A History of Ireland in 100 Objects

by Fintan O'Toole

  The figure of the swaggering officer returned from continental wars epitomised a strain of Catholic male pride. In her great ‘Lament for Art O’Leary’, Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill recalls her husband, a captain in the Austrian army, with his ‘silver-hilted’ sword, fine horse and elegant clothes: the very image of the uppity Catholic. In truth, the Wild Geese were more of a safety valve than a threat to the established order. The Irish Brigade was disbanded in 1783 as part of the peace between France and Britain after the American war. Ironically, in 1792, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, the remnants of the Dillon regiment joined the British army.

  70. Rococo silver candlestick, c.1745

  With its wild floral elaborations and flamboyant abandonment of symmetry or straight lines, this candlestick is characteristic of the rococo style that became the rage in Paris in the 1720s. That it was made in Dublin tells us something both about the extravagant taste of the Irish ruling class and about the city itself.

  Members of the ascendancy could spend enormous sums on silver plate. A dinner service commissioned by the earl of Kildare in 1745, the year when our candlestick was probably made, cost £4,044 at a time when £44 would have been a comfortable annual middle-class income. The ‘family silver’ was a crucial token of status, and the over-the-top rococo style was perfect for the flaunting of wealth. Much of the silver made in Dublin was a local version of a London take on a Parisian original—Huguenot craftsmen fleeing the persecution of Protestants in France forming one of the networks through which styles were diffused. Dublin silverware, made by masters such as John Hamilton and Robert Calderwood, was not, however, merely provincial: it attained very high levels of artistry and came to be prized for itself.

  That Dublin could produce such objects is a token of its remarkable development. At the end of the Cromwellian wars, the city was small and miserable: Cromwell described its castle as ‘the worst in Christendom’, and its two cathedrals were virtually falling down. Its population was just 9,000. Yet, over the following century, Dublin came to be regarded as the second city of the British Empire.

  The Protestant ruling class felt secure enough to invest in the radical redevelopment of its capital city. Beginning with Parliament House, on College Green, in 1728, a series of grand buildings was erected, including the Royal Exchange and James Gandon’s Custom House and Four Courts. The mediaeval streetscape was transformed with the creation of fine squares and wide thoroughfares. Intellectual life blossomed, with figures such as Jonathan Swift, George Berkeley, Richard Steele, the Sheridan family and Mary Delany giving the city an international cultural status. The first performance of George Frideric Handel’s ‘Messiah’ at Fishamble Street Theatre in 1742 was a mark of Dublin’s new stature.

  For the rich, Lord Cloncurry’s claim that Dublin was ‘one of the most agreeable places of residence in Europe’ had substance. The contrast with the squalor of the city’s poor was, however, stark. With little or no sanitation, gross overcrowding, intermittent famine and epidemic disease, low wages and high unemployment, it is unsurprising that Dublin was infamous for its beggars.

  Child poverty and child mortality reached appalling levels: 25,000 children were taken in by Dublin Foundling Hospital between 1784 and 1796; more than 17,000 subsequently died. Dublin, for all, its elegance, mirrored the profound divisions between the ruling elite and the impoverished majority that were a feature of the ancien regime world.

  71. Engraving of linen-makers, 1782

  This engraving, one of a set of twelve by Irish artist William Hincks, is a rare artefact: it acknowledges the work of women. It is, as the title explains, a view ‘taken on the spot in the County of Downe, Representing Spinning, Reeling with the Clock reel, and Boiling the Yarn’. The work was hard, but the relative prosperity of the cottage depicted in the engraving hints at the enormous impact the linen trade had on Irish standards of living in the eighteenth century. Irish people had been growing flax and making linen since the Bronze Age. With Ireland largely pacified in the early-eighteenth century, the authorities promoted the development of linen as the primary Irish industry. The wool industry was discouraged to avoid competition with England, and linen was an unthreatening substitute.

  The Linen Board was formed with public money in Dublin in 1711 to regulate the growing industry. In the second half of the century production expanded dramatically, and by 1800 linen exports had risen to between 35 million and 40 million yards. Early linen production was not industrialised. It centred on farm-family units, with the whole household involved in planting and harvesting the flax, the women and girls spinning it into yarn and the men weaving the yarn into cloth.

