Political Discourse in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth- Century Ireland

Political Discourse in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Ireland Edited by D. George Boyce, Robert Eccleshall and Vinc...

Author: D. George Boyce | Robert Eccleshall | Vincent Geoghegan

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Political Discourse in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Ireland Edited by D. George Boyce, Robert Eccleshall and Vincent Geoghegan

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Political Discourse in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Ireland


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Also by D. George Boyce BRITISH PUBLIC OPINION AND GOVERNMENT POLICY IN IRELAND, 1918–1922 THE CRISIS OF BRITISH UNIONISM DECOLONISATION AND THE BRITISH EMPIRE, 1775–1997 ENGLISHMEN AND IRISH TROUBLES IRELAND 1828–1923 NATIONALISM IN IRELAND NINETEENTH-CENTURY IRELAND POLITICAL THOUGHT IN IRELAND SINCE THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY (co-editor with Robert Eccleshall and Vincent Geoghegan) THE IRISH QUESTION AND BRITISH POLITICS, 1868–1996 THE MAKING OF MODERN IRISH HISTORY THE REVOLUTION IN IRELAND 1879–1923

Also by Robert Eccleshall BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY OF BRITISH PRIME MINISTERS (co-editor with Graham Walker) BRITISH LIBERALISM ENGLISH CONSERVATISM SINCE THE RESTORATION ORDER AND REASON IN POLITICS POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES (with Vincent Geoghegan and others) POLITICAL THOUGHT IN IRELAND SINCE THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY (co-editor with D. George Boyce and Vincent Geoghegan)

Also by Vincent Geoghegan ERNST BLOCH POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES (with Robert Eccleshall and others) POLITICAL THOUGHT IN IRELAND SINCE THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY (co-editor with D. George Boyce and Robert Eccleshall) REASON AND EROS UTOPIANISM AND MARXISM


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Political Discourse in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Ireland Edited by

D. George Boyce Professor of Politics University of Wales Swansea

Robert Eccleshall Professor of Politics School of Politics Queen’s University Belfast

and

Vincent Geoghegan Professor of Political Theory School of Politics Queen’s University Belfast


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Editorial matter and selection © D. George Boyce, Robert Eccleshall and Vincent Geoghegan 2001 Chapter 2 © Vincent Geoghegan 2001 Chapter 3 © Robert Eccleshall 2001 Chapter 4 © D. George Boyce 2001 Chapters 1, 5–12 © Palgrave Publishers Ltd 2001 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2001 by PALGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). ISBN 0–333–71261–7 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Political discourse in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Ireland / edited by D. George Boyce, Robert Eccleshall, Vincent Geoghegan. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–333–71261–7 1. Political science—Ireland—History—17th century. 2. Political science—Ireland—History—18th century. 3. Ireland—Politics and government—17th century. 4. Ireland—Politics and government—18th century. I. Boyce, David George, 1942– II. Eccleshall, Robert. III. Geoghegan, Vincent. JA84.I76 P627 2001 320’.09415’09032—dc21 00–069471 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 Printed in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

Contents Preface

vii

List of Contributors

xii

1 ‘Firm Catholics’ or ‘Loyal Subjects’? Religious and Political Allegiance in Early Seventeenth-century Ireland Alan Ford

1

2 Thomas Sheridan: Toleration and Royalism Vincent Geoghegan

32

3 The Political Ideas of Anglican Ireland in the 1690s Robert Eccleshall

62

4 The Road to Wood’s Halfpence and Beyond: William King, Jonathan Swift and the Defence of the National Church, 1689–1724 D. George Boyce 5 Public and Political Opinion in Ireland and the Idea of an Anglo-Irish Union, 1650–1800 James Kelly

81

110

6 Ideas of Union in Anglo-Irish Political Discourse, 1692–1720: Meaning and Use David Hayton

142

7 Ulster Presbyterians and the Confessional State, c. 1688–1733 Ian McBride

169

8 The Languages of Politeness and Sociability in Eighteenth-century Ireland Toby Barnard

193

9 Politics and the Writing of History: The Impact of the 1690s and 1790s on Irish Historiography Jacqueline Hill

222

v

vi

Contents

10 Republicanism before the United Irishmen: The Case of Dr Charles Lucas Jim Smyth

240

11

Volunteer Thought: William Crawford of Strabane Norman Vance

257

12

‘A Perfect Liberty’: The Rise and Fall of the Irish Whigs, 1789–97 Nancy J. Curtin

Index

270

290

Preface In 1993 we introduced a collection of essays on Political Thought in Ireland since the Seventeenth Century with the possibly rash suggestion that the history of political ideas in Ireland was largely unwritten. Our contention was that the fixation of Irish historians with a few canonical writings had inhibited them from following the lead of intellectual historians elsewhere in searching for the articulation of political ideas in more diverse outlets: pamphlets, sermons, poetry, and so forth. In subsequent years there has been a deal of exploration, and none more so than in the centuries covered in the present volume. The seventeenth century was a period of protracted, if sporadic warfare, accompanied by a series of political crises. The century witnessed not only wars of religion and politics, but a massive social revolution, the overthrow of the Roman Catholic landed classes and their replacement by a Protestant, more specifically, Anglican, landed order. It resulted in the legal securing of the Anglican Church of Ireland, and a series of penal laws directed at suppressing political and religious opposition, Presbyterian as well as Catholic. The ‘Glorious Revolution’ in Ireland followed the English pattern in most respects. The foundationstone was the securing of the liberty of Protestantism, as enshrined in a church establishment and a constitutional monarchy. Irish Protestants celebrated this deliverance, and for some decades in the eighteenth century held services to mark the martyrdom of Charles I, unlawfully done to death by sectaries. But in Ireland there was for a long time another more potent remembrance, that of the disastrous massacre of Protestants in the Catholic uprising of 1641. England had nothing to rival this experience; and the difference between English celebration and Irish commemoration marks a significant difference between political ideas in the two parts of the British Isles. The physical manifestation of the Protestant establishment was the construction throughout Ireland of the ‘big house’, which was characteristic of England as well. There was also the construction of polite society, with its carefully nuanced manners and behaviour, which Toby Barnard delineates in his chapter. But Ireland’s rulers were a small minority in an overwhelmingly popish land. The narrow escape of Protestant Ireland in 1688–90 provoked further reflections of how England, which was instrumental in securing the victory of the Protestant cause, vii

viii Preface

might be retained as Ireland’s protector, yet prevented from exploiting that role in order to secure, not Irish, but English interests. The Irish Sea was a key geopolitical factor in shaping the destiny of Protestant Ireland; the Irish landscape, with its Protestant landlords anxious to secure its mastery was another. For not only were Protestants scattered thinly over most of the country, they also encountered in the Province of Ulster a strong, numerous, dissenting political-religious community, the Presbyterians, who had collaborated in the fight against Roman Catholics in the seventeenth century, but who could derive little satisfaction from a Revolutionary Settlement that treated them, as it did Catholics, as potentially dangerous foes. In his chapter, Alan Ford traces the making of religious and political allegiance in early seventeenth century Ireland, showing how the ‘seventeenth-century legacy of confrontation and hostility’ reached out, not only to the following century but beyond, for it was ‘not until the nineteenth century that Catholics were finally accepted as equal members of the Irish polity’ (and some would argue not even then). In turn, Robert Eccleshall illustrates how the siege mentality of Anglican Ireland was reinforced by the turbulent events of the late seventeenth century. Jacqueline Hill surveys the way in which history was conscripted in the cause of political argument, and especially for the justification, or lack of it, for Protestants forcing Catholics into the mould of what the nineteenth-century nationalist Thomas Davis called a ‘serf nation’. She demonstrates that the troublesome issue of conquest lay at the heart of this discourse. This reflected not only Catholic overthrow, but the justification for that fate; it also mirrored the problem of the relationship between the victorious Protestants and their powerful fellow Protestant state, England. Moreover, the gestation of other political crises in the late eighteenth century, under the impact of the American and French Revolutions, emphasised yet again both the failure of the governing elite to create a stable political society and its dependence on England for help in time of trouble, as the century ended with the United Irish uprising of 1798 and the Act of Union, which followed hard upon its heels. Several chapters work out some sub-texts of this broader context. D.G. Boyce traces the anxiety of the Anglican establishment over the pretensions of Protestant dissent through the writings of two representative figures, Jonathan Swift and William King, showing that, despite the association of these two (and especially the first) with ‘liberty’, their political and constitutional ideas were shaped by the logical conclusion that was drawn from the Protestant predicament: that non-toleration, and

Preface ix

non-toleration alone, could inject the necessary moderation into the religious, political and constitutional system that would secure the stability of Ireland and its place as a sister-kingdom. Both were doubtful about the integrity of their own gentry, who seemed more interested in securing their hold on Catholic property than in doing good work; and they also suspected the reliability of England, which had its own perspectives on the Anglo-Irish relationship. David Hayton examines the tempting prospect of a union of Ireland and England between 1692 and 1720, arguing that this was regarded more as a fall-back position than as a real solution to the Protestant fear of their only narrowly defeated Catholic foes. The building up of Protestant power through laws and the Protestant parliament seemed to offer a more immediate and reliable security. Ian McBride finds plenty of evidence to show why the American and French Revolutions, with their emphasis on civil and legal rights, elicited such a powerful response from the Presbyterians; during the last four years of Queen Anne’s reign Irish high churchmen launched an assault on Whig political theory, warning against subversive notions of contract and resistance, and offering an uncompromising defence of passive obedience and non-resistance. Ulster Presbyterians defended themselves against charges of treason and rebellion, but also stressed that, since church and state were two distinct kingdoms, magisterial supremacy was as much a usurpation as popery. By 1733 the Calvinist concept of the covenanted community was giving way to the duty to resist civil tyranny. The Whig idea of contract and civil liberty was, of course, founded on English soil; and much of the debate on Irish politics in the eighteenth century, and particularly from the middle of the century, was based upon the rights of what the historian J.A. Froude called ‘The English in Ireland’, that is, the Protestant Irish ruling elite. Jim Smyth explores the career of Charles Lucas, who combined a medical practice with the ability to identify the ailing parts of, in this case, the Irish body politic. Like other radicals, Lucas claimed that he wished to restore the constitution to the purity of the past. He defended local (Dublin) liberties, but did not extend his radical mantle over the Irish Catholics. Nancy Curtin traces the rise and fall of the Irish Whigs in the decade following the outbreak of the French Revolution. They looked back to another Revolution, that of 1688, which they regarded as the key-stone of Ireland’s happy condition; they glorified the English connection, yet sought to defend the liberties of the Irish parliament, and some, notably Henry Grattan, even extended their vision

x

Preface

to ask whether or not Irish Catholics could be secured for the cause of the British connection and Irish parliamentary rights through Catholic political relief. But they revealed only that the language of liberty, if expressed too strongly, could prove a dangerous weapon in the hands of those who would go further down the radical road. Norman Vance explores the ideas of that vital populist organisation, the Irish Volunteers, through one of their number, William Crawford of Strabane, whose conviction was that rationalism in politics and its exemplar, the Presbyterian tradition, could offer Ireland a new prosperous future; in the end, he was obliged to acknowledge the failure of his project. Two other significant projects were aired in the period, one a failure, the other, apparently, a success. Vincent Geoghegan illuminates the sometimes almost forgotten tradition of Catholic royalism. He describes the career of Thomas Sheridan, who was brought up as a Protestant and who later converted to Roman Catholicism, but who maintained across this personal divide a belief in toleration for all religious faiths under the divinely ordained Stuart kings – a kind of absolutist pluralism. He ended up after 1688 a disillusioned man, holding that it was James II’s Catholicism, rather than the ostensible constitutional reasons put forward by his enemies, that caused the legitimate king’s deposition. Catholic loyalism made something of a comeback in the last 40 years of the century; but it was to earn Protestant hostility through Catholic participation in the 1798 rebellion. However, there is ample evidence to show that Catholics welcomed, or at least did not oppose, the expedient that followed that event, the making of the Irish Act of Union, which united the sister kingdoms into one state. James Kelly traces the idea of Union, which was floated as early as the midseventeenth century. What was debated in a usually desultory fashion became, after 1798, a matter of urgent interest to both Catholics and Protestants, but particularly to those Protestants who saw in it a means of self-preservation. This made the success of the Union possible, but its ambiguous status, as Protestant defender and (possibly) Catholic appeaser, from the start rendered uncertain the constitution which brought to an end the history of the eighteenth-century Kingdom of Ireland. This volume, though reflecting the energy and attention now given to Ireland’s intellectual history, is not an exhaustive account of political discourse in the period. A more comprehensive history would probably contain additional chapters on Gaelic Ireland, for example, possibly at the expense of one or two of those on Anglican Ireland. Our

Preface xi

1993 collection included a fascinating essay by Brendán Ó’Buachalla who was due to contribute a chapter on Irish Jacobite rhetoric to this volume. We regret that he was unable to do so due to circumstances beyond his control. We should like to acknowledge the secretarial help of Marita Jaschob and Rosemarie Moore in putting the volume into shape.

List of Contributors Dr Toby Barnard, Hertford College, Oxford. Professor D. George Boyce, Department of Politics, University of Wales, Swansea. Professor Nancy J. Curtin, Department of History, University of Fordham, New York. Professor Robert Eccleshall, School of Politics, Queen’s University, Belfast. Professor Alan Ford, Department of Theology, University of Nottingham. Professor Vincent Geoghegan, School of Politics, Queen’s University, Belfast. Dr David Hayton, School of Modern History, Queen’s University, Belfast. Dr Jacqueline Hill, Department of History, St Patrick’s College, Maynooth. Dr James Kelly, St Patrick’s College, Drumconda, Dublin. Dr Ian McBride, Department of History, King’s College, London. Professor Jim Smyth, Department of History, University of Notre Dame, Indiana. Professor Norman Vance, School of English and American Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton.

xii

1 ‘Firm Catholics’ or ‘Loyal Subjects’? Religious and Political Allegiance in Early Seventeenth-century Ireland1 Alan Ford

In early May 1603 Lord Deputy Mountjoy arrived outside the town of Waterford at the head of an army of 5,000 men. On hearing of Queen Elizabeth’s death, the city’s leaders had seized the Protestant churches and restored the public celebration of Catholic rites, confident that the new monarch, James I, the dutiful son of a Catholic mother, would be more tolerant than his predecessor. Mountjoy, basking in his victory over Hugh O’Neill and the Spanish at Kinsale, was confronted on this occasion not by soldiers, but by a delegation of two Catholic priests, Thomas Lombard, a Cistercian, and Dr James White, vicar apostolic of Waterford and Lismore, both in full ecclesiastical dress and carrying before them the crucifix from the cathedral in Waterford.2 After running the gauntlet of the English soldiers jeering at the cross, White was granted an audience with the Lord Deputy. There followed a rather surreal conversation. According to White’s account, Mountjoy opened proceedings by asking him ‘What are you?’ This was not merely an innocent or polite enquiry. Mountjoy was in effect raising a series of highly contentious issues, such as ‘What kind of subject are you? Where do your loyalties lie: with the English monarchy, or with the papacy? Are these twin allegiances compatible? Will he obey Romans 13.1: ‘Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers’? White appreciated the loaded nature of the question, replying carefully that he ‘was a Christian and a firm Catholic, a servant of the King’s Majesty and a most loyal subject’. Mountjoy tried to press White for an unequivocal statement on one of the key issues of principle: ‘whether it is lawful in any case to take up arms against our natural king and lord’.3 White refused to answer so 1

2 Alan Ford

Machiavellian a question: it was too general, he protested, and more suited for lengthy discussion in a university than an encounter in a military camp. Instead, he offered two limited responses – one relating to the specific circumstances of 1603, the other conditional. He would, he said, be prepared to answer a question put in the form: whether, de facto, any subject of his most serene Majesty King James would be justified in taking up arms against him. For to the question proposed in this form the answer was easy.4 In other words, White was prepared to declare his secular loyalty to the new king under the present circumstances. When pressed for a more general response, he offered the following: ‘if all the actions of the prince were just, if his laws be good and honest, no subject could without grievous sin resist or disobey him.’5 But what happens when a king commands things that are unjust or against the principles of true religion? Here White pointed to the biblical examples of Daniel, who continued to pray to God though by doing so he was breaking the law of the Medes and Persians, and Peter and John, who disobeyed the orders of the Jewish rulers, elders and doctors by continuing to preach the gospel, producing the conclusive text: ‘We ought to obey God rather than men.’6 In 1618 Robert Daborne, the Protestant Chancellor of Waterford, preached a sermon in the cathedral before the Earl of Thomond, the Lord President of Munster and other officials on the occasion of the formal surrender of the city’s charter, in punishment for its disloyal behaviour. He outlined the relationship between civil and ecclesiastical power, stressing the supremacy of the monarch in both spheres, and attacked the unwillingness of the city authorities to enforce religious uniformity. Now that the military battle in Ireland had been successfully concluded, he urged that firm action must next be taken by the magistrates in the religious battle against Catholics who refused to attend church.7 Two years later a Catholic priest from Waterford, and future Bishop of Waterford and Lismore, Patrick Comerford, wrote a reply to Daborne.8 Defending the honour of his native city, Comerford attacked Daborne as a former theatrical impresario who had fled to Ireland to avoid his debts and had there become a ‘prodigious fat minister’ whose huge paunch showed that ‘his capacity is better for devouring fat pigs, than for comprehending lean subtleties of divinity’.9 More relevantly, Comerford, with considerable energy and learning, set out to demonstrate the independence of the clergy from secular jurisdiction.

‘Firm Catholics’ or ‘Loyal Subjects’? 3

Comerford defended the decision to restore Catholic worship in 1603, giving an account of the meeting of Mountjoy with ‘those learned fathers’, White and Lombard, who had, he claimed, given the Lord Deputy ‘full satisfaction’.10 The people of Waterford, he stressed, remained ‘loyal and faithful to the crown of England’. But they also remained loyal and faithful to the Catholic religion. They were taught ‘that there is no better proof of the subjects’ loyalty to their temporal prince, than their loyalty to the prince of princes in their observance of his belief, and the doctrine of the Apostles and their lawful successors’.11 As for Romans 13, this required ministers to be subject to the higher powers only in secular, not spiritual matters.12 These vignettes offer a revealing insight into the complexities of political thinking at a crucial period in the development of the Irish polity. Following its victory in the Nine Years War, the English Crown for the first time controlled the whole of the island. This had dramatic consequences for both the Catholic population and the English government in Ireland. The former had to work out how they could live in and under a Protestant state; the latter had to grapple with the challenge of how that Protestant state could relate to an almost entirely Catholic population. In a Europe which was still founded upon the axiom that a state must be religiously uniform, the process of coming to terms with this challenge was complex and many-layered. Political ideas met, and were shaped by, political realities, as the particular exigencies of Ireland were linked to wider European efforts to define the relationship between political and religious allegiance. The purpose of this investigation is to examine the interaction between ideological principles and the new political realities of early seventeenth-century Ireland, and, by tracing the process of adjustment on both sides of the religious divide, to assess the extent to which it proved possible to arrive at a mutually accepted formulation, specifically an oath of allegiance, which allowed Catholics to live satisfactorily in a Protestant state.

I The basic theoretical disagreement between Protestant and Catholic was over the issue of authority: whose was higher, that of pope and church, or that of king and state? And, more practically, in the event of conflict between the two, whom were people to obey? Some papal supporters, harking back to the high vision of the pope’s power outlined in Boniface VIII’s bull of 1302, Unam sanctam, claimed for the

4 Alan Ford

church a plenitudo potestas, a fullness of power, not merely over spiritual matters, but over secular affairs as well. They argued that a ruler’s temporal authority was not granted directly by God, but was merely delegated by the papacy, or derived from the people, and could, in cases of serious misbehaviour, be taken away. It was therefore possible for the pope to depose an heretical ruler and absolve his subjects of their duty to obey him. The Reformation, however, building upon alternative mediaeval views of the relation between secular and ecclesiastical power, challenged such papal claims. Protestants stated that the sword was directly given to princes by God. This meant that subjects must obey their ruler. Even in the case of a pagan or heretical prince, the most that Luther would initially concede was that Christians might passively resist commands directly contradictory to their religious beliefs.13 The strongly Erastian settlement in England shifted the balance of power still further in the direction of the ruler, granting the prince the exercise of ecclesiastical as well as secular jurisdiction. In countries where the post-Reformation compromise of cuius regio eius religio was followed, and church, state and nation were as a result wholly Catholic or Protestant, such arguments were primarily theoretical – a matter for learned controversy. However, where there were significant Catholic or Protestant minorities, the issue of loyalty was deeply divisive and affected the very nature and survival of the state. Could a Catholic be loyal to an heretical Protestant ruler? Could a Protestant subject resist the demands of a Catholic king? Each particular situation, of course, produced its own, unique solutions. Repeatedly, theory had forcibly to be changed to suit circumstance, producing such breathtaking adjustments as those in France where, on the one hand, the Protestants, having developed a theoretical justification for the right to resist oppressive Catholic magistrates, had to jettison it when the Catholic king offered them toleration; while, on the other hand, the Catholics, having actively resisted the idea of a Protestant king, switched to undying loyalty when that king converted to Catholicism.14 But Ireland, defying semantic logic, was even more unique, since there the persecuted church was not a minority but, strangely, a clear majority of the population, offering perplexing possibilities for both sides. The size of the Catholic majority, and the starkly opposed postReformation ideologies, led initially to the adoption of extreme ideas and extreme solutions. Here political circumstance and political thought neatly dovetailed. Military tension, risings and rebellions were a familiar feature of the turbulent Irish polity well before the sixteenth century.


But the Reformation added a new ideological dimension. Once Henry had rejected the papacy, resistance to royal power in Ireland was no longer a matter purely of self-interest and political calculation; it could be combined with high principle, by pointing to the Catholic duty to oppose heresy and restore the true faith to Ireland. The ignominy of rebellion could be replaced by the glorious ideal of a crusade. Justifying one’s actions in such terms had, moreover, the added and extremely practical advantage that it identified the opponents of the Crown in Ireland with the wider battle between Protestant and Catholic forces in Europe, and raised the tempting possibility of securing financial and military support from the papacy and Catholic powers such as Spain and France. The persistent Irish risings in the six decades after the Reformation, from Silken Thomas Fitzgerald in 1534 to Hugh O’Neill, the Earl of Tyrone, in 1594, though not, of course, without their pragmatic and local dimensions, nevertheless, by exploiting the idea of fighting for the Catholic faith, helped to develop a new justification for expelling the English from Ireland. This recently christened ‘faith and fatherland’ ideology offered a radically different reading of Irish history and the source of Irish political legitimacy from that enshrined in Henry VIII’s 1541 Act declaring the King of England to be King of Ireland.15 It was, after all Pope Adrian IV who had originally granted Ireland to Henry II and his successors.16 What the pope gave he could also take away. And when the English kings chose heresy and sought to declare themselves kings of Ireland without any reference to the pontiff, then the pope had the right to reassign the lordship to an orthodox Catholic king.17 Further religious support for expelling the English from Ireland by armed force was provided by Pope Pius V, when, in 1570, he excommunicated Elizabeth in the bull Regnans in excelsis.18 As James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald put it in 1579, when appealing to his fellow Irishmen to join the ‘just war’ against the ‘banner of heresy’: we are not at war against the legitimate and honourable crown of England, but against that she-tyrant who, by refusing to hear Christ in the person of his vicar … has deservedly forfeited her royal authority.19 The climax of this battle for faith and fatherland, the Nine Years War of 1594–1603, saw O’Neill employ the services of a Catholic priest, Peter Lombard, who produced the first detailed account of this alternative Catholic view of Irish history in his work of 1600, De regno Hiberniae,

6 Alan Ford

sanctorum insula, commentarius, which detailed the conditions on which Adrian IV had granted Ireland to Henry II, and traced the efforts of the Irish, inspired by their love of ‘God and country’, to free themselves from the heretical yoke of the English.20 The Protestant response to such Catholic claims was equally fierce. Catholics were declared to be inherently disloyal subjects who, because of their allegiance to the papacy, could not be trusted.21 Protestant political theory was wheeled out to counteract Catholic claims to be fighting a just war. Papal supporters, Bishop Thomas Jones of Meath argued, confused spiritual with temporal power. Rome merely had the former, a power of persuasion and advice; kings possessed the latter, the power of coercion and compulsion.22 Since the latter was granted directly by God to rulers, to attempt to displace kings and depose them by force was ‘a most wicked and unlawful act, yea it is rebellion against God and his ordinance’.23 The pope in Regnans in excelsis was therefore seeking to absolve men from a duty from which in fact only God could release them, and in so doing was turning subjects into traitors.24 There could be no question of tolerating, negotiating or compromising with people who rejected the foundation of the ruler’s authority.25 The implications of this clash of ideologies for Ireland were stark. It established two irreconcilable political positions, in which the conflicting theoretical assumptions were inextricably linked to a mutual antagonism fuelled by racial, cultural, personal and religious antipathies. Each side was agreed on only one principle: it was not possible to be a firm Catholic and a loyal subject to the English monarch. Catholic defenders of faith and fatherland believed that their fellow Catholics had a religious duty to rise up against the English Crown and restore Catholicism by force. New English Protestants were equally convinced that all Catholics were, by the simple fact of their allegiance to the papacy, bad subjects and potential traitors, who must be excluded from positions of influence in the Irish state.

II The power of this sixteenth-century legacy of confrontation and hostility should not be underestimated: our period ends, after all, with the rising of 1641; and it was not until the nineteenth century, that Catholics were finally accepted as equal members of the Irish polity. Throughout the early seventeenth century, members of the new English minority, including many of the Protestant leaders of church and state, remained deeply hostile to Catholicism, determined to ‘see a threat


to political loyalty in the very fact of popery’.26 Equally, many of the native Irish, especially those living in exile after the flight of the Earls in 1607, continued to look to the Catholic powers of Europe to support further invasions in order to restore the Irish state to its rightful faith.27 Nevertheless, the countervailing need to recognise the new political and military realities of a confessionally divided country meant that advocates of confrontation were increasingly challenged in the early seventeenth century by those seeking some form of accommodation. The reasons for this shift from the extremes to the centre lie in the changing political, diplomatic and ideological circumstances not just within Ireland, but across the whole of Europe. To take the latter first, by the early seventeenth century the papacy had made a decisive move away from the military option in its approach to the recovery of Protestant countries. As early as 1580, Gregory XIII, at the request of the Jesuits, had made it clear that, in the current circumstances, Catholics in England need not obey the bull Regnans in excelsis.28 Most notably, Clement VIII (1592–1605) proved reluctant to give O’Neill’s military venture his full blessing, preferring a missionary strategy in the hope that, if Catholic clergy concentrated solely upon their spiritual duties and acknowledged where possible the secular power of the Protestant monarch, that same monarch would allow them to minister to their flocks undisturbed by persecution or allegations of treason.29 Equally, by the early seventeenth century the secular Catholic powers were moving away from a confessional foreign policy and the use of force to achieve religio-political ends. The death of Philip II in 1598 marked the end of an era in Spain, symbolised in 1604 when his successor concluded peace with England.30 This was followed by increasingly close relations between the two countries, culminating in the early 1620s with James I’s efforts to marry his son to the Spanish Infanta.31 In France, too, the vicious religious wars of the sixteenth century were ended with the Edict of Nantes of 1598, which granted toleration to the Huguenots, and offered a possible model for handling non-established religions in other European states.32 Nor were political theorists far behind pragmatic rulers. It would be misleading to leave the impression that all sixteenth-century Catholic theologians inevitably looked to Unam sanctam as a model. Catholic as much as Protestant monarchs objected to such overarching claims. In the latter part of the century two notable theologians, Suarez and Bellarmine, tackled the vexed question of church–state relations and political versus ecclesiastical allegiance, trying to steer a middle ground

8 Alan Ford

between the extremes of the post-Reformation period. They stressed that the pope’s power was spiritual, rather than directly secular. But they also insisted that the pope might, for religious purposes, sometimes need to use his spiritual power in the civil sphere. The most obvious example was to depose an heretical king – hence the name subsequently given to the theory: the pope’s indirect deposing power.33 The shift away from direct papal political claims and from military action resulted in a significant change of policy on the part of English Catholic leaders in the 1590s. That veteran Jesuit campaigner, Robert Parsons, who had earlier defended active resistance, argued in 1599 that ‘we owe all temporal obedience in civil matters’ to ‘our temporal prince’.34 Only in religious matters, which had no bearing on this civil allegiance, did Catholics refuse to obey the monarch. It was, in short, becoming possible to be a firm Catholic and a loyal subject to a Protestant king. Some maverick Catholic theorists went even further along the road to accommodation, seeking to confine the papacy wholly to ecclesiastical matters. The Appellants, a group of English secular clergy, tried at the very end of Elizabeth’s reign to disassociate themselves from Catholic efforts to attack the queen, and sought instead to demonstrate their loyalty by themselves attacking papal claims, including the indirect deposing power.35 The result is that in England at the accession of James I there were (to oversimplify a complicated position) three main Catholic camps. One, including the Appellants, was prepared to make a distinction between secular and ecclesiastical loyalty along lines acceptable to the English Crown. At the other extreme, a few diehards still hankered after the overthrow of the Protestant monarchy by force. In between lay the majority of orthodox Catholics who advocated ‘loyalty to the crown combined with a defence of papal temporal authority’.36 These divisions were exploited by James I, who, with his scholarly pretensions, threw himself into the intellectual arguments over religious and secular loyalty during the first decade of his reign.37 James’s prime concern was the papal deposing power. This he saw as a direct affront to his divinely ordained royal authority and the root of Catholic disloyalty to the English Crown. His main weapon was the oath of allegiance, passed by parliament in 1606 in reaction to the Gunpowder Plot. It required Catholics to accept James as lawful king; deny that the pope had any power to depose him, or to authorise anyone to invade his kingdoms, or to discharge his subjects from their allegiance to him; and to swear allegiance to James notwithstanding the Bull of Excommunication.38 To the king the oath was a purely civil


one, which Catholics could take without any diminution of their religious loyalty. It offered, in effect, a secular alternative to the oath of supremacy.39 But to Catholics who admitted that the papal deposing power was de fide, the oath was completely unacceptable. It was carefully phrased to trap Catholics into denying an essential part of their faith, and Rome was explicit in its condemnation. Despite this, the oath caused considerable confusion among English Catholics, and it is a testimony to their loyalty to James, the careful phrasing of the oath and the severity of the penalties attached that a number initially were prepared to swear it.40 Within Ireland, too, there was renewed interest in the possibility of accommodation. The Old English, despite their increasingly firm Catholicism, were always anxious to demonstrate their loyalty to the English Crown. Nor were the Gaelic Irish necessarily wholly committed to the faith and fatherland ideology. Recognising the simple fact of James’s secular control over the whole island, and noting that he, unlike his predecessor, was not excommunicate, some proved willing to accept him as their lawful king. The Irish poets played a significant role here, by assimilating James’s Celtic genealogy to that of the Irish high kings, and producing that bizarre manifestation of Irish national feeling, Cing Séamas, ‘scion of the Irish’.41 Indeed, after the death of Hugh O’Neill in 1616, some pragmatic Catholics on the continent even set about redefining the nature of the Catholic fatherland by accepting that it was ruled by ‘our king’ James.42 The living symbol of this new willingness to come to terms with the English presence in Stuart Ireland was Peter Lombard who, in the early 1600s, like Parsons in the 1590s, made the transition from resisting to accepting the reality of the secular power of the English monarch. Lombard had been appointed Archbishop of Armagh in 1601, and remained in Rome after the defeat of O’Neill, where he became not just the chief adviser on Irish affairs, but also an influential theologian offering his opinions to the papacy on a wide range of controversial subjects. Early in James’s reign Lombard took the opportunity to spell out his attitude to the new king. In 1604 he wrote his Episcopalis Doron, obviously a reply to James’s Basilikon Doron, in which he sought to persuade James that, having joined his kingdoms with Spain in civil peace, his next and greater challenge was to return to his proper religious allegiance by making peace with God.43 He particularly lamented the persecution of Catholics in Ireland, and called on James to recognise the determination of the Irish people to retain the faith of their fathers by granting them the freedom to exercise their religion.44 The Irish, he

