A History of Ireland in 250 Episodes – Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About Irish History: Fascinating Snippets of Irish History from the Ice Age to the Peace Process

by Jonathan Bardon

  Perhaps never before in Ireland had an election campaign been organised with such meticulous attention to detail. Committees were formed to transport, feed and house the voters. Priests and laymen patrolled with shillelaghs to make sure that all supporters remained sober. The Beresfords lavished silver shillings on voters to keep them loyal. O’Connell joined Villiers Stuart in Co. Waterford, and both men were drawn three miles by voters harnessed to their coach. They were aware that they were making history.

  Episode 170

  THE ‘INVASION’ OF ULSTER

  During the general election of 1826 Henry Villiers Stuart, who had agreed to stand as a candidate in favour of Catholic Emancipation in the county of Waterford, needed large numbers of voters to defy their landlords, particularly the Beresfords, and risk eviction. Daniel O’Connell, the leader of the Catholic Association, who was there to rally support, described his reception in the constituency and the prevailing attitude among the electorate:

  We breakfasted at Kilmacthomas, a town belonging to the Beresfords, but the people belong to us. They came out to meet us with green boughs and such shouting you can have no idea of. I harangued them from a window of the inn, and we had a good deal of laughing at the bloody Beresfords. Judge what the popular feeling must be when in this, a Beresford town, every man their tenant, we had such a reception.

  In those days there was no secret voting, and as polling got under way it was clear that Villiers Stuart was going to win. The head of the Beresford clan, the Marquis of Waterford, turned to his faithful huntsman and said: ‘Et tu, Brute?’ Not recognising this quotation from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, the old man nevertheless replied, his voice broken with emotion: ‘Long life to yer honour, I’d go to the world’s end with yer honour, but sure, please your lordship, I cannot go agin my country and religion.’

  Villiers Stuart was elected along with another pro-Emancipation candidate, and his opponent, Lord George Beresford, had the humiliation of being relegated to third place. Elsewhere tenant farmers defied their landlords successfully to return pro-Emancipation candidates in the counties of Monaghan, Louth and Westmeath. The tenant farmers had risked all in defying their landlords—unthinkable in other parts of the United Kingdom. Many, indeed, suffered eviction, and to help them make a new start, great sums had to be drawn from the Catholic Rent—money collected in pennies and farthings from supporters.

  Still Westminster would not give in. King George IV instructed his Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool, to stand firm against Emancipation, as his father, George III, had done: ‘The sentiments of the king upon Catholic Emancipation are those of his revered and excellent father; from those sentiments the king can and never will deviate.’ But Lord Liverpool had a seizure in his drawing-room in April 1827. He was replaced as Prime Minister by George Canning, who had a Co. Londonderry background and was known to be in favour of Emancipation. Canning, however, dropped dead five months later, whereupon Lord Goderich became Prime Minister. But the arguments in his cabinet room were so bitter that he dissolved in floods of tears, and in January 1828 he resigned. There was nothing for it, the king concluded, but to ask the Duke of Wellington to form a government.

  Passions now ran high in Ireland. In the autumn of 1828 Jack Lawless, one of O’Connell’s most energetic lieutenants, announced what he called ‘the invasion of Ulster’. His plan was to advance from town to town in the province, rallying support for Emancipation. On 17 September Lawless arrived in Carrickmacross, Co. Monaghan, and declared that he would go on to enter Ballybay, then a Presbyterian town, with 50,000 followers. Some 8,000 Orangemen rallied in the town, as the Northern Whig reported:

  They were generally armed with muskets; but failing these, swords, bayonets, pitch-forks, scythes, &c. &c. were in requisition. A set of more determined men, perhaps, never appeared in any cause. It is well known that many of them made their wills, and settled their affairs before they left their houses in the morning.

  General Thornton, in command of a body of foot-soldiers, all the county police and a troop of lancers, galloped towards Carrickmacross and persuaded Lawless to take a circuitous route. Nevertheless, supporters from the two sides clashed on the Rockcorry road:

  A conflict ensued immediately ... the termination was awfully fatal. One Catholic was run through the body with a sword or bayonet, and died on the spot. Another had his leg shattered by a musket ball, and is lying with little hopes of recovery.