  Linen had a particularly dramatic effect on the economy of Ulster, transforming a hitherto poor province into the most prosperous in Ireland. Initially, the trade was centred on the Linen Hall, which opened on Dublin’s north side in 1728; the Ulster origins of much of the cloth was acknowledged in the surrounding street names: Coleraine, Lurgan, Lisburn. Gradually, however, Ulster traders took control of the export business and Belfast Linen Hall opened in 1783. In the ‘linen triangle’ between Lisburn, Dungannon and Armagh in particular linen drapers formed a new entrepreneurial nexus, typically Presbyterian and often open to radical ideas, especially during and after the American Revolution.

  Linen transformed Ulster in other ways too. Hunger for land to grow flax led to the destruction of the last of the great Ulster forests that had terrified Tudor armies: the last wolf in the Sperrin Mountains was killed in the 1760s. The population rose rapidly: between 1753 and 1791 the number of households paying hearth tax in Ulster doubled. Market and estate towns such as Banbridge, Downpatrick and Newtownards were redeveloped. This rapid change produced new social tensions, including militant protests in 1771–2 by groups called the Hearts of Oak and Hearts of Steel, enraged by bad harvests, taxes and rent rises. Emigration to Colonial America peaked in the 1770s; in the 1780s sectarian tensions rose, especially in Co. Armagh, now the most populous county in Ireland, where the Protestant Peep O’Day Boys and the Catholic Defenders engaged in low-level warfare. These tensions were fuelled, ironically, by the very success of the linen trade, as Catholic and Protestant weavers competed for business.

  72. Cotton panel showing Volunteer review, 1783

  In November 1783 Edward Clarke, proprietor of the Irish Furniture, Cotton and Linen Warehouse on Werburgh Street in Dublin, advertised for sale:

  a Volunteer furniture, with an exact representation of the Last Provincial Review in Phoenix Park, with a striking likeness of Lord Charlemont as reviewing General.

  That images of the Volunteers, like this one, produced by Thomas Harpur in Leixlip, were desirable consumer goods for the well-to-do is vivid evidence of the political ferment of the decade.Volunteering took off in 1778, as a response to the American War of Independence. France joined the war on the side of the colonists, and there were fears it might attempt to invade Ireland. Regiments of regular troops were sent to fight in America, leaving the administration with little choice but to accommodate the formation of Volunteer corps. As Lord Charlemont, the commander-in-chief depicted on the panel, put it: ‘They feared and consequently hated the Volunteers, yet to them alone they looked for…safety’. By late 1779, 40,000 men were under arms, half of them in Ulster.

  Charlemont was also the leader of the so-called Patriot Connexion in the Irish House of Lords, and an ally of opposition leaders Henry Flood and Henry Grattan. This faction was not innately revolutionary, taking Ireland’s connection to Britain for granted. Nevertheless, it wanted more local control over Irish affairs, and the removal of Westminster’s restrictions on Irish trade. It especially opposed two pieces of legislation. Poynings’ Law (1494) allowed the privy council in London to veto or alter legislation passed by the (entirely Protestant) Irish parliament. The Declaratory Act (1720) gave Westminster the right (rarely used) to legislate for Irish affairs.

  In 1779, after demonstrations by the armed Volunteers outside the parl
iament on College Green, London lifted restrictions on the export of wool, glass and other goods from Ireland. Success bred larger demands: in February 1782, the Volunteer convention in Dungannon approved resolutions demanding legislative and judicial independence for Ireland and further relaxation of the Penal Laws. In May the dismantling of the Penal Laws was intensified, and in June the Declaratory Act was repealed and Poynings’ Law amended. The Volunteers, and their liberal Protestant supporters, then faced the hardest question of all: what about middle-class Protestants and the Catholic majority? Belfast and Dublin radicals pushed for an extensive widening of the franchise, for Catholics as well as Protestants; conservatives in parliament and the Volunteers took fright. Reform was rejected and the Volunteers began to decline.

  The French Revolution of 1789 upped the stakes. The Belfast Volunteers hailed it as ‘the Hope of this World’. Establishment liberals drew back from the cause of ‘liberty’. The gulf between radicalism and reaction became even wider, and for both sides the stakes seemed even higher

  73. Pike, 1798

  No Irish event of such consequence is more powerfully symbolised by a single object than the 1798 insurrection and the pike. Pikes were a standard weapon of mediaeval and early modern armies, but by the eighteenth century they were much more strongly associated with revolutionary violence. So symbolic of popular insurrection has the weapon become that it is generally forgotten that crown forces in Ireland in 1798 also used pikes.

  The first seizure of hidden pikes was in Dublin in 1793. Four years later the directory of the Society of United Irishmen ordered all members who could not afford firearms to equip themselves with pikes. More than 70,000 were found in government searches in Leinster and Ulster in 1797 alone. When fighting finally began, charges by massed ranks of pike-wielding men were the main rebel tactic. Jonah Barrington, an independent observer, noted ‘the extreme expertise with which the Irish handled the pike’. Even this expertise was seldom sufficient for very long against trained troops.

  The United Irishmen, founded in Belfast in October 1791, aimed, as one of its leaders, Theobald Wolfe Tone, put it, to ‘comprehensively embrace Irishmen of all denominations’ in the cause of democratic reform and ‘national government’. Its initial methods were constitutional, but after Britain declared war on revolutionary France in 1793, demands for peaceful reform were increasingly met with frustration and repression, culminating in the banning of the United Irishmen. Campaigns for reform turned to dreams of revolution. Tone and other leaders went to Paris to lobby the revolutionary government for support. A French invasion fleet of 43 ships set sail for Bantry Bay in December 1796 but was driven back by gales.

  Thereafter, the government launched a ferocious campaign of repression, aimed at disarming the would-be rebels. Through house-burnings, floggings, executions and torture, it smashed the United Irish organisation in Ulster, which had deep support among Presbyterians. While Tone waited for another French invasion, the United Irish at home planned to go ahead with a rebellion, which took hold mostly in Wexford and Wicklow. By the end of May 1798 the rebels had taken Wexford town and Enniscorthy. They were driven back from New Ross on 4 June, however, and crushed at Vinegar Hill above Enniscorthy on 21 June. A belated rising in Ulster, beginning in Antrim on 7 June and partly led by young Belfast cotton-maker Henry Joy McCracken, had also been defeated. By the time a small French force under General Jean-Joseph Humbert arrived at Killala Bay, in Mayo, on 22 August, it was no more than a bloody coda to one of the bloodiest episodes in Irish history. When Tone, captured on a French ship, took his own life, he was one of perhaps 30,000 who had died violently since May.

  The United Irishmen’s hope for a non-sectarian Irish democracy was drowned in this bloodshed; the conflict ultimately reinforced sectarian divisions by shattering Presbyterian radicalism. The idea of ‘the pike in the thatch’ retained its romantic appeal, but 1798 changed Ireland for good: the revolutionaries’ ideal of unity became an ever more distant dream.

  74. Act of Union blacklist, early-nineteenth century

  This list, written out in this instance by barrister and writer Jonah Barrington, circulated in a number of manuscript copies in the early-nineteenth century. (Just one page of nineteen is shown here.) On one side of the page are the names of members of the Irish parliament in 1799. On the other are the rewards they received for voting in favour of the Act of Union, which abolished Ireland’s independent status and created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

  Richard Hare, put two members into Parliament, and was created Lord Ennismore for their votes…Colonel Heniker, a regiment, and paid £3,500 for his seat by the Commissioners of Compensation…got a peerage;…George Hatton, appointed Commissioner of Stamps; J. Hutchinson, a general, Lord Hutchinson; Hugh Howard, Lord Wicklow’s brother, made Postmaster General; William Handcock, Athlone, (an extraordinary instance; he made and sang songs against the Union in 1799, at a public dinner of the Opposition, and made and sang songs for it in 1800); he got a peerage…Hon. G. Jocelyn, promotion in the Army, and his brother consecrated bishop of Lismore.

  The decision to move rapidly ahead with a full union was London’s response to the violence of 1798 and to the continuing war with France. Prime Minister William Pitt imagined the union as the only way to draw Catholics into loyalty—a matter of increasing urgency given that one-third of the British army was Irish. The lure was to be Catholic emancipation and the abolition of an exclusively Protestant and generally reactionary Irish parliament. At Westminster, Irish playwright and radical Richard Brinsley Sheridan attacked British treatment of Ireland. Pitt, remarkably, conceded that British policy ‘tainted and perverted by selfish notions treated Ireland with illiberality and neglect’. The implication was that union would prevent the ascendancy from pursuing that ‘selfish’ interest.

  Meanwhile, the Irish Catholic bishops secretly adopted resolutions in favour of accepting state salaries for clergy and a government veto on the nomination of bishops. But would the Dublin parliament abolish itself? In January 1799 the chief secretary concluded, in the face of a hostile Irish House of Commons, that ‘the measure could not be proceeded with until the mood of the country changed’. In March many Orange lodges passed resolutions against the union. Faced with such opposition, the government resorted to wholesale bribery: the secret service was limited to expenditure of £5,000 domestically but spent £32,336 in buying votes for the union. On 6 February 1800, the House of Commons in Dublin voted for union by 158 votes to 115. On 1 August the Act of Union became law, to come into effect on 1 January 1801. Oliver MacDonagh called it ‘the most important single factor in shaping Ireland as a nation in the modern world’. Officially, the two islands now contained ‘one people’. It was hoped they would enjoy equal treatment under the law.

  75. Penrose glass decanter, late-eighteenth century

  This glass decanter is striking for its elegance of form and luxurious, almost sensual curves. Its applied cutting is a variant of the more typical style of semi-circular pendant arch motif, with a star underneath and pillars running around it—typical of the work of the Penrose glass factory in Waterford. It also tells a poignant story: the flowering of an Irish industry in the two decades before the Act of Union and its withering after.

  The Penroses were representative of the more dynamic, entrepreneurial side of Anglo-Ireland. With roots in Cornwall, they moved to Ireland in 1656, by which time they may already have been Quakers. William Penrose established himself in Waterford in the early-eighteenth century as a tanner and merchant, and his son, also William, founded the Waterford Glass Factory in 1783. It cost £10,000 to establish and employed between 50 and 70 workers, especially cutters and engravers. It can be seen as an excellent example of positive Anglo-Irish relations: the immensely skilled John Hill, who oversaw the process, was a Quaker brought from Stourbridge, in Worcestershire, taking eight or ten of the ‘best set of workmen’ with him.Their skills, passed on to Irish workers, quickly earned Waterford glass
a high international reputation: Penrose products were sold in the United States, Canada, the West Indies, France, Spain and Portugal. Irish-made glass, including that from Waterford, also began to replace imports.

  The Penrose factory was made possible by the lifting of English prohibitions on the export of glass from Ireland and of duties on coal used for its manufacture in the dynamic 1780s. The Act of Union should not have interfered with the business, which was carried on by Jonathan Gathchell after the Penroses gave it up on William’s death, in 1799. Initially, indeed, the glass industry continued to thrive in Waterford, Cork, Dublin, Belfast and Newry. Westminster, however, often proved indifferent if not hostile to Irish commercial interests. In 1811 flint glass made in Ireland and exported was made liable to duty; in 1825 a very heavy excise tax was imposed on glass manufacturers, which devastated the industry in Ireland. Ireland had eleven glass factories that year, and by 1852 it had only two: one in Belfast and one in Dublin. The Waterford glass factory had closed in 1851. In the previous decade overall employment in the making of pottery and glass in Ireland had fallen by 45 per cent.

  The decline of the glass industry is part of a larger pattern: the failure of Ireland under the union to catch up with the British industrial revolution. If anything, Irish industry declined. Historians dispute the causes and nature of ‘de­industrialisation’, and it was a gradual process. What is clear is that industrial employment became increasingly dependent on the textile sector, which was heavily concentrated in the north. In 1841 about 32 per cent of the labour force was in industry, but of the industrial workforce, about two-thirds were in textiles, chiefly linen. Unity with a great industrial power did not prevent Ireland beyond Ulster from becoming, over the course of the nineteenth century, a more agricultural society.