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insisted, were perfectly prepared to follow the biblical injunctions and render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, but from this it followed that they had the right to give to God what is God’s.45 Lombard was clear that the deposing power could not be dispensed with. But he nevertheless strove to make the Catholic position acceptable to the English authorities. His most sophisticated treatment of the subject of conflicting loyalties, in Ad quaestiones XII of c. 1616, reiterated two important points. First, he distinguished between objective and subjective heresy: unlike his predecessor, James was not excommunicate, and though he was objectively an heretical monarch, he could not be blamed for this, since he had been brought up in his errors. Hence, like any other pagan emperor (and unlike Elizabeth) he must be obeyed by Catholics in all secular matters. Second, Lombard stressed that though in theory the pope indeed had the right to depose, it was only a very remote possibility that the power would ever be used against the English monarch.46 In short, if James could forget his obsession with the deposing power, focus upon the distinction between civil and religious loyalty, and grant Catholics religious toleration, it should prove possible for Irish Catholics to be his loyal secular subjects. The accession of James and the ending of the Nine Years War thus appeared to offer a fresh start for religious policy in Ireland. Internal Irish and external European developments on both sides of the religious divide led to a rethinking of the nature of relations between the Catholic people and the Protestant state of Ireland. The most obvious symbol of this interaction between domestic and foreign factors is the way in which the model offered by recent events in France began to be taken up in Ireland. Within a few years of its issue, the Edict of Nantes was cited as a possible way forward for Ireland by both Protestant and Catholic commentators.47 The French example, originally cited in 1599 by O’Neill as a justification for Catholic rebellion against an heretical monarch, was exploited by James Ussher as an example of foreign opposition to the deposing power, and by Francis Barnaby to prove that papal excommunication of a monarch need not be obeyed by Catholic subjects.48 But it was also used by Catholics such as David Rothe in 1619, and the Franciscan Thomas Strange in 1630, as a parallel for state toleration of recusancy in Ireland.49

III By the early seventeenth century, then, the ‘battle for a Catholic prince was over and the battle for toleration under a Protestant prince was


about to begin’.50 In Ireland, the struggle can be divided into three main phases: during the first, from 1603 to about 1620, despite initial optimism, it became clear that there were still fundamental ideological differences, not just between the Irish Catholics and the English king, but also between both these parties and the Dublin government. In the 1620s dramatic shifts in royal policy appeared to open the way for some form of official toleration. By the 1630s, however, it was becoming obvious that no formal declaration would be made – there was to be no equivalent of the Edict of Nantes for Irish Catholics. Instead, they had to be content with de facto recognition, a much less satisfactory alternative, whose ambiguities contributed to the outbreak of the rising in 1641. The detailed history of these political manoeuvrings over Catholic loyalties is long and complicated, and has been extensively covered elsewhere.51 The main purpose of this investigation is, rather, to focus upon the linkage between ideas and actions, by looking at the attitudes of the various parties to that crucial test of political and religious loyalty – the oath of allegiance. What Irish Catholics, in particular Old English Catholics, desired during the first two decades of James’s reign was the formal recognition of their distinction between secular and religious loyalty. The classic statement of their position came from the chief resident Catholic bishop (and close ally of Peter Lombard) David Rothe of Ossory. Rothe made a personal plea to James at the time of the 1613–15 parliament. That parliament, the first for over a quarter of a century, provided the setting for an almost inevitable clash between the rival political claims and interests of the Catholic Old English and the Protestant New English. The Dublin government sought to ensure a Protestant majority so that they could pass stricter legislation against recusancy. The Catholic interest fought a determined rearguard action to prevent their exclusion from political power and influence. Rothe’s appeal to James urged the king to end the long-lasting but unavailing temporal afflictions on Catholics and take a milder course. Rothe assured James that all the different races in Ireland were loyal to him, but was equally insistent that this acknowledgement of secular allegiance ‘may consist with diversity of religion, to be condescended unto with a commiseration towards us and a tolerance of disinterrupted profession’.52 He was thus fully prepared to accept James’s lawful power as king – indeed, he was appealing to him to use that power to dispense with the enforcement of penal laws on Irish Catholics. Rothe elaborated his ideas for a much wider audience in his work Analecta sacra, published on the continent between 1616 and 1619. The Analecta, dedicated to the orthodox rulers

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of Europe, hammered home the basic point of Irish constancy in the Catholic faith, which in turn proved the pointlessness of royal efforts to force the Irish people to conform.53 The problem was James’s, or rather his advisers’, insistence on making Catholics become Protestant. Coercion could not make people change their religion: ‘God requires a voluntary not a forced offering.’54 Enforced conformity merely made Catholics disobey what they were otherwise perfectly prepared to respect – the lawful government of the country. Rothe further complained that such practice of their religion as they had in Ireland was wrested from the king and his persecuting officers against their wills by connivance and subterfuge.55 James’s policy was, Rothe claimed, in marked contrast to that of Catholic princes who were prepared to tolerate Protestants. Indeed, even the Turks and heathen emperors had let Christians worship freely in return for a tribute.56 The leaders of the Protestant church–state in Ireland, on the other hand, were staunchly opposed to any relaxation of the pressure on Catholics to conform. Convinced that firm Catholics could not be true subjects, they repeatedly pressed James to renounce toleration, expel priests, enforce the Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity, punish recusancy and exclude Catholics from all positions of influence and authority. Initially, events played into their hands. The conclusion of the peace treaty between England and Spain in 1604 did not, much to the disappointment of Irish Catholics, include in its terms any amelioration of the position of Catholics: the Jesuit, Henry Fitzsimon, reported that all the lords and gentlemen are scandalized, that the king of Spain made a treaty with the English without securing freedom of conscience for us; and they wonder how the Holy Father let him do so.57 Indeed, far from improving, the position of Irish Catholics deteriorated when the anti-popish backlash after the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 provided an opportunity for the Irish government to push through new measures of religious oppression, using the 12d fine of the Act of Uniformity to force ordinary Catholics to attend church, and the innovative ‘mandates’ to try to break the resistance of the lay Catholic leaders.58 Between these two extremes stood James. Though he quickly ruled out the wilder Catholic hopes that he might return to the true faith, and reassured the Irish Protestants that he had no intention of granting toleration, Old English leaders remained convinced that the king was


sympathetic to their cause. They developed an elaborate rhetorical case which combined assertions of undying loyalty with suggestions that the son of a Catholic mother could not fail to stand by them if only he was freed from the bad advice of his puritan counsellors. Nor were these hopes entirely groundless. James provided clear hints that he was not happy with a policy of unremitting persecution. Once the furore over the Gunpowder Plot had died down, he quietly advised the Irish government in 1606 to abandon the more extreme anti-recusant measures, though he allowed them to continue to enforce the 12d fine. Even more significantly, throughout his reign, James repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to make distinctions between different kinds of Catholics. As Ussher put it, the king’s aim in introducing the oath of allegiance was ‘to distinguish betwixt his loyal and disloyal subjects, and to put a difference betwixt a seditious and a quiet-minded Romanist’.59 As a result, there was sufficient common ground to encourage recusant leaders such as Rothe to appeal directly to the king when the Dublin government sought to pack the 1613 parliament with Protestant Members in order to pass the anti-Catholic legislation. Great expectations rode on the departure of the recusant delegation for England to hear the king’s verdict on their complaints. As one Irish Jesuit put it in a letter to a friend in Portugal, it was either ‘total ruin or liberty of conscience’.60 In the event, Catholic hopes once more proved illusory, foundering upon that unresolved argument between James and Catholic political theorists over the deposing power. James would not allow Catholics simply to separate their religious from their secular loyalties: he also demanded that they be willing to disavow the papal deposing power, something Rothe and Lombard could never accept. This he made plain to the Old English parliamentary delegation in his famous harangue at Whitehall in 1614. They were, he claimed, but half-subjects that have an eye to me one way and to the Pope another way. The Pope is your father in spiritualibus and I in temporalibus only, and so have your bodies turn one way, and your souls drawn another way... Strive henceforth to become full subjects, that you may have cor unum et via una, and then I shall respect you all alike. But your Irish priests teach you such grounds of doctrine as you cannot follow them with a safe conscience, but you must cast off your loyalty to your King.61 Like Mountjoy in 1603, James tried to force the Irish delegation to answer the fundamental question about their loyalties: Did they accept

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the pope’s deposing power? Their response was mixed: two refused to answer, and though one of them, Thomas Luttrell, changed his mind after imprisonment, the other, Sir William Talbot, remained resolute and was eventually sentenced in Star Chamber; the other mebers of the delegation, including one leading recusant, Patrick Barnwell, agreed to reject it.62 Their willingness to deny orthodox Catholic theory can be seen in two ways: as a natural and pragmatic reaction to the threat of punishment; or as a product of the innate and principled, though ultimately contradictory, loyalty which the Old English bore towards their monarch.63 James’s questioning of the Catholic delegation at Whitehall in 1614 pointed clearly to the key issue in early modern Irish political thought and practice: how was the allegiance of Irish Catholics to be tested, and on what terms? The answer was by that familiar early modern resort, the oath of loyalty. The swearing of allegiance was fundamental to the creation and regulation of local and national identities during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.64 In unified communities, oaths served as a form of political glue, publicly confirming the bonds which held together the city or the state.65 In fragmented polities, however, they were deeply divisive and fissiparous, translating the theoretical differences over political or religious principles into real divisions between different groups of citizens. In the post-Reformation context they were particularly potent weapons, of both social discipline and religious exclusiveness, serving to bind together state and church. In England, the authorities had two main weapons at their disposal. The first was the oath of supremacy, prescribed by the Act of Supremacy of 1559, which endorsed royal claims to be supreme governor of the church as well as the state, and denounced foreign ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Required of all those holding official positions in church and state, together with wards, schoolmasters and university graduates, where administered thoroughly it served to exclude all Catholics from power at local and central levels. The oath of allegiance, on the other hand, was a more subtle weapon: it was at one and the same time more sweeping – since it could be administered to any Catholic, whether an office-holder or not, and refusal carried the penalty of death as a traitor under praemunire; and less demanding – since it left aside the issue of royal ecclesiastical supremacy and papal jurisdiction in religious matters, and focused solely upon the deposing power and papal claims over the English king. Though unacceptable to ‘good Catholics’, the oath of allegiance marked a potentially significant step along the path to distinguishing between political and religious


loyalties which, with hindsight, was the obvious means of solving the dilemma posed by the conflict between Catholic and Protestant views over allegiance in the early modern period. In Ireland, however, the situation was different. The only means available to the government for testing Catholic loyalty was the oath of supremacy.66 To a certain extent, this suited the needs of the new English Protestant elite, since they could use it to exclude Catholics from power. After James’s accession, the Dublin authorities pressed for, and got, permission to take the oath of supremacy from judges, lawyers and central and local government officers, and began the task of weeding out the remaining Catholics.67 But it was a blunt weapon, for two not wholly complementary reasons. First, Catholic clergy had little difficulty in persuading the laity to reject the oath, since it was so unambiguously contrary to their faith and ecclesiastical loyalty.68 As a result, it threatened to put the entire Catholic population, even those who most strenuously protested their secular loyalty to James, outside the political process, seriously threatening that essential political consensus which enabled government to function effectively. Second, the sheer size of the Catholic majority made it difficult to impose it effectively, especially in local government, where determined recusants, such as mayors, who were elected annually and repeatedly refused to take the oath, stretched the enforcement powers of the central government to breaking point.69 In such circumstances the oath of allegiance seemed an attractive and politic option to the government, since it might serve, at the very least, to sow dissension amongst the otherwise united recusants, at best to drive a wedge between those prepared to renounce the deposing power and those who were not, and bring the former back into political life. In 1611, a Scottish bishop, Andrew Knox, recently appointed to the see of Raphoe by James with a special brief to reform the Church of Ireland, secured royal permission for bishops to impose the oath of allegiance on all important Catholics in their dioceses. But the king soon had to backtrack on this potentially draconian power, once it became plain that the English Act of 1606 did not apply to Ireland and therefore there were no statutory punishments for those who refused the oath.70 Efforts persisted, however, and one of the Acts proposed in 1611 for the forthcoming parliament (but subsequently dropped because of Catholic opposition) was an ambitious plan to establish a commission to take the oath from all Catholics over the age of 16.71 Nevertheless, as it became increasingly apparent over time that the oath of supremacy was not going to secure the mass conversion of

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recusants, the desire to secure Catholic loyalty by some less daunting means grew. The 1622 Commissioners, sent over to review the functioning of the whole Irish polity, civil and ecclesiastical, noted that the exclusion of Catholics from practising law was proving detrimental to both the courts because Catholics were settling cases outside the legal system, and to the state because recusant lawyers were proving more troublesome and hostile to the government, since they no longer feared losing official favour. As a means of securing their loyalty, the Commissioners proposed that recusant lawyers be made JPs so long as they were prepared to take the oath of allegiance.72 In 1627, Lord Deputy Falkland extended this proposal by suggesting that Catholics be allowed to serve as mayors and sheriffs provided they took the oath of allegiance.73 Whether the oath of allegiance would ever have made any impact in Ireland is debatable. Though it is true that most of the Old English delegation in 1614 rejected the papal deposing power, and it is possible that, under pressure, other Catholics might have done the same, there is no evidence that the issue of the deposing power caused the same deep fissures and arguments amongst Irish Catholics that it had amongst their English co-religionists. It may therefore be no coincidence that one of the earliest printed Catholic rebuttals of the oath of allegiance came from an Irish source, the Jesuit Henry Fitzsimon.74 He wrote in 1607 that the oath of allegiance was ‘in substance all one with the old oath of supremacy’.75 Catholics, he acknowledged, should never fail to demonstrate their loyalty to James ‘at all occurrences’: ‘but to swear these present oaths, that you may not, because they contain an abjuration of his authority, to whom Christ Jesus hath committed the charge of all his flock.’76 The Appellant controversy did, it is true, make brief forays into Ireland. James White thought he detected behind Mountjoy’s questions ‘a certain seditious book written in English by a wicked and abandoned man’ – almost certainly the recent work of an English Appellant priest, William Watson.77 James Ussher, the leading Irish Protestant academic, kept detailed notes on Appellant arguments.78 And in 1611 Francis Barnaby, who had served as chaplain to Mabel, Countess of Kildare, was arrested and imprisoned in Dublin Castle along with two other priests, Conor O’Devany and Patrick O’Loughran. Initially the authorities thought they had arrested another ‘traitor’ like O’Devany and O’Loughran, who maintained the deposing power of the pope. But Barnaby was in fact a member of the Appellant party. He soon established friendly relations with the young Ussher, and even went so far as to take the oath of allegiance, producing a


lengthy defence of his decision, demonstrating in the process a detailed knowledge of contemporary political theology and of developments in other European countries, particularly France. Barnaby, however, was not typical. He was English, and his example was not followed by his imprisoned confreres, or any other Irish priests. Hence their sharply divergent fates: O’Devany and O’Loughran were executed by the government in 1612, joining the list of Catholic Irish martyrs, while Barnaby was released and even recommended to Salisbury.79 Given James’s insistence on the centrality of the deposing power, Irish Catholics’ struggle for toleration during the first two decades of the seventeenth century was therefore mainly a defensive one: resisting the efforts of the Dublin government to impose conformity; trying to convince the king that such measures were in any case unnecessary because Catholics were loyal subjects; and using their influence in parliament to prevent the introduction of any new powers to exclude Catholics from power or force them to conform. Thanks to their solidarity and their numerical superiority, they succeeded in resisting the introduction of the oath of allegiance and in maintaining their running battle against the oath of supremacy. What they did not manage to secure was their ultimate goal, a formal toleration. Underneath this apparent failure, however, progress had been made. There was just beginning to emerge, in, for instance, the recommendation of the 1622 Commissioners, a distinction between the different ways that an oath could be used. As far as the leaders of the Irish church–state were concerned, an oath was part of a threefold offensive strategy: it constituted a dividing line between confessions, which ministers and magistrates had to use their utmost power to get recusants to cross; it was a political weapon, a means of excluding Catholics and ensuring that all those admitted to positions of power, influence and office were committed to Protestantism; and, finally, it could be used economically, as a means of attacking the wealth and status of determined Catholics and threatening them with jail and ruin. The oath of supremacy was the obvious example of aggressive, exclusive use of an oath. The enthusiasm of Irish Protestant leaders such as Bishop Knox for the widespread application of the oath of allegiance can probably be put down to similar reasons. But it was also possible to use a carefully phrased oath more defensively or inclusively – as a means of ensuring the loyalty of an otherwise alienated or excluded section of the population, yet without forcing them to abandon their religious principles. The oath of allegiance did not meet these criteria, but it went some way along the road to doing so, offering a way forward for

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those (especially those in charge of Irish affairs in England) anxious to create a more cohesive Irish polity which included Catholics and Protestants.

IV What had seemed hopeless in the first two decades of the seventeenth century changed dramatically in the 1620s. The deus ex machina which promised to save Irish Catholics was Spain: first as ally, then as enemy. The initial opportunity came from James’s desire to marry his son Charles to the Spanish Infanta, which had potentially dramatic implications for royal religious policy. As early as 1617 (or thereabouts) Peter Lombard had briefed Pope Paul V about the proposed match, arguing that it offered a golden opportunity to secure the ‘free use and exercise of the Catholic religion’ and, even more invitingly, the abrogation of anti-Catholic statutes.80 The marriage became a matter for serious negotiation in the early 1620s, culminating in Charles’s visit to Spain in 1623. In exact proportion, Protestant horror in England and Ireland was matched by Catholic optimism, as it became plain that the Spanish would insist on a relaxation of the penal legislation being included as part of the marriage treaty. Catholics were even offered a tantalising foretaste of what relief might be in store, as James, in an effort to prove his good faith to the Spanish, ordered the suspension of recusancy proceedings in both England and Ireland.81 The development of Catholic thinking on the politico-religious settlement in Ireland is most evident in the recently discovered appeal which Irish Catholics made to Philip IV of Spain at this time.82 Recognising the opportunity, it urged the Spanish king to press James to grant toleration for Irish Catholics by repealing anti-Catholic legislation and to restore to their church the ecclesiastical property lost to the Church of Ireland at the Reformation. Both these demands were subtly phrased. Unlike O’Neill in the Nine Years War, the appeal did not demand the creation of a Catholic state under a Catholic ruler: James was implicitly accepted as king, and the reality of the Protestant presence in Ireland acknowledged in the sweeping request that ‘full and universal liberty of conscience be granted throughout Ireland for all categories of people without any exception whatsoever’. There was, moreover, a fall-back position if the wholesale return of ecclesiastical property proved impractical, allowing division of the spoils between the two churches, and accepting the right of the Protestants to tithes.83 In fine, an ambitious, but not impractical or impolitic proposal.


The collapse of the marriage plans in 1623, and the subsequent lurch into war with Spain after Charles’s succession in 1625, appeared to scupper, once again, the hopes of Irish Catholics for significant change. But, perversely, the desperate need to defend Ireland against the Spanish threat offered a reprieve. The government was anxious both to secure Catholic loyalty in the face of foreign invasion and to get funds to pay for the essential military preparations. Increasingly confident and assertive as a result of their de facto toleration, Catholic leaders proposed to a receptive Charles that they make a substantial financial contribution in return for a set of religious and civil reforms – the ‘matters of grace and bounty’, or the graces. As the king overruled the doubts of the Protestant leaders in Dublin, the prospect loomed of some kind of formal toleration, confirmed by an Irish parliament.84 Many of the proposed graces were of purely secular import, most notably the promise of security of tenure for landholders, and some were equally welcome to New English as well as Old English and native Irish. But there was also significant provision for specifically Catholic religious concerns: Irish lawyers were to be allowed to practise if they took an oath of allegiance; the 12d penalty for not attending church was to be suspended; recusants were not to be prosecuted in ecclesiastical courts; and wards were to be allowed to sue out their liveries without taking an oath of allegiance.85 Such concessions were anathema to the Irish Protestants, and their vigorous protests ensured that the final version of the graces dropped the reference to the suspension of the 12d fine and added an oath of allegiance to be taken by wards. Nevertheless, even the final draft represented a dramatic advance for Irish Catholics towards formal toleration. Though the individual concessions admitted them only to the periphery of Irish public life – by allowing them to practise as lawyers – and freed them from only one of the penal laws – that affecting wards – in terms of the principles conceded they had made a momentous gain. At first sight, the imposition of an oath of allegiance seemed to take away much of the substance of the concessions. After all, the formal position of the papacy on this taking of the oath had not altered since the outright ban of the early seventeenth century. But the graces did not, in fact, insist on the oath of allegiance, but on a much watereddown version: I A.B. do truly acknowledge, profess, testify and declare in my conscience, before God and the world, that our sovereign lord King Charles is lawful and rightful king of this realm, and other of his

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Majesty’s dominions and countries. And I will bear faithful and true allegiance to his Majesty, his heirs and successors, and him and them will defend to the uttermost of my power against all conspiracies and attempts whatsoever, which shall be made against his or their crown and dignity, and do my best endeavour to disclose and make known unto his Majesty, his heirs or successors, or to the Lord Deputy or other Governors for the time being, all treasons and traitorous conspiracies, which I shall know or hear to be intended against his Majesty, or any of them. And I do make this recognition and acknowledgement heartily, willingly and truly, upon the true faith of a Christian. So help me God.86 This was based upon the 1606 English oath, including the opening and closing clauses, but it omitted the crucial central section, which required Catholics to acknowledge that the Pope, neither of himself nor by any authority of the church or see of Rome, or by any other means with any other hath any power or authority to depose the king, or to dispose any of his Majesty’s kingdoms or dominions, or to authorize any foreign prince to invade or annoy him or his countries, or to discharge any of his subjects of their allegiance and obedience to his Majesty, or to give license or leave to any of them to bear arms, raise tumult, or to offer any violence or hurt to his Majesty’s royal person, state or government, or to any of his Majesty’s subjects within his Majesty’s dominions.87 Reflecting the recent Catholic acknowledgement that James had never been formally excommunicated, it also left out the prefix to the promise to ‘bear faithful and true allegiance to his Majesty’: ‘notwithstanding any declaration or sentence of excommunication or deprivation made or granted or to be made or granted by the Pope or his successors … against the said king, his heirs or successors, or any absolution of the said subjects from their obedience.’88 Not surprisingly, the initiative for this oath came from the Catholic side – the vital intermediary here was almost certainly Sir John Bath, an influential Old English Catholic living in London, who had direct access to the English court, and was deeply concerned at the increasing exclusion of the Old English Catholics from office and influence.89 Bath proposed in 1625 that the oath of supremacy should be replaced


by one relating to ‘temporal subjection and allegiance only’.90 Subsequently he explained the logic behind it: As the oath of supremacy concerning spiritual causes breeds scruple in the Catholic subjects, and as all other princes exact of their subjects such oaths as shall assure them of their loyalty and hold those subject in due temporal obedience, the Catholics pray that the king may be satisfied with an oath of temporal loyalty … 91 This oath represented a tacit acceptance of the long-standing arguments of Rothe, Lombard and Comerford. Catholics were being asked to swear temporal allegiance only to the king. The progress since the time of James was startling, and nearly all on the royal side. The problem of the deposing power, which James had made the centrepiece of his policy, was silently and quietly abandoned by his son. Quite why Charles was prepared to do what his father had so set his face against is by no means clear. The fact that Charles initially proposed an alternative oath of loyalty which, though general, did implicitly condemn the deposing power, suggests that James’s principles had not just been forgotten, but, rather, consciously overridden – a triumph of pragmatism over a political theory that stood in the way of financial and military necessity, perhaps, or, more strategically, a recognition of the realities of governing a polity where the majority of the inhabitants rejected the established church.92 Whatever the motivation, the first tentative steps had been taken towards admitting Irish Catholics back into the circles of privilege and influence from which they had been excluded, and ending the threat of plantation which had so dangerously alienated them from political processes. Though English Catholics would have enthusiastically welcomed such an oath, the realities of a Protestant state made a formal concession along these lines unthinkable in England. But the different religious constitution of the king’s three dominions pushed royal policy in diametrically opposite directions.93 In Ireland the graces represented a realistic recognition of the size, persistence and determination of the Irish Catholic majority at a moment of military crisis. With the benefit of hindsight, the proposed oath appears startlingly modern, recognising what so few in the early seventeenth century were willing to accept – that a line could and had to be drawn between civil and religious loyalties in order to ensure the effective functioning of divided polities. Above all, it represented not the aggressive exploitation of an

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oath to exclude, as favoured by many Irish Protestants, but an inclusive use of it to allow Catholics to participate in the Irish polity, a reflection of the very different perspective of the king and his advisors in London. The great weakness of the graces from the point of view of the Irish Catholics was that they had been extracted at a moment of crisis. Though they had gained an important point of principle, they were repeatedly baulked in their efforts to turn the concession into permanent political gains. Changing circumstances, most notably the diminishing of the threat of invasion, combined with the deep-seated opposition of the Irish Protestant church and state, not to mention Falkland’s blunder in failing to call parliament properly, ensured that the graces were never confirmed by statute. Security of tenure, that key Catholic demand, was never granted, though the new oath of allegiance was used by the courts of wards and it was ordered that Catholic lawyers who took it should be allowed to practise.94 But the harsh realities of the division between Catholic and Protestant, both in theory and in practice, had not been negotiated away. The departure of Falkland in 1629 was followed by a recrudescence of persecution, as the Dublin government came under the influence of the two Lords Justices, the Earl of Cork and Adam Viscount Loftus, who gave vent to the pent-up frustrations of their fellow New English in restoring the rigorous implementation of the 12d fine and the suppression of public celebration of the Catholic religion. The hostility to Catholic demands was summed up in 1633 by one veteran English planter, Valentine Gookin, when he complained of their twofold thrust: to reverse their exclusion from government office and at the same time to secure liberty of conscience which, he complained, ‘is already without bounds’:95 I dare be so bold to aver that no papist can be so loyal a subject to our king’s majesty as he ought to be; for if they be judged by the holy ghost to be Antichristians, that profess to be Christians … what may we judge of those that profess themselves to be subjects, and yet deny his Majesty to be their king … and deem his sacred Majesty and us all that profess the evangelical truth heretics … 96

V The arrival of Lord Deputy Wentworth in 1633, it is true, saw a significant change in policy. Although he initially played along with Irish Catholic hopes in order to ensure their support in parliament, he had


no intention of conferring statutory approval on the graces. Nor, however, did he wish to enforce conformity through the familiar means urged by the leaders of the Irish church-state. Rather, he favoured a policy of toleration by connivance. This was, however, a matter of pragmatism rather than of principle. The use of the oath of supremacy to exclude Catholics from local government was suspended, it is true, but the new oath of allegiance was not used as a basis to negotiate fresh terms on which Catholics could be admitted to public life. Wentworth stressed in private his desire eventually to impose religious uniformity on Ireland, but believed that before it could be done, it was essential thoroughly to reform and build up the established church, so that it would be in a position to minister to Catholic converts. Since this was a lengthy task, taking the whole of the 1630s, the result was a de facto recognition of Catholics’ right to practise their religion. As Wentworth instructed Christopher Wandesford in 1636, when his deputy wrote to him in England asking for instructions about whether to suppress a meeting of Catholic friars, the time was not ripe for precipitate actions: ‘you know my ground not to attempt at all, till we be provided to draw it through.’97 Toleration by connivance, though it provided the Catholic Church with crucial breathing space to develop its diocesan and parochial structures, and even allowed its regular and secular clergy the luxury of public bickering, nevertheless did not offer any permanent solution to the problem of conflicting loyalties.98 So long as Ireland was peaceful, and the wider political and diplomatic situation favourable, Irish Catholics could continue to practise their religion quietly without the fear of persecution. But, crucially, there were no guarantees. The leaders of the Church of Ireland did not complain, partly because of Wentworth’s efforts generously to re-endow it. But the underlying hostility to popery on the part of Irish Protestants had not vanished. Above all, the penal legislation remained on the statute book. Even the Lord Deputy saw his policy as a temporary respite. It was, in Aidan Clarke’s words, ‘ominously incongruous’.99 And when, in the turmoil of the early 1640s, the Old English, the New English and their allies in the English parliament began to regain some political power and influence, the graces and the question of religious policy returned to the agenda. Their continuing significance into the 1640s was, of course, primarily a product of their secular content which initially united both sides behind the pleas for their enactment. But, in the longer term, the persistent problem of religious policy implicit in the graces drove a wedge between the Old English and native Irish on

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the one hand, and the New English and the English parliamentary allies on the other. One of the justifications most commonly quoted by Catholics for their rising in 1641 was that the New English were conspiring with the English parliament to persecute and even massacre Irish Catholics.100 Subsequently, one of the ideas that most horrified English parliamentarians and Irish Protestants about royal policy was the idea of granting formal religious toleration to Irish Catholics.101 The renewal of persecution under Cromwell, and the beginning of the formal enactment of penal laws later in the seventeenth century, ensured that the conflict between religious and political loyalty persisted down to the nineteenth century. Mountjoy’s ‘What are you?’ thus reverberates down Irish history. His timing was precise. He raised the question at the moment when, on the one hand, the power of the English monarch was finally extended to the whole island, thus forcing all of Ireland’s Catholics to confront the issue of divided loyalty, and, on the other, when it was beginning to become apparent that the vast majority of Ireland’s population was determined to remain Catholic, thus presenting the English monarchs and their officials with their dilemma of how to operate in a Catholic country with a Protestant state. Serious efforts were made to find a compromise. Under James they foundered upon the scholarly royal distaste for the papal deposing power and the determination of the Irish Catholics to resist taking either the oath of supremacy or the oath of allegiance. His son, however, proved more accommodating, agreeing to an oath of allegiance which was acceptable to Irish Catholics. This was an astonishing reversal, a clear demonstration of the way in which the markedly different political and religious situations in England and Ireland could push royal policy in conflicting directions. What would have been inconceivable in Protestant England proved to be practical politics in Catholic-dominated Ireland. Ultimately, however, like the many other occasions in modern Irish history when sectarian or political compromise seemed possible, the opportunity was missed. Sheer contingency and ill luck, ranging from the shifting sands of international diplomacy to Falkland’s incompetence, together with the determined opposition of the New English and the Dublin authorities to any concessions, prevented Irish Catholics from getting parliamentary confirmation of the graces. Given the complexity of the Irish political and religious context, and the depth of religious divisions, it is hardly surprising that that standard early modern panacea, the oath, proved inadequate to the task of bringing Catholics and Protestants together in the same polity. Various


attempts were made to produce an acceptable form of words, but words alone could not bridge the ideological and political gaps and produce a consensus. Catholics wanted to distinguish between secular and ecclesiastical loyalties. But the whole thrust of the Reformation settlement in both England and Ireland was to tie church and state together in a way that made it almost impossible to separate religious and civil issues. The principled anti-Catholicism, not to mention the self-interest, of Irish Protestants ensured that the oath of supremacy survived to remain a bar to Catholic participation in the state, and was, in the long run, supplemented by further penal laws. The sheer size of the Catholic majority did, it is true, give them considerable leverage and power, but it was passive and negative, enabling them to resist or evade the effective imposition of oaths and penal laws, but not to repeal them and win a formal or official toleration. As a result the redundant formulas of various oaths lie scattered in the footnotes of history books, like constantly reworked themes and variations thrown into the dustbin by their frustrated composers: from the Remonstrance of 1661, to the Treaty of Limerick, through the Penal Laws, the Relief Acts, even down to the Emancipation Act of 1829 and beyond.102 Behind the drafting and redrafting lies complex political infighting on both sides of the religious divide, as tensions between the crown and the Protestant interest in Ireland were matched by the divisions between Anglo-Irish and Irish, papalists and ultramontanists, advocates of faith and fatherland and loyal royalists, all proving to their own satisfaction that it was possible, or impossible, to be a firm Catholic and a loyal subject.