  The Northern Whig, a Belfast newspaper which supported Emancipation, concluded:

  Mr Lawless’s procedure was impolitic in the highest degree.... As to his reconciling the Catholics and Orangemen—the idea is Quixotic.

  Lawless abandoned his plan to march to Armagh. Protestants celebrated at great demonstrations, 40,000 gathering at Tandragee alone. Some Orangemen marched to the Moy, where all but two families were Catholic. Their approach, the Newry Telegraph reported,

  was announced by drums, fifes, bugles, and by playing party tunes, such as ‘Holy Water’, ‘Croppies lie down’, and ‘Kick the Pope before Us’ ... till two in the morning, when they marched back, playing the same tunes, huzzaing, and firing shots.

  Support for Emancipation was hard to find among ordinary Protestants in Ulster, but O’Connell’s movement was only a few months away from complete victory.

  Episode 171

  THE CLARE ELECTION

  In response to entreaties from King George IV, the Duke of Wellington agreed to become Prime Minister in January 1828. He was expected to hold the line against Catholic Emancipation, that is, the repeal of the penal law which prevented Catholics sitting in parliament. Wellington selected an Irishman, William Vesey Fitzgerald, MP for Co. Clare, to be President of the Board of Trade. In those days an MP appointed to the cabinet had to stand for re-election in his constituency.

  Fitzgerald expected no opposition. After all, he himself supported Catholic Emancipation. He was wrong. Daniel O’Connell, the charismatic leader of the Catholic Association, agreed to stand against Fitzgerald. But how could a Catholic stand? A careful scrutiny of the law showed that there was nothing to stop a Catholic being elected—it was just that the oath prescribed for MPs was an impossible one for any Catholic to take. This O’Connell made clear in his election address:

  You will be told I am not qualified to be elected: the assertion, my friends, is untrue.… It is true that, as a Catholic, I cannot, and of course never will, take the oaths prescribed to members of parliament.…

  The oath at present required by law is, ‘That the sacrifice of the mass, and the invocation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and other saints, as now practised in the Church of Rome, are impious and idolatrous’. Of course I will never stain my soul with such an oath: I leave that to my honourable opponent, Mr Vesey Fitzgerald. He has often taken that horrible oath.... I would rather be torn limb from limb than take it.

  O’Connell’s journey from the capital to Ennis, the county town, was a triumphal procession. At the chapel of Corofin on the Sunday before the poll the aged Father John Murphy threw off his vestments after Mass and called upon his people in Irish to sacrifice themselves for O’Connell, their faith and their fatherland. Richard Lalor Sheil described the scene:

  It was a most extraordinary and powerful display of the externals of eloquence.... His intonations were soft, pathetic, denunciatory, and conjuring.... Shouts of laughter attended his description of a miserable Catholic who should prove recreant to the great cause, by making a sacrifice of his country to his landlord.

  The close of his speech was peculiarly effective. He became inflamed by the power of his emotions, and while he raised himself to the loftiest attitude to which he could ascend, he laid one hand on the altar ... and as his eyes blazed and seemed to start from his forehead, thick drops fell down his face, and his voice rolled through lips livid with passion and covered with foam.... The multitude burst into shouts of acclamation, and would have been ready to mount a battery roaring with cannon at his command.

  Two days
later Father Murphy led the freeholders of his parish into Ennis and polled them to a man in favour of Daniel O’Connell. Their landlord, Sir Edward O’Brien, stood aghast. After all, these voters, those who had holdings worth forty shillings or more, risked eviction from their farms by going against him. As he saw he was going down to defeat, Vesey Fitzgerald wept openly. Meanwhile O’Connell joked with the crowd in a rich Munster accent:

  Arrah, bhoys, where’s Vasy Vijarld at all, at all ... sind the bell about for him. Here’s the cry for yez:—

  Stholen or sthrayed,

  Losht or mishlaid,

  The President of the Boord of Thrade!

  When a priest announced that a forty-shilling freeholder who had voted against O’Connell had just dropped dead, the crowded square of Ennis became totally silent, and the entire body knelt down in prayer.

  Huge numbers packed the town. The three thousand freeholders qualified to vote were accompanied by perhaps ten times that number, this huge concourse being made up of wives, children, relations, supporters and friends. Around 150 priests were in the town organising and arranging feeding and accommodation.

  When the results were announced, O’Connell was declared the winner, having polled 2,057 votes to 982 for Vesy Fitzgerald, with 300 additional votes for him ruled out because of a printer’s error on the ballot paper. O’Connell beseeched the landlords of the county not to avenge themselves on the wretched forty-shilling freeholders, and he concluded:

  Wellington and Peel, if you be true to old England, for I love and cherish her ... all shall be forgotten, pardoned and forgiven upon giving us Emancipation, unconditional, unqualified, free, and unshackled.

  Robert Peel, the Home Secretary, after reading a letter from Vesey Fitzgerald reporting the election result, observed:

  We were watching the movements of tens of thousands of disciplined fanatics, abstaining from every excess and indulgence, and concentrating every passion and feeling on one single object.... Is it consistent with common prudence and common sense to repeat such scenes and to incur such risks of contagion?

  He was rapidly coming to the conclusion that Catholic Emancipation would have to be conceded.

  Episode 172

  ‘SCUM CONDENSED OF IRISH BOG!’

  Following his famous victory in the Clare election in July 1828, Daniel O’Connell made a triumphal return to Dublin. Here ballad-singers had a new version of an old favourite:

  We have good news today, says the Shan Van Vocht,

  And the parsons feel dismayed, says the Shan Van Vocht.

  Now the Bible saints won’t pray, but curse both night and day

  Since O’Connell gained the day, says the Shan Van Vocht.

  What was to be done? The Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington, was aghast when his old comrade in arms, the Marquis of Anglesey, now the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, announced his conversion to Catholic Emancipation: ‘Lord Anglesey is gone mad. He is bit by a mad papist.’

  Robert Peel, the Home Secretary, had long been O’Connell’s bitter adversary. Denouncing him as ‘Orange Peel’, O’Connell had notoriously likened Peel’s smile to the shine of a silver plate on a coffin. Now Peel became convinced that, for the sake of peace in Ireland, Catholics should be allowed to take seats in parliament. He also persuaded Wellington to change his mind. That meant wigs on the green: when Wellington introduced his Emancipation Bill in February 1829, the Earl of Winchelsea accused him of seeking to introduce popery into every government department. The Prime Minister reached for his duelling pistols. The Iron Duke and the earl met at dawn on Battersea Fields. Fortunately both were unscathed, and, honour satisfied, they shook hands.

  The Emancipation Bill became law in April 1829—but there was a sting in the tail. The property qualification for voting in county elections in Ireland was raised from forty shillings to £10. O’Connell never quite lived down the accusation that he did not fight hard enough to prevent the disenfranchisement of the forty-shilling freeholders, the men who had risked the wrath of their landlords to get him elected in Clare.

  And so for the first time since the Reformation a Catholic took his seat in the House of Commons. The year 1830 saw the return of the Whigs to power after decades of opposition. The burning issue now was reform of parliament. O’Connell’s support was crucial to get the Reform Bill through, and during the session of 1831 he spoke in the House no fewer than 283 times in favour of the measure.

  O’Connell’s next great objective was repeal of the Union, which meant, in effect, the restoration of the Irish parliament, closed down in 1800. But it was hard enough to get sufficient support for that proposal from Irish MPs, let alone from those representing the rest of the United Kingdom. Though he quarrelled with the Whigs endlessly, O’Connell realised that, as reformers, they were more likely than the Tories to produce beneficial measures for Ireland. His view was that he would test the Union: if governments were prepared to give justice to Ireland, then he could set his demand for repeal to one side. ‘The people of Ireland’, he declared, ‘are ready to become a portion of the Empire, provided they be made so in reality and not in name alone; they are ready to become a kind of West Britons if made so in benefits and in justice; but if not, we are Irishmen again.’

  Reform certainly was needed. Irish farmers—Catholics and Presbyterians, as well as Anglicans—were still forced by law to pay the tithe, a compulsory payment for the upkeep of the Established Church. Now Irish farmers violently resisted tithe collection. In 1832 this ‘Tithe War’ resulted in 242 homicides, 300 attempted murders, thousands of assaults on persons and property, and widespread intimidation of juries.

  The government’s response in 1833 was to put through a stringent coercion act, which included the suspension of trial by jury. O’Connell hated this measure and denounced ‘the base, bloody and brutal Whigs’. Nevertheless, he did not want the Tories in power, especially with Peel as Prime Minister. In turn the Whigs realised that they needed O’Connell, and the forty MPs he had with him, to stay in power. In 1835 at Lichfield House in London the new Whig leader, Lord Melbourne, and O’Connell made a gentleman’s agreement to back each other in parliament. When news of what became known as the ‘Lichfield House Compact’ came out, the Times newspaper was outraged and published a scathing piece of verse which began:

  Scum condensed of Irish bog!

  Ruffian—coward—demagogue!

  Boundless liar—base detractor!

  Nurse of murders—treason’s factor!

  Of pope and priest the crouching slave,

  While thy lips of freedom rave;

  Of England’s fame the vip’rous hater,

  Yet wanting courage for a traitor.

  Ireland’s peasants feed thy purse,

  Still thou art her bane and curse ...

  In fact O’Connell’s alliance with the Whigs was to last for six years. It resulted in a radical change in the way Ireland was governed.

  Episode 173

  A SOCIAL LABORATORY

  When the new Union Flag was unfurled for the first time on 1 January 1801, it was assumed that, now Ireland was part of the United Kingdom, the island would be ruled in just the same way as England, Scotland and Wales. But was this possible? The British ruling classes tended to regard Ireland as a place apart, inhabited by turbulent and backward people, constantly threatening the violent overthrow of law and order.

  The first sign that Ireland would be treated differently was the retention of a separate administration in Dublin Castle. There would still be a Lord Lieutenant residing in the Viceregal Lodge in Phoenix Park. And he still had the support of a Chief Secretary, other ministers, and a separate civil service. This was not the case in Wales or Scotland.

  A startling fact is that during the first fifty years of the nineteenth century ordinary law was in force in Ireland for only five years. During the other forty-five years the government adopted special powers—then generally known as ‘coercion’—to suspend trial by jury, to hold people without trial
, and to send in armed forces to restore order. The Protestant Ascendancy, for long the ruling class of Ireland, could be forgiven for thinking, with much satisfaction, that nothing much had changed.

  Yet the Act of Union had been introduced because the British government had lost confidence in the ability of the Protestant Ascendancy to govern Ireland. In time successive governments, both Whig and Tory and, later, Liberal and Conservative, steadily undermined the power base of the Ascendancy. With differing degrees of enthusiasm, Westminster governments strove to be neutral and to detach themselves from dependence on Ireland’s Protestant elite.

  To achieve this, governments had to take on responsibilities they would not think of accepting on the other side of the Irish Sea. Such a proactive approach could be very much to the benefit of the Irish people. Indeed, some historians argue that British governments were using Ireland as a ‘social laboratory’ for trying out national education, publicly funded hospitals, independent policing, unemployment relief schemes, and the like, long before these improvements were introduced into the rest of the United Kingdom.

  The man who really set this process rolling was Robert Peel. Peel arrived in Dublin as Chief Secretary at the age of twenty-four in September 1812. A virulent opponent of Catholic Emancipation, he soon attracted the vituperative denunciation of Daniel O’Connell, who depicted him as ‘a raw youth squeezed out of the workings of I know not what factory in England before he had got rid of the foppery of perfumed handkerchiefs and thin shoes’. Yet O’Connell’s contemptuous soubriquet ‘Orange Peel’ was unjustified, for Peel was determined to show no favour to sectional interests in the government of Ireland. He sent out an order that members of the Yeomanry were not to appear at Orange parades in their uniforms. Seeing that the Yeomanry—for the most part Protestant gentlemen and farmers—rarely acted with impartiality when called in to restore order, Peel decided to create a new force which would command respect from all sides of the community. In 1813 he proposed that the viceroy should appoint a specialist force of police to be sent into the most disturbed districts. Though the Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool, objected that this was ‘not English’, Peel obtained parliament’s permission. The Peace Preservation Force, which later became the Irish Constabulary, came into being in 1814—the first police force in any part of the United Kingdom. It soon proved its worth, often coping where soldiers were unable to do so. Since the new police force was independent of local landlord control, its very existence began a significant erosion of the power of the Ascendancy. Peel was determined that there should be no ‘jobs for the boys’, stating emphatically that ‘We ought to be crucified if we ... select our constables from the servants of our parliamentary friends.’