism was that repression of the Catholic population would likely have been even more ferocious if it had been left entirely in the Protestant electorate's hands. The view of themselves as external moderators between religious zealots allowed the Kit-Cats to reconcile their Whiggish principles about governmental accountability with their near total lack of such accountability to the Irish freeholders.
As the viceregal procession moved off from the waterside, gunfire saluted the new arrivals, followed by bell ringing and bonfires that continued through the night. A contemporary observed that to be Lord Lieutenant came nearer to kingship in ‘train and state’ than any comparable office in Europe.17
The city that the two men found in 1709 had a population of 60–75,000, but it had rapidly expanded from only 15,000 in 1660, and was crammed into a small geographical area. The town's boundaries were, by today's landmarks, St Stephen's Green to the south, College Park to the east and St Audeon's church to the west. Visible on one hill was the Royal Hospital at Kilmainham, completed the previous year, and another prominent landmark was the tower of the Tholsel (law courts), which afforded the best view over the city. Ormonde's Quay was a large open square with docks on the bank of the river, dominated by the Custom House. Walled embankments were being built along the river, but were not yet complete; improvements in the harbour were also underway, Dublin and Cork being the main ports for American trade. Around Temple Bar stood Dutch-style ‘Billies’: tall, thin, gabled, brick terraces built by Huguenot immigrants. Other than this, the city centre's basic layout in 1709, before it was expanded by Georgian squares, was remarkably similar to that of today.
The procession's final steps were along Castle Street, Cork Hill and Cole's Alley, which led up to the Castle's ornate armorial gate. The Castle's viceregal lodgings had a view out through this gate, while Addison resided on the side of Upper Castle Yard. Back in January 1709, Addison had sent his second cousin, a triple-chinned fellow named Eustace Budgell, ahead to Dublin ‘to make my Lodgings Inhabitable’.18
Addison secured Budgell a place as a clerk under him, but tasked him first with ensuring there was a well-stocked wine cellar at Dublin Castle. In 1709, French wine was more easily available in Ireland than in England, and was often smuggled from Dublin to London as Portuguese or ‘Irish wine’.19 If Budgell did his job well, therefore, Wharton and Addison would have enjoyed their first night at Dublin Castle sampling their new cellar and toasting friends back in Westminster,20 only to be awakened at dawn by the Castle's kettledrummer, trumpeters and the racket of soldiers with their horses and dogs in the yard outside.
Thanks to his Kit-Cat contacts, Addison had plenty of Dublin acquaintances eager to introduce him to the town's treacherously complicated local politics. Congreve's friend Joe Keally, for example, was now living at his estate of Keally Mount in Kilkenny, sitting as MP for Doneraile and as Attorney General for the Palatinate of Tipperary. In May 1709, Congreve encouraged Keally to offer his services to Wharton. When Keally suggested that Congreve, who was a regular dinner companion of Wharton's in London, should do the same, Congreve demurred: ‘The hint you give me is very kind, and need not seem unfeasible to any who does not know particular persons and circumstances as well as myself.’21 Since Congreve wrote warmly in other private letters about Wharton's political skills and Addison's character, this is a somewhat cryptic answer. It may have been merely his polite way of saying that his life (and lover Henrietta) lay in London and that he preferred not to become a serious civil servant like Addison.
Wharton and Addison had had the whole winter to prepare for their rule of Ireland, and arrived with a clear plan, hammered out over Kit-Cat dinners in late 1708 and fine-tuned on the voyage over. Their priorities were simple: to secure Irish funds and soldiers for the war, and to ensure Ireland's Catholics and Tories provided no foothold for foreign Jacobites. When Wharton made his first speech to the Irish Lords at Chichester House on 5 May 1709, these were his simple messages. He asked them to vote for war supplies, reassured them the Irish troops on the Continent would soon be relieved, suggested they consider increased fortifications and construction of an armoury in Dublin, and called for new legislation to promote the Protestant interest and prevent ‘the Growth of Popery’.22 Notably absent was any mention of helping the Dissenters by repealing the Test Acts, an omission that instantly won grateful support from the Anglo-Irish MPs and Lords.
Addison, who probably helped word the speech, commended Wharton's wisdom in not raising the issue of Dissenters' emancipation immediately, so as to ensure that other measures—most importantly the war supply—would first be voted through. Allowing the Irish parliamentarians to come up with their own proposals for further excluding and controlling the Catholics was also clever. ‘I question not but…he will be able to lead them into anything that will be for their real interest and advantage,’ Addison assured Halifax in London.23 Congreve, when sending news of the failing 1709 peace negotiations at The Hague, responded to praise of Wharton's political instincts and oratory: ‘I am glad His Excellency pleases so well. Nobody knows better how to do it.’24
The following day, 6 May 1709 (on which, in London, Steele was released from debtors' prison), Wharton and Addison received the freedom of the City of Dublin. On the same day, a vote by the City of Dublin Corporation was the first spark in a Whig–Tory dispute that would escalate into a major political row a few years later. A senior alderman was passed over as Chief Magistrate in favour of a more junior Whig: a result orchestrated by, or designed to please, Wharton. Dublin's Tory leaders, who clubbed at the Swan tavern near Lucas' Coffee House, complained that this infringed the Corporation's charter. They swore to reverse the appointment if they ever regained power in Dublin Castle.