Notes 1. My thanks to Johann Sommerville, Ciaran Brady and Hiram Morgan for helpful discussions and comments about the subject of this chapter. 2. John Lynch, Cambrensis Eversus, 3 vols (Dublin: Goodwin & Nethercott, 1848–52), vol. 3, pp. 521–50, translated in James White, ‘The Irish Catholics after the Death of Queen Elizabeth’, Duffy’s Irish Catholic Magazine, 22 (1848) pp. 270–5, 296–302; Fynes Moryson, An Itinerary, 2 vols (London, 1617), vol. 2, pp. 28f.; White had reportedly preached a sermon claiming that ‘now they might thank God that every man might freely enjoy the fruits of his own reward … for now Jezabel was dead’: J.S. Brewer and William Bullen (ed.), Calendar of the Carew Manuscripts Preserved in the Archiepiscopal Library at Lambeth, 6 vols (London, 1867–1873) [hereafter, Cal. Carew], vol. 6 (1603–24), p. 10; for a general survey of the Catholic responses to James’s succession, see A.J. Sheehan, ‘The Recusancy Revolt of 1603: a Reinterpretation’, Archivium Hibernicum, 38 (1983) pp. 3–13.

26 3. 4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

Alan Ford Lynch, Cambrensis eversus, vol. 3, p. 535; White, ‘Irish Catholics’, p. 297. Ibid. Lynch, Cambrensis eversus, vol. 3, pp. 535–6; White, ‘Irish Catholics’, p. 297. Daniel 6; Acts 5.29; for a similar enquiry in Cork, see A.J. Sheehan (ed.), ‘An Interrogation Carried out in Cork in 1600 by the Ecclesiastical High Commission for Recusancy: A Document from Laud MS 612, Bodleian Library, Oxford’, Analecta Hibernica 31 (1984), pp. 61–8. Robert Daborne, A sermon preached in the cathedral church of the city of Waterford, in Febr. 1617, before the … Lord President of Munster, and the State… At which time the charter of the same city, being by divers juries found forfeit, was lastly surrendered (London, 1618), pp. 8–34. P.C., The inquisition of a sermon preached in the cathedral church of the city of Waterford, in February 1617 &c by Robert Daborne Chancellor of the said cathedral (Waterford, 1644). As the printer’s note to the reader explains, this could not be published when it was written because of the persecution of Irish Catholics. The reference on p. 232 to it being now 1620 years after Christ, suggests 1620 as the date when it was actually written. The copy in Marsh’s library contains twentieth-century correspondence discussing whether the author was Patrick Comerford the bishop or another Catholic priest of the same name: the balance of probabilities is strongly in favour of it having been written by the former. Ibid., pp. 66, 10–12. Ibid., pp. 18f., 28f. Ibid., pp 29f. Ibid., p. 65f. J.H. Burns and Mark Goldie (eds), The Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) chs. 6–8; Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978) vol. 2. M.P. Holt, The French Wars of Religion 1562–1629 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Philip Benedict, ‘Une roi, une loi, deux fois: Parameters for the History of Catholic-Reformed Co-existence in France, 1555–1685’, in O.P. Grell and Robert Scribner (eds), Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) pp. 71f.; Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, ii, chs. 8–9; Burns and Goldie (eds), History of Political Thought, chs. 7–8. Statutes (Ire.), 33 Henry VIII c.1. J.A. Watt, The Church in Medieval Ireland (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1972), p. 28; J.A. Watt, The Church and the Two Nations in Medieval Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970) pp. 36–8. Laurence McCorristine, The Revolt of Silken Thomas (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1987) p. 95; R.D. Edwards, Church and State in Tudor Ireland. A History of the Penal Laws against Irish Catholics 1534 –1603 (Dublin: Talbot, 1935) p. 166. In 1554, when the Catholic Philip and Mary succeeded to the throne, it was Pope Paul IV who granted them their Irish kingdom, reserving his papal rights in doing so: James Morrin (ed.), Calendar of the Patent and Close Rolls of Chancery in Ireland, 3 vols (Dublin, 1861–3), vol. 1, p. 339. Similarly, in 1570 when Archbishop Maurice MacGibbon of Cashel wanted to offer the Irish kingship directly to Philip II of Spain, Cardinal Alciati, the Cardinal


18. 19.

20.

21.

22.

23. 24. 25.

26.

27.

28.

Protector of Ireland, warned him against such a course, as ignoring the fact that Ireland was a papal fiefdom whose kingship could only be assigned with the authority of the pope. P.F. Moran (ed.), Spicilegium Ossoriense: being a collection of original letters and papers illustrative of the history of the Irish church from the reformation to the year 1800, 3 vols (Dublin, 1874–84), vol. 1, pp. 59–64; J.H. Pollen, The English Catholics in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth. A Study in their Politics, Civil Life and Government (London: Longmans, Green, 1920) p. 221; for a discussion of these claims from a Protestant point of view, see James Ussher, The Whole Works, ed. C.R. Elrington and J.H. Todd, 17 vols (Dublin, London, 1847–64), vol. 4, pp. 360ff. Pollen, English Catholics, pp. 149–51; Patrick McGrath, Papists and Puritans under Elizabeth I (London: Blandford, 1967) pp. 69–72. M.V. Ronan, The Reformation in Ireland under Elizabeth, 1558–80 (London: Longmans, 1930) p. 620; J.B. Wainewright (ed.), ‘Some Letters and Papers of Nicholas Sanders, 1562–1580’, Catholic Record Society, 26 (1926) pp. 20–3. Peter Lombard, De regno Hiberniae, sanctorum insula, commentarius, ed. P.F. Moran (Dublin, 1868); Mícheál MacCraith, ‘The Gaelic Reaction to the Reformation’, in S.G. Ellis and Sarah Barber (eds), Conquest and Union. Fashioning a British State, 1485–1725 (London: Longman, 1995) pp. 144–6; Hiram Morgan, ‘Faith and Fatherland in Sixteenth-century Ireland’, History Ireland, 3 no. 2 (1995), pp. 13–20; Hiram Morgan, ‘Hugh O’Neill and the Nine Years’ War in Tudor Ireland’, Historical Journal, xxxvi (1993), pp. 21–7. R.M. Kingdon (ed.), The Execution of Justice by William Cecil and A True, Sincere and Modest Defence of English Catholics by William Allen (New York: Cornell University Press, 1965). Hiram Morgan, ‘Faith and Fatherland or Queen and Country? An Unpublished Exchange between O’Neill and the State at the Height of the Nine Years War’, Dúiche Néill Journal of the O’Neill Country Historical Society, 11 (1994), p. 43. Ibid., p. 44. Ibid., pp. 46–50. Toleration, it must be remembered, was a word with predominantly negative connotations in the sixteenth century: Benedict, ‘Une roi, une loi, deux fois’, p. 67; N.M. Sutherland, ‘Persecution and Toleration in Reformation Europe’, in W.J. Sheils (ed.), Persecution and Toleration (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984); Studies in Church History, vol. 21, p. 153. Conrad Russell, The Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990) p. 53; see the discussion of this outlook in Alan Ford, ‘Reforming the Holy Isle: Parr Lane and the Conversion of the Irish’, in ‘A miracle of learning’: Irish Manuscripts, Their Owners, Their Uses, ed. T.C. Barnard, Dáibhí Ó Cróinín and Katharine Simms (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998) pp. 137–63. M.K. Walsh, An Exile of Ireland: Hugh O’Neill, Prince of Ulster (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1996); Gráinne Henry, The Irish Military Community in Spanish Flanders, 1586–1621 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1992) ch. 6; Mícheál MacCraith, ‘The Gaelic Reaction to the Reformation’, in Ellis and Barber (eds.), Conquest and Union, pp. 149f. Pollen, English Catholics, p. 293; M.J. Carrafiello, ‘Rebus sic stantibus and English Catholicism, 1606–1610’, Recusant History, 22 (1994), pp. 29–40.

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29. Walsh, Hugh O’Neill, pp. 12, 42. 30. A.J. Loomie, Spain and the Early Stuarts, 1585–1655 (Aldershot: Variorum, 1996). 31. Thomas Cogswell, The Blessed Revolution. English Politics and the Coming of War 1621–1624 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Thomas Cogswell, ‘England and the Spanish Match’, in Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (eds), Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics 1603– 42 (London: Longman,1989), pp. 107–33. 32. Holt, French Wars of Religion, pp. 162–72. 33. J.P. Sommerville, Politics and Ideology in England, 1603–1640 (London: Longman, 1986), p. 196; Burns and Goldie (eds), History of Political Thought, pp. 236–40. 34. Peter Holmes, Resistance and Compromise. The Political Thought of Elizabethan Catholics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 207. 35. Arnold Pritchard, Catholic Loyalism in Elizabethan England (London: Scolar, 1979). 36. Holmes, Resistance and Compromise, p. 222. 37. J.P. Sommerville, ‘Jacobean Political Thought and the Controversy over the Oath of Allegiance’, Cambridge University, Ph.D. thesis, 1981; Sommerville, Politics and ideology; Thomas Clancy, ‘English Catholics and the Papal Deposing Power, 1570 –1640’, Recusant History, 6 –7 (1961–2, 1963– 4), pp. 6, 205–27; 7, 2–10; Holmes, Resistance and Compromise. 38. Statutes, 3&4 Jac. I c.4 §9. 39. Some modern historians have, as a result, lauded the Appellants and the oath of allegiance as representing brave but overly ambitious attempt to redefine the boundaries between church and state: see John Bossy in The London Review of Books, vol. 18, no. 7 (4 April 1996) p. 20. 40. J.P. Sommerville, ‘Jacobean Political Thought and the Oath of Allegiance’; M.C. Questier, ‘Loyalty, Religion and State Power in Early Modern England: English Romanism and the Jacobean Oath of Allegiance’, Historical Journal, 90 (1997) pp. 311–29. 41. Breandán Ó Buachalla, ‘James Our True King: The Ideology of Irish Royalism in the Seventeenth Century’, in Political Thought in Ireland since the Seventeenth Century, ed. D.G. Boyce, Robert Eccleshall and Vincent Geoghegan (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 7–35; Rothe, Analecta, p. 169. 42. MacCraith, ‘Gaelic Reaction to the Reformation’, pp. 150–7. 43. James I, Basilikon Doron. Or his majesties instructions to his dearest son, Henry the prince (London, 1603); Peter Lombard, Preface to Episcopalis Doron, in J. Hagen (ed.), ‘Miscellanea Vaticano-Hibernica’, Archivium Hibernicum, 3 (1914), pp. 276f. 44. Lombard, Preface to Episcopalis Doron, p. 282. 45. Ibid., p. 283. 46. Silke, ‘Lombard and James’, pp. 135–44. 47. F.M. Jones, Mountjoy, 1563–1606: The Last Elizabethan Deputy (Dublin: Clonmore and Reynolds, 1958), p. 190; Holmes, Resistance and Compromise, p. 213. It should be noted, though, that Mountjoy saw an Irish edict as a temporary expedient. 48. Morgan, ‘Faith and Fatherland or Queen and Country?’, p. 32; Bodleian Library, Oxford, Barlow MS 13, fol 102r; Benignus Millett (ed.), ‘James


49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

59.

60.

61.

62.

63. 64.

Ussher, Francis Barnaby and Blessed Conor O’Devany, January–February 1612’, Collectanea Hibernica, 38 (1996),p. 50; for Barnaby, see below, p. 16. David Rothe, Analecta, p. 173; Brendan Jennings (ed.), Wadding Papers 1614–38 (Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 1953), p. 364. Clancy, ‘English Catholics and the Papal Deposing Power’, 6, pp. 134, 137, p. 205. By far the best general account is that by Aidan Clarke in T.W. Moody, F.X. Martin and F.J. Byrne, A New History of Ireland (Oxford, 1976) chs. 7–9; for more detailed analyses of policy towards Catholics, see R.D. Edwards, ‘The History of Penal Laws against Catholics in Ireland from 1534 to the Treaty of Limerick (1691)’, University of London, Ph.D. thesis, 1933; R.D. Edwards, ‘Church and State in the Ireland of Míchél Ó Cléirigh 1626–1641’, in Sylvester O’Brien (ed.), Measgra i gcuimhne Mhichíl Uí Chléirigh. Miscellany of historical and linguistic studies in honour of Brother Michael Ó Cleirigh, O.F.M. chief of the four masters 1643–1943 (Dublin, 1944); Alan Ford, The Protestant Reformation in Ireland (2nd edn, Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1997) ch. 3; Alan Ford, ‘Reforming the Holy Isle’; and John McCavitt, ‘Lord Deputy Chichester and the English Government’s “Mandates Policy” in Ireland, 1605–7’, in Recusant History, 20 (1991) 320–35. H.M.C., Report on Franciscan manuscripts (1906), pp. 61f. Rothe, Analecta, passim. Ibid., p. 59. Ibid., p. 77. Ibid., pp. 77, 103–5. Henry Fitzsimon, Words of Comfort … Letters from a Cell … and Diary of the Bohemian War of 1620, Edmund Hogan (ed.) (Dublin, 1881), p. 117. H.S. Pawlisch, Sir John Davies and the Conquest of Ireland. A Study in Legal Imperialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) ch. 6; McCavitt, ‘“Mandates Policy”’. Ussher, Works, vol. 2, p. 455; for a detailed exposition of James’s views, see his speech in the Star Chamber in June 1616, King James VI and I, Political Writings, J.P. Sommerville (ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 223f.; Rothe and Comerford were both familiar with James’s views, and quoted from this speech: Analecta, pp. 212–15; P.C., Inquisition of a Sermon, p. 29. Walter Wale to Cornelius de Rocha, 13 July 1613, quoted in F.M. O’Donoghue, ‘The Jesuit Mission in Ireland, 1598–1651’, Catholic University of America, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, 1982, pp. 119f. Cal. Carew, 1603–24, pp. 290f.; for a Catholic account, see Hagan (ed.), ‘Miscellanea Vaticano-Hibernica’, pp. 313f.; for a discussion of the different texts and the date of the speech, J.J. Silke, ‘Primate Lombard and James I’, Irish Theological Quarterly, 22 (1955), pp. 131f. Richard Bagwell, Ireland under the Stuarts, 3 vols. (London, 1890–1916), vol. 1, pp. 111–31; T.W. Moody, ‘The Irish Parliament under Elizabeth and James I’, in Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 45, sect. C, no. 6 (1939), pp. 58f. For the latter interpretation see Aidan Clarke, The Old English in Ireland, 1625– 42 (London, 1966), pp. 21f. Paolo Prodi, ‘Der Eid in der europäischen Verfassungsgeschichte: Zur Einführung’, in Paolo Prodi and Elisabeth Muller-Luckner (eds), Glaube und

30

65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

70.

71. 72. 73.

74.

75. 76. 77.

78. 79.

80. 81.

Alan Ford Eid: Treueformeln, Glaubensbekenntnisse und Sozialdisziplinierung zwischen Mittelalter und Neuzeit (Munich: R. Oldenberg, 1993), pp. vii–xxix; Christopher Hill, ‘From Oaths to Interest’, in Society and Puritanism (London: Secker & Warburg, 1964), pp. 382–419; Caroline Robbins, ‘Selden’s Pills: State Oaths in England, 1558–1714’, Huntingdon Library Quarterly, 35 (1972), pp. 303–21. Carrafiello, ‘Rebus sic stantibus’, p. 34. 2 Eliz., c.1, § 7. Colum Kenny, ‘The Exclusion of Catholics from the Legal Profession in Ireland, 1537–1829’, Irish Historical Studies, 25 (1987), pp. 337–57. See Lombard’s stern refusal to countenance any compromises on the oath of supremacy: Hagan (ed.), ‘Miscellanea Vaticano-Hibernica’, pp. 324–59. On the unavailing efforts to enforce the oath in the towns and cities, see P.C., Inquisition of a Sermon, pp. 20–2; Historical Manuscripts Commission, Reports on the manuscripts of the Earl of Egmont, 3 vols (London, 1905–9), vol. 1, pp. 45–50. Calendar of the State Papers Relating to Ireland, of the Reign of James I, C.W. Russell and J.P. Prendergast (eds.), 5 vols (London, 1872– 80), vol. 4 (1611–14), pp. 32, 96, 143, 147. Cal. Carew, 1603–24, p. 160; Calendar of State Papers Ireland James I, vol. 4 (1611–14), p. 249. B.L. Add. MS 4756, fol. 63v. Public Record Office, London [hereafter P.R.O.], S.P. 63/245/884 (Calendar of the State Papers Relating to Ireland, of the Reign of Charles I, R.P. Mahaffy (ed.), 4 vols (London, 1900–3), vol. 1 (1625–32), p. 298); quite which oath of allegiance Falkland meant is not clear. Henry Fitzsimon, A reply to M. Riders rescript. And a discourse of puritan partiality in his behalf. Together with a brief narration why this author himself, renounced Protestantcy … Also, an answer to sundry complaintive letters of afflicted Catholics. Declaring the severity of late proclamations; as, of the speedy banishment of all priests; of death to them and their receivers, if any remained; of the oath of allegiance; ransacking of pursuivants; and of utter ruin to any professing the Catholic religion (Rouen, 1608), pp. 108ff.; Fitzsimon, Words of Comfort, pp. 39ff. Fitzsimon, Words of Comfort, pp. 39f. Ibid., p. 41. Lynch, Cambrensis eversus, vol. 3, 535; White, ‘Irish Catholics’, p. 297; William Watson, A decacordon of ten quodlibeticall questions concerning religion and state (London, 1602). Bodleian Library, Oxford, Rawlinson MS C849, fols. 57r–60r. P.R.O., S.P. 63/222/183 (Calendar of State Papers Ireland James I, vol. 2 (1606–8), p. 346); S.P. 63/223/3 (Calendar of State Papers Ireland James I, vol. 2 (1606–8), pp. 393f.); S.P. 63/231/87 (Calendar of State Papers Ireland James I, vol. 4 (1611–14), p. 156); S.P. 63/232/16 (Calendar of State Papers Ireland James I, vol. 4 (1611–14), p. 253); Pritchard, Catholic Loyalism, p. 157; Holmes, Resistance and Compromise, ch. 17; Bodleian Library, MS Barlow 13, fols. 17r, 18r, 103r–104v; Millett (ed.), ‘Ussher, Barnaby and O’Devany’, pp. 40–51. Hagan (ed.), ‘Miscellanea Vaticano-Hibernica’, p. 321. Ford, The Protestant Reformation, pp. 205–7.

‘Firm Catholics’ or ‘Loyal Subjects’? 31 82. Glyn Redworth (ed.), ‘Beyond Faith and Fatherland: The Appeal of the Catholics of Ireland, c. 1623’, Archivium Hibernicum, 52 (1998), pp. 3–23. 83. Ibid., p. 13. 84. Clarke, Old English, ch. 2; Aidan Clarke, The Graces (Dundalk: Dundalgan, 1968); Moody, Martin and Byrne (ed.), New History of Ireland, iii, pp. 232–5. 85. S.P. 63/243/446 (Calendar of State Papers Ireland Charles I, vol. 1 (1625–32), p. 157). 86. Clarke, Old English, pp. 242f.; BL Harleian MS 6842, fol. 117r. 87. Statutes, 3&4 Jac. I c.4 §9. 88. Some secondary works simply refer to ‘the oath of allegiance’ without noting the changes: e.g. Michael Perceval-Maxwell, The Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion of 1641 (Dublin, 1994), p. 12; Kenny, ‘Catholics and the Legal Profession’, p. 347, notes that it is new, but mistakenly identifies it as distinctive because ‘it did not require recognition of the sovereign’s supremacy in matters spiritual’. 89. Clarke, Old English, pp. 30–7; Victor Treadwell, ‘Richard Hadsor and the Authorship of “Advertisements for Ireland”, 1622/3’, Irish Historical Studies, 30 (1997), p. 325. 90. P.R.O., S.P. 63/268/62; Clarke, Old English, p. 32. 91. P.R.O., S.P. 63/276/112; (Calendar of State Papers Relating to Ireland, R.P. Mahaffy (ed.) (London, 1908), (1647– 60), Addenda, 1625– 60, pp. 311f.). 92. P.R.O., S.P. 63/243/400, 415 (Calendar of State Papers Ireland, Charles I, vol. 1 (1625–32), pp. 144, 149); Clarke, Old English, p. 36. 93. Russell, Causes of the English Civil War, pp. 128f. 94. Clarke, Old English, pp. 57f. 95. Bodleian Library, MS Tanner 458, fo. 136v. 96. Ibid., fo. 137v. 97. Thomas Carte (ed.), A Collection of Letters (London, 1735), p. 3. 98. H.F.J. Kearney, ‘Ecclesiastical Politics and the Counter-Reformation in Ireland, 1619–1648’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 2 (1960), pp. 202–12. 99. Clarke, Old English, p. 123. 100. Perceval-Maxwell, Irish Rebellion, pp. 233–9. 101. Moody, Martin and Byrne (ed.), New History of Ireland, iii, pp. 305f.; Ussher, Works, vol. 1, pp. 236–7. 102. For a survey of later attempts, see James Brennan, ‘A Gallican Interlude in Ireland’, Irish Theological Quarterly, 24 (1957), pp. 219–37, 283–309; Patrick Fagan, Divided Loyalties: The Question of the Oath for Irish Catholics in the Eighteenth Century (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1997).

2 Thomas Sheridan: Toleration and Royalism Vincent Geoghegan

Thomas Sheridan is of interest to the history of Irish political thought in that like Edmund Burke, he was an Irish writer who threw himself into the tumultuous political debates convulsing Britain and Europe, while retaining an intense and informed interest in the affairs of Ireland. Unlike Burke he was not a major original thinker, his importance instead lying in the way he articulated a range of theoretical and political positions in the course of a deeply engaged political life, spent amongst the good and the great, in a time of high political drama in Britain and Ireland. Brought up a Protestant, though from an Old Irish family in the paternal line, he was, like Locke, an advocate of religious toleration (publishing before Locke’s celebrated Letter Concerning Toleration). Unlike the great Whig writer, however, Sheridan included Roman Catholicism amongst the creeds to be tolerated. He himself was to convert to Roman Catholicism, and at the end of his life wrote a manuscript explicitly abandoning toleration in favour of an intolerant Catholicism. Politically, he linked himself to the Stuart dynasty and came to espouse a legitimist and royalist absolutism which led him into Jacobite exile in 1689. Throughout, he was supportive of the right of the English Crown in Ireland, viewing it as the bedrock of his plans to reform Ireland’s culture, economy and institutions. For a brief period in James II’s reign, as First Commissioner of the Irish Revenue, and as secretary to Tyrconnell, he opposed the new Lord Deputy’s attempts to disadvantage Protestants in favour of Old English Catholics, but in his final manuscript he looked forward to a totally Catholic Ireland. This chapter will seek to explore these continuities and discontinuities. Sheridan grew up in an environment deeply marked by a range of cross-cutting religious, ethnic, cultural and political identities. Although 32

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born in St. John’s, near Trim, Co. Meath in 1646,1 he was descended from a Cavan Old Irish family which had been swept up by the momentous events of early seventeenth-century Ulster. Thus whereas his grandfather had been a local Catholic landowner, his father, Dennis, was left an orphan and dispossessed by the Ulster plantation, eventually being brought up a Protestant in the house of a local cleric. Dennis himself became a Protestant clergyman, married an English Protestant named Foster, and came to the attention of William Bedell, Bishop of Kilmore, who made use of Sheridan’s fluency in Irish in his attempts to convert the Gaelic Catholic population.2 In the rebellion of 1641, Dennis Sheridan’s family and social connections with leading local Catholics enabled him, for a period, to keep his house as a sanctuary for fleeing Protestants, including Bedell, who died of typhus in the Sheridan household. Eventually Sheridan too had to flee, and Thomas was born in this period of exile from Cavan. Raised a Protestant, Sheridan graduated from Trinity College Dublin in 1664, where he was elected to a fellowship in 1667,3 and briefly entered the Middle Temple in 1670 before abandoning the law to become collector of the customs in Cork. His next few years were spent in a whole series of speculative financial projects involving various Irish revenues, which seem to have brought him a degree of wealth. A vital element of these enterprises was the acquisition of powerful patrons at court, and Sheridan successfully attached himself, first, to Ormond (possibly via his brother William, the future non-juring Bishop of Kilmore and Ardagh, who was, for a time in the 1660s, Ormond’s chaplain), and, ultimately, to James, Duke of York. By 1677 Sheridan had left Ireland for England. He was clearly a rising presence, for in 1677, as part of Ormond’s entourage, he received an honorary D.C.L. from Oxford University (where Ormond was Chancellor), and in 1679 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. In 16784 he published A Discourse of the Rise & Power of Parliaments, of Laws, of Courts of Judicature, of Liberty, Property, and Religion, of the Interest of England in reference to the Desines of France; of Taxes and of Trade. In a Letter from a Gentleman in the Country to a Member of Parliament. As the title suggests, the text is divided into three broad sections dealing with constitutional history and theory, religious controversy, and economic and financial policy. Among the varied contents is a reasoned case for religious toleration. Sheridan’s starting point is a distinction between a divinely grounded reason and nature – a source of certainty – and a fallible realm of understanding and opinion, occasioned by differences in temperament and education, and by clashes of

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interest. A consequence of the latter is that people will fail to agree on a wide range of matters. God, however, has made sure that all that is required for human felicity in this life and the next can be indisputably ascertained through the fundamentals of scripture. Religious disputation is thus a sure sign that essentials are not at stake, for ‘only the Fundamentals can be tru, or necessary, because in them alone al agree’.5 This minimalist stance on basic truths allows Sheridan to advocate a fairly wide-ranging toleration. If people lead good lives, it is dangerous and presumptuous to condemn them because they hold a number of religious beliefs different from our own. The substratum of truth legitimates continual educational improvement and the eradication of selfish interests, but delegitimates doctrinal dispute and forceful evangelising: since the Foundations of Religion are Eternal Truths, were Men rightly instructed, of which al are capable, because al desin’d for Happiness, and Men got nothing by lying; we shoud have as much Truth, and as little Disputing in matters of Christianity, as in the Mathematical sciences: Or, at least, if men desin’d nothing really but the tru Ends of it, Eternal Happiness, it might be lawful for every Man, even in the way which another cals Heresie, to worship the God of his Fathers; for, tho one thinks his a clearer or a shorter way, than that of another, so long as he stil goes on; that is, treads in the Paths of a sober and virtuous Life; tho he may be more dabbl’d, or longer on the Road, what’s that to him? He that finds fault, may miss his own way, by looking towards his Brother; his particular Duty requires al his care …6 Sheridan contrasts the period of primitive Christianity, where plain universal preaching prevailed, with the rise of religious controversy in subsequent centuries, where clerics mystified religion to reinforce their privileged positions. Not least among the recent effects of inflexible religion is the disastrous chaos of the English civil war, brought about by zealous Puritans and reactionary Episcopalians. Likewise, the lack of religious toleration drove many into exile and made England an unattractive place for industrious foreigners to settle. The restraint of liberty of conscience ‘drove Shoals away in Queen Maries, King James and King Charles the First’s Dayes; it has lost the Wealth of England many Millions, and bin the occasion of spilling the Blood of many Thousands of its people’.7 He raises the spectre of a consequently weakened England being forced by a conquering France to worship in the


Roman Catholic mode. The future course of action should be clear: ‘What ever such violent disputes, have formerly been able to do, tis my duty to wish, and Yours to endeavor, that England be no more the Stage of such Tragedies … and be not backward in advising that Toleration is the First step, and Education the next that perfectly leads the way to peace and happiness.’8 His long-term vision is of a return to the spirit of the earliest days of Christianity, before division set in, and looks forward to the replacement of sectarian names by the common name of Christian – Christ’s seamless coat once more. There are limits to Sheridan’s espousal of toleration. His whole approach to restrictions is, however, pragmatic rather than principled. Atheists and the irreligious cannot be tolerated because their views are destructive of the basics of a good life. He also calls for restraints on those who might endanger the peace of the Commonwealth; thus Jesuits and regular priests are to be prohibited; secular priests and nonconforming ministers and teachers are to be limited; they and their flocks are to be registered and to be incapable of holding any civil office; wealthy members of congregations are to act as security against their preachers advocating sedition; and polemical literature is to be prohibited. The death penalty plays no part in any of Sheridan’s strictures, for he rejects capital punishment in all areas of the criminal law as being contrary to the law of nature, the positive law of God, and the purpose of all law amendment. Charles II is praised for his clemency, in respect to the death penalty, in his dealings with dissent; and Sheridan is convinced that the removal of systematic persecution from nonconformists would remove the glamour of martyrdom from them and lead to a decrease in their numbers. ‘Toleration with convenient Restrictions’9 is what he seeks. A discussion of the state of Ireland follows a consideration of the relationship between war and toleration. Sheridan’s fear is that when England, of necessity, goes to war with France, she will be vulnerable to French manipulation of domestic religious differences; the need is therefore to ‘reconcile by Toleration, our Differences in point of Religion, That the French Emisaries, or others, may not be able to strike Fire into the Tinder already prepared for the least Spark’.10 The two historic examples he gives are the French incitement of the Scots against England – which, he believes, could occur again by clever playing on, among others, religious grievances – and the Spanish encouragement of Tyrone’s rebellion in Elizabethan times. As with Scotland, Ireland could still be troubled waters in which the French might skilfully fish.

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Sheridan at no point reveals his own Irish origins, maintaining his persona as a native English gentleman. The native Irish, he says, were rightly punished for their various rebellions, but he is at pains to spell out both the strong negative feelings of these Irish towards England and positive elements in this relationship which could be enhanced by thoughtful English policy. On the negative side he points to the dispossession of significant sections of the Irish gentry, and the religious and civil disabilities they are under: this has ‘reduced them to a condition more like that of Slaves than Subjects’.11 The French might be able to persuade these leaders to foment further rebellion amongst the native population as a whole. On the positive side, Sheridan points to the fact that the Stuarts, given their dynastic roots in Ireland, might be expected to show some favour to the native Irish, and he repeats the view expressed to him by an ‘Irish Gentleman in France’ that the native Irish are now ruled by a legitimate Stuart dynasty, and therefore no longer considered themselves a conquered people: his Countrey-men were so pleased, that they were at last govern’d by a King descended from their own blood Royal, that they had resolved, to pay his Majesty and the Successors of his Line, the Allegiance due from natural born Subjects, not from a Conquer’d People, which they now no more esteem themselves, nor desire to be accounted by others … .12 Sheridan’s prescription assumes both that the English settled in Ireland have an undoubted legitimacy and that ‘there are few pure Families left’13 among the native Irish; it is a call for the extension to Ireland of all the benefits of England, including her language: If all the Natives were oblig’d to speak English, and all call’d by the Name of the English of Ireland, and allow’d equal Privileges in Trade, the same usages and customs, begetting a Harmony in Humor, that Rancor might in time be remov’d, which from a sense of being Conquer’d renders them now troublesom and chargeable to this Kingdom.14 He appears to have no objection in principle to the idea of a formal union, opining that there would be no fundamental differences of interest in such an arrangement, but he does note that many do not share this view. His views on Anglo-Irish relations are, in fact, remarkably similar to those of Sir William Petty, who was a clear advocate of a union.15 There is also a manifest lack of sympathy for traditional Irish


culture. Elsewhere in the text he suggests that one possible solution to England’s shortage of labour would be to import hundreds or even thousands of native Irish children to take up the slack. This would both increase the wealth of England and help pacify Ireland by aculturating these young people (making them ‘one and the same People with us’), who would soon ‘forget their Fathers House and Language’16 and could, at some time in the future, return to Ireland, presumably suitably anglicised. In this respect he is at variance with his father’s mentor Bedell, and is aligned with those arguments stressing the English language as a necessary instrument for the material and moral salvation of Ireland.17 James II clearly came to hold the latter approach, for in a 1692 set of instructions to his son, he was to advocate the education of the sons of the leading native Irish in England, and the setting up of schools in Ireland to teach English to Gaelic speakers, which would ‘by degrees weare out the Irish language’.18 Sheridan was by no means unique in his defence of toleration. Writers as varied as Bethell and Temple, Wolseley and Clifford, anticipated elements of Sheridan’s case;19 and whilst Sheridan’s persistent failure to register any intellectual debts renders the attribution of influence a virtually hopeless task, one might speculate about a direct influence of the tolerant stance of William Petty,20 with whom he was personally acquainted. (Their similarities on the issue of Anglo-Irish relations having already been noted.) Petty’s long sojourn in Ireland in turn raises the question of the role of the Irish context in moulding Sheridan’s tolerant perspective. It is certainly the case that within Petty’s circle there were a number of tolerant ‘sceptical Tories’, with experience of Irish administration, or interest in Irish reform (and often, like Sheridan, members of the Royal Society), who were to become members of ‘an embryonic scientific civil service’ in James II’s reign.21 Sheridan’s views on toleration can be seen to be both dissonant and congruent with the Irish polity of his day. One might speculate about a continuing influence upon him of William Bedell, who was famed for his desire to persuade rather than oppress religious opponents. In this respect he was part of a broader ‘persuasionist’ current in Ireland dating back to Elizabethan times, which was often in tune with the pragmatic policies of an English state which feared the social consequences of the ‘coercive’ strategies espoused by important figures in the Irish church and polity.22 He is thus at marked variance with the predominant position of the bishops of the Church of Ireland, and would seem to be in tune with the broadly accommodationist approach usually taken by the Restoration civic authorities (both English and Irish) in Ireland. Thus

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whilst there was no great love for nonconformism or Catholicism, there was a recognition that civic peace and economic prosperity could be best preserved by a light touch in matters of religion; only in times of political emergency, or when religious differences were flaunted or became overtly political, was a more forceful policy pursued.23 Sheridan’s patron Ormond became Lord Lieutenant in 1677, and owed his position partly to the Duke of York’s advocacy of him to Charles II (against Danby’s preferred candidate, Monmouth). Ormond, despite his staunch Anglicanism, pursued a cautious, pragmatic policy towards the non-Anglican groupings in Ireland, continuing his predecessor’s concern to place security and economic benefit first; he clearly distinguished moderate Catholics and dissenters from their more inflammatory co-religionists, including amongst the former his own Catholic parents and siblings.24 Ormond also had links with the Royal Society; amongst those receiving doctorates along with Sheridan in 1677 were two Fellows of the Society – Sir Kingsmil Lucy and Ormond’s close confidant, himself of an Irish family, Sir Robert Southwell.25 He also held William Petty in high esteem.26 Sheridan’s tolerationist stance thus appears to be embedded in a range of mutually reinforcing relationships encompassing the Duke of York, Ormond, Petty and the Royal Society, in which a strong Irish coloration is discernible. 1678 was the best and worst of times to be mounting a defence of toleration. By the summer of that year the ‘Popish Plot’ affair was afoot, ushering in an orgy of anti-Catholic feeling, which in turn helped generate the energy behind the Exclusion Crisis of the following year. A clearly rattled Sheridan issued a second edition of Power of Parliaments in late 1678 or early 1679 with an introductory ‘Preface, newly writ by the Bookseller’s Friend’ in which he pleaded that he ‘never dreamt of the horrid plot, which has been lately discovered, when he pleaded for toleration to honest and peaceable Dissenters’.27 In the preface he reiterates his principled defence of toleration, but takes pains to stress the legitimate restrictions to be placed on activities and doctrines subversive of the social and political order. Sheridan asserts that liberty is a ‘natural right’ from birth, but such a right needed to be distinguished from an unchangeable ‘natural law’: a natural right is subordinate to the public good and can be forfeited by abuse. Directly contradicting his previous rejection of capital punishment, he now claims that an ‘atheist, a murderer, &c. may as justly be killed as a viper or a wolf’28 because they threaten the very foundations of society and therefore lose the privileges of mankind. He enumerates subversive religio-political doctrines that cannot be tolerated – that dominion is founded on grace;


that heretical and idolatrous princes can be deposed; that true religion can be vindicated by the sword; that power is originally rooted in the people and can be resumed where maladministration occurs – and argues that those who advocate such principles deserve death. He insists that the intolerant cannot be tolerated, that ‘he that will not allow the same liberty which he asks, destroys the right to his own demands’.29 The sanguinary and self-exculpatory cast of the preface reveal it to be a piece written under pressure, though even under these conditions the principle of toleration, although attenuated, remains standing. Thus he took the opportunity of the preface to counter the Anglican canon of intolerant patristic sources with the more emollient opinions of, amongst others, Tertullian, Lactantius and Martin of Tours, disparaging the frequently cited Optatus, and co-opting to the tolerant camp John Chrysostom, and, above all, that mainstay of Restoration intolerance, Augustine (citing his tolerance towards the Manicheans, rather than his more usually ventilated severity towards the Donatists).30 Sheridan himself was shortly to fall victim to the hysteria surrounding the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis. By 1679 he had attached himself to the patronage of the Duke of York, following him into his temporary exile in Flanders in the wake of the Exclusion Crisis, and returning on the same ship as the duke.31 This relationship made him vulnerable to attack, not least as a way of ensnaring James (‘Through his Sides, tis well known, a very great Person was Shot at’32). It was alleged that he was a Catholic, a second Coleman (the former secretary of the Duke of York, who was hanged, drawn and quartered for his supposed involvement in the Popish Plot), and even a Jesuit priest and James’s confessor. He was imprisoned, and had to defend himself before the English House of Commons. In his defence, whilst denying that he was employed by the duke or knew anything of the Popish Plot, and strenuously adducing proofs of his deep and lasting Protestantism (‘I … will live and die in this Profession’33), he none the less maintained that he esteemed good people regardless of their religion, and reaffirmed his belief in liberty of conscience (consistent with the safety of the state). He was released after a short space of time – but it had been a very dangerous period for him. Sheridan’s stock seems to have remained high with a number of Irish grandees. In later recollections he particularly mentions two men who were bitter political opponents in Ireland during the Civil War, Antrim and Ormond. He was thus one of the executors of the will of Randal MacDonnell, Marquis of Antrim, who died in 1683, and says of Rose O’Neill, the marquis’s widow, that with her ‘he was free and intimat,

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having the honor of being own’d her relation’.34 Furthermore, when in 1682 the Earl of Anglesey publicly claimed that Ormond had been derelict in his duty during the Irish rebellion of 1641, Ormond gathered together his various papers to counter the charge, and asked Sheridan ‘to lick it over, and make it run in a smoother and more connected stile than he himself had written in’.35 Ironically, given that at the time of the Restoration Antrim had been accused of suggesting that Charles I had encouraged the Irish rebellion, Charles II refused Ormond permission to publish his text ‘because twoud reflect upon his father’s memory; & make men conclude, what the long Parliament had given out, that he was the author of the Irish Rebellion’.36 Sheridan was also sufficiently in royal favour for Charles II to award him a lump sum of £1,000 and an annual pension of £500.37 Certainly, Sheridan had high hopes of advancement when James, Duke of York, became king in 1685, given his support for the latter in difficult times and James’s reputation as a loyal patron. Furthermore, Sheridan announced his conversion to Catholicism in 1686, a matter of days after a decision of the courts which effectively allowed Catholics to hold public office.38 That this was not a sudden decision is perhaps indicated by his prior marriage into an English Catholic family around 1683 or 1684. His wife, Helen, was the great-granddaughter of Sir Thomas Gascoigne, who had been tried and acquitted of treason in connection with the Popish Plot.39 Sheridan brought his children up as Catholics, and, as will become clear later, his conversion to Catholicism was to be both life-long and to have major consequences for his political views. His immediate hopes were, however, to be dashed – rumours linking him to an ambassadorship, and hopes of becoming a Secretary of State, came to nothing40 – for in late 1686 he was, against his wishes, made secretary to Lord Tyrconnell, the new Lord Deputy of Ireland, and, more to his liking, subsequently appointed First Commissioner of the Irish Revenue. His relationship with Tyrconnell was fraught from the start, for Tyrconnell had more favoured candidates for the two posts. Reflecting on this period from exile in 1702 (but drawing on his papers of the time), Sheridan depicts their animosity not simply as personal dislike, but, more importantly, as reflecting two very different visions of the future of Ireland. Sheridan’s account of these years has, of course, to be treated with caution. He displays the widespread Jacobite tendency of counterposing the godly prince to the mendacious minister. It is Sheridan’s perspective, however, which is the focus here. He portrays James as attempting to pursue a sensible policy of sensitive religious toleration in Ireland, one in which all previous religious bars to employment


were to be removed, and merit alone was to be the criterion. Tyrconnell, on the other hand, is presented as a bigoted Catholic, who wished to promote the interests of his fellow Old English, and who sought ultimately to break Ireland’s link with Britain. James, he suggests, was very reluctant to make an Irish Catholic head of his administration in Ireland, for fear of Protestant opinion, and his wish that Sheridan be Tyrconnell’s secretary was motivated by a desire that there be a restraining influence on Tyrconnell who, whilst possessed of the necessary toughness, was not to be fully trusted, and was consequently initially only made Lord Deputy and not Lord Lieutenant. This contrast between the virtuous king and the treacherous Tyrconnell dominates Sheridan’s account of his Irish experience. Thus James’s religious agenda for his new Lord Deputy is spelled out: ‘no man was to be put out or into any employment, civil or military, on account of religion, and that one of his chief injunctions to Tyrconnell was not to disoblige his Protestant subjects’.41 In an early conversation with Sheridan, however, Tyrconnell laid out a very different religious and political agenda: that ‘the Irish would be fools or madmen, if after [James’s] death they should submit to be governed by the Prince of Orange or Hyde’s daughter, or be longer slaves to England, but rather set up a King of their own, and put themselves under the protection of France’.42 Sheridan’s objections to this outburst elicited a stinging retort from Tyrconnell: ‘I will no longer dispute this matter with you, who I thought was my countryman, but now perceive you are an Englishman.’43 It also became quickly apparent to Sheridan that Tyrconnell displayed a deep animosity to the Old Irish. Thus at Tyrconnell’s behest Sheridan was (unsuccessfully) solicited to persuade the king to receive into the army several thousand Irish Catholics ‘descended from the English that first invaded their country, with an exclusion to all the old natives, distinguished from the others by the O’s and Macs prefixed to their surnames’.44 Along with this dislike of the Old Irish went a particular distaste for the Province of Ulster. Sheridan indignantly relates Tyrconnell’s claim to a Bishop that ‘the King did not love those of that Province nor indeed any O or Mac’,45 and refutes it with James’s own response that ‘he never made any difference between the old and new Irish Catholics’.46 Sheridan’s position on this matter, expressed at the time, he recalled, in a paper for Tyrconnell (who was far from pleased), was that the deep historical distrust between the Old English and the Old Irish was such that they would never agree to a king from the opposite camp, and that this division provided a guarantee for the (beneficial) continuation of the English Crown in Ireland.

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For Sheridan, Tyrconnell’s administration was a disaster. Whilst waiting at Holyhead to take ship for Ireland, Tyrconnell talked of ‘taking Christ Church in Dublin from the Protestants to his own use … and of bringing Catholics by little and little as fast as possible into all employments, especially in the Revenue, of disarming all Protestants and raising, arming, and training a Catholic militia’.47 Once in Ireland, Tyrconnell suggested that all the Irish sheriffs should be Catholic; Sheridan demurred, stating that this should not be done where loyal Protestants could be found, for the Protestants of Ireland were already deeply apprehensive of the direction of policy, and that Tyrconnell’s idea ran directly counter to the king’s expressed wish. Whilst in England Tyrconnell had got the king to agree to the admission of more Catholics to the Irish army, courts and administration, but, in Sheridan’s estimation, Tyrconnell was using this to flood these areas with Catholics, who were also ‘his creatures, dependants and relations’.48 He so saturated the army with Catholics that the remaining few good quality Protestant officers felt obliged to sell their commissions at knockdown prices, with many of them going to Holland where they ‘instigated the Prince of Orange to the invasion’.49 Sheridan further noted Tyrconnell’s wish to impose a Catholic Fellow on Trinity College and ultimately to make that institution thoroughly Catholic. Furthermore, Tyrconnell’s claim to the Catholics that they would soon regain possession of their ancient lands and obtain all the principal employments of the state precipitated an exodus of the leading Protestant classes in Ireland, at great cost to the economy. Sheridan vehemently opposed Tyrconnell’s plan to restructure fundamentally and rapidly the balance of confessional power in Ireland by having the Act of Settlement overturned to the advantage of Catholics, and making urban charters alterable at his wish (the key to control of parliamentary representation). Sheridan’s objections to all of this, and his refusal to go along with it, brought forth the wrath of Tyrconnell and jibes from some Catholics that ‘he was not a real convert but a Protestant in masquerade’ (a view also expressed by Tyrconnell himself) and, in a vein of pure interest politics, that ‘they found no advantage by having the King and Government of their religion, since the Protestants were still to be continued in their employments and the Catholics excluded’.50 Not surprisingly, Tyrconnell began actively to seek Sheridan’s removal. He accused Sheridan of corruption and sought support from ministers and the king for this charge. In Miller’s view ‘Sheridan was very possibly justified in claiming that the charges against him were false and malicious’.51 Sheridan protested his innocence but was no


match for the powerful and well-connected Tyrconnell. He had to undergo a trial packed with Tyrconnell’s placemen and, obstructed in the proper conduct of his defence, his only crumb of comfort was that the king would make the final judgement as to his guilt. Whether James believed him or not, hard politics sealed Sheridan’s fate, as James, in the final crisis of his reign, needed Tyrconnell far more than he needed Sheridan. Furthermore, Sheridan either failed to see or chose to ignore the extent to which Tyrconnell had managed to win James over to his own policy agenda in Ireland.52 Sheridan was stripped of his Irish posts, and was persuaded, out of loyalty to the king, who was now facing William of Orange’s invasion, not to ventilate his major charges against Tyrconnell in public. James, he was always to maintain, did believe him innocent, and personally promised to obtain him justice when better times returned; and James II’s reassertion in 1692 of his pre-Tyrconnell policy of not wishing to have a native Irish Lord Lieutenant provides some evidence that his assessment of Tyrconnell’s time in Ireland was not a positive one (though he might by this period, with an eye on Protestant English opinion, have had a political interest in distancing himself from Tyrconnell’s administration in Ireland).53 For the present, however, Sheridan’s active support for what he took to be James’s policy of religious even-handedness in Ireland had brought him nothing but unjustified obloquy and disgrace: ‘Tyrconnell was not to be displeased, to whose rage and malice an innocent person must therefore be sacrificed against all the rules of law and reason.’54 As the events of 1688 unfolded, Sheridan, whose struggle with Tyrconnell had given him the reputation of being ‘discontented’, was the object of overtures by supporters of William of Orange, and, according to Sheridan, the Tyrconnell camp spread a rumour that he had actually gone over to the Prince. Sheridan, however, was intent on following James to France, which he did at the earliest opportunity. This climate of uncertain allegiances, however, provided Sheridan with an opportunity to further the Jacobite cause with a literary imposture. The impetus appears to have come from Talon, one of Louis XIV’s cabinet secretaries. Sheridan fabricated a letter in the style of the arch-trimmer Halifax, articulating sentiments highly critical of William of Orange and his supporters. A Letter from a Nobleman in London, to his Friend in the Country: Written some months ago. Now Published for the Common Good, dated 8 February 1689, appears to have been sufficiently plausible that both William and James believed Halifax to be the author.55 The letter has two elements, a narrator now regretting his support for William, and a letter within the letter, printed as a warning by the

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horrified narrator, supposedly from an English peer, offering William Machiavellian advice on how to maintain his new dominion, and which assumes duplicity on William’s part and stupidity amongst his English backers. Both narrator and peer are identified as Protestants. The narrator admits that it was the king’s religion that made him disaffected. Articulating a common Protestant fear, he confesses that he believed that a Roman Catholic king might introduce arbitrary government, and that he looked to a Protestant replacement to nullify this threat. Sheridan has the narrator reject as self-evidently false such stock-in-trade rumours as the supposed murder of Charles II and the ‘suppositious’ Prince of Wales, but allows greater space to the claim of a league with France, only to reject this as also false. Public opinion was manipulated – ‘fear of slavery artificially spred among the Gentry, and of Popery among the Commonality’56 – to turn the king out. Sheridan evidently wishes, in the light of his longstanding belief, to validate toleration, and, as a Catholic, to deny any universalist claims of the Church of England. He therefore makes his narrator suggest that a state’s religious policy should be tolerant and a matter of local choice, and also assert that no simple connection can be established between specific religions and particular forms of government: I laugh at all forms of bigotry, and prefer our own Religion to Popery, not as more agreeable to Truth, but as established by Law; Disputes of this Nature ought, in my Mind, to be banished the Common-Wealth, at least, confin’d to the Schools; nor should I trouble my Head, nor would any Man that wanted not Brains, what Religion a lawful Parliament put down, or set up; provided we could but be secured aginst Slavery, and the loss of Abby Lands. Nor need I tell you, who have as sensibly felt it, that Slavery is not a more natural consequence of Popery, than of Presbitery, or any other Sect.57 Thus, contrary to the narrator’s expectations, it has been the Protestant William of Orange who has introduced arbitrary government, and, as is now evident, the traduced Catholic James who is the true friend of the constitution. At this point the cynical letter within a letter is ‘reproduced’. The purpose is to show, via the fictitious author’s harsh realism, that William of Orange’s interests are not those of England, and that those who have believed the contrary have been duped. A discussion of Ireland is introduced to show, first, that William’s despotic ambitions in England require a distinctive policy in Ireland, and second, that


Ireland might prove the undoing of William’s ambitions. Thus William is advised to prolong the war in Ireland so as to gain parliamentary support for expanding the armed forces and declaring war on France, which in turn will allow him to deflect any criticism on to the parliament and use his increased strength to consolidate his dominion in England. However, Sheridan suggests, the war in Ireland will be prolonged anyway. In this pre-Boyne period we can detect Sheridan’s hopes that Ireland will prove a very tough nut to crack. With a different emphasis from the paper he had presented to Tyrconnell, which stressed the deep divisions amongst the native Irish, he now draws a comparison between the events of Cromwellian Ireland and the present. In the previous period it took all the vast military and financial resources of the state, four years (1649–1653) to cope with a native Irish ‘destitute of Forreign Assistance, broken into Factions, spent and impoverished by a seven years Rebellion and Civil War’;58 since when the situation has been transformed: They have enjoyed the fruits of a long Peace, are united as one Man, thousands of ‘em have learn’d the Art of War abroad, and were not reputed to want courage: yet, allowing them as great Cowards as they are now represented, being driven to a Wall, by such a concern as they have at stake, their All, Life Liberty, Fortune, and Religion, they cannot but fight manfully… 59 Continuity with the Tyrconnell paper is established with the addition ‘especially when headed by their own Prince’.60 He also notes that they now also have the support of France. To alarm his readers further, Sheridan has his letter-writer raise the spectre of James rapidly subduing the Irish Protestants: ‘the Protestants he will disarm, and imprison, at least, the Chief of them, and seize all their Corn and Cattel: Londonderry, if he do not take, he will starve, before you can succour it.’61 The conditions of conflict have clearly forced Sheridan to take sides, and a hardening of his attitudes to the anti-Jacobite Irish Protestants is apparent; hence the letter’s conclusion that ‘the reduction of Ireland, is like to prove a Work of time, and of much greater difficulty, than the Protestants of that Kingdom would perswade you’.62 But the main point is not to castigate Protestantism, but to show the catastrophe that ensues when religious differences are exploited for political reasons. William of Orange’s enterprise was not a campaign for Protestantism, for his ‘Religion is Policy’;63 the religious configuration

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of the three kingdoms is, for him, simply a dynamic he can manipulate for his own personal aggrandisement. None the less, the negative references to Protestantism are worth noting and perhaps indicate the beginnings of a shift in his opinions which becomes explicit later. According to Sheridan, when James discovered that he was the author of this pamphlet, it reinforced his intention to have Sheridan write a formal defence of his reign against the calumnies of the Williamites. Sheridan produced a draft, which was amended by James, but which remained unpublished, initially due to policy/strategy differences amongst the Jacobite court, and finally, if Sheridan is to be believed, following the unsuccessful Calais expedition and the subsequent Treaty of Ryswick, to James’s recognition that he was not going to be restored. The piece is entitled The King of Great Britain’s Case impartially Stated with some Reflections upon the Times, in a Letter from a Gentleman in London to his friends at Vienna in December 1692.64 Sheridan wished to produce a principled defence of James which in no way conceded any wrong-doing on the monarch’s part. As he wrote in response to concessionist criticisms of his text made by the Irish lawyer, Sir Richard Nagle, the need was for ‘bold and vigorous resolutions’ rather than ‘fearfull trimming Counsells, or Counsellors’.65 From this perspective, Sheridan was hostile to James’s Declaration of 1693, which promised to pardon and indemnify the supporters of William of Orange, uphold the established church and allow parliament to restore the old Protestant status quo in Ireland. ( James’s wish to see the effects of this Declaration in Britain was, according to Sheridan, a factor in the delays surrounding The King of Great Britain’s Case.) The theoretical heart of The King of Great Britain’s Case is an uncompromising defence of monarchical power, and a correspondingly restrictive definition of legitimate popular and parliamentary power. In his 1678 book, A Discourse of the Rise & Power of Parliaments, Sheridan, though mindful of the problems of reconstructing the past, had sketched a conjectural history of the origins of society and government which combined both contractual and patriarchalist elements. Individual family members, possessed of reason, realised that conflicts between themselves would cause ‘misery’ and ‘War’,66 and therefore confirmed in the eldest male a continuation of the power he held over them when they were children, believing him to be the most impartial, wise and experienced person to decide disputed matters. The need for mutual defence from other societies led to a further transfer of the power of war and peace to ‘one man’, whose pre-eminent natural qualities were evident to all. The people promised to obey him, but, at the


insistence of their new leader, they retained the right of examining and approving the reasons for his decisions, since without this validation, the leader reasoned, he would lack the vital element of consent. This office of Prince then continued down the male line. The emphasis is thus on a strong central power, grounded in natural abilities, where popular scrutiny is itself a gift from the centre. Thus kings of England, in the matter of declaring war and peace, ‘have bin pleas’d, to advise in such matters with their Parliaments; But that was an Act of Grace, and condescension … . For no man in his Wits wil dream, the Lords and Commons have a power of imposing what they please upon the King.’67 Sheridan is worried about the growth of factionalism and party in parliament, and clearly considers some of its practices inefficient, but the general tone towards parliament is relaxed, even encouraging, especially in regard to its judicial functions. Thus in his defence before the Commons in 1680, to the charge that he advocated that the king should do without parliaments, he felt sufficiently confident to recommend his own 1678 book, where ‘Parliaments are magnifi’d, their power rather enlarg’d than lessen’d, and their frequent meetings recommended as most convenient’.68 The historical record of the Commons is acknowledged, but not magnified – it probably had a role in Saxon times, was marginalised after the Norman Conquest, and became a constituent part of parliament in the medieval period – there is no ‘Ancient Constitution’ notion of the continuity of Saxon communalism. In his book he was also at pains to deny that either Charles II or the Duke of York had, as a consequence of their relations with France, become ‘Frenchifi’d’ and desired ‘that they might be more absolute’.69 The central image is of a harmonious and historic constitution of king, lords and commons; in fact he wishes to avoid ‘anatomizing the distinct Powers of the several parts of this great Body’, because ‘whosoever first attempted that, desin’d the overthrow, of the best constituted Government in the World’.70 The tone and emphasis of The King of Great Britain’s Case is different; the intention is to put parliament very much in its place. Whereas A Discourse had sought to portray the Stuart monarchy as a mild, constitutional institution, remote from absolutism, the need now was for a firm defence of royal power against the subversive theory and practice of popular and parliamentary sovereignty. Sheridan returns to the notion of an original contract, but only to reinforce the claim (against radical forms of the concept, ‘infus’d from the Schools and from the pulpits’71) that a fundamental and irreversible transfer of power from people to monarch occurred: ‘that the people for them and their heirs

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by consent and oaths, have long ago divested themselves and lodg’d the supream power in the hands of their Kings for them, and their heirs for ever, without any reserve, Contract, or Condition of reassumption upon failure.’72 Parliament at most is merely the king’s great council, subordinate to his will and possessed of no powers of monarchical deposition; both houses of parliament are ‘a perfect creature of the King’s, indebted for their political life, or being to his breath, Summons or Command; … [they] never can impose, much less unking their hereditary Soveraign; their Author and Maker, as I may call him.’73 In the same vein, the ‘King never dies’,74 royalty passing in the blood to his heir, and the ‘King can do no wrong’,75 for it is the duty of his ministers to make sure that royal policy, as the embodiment of the common good, is both lawful and rational, and to them alone falls the guilt. Such principles are enshrined in statutes and the common law, and are fully in accord with the dictates of reason. Needless to say, these contrasts between people and king, and parliament and king, are deemed to nullify any of the proffered defences of William of Orange’s legitimacy as king. In both the preface – written a number of years after the main text – and in the text itself, it is suggested that the author is a member of the Church of England. In spite of this subterfuge Sheridan’s defence was considered too unguardedly papist and uncompromising by some prominent Catholic figures in the Jacobite court. A contemporary distinction divided Jacobites into ‘compounders’, who wished to accommodate Anglican interests in Britain, and ‘non-compounders’, who demanded an unconditional restoration, and punishment of the king’s opponents.76 In his 1702 reminiscences of this period, Sheridan says that Melfort, the leading ‘non-compounding’ opponent of major concessions to British Protestant opinion, had thought the text too Catholic, and informed Sheridan that the king wished the impression to be given that it had been written by a Protestant;77 whilst John Caryll was clearly alarmed by the text’s treatment of James’s imprisonment of the Seven Bishops, where it is undoubtedly the case that Sheridan perceives a gap between the rhetoric and the reality of the Anglican doctrine of passive obedience.78 In one sense these references to ‘papist’ and ‘Protestant’ merely denote political and strategic matters. For Sheridan, a more ‘Protestant’ approach entailed a greater willingness to conciliate Protestant sentiment in Britain, which meant a weakening of James’s case by admitting that laws had been broken, when the truth was that James had been deserted because of his religion, ‘which could not be more truly written than it was, whether Protestant or Papist undertook it’.79 There are,


however, hints in this 1702 work of a more rigid confessional perspective which sees in Protestantism itself an innate predisposition to subversive doctrines, as in Sheridan’s claim that to defend James adequately he would have to ‘renounce the present Protestant principles and practice’.80 The corollary of this view, that Catholicism has unique access to sound principles, is not articulated in this work, but is very much to the fore in the final reflections of his life. Daniel Szechi has argued that the distinction between non-compounder and compounder was broadly a religious one, with the former predominantly Catholic and the latter Protestant. He makes the further point that among the Catholic Jacobites the Irish were the most notable opponents of Melfort.81 Certainly Sheridan’s stance would suggest that there was a possible Irish Jacobite critical response to Melfort involving a purist form of non-compounding. Melfort, as James’s Secretary of State, had, unlike Sheridan, tough political decisions to take. When Sheridan showed him the draft of his text in 1692, the Jacobite administration was coming under intense pressure from its French host to demonstrate a more conciliatory approach to Protestant Britain – a process which was to lead to that Declaration of 1693 which Sheridan so disliked, and ultimately to the replacement of Melfort by the compounding Protestant Middleton.82 The problem, however, with describing Sheridan as a member of any faction is that he portrays himself as a loner fighting the good cause against opponents on all sides, and rarely has a good word to say about any of his fellow Jacobites. Sheridan’s closeness to Catholic Ireland and his distance from some other Catholic Jacobites is revealed in his participation in the defence of the Irish Catholic clergy. Following the banishment of Catholic bishops, prelates and regular clergy from Ireland by a 1697 Act of Parliament, their leaders met in Saint Germain, and ‘desired Sheridan to draw in their name a representation of their miserable state and condition to the Pope and the Catholic Princes of Europe’.83 This Sheridan did, only to be told by John Caryll to omit the claim that the king had been deprived of his crown because he was a Roman Catholic. (Caryll, according to Sheridan, argued that James had lost the throne through breaking the laws.) Sheridan appealed to the king, who supported his version and gave him money to have the document published in Latin and English. The gap opening up between Sheridan and the Jacobite administration is apparent, as is his belief that the king shares his own beliefs. Although Caryll was a Catholic, Sheridan is clearly exercised by the religion of the Secretary of State, Middleton. Thus Sheridan in his account of a secret diplomatic mission he undertook to the Elector Palatine in 1695, notes

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that the king expressly commanded him not to reveal to Middleton those aspects of his discussion with the Elector dealing with James’s unhappy relationships with English Protestantism.84 James II died in 1701, and a five-year regency was established for his 13-year-old son. Charles Petrie has argued85 that following the regency there was intense debate within Jacobitism as to future policy. One strand focused on the degree of support for the exiled court in Britain and the lukewarmness of Queen Anne to a Hanoverian succession, and hoped for an orderly and peaceful restoration of the Stuarts following her death – the ‘dream of a repetition of the “miracle” of 1660’, as Monod has put it.86 Others, however, were highly sceptical of this supposedly painless path and, encouraged by the popular outrage in Scotland following the Act of Union in 1707, favoured an armed restoration. In 1709 Sheridan, by now in his sixties, and just a few years before his death in 1712,87 finished a manuscript entitled Political reflexions on the history and Government of England, the late Revolution and other State affairs written by an impartial hand in the year 1709.88 On the basis of this document it is clear that Sheridan is to be placed among the advocates of an armed strategy. He believed that there were ‘infinitely too few’ loyal Protestants to bring about a Jacobite restoration ‘without Foreign force’;89 a force that should be mostly French and Irish. Likewise he was sensitive to the potential of the Scots, who ‘find themselves sold by a corrupted party; & that instead of the great advantages they were made to believe from the Union, they are made a Province’;90 this it should be noted, having probably been written not before but after the disastrous Scottish adventure of 1708. To this bellicosity is added a repudiation of the toleration advocated by Sheridan in his earlier works, and the substitution of an uncompromising Roman Catholicism. It is as if, with the passing of James II and the youth of his successor, Sheridan felt impelled to be the explicit champion of Stuart Catholicism in the teeth of the continuing policy of concessions to British Protestantism. Catholicism is now described as ‘the true faith’ whose ‘re-establishment’ is vital for the future of the three kingdoms;91 whilst Protestantism is designated a ‘noReligion’92 based on sacrilegious, treasonable and worldly principles, the establishment of which in Elizabeth’s reign initiated the period of rebelliousness which culminated in the events of 1688. Sheridan explicitly links political to confessional principles: ‘the nonconformists are all Republicans, & cannot endure even the name of King; the Church party like the title, provided they may limit his power; and tho they hate and rail against one another, yet, on occasion, they will joyn & combine against Popery, as the common enemie.’93


Absolutism is reaffirmed – the king’s ‘power is wholy from God, and therefore to him alone and not to the people he is accountable … . Soveraign or Supreme power is … and must of necessity be absolute and arbitrary’94 – and yoked to a policy of religious intolerance. No state, Sheridan argues, can live with a plurality of religions, for ‘nothing can be more impolitic than to suffer varieties of Religion; which naturally produce, seditions, insurrections, and changes of Government’.95 Recent British history thus bears out the perils of toleration: ‘the present stirs in that island seem to ow their encrease if not their birth to the latitude which the subjects take in matters of conscience; whilst every man carvs out to himself such a Religion as best pleases him, without being accountable to the State’.96 He applauds Richelieu, ‘one of the greatest States-men that ever liv’d’, for his resolve ‘to convert the hugonots of France by reason, or exterminat them by force’,97 and Louis XIV’s decision to continue this policy and to re-establish ‘in all his Dominions, the sole profession of the Roman Catholic doctrin’.98 This, he maintains, is only to follow the Protestant states of Scandinavia, who are equally single-minded in their intolerance of Roman Catholicism; nor does he concede that Holland is an exception, for Calvinism is the sole state religion and there is no public (as opposed to private) toleration of other faiths. The practical implications for a restored Jacobite administration soon become clear. They begin on a reassuring note – James III will issue a Declaration promising ‘that he will govern his Subjects justly and equally according to law, and disturbe none on account of their Religion or conscience’.99 It immediately becomes apparent, however, that Sheridan favours the use of state power and patronage to undermine the very basis of British Protestantism. The lesson he draws from previous legislation restricting the employment opportunities of Roman Catholics is that it is a highly effective means of weaning people away from their religion, a policy likely to be even more effective against Protestantism, since its entire foundation is worldly self-interest: ‘no doubt when Protestants see themselves incapable of places and benefices, their Religion being founded on interest & gain, not conscience & godlyness, they will quickly renounce their errors, return to their mother church, and embrace her communion.’100 By such means Sheridan looks confidently forward to the time when ‘truth shal have prevail’d and the Catholic Religion is become the only religion of the 3 Kingdoms’.101 The strong Roman Catholic cast to this work is also apparent in his treatment of Ireland. The Catholic Irish are portrayed as the Stuarts’

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most loyal subjects, whose fidelity, most unjustly, brought them nothing but death, dispossession and exile, whilst Protestant Ireland, though thoroughly disloyal, has prospered. He is now distinctly ambiguous on the question of whether the Catholic Irish were truly rebels in the 1640s, and, no doubt drawing on his acquaintance with the Ormond papers in the early 1680s, suggests an element of royal culpability in those events.102 Despite the injustices Catholic Ireland suffered subsequently, ‘the sons of those very Irish follow’d the example of their fathers, & gave at home and abroad, never to be forgotten proofs of their courage, fidelity, and adherence to their Lawful Kings against the next Usurpers, Orange and his Successor the Princess of Denmark & their allies’.103 The direction of future Jacobite policy in Ireland, though not spelled out, is clear. Thus he asserts that ‘there is, no doubt, but all or most of the Protestants have forfeited their estates, to the King’; adding: ‘who having the best title, may dispose of the Lands, as he shal judge most just & equitable for his subjects, and most advantageous to the Crown’,104 which, whilst leaving the door open, when taken with his previous remarks about undermining Protestantism, can leave little doubt about his conception of an ‘equitable’ settlement for Ireland. His specific proposals for institutional change in Ireland have the twin goals of strengthening both royal authority and the distinctiveness of Ireland as a separate kingdom. Thus, no doubt in the light of his experiences with Tyrconnell, he advocates the abolition of the lord lieutenancy and its replacement with a direct chain of command, from the king through a secretary of state resident in England to a council in Dublin, composed primarily of salaried Englishmen, with a commissioner to be appointed to grant the royal assent to Acts of the Irish parliament. This strong royal centre would thus remove the previous, and irksome, interference by specifically English institutions in Ireland. Sheridan’s earlier flirtation with the idea of a formal union is absent: In a word that Country ought to depend intirely on himself; without suffering his English Courts of law or Parliament to intermeddle in the management of anything relating to it; … which will be much more pleasing to that Nation: who by that means, wou’d be, (as they desire) a Kingdom of itself, depending on the King, but independent of that of England … .105 Such a nation needs also to get rid of all the divisions grounded in differences between the Old Irish and Old English. Thus ‘the foolish


distinctions of old and new Irish, and the vain titles of O’s and macs, ought to be abolished and laid aside; serving but for grounds and occasions of pride and animosities among themselves, and of scorn and hatred of the others that live in the island’.106 In this way the cultural disagreements will disappear in a reformed Ireland underpinned by a hegemonic Catholicism. Surveying the disasters which have befallen the Stuart dynasty, Sheridan is attracted to providential explanations, in which the treatment of Roman Catholicism is central. Thus James I’s treatment of English Catholics in the period of the Gunpowder Plot, and of Ulster Catholics at the time of the plantation, contrary to equity, morality, promises and sacred oaths, are deemed to be a perjury before God, an ‘affront … rarely escaping punishment even in this world’.107 In an autobiographical moment Sheridan returns to his family’s Ulster roots, and quotes ‘a Loyal Irish Protestant, who, by the plantation in Ulster, was (tho innocent) deprived of his paternal estate’108 (almost certainly a reference to his own father) to the effect that ‘the horrid iniquities of K.J. [King James] woud be punish’d in his children, to the third and fourth generation’.109 This, Sheridan argues, with a grisly catalogue of the misfortunes attending large numbers of the Stuart dynasty, has been all too accurately borne out. Such suffering, he hopes, will have appeased God, and pave the way for the restoration of James III: Tis to be hop’d, that the great crosses and misfortunes those of this family have already undergone, and the loss of a Crown, and so long a banishment in the person of this young Prince, have at last atton’d for all the transgressions of J.1st. And that the almighty, wil now put an end to al persecutions, and, by a speedy restoration of this 4th descendant, show his indignation is fully satisfied and appeas’d; and that the Vials of his wrath shal be no more pour’d out upon any of his Royal race.110 Sheridan’s thoughts on Ireland inevitably prompt the question of his relationship to the emergence of ‘patriotic’ discourse. Throughout his writings he is concerned with maintaining the integrity of Stuart rule; he worries about Scotland and Ireland becoming detached, of England losing its vitality. In A Discourse, though aware of the distinctiveness of Ireland (and Scotland) he has no sympathy for Gaelic culture, views England as the cutting edge of progress, and is clearly attracted by the concept of ‘one people’. The Williamite accession to power is viewed as a disruption, but not a destruction, of this fundamental ideal; a restoration

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of the legitimate dynasty is the political imperative. What does seem to change, however, is his approach to Ireland: a growing appreciation of Ireland’s distinctive contribution to the Stuart cause. His is not the constitutional patriotism of Molyneux, with its antecedents, via Domville, in the Old English circle of Darcy; given Sheridan’s concern to limit the power of the English parliament, he has no desire to enhance the power of the Irish parliament, nor to subordinate the king to the common law, nor to dabble with Lockean-type contractual arguments. He was no friend of the ‘Jacobite’ parliament of 1689, viewing it as an instrument of the malign Tyrconnell, and not in the best interests of James II. Furthermore, whilst in his late reflections he clearly wished to excise the role of English parliaments and courts in Ireland, this was to remove constraints on royal power, not to magnify the powers of Irish institutions (though he hoped that this would please Irish patriotic sensibilities). In these respects, as in so many, he was James II’s man, for it is evident that James disliked the patriotic agenda of the Declaratory Act of 1689, partly because he feared it would undermine the royal prerogative, and partly because it would undermine his standing with English Protestant opinion (a view shared by Sheridan himself at the time).111 Instead, Sheridan adopts a ‘faithful Ireland’ approach, where ‘faithful’ has two main meanings. First, Ireland, of all the three kingdoms, has proved to be the most loyal to the Stuarts and has suffered disproportionately as a consequence. This combines, secondly, with his militant Catholic faith into that concept of Catholic Ireland’s boundless fidelity to the divinely sanctioned Stuart cause, which becomes a leitmotif of Irish Catholic Jacobitism. It is a moral assessment of a people. Sheridan, in this vein, is virtually indistinguishable from the patriotic and Catholic gloss on Irish history to be found in later Irish Jacobites, such as the Abbé James MacGeoghegan.112 Unlike MacGeoghegan, however, there is no desire to disparage the historic role of England in Ireland, nor any wish to privilege the old Irish experience. In so far as Sheridan’s view of Ireland can be characterised as ‘patriotic’, it is firmly subordinated to his commitment to the violated settlement of the Stuarts. What is to be made of the discrepant approaches to toleration in his work? One possible explanation might be that Sheridan was never a principled defender of toleration, and that his late intolerant views represent the values he held throughout his adult life.113 There is, however, nothing to give textual or contextual credence to the claim that the defence of toleration in A Discourse is anything other than it seems. A second possible explanation is to dismiss his final thoughts as the


disordered and embittered musings of an old man, and to argue that the essence of Sheridan’s rational adult position is toleration. It is undoubtedly the case that the final document is rambling and repetitive, but the denunciation of toleration is clearly argued, deeply felt and does not give the impression of being newly coined. A more plausible explanation is that a shift occurs in his work. Thus his Protestant work in the late 1670s is a genuine defence of toleration. These views do not materially shift once he becomes a Roman Catholic, not the least because he believes James II to be a staunch advocate of toleration, hence his genuine outrage at the direction of Tyrconnell’s policy in Ireland. The iron enters his soul with the revolution of 1688. Time and again he repeats his belief that the main reason James was deposed was because of his Catholicism. From this period dates the increasing hardness to Protestantism. This is not expressed fully, partly because, for a period, his old and new views uneasily coexist (especially in reminiscence material), and partly because he is writing as a spokesperson for James, where a strident Roman Catholic intolerance would be inappropriate and unappreciated. Only with James long dead, and himself perhaps a more marginal figure, could he unburden on paper his now fully developed strictures on toleration. The lynch-pin of his life is his devotion to the legitimate Stuart dynasty in general and James II in particular. Even in his early dabblings with social contract ideas, Sheridan was emphatic about monarchical blood succession, and this developed into a full-blown defence of royal absolutism and a concomitant rejection of theories of popular or parliamentary sovereignty. In a sense his later views on toleration are more typical of the confessional absolutism of his day, whilst his earlier combination of strong central authority with toleration has some affinity with those later European notions of absolutist pluralism which have had attached to them the unfortunate label of enlightened despotism. At no point was he a precursor of modern democratic notions of toleration. His thoughts on Ireland also fall outside modern political categories. First as a Protestant, then as a Catholic, he was an Irish royalist.114 Ireland was legitimately ruled by Stuart kings (who held that right as kings of England). Though sensitive to Ireland’s distinctiveness, he had no sympathy for Gaelic culture, and viewed England as the cutting edge of reform. Again, whilst convinced of the need for royal control from London, he was, in his later work, explicitly hostile to the interference in Irish affairs of English courts and the English parliament. For much of his life he advocated a policy of conciliation between the

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creeds in Ireland, but latterly abandoned this for one of the establishment of an all-embracing Catholicism – not a Catholic nation, but a universal Catholicism. Modernity and premodernity jostle in his work. He wanted a reformed, efficient Ireland, but he was also drawn to a vision of a society not fractured on religious grounds, and ruled by a divinely ordained king.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Bob Eccleshall, Yves Le Juen, David Hayton, Mark Goldie, John Miller and George Boyce for their comments on earlier drafts. I would also like to acknowledge the gracious permission of Her Majesty the Queen for permission to quote from the Sheridan manuscripts contained in the Stuart Papers held in the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle, and to thank Miss Pamela Clark, Deputy Registrar of the Royal Archives, for her kind help while I was at Windsor. The chapter was completed while I was a Charter Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford, and I would like to thank the President and Fellows of Wolfson for providing me with such a congenial atmosphere to finish the piece. Finally, I would like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Board for funding my leave in Oxford.

Notes 1. For biographical details, see J. Miller, ‘Thomas Sheridan (1646–1712) and his “Narrative”’, Irish Historical Studies, Vol. XX, No. 78 (1976); ‘Thomas Sheridan’, Dictionary of National Biography, (London: Smith, Elder, 1885–1900) Vol. LII; ‘The Sheridan Family’ in T.W. Jones (ed.), A True Relation of the Life and Death of the Right Reverend Father in God William Bedell, Lord Bishop of Kilmore in Ireland, (London: Camden Society, 1872), pp. 203–11; J.E. Bruns, ‘Some Details of the Sheridans (1647–1746)’, The Irish Sword, Vol. 2 (1954–56), pp. 65–6; Mr Sheridan’s Speech after his Examination before the late House of Commons, on Wednesday the 15th of December, 1680 (London: Jo. Hindmarsh, 1681), p. 1; furthermore, quite a bit of autobiographical material is scattered throughout Sheridan’s writings; there is also a very hostile, tendentious, but relatively detailed account of his life in a 1690 text, A Full and Impartial Account of all the Secret Consults, Negotiations, Stratagems, & Intriegues of the Romish Party in Ireland, From 1660, to this present Year 1689. For the Settlement of Popery in that Kingdom (London: Richard Baldwin, 1690). 2. See E.S. Shuckburgh (ed.), Two Biographies of William Bedell, Bishop of Kilmore: With a Selection of His Letters and an Unpublished Treatise (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1902). 3. If A Full and Impartial Account is to be believed, he was also ordained a Deacon of the Church of Ireland in this period, p. 22.

Thomas Sheridan: Toleration and Royalism 57 4. Sheridan, at the end of the text, gives the date 4 January 1677/8. The text is anonymous but Sheridan virtually admits authorship in Mr Sheridan’s Speech, p. 3, and fully admits it in A copy of the objections to the King’s Case answered in July 1694, p. 3. This document accompanies The King of Great Britain’s Case impartially Stated with some Reflections upon the Times, in a Letter from a Gentleman in London to his friends at Vienna in December 1692 in the Stuart Papers in Windsor Castle. 5. A Discourse of the Rise & Power of Parliaments, of Law’s, of Courts of Judicature, of Liberty, Property, and Religion, of the Interest of England in reference to the Desines of France; of Taxes and of Trade. In a Letter from a Gentleman in the Country to a Member of Parliament, (London: n.p., 1677), p. 77. 6. Ibid., pp. 81–2. 7. Ibid., pp. 190–1. 8. Ibid., pp. 114–15. 9. Ibid., p. 93. 10. Ibid., p. 140. 11. Ibid., p. 142. 12. Ibid., p. 145. 13. Ibid., pp. 144–5. 14. Ibid., pp. 145–6. 15. Ibid., pp. 143–6; see James Kelly’s chapter, ‘Public and Political Opinion in Ireland and the Idea of an Anglo-Irish Union, 1650–1800’ for an account of Petty’s unionism. 16. A Discourse, p. 235. 17. See T.C. Barnard, ‘Protestants and the Irish Language, c. 1675–1725’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Vol. 44, no. 2, 1993, pp. 243–72. 18. J.S. Clarke (ed.), The Life of James the Second, King of England &c, Vol. II (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1816), p. 636. 19. See Nicholas Tyacke, ‘The “Rise of Puritanism” and the Legalizing of Dissent, 1571–1719’, in O.P. Grell, J.I. Israel and N. Tyacke (eds), From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), pp. 34–7; also, John Spurr, ‘Religion in Restoration England’, in L.K.J. Glassey (ed.), The Reigns of Charles II and James VII & II (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave, 1997), p. 123. 20. Miller certainly sees a Petty influence on Sheridan’s economic ideas, ‘Thomas Sheridan’, p. 108. 21. Mark Goldie, ‘Sir Peter Pett, Sceptical Toryism and the Science of Toleration in the 1680s’ in W.J. Sheils (ed.), Persecution and Toleration (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), pp. 266–7. Pett, who became Advocate General of Ireland in the 1660s, sat in the Irish Parliament, and was to publish a defence of religious toleration, was, like Sheridan, also a beneficiary of Ormond’s patronage. Goldie builds on the work of J.R. Jacob who also associates Sheridan with the Royal Society Tories: ‘Restoration Ideologies and the Royal Society’, History of Science, Vol. 18 (1980), p. 37. When Sheridan’s papers were seized at the time of the Popish Plot, one supposed ‘incriminating’ document turned out to be a transcript of a paper by Pett showing, on the basis of a numerical breakdown of religious groups in England, that the claim made about a vast reservoir of armed Catholics was statistically

58

22.

23.

24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36.

37. 38.

Vincent Geoghegan impossible; A Short Account or State of Mr. Sheridan’s Case before the Late House of Commons, In a Letter to J.T. (London: J. Hindmarsh, 1681), p. 9. See A. Ford, The Protestant Reformation in Ireland, 1590–1641 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1997); Saxe Bannister (ed.), Some Revelations in Irish History; Or, Old Elements of Creed and Class Conciliation in Ireland (London: Longman, 1870), p. xxxi. This book was reprinted by Kennikat Press (Port Washington, N.Y./London) in 1970. ‘Letter to Mr. Secretary Coventry, July 24, 1676’, in C.E. Pike (ed.), Selections from the Correspondence of Arthur Capel Earl of Essex 1675–1677 (London: Camden Society, 1913), p. 67; see also R.L. Greaves, ‘That’s No Good Religion that Disturbs Government: the Church of Ireland and the Nonconformist Challenge, 1660–88’, in As by Law Established: The Church of Ireland since the Reformation (Dublin: Lilliput, 1995), pp. 120–35. Letter from Ormond, 30 November 1678, Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on the Manuscripts of the Marquis of Ormonde, Vol. 2 (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1899), p. 280; Lady Burghclere, The Life of James First Duke of Ormonde 1610–1688, Vol. II (London: John Murray, 1912), p. 382. Thomas Carte, An History of the Life of James Duke of Ormonde, From his Birth in 1610 to his Death in 1688, Volume II (London: Bettenham, 1736), p. 467. 20 October 1677, Manuscripts of the Marquis of Ormonde, Vol. 2, p. 265. This preface is printed in a nineteenth-century reprint of Power of Parliaments, Bannister (ed.), Some Revelations in Irish History, p. 1. Ibid., p. lxi. Ibid., p. lxiv. Ibid., pp. li–lx; translations of Sheridan’s Latin sources can be found in a collection of short extracts from A Discourse entitled A Scheme of Universal Instruction, Religious Instruction, Religious Equality and Charity (introduced by Saxe Bannister) (London: Trübner, 1873). On the important role of patristic sources in Restoration Anglican intolerance, see Mark Goldie, ‘The Theory of Religious Intolerance in Restoration England’, in Grell, Israel and Tyacke (eds), From Persecution to Toleration, pp. 331–68. A Full and Impartial Account claims that he also accompanied the Duke of York to Scotland, p. 39. A Short Account, p. 38. Mr Sheridan’s Speech, p. 2. Political reflexions on the history and Government of England, the late Revolution and other State affairs written by an impartial hand in the year 1709, p. 60. This document is to be found amongst the Sheridan manuscripts in the Stuart Papers in the Royal Archives, Windsor Castle. Political reflexions, pp. 59–60. Ibid., p. 61; J.H. Ohlmeyer, Civil War and Restoration in the Three Stuart Kingdoms: The Career of Randal MacDonnell, Marquis of Antrim, 1609–1683 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 260. Miller suggests that Ormond perhaps became cooler towards Sheridan when he possibly discovered that Sheridan had been spreading falsehoods about him, ‘Thomas Sheridan’, pp. 112–14. Miller, ‘Thomas Sheridan’, p. 114. Ibid., p. 115.

Thomas Sheridan: Toleration and Royalism 59 39. Bruns, ‘Some details of the Sheridans’, pp. 65–6. 40. Miller refers to talk of Sheridan becoming ambassador to Rome, ‘Thomas Sheridan’, p. 115; Sheridan later maintained that both Charles II and James II wanted him to become a secretary of state, An Historical Account of some remarkable matters concerning King James the Second’s succession, Sunderland’s contrivances and corruptions, Tyrconnell’s getting the Government of Ireland, his proceedings there contrary to his Majesty’s positive injunctions, and his particular malice against Sheridan, together with some passages relating to the public, the King’s case and the management of affairs in Saint Germains, by the King’s Ministers Lord Melfort, Lord Middleton and Mr., now Lord Carryll in Calendar of the Stuart Papers Belonging to His Majesty the King, Preserved at Windsor Castle, Vol. VI (London: Mackie, 1916), pp. 51–2. Sheridan’s explanation of why he did not get this post is suggestive of an undoubted truth, that he had made some powerful enemies at court, notably Lord Rochester, whom he had plotted against in pursuit of one of his financial projects. 41. An Historical Account, p. 16. 42. Ibid., pp. 8–9. 43. Ibid., p. 10. 44. Ibid., p. 6. 45. Ibid., pp. 16–17. 46. Ibid., p. 17. 47. Ibid., pp. 17–18. 48. Ibid., p. 20. 49. Ibid., p. 21. 50. Ibid., p. 23. 51. Miller, ‘Thomas Sheridan’, p. 126. 52. J. Miller, ‘The Earl of Tyrconnel and James II’s Irish Policy, 1685–1688’, The Historical Journal, Vol. 20, no. 4, 1977, pp. 803–23. 53. Clarke (ed.), The Life of James the Second, Vol. II, p. 637. 54. An Historical Account, p. 49. 55. Sheridan reveals his authorship in An Historical Account, pp. 53–4. 56. A Letter from a Nobleman, p. 1. 57. Ibid., pp. 1–2. 58. Ibid., p. 3. 59. Ibid., pp. 3–4. 60. Ibid., p. 4. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid., p. 2. 64. The manuscript is to be found in the Stuart Papers in the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle. It is one of three Sheridan manuscripts, the other two being the now published An Historical Account, and the unpublished Political reflexions on the history and Government of England, the late Revolution and other State affairs written by an impartial hand in the year 1709 (RA SP M. 3–5). A microfilm copy is available at the National Library of Ireland, Dublin. 65. A copy of the objections to the King’s Case answered, p. 7. 66. A Discourse, p. 13. 67. Ibid., pp. 119–20.

60 Vincent Geoghegan 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76.

77.

78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

88.

89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102.

Mr Sheridan’s Speech, p. 3. A Discourse, p. 122. Ibid., p. 28. The King of Great Britain’s Case, p. 109. Ibid., p. 111. Ibid., p. 106. Ibid., p. 112. Ibid., p. 113. On ‘compounding’ and ‘non-compounding’ see D. Szechi, The Jacobites: Britain and Europe 1688–1788 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), pp. 30–1. Melfort suggested as a possible model a work by the Scottish Presbyterian, and one-time supporter of William, Sir James Montgomery, Great Britain’s Just Complaint. An Historical Account, p. 66; The King of Great Britain’s Case, pp. 65–9. An Historical Account, p. 65. Ibid. D. Szechi, ‘The Jacobite Revolution Settlement, 1689–1696’, English Historical Review, Vol. CVIII (1993), pp. 613–14. Ibid., pp. 619–21. An Historical Account, p. 74. Ibid., p. 72. C. Petrie, The Jacobite Movement: The First Phase 1688–1716 (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1948), pp. 123–4. P.K. Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, 1688–1788 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 308. French records state his death as 16 March 1712; J. Dulon, Jacques II Stuart, sa famille et les Jacobites à Saint-Germain-en-Laye (St. Germain: Leveque, 1897), p. 143. As with most of Sheridan’s output this document is also anonymous. Stylistic and other similarities, plus clear autobiographical material, leave little doubt as to Sheridan’s authorship. This is also the view of G.H. Jones in The Main Stream of Jacobitism, (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1954), pp. 247–9. Political reflexions, p. 108. Ibid., p. 164. Ibid., p. 8. Ibid., p. 117. Ibid., p. 165. Ibid., pp. 194, 195–6. Ibid., p. 154. Ibid., p. 171. Ibid., p. 169. Ibid., p. 154. Ibid., p. 178. Ibid., p. 188; James II is known to have expressed similar sentiments, J. Miller, James II: A Study in Kingship (London: Methuen, 1989), pp. 126–7. Political reflexions, p. 187. Ibid., p. 65.

Thomas Sheridan: Toleration and Royalism 61 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111.

Ibid., pp. 71–2. Ibid., p. 185. Ibid., pp. 186–7. Ibid., p. 186. Ibid., p. 44. Ibid., pp. 44–5. Ibid., p. 45. Ibid., p. 47. J.G. Simms, The Jacobite Parliament of 1689 (Dundalk: Dundalgan Press, 1974), p. 9; Miller, James II, p. 224. 112. See V. Geoghegan, ‘A Jacobite History: The Abbé MacGeoghegan’s History of Ireland’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, Vol. 6, 1991. 113. The antagonistic and stridently anti-Catholic A Full and Impartial Account claimed that Sheridan was a secret Catholic from 1672, who used the mask of Protestantism to conceal his involvement in a number of Catholic plots involving the Duke of York and Coleman. No plausible evidence is provided to back up these assertions. 114. On the origins of Irish royalism, see Breandán Ó Buachalla, ‘James our True King’ and also R. Eccleshall, ‘Anglican Political Thought in the Century after the Revolution of 1688’, in D.G. Boyce, R. Eccleshall and V. Geoghegan (eds), Political Thought in Ireland Since the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 7–35.

3 The Political Ideas of Anglican Ireland in the 1690s Robert Eccleshall

At the beginning of the final decade of the seventeenth century Ireland’s rulers were solid in vindicating William’s victory over the Jacobite forces occupying their country, while at the end many of them were preoccupied with the relationship of the London and Dublin parliaments. The decade began with Anglican Ireland adapting casuistical arguments from the larger island to pretend that the Williamite revolution did not constitute a breach – at least, not a serious one – with the doctrine of non-resistance to an hereditary monarch, an argument reinforced by the claim that as inhabitants of a subordinate kingdom the English in Ireland were assigned ‘a passive lot’ in a dynastic struggle, as Edward Wetenhall put it, and whose business therefore had not been ‘to set up Powers; but yet we must own it is our Duty to obey them’.1 It ended with the contention, no less fanciful, that as an equal partner in the multi-kingdom of the British Isles Ireland was entitled to legislative autonomy. The apparently rapid change in post-Revolutionary Anglican discourse has given rise to three interpretations of the intellectual significance of the decade. At one end of the spectrum is the claim that in challenging Westminster’s hegemony Ireland’s elite were in the vanguard of Enlightenment liberalism. There is scope within this perspective for debate about the precise antecedents of a mode of thinking which extolled the virtues of a robust citizenry as a bulwark against the arbitrary exercise of power. For some commentators ‘patriotic’ opposition to the London government’s exploitation of Ireland helped to transmit the democratic ideals of the English commonwealth to subsequent centuries. For others ‘patriotic’ discourse constituted more of a Machiavellian rather than a radical Whig ‘moment’ in the evolution of ideas: one that signalled the displacement of a Hebraic concern with 62

The Political Ideas of Anglican Ireland 63

the tribulations of a chosen people by a language of civic humanism not unlike that used in the republics of the ancient Graeco-Roman world. There is nevertheless concurrence that the ideas of Anglican Ireland in the decade forged an ‘essential link’ in ‘the development of a radical chain of thought’.2 At the other end of the spectrum is the suggestion that the ideology of Anglican Ireland in the decade was neither inventive nor of any significance in the development of Western political ideas. This view is based primarily on a reading of political sermons and other writings in the early years of the decade,3 though it has been reinforced by an examination of later sermons commemorating the execution of Charles I. During the eighteen months it took to expel Jacobite forces from Ireland a mass of arguments had been assembled in England to vindicate the accession of William and Mary. Anglican Ireland, relieved to have escaped from the threat of nemesis, was content to draw upon this ideological stock-in-trade. ‘By the time normal political life had been restored,’ according to Sean Connolly, ‘there was little for Irish writers to add to what was already an extensive literature in defence of a constitutional settlement now firmly established.’4 As a small elite in an overwhelmingly popish land, moreover, Anglican Ireland was disinclined to quarrel among itself by exploring every avenue of available Whig and Tory explanations of James’s departure. In contrast to the residents of the larger island their party and ideological divisions ‘were muted by a general conservatism’,5 and their political utterances in consequence were largely derivative and cautious. On this account a plagiarist might be tempted to entitle an article on the period, ‘The poverty of the political theory of Anglican Ireland in the 1690s’.6 The third perspective occupies a kind of halfway house between the other two. Though dismissive of the first for treating the decade as a prelude to subsequent intellectual developments, it nevertheless suggests that Anglican Ireland was undergoing a process of transmutation in its self-image. The claim is that the clash between the Westminster and Dublin parliaments prompted Ireland’s rulers to reconceptualise themselves as something other than the colonial settlers of a conquered country. My quarrel with the first and third perspectives is that the image that Ireland’s rulers had of themselves as a beleaguered colonial elite occupying hostile territory remained intact through the decade. We should therefore be wary of supposing that they were engaging in an exploration of various novel modes of political discourse. My objection to the second interpretation is that it underestimates the versatility of the

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political thinking of the time. Their sense of being a precarious minority prompted Ireland’s elite to be in some ways more daring ideologues than their English co-religionists. Logically, consideration of the third perspective on the decade, which is primarily a critique of the first, ought to be sandwiched between the other two. My impression, perhaps false, is that the threads of the chapter can be more neatly woven together by leaving it until last.

I Those who perceive Anglican Ireland at the end of the seventeenth century as a crucible of the Enlightenment have been legitimately criticised for writing their intellectual history from a Whig perspective. The bulk are American, by adoption if not birth, in search of the genealogy of those ideas which in the eighteenth century had inspired their compatriots to secede from the British empire.7 Rebellious American colonists were influenced by radical ideas that had taken shape during the English commonwealth period and were subsequently refined by John Locke, and the Declaration of Independence ensured their entry into the ideological mainstream. In England, however, commonwealth ideas remained marginal because their prospect of a democratic republic founded upon natural rights chilled even most Whigs. So perhaps Americans may be excused for seeking the ideological origins of their own separatist nationalism in some other region of the British Isles; and to find it in late seventeenthcentury Ireland, particularly in William Molyneux’s The Case of Ireland’s being bound by acts of parliament in England stated, which as well as revealing Locke’s authorship of The Two Treatises of Government used its doctrine of the natural right of people to be governed by consent to challenge the authority of the Westminster parliament to legislate for Ireland. ‘Of all constitutional parallels to the American Revolution,’ according to C.H. McIlwain, this Irish one is the closest, the most definite and conscious, and the longest in continuance that can be found in British history. It begins a century and a quarter before the same issue was seriously agitated in America, [and] it continued side by side with the American struggle till its very close …8 The parallels, of course, were not nearly as close as McIlwain indicated. Whatever its grievances against the Westminster government, Anglican


Ireland had not embarked upon a course of secession from the imperial monarchy. With this kind of teleological account emanating from an American perspective even the penal laws can appear as an Irish bid to pioneer the Enlightenment: an application of the new science of psychology, formulated in Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding and transmitted to Ireland by Molyneux and others with the intention of cracking the carapace of Catholic intransigence. For if the mind was a tabula rasa, there was the prospect that a legislative programme of cultural assimilation would enable papists ‘to enjoy the rights of freeborn Englishmen’ by enticing them from the shadows of ignorance and superstition into the light of Protestant reason.9 The problem is that the utterances of Anglican Ireland in the decade do not intimate an eagerness to initiate a progressive line of thinking. When using the language of patriotism, for example, they were less likely to be engaging in some radical mode of political discourse than urging one another to spare no energy in repressing those who had so recently connived to extirpate the English interest in Ireland. In 1695 John Travers, preaching to the parliament that was about to enact penal legislation, regretted that it had been deprived by infrequent sessions in previous decades of an opportunity to subjugate the treacherous majority of the island. Ireland’s ‘great Patriots’, as he called the members of his congregation, should now ‘Redeem the time’ by ‘passing and preparing such Sanctions, as if duly executed, will tie upon the hands of our Native Enemies, and break all their Power of hurting us’.10 The evidence that Anglican Ireland was poised to reject a discourse of Hebraic righteousness for that of Roman virtue is also flimsy. According to Nicholas Canny Ireland’s ‘Machiavellian moment’ was inaugurated by William King’s passing reference, in The State of the Protestants of Ireland under the Late King James’s Government, to the corruption of Florence and Rome in periods of absolutism.11 King, who possessed one of the best libraries in Ireland, used numerous sources to concoct a hotchpotch of arguments vindicating the Williamite victory. His allusion to the fate of republics careless of their liberty was a ploy – reinforced by quotations from impeccable theological authorities – to suggest that in exceptional circumstances subjects were absolved from the injunction to obey rulers. King did not, as Canny suggests, construct a novel thesis around the proposition that Ireland’s elite were more vigilant than their English co-religionists in safeguarding their liberties. His point was the commonplace one that Protestants generally

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were less likely to succumb to arbitrary power than adherents of a creed which inculcated an attitude of servility.12 Recent investigation of the writings of the period, particularly the excavation of political sermons, has revealed the extent to which postJacobite Anglican Ireland perceived itself as an ectype of liberated ancient Israel.13 Escape from ‘the Egyptian darkness of Popery’,14 the latest in a series of heavenly deliverances, was a sign of the deity’s peculiar regard for Anglican Hibernia. Preachers exceeded even the most ferocious of Old Testament writers in their denunciation of ‘the Enemy at our Doors’ who were ‘Treacherous, Ingrateful, Secret, Bloody and Implacable’,15 and also brutish, barbarous, uncouth and slovenly. There was clearly a need to batten the hatches on ‘the Rebellious troublers of our Israel’ whose religion inclined them continuously to dispense with oaths of allegiance to legitimate authority.16 Less clear was an appropriate strategy for anglicising a people who ought to have been civilised by their prolonged exposure to a superior culture, ‘were it not for some unaccountable antipathy in their natures, that renders ‘em utterly irreconcilable to anything that is English’.17 The Bishop of Cork advocated a policy of cultural apartheid, urging his co-religionists not to risk contamination by mixing with papists ‘either in Sin, Society, Blood, or Religion’.18 Others believed that measures could be taken to break through the native carapace of ignorance and superstition. The Bishop of Waterford’s programme of cultural assimilation included a proposal to eliminate ‘their wild Savage way of Living in Single Cottages’ by conscripting ‘the Irish Nation into Towns and Villages’. In these ‘Colonies’ they would experience a more natural rhythm of social intercourse, acquire techniques of agricultural improvement and be compelled to send their children to Protestant schools.19 Everyone nevertheless agreed that Protestants should attend to their own behaviour. God’s preservation of a chosen people was always conditional, and any measure to subjugate or civilise the Irish would be fruitless unless Anglican Ireland refrained from those vices of intemperance, impiety, blasphemy and luxury which had been the downfall of the Jews. Protestants were therefore enjoined to engage in spiritual and moral regeneration by ‘Abandoning the Airy, Thoughtless, Revelling, Negligent Humour of the Age’.20 Otherwise they would find themselves outside the canopy of divine protection. As John Vesey, commander of the Irish brigade of law-and-order ideologues, put it: God knows how to punish, as well as to deliver: He can give us up to our own hearts lusts, to bite and devour, to consume one another, by


civil Wars; or he can hiss for our Enemies from abroad … or stir up the conquer’d Philistine, and arm the Canaanite yet in the Land against us … 21 Political sermons of the decade intimate overlapping images of Anglican self-identity: of missionaries proselytising against the odds in a weird land where the overwhelming majority was stubborn in its adherence to a servile creed; of bearers of an imperial civilisation frustrated by the unshakeable habits of the indigenes; and of a precarious minority, threatened by the enemy within and apprehensive that divine approval of their conduct would be suddenly withdrawn. There is nothing in these self-images to indicate that the language of providentialism was about to unravel. In a sermon celebrating William’s victory over the Jacobites, William King – who, according to Canny, initiated Ireland’s post-Hebraic political discourse – gave eighteen reasons why the course of events had to be construed as evidence of ‘the over-ruling Providence of God’.22

II Anglican Ireland in the 1690s was not a seedbed of the Enlightenment. Yet its vindication of William’s accession was in some ways more erratic and adventurous than that of the larger island. In England justifications of James’s removal were an ideological mudge-and-fudge. The Revolution was generally portrayed as a conservative event in which the framework of government, though shaken, had remained intact. Hence, for example, the pretence that James had deposed himself by abdicating and the claim that parliament had engaged in a bloodless coup to preserve the balanced constitution. John Locke, who finished his Two Treatises in exile following the failure of the Whig attempt to exclude James from the throne, suggested that a tyrant declares war on his people and thereby dissolves government, leaving them no option but to reconstitute legitimate authority and to appeal to heaven in exercising the frightful imperative imposed upon them. Few English Whigs and Tories were disposed to portray the events of 1688 in Lockean terms because dissolution evoked dreadful memories of 40 years earlier when ‘there was no king in Israel; but every man did that which was right in his own eyes’. In endowing ‘the body of the people’ with authority in times of emergency, moreover, the doctrine of dissolution was potentially too radical for most ideological tastes. Only some commonwealthmen, who wanted an opportunity

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to enshrine popular rights in the constitution, described James’s removal in language similar to that of Locke.23 Anglican Ireland was less restrained in depicting the catastrophe of the Jacobite regime in terms which in England were confined to a radical fringe. According to Richard Cox, ‘the whole Frame and Contexture of the English Government was subverted and dissolv’d’ once James began to Catholicise the army and administration in Ireland.24 Michael Jephson declared that it was beyond ‘the power of the Pen, or Pencil to paint and describe’ the sufferings of Protestants ‘whilst we knew no King in Israel’.25 In September 1690 John Vesey welcomed ‘the appearance of civil Authority again in this kingdom & hope the Country will receive sudden & great advantage by it, which has so long groaned under spoyl and rapine, every man doing what was Right in his own eyes, as if there were no King in Israel’.26 Two years later Vesey used the text for his sermon to the Irish parliament.27 Dissolution suggested a destruction of the social fabric as well as a collapse of legitimate political authority. Irish Protestants were enraged that the Jacobite occupation of their country had subverted the natural order by enabling papists to indulge in an orgy of plunder and slaughter. Ireland had been delivered not only from popish servitude, ‘the worst of Tyrannies’, said John Travers, but ‘from the worst Branch of that, an ignominious hard bondage under our own Servants’.28 In The State of the Protestants of Ireland under the Late King James’s Government, William King provided a graphic account of the genocide allegedly inflicted upon them during the Jacobite occupation. He dealt with the contention that subjects lacked the judgement and authority to withdraw allegiance from a despot by arguing, as did Locke, that ‘Every Man must be left to judge for himself; and for his Integrity he must be answerable to God and his own Conscience’.29 In threatening to exterminate his people by declaring war upon them, a ruler forced subjects to make an agonising decision for which there was no court of appeal except heaven. Ireland’s elite were also less circumspect than English polemicists in using more conventional arguments to vindicate the accession of William and Mary. Whigs and Tories on the larger island had to pick their way through an ideological minefield because of polarised party divisions. In Ireland, where differences between the two parties did not harden until after 1704,30 churchmen and others were less restrained in adapting to their circumstances whatever arguments were to hand. Charles Leslie considered William King to have been so latitudinarian in using any principles to suit his case that ‘Like a Man Drowning, he catches at some, or all of these, but holds by none’.31 As a non-juror,


one of only a handful of Irish Anglicans, Leslie’s judgement of King was bound to be caustic. English writers were also inclined to use what John Kenyon calls ‘a blunderbuss technique, throwing in every argument they thought would serve’.32 After dining with apologists for the Revolution, the non-juring Henry Hyde – whom James had replaced by Tyrconnell as Ireland’s Lord Lieutenant for being insufficiently rigorous in Catholicising its administration – confessed that he had become too passionate in defending the traditional Anglican doctrine of passive obedience: ‘but really to hear clergymen in these days so vary in their practice from what themselves have formerly taught, as if we were to change our principles as often as they change their humours, would give provocations.’33 Leslie nevertheless had a point. King’s performance was remarkable even by the normal post-Revolutionary standards of casuistry which prompted churchmen to discard the doctrine of indefeasible hereditary monarchy by jumbling various concepts. As well as charging King with inconsistency, Leslie accused him of using ‘all the old Rotten, Rebel, Commonwealth Principles’ in vindicating William’s accession.34 Again, there is an element of truth in Leslie’s broadside. In England few writers depicted the Revolution as a justifiable exception to the doctrine of passive obedience.35 Yet the future Archbishop of Dublin, citing respectable authorities such as Grotius, Hammond, Barclay and Bilson, argued that subjects were entitled to resist in ‘cases of extream necessity’ when a ruler was determined to destroy their lives, liberties and properties. He did so by portraying James as an unbridled despot who sought to ‘ruin’ ‘the English Interest in Ireland, and alter the very Frame and Constitution of the Government’.36 In flirting with a right of resistance to tyranny, King provided a glimpse of the siege mentality which distinguished Irish churchmen from their co-religionists in England. There are other indications that they were less restrained than the English establishment in using any ideological ammunition available. One means of preserving a commitment to non-resistance was to depict William as a godly conqueror of despotism. The doctrine that subjects were obliged to obey the victor in a just war not of their making because waged by a foreign prince had been formulated by the Dutch thinker Hugo Grotius. It had a particular appeal for Anglican Ireland, relieved to see the end of a dynastic struggle which had threatened its survival and so disinclined to dispute the title of the one who had rescued them from arbitrary power. Just war theory and some of Grotius’ other ideas appealed to William King, perhaps not surprisingly as they shared a breathtaking capacity for ideological gymnastics.

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The claim that James had been justly vanquished was aligned with the de facto argument, which had taken shape in the Engagement controversy of the 1650s,37 that subjects were bound to obey those in possession of power because providence was at work in the preservation and destruction of governments. Following the Restoration, de facto arguments became unfashionable because of an insistence on indefeasible hereditary monarchy as the sole source of authority. PostRevolutionary Anglicans, however, expended energy in demonstrating the deity’s fecundity in maintaining public order in a world in which hereditary succession was frequently disrupted by death, abdication and usurpation. This crude providentialism was particularly attractive to Tories unable to accept that William, though James’s son-in-law, had a hereditary entitlement to the throne. Although subjects ought always patiently to submit to a tyrant, according to John Vesey, they should have no qualms about transferring allegiance to rulers ‘who had no immediate right to the crown before they possessed it’. Because God sometimes used the sword to break hereditary lines of succession, there was ‘no difference between the King de facto, and de jure … . For Kings de facto are Kings’.38 In September 1690, Vesey suggested that some English nonjurors might be tempted by the prospect of a Williamite victory in Ireland to fill vacant sees in England’s dependent kingdom: It may be, they would not be so scrupulous here, as there, tho I know not why they should be so in either place. But this crown so depends upon Engld yt a king even de facto there, is de juro here, and now, there is, or will be such a kind of conquest, I hope in God, in a little time, as determines the allegiance to the conquered Prince, as I take it, even in the sens of some yt conform not to ye Government in Engld. [I]f any of these persons think yt a bloody conquest determines ye title, and carries Right to ye Conquerr King Wm has that right, and they may own it here.39 In England just war theory was soon expunged from the postRevolutionary canon because to contend that ‘God has now put us under the Power of the Second William the Conqueror’, as did Edward Wetenhall,40 was close to intimating that an entire nation had been subjugated in the process of removing a despot. After January 1693, when both Whigs and Tories used the latest book celebrating the conquest of William and Mary to accuse the government of wishing to oppress the people, little more was heard of the doctrine in England.41


In Ireland, however, the absence of such sharp party divisions provided enough ideological space for it to persist, despite Molyneux’s repudiation of conquest as a basis for legitimate political authority when arguing for the autonomy of the Irish parliament. In his 1707 sermon commemorating the martyrdom of Charles I, for example, the moderate Samuel Synge used Grotius to rehearse the usual arguments of why William had been victorious in a just war.42 Unlike English writers, moreover, the Irish establishment did not tiptoe around the distinction between a conquest in regem and in populum. For them – a point to which we shall return – their delivery by a godly warrior prince from arbitrary power meant the defeat of both a tyrant and the people of Gaelic Ireland. Irish justifications of the defeat of despotism were more wayward and dramatic than those of the larger island. The suggestion that their discourse was a kind of diluted anglicism – hesitant, evasive and taking its cue from ideas settled across the water – perhaps feeds into another perspective on the decade: one in which Ireland’s elite, in spite of setbacks, had already slipped into the not uncomfortable cultural and ideological garb of a European ancien régime where intricate ties of social hierarchy were at least as significant as polarities of religion and ethnicity. According to Sean Connolly, who detects an underlying confidence in post-Restoration Anglican Ireland, the ‘image of a ruling class tortured by a constant sense of its own insecurity belongs essentially to a later period, to the era of the French Revolution and the struggle for Catholic emancipation’.43 But does not the image also belong to the final decade of the seventeenth century?

III The third perspective on the decade seeks to distance itself from the teleology of the first, while claiming that the strained relationship between the Dublin and Westminster parliaments prompted a swift change in the self-identity of Anglican Ireland. The turbulent Irish parliament of 1692, which had not met for a quarter of a century, was quickly terminated by the Lord Lieutenant because of its insistence on an ‘inherent Fundamental Right’ to initiate all supply legislation;44 while in 1699 the Westminster government sought to protect English interests by prohibiting the export of woollen cloth from Ireland. The claim is that rivalry between the two legislatures encouraged Ireland’s elite to reinvent themselves from being inhabitants of a dependent kingdom – the argument of Cox, Wetenhall and others when

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vindicating oaths of allegiance to William – to equal partners in a multi-kingdom, which was the message of William Molyneux’s The Case of Ireland’s being bound by acts of parliaments in England stated, written during the controversy about the Irish woollen industry. Historians have exerted themselves to find appropriate terminology to characterise this shift in self-identity. None now appears to accept the once fashionable concept of colonial nationalism because of the inference that resentful Irish Protestants were akin to American colonists who were eventually to secede from the imperial monarchy. ‘Anglo-Irish political thinking,’ according to George Boyce, ‘held no brief for the idea that they were colonialists, or that Ireland was in any respect like Virginia or Maryland.’45 They have been more ambivalent on the issue of whether Protestant anger at being treated by the English as custodians of a subordinate statelet fuelled among them a sense of Irish nationalism. Some prefer to avoid the term in case it is taken to imply that Ireland’s elite were forerunners of nineteenth-century romantic nationalism. One means of doing so is to follow the lead of the Dutch writer Joep Leersen, who described the emerging identity of Protestants with ‘the cause of Ireland’ as a form of patriotism which celebrated the virtues of a stalwart citizenry vigilant in defence of individual liberty against arbitrary and corrupt power. On this account Molyneux and others were heirs of the commonwealthmen and in the vanguard of European liberalism.46 Whether or not eighteenth-century Protestants articulated an unfolding sense of Irishness by engaging in a patriotic mode of discourse, there are two problems in approaching the final decade of the previous century from this perspective. The first is that, notwithstanding its critique of those who locate in the ideas of the period the antecedents of breakaway nationalism in America and elsewhere, this approach also views the 1690s through Whiggish spectacles. Yet Anglican Ireland still largely operated in an ideological universe of conservative providentialism rather than post-Hebraic liberalism, and, as we have seen, recourse to ‘patriotic’ language was sometimes a device for urging subjugation of the enemy within rather than for complaining about the audacity of the Westminster government. The major problem, however, is that Ireland’s rulers did perceive themselves to be in a sense both nationalists and colonists. They were nationalists not in the sense of going native to affirm their Irishness, but in their conviction that they were bearers of the true faith and of a superior civilisation in a part of the British Isles which, though an outpost, nevertheless participated in a constitutional system envied by other nations. According to Steven Pincus,


those English who endorsed William’s accession were united not by ‘unswerving loyalty to their divinely appointed monarch, but their profound and unbending commitment to their national religion and their national constitution’.47 Pincus underestimates the significance of a crusading Protestantism among the English, who were no more inclined than their Irish co-religionists to discard an apocalyptic discourse in which their preservation in a hostile world was indicative of the frequent favours granted to a chosen people. Williamites in both England and Ireland nevertheless perceived themselves as engaging in what Pincus calls ‘a nationalist revolution’ to secure a unique set of ancient institutional arrangements. In 1695 Edward Walkington commanded his congregation to rejoice in their possession of ‘the most excellent constitution of Government in the world, both Civil, and Ecclesiastical’,48 and three years later the High Church Tory Edward Smyth ventured the opinion that an inferior political system would not have been sustained by so many providential interventions: Our Government is so happily Qualified and Tempered, as to have secured a just Measure of Power to the Prince, and of Liberty to the Subject. The Sovereign Authority is not Despotick, but Political; We are not Slaves, but Subjects; ’tis equally out of the Sovereigns Power, and against his Interest, to become Tyrannical and Arbitrary. ’Tis as Injurious to the publick welfare to encroach upon the Prerogatives of the Crown, as it can be Hurtful to the Regal Dignity; and in this Happy Ballance, in this Golden Mean, stands the Wisdom of our Constitution.49 There may be intimations here of the suffocating smugness which made much eighteenth-century English and Irish political thinking so dull. There is no hint, however, that Anglican Ireland was intent on eroding its sense of Englishness either by tapping into commonwealth radicalism or by initiating Enlightenment liberalism. Ireland’s rulers perceived themselves as colonists in the sense of presiding over a people who, though conquered, were unassimilated. The trauma of the Jacobite years reinforced their self-image as occupants of a hostile outpost of English civilisation where the obdurate and treacherous indigenes had to be periodically reconquered. In 1686 Ireland’s displaced Lord Lieutenant complained that the Catholicisation of its army and administration would put power ‘in the hand of the conquered native’, leaving ‘the English who did conquer … naked’.50 In Ireland, unlike England, James’s eventual departure was celebrated as

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the subjugation of a people as well as a tyrant. According to Edward Walkington there had been several providential interventions to ensure that ‘the English Interest was again established in this Nation’, the latest of which had vanquished ‘this Barbarous People once more, and put their Necks under our Feet’.51 When exhorting the Irish Commons in 1695 to enact stern penal measures, John Travers reminded them that ‘the infrequency of Parliaments here’ had enabled the enemy within to be ‘treated heretofore more like a free than a conquer’d People; they were Indulg’d beyond the allowance of the Law, and it seems beyond a consistency with our own safety’.52 Three years later he told MPs that they resided in ‘an Enemies Country’.53 This garrison mentality was intensified by disputes between the two legislatures. One reason why Anglican Ireland was dismayed by the allegation of the Lord Lieutenant, in proroguing and then dissolving the 1692 parliament, that they had invaded the royal prerogative was that it exposed them to the Insultings of their most implacable and malitious Adversaries, who they knew were ever watchful and ready to improve all Advantages against them; who cou’d not but look upon a Protestant Parliament with trouble, and therefore rejoyced to see it meet with such Treatment.54 The controversy about the woollen industry at the end of the decade reinforced this self-perception of a beleaguered minority. In his contribution to this volume about arguments for Anglo-Irish union David Hayton warns against interpreting stray remarks made in anger at the haughty conduct of the Westminster government as evidence of the inauguration of some robust political discourse. We should be wary of probing the 1690s for the intellectual antecedents of Anglo-Irish civic republicanism, unionism, nationalism or whatever because the quarrel with the metropolis encouraged Ireland’s elite to elaborate rather than discard familiar arguments. According to Jacqueline Hill, William Molyneux’s contention that Ireland was an independent kingdom rather than a conquered nation induced English writers to remind its elite of ‘their colonial status, which guaranteed them protection from foreign and domestic enemies. The episode thus reflected the gap which had opened up since the revolution between Anglo-Irish and English perceptions of Ireland’s constitutional position’.55 Yet the dispute of much of Anglican Ireland with the London parliament was not about their country’s colonial


status. Few would have dissented from the remark of Sir Robert Southwell, Ireland’s Secretary of State, that they had ‘“nothing on this side [of] Paradise to adhere to but Old England”’,56 and there is little evidence to indicate that they were engaging in a subtle redefinition of themselves as Irish patriots or nationalists rather than English colonists. Their complaint rather was that as the inhabitants of Ireland’s political nation they were being treated as the natives instead of the colonisers of a conquered country. Much of the literature provoked by the controversy explicitly raised the issue of how best to secure a colonial society. In considering the most effective means of preserving the loyalty of conquered countries to the imperial power one author, probably Francis Annesley,57 made a distinction between Colonies for Trade, and Colonies for Empire. The first is when a small number of your People are sent forth to plant Commodities which your native Country does not produce, as in the West Indies, or else when they are sent to negotiate a Trade with the Natives, and build Forts for their Security, as in Africa and the East-Indies. In both these cases it hath been usual to restrain their whole Trade to their Mother Kingdom … But Colonies for Empire stand upon quite different reasons; they are always planted to keep great Countries in subjection, and prevent the charge and hazard of constant standing armies. These have always received the utmost Encouragement, much less been restrained from making the best advantage of their natural Product, and having their whole Trade restrained to their Mother Kingdom … 58 His point was that destruction of the woollen trade would jeopardise Ireland’s position as a ‘colony for empire’ by encouraging the English there either to leave or to form an alliance against the mother country with the growing number of Presbyterians. William King, in a letter to Robert Southwell repudiating a particularly intemperate attack on Ireland’s parliament and woollen industry, also complained that the proposed bill would undermine the English interest in Ireland. ‘I hope the English that Came into Ireland & by Conquest Inlarged the Dominion of England, Did not thereby forfeit the Liberty of English Men, which I think Consists in being Governed by Laws to which they have given their Consent Either in Person or by their representatives.’ King feared that any weakening of Anglican Ireland might foster a pact between Catholics and Presbyterians. The

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only sensible policy was for the imperial power to ‘Encourage a sufficient Number of English to come to Ireland, and allow them their English liberty there’, and ‘so make it an English colony and a part of England’.59 Both Annesley and King suggested that current policy exposed Ireland’s weakness on two flanks. Any restriction on the trade of the rulers of England’s nearest colony, according to Francis Brewster, would increase the likelihood that ‘either the Irish, or Scotch become Masters of Ireland’.60 Instead of enticing Anglican Ireland to engage in ideological reinvention, the row with the metropolitan government augmented its self-perception as an embattled colonial elite which was now vulnerable not only to the native majority but to an influx of Scottish immigrants.61 In the 1690s Ireland’s elite expressed their unease about the threat posed by the Catholic majority, Scottish newcomers and discriminatory policies by those whose ‘interest’ they represented in the country and upon whom they depended for security. In doing so they were neither reconceptualising themselves nor expressing the concerns of the rulers of a typical European ancien régime. Instead, they persisted in articulating their anxieties as colonial settlers in a conquered land that was unusual both in its proximity to the mother country and in the resistance of its indigenes to acculturation. All historians, revisionist or otherwise, are tempted to tell their story backwards, and the decade has provided abundant pickings for those intent on constructing some bold thesis about the cultural and intellectual significance of Anglican Ireland in the early modern period. The purpose of this chapter has been to set the ideas of the decade in context rather than to contribute to a debate about subsequent developments. Its arguments, if accurate, may however serve as a modest warning to those who anticipate mining the utterances of post-Jacobite Ireland for evidence either of fresh modes of discourse or of an unremarkable conservatism.

Notes 1. [Edward Wetenhall], The Case of the Irish Protestants: In Relation to Recognising, or Swearing Allegiance to, and Praying for King William and Queen Mary, Stated and Resolved (London, 1691), p. 25. 2. Nicholas Canny, Kingdom and Colony: Ireland in the Atlantic World 1560–1800 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press,1988), p. 122. 3. J.I. McGuire, ‘The Church of Ireland and the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688’, in Art Cosgrove and Donal McCartney (eds), Studies in Irish History Presented to R. Dudley Edwards (Dublin: University College), pp. 137–49.

The Political Ideas of Anglican Ireland 77 4. S.J. Connolly, ‘The Glorious Revolution in Irish Protestant Political Thinking’, in S.J. Connolly (ed.), Political Ideas in Eighteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000). I am grateful to Professor Connolly for allowing me to read the unpublished version of his chapter. 5. S.J. Connolly, ‘The Church of Ireland and the Royal Martyr: Regicide and the Revolution in Anglican Political Thought c. 1660–c. 1745’. Again I am indebted to Professor Connolly for permitting me to read an unpublished paper. 6. Cf. Bruce P. Lenman, ‘The Poverty of Political Theory in the Scottish Revolution of 1688–1690’, in Lois G. Schwoerer (ed.), The Revolution of 1688–1689: Changing Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 244–59. 7. Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman: Studies in the Transmission, Development and Circumstance of English Liberal Thought from the Restoration of Charles II until the War with the Thirteen Colonies (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1959), which is the most splendid example of the genre, traces the threads of commonwealth ideas through Ireland to the American Revolution. Robbins was English but taught for forty years at Bryn Mawr College. 8. C.H. McIlwain, The American Revolution: A Constitutional Interpretation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1958), p. 56. 9. Robert E. Burns, ‘The Irish Popery Laws: A Study of Eighteenth-Century Legislation and Behavior’, Review of Politics, 24 (1962), pp. 485–508. 10. John Travers, A Sermon Preached in St. Andrew’s–Church, Dublin; Before the Honourable The House of Commons the 8th Day of October, 1695 (Dublin, 1695), p. 9. 11. Canny, Kingdom and Colony, p. 119. 12. William King, The State of the Protestants of Ireland Under the Late King James’s Government (London, 1692), 4th edn, pp. 3–5, 38–9. 13. For example, T.C. Barnard, ‘The Uses of 23 October 1641 and Irish Protestant Celebrations’, English Historical Review, 106 (1991), 889–920; idem, ‘Reforming Irish Manners: the Religious Societies in Dublin during the 1690s’, Historical Journal, 35 (1992), 805–38; idem, ‘Protestants and the Irish Language, c. 1675–1725’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 44 (1993), 243–72; Robert Eccleshall, ‘Anglican Political Thought in the Century after the Revolution of 1688’, in D. George Boyce, Robert Eccleshall and Vincent Geoghegan (eds.), Political Thought in Ireland since the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 36–72. 14. Tobias Pullen, A Sermon Preached in Christ-Church Before His Excellency the Lord Deputy and the Parliament, On the Fifth day of November, 1695 (Dublin, 1695), p. 15. 15. Edward Walkington, A Sermon Preached Octob. 23. 1692. In St. Andrews Church Dublin; Before The House of Commons (Dublin, 1692), p. 10. 16. Michael Jephson, A Sermon Preached At St. Patrick’s Church Dublin, On the 23rd of October. 1690 (Dublin, 1690) p. 12. 17. Walkington, A Sermon Preached Octob. 23 1692, p. 11. 18. Edward Wetenhall, A Sermon Setting Forth the Duties of the Irish Protestants, Arising from the Irish Rebellion, 1641. And the Irish Tyranny, 1688, 8c. (Dublin, 1692), p. 18.

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19. Nathanel Foy, A Sermon Preached in Christ’s-Church, Dublin; On the 23rd of October, 1698 (Dublin, 1698), pp. 27–8. 20. Edward Wetenhall, A Sermon Preached Octob. 23. 1692. Before His Excellency the Lord Lieutenant and the Lords Spiritual and Temporal. And divers of the Commons: In Christ-Church, Dublin (Dublin, 1692), p. 22. 21. John Vesey, A Sermon Preached Before His Excellency the Ld. Lieutenant and the Two Houses of Parliament, in Christ’s-Church, Dublin; When They First Met there together: On Sunday, October 16. 1692 (London, 1692), p. 19. 22. William King, A Sermon Preached at St. Patrick’s Church, Dublin On the 16th of November, 1690 (London, 1691), p. 23. 23. Mark Goldie, ‘The Roots of True Whiggism 1688–94’, History of Political Thought, 1 (1980), pp. 195–236. 24. Richard Cox, Hibernia Anglicana: Or, The History of Ireland from the Conquest thereof by the English, To this Present Time (London, 1689), II, ‘To the Reader’. 25. Jephson, A Sermon Preached at St. Patrick’s Church, pp. 14–15. 26. John Vesey, Archbishop of Tuam, to Sir Robert Southwell, 13 September 1690, inlaid in Gilbert Burnet, History of his Own Time (4 vols, rebound as 6 vols, London, 1809), 3, p. 100, Folger Shakespeare Library, V.b.267. I am grateful to Ian McBride, who found the letter in a grangerised copy of Burnet’s History at the Folger Library, for sending me a copy of his transcription. 27. Vesey, A Sermon Preached Before His Excellency the Ld. Lieutenant. 28. Travers, A Sermon Preached in St. Andrew’s-Church … 1692, p. 3. Cf. Cox, Hibernia Anglicana, I, ‘To the Reader’. 29. King, The State of the Protestants, p. 14. 30. D.W. Hayton, ‘The Crisis in Ireland and the Disintegration of Queen Anne’s Last Ministry’, Irish Historical Studies, 22 (1980 –1), 193–215; idem, ‘A Debate in the Irish House of Commons in 1703: A Whiff of Tory Grapeshot’, Parliamentary History, 10 (1991), 151– 63; idem, ‘The High Church Party in the Irish Convocation 1703–1713’, in Hermann J. Real and Helgard StöverLeidig (eds), Reading Swift: Papers from the Third Münster Symposium on Jonathan Swift (Sonderdruck, Wilhelm FinkVerlag, 1998), pp. 117–40. 31. Charles Leslie, An Answer to a Book, Intituled, The State of the Protestants in Ireland under the Late King James’s Government (London, 1692), p. 6. 32. J.P. Kenyon, Revolution Principles: The Politics of Party 1689–1720 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 22. 33. S.W. Singer (ed.), The Correspondence of Henry Hyde, Earl of Clarendon (London: Henry Colburn, 1828), II, p. 300. 34. Leslie, An Answer to a Book, p. 2. 35. Mark Goldie, ‘The Revolution of 1689 and the Structure of Political Argument’, Bulletin of Research in the Humanities, 83 (1980), p. 489. 36. King, The State of the Protestants, pp. 3–5. Cf. Glenn Burgess, ‘Usurpation, Obligation and Obedience in the Thought of the Engagement Controversy’, Historical Journal, 29 (1986), p. 515–36. 37. John Vesey, undated sermon on I Timothy 2, verses 1 and 2, in the De Vesci papers, envelope 3, pp. 5–7, T3738-G-1. The papers, which were consulted in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, are now in the National Library of Ireland. 38. Vesey to Sir Robert Southwell, 4 September 1690, inlaid in Burnet, History of his Own Time, 3, p. 88. Again I am grateful to Ian McBride for sending me a copy of his transcription of the letter.

The Political Ideas of Anglican Ireland 79 39. King, The State of the Protestants, pp. 3–5. 40. Wetenhall, The Case of the Irish Protestants, p. 6. 41. Mark Goldie, ‘Edmund Bohun and Jus Gentium in the Revolution Debate, 1689–1693’, Historical Journal, 20 (1977), 569–86; idem, ‘Charles Blount’s Intention in Writing “King William and Queen Mary Conquerors”’(1693), Notes and Queries, 223 (1978), 527–32; M.P. Thompson, ‘The Idea of Conquest in Controversies over the 1688 Revolution’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 38 (1977), pp. 33–46. 42. Samuel Synge, The Case of King Charles the First and King James the Second, Stated and Compar’d; In a Sermon. Preach’d at Christ-Church, Dublin, Jan. the 30th. 1706/7 (Dublin, 1707), pp. 21–4. 43. S.J. Connolly, Religion, Law and Power: The Making of Protestant Ireland 1660–1760 (Oxford; Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 3. 44. An Account of the Sessions of Parliament in Ireland, 1692 (London, 1692), p. 14. 45. D. George Boyce, Nationalism in Ireland (London: Croom Helm, 1982), p. 106. 46. Joep Th. Leersen, ‘Anglo-Irish Patriotism and its European Context: Notes Towards a Reassessment’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 3 (1988), p. 7–29. For a partial endorsement of Leersen’s thesis, see Connolly, Religion, Law and Power, p. 123; while for an attempt to locate ‘Irish patriotism’ in the context of contemporary political thought, see the introductory chapter in Jacqueline Hill, From Patriots to Unionists: Dublin Civic Politics and Irish Protestant Patriotism, 1660–1840 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). 47. Steven Pincus, ‘“To protect English Liberties”: the English Nationalist Revolution of 1688–1689’, in Tony Claydon and Ian McBride (eds), Protestantism and National Identity: Britain and Ireland, c. 1650–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 90. 48. Edward Walkington, A Sermon Preached In Christ-Church Before His Excellency the Lord Deputy, And the Honourable House of Peers; October the 8th 1695. Being the Day Appointed for a Solemn Thanksgiving for the Taking the Strong Cittadel of NAMUR, And for the other happy Success of His Majesty’s Forces, and those of His Allies in Flanders this Campaign (Dublin, 1695), p. 13. 49. Edward Smyth, A Sermon Preached Before Their Excellencies The Lord Justices, At Christ-Church, Dublin, The 29th May, 1698 (Dublin, 1698), p. 4. 50. The Correspondence of Henry Hyde, II, p. 26. 51. Walkington, A Sermon Preached Octob. 23. 1692, pp. 12–13. 52. Travers, A Sermon Preached in St. Andrew’s-Church … 1695, pp. 5, 9. 53. John Travers, A Sermon Preached in St. Andrews’ Church Dublin. Before the Honourable the House of Commons the Twenty Third of October, 1698 (Dublin, 1698), p. 13. 54. An Account of the Sessions of Parliament in Ireland, 1692, p. 25. 55. Jacqueline Hill, ‘Ireland without Union: Molyneux and his Legacy’, in John Robertson (ed.), A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the Union of 1707 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 288. 56. Second Report of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1874), Appendix, p. 233. 57. Cf. Patrick Kelly, ‘The Irish Woollen Export Prohibition Act of 1699: Kearney Re-visited’, Irish Economic and Social History, 7 (1980), 35, n. 47. 58. [Francis Annesley], Some Thoughts on the Bill Depending before the Right Honourable the House of Lords For Prohibiting the Exportation of the Woollen

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Manufactures of Ireland to Foreign Parts … Written in the Year 1698 (Dublin: S. Powell, 1740) 2nd edn, pp. 10–11. 59. Patrick Kelly, ‘A Pamphlet Attributed to John Toland and an Unpublished Reply by Archbishop William King’, Topoi, 4 (1985), pp. 86, 88, 89. 60. [Francis Brewster], A Discourse Concerning Ireland and the Different Interest thereof, In Answer to the Exon and Barnstaple Petitions (London, 1698), p. 60. 61. The point that the garrison mentality of Anglican Ireland was reinforced by its quarrel with the Westminster parliament is well made by Jim Smyth in his articles on arguments for an Anglo-Irish union: ‘“Like Amphibious Animals”: Irish Protestants, Ancient Britons, 1691–1707’, Historical Journal, 36 (1993), pp. 785–97; ‘Anglo-Irish Unionist Discourse, c. 1656–1707: From Harrington to Fletcher’, Bullán, 2 (1995), pp. 17–34; ‘“No remedy more proper”: Anglo-Irish Unionism before 1707’, in Brendan Bradshaw and Peter Roberts (eds), British Consciousness and Identity: the Making of Britain, 1533–1607 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 301–20.

4 The Road to Wood’s Halfpence and Beyond: William King, Jonathan Swift and the Defence of the National Church, 1689–1724 D. George Boyce

In 1727 Jonathan Swift published a poem, ‘To His Grace the Archbishop of Dublin’.1 The two men had enjoyed a long, if at times fractious, relationship, while King was Archbishop of Dublin (from 1703) and Swift Dean of St. Patrick’s (from 1713). Swift always doubted whether King had fully appreciated his Dean: in May 1727 he complained of King ‘giving me all sorts of uneasiness, without ever giving me, in my whole life, one single mark of your favour, beyond common civilities’.2 But Swift was unstinting in his poem saluting King’s opposition to the British government’s decision to grant a monopoly to William Wood to mint coinage for Ireland: ‘Great, good and just’ was once applied To one who for his country died; To one who lives in its defence, We speak it in a higher sense. O may the fates thy life prolong! Our country then can dread no wrong: In thy great care we place our trust, Because thou’rt great, and good, and just. What need Ireland fear from William Wood ‘If by thy presence he’s withstood?’ Where wisdom stands to keep the field, In vain he brings his brazen shield. 81

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Appropriately, the words ‘great, good and just’ were the opening line of an epitaph on Charles I written by the Marquis of Montrose, ‘both figures of pious memory to Swift’.3 For both Swift and King began their long march to the Wood’s Halfpence affair, not in the cause of Irish nationalism, or even Irish patriotism, but by way of their anxiety to defend that institution for which Charles I gave his life: the Anglican Church and religion. This was the broad, guiding principle of their lives; other ideas or arguments were secondary to this purpose, and derived from it. Swift and King were priests in politics, though they differed in their entry point to the world of politics. Swift, as J.C. Beckett has pointed out, enjoyed politics for its own sake, and used his political skills, acquired elsewhere, to defend the church.4 He was convinced that politically astute priests like himself were, unhappily, few in number: ‘On serious reflection,’ he wrote in 1708, ‘I am apt to think that there are hardly any men less politick for themselves than clergymen’; adding (with a somewhat forced modesty), ‘and we perhaps least of all.’5 King took up politics to save the church in its darkest days, for he lived in Ireland during the pro-Catholic reign of James II, suffered imprisonment twice for his cause, and had reason even to fear that a Williamite victory would prove less than helpful, bringing as it might Whiggery to the fore, to the detriment of the Church of Ireland. The fact that most Irish Anglicans had escaped to England while the Presbyterians of Ulster stood their ground was an inconsistency in behaviour that not infrequently embarrassed King. The necessity to work as far as possible with the Jacobite regime and obey the rightful king, for reasons of principle as well as prudence, was another compromising reflection. It was for this reason that King asserted in 1689 that the ‘Principles of Church Government’ rested on the interdependence of church and state: the state had temporal power over the church in temporal matters, and the church had spiritual power over the king and state in spiritual matters. This was a contractual relationship which, if broken by either party, dissolved the union and enabled the church (or king) to act separately, though the church should make every effort to prevent such a dissolution. And although King was highly suspicious of Presbyterians, he was obliged, in the time of trial, to seek ways in which their religious practices and views might yet be accommodated within the Anglican Church6 (but without sacrificing that church’s principles and primacy). King’s nuanced politics during the Revolution period might seem to mark him as a man of expediency only. But this is to confuse political necessity with the underlying purpose which, for both King and Swift,

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was that laid down by the sixteenth-century theologian, Richard Hooker. Hooker asserted, with some philosophical style, that it was essential for the church and the nation to be one: that the Church of England embraced all English subjects, and royal power served the good of the soul as well as the body.7 But this did not place the church under the king, even though the king exercised jurisdiction over what Hooker called ‘things indifferent’ in religion, the ‘external frame’ of the church’s affairs: these things Christ had not laid down as essential for salvation, but they nevertheless required regulation by the magistrate. But the church had a strong separate identity. Thus there was a partnership between church and state. Church government, like civil government, rested upon consent; and the royal supremacy was that of the king-in-parliament which embodied the consent of the whole church, since the church was the whole community and not merely the clergy. The danger here was that religion was subordinate to state interest; and King and Swift addressed this difficulty. The Crown upheld the church’s authority and its unity; the church supported the Crown’s authority. But the church did not owe its origin to the state, for the church was founded on scripture and held its authority from Christ. Hooker’s primary aim, though he gave it philosophical treatment, was to save the church and to give good reasons for state persecution of Protestant nonconformity.8 King and Swift were sincere in their belief that the Anglican religion was the most pleasing to God and the nearest to truth; but they both knew, and King in particular appreciated, that this was also a question of holding ground, maintaining numbers, calculating religious and political arithmetic. Catholics, of course, presented a special problem in King James’s reign; and William King’s leaning towards the doctrine of divine right was modified by the narrow escape of 1689. The penal laws secured the church against that threat. But dissent was another matter because it presented what might even be called an ‘ethnic’ dimension to the church’s problems. Dissenters could capture towns and cities, drive out Anglicans and settle in former Anglican territories: in short, threaten not only religion (and that, of course, was central and reason enough to call on the state to control them) but also the demographic and therefore political and religious map of Ireland. And when the reigns of Charles II and James II offered them reasonable toleration for the sake of state tranquillity, they seemed all the more inclined to flaunt their limited freedom.9 King was sure, as he put it in 1696, that the ‘English Protestant interest’ was ‘the true interest of the Kingdom’.10 But the danger of the government weakening in the face

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of dissenters’ demands was seen in the fact that more dissenters were made into sheriffs in 1696; even the most ‘contemptible fellow’ in the country was sure to be named sheriff. If this went on it would be hard to stop schismatics multiplying, ‘for most people value their interest above their religion’, and if dissenters were placed in positions of honour, trust and profit, ‘many will daily qualify themselves as they see their neighbours do’.11 As late as 1718 King returned to the early struggles of the church in Derry, recollecting that his predecessor there, Bishop Hopkins, was ‘a very good man and an excellent preacher, but so indulgent to the dissenters that they most unjustly and unkindly claimed him as their own, and used to tell the churchmen that if it were not for the £200 per annum he would never wear lawn sleeves’. But, by standing his ground, King tripled his congregations, and ‘the Rigidest Dissenters wou’d sooner referre the Differences between them to their parish Minister, then to their own Teachers or Elders’.12 Despite King’s necessary pragmatism, and Swift’s leaning towards Whiggery before 1710, both men were convinced of two things: that the Anglican religion was indeed the best way for men to find God; and that the civil magistrate was the best means of securing that happy certainty. There is no doubt that Swift was sincere (though less than fully honest with himself) when he wrote to King in 1708 that ‘although I care not to mingle publick Affairs with the interest of so private a Person as myself’, yet he begged King to ‘have favourable thoughts to me on such an Occasion’, because ‘no Prospect of making my Future, shall ever prevail on me to go against what becometh a Man of Conscience and Truth, and an entire friend to the established Church’.13 For Swift, the Church of England was divinely instituted. King, too, was certain that the Church of England and its Irish equivalent had a scriptural foundation for their beliefs and authority. In his autobiography King wrote: In the year 1693, while meditating on what manner I might prove useful to the dissenters and might render secure members of the church by law established, it occurred to me that all dissenters founded themselves on the authority of Scripture; and held that their religion was conformable to Scripture, and rested upon it, while ours was supported by human precept; nor could these things in which we differed from dissenters be confirmed by Divine authority, or the testimony of, or examples from, Holy Scripture.14 King felt that it must be very hard to persuade dissenters to join the Anglican church or for his people to adhere more firmly to it. But King


was not content with obliging dissenters to obey ecclesiastical and civil authority: efforts must be made to bring them to believe, through the process of argument, that the Church of Ireland was the most pleasing in the sight of God.15 It was to counter dissenting error that in 1694 King wrote The Inventions of Men in the Worship of God, in ‘which I showed clearly that our mode of worshipping God was conformable to Scripture, but theirs not only was not but was contrary thereto’.16 King was himself of dissenting background; his father was a Scottish Presbyterian who settled in Co. Antrim, but refused to subscribe to the Solemn League and Covenant, and was ostracised by his Presbyterian neighbours. King was educated in Trinity College Dublin, and this was a formative influence. In 1670 he embraced the Anglican faith. But his attitude to dissent did not spring only from his personal family background. It came from King’s conviction, as it did from Swift’s, that the church was a divinely instituted body based on apostolic doctrine. In December 1708 King wrote to the Bishop of Down that ‘no meer Presbyter nor body of Presbyters’ either had the power of ordination or exercised it. Nor did they have the power of excommunication. There were no mere Presbyters nor body of Presbyters that were not subject to and accountable to superiors. Where, then, did these privileges go when the Apostles and their assistants died? The last apostle, John, died in 106, and episcopacy began in 108: thus it was clear that the apostles so ordered it. These offices were exercised ‘by an order of men superior to Presbyterians’. This, he concluded, was the foundation of his belief in episcopacy.17 In The Inventions of Men, King attacked the Presbyterian way of praising God in public. From their way of singing psalms in metre, to their opposition to forms of prayer and, above all, their practice of leaving Presbyterian preachers to their own choice of what piece of scripture they would explain, or what subject they would deal with, King exposed Presbyterian faults. Their catechism was ‘full of Hard Word, School Terrors and Abstruse Notions, no wise necessary to be known by the generality of Christians’. Presbyterians did not read the Word of God but merely a verse or two for a text. They appealed to the bible, but did not allow the reading of it a constant place in their religious assemblies. They left that to private study where people may do what they like. They did not allow bodily worship.18 But worst of all was the Presbyterian failure to hold frequent communions: Whereas it is a Corruption of Popery, to suffer the People to be present at the Publick assemblies for worship and celebration of the Lords Supper, without being obliged to Receive: your Teachers insisted

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on endeavouring to Reform this Abuse and Innovation, have fallen into another Practice as unprecedented in Scripture, the Excluding the Sacrament intirely from your Ordering Solemn Meetings. ‘And truly,’ King concluded, ‘in this Point, you seem more inexcusable than the Papists themselves; for the Papists order the Elements to be consecrated every Lord’s Day, and distributed to those that desire it. But your Teachers neither offer it to the People, nor invite them to it’, thus ‘multiplying the Abuses introduced by Popery, instead of Reforming them’.19 King exhorted his brethren to gird their loins for battle, for ‘you are Minsters of the Gospel, and not of a Party’.20 They must persuade the world that ‘it is not Faction, or a Party you contend for, but the Fruits of Righteousness’. They must strive to outlive those who differed from them, rather than out-argue them, in the sense that they must live by standards of purity and holiness.21 Congregationalists differed more from Anglicans than did Presbyterians; he hoped to persuade them to ‘come nearer’ to Christ’s institutions ‘in their worship’.22 In his second Admonition (to the Dissenting Inhabitants of Derry), published in 1694, he urged them to ignore those ministers who had ‘preached you into a Dislike of the Established Worship. They have represented it as toleration, and by these means they have entirely separated you from us, as to all publick worship, and have got you to depend on themselves.’ And, having got them, their ministers ‘will rather you shall not worship God at all, than with us’.23 In 1701 he wrote to Archbishop Marsh of Dublin claiming that he entertained ‘great crowds of dissenters everywhere’ in Derry, and that they generally saw the ‘no-necessity’ of separation.24 For King, persecution of dissent was not enough: discussion and edification were equally necessary. This prompted some ruminations from Swift on the difference between his own and King’s temperament. Swift ‘very much applauded’ King’s ‘sanguine temper’, but did not share it. ‘I compare true Religion to Learning and Civility,’ he wrote in November 1708, which have ever been in the World, but very often shifted their Scenes; sometimes entirely leaving whole countries where they have long flourished, and removing to others that were before barbarous; which hath been the Case of Christianity itself, particularly in many parts of Africa, and how far the weakness of a Nation may provoke God Almighty to inflict so great a Judgement, is terrible to think.


But, he continued, ‘as great Princes, when they have subdued all about them, presently have universal Monarchy in their Thoughts’, so King ‘having conquered all the Corruptions in a Diocese, and then pursued your Victories over a Province, would fain go farther, and save a whole Kingdom, and would never be quiet, if you could have your Will, until you had converted the World’.25 Swift and King were at one in their conviction that the established church was the only true inheritor of the apostolic foundation. But they must work out how best this great edifice could be preserved against the enmity of Roman Catholic, dissenter and, indeed, an unworthy, apostate or hostile civil magistrate. King maintained as late as 1697 that the church could retain its medieval position as a self-regulating body. The Church of England based its position on Magna Carta, which in the first article stated that it should be free, that is free to choose ‘the ecclesiastical constitutions by which she is governed in convocations’.26 But Swift and King knew that the church depended on the civil power more than they cared to admit. In a sermon preached before the Lord Mayor and magistrates of Dublin in December 1706, King declared that all designs of men were vain, except the fear of God and the duties of religion. God governed the world, though in ways incomprehensible to man. The magistrates must be obeyed, but their power was ineffective to secure men in the practice of virtue. The king, moreover, could not dispose of the lives of his subjects, but as God thought fit to permit them. It was the duty of magistrates to punish sins. But ministers should put magistrates in mind of their duty: ‘They are constituted Watchmen to this very purpose ...’ Men must execute the laws; but men were partial and weak. There was a Hobbesian note in King’s argument. Magistrates might not be zealous in enforcing the laws; for example, if slander threatened a man’s property, he must defend against it; but if it were just blasphemy, then ‘I suffer nothing in particular of it’. Only those who were truly good would act against blasphemy even to preserve religion and the public. All mankind was ready to justify the defence of life, liberty, fame and property. There were many laws to secure the private interest; but few to secure the public concerns for religion and holiness. And such laws were likely to be imperfectly executed. There was no remedy for this but a diligent choice of magistrates. Careful choice was needed because an ill choice of constables, churchwardens and the like would result in men securing office for their own profit. ‘If they be not zealous for God’s glory... no good progress towards a Reformation can be expected; for the execution of Justice begins with them ...’27

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Thus church and state met in the execution of laws to ensure that the church’s teachings on sin and duty were not neglected: the church possessed a ‘recoverable reserve of prerogatives’, which only by custom and gracious condescension have been lent to the civil magistrate.28 But this concept of the meeting of church and state was not necessarily to the liking of the state. The state might find other reasons, other ways, to promote the public good. If it was accepted that the purpose of religion was to promote the right ordering of society, and thus realise the will of God, then the state might be expected to understand how this good end was to be achieved. But King admitted, even asserted, in his 1706 sermon that the civil power, though designed to direct the world in ways of justice, was incompetent to answer that end, the end of ensuring fear of God and the keeping of his commandments, because the magistrates might insist on the duty of obedience to the government, but their power to secure virtue or punish vice was ineffective. They had no power over the souls of men, and their power over the body was not as great as they imagined; they could not, for example, secure any man from the day of his death. The wicked might be hypocrites and escape punishment. Magistrates might abuse their power. Hence the need for the careful choice of the civil magistrate. The state might set order above virtue; and if the aims of true religion, to promote virtue, and those of the state, to secure good order, clashed, then the church might find itself contrary to the spirit of the age. As Pocock explains, the state’s concern for order, good governance and right religion was undeniable. But the state might define the pursuit of order as taking precedence over the enforcing of right religion: thus an indulgence for dissenting religion might be considered expedient, even if this was not ‘toleration’ in the modern sense.29 William King had feared that the Williamite victory, with its Whiggish support, might lead to a toleration of dissent to the detriment of the Church of Ireland. And indeed the English state was disposed to lean towards an indulgence, with the Whig policy of relieving dissenters from the sacramental test imposed on them in 1704. This tendency alarmed Swift, attached though he was to the governing party.30 King found himself watching and monitoring with the utmost care, even wariness, the policy of the English king and parliament. He was anxious, he preached in a sermon in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in July 1690, following the victory at the Boyne, that ‘sectarianism’ not be permitted to divert the natural resources, to weaken the powers, and to diminish the authority of the church.31 But his earlier concern lest William favour the dissenters caused him to write with some satisfaction to


Sir Robert Southwell that the king’s death had put the dissenters rather out of countenance. They thought themselves very much in the king’s favour. ‘I believe good use might be made of this,’ he continued, ‘if rightly managed; and that right methods now used might bring in many of them.’32 King, unlike Swift, never lost his desire to ‘bring in’ the dissenters (and, indeed, the Roman Catholics if possible, for whose conversion he was ever anxious, and the purpose of which he hoped might be achieved by providing religious instruction in the Irish language).33 But if this were not possible, then the church must look to the state to control politically those religious sects and denominations that were likely to pose a threat to the church. The obvious place to look was the Irish parliament, consisting of landlords who had, to say the least, a vested interest in upholding the Anglican Church in Ireland. But King was aware of the essentially secular concerns of the landlords: indeed, his 1708 sermon before the Mayor and magistrates of Dublin claimed that it was property rather than virtue that motivated men. On 5 October 1697 he referred to parliament’s refusal to confirm the articles of the Treaty of Limerick. ‘One would think the world were somewhat concerned about religion,’ he wrote, ‘for of the three bills that passed last, one was to prohibit marrying with papists, and another to banish regulars, and the third for damning the Articles of Limerick on pretence of weakening the papish interest; but after all there was not the least consideration of religion at the bottom, and we must learn from this not to judge according to appearance.’34 In a letter to the Bishop of Lincoln in 1715 he reaffirmed that ‘all the case has been to get their [Roman Catholics] lands and make them Hewers of wood and drawers of water’.35 It is for this reason that King moved for a reform of the Church of Ireland, secured the calling of an Irish Convocation, and sought to bring the Church of Ireland into a more regular administration.36 But King knew that the church depended not only, perhaps not mainly, on the Irish parliament for its support, but on the best efforts of the English government. It was on England that the Protestant interest depended; as Robert Southwell put it, the church consisted of ‘those English protestants who have nothing on this side [of] paradise to adhere to but old England’.37 Yet King also could convince himself that (depending on the ministry in power) it needed the Church of Ireland’s support more than the clergy and church needed the ministry.38 There was, then, a mutual interest here, and King even considered that it might best be served by a full union between England and Ireland: ‘I have thought much of our union to England,’ he wrote to

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the Bishop of Clogher in 1701, ‘and believe it will prove more difficult than many imagine. We have this disadvantage that we must just take what is given us, for we can’t struggle.’ King confessed in 1708 that the Scottish Union, by adding Scottish MPs to parliament, had given the bulk of the English people fears on that account, and if those from Ireland were of the same stamp ‘they will never admit them’.39 With no possibility of a political union to support the Church of Ireland, King then must rely partly on the church’s own efforts to reform and revitalise itself, the support of the Irish parliament and/or the English government. Despite King’s belief, expressed in 1710, that the government depended on the church more than the church depended on the government, he was not always so sanguine. An English parliament could hold an outlook very different from that of Ireland. In 1699 King warned the Bishop of Lichfield that the favour of the English government enabled the Presbyterians to influence affairs in Ireland.40 In 1708 he felt certain that a change of government in Ireland (one emanating from England with the Earl of Pembroke replaced by the Whig Earl of Wharton) had raised dissenters’ hopes; but King reported that this had ‘so turned the hearts of the generality, that I’m confident I could name 40 gentlemen that were either for or indifferent in relation to the repealing of the Test Act do now declare and protest that they will never do it’.41 In June 1710 King told the Bishop of Clogher that his chief struggle when he was in Derry was with the government, not the dissenters. He hoped now to collect all the church’s grievances caused by the dissenters, to prevent schism and ‘discountenance of the Established Church’: ‘Perhaps we may have a Parliament that will take the matter to heart and provide against it.’42 By 1711 he was losing hope: ‘our business in Ireland is to be quiet and mind our own business by making a noise we may hurt ourselves, but can signify nothing to the decision of the point, we must stand or fall by the fate of England, and Sure we are most Safe when we are in the same bottom with them.’43 But King had some personal as well as political experiences at the hands of England that urged qualification of his recommendation to stand or fall by England. A lawsuit between King and the Londonderry Corporation over a lease of land in 1697 saw King appeal to the Irish House of Lords, who reversed a decision in Chancery in Ireland, finding in King’s favour. The Londonderry Corporation in the course of the trial had discovered that the property belonged to the Irish Society, which appealed now to the English House of Lords. The English Lords resolved that the appeal from the Chancery in Ireland to the Lords in


Ireland was coram non judice. The latter proceedings in the case were accordingly void, and the Lord Chancellor of Ireland was directed to reinstate the Society of Ulster in its possessions.44 The English parliament’s decision to destroy the Irish woollen industry was another sign of the partiality of English institutions. The proposed Union in 1706 between Scotland and England meant that the Scots now had a vote and Ireland none to oppose them. ‘A corporation in England has interest only to baffle all our opposition, how more will a Kingdom?’45 Swift, for his part, had followed the fortunes of the Church of Ireland chiefly from the other side of the Irish Sea; but he was none the less solicitous for its welfare. He had served in a Co. Antrim parish, Kilroot, and had taken up the benefice of Laracor in 1700, and then Rathbeggan. In September 1700 he was appointed to the prebend of Dunlavin in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. He still had high hopes of advancement in England and was on good terms with leading English politicians; and in 1707 he used his influence to secure a fiscal advantage for the Church of Ireland in the form of a return of the ‘first fruits’ (a tax which before the Reformation went to the Pope) and the twentieth parts (a sum amounting to one twentieth of the annual income of a benefice) which, after the Reformation, was annexed to the Crown.46 The government indicated that it would support Swift’s pleas if the Irish clergy would acquiesce in the intention of the ministry to remove the Test Act in Ireland as a gesture to the dissenters. The way was being prepared by the addresses to the throne from dissenters in Ireland, and by the Speaker of the Irish Commons, Alan Brodrick.47 Swift showed his order of priorities: despite his political ambitions, he urged the Irish Church to defend the Act, though, when he was expressing his opinion to a government man, Lord Somers, he confessed to Archbishop King that he urged the case with ‘all the gentleness I could, because I am inclined and obliged to value the friendship he professes for me’.48 The negotiations dragged on, and ended with Swift’s bitter complaint over a manoeuvre by the Irish bishops, who decided that they could work better behind Swift’s back:49 but the experience led Swift to consider the implications of Irish economic decay on the temporalities of the Church of Ireland, especially the proportion of land devoted to grazing rather than to tillage, which converted land to a usage which lowered income for tithes.50 King and Swift were confronted with the dilemma of keeping the English ministry up to the mark: of securing their alliance, and if possible friendship, in supporting the Church of Ireland and thereby the English interest in Ireland. But the problem lay in deciding how best to

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realise that English interest, and the danger of it colliding with, or at least not conforming to, the position of the established church in Ireland.51 King wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury in March 1715, concerning the arming of dissenters to meet the Jacobite threat. It was said, he claimed, that dissenters were sincere in his Majesty’s service; ‘to this I answer,’ he wrote, that by the same fatal way of reasoning King Charles the first joined with and employed Papists in England, made a peace with the Papists of Ireland on Conditions of their sending him 10 thousand men to assist him in England, and for the same sort of reasons King James the 2nd declared he could not be without the assistance of his Roman Catholic subjects. God forbid any friend of His Majesty’s Government should endeavour to persuade his Majestie to make any such declaration in relation to the Dissenters. The possibility of a bill to relieve dissenters of civil disabilities reminded King of the time in James’s day, when it was ‘computed that Papists and dissenters made but one in fifteenth of the people of England, and I believe they are not encreased since’. It did not therefore seem good policy to ‘disoblige fifteen to oblige one’. But, ‘further I do not see how his Majestie is sure even of the Dissenters of Ireland any longer than he continues to comply with their demands, they are not like the English Nonconformists’, for ‘they are a people embodeyed under their lay Elders, presbyters and Synods ... and allow not that the civil magistrate has any right to control them and will be just so farre the King’s subjects as their lay Elders and presbyters will allow them’. It was, most significantly, ‘an article of their confession of faith that a false religion is not to be tolerated, and let any judge how safe the Church may be if these have the Arms in their hands’. The danger was that because they were represented as not being a large interest, and with so few gentlemen, but ‘as mean and common’, they might be allowed to bear arms. But their predecessors, having got arms, ‘after [16]41 overturned Church and State, and were too hard for Kings, Lords and Commons’. There were, King acknowledged, those who held that the church was very safe before the making of the Test Act, and so why should it not be safe were the Test Act taken away? ‘To this I answer that before the Revolution we had the oath of Supremacy which kept out Dissenters effectively from all places of trust and imployments.’ When that was taken off, ‘inevitably they became insolent and offensive to the highest


degree, and about 50 thousand of them being powered into the North of Ireland out of North Britain, they combined together and gott most of the corporations and trade into their hands.’ If the Test Act were taken away now, ‘I do not see how the Church in the North can Subsist otherwise than by some extraordinary providence of God.’ King had no faith in the opinion that a united Protestant front would be made if the Test were deleted. If this were likely ‘God forbid any honest man should be against it’. But it was ‘plaine the very expectation of the Success of this clause has considerably inflamed them and has already occassioned many hearts and encouraged Several insidences against the Clergy and churchmen’.52 King’s acute awareness of the difference between Ireland and England helps explain the apparent discrepancy between his scruple about persecuting anyone on the grounds of religion, and his willingness to attack dissent (let alone Catholicism) on civil grounds, as his assault upon the legality of Presbyterian marriages bears out. King was confident that the Presbyterian design was not ease of conscience and the liberty of serving God in their own way, but was ‘plainly to get the whole power in their hands and settle Presbytery in Ireland as it was in Scotland by the national Covenant, in 1638 and the Solemn League and Covenant afterwards in Great Brittain’.53 Even Swift, despite his concern for ‘liberty’ and his less dangerous Irish experience, found himself, once he had adjusted to the Irish predicament, dividing the world into churchmen and those such as the Whig politician, the Earl of Wharton, who was ‘a Presbyterian in Politics and an Athiest in religion; but he choseth at present to whore with a Papist’. The enemies of the church were popery and dissent, and dangerous foes they were.54 How much more alarming to King, who had lived through the Catholic assault on Ireland, and the Presbyterian danger to the North, who could plausibly claim that repeal of the Test Act would not have a disastrous effect in England; but would certainly have such an impact on Ireland. It would invite further demands in Ireland ‘and contribute to make those inquiet, that since the Test have been tolerably quiet and manageable’. They would claim that they should have the ‘liberty to Serve God their own way’, without hindrance, ‘and every bodie contends they should be on the same foote as in England’. When in England he told Tories not to do anything that might arouse suspicion of themselves: ‘Some that will call themselves Whigs have no good will towards the Established church either, nor to religion in general.’ His Majesty was safe with his ‘conformable subjects’. But to enable the dissenters to gain the advantage of the Revolution without qualifications

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or limitations was what ‘stumbles’ a good many, ‘especially in a Kingdom where our laws pass thro’ so many hands before they come to be enacted and under the cheque of so many persons of different interests’.55 King’s concern about the complex and limiting mechanism of the Irish constitution provides the link between his great project of saving the Irish Church from its enemies, especially the active dissenters, and his defence of Irish rights. The chief danger was a Presbyterian push towards gaining an establishment of their own: ‘Nothing will satisfy these people but the Church Constitution of North Britain.’ King was confident that ‘hardly 20 gentlemen in the whole kingdom’ would ever consent to any such constitution, but the ‘plain dilemma now seems either to Repeal the Test and join with Scotland, or let it stand and adhere to England’.56 This was his opinion in 1708, but at that time King was heartened by the fact that, though the dissenters of Ireland were ‘blown high of late’, yet ‘what happened lately in the House of Commons with you’, he explained to the Bishop of Bangor, ‘has lowered them much’.57 King was here referring to the high hopes raised on the part of Irish Presbyterians by the appointment of Wharton, who was believed to be favourable to dissenters, as Lord Lieutenant in Dublin. But the English Commons voted to have a pamphlet opposing the Test burned by the common hangman.58 ‘I cannot tell how it will hold,’ King went on, ‘but this Kingdom will always follow the measure of Great Britain and we have one happiness that generally speaking the most hearty persons for the Ch. are likewise most constant for the revolution which I believe is partly duw to the great suffering they underwent in K.J’s reign.’ He added tartly, ‘I am apt to think that if in England they had tasted a little more of our treatment, there would have bin as few non-jurors with you as with us.’59 A Presbyterian assault upon Anglicanism was dangerous on two counts: it threatened the constitution; but, in Ireland, it threatened to catch souls as well, and therefore to make areas that were vulnerable to proselytism into Presbyterian tracts of land, especially in Ulster, where King (like Swift) had his early, and troublesome, administrative experience in the diocese of Derry. The grave danger was that dissenters could develop political methods with which to advance their cause; once take off the constraints of politics, and the way would be opened to the advance of Presbyterian religion. This would seem to imply that King and Swift viewed religion as something that must depend, in the last resort, upon the state and its laws. This they would not want to admit; and they were both of a real, and sincere, piety and accepted


that it was hard to restrain men on account of their religious beliefs. But, once accept the idea of an establishment – and no other system could secure religion – then it followed that the state must be kept in the right hands, however imperfect the men who managed the state might be. Presbyterians would push their hopes of their own establishment, not only by direct, but by indirect means; nothing ‘will hinder both us and them’ in this struggle.60 But, as always, the argument came back to what the ‘state’ in Ireland was. Ireland had her own parliament to be sure; but, in words not unlike those of Swift in his celebrated arguments on behalf of Ireland when he attacked the obtuseness of English government policy, King in 1706 acknowledged ‘no other notion of slavery, but to be subject to Lawgivers that have different interest from the People that are to be governed by them’. Thus the ‘woollen manufactory was taken from us, because England resolved to have it to themselves, and sure Scotland rivalls us much more in our linen’.61 Both Swift and King thought on converging lines as they contemplated the gaps that could, and did, open between the English interest in Ireland and the view of that interest from the perspective of England herself. The political divergence of Ireland from England went deeper than the shifts and movements of parties and politics, of Whigs and Tories on both sides of the Irish Sea. It was one of political temperament. England may have aspired as much to construct a confessional state as did Ireland; but in England the response was ‘a series of unrelated and provisional political additions to what were plainly seen as delicate and highly immediate political problems’.62 In Ireland James’s last stand, and the concern that the danger was not removed by his defeat, reinforced a certain absolutist tendency in political thought, with a noticeable concern that England did not comprehend the special conditions of the Anglican Church and nation in Ireland. This concern easily translated itself from the religious to the political world, because the issues raised were similar. In his pamphlet, A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture, published in 1720, Swift drew out the contrast between the working of laws to regulate the economy in England and the English government’s policy towards that same end in Ireland. ‘Nothing,’ he wrote, hath humbled me so much, or shewn a greater Disposition to a contemptous treatment of Ireland in some Chief Governors, than that high Style of several Speeches from the Throne, delivered, as usual, after the Royal Assent, in some Periods of the two last Reigns.

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He confessed that it was hard to see ‘how any good Law can pass, wherein the King’s Interest is not as much concerned as that of the People’.63 King, in a private letter written in November 1721, expressed similar concerns. Like Swift, he was indignant about the proposal to establish a bank in Ireland, which he saw as yet another sign of English indifference to Irish needs and wishes: I am sure the body of the Protestants of Ireland were as sincerely and zealously affected towards His Majesty and his family as any of his Subjects, I am sorry to say it (but I am not afraid) the treatment they had recently in the Parliment of Great Britain has much cool’d them and if this Bank should be put upon them which only His Majesty can prevent it will greatly contribute to their chagrin.64 King had watched what he called the ‘short sightedness’ of England65 since the 1690s. But in the 1690s, against the background of the Protestants’ narrow delivery from Catholic power, he was anxious lest William Molyneux’s championing of the rights of Ireland should inflame opinion in England, though he did not abate his concern for the rights of the Irish Protestant people.66 But by the 1720s he was more willing to show his hand. This was because it was by now clear that the British parliament, dominated by the Whig party, was also determined to assert the right of that parliament to make laws for Ireland, in the Declaratory Act of 1720, and in its clear intention to conciliate, as best it could, dissenters. The Declaratory Act, as David Hayton has shown, was a shock to the Irish religious and political elite in its uncompromising language;67 it was now not only possible, but perhaps even essential, to begin to assert openly what King had so far professed only privately; and that even Swift, for his part, had kept to himself in an unpublished work: that Ireland, the ‘injured Lady’,68 must stand up for herself. It was not difficult for Swift and King to bridge what appears to be the gap between their denial of civil rights to dissenters and their assertion of the rights of the people of Ireland. When the English parliament was preparing the Woollen Act to restrict Irish manufactures, King was in despair at the insensibility of the people here in the matter of our trade, the Bill concerning which is not only destructive to us in my opinion by our present suffering, but likewise by the example; for if the


Parliament of England makes laws for us at this rate they may likewise tax us and beggar us when they please. But the ‘us’ were not the whole people of Ireland; for, King continued, the ‘Irish are overjoyed at these proceedings for they reckon that the lands will generally be tenanted by them, they being most necessary, if the gentlemen be obliged to throw up their flocks.’ They always looked on great flocks as hurtful to their interest and therefore the first thing the rabble did in 1688 was to destroy them, as to the worth they will be rather gainers than sufferers at present by this Act, for they will have room to enlarge their plantations, and they propose already the way of conveying off such quantities of wool and manufactures as can be kept out of the Kingdom by stealth, the principal losers will be the English gentlemen and tradesmen [that is the Protestant gentry], but they are yet so devoted to England and have such hopes of return to it that they seem rather desirous to enlarge than lessen the power of the Parliament of England ... King urged Grand Juries to address remonstrances to the Lords Justices, pointing out the injustice of the measure to both kingdoms, which must alienate the affection of the Anglican Protestants from the Crown.69 King never lost sight of the danger that there were those on the other side of the water who thought that Ireland’s difficulty was England’s opportunity. In January 1719 he wrote to Samuel Molyneux about the Irish Lords’ representations of their grievances over the Sherlock versus Annesley case, insisting that they were right to protest but hoping that, if ‘your House of Commons do not join with the House of Lords to oppress us, I think we can suffer little by any thing they can do to us’. The Irish Lords were, he argued, defending the rights of the Crown. ‘England,’ he continued, ‘has wanted the assistance of Ireland three or 4 times within last 60 years’ and ‘it may so happen again,’ though one in answer to your father’s book has the impudence to publish that it is certain, that Ireland was not reduced on the revolution one hour sooner for any assistance Ireland gave towards it, whereas the truth is that if it had not bin for the opposition Ireland gave King James, it was a great question whether he wou’d have bin kept out

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of Brittain or a most bloody Civil Warre averted, the Issue of which only God cou’d foresee. If the people of Ireland had not joined with the forces that came from England, ‘the warre might have lasted 3 years longer’. ‘It were worth somebody’s while,’ King concluded with a flourish, ‘to put these things in a just light and if I were as young as I was at the revolution, I believe I’d do it.’ 70 Swift likewise fretted under the obtuse politics of the British parliament. In his Letter from a Member of the House of Commons in Ireland to a Member of the House of Commons in England concerning the Sacramental Test, he argued fiercely against the relaxation of the laws penalising dissent (and in so doing virtually ended any hopes of advancement from a Whig ministry).71 But the tone in which he couched the Letter is instructive; for it began with a complaint that a case concerning two dissenting ministers in Drogheda, who had been prosecuted for their efforts to found a congregation there, was characteristic of the stories of hardship that dissenters used to influence English opinion. To this end, ‘our Speaker’ (St. John Brodrick, Viscount Midleton) ‘sollicited, in Person, several Members of both Houses’ to have the Test repealed by an act in the British Houses of Parliament although it be a Matter purely national, that cannot possibly interfere with the Trade and Interest of England, and although he himself appeared formerly the most zealous of all Men against the Injustice of binding a Nation by Laws, to which they do not consent.72 Swift warmed to his theme, observing that we are generally surprised at your wonderful kindness to us on this Occasion, in being so very industrious to teach us to see our Interests, in a Point where we are so unable to see it ourselves. This hath given us some suspicion; and although, in my own Particular, I am hugely bent to believe, that whenever you concern your selves in our Affairs, it is certainly for our Good; yet I have the misfortune to be something singular in this belief, and therefore I never attempted to justify it, but content myself to possess my own Opinion in private, for fear of encountring Men of more Wit, or Words than I have to spare. ‘We at a Distance’ conjectured two reasons for England desiring Ireland to repeal the Test. One was because it would be a step towards the like


‘good Work’ in England; the other that it would open the way for rewarding ‘several Persons’.73 Swift acknowledged that he did not frequently quote poets, ‘especially English’, but he recalled a strain from one of Mr. Cowley’s Love Verses, ‘a strain that I thought extra ordinary at Fifteen and have often since imagined it to be spoken by Ireland’: Forbid it Heaven my Life should be Weigh’d with her least Conveniency. Swift, therefore, exhorted England to speak out plainly the best argument England could use to repeal the Test ‘for we value your Interest much more than our own’: If your little Finger be sore, and you think a Poultice made of our Vitals will give it any Ease, speak the Word, and it shall be done; the Interest of our whole Kingdom is, at any Time, ready to strike to that of your poorest Fishing Town. It was ‘hard you will not accept our Services, unless we believe, at the same Time, that you are only consulting our Profit, and giving us Marks of your Love’. If there be a Fire at some Distance, and I immediately blow up my House before there be Occasion, because you are a Man of Quality, and apprehend some Danger to a Corner of your Stable: yet why should you require me to attend next Morning at your Levee, with my humble Thanks for the Favour you have done me?74 This defence of Ireland’s interest, Swift made clear, was based upon his belief that, ‘if once we repeal our Sacramental Test, and grant a Toleration ... I do not see how we can be said to have any Established Church remaining; or rather why there will not be as many Established Churches as there are sects of Dissenters.’75 This was especially troublesome in the North, where the influx of Scots was such that, when they encountered those that they could not assimilate, they soon found it in their interest to remove. ‘I have done all in my Power, on some Land of my own,’ Swift wrote ‘to preserve two or three English Fellows in their Neighbourhood, but found it impossible.’76 There was a real danger that dissent would in the end be made the national religion.77 The best barrier against this was the Irish parliament which, Swift argued,

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was one of different character from that of England. In Ireland, the terms ‘Whig’ and ‘Tory’ did not properly express the differences in parliament: in the sense that Whigs revered the memory of William III and approved the succession of the Crown to the House of Hanover, and sought to preserve the doctrine and discipline of the Church of England, with an indulgence for scrupulous consciences, there were not six members of the Irish Commons who would not come under this description. Likewise the Lords were secure, and in any case the absence of so many Lords in England placed the bishops ‘generaly pretty near a Par of the House’. Moreover, ‘we generally love and esteem our Clergy, and think they deserve it’. In this matter of the Test, they were the last persons who would be affected by it and thus we think them impartial, and ‘that their Concern is only for Religion and the Interest of the Kingdom’.78 When in London in April 1708 Swift warned the Dean of St. Paul’s that if the Test were repealed next session, there would be a ‘terrible consequence, both as to the thing and the manner, by the parliament here interfering in things purely of Ireland, that have no relation to any interest of theirs’.79 It was not in that interest of a man to release ‘an angry Cat in full Liberty at his Throat’.80 But the Irish parliament must be kept up to the mark; even the English interest in Ireland, that is, the political and religious nation, Swift believed was by 1721 endangered by the character of its representatives. In a letter to Alexander Pope in January 1721 Swift complained about that ‘whiggish or fanatical Genius so prevelant among the English of this Kingdom’: a ‘certain Minister’ had replied that this was accountable to ‘that number of Cromwell’s soldiers, adventurers establish’d, who were all of the surest leaven, and the meanest birth, and whose posterity are now in possession of their lands and their principles’.81 When to this was added the Irish parliament’s inclination towards ‘slavery’, then Swift’s ever more ferocious attacks on Irish Presbyterians are easily understood. And thus fanatic saints, though neither in Doctrine, or discipline our brethren, Are ‘brother Protestants and Christians’, As much as Hebrews and Philistines: But in no other sense, than nature Has made the rat our fellow-creature. These words were written in 1733, five years after Swift spoke for the ‘whole people of Ireland’.82 But also understandable is Swift’s concern


that the English interest rise above the political meanness and pusillanimity of their representatives, now tainted with Cromwellianism and Whiggery. Of course, his bitterness owed something, at least, to his final exclusion from ministerial company in 1714; but this personal anger is not the whole explanation, nor the main one. Swift appealed to the Protestant nation and called on the Irish parliament to lead the nation, a parliament which he always felt stood for the defence of the Church of Ireland, the national church on which the security, prosperity and dignity of the kingdom depended. King shared this view: hence his refusal in October 1724 to sign a letter which the Lord Lieutenant, Carteret, had drawn up urging prosecution of the publisher of the fourth Drapier’s Letter: an action which King, as a Lord Justice of Ireland, might more easily have put his name to.83 King even permitted himself a potentially expensive witticism in September 1725, when parliament met the Lord Lieutenant to hear of the surrender of Wood’s patent, and draw up an address of thanks. The Lords debated the precise form of the letter, and King urged that the words ‘great wisdom’ be included. When this was done, King remarked (in a phrase worthy of Swiftian satire) that ‘if it was wisdom to gett the Patent surrendered, it must have been the contrary to have granted it’. When the implications of King’s remarks were digested, it was urged that the words be deleted. King protested, and had the distinction of standing alone.84 King always suspected the Protestant gentry of putting their economic interest before their religious obligation, and certainly the gentry’s indignation at Wood’s Halfpence vindicated King’s suspicions.85 But King saw the matter in the light of his disillusioning experience with the English ministry’s control of Irish affairs over the Toleration Act of 1719. In the course of the century, the ideas put forward by Swift and supported by King over the proposal to establish a bank in Ireland, or to grant Wood his patent, were to take on a wider, more ‘patriotic’ tone, and be shorn of their religious context. But it is significant that one of the most derisive (and effective) Protestant slogans against King James was his financial need, requiring him to coin emergency money in 1689: ‘Brass money’, together with ‘wooden shoes’ and popery, were evils from which William III delivered Ireland. Swift made frequent references to ‘brass money’, and left his audience in no doubt that what he called ‘the Irish’ were unconcerned about the danger from Wood’s Halfpence: ‘for it is the true English people of Ireland, who refuse it’.86 And while the danger of reductionism must be acknowledged, and the development of a patriotism in Ireland’s two greatest eighteenthcentury Anglican priests must not be denied, it was their certainty that,

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as King put it, ‘Religion is so rivetted to the nature of man, that all Projects against it being unnatural must of necessity fail’,87 that they stood by their Church establishment. Toleration was a licence to let anyone profess any religion, or none.88 Swift’s parishioners were of the ‘middle and lower sort of people’ who were not tempted by worldly concerns to abandon religion; but where ‘Party hath once made Entrance with all its consequences of Hatred, Envy, Partiality and Virulence, religion cannot long keep its Hold in any State or Degree whatsoever’. For, if the Great Men of the World have been censured in all Ages for mingling too Little Religion with their Politicks, what a Havock of Principles must they needs make in Unlearned and Vulgar heads?89 Swift and King defended a confessional state against not only dissenters, and of course Catholics, but against the English government’s leanings towards dissent for its own peculiar reasons. In 1708 Swift spoke disparagingly of this tendency, including those who ‘would not give threepence to save all the established clergy in both Kingdoms from the Gallows’.90 It was to prevent this folly that Swift and King set out on the long road that led them, in the end, to the protest against Wood’s Halfpence in 1724, as another, this time economic, example of English indifference to the well-being of the Protestant kingdom of Ireland. It was precisely because they were primarily concerned to defend the national church against those who were, in their view, indifferent to it that the national issue was most strongly felt, and exerted its most powerful influence among the Anglican clergy.91 When King informed the Archbishop of Canterbury in November 1719 that the Toleration Bill had passed ‘after long and warm debates’ – a toleration ‘not precedented in the whole Earth’ – he complained that the ‘Bill could not have pass’d if our Brethren that came to us from your side of the water had not deserted us and gone over to the adverse Party. I fear we shall feel the effects of it ...’92 Moreover, the special character of the bill, which differed from the equivalent English Act, provoked King to try to make it conformable to the latter; but he was frustrated in Council by the Lord Lieutenant using his casting vote (with ten for and ten against) and with what King called an ‘artificial adjournment’ in the House of Lords.93 Six months earlier, in July 1719, King complained to Dr. Charlotte at Bath that the ‘undertakers’ who managed the Irish parliament for the government had falsely informed the ministry of


the temper of the people, in claiming that the people of Ireland wanted the Test Act removed.94 He referred to the defeat of the attempt to repeal the Test Act as showing that even ‘the most zealous Whigs’ were ‘for preservation of the constitution in church and state’.95 Swift and King hoped to rely on the Irish gentry and its parliament to defend the national Church of Ireland. They stood at a point when they appeared to anticipate the patriotic opposition of the later eighteenth century, but looked back to the profoundly religious (and therefore religiously political) seventeenth century.96 But there were significant later resonances: for a tradition had been established. Swift’s connection with Irish nationalism is slight and exists merely in rhetorical terms. His belief that the established church must defend the sister kingdoms and that the sister kingdoms existed to maintain the established church links him with the Anglican Toryism of the early nineteenth century. In 1834 the doyen of that Anglican Toryism, the Dublin University Magazine, published a hypothetical ‘Dialogue on the Popular Objections against the Established Church’, between ‘the Archbishop of D———n, Bishop of L———n, and D———l O’C———ll, Esq.’. The ‘Archbishop of Dublin’ summed up the argument for an establishment in ways of which Swift and King would have approved. A state church was essential for the maintenance of the ‘momentous truths’ of religion. It was also necessary that the sovereign should be aware that his adoption of a religion did not necessarily secure him from ‘the troubles which a factious clergy may entail upon his kingdom’. The doctrine he espoused must tend towards ‘loyalty to his throne, and contentment in the allotted condition of the clergy’. These considerations excluded the Roman Catholic religion for it proclaimed the pope God’s vice-regent on earth. Likewise it excluded the ‘Independents’, for an ‘Independent clergy will upset his throne’: These are the natural consequences of the principles of each. The one, wily and worldly, being connected with the state, seeks not to subvert it, but to transform and metamorphose the entire range of interests, properties, and even the social condition itself, to its own use, and, being intolerant, to crush every attempt to limit this universal worldliness. The other, visionary, gapes after unattainable perfection, and being fanatical, and therefore uncalculating and presumptuous, throws down the entire edifice of the state, and leaves nothing but anarchy behind. But both these religious systems being tolerated in a free country, ‘and the Church of England as by law established standing between them,

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prevents the tyranny of the one from subjecting the state to its control, and limits the wild prospects of the other to spiritual speculations’. If no established church existed, then ‘the imperishable properties of these two systems, derived from the presumed properties of each, will necessarily produce evil in the state’, causing the people to ‘regret the removal of the check to intolerance and fanaticism which the Church of England had provided’. Roman Catholics invariably sought to aggregate power to themselves; but dissenters also, because of ‘the spirit of their irresponsible authority’ in religious matters generated a uniformity of design and action in their political objects; and if the Church of England were removed, then a large and influential body would move into direct opposition to the control of the sovereign, and this would beget a desire ‘hallowed by the fond allurements of a wild religious fancy’, to assimilate the government of the country to the system of Independence which pervaded their churches. The study of Independency in America, and of Presbyterianism in Scotland, proved the point.97 This was the reassertion of a Toryism based on the merging of the Church of Ireland and the Church of England, and the maintenance of the Irish Church as an establishment; a Toryism that excluded the Catholics and (by implication) even the Presbyterians from the political nation, and upheld, as did Swift and King, the constitutional foundations of a confessional state.

Notes 1. Pat Rogers, Jonathan Swift: The Complete Poems (London: Penguin Books, 1989), p. 278. 2. Swift to King, 18 May 1727, in Harold Williams (ed.), The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift (5 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), Vol. III, 1724–1731, pp. 209–11. 3. Rogers, Jonathan Swift: The Complete Poems, p. 743. 4. J. C. Beckett, ‘Swift: The Priest in Politics’, in Confrontations: Studies in Irish History (London: Faber, 1972), pp. 111–122. 5. Swift to King, 12 August 1708, in Williams (ed.), Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, Vol. I, 1690–1713, pp. 92–3. 6. Andrew Carpenter, ‘William King and the Threats to the Church of Ireland during the Reign of James II’, Irish Historical Studies, 18 (1972), pp. 22–8. 7. For a brief and penetrating discussion of Hooker’s thought see Christopher Morris, Political Thought in England: Tyndale to Hooker (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 172–98. 8. Morris, Political Thought in England, p. 176. 9. Ian McBride, ‘Presbyterians in the Penal Era’, in Bullán: An Irish Studies Journal, 1 (1994), pp. 73–86. For the late seventeenth-century background, see John D. Neville, ‘Irish Presbyterians under the Restored Stuart


10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

16. 17. 18.

Monarchy’, Eire/Ireland, XVI (1981), pp. 29–42. Dissenters were particularly strong in Dublin, and one of their most effective pamphleteers, Dr. Joseph Boyse, English born, was a Dublin Presbyterian cleric (Thomas Gerard Doyle, ‘The Politics of Protestant Ascendancy: Politics, Religion and Society in Protestant Ireland’ (Ph.D. University College Dublin, 1996), p. 233). For an appreciation of Boyse, see Thomas Witherow, Historical Memorials of Presbyterianism in Ireland, 1623–1731 (Belfast and London: William Mullen, 1879), pp. 79–87. For a calculation of dissenters’ numbers in this period see T.C. Barnard, ‘Identities, Ethnicity and Tradition among Irish Dissenters, c. 1650-1750’, in Kevin Herlihy (ed.), The Irish Dissenting Tradition, 16501750 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1995), p. 33 and fn. 19. Barnard’s conclusion is that ‘only in Ulster, Dublin and a few larger towns were Dissenters regularly to be met’, and in Ulster, only Presbyterians. Elsewhere only Quakers were found. But in Irish politics, obsessed with political and religious arithmetic, the question of numbers was rarely considered in a calm frame of mind. For the treatment of dissenters in the reigns of Charles II and James II, see Richard L. Greaves, ‘“That’s no good religion that disturbs government”: the Church of Ireland and the Nonconformist Challenge, 1660–88’, in Alan Ford, James McGuire and Kenneth Milne (eds.), As by Law Established: The Church of Ireland since the Reformation (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 1995), p. 135. Ian McBride makes the point that when King arrived in Derry in 1691 the city was under siege, but from Presbyterians, not Papists. Dissenters formed a powerful party in the corporation. King tried, unsuccessfully, to prevent the election of nonconformists to the post of mayor. The Test Act of 1704 resolved these disputes by excluding Dissenters from such offices (Ian McBride, The Siege of Derry in Ulster Protestant mythology (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1997), pp. 25–6. Richard Mant, History of the Church of Ireland (2 Vols., London 1840), Vol. II, from the Revolution to the Union of the Churches of England and Ireland, January 1, 1801, p. 67. King to the Archbishop of Canterbury, 15 Dec. 1696, ibid., p. 68. King to the Bishop of Derry, 18 July 1718, T.C.D., King MSS, 750/11/3, 224–6. Swift to King, 9 November 1708, in Williams, Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, Vol. 1, pp. 104–5. Sir Charles Simeon King (ed.), A Great Archbishop of Dublin: William King, D.D., 1650–1729, his Autobiography, Family and a Selection from his Correspondence (London: Longman, 1906), pp. 36–7. For a general discussion of religious intolerance see Mark Goldie, ‘The Theory of Religious Intolerance in Restoration England’, in Ole Peter Grell et al. (eds), From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 333–4. King, A Great Archbishop of Dublin, pp. 36–7. King to the Bishop of Down, 7 December 1698, Trinity College Dublin, King MSS, 2531/26–7. William King, A Discourse Concerning the Inventions of Men in the Worship of God (London, 1694), pp. 20–4, 44–5, 60–1, 67, 81–94, 126–39. For a discussion of Presbyterian worship, see Alan Ford, ‘The Church of Ireland, 1558–1634: A Puritan Church?’ in Ford et al., As by Law Established, pp. 64–5.

106 D. George Boyce 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43.

Ibid., pp. 158–9. Ibid., pp. 167–9. Ibid., pp. 180–1. Ibid., p. 176: see also pp. 175, 178. See also King’s An Admonition to the Dissenting Inhabitants of Derry, Concerning a book lately published by Mr. J. Boyse, Entituled, Remarks on a late Discourse of William King late Bishop of Derry, Concerning the Inventions of Men in the Worship of God (London, 1694), p. 57. A Second Admonition … (London, 1696), pp. 10–11. King, A Great Archbishop of Dublin, pp. 98–9. A.P. Isdell Carpenter, ‘Archbishop King and Dean Swift’ (Ph.D., National University of Ireland 1970), pp. 341–2. Beckett, ‘Swift: The Priest in Politics’, in Confrontations, p. 112. William King, The Mischief of delaying Sentence against an evil Work. In a Sermon Preach’d before the Lord Mayor and Magistrates of Dublin, in St. Patrick’s Church, Dublin, December the 24th, 1706, by His Grace, Lord Archbishop of Dublin (Dublin, 1707). Mark Goldie, ‘Political Thought of the Anglican Revolution’, in R. Beddard (ed.), The Revolutions of 1688 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 129. J.G. Pocock, ‘Religious Freedom and the Desacrilisation of Politics: From the English Civil Wars to the Virginia Statute’, in Merrill D. Peterson and Robert C. Vaughan (eds), The Virginia Statute for Religous Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 43–73. Beckett, ‘Swift: The Priest in Politics’, in Confrontations, p. 115. Mant, History of the Church of Ireland, Vol. I, From the Reformation to the Revolution, pp. 732–3. Mant, Vol. II, From the Revolution to the Union of the Churches of England and Ireland, January 1, 1801, pp. 126–7. See, e.g., King to the Bishop of Lincoln, 19 July 1715, T.C.D, King MSS, 2533/24–5. Robert H. Murray, Revolutionary Ireland and Its Settlement (London: Macmillan, 1911), p. 309. King to the Bishop of Lincoln, 19 July 1715, T.C.D., King MSS, 2533/24-5. ‘King’s phrase was used by Swift in one of his Drapier’s Letters later on’. Beckett, ‘The Government and the Church of Ireland under William III and Anne’, in Confrontations, pp. 89–102. Ibid., p. 98. Ibid., p. 102. Murray, Revolutionary Ireland, p. 336: King to Mr. McCausland, 14 October 1708, T.C.D., King MSS, 2531/4. J.C. Beckett, Protestant Dissent in Ireland, 1687-1780 (London: Faber, 1948), p. 36. King to Robert Southwell, 16 February 1708, T.C.D., King MSS, 2531/67. The Irish Whigs opposed the imposition of the Test in 1704, but S.J. Connolly claims this arose from resentment at a Tory measure, rather than any great concern for dissenters (Religion, Law and Power, p. 164). In any event, there were only twenty negatives when it came to a vote (J.C. Beckett, Protestant Dissent in Ireland, p. 44). King to the Bishop of Clogher, 30 January 1710, T.C.D., King MSS, 2531/309. King to Mr. Jenkins, January [?] 1711, T.C.D. King MSS, 750/11/1/380.

The Road to Wood’s Halfpence and Beyond 107 44. Murray, Revolutionary Ireland, pp. 318–21. 45. King to Mr. Annesley, 17 September 1706, T.C.D., King MSS, 750/3/3/51. 46. Louis Landa, Swift and the Church of Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), pp. 53–67. 47. Ibid., p. 56. 48. Ibid., p. 57. 49. Ibid., pp. 62–4. 50. Ibid., p. 67: Harold Williams (ed.), Swift, Journal to Stella, Vol. II (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974), pp. 677–80. 51. Landa, Swift and the Church of Ireland, pp. 109–10. 52. King to the Archbishop of Canterbury, 24 March 1715, T.C.D., King MSS, 2533/160–71. King used his efforts to carry a bill through the Irish House of Lords confining the indemnity to the past (W.E.H. Lecky, History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (London: Longman, 1906), Vol. I, pp. 434–5). The Commons contented itself with a resolution that anyone prosecuting a dissenter for accepting a commission was an enemy of the Protestant interest (Connolly, Religion, Law and Power, p. 165). For King’s continuing anxiety about the state of the Protestants, and their danger from Catholics, even after 1714 and the Hanoverian succession, see ibid., pp. 279–80, 288. 53. Same to same, 2 June 1719, King MSS, 750/5/171–2. 54. Ian Higgins, Swift’s Politics: A Study in Disaffection (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 21. 55. King to the Archbishop of Canterbury, 24 March 1715, T.C.D. King MSS, 2533/160–71. 56. King to Mr. Annesley, 27 January 1708, T.C.D., King MSS, 2531/45. 57. King to the Bishop of Bangor, 8 February 1708, T.C.D., King MSS, 2531/149. 58. Thomas Gerard Doyle, ‘The Politics of the Protestant Ascendancy: Politics, Religion and Society in Protestant Ireland, 1700–1710’ (Ph.D., University College Dublin, 1996), p. 260. 59. King to the Bishop of Bangor, 8 February 1708, T.C.D., King MSS, 2531/45. 60. Ibid. 61. King to Mr. Annesley, 17 September 1706, T.C.D., King MSS, 750/3/3/51. 62. John Dunn, ‘The Claim to Freedom of Conscience: Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Thought, Freedom of Worship?’, in Grelle, From Persecution to Toleration, pp. 171–2. 63. ‘A Proposal for the Universal use of Irish Manufactures’, in Herbert Davis (ed.), The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. 9, Irish Tracts, 1720–23, and Sermons (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1948), p. 20. 64. King to Lord Townshend, 18 November 1721, T.C.D., King MSS, 750/7/34–5. 65. Philip O’Regan, ‘Archbishop William King, 1650–1729, and the Constitution of Church and State’ (Ph.D., University College Cork, 1996), p. 126. 66. Ibid., pp. 177–8. 67. David Hayton, ‘The Stanhope/Sunderland Ministry and the Refutation of Irish Parliamentary Independence’, English Historical Review, CXIII (1998), pp. 610–36. It is pertinent to note that in this context the government considered using the Declaratory Act to introduce relief for dissenters (pp. 633–5). 68. ‘The Story of the Injured Lady’, in Davis The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. 9, pp. 3–12. For an explanation of why Swift did not publish this piece see Beckett, ‘Swift: The Priest in Politics’, in Confrontations, pp. 117–18.

108 D. George Boyce 69. Murray, Revolutionary Ireland and its Settlement, pp. 398–9. 70. King to Molyneux, 3 January 1719, T.C.D. King MSS., 750/5/238-9. 71. Swift, ‘A Letter from a Member of the House of Commons in Ireland to a Member of the House of Commons in England, concerning the Sacramental Test’, in Davis, The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. II, Bickerstaff Papers and Pamphlets on the Church (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1939), pp. 108–25. 72. Ibid., pp. 111–12. For the Drogheda incident see I Ehrenpreis, Swift: The Man, His works and the Age, Vol. II, Dr. Swift (London: Methuen, 1967), p. 255. For Brodrick’s activities, see ibid., pp. 264–5. 73. Swift, Letter, pp. 113–14. 74. Ibid., p. 114. 75. Ibid., p. 115. 76. Ibid., p. 116. 77. Ibid., p. 117. 78. Ibid., pp. 118–9. 79. Mant. History of the Church of Ireland, II, p. 187. 80. Ibid., p. 122. 81. Swift to Alexander Pope, 10 January 1721, in Williams, Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, Vol. II, p. 367. In his fourth Drapier’s Letter, published in October 1724, Swift thought better of the Irish parliament; perhaps he had to. Oaths, affability and dinners; promises, threats and warnings: these ‘and the like Methods, would, in corrupt Times, have been taken to let in this Deluge of Brass among us: and I am confident, would even then not have succeeded’. (Herbert Davis (ed.), The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift: The Drapier’s Letters and Other Works, 1724–1725. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1941), p. 60.) 82. ‘On the Words “Brother Protestants and Fellow Christians”, So Familiarly Used by the Advocates for the Repeal of the Test Act in Ireland, 1733’, in Pat Rogers, Jonathan Swift: The Complete Poems, pp. 537–9. See e.g. his sermon on ‘Brotherly Love’, preached at St. Patrick’s Church, 1 December 1717, where he warned that the lack of brotherly love ‘increases the insolence of the Fanaticks; and this partly ariseth from a mistaken meaning of the word Moderation’ (i.e. indifference). Davis, Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. 9, pp. 171–9, at p. 175. See also his ‘Sermon on the Martyrdom of King Charles I’, preached at St. Patrick’s, 30 January 1725–6, ibid., pp. 219–31; ‘The Advantages Proposed by Repealing the Sacramental Test, Impartially Considered, 1732, in Davis (ed.), Irish Tracts, 1728–33 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1955), pp. 245–51; ‘Queries Relating to the Sacramental Test’, ibid., pp. 255–9, ‘The Presbyterians Plea of Merit, Etc.’, 1733, ibid., pp. 261–79. 83. Herbert Davis (ed.), The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. 10, The Drapier’s Letters and Other Works, 1721–1728 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1941), pp. xix-xx. 84. Ibid., p. xxix. For King’s attitude to the controversy, see I. Ehrenpreis, Swift: The Man, his Works and the Age, Vol. III, Dean Swift (London: Methuen, 1983), pp. 266–7, 275, 312–14. 85. Patrick McNally, ‘Wood’s Halfpence, Carteret, and the Government of Ireland, 1723–6’, Irish Historical Studies, 30 (1997), pp. 354–76. 86. Davis, Prose Works of Jonathan Swift: The Drapier’s Letters, pp. 53, 67. For specific references to ‘brass money’, see pp. 12, 19, 48, 67. 87. King to the Bishop of Dromore, 25 September 1714, T.C.D., King MSS, 2536/75–6.

The Road to Wood’s Halfpence and Beyond 109 88. King to the Archbishop of Canterbury, 11 December 1719, T.C.D., King MSS, 750/5/216–20. 89. Swift, ‘On Brotherly Love’, in Davis (ed.), Irish Tracts, 1720–23, and Sermons, pp. 174–5. 90. Swift to King, 28 August 1708. In Williams (ed.), Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, Vol. I, p. 94. 91. For which see Patrick McