This Sceptred Isle

by Christopher Lee

  Scotland’s religious communities had an altogether different tint with four main Christian persuasions: the Roman Catholics; the Episcopalians; the Presbyterians; and a myriad of Non-conformist Churches. In 1188 Pope Clement III (1130–91) declared the Scottish Church no longer a subject of the Archbishop of York, but the Daughter of Rome thus separating the Scottish Church from the English Church. This uneasy alliance survived until the establishment, led by the Calvinist convert, John Knox (c.1512–72), of the reformed Church of Scotland in 1560 and the decision of the Scottish Reformation Parliament that the Church, the Kirk, was Protestant and to outlaw the Catholic Mass. Seven years on, 1567, the government recognized the Established Church of Scotland as the official Church. By 1689 the Scottish church had become Episcopalian and very much a minority persuasion beneath the Church of Scotland, Established but not in the English sense where the Church of England was controlled by Parliament. The Episcopal and Roman Catholic denominations may have been in the minority, but were not without political influence. A further significance of the Scottish Presbyterians was that influence extended to Northern Ireland communities and the Irish were present at the 1707 ceremonies for Scottish Union.

  Here then, was the religious wiring diagram of the British Isles suggesting that with the exception of Wales – Anglicans under the see of Canterbury and Non-conformists – religion had a political history and remained very much in the political consciousness of government. Therefore, it followed that structured religion, by the period of introspection and political fear in the 1790s, was ever likely to be at least a serious consideration in the political thinking of Pitt and others if for no other reason that all other religions (particularly the Catholics) were suspected of political ambitions encouraged by England’s historical enemies.

  For the English establishment, religious identity could not be separated from politics and security of the State. For example, there was a constitutional difference between Pitt as Prime Minister, who saw Catholic Emancipation as a practical political reform, and the King, George III, who was against Catholic Emancipation because he believed it compromised his coronation vows as head of the one Church, the Established Church of England. Moreover, the King saw no good reason for Catholics in Ireland to vote for Parliament. In 1801 Pitt offered his resignation on this point of principle and because he had promised Emancipation for the vote on the Union.

  In Ireland, established Catholic families sensed that Emancipation could mean more than votes, for example: legal right and status could threaten the pockets and holdings of the Protestant Ascendancy – something not imagined in the Pitt-led debate. Catholics were already reclaiming lands they said had been taken or plundered by Protestants in earlier times. It was an observation raised by Lord Minto (1738–1805), sometime Lord Lieutenant, in the Lords: ‘The Catholics of Ireland not only claim a participation in the civil franchises enjoyed by their Protestant countrymen but they foster claims on the Property of Protestants, the present possession of which they treat as mere usurpation; and these claims are of no trifling extent.’

  While right and tenure were difficult to distinguish (and litigants argued this into the twentieth century) the constant was clear: Protestants (ruling classes) had taken land from Catholics (then largely, non-ruling classes). Again, the religious (but not necessarily the devout) persuasions could rarely be separated from political argument.

  In ordinary times each of these distinctions, may have had only local significance. But there were no ordinary times in Ireland. Furthermore, the religious make-up of Ireland and the uncompromising position of the English Established Church could not be ignored as a base for anti-British exploitation. Prime Minister Pitt understood the extent that religion (not faith) was an influence on the politics of Ireland and therefore Britain. To Pitt, Ireland in constitutional Union rather than personal Union was the only way in which stability could be maintained. The Irish Rebellion in 1798 did nothing to weaken this conviction.

  Rebellion in Ireland was no novelty. The Gaelic Uprising in 1641 led to the massacre of thousands of English and Scottish settlers, who had been given prime estates three decades earlier in Ulster and reduced the Gaelic population to peasant status. It took Cromwell’s ruthless campaign in 1649 to successfully put it down. Nor should the relatively minor confrontations be overlooked. For example, when in 1778 the British repealed some of the harsher anti-Catholic protocols in the 1698 Popery Act, anti-Catholic sentiment in England increased – as senior Catholic laity had feared that it might. The animosity towards the Catholics was so inflamed that in 1780 Lord George Gordon (1751–93) and his followers in the Protestant Association descended on Westminster to demand the 1778 Act’s repeal. Two ‘No Popery’ marches, involving perhaps tens of thousands of people, produced rioting. Others outside the protest joined the marches and the rioting. Britain’s economic state was parlous and hardship everywhere.

  The 1798 rebels wanted at least a reformed Parliament and believed that in Tone’s republican-minded United Irishmen they had the vehicle to get it. Tone emerged in Irish politics at a time when Roman Catholicism and Protestant Dissenters showed they could be in sympathy. Tone claimed that he believed that if the Irish expected to right what they saw as wrongs imposed by the Protestant Ascendancy, then one essential action had to be the merging of religious lines – ecumenism for political ends. This was the original motive of the United Irishmen: to unite Catholics and Protestants to achieve political ambitions. Indeed, Tone’s The Argument on Behalf of the Catholics of Ireland was directed at an Ulster Presbyterian audience.

  The British suppressed the organization until it became an underground movement in 1794. From this suppression, the Society attracted more support than it might have had and so became an even greater threat as a secret oath-taking society with the notional support of the French – who sent an invasion fleet to southern Ireland (with Tone embarked). It might have landed if it had not suffered a storm.

  The British successfully infiltrated the Society as well as encouraging the Orange Order’s excessive treatment of collaborators. But the Rebellion was not yet defeated. In May 1798, the United Irishmen rose in Dublin – but without the result it had imagined.

  The response in the capital was at best disorganized and tepid. Some suggest that because the Dublin rallying call was not enthusiastically followed, then the provincial Societies were left to carry the main rebellion standard. This is only partly so. The seat of the uprising was in Wicklow, south of Dublin, and Wexford; it was almost exclusively Protestant led. The Catholics of Munster and Connaught, who might have been expected to join forces, never did on any meaningful scale. This was not a Roman Catholic uprising – majority against minority rule. In fact, the zealous and successful militia that helped put down the rebellion was three-quarters Roman Catholic. The Rebellion failed its architects but it was an unquestionable lesson for Pitt: Union had to come.

  With the Rebellion came the anticipated fury of those who saw it as an inevitable consequence of religious inclination caught in political rebellion. For example, Dr Patrick Duigenan (1735–1816), a Catholic-born lawyer-politician who supported Pitt’s notion for Union but opposed Catholic Emancipation, was uncompromising in his belief that the Catholic majority (his wife was a practising Catholic) could not be tolerated.

  The great cause of disorder is, that a large proportion of the inhabitants are Roman Catholics, the most ignorant, and consequently, the most bigoted in Europe; their hostility to a Protestant British government, from the very tenets of their religion is uncurable [sic]. This enmity to all Protestant governments is innoxious [sic] in other European Protestant states, because such states are all despotic governments, in which the body of the people have but very little power or influence, and in which the number of Romanists bear but a small proportion to the bulk of the people; but in a popular Protestant state, Romanists become dangerous subjects in proportion to their numbers, rank, and property; their religion obliging them, as a point of faith, to d
eny the supremacy of the state, (that is the power of the state to bind its subjects by its own laws) and compelling them to acknowledge and submit to the supremacy of a foreign tribunal. The Romanists in Ireland, on the very best calculation, do not, in number, amount to two-thirds of the people; as to property, they do not possess the fiftieth part.

  Nor was this a matter of simply how to deal with Catholics. The Anglican wealthy and noble in Ireland, were in a social and religious minority; but they held the political ground and so were nervous that Union would take away their power. They would argue the political case against Union and leave the militia to put down the Rebellion.

  Where Pitt and the Protestant Ascendancy merged was in their common concern for a gathering threat from peasant Catholics and petty bourgeois Non-conformists that supposed ‘the fight of Protestant against Catholic, quiescent for a century, seemed likely to recommence’. No one forecast the twentieth century.

  But did this mean that religion did indeed have a major influence over Anglo–Irish politics at the end of the eighteenth century? Pitt seems to have believed this to be a given in his search for a settlement with Dublin. His assertion that Catholic Emancipation should go hand in hand with Union was politically motivated. Equally, it was not to enhance Catholic political power and only agitators sought that anyway. There is no evidence to suggest that apolitical Catholics – some 70 per cent of the Irish population – had any interest in Union. Laws made at Westminster or Dublin were laws wherever they were drafted and would not significantly change their circumstances and few would come out to speak in their favour. For example, in spite of fighting for the rebellious cause, an influential part of the non-republican Presbyterian congregation believed most Catholics who fought in the 1798 Rebellion were fierce and bloodthirsty and, not much more.

  All the Protestants of Ireland, that is, almost the whole property of the kingdom, would find it in their interest to join the King’s standard. The bloody remorseless cruelty, and insatiable thirst for plunder, of the rest of their countrymen [Roman Catholics] would soon convince them [the Protestants] of using their arms against them.

  The Union cause, perhaps because of the Rebellion, was in the ascendant. Yet because of the status quo, as represented by some of the Protestant Ascendancy, it was not to be given clear passage. Moreover, the opposing opinion in Dublin was well represented in London. Some, like Richard Brinsley Sheridan, then a Whig Member of Parliament, could never believe Union to be a proper way forward. Sheridan tried to amend the Committee Stage of the Bill in 1799 by suggesting that the cure for Anglo–Irish instability was Emancipation of all the faiths (including the Established Church).

  That it be an instruction to the Committee to consider how far it would be consistent with justice and policy, and conducive to the general interests, and especially to the consolidation of the strength of the British Empire, were civil incapacities, on account of religious distinctions, to be done away throughout His Majesty’s dominions.

  Sheridan had no possibility of getting Parliamentary support for his amendment – it amounted to an unconstitutional instruction to the Committee and was nothing more than a delaying tactic. Union would take more than a year to debate, but it would go through in spite of the Anglican anxieties.

  What could the Protestant Ascendancy hope for in Union? Protestant nationalism had long been based on the autonomy of the Irish Parliament and so had acted as a barrier to Unionism. But the Catholic Relief Acts of 1791–3 had had a ‘formative impact on Irish Protestant opinion’. Moreover, attitudes among British and Irish political elites began to move in the same direction. By having legislative control entirely in the hands of the London-based interest, including the Established Church, then the Protestant Ascendancy might less fear the growing influences of the Catholic and Dissenting churches. In an exchange between Lord Cornwallis (1738–1805), the Lord Lieutenant in 1798, and Alexander Ross (1742–1827) saw Union and Catholic Emancipation as travelling one and the same political route. Cornwallis was ‘fully convinced that until the Catholics are admitted into general participation of rights (which when incorporated with the British government they cannot abuse) there will be no peace or safety in Ireland’.

  Here surely was the answer to the question of the influence of religion on political thinking. While religion was not faith, there was no doubt that at least one of its persuasions did have a direct influence – ironically, far more than the majority of Irish Catholics understood, or maybe cared.

  The Catholic position did not divide the debate on religious lines. The Catholic laity and clergy in Ireland, including Thomas Troy (1739–1823), the Archbishop of Dublin, had considerable political powers on two fronts: they had a lobby in the Irish Parliament and they had a voice from the pulpits. That partly suited the Protestant government even though it never trusted the Church and so, when Archbishop Troy condemned the Rebellion (because he believed it would lead to atrocities on both sides), the government in Dublin suspected his motives. When Troy was called to Dublin Castle to explain himself, his Catholic followers were suspicious that he might be in collusion with the government – such were the suspicions of all parties even though it was obvious that the Irish Catholic gentry had no less desire for a quiet society than the English.

  There was agreement on one important point: Pitt would lend his authority to a Catholic Emancipation Bill only if it went through a Union Parliament. The Catholic leadership in Ireland believed they held a political sway and so agreed to this, with the exception of a group of lawyers led by Daniel O’Connell (1775–1847). O’Connell’s first speech against Unionism and, more significantly, for Emancipation was made in 1800. But his time was not then. O’Connell’s significance came during the following quarter of a century when his campaigning was influential in the 1829 Catholic Emancipation Act.

  In January 1799, Parliament prepared for a Union with Ireland Bill uncertain what support it would have in Dublin. Certainly in the Irish capital, it was a coffee house subject – with pen as well as craic: ‘Pamphlet writing is such a rage at present that all classes are scribbling upon the Union. It is a common question in the streets; are you writing a pamphlet against the Union.’47 Pamphleteers (often anonymous) were indeed writing – for both sides of the argument: ‘In every other country where religious distinction has been made the test of office, the majority has constituted the establishment. In Ireland, the case is reverted in favour of the minority.’

  Few cared for this argument. Colonial Britain was used to ruling over the majority. Furthermore, British colonial and imperial history suggests that Catholics were excluded not entirely for religious reasoning but more simply: they were the natives beyond the Pale.

  The question of whether religion had a political influence, even a political identity, was being answered in every political and even rebellious action. From the grandeur of the Protestant Ascendancy to the miserable poverty of the majority of Catholics, one common point stood out: no political or social interest in Ireland was without a religious label. Even moderate opinion was religiously identifiable.

  When the Union Bill arrived in the Dublin Parliament, in 1799, it fell by just 107 votes to 105. Sheet writers, pamphleteers and editors had little time for divides, statistics and who voted what. Instead they bunched all non-Established Church, including the Catholics, together.

  The uncommon zeal and activity with which the Dissenters have endeavoured to decimate their political principle, and to overturn the established Constitution in Church and State, are notorious . . . they have attempted to promote their designs by means of religion and by sending forth missionaries of their doctrines under the name of Dissenting Ministers.48

  The Express and Evening Chronicle had few doubts that the missionaries were political agents and that Pitt’s anticipated Catholic Emancipation, after Union, could be nothing but divisive: ‘It is certain that Catholic Emancipation can never be attained completely while a Protestant is suffered to exist in Ireland.’

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p; Pitt, acknowledged the insecurities of both Catholics and Protestants when faced with the prospect of Union when he spoke in Parliament in January 1799:

  It must ever be a question of the greatest difficulty to say what shall be the rights of the Catholics, or what securities are necessary for the Protestants . . . the Protestant feels that the claims of the Catholic for power and privilege (for this now is all) threatens his ascendancy and the Catholic considers his exclusion as a grievance.

  Equally, Pitt was suspicious of the motives of those who used this religious argument to reach a political conclusion:

  When questions of this nature have been agitated in this House by those who pretended a regard for the privileges of the Catholics, it was ever my opinion that the questions were direct attacks on the independence of the Irish Parliament.

  His disappointment was clear that such big questions as Union ‘are more likely to be decided upon by passion than by judgement’ and that religion, national pride and instinct ‘influences political decisions’. There seemed little doubt that radical politics then originated in religious heterodoxy.

  The Act of Union between Ireland and Great Britain was passed on 2 July 1800 in Britain and 1 August in Dublin. The two kingdoms were united on 1 January 1801 as the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Of the eight Articles and protocols in the 1800 Act, two were direct references to the position of the Established Church.

  Article 4 allowed: ‘the lords spiritual and temporal and the commons, to serve in the Parliament of the United Kingdom on the part of Ireland‘. There were to be four Protestant Irish bishops in the Parliament but, until amended, not with the same authority as English bishops: ‘all lords spiritual of Ireland shall have rank next after the lords spiritual of the same rank of Great Britain’.