This matter showed that the Irish ‘political nation’ was becoming almost as polarized as England by the labels of Whig and Tory. The Irish Tories tended to have Old English, pre-1641 settler roots, whereas the local Whigs tended to descend from families settled after Cromwell. Unlike England, where a normally Tory Parliament was going through an exceptional period of Whiggism, the Irish Parliament remained evenly split between Whig and Tory MPs, united by membership of a single minority—the High Church Anglo-Irish squirearchy. A centre grouping usually voted with whichever party was sent over from London to govern. The handful of former Catholics in the Irish Parliament always voted with the Tories, however, and an association between Tories and Jacobites was inevitably imported from English politi
cal discourse. In 1708–9, therefore, the Whig hand was strengthened by rumours that The Pretender planned to invade again; even more than in England, the Irish ruling class feared the Jacobites because a Stuart restoration would reverse the current arrangement of land tenure in Ireland.
Addison, who made himself personally popular with men of both parties in Ireland, was returned to the Irish Parliament in May 1709 as Member for Cavan—a seat acquired by nomination rather than contest. There is an anecdote about Addison's first speech in either the British or Irish Commons, at which he was said to have stood up and stammered ‘Mr Speaker, I conceive…’ three times, before, conceiving nothing, sitting down again.25 Addison wrote repeatedly in his later journalism about ‘Oppressions of Modesty’ creating an incapacity for public speaking, and how this could let down even the most intelligent and educated man, so there was probably some truth in the story.26 Addison's praise for Wharton's effective delivery of speeches takes on added significance in this light: Addison must have felt a mixture of emotions about his more extrovert patron, ‘envying his Impudence and despising his Understanding’.27 Steele hit the nail on the head, perhaps, when he wrote an essay about men held back by ‘their fear of failing at indifferent things’ like public speaking, and attributed such fear to vanity, since it showed ‘they would be too much pleased in performing it’.28
During this first session of the Irish Parliament, the Quakers addressed the Queen, via Wharton, expressing thanks for their freedom to worship, proclaiming their loyalty, and begging for mercy ‘where we cannot actually Obey some Laws’, meaning their refusal to pay tithes or swear sacramental oaths.29 Various poetic dialogues about the Quakers not paying tithes were published in Dublin in 1709, prompted by Wharton's arrival. While Wharton knew the Irish Parliament would pass no overt proposal to free Dissenters from the Test Acts or give them greater freedom of education, he did what he could to alleviate the discrimination suffered by ‘his people’. Wharton supported a subscription fund to assist Dissenters fighting ‘unreasonable prosecutions’, for example.30
In subsequent speeches to the Irish Parliament, Wharton hinted he would like to see the Test Acts repealed, but the Irish oligarchy ignored his hints. Wharton's underlying theme was always the need for the Protestants of Ireland to unite against the Catholic threat: ‘It is not the Law now passed, nor any Law that the Wit of Man can frame, will Serve you against Popery, whilst you continue divided amongst yourselves.’31 Unfortunately, the Church of Ireland knew that in a crisis the Presbyterians and Quakers would always back them against the Catholics, so there was little incentive to establish a friendlier accord with these economic rivals. In fact, granting equal rights to Protestant Dissenters was the one ‘threat’ that could unite Irish politicians of both parties, such that Englishmen often mistook Irish Whig MPs for Tories when they voted against toleration of other Protestant denominations.
When it came to repressing Ireland's Catholic masses, Lord Lieutenant and Parliament were on adjacent, if not identical, pages. Wharton's invitation to Parliament to come up with additional Penal Laws was hungrily accepted, with new Bills proposed before the month was out and passed by the end of August 1709. These were the laws Edmund Burke would later describe as the ‘ferocious acts of Anne’, which were ‘as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment, and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man’.32 They completed the transfer of property from Catholics to Protestants; made the oath of abjuration (swearing Anne was rightful Queen and denying The Pretender's claims) a requirement for every Irishman over 16; offered rewards for reporting unregistered Catholic priests; and ensured children of declared converts received a Protestant education.
The size of the Irish Catholic population made strict enforcement of the Penal Laws impossible. The Catholic bishops had been banished since 1697, but many survived clandestinely. A 1709 letter from the Bishop of Elphin tells how he lived on the run, too poor to keep a horse or servant. As Catholic priests died, it was illegal to replace them, so that one Englishman wrote, ‘[I]t will appear plain enough that the Romish religion is on its last legs in Ireland.’33 In January 1704, one Penal Law had required every Catholic priest to register with a local magistrate, stay at one address and provide securities against absconding or other suspect behaviour. For several years, the rural magistrates had left the parish clergy fairly well alone, with only one priest prosecuted at the Cork Assizes in April 1709. However, the new law offering increased rewards triggered a spasm of priesthunting that summer after the Kit-Cats arrived, with several bishops captured and transported. A particularly zealous ‘priest-catcher’ named Oxenard received large rewards from Dublin Castle.
There were also increased rewards for ‘discoverers’—Protestants who, having found a Catholic breaking the Penal Code by purchasing land or taking a long lease, filed a ‘bill of discovery’ and won entitlement to the property in question. This aspect of the Code divided families. Any Catholic who joined the Established Church could deprive his Catholic relations of all but a life interest in their property by ‘discovering’ them. After the 1704 extension of the Penal Laws, fewer than ten landowners ‘conformed’, whereas after 1709, some 500 did so, fearing they would be deprived of their estates. In June 1709, under Wharton's gaze, two prominent Catholic nobles renounced their Catholicism in St Andrew's Church, Dublin. Nonetheless, other members of the Catholic elite continued to own land, and though excluded from public office, had the right to vote. The majority of their compatriots continued to treat them with respect.
The inability to own land pushed many young Catholics into trade, which was still permitted, even if they could not join a guild. This was encouraged by a 1707 Penal Law ordering the transportation of ‘such as pretend to be Irish gentlemen and will not betake themselves to any honest trade or livelihood, but wander about demanding victuals’.34 During the spring 1709 debates, it was proposed that Catholics should be debarred from trade as well, but Addison recorded with some relief that this clause was ‘after great debates entirely flung out’.35
It was also debated whether Catholics should be entirely deprived of the franchise. Addison's summary of this debate illustrates the complex dynamics of a country ruled by an insecure minority grappling with Lockean principles of government:
It was urged…that it was unreasonable so great a body of people should be bound by laws which were not made by their representatives…that religion should have no part in the considerations but as it endangered the State, and that therefore all who could comply with the oath of abjuration should be qualified as voters.36
It remains unclear to what extent Wharton and Addison encouraged elaboration and enforcement of the Penal Laws, or whether their mediation softened the impact of a system amounting almost to apartheid. The Lord Lieutenant's power and patronage were so great that some influence can be presumed. Swift claimed Wharton would override the Irish Privy Council whenever he and Addison had not managed them into the desired position, saying simply, ‘Come, my lords, I see how your opinions are, and therefore I will not take your votes.’37
Steele's biographical sketch complimented Wharton on his mercy and humanity in protecting the English Papists from being plundered and attacked after the Glorious Revolution, but the same piece also boasted Wharton did more to suppress the Irish Catholics in the first three months of his government than his Tory predecessors in the previous three years. As a result, ‘the Native Irish, the ragged Teagues and beggarly Papists did not crowd after his Coach and howl him along the Streets as they have done some who preferred an Affection of Popularity to the Destruction of the Popish Interest’.38
Swift, on the other hand, gossiped that Wharton liked to ‘whore with a Papist’39—a detail which, if true, suggests his anti-Catholic pre judices were more pragmatic than visceral.
Wharton and Addison, viewing the situation in its European, wartime context, feared the Catholics above all for
their treasonous French sympathies. Many Gaelic Irish were suspected of lending support to French pirates and privateers, and when Dr Lambert, Wharton's chaplain, sermonized against Catholic pilgrimages to holy wells, he did so believing they had a politically seditious purpose. Addison served on a number of committees involved in drafting Penal Laws while Parliament was adjourned during June and most of July 1709.
As Kit-Cats, Wharton and Addison felt patronage of the arts in Dublin—what they and later Whig historians saw as bringing civilization to the hinterlands—to be an important part of their colonial duties. Of course, this civilizing mission only concerned itself with Protestant Irish society, trusting in a trickle-down effect to civilize the ‘superstitious’ and ‘barbarous’ Catholics. They did not commence any private palatial building projects in Ireland (back in England, Vanbrugh was nearing completion of Castle Howard's exterior that summer of 1709), but one of Wharton's first decisions was to support an Irish parliamentary petition to the Queen for a £5,000 donation (almost £480,000 today) to found a library in Trinity College to promote ‘good literature and sound Revolution Principles’.40 This is the beautiful library that remains the pride of the College today. Addison became particular friends with one of the Fellows of Trinity, the great philosopher George Berkeley, who was just publishing his Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision (1709).
When it came to musical edification, the Kit-Cat governors imported people from London. Thomas Clayton, the composer of Addison's failed opera Rosamund, accompanied them to Dublin to direct ‘Court diversions’. He presented a season of operas between April and September 1709, including Arsinoe, Queen of Cyprus and Rosamund. The Aldermen and other chief citizens of Dublin were invited with their wives to these operas at the Castle, where Lady Wharton presided—‘Never was there a Court at Dublin so accessible, never a Lord Lieutenant so easy to be approached…The Day was for Council, the Night for Balls, Gaming Tables and other Diversions.’41 The balls were famously good, to the extent that Wharton's name was used in one poem as a verb—‘to Whartonize’, meaning to party.42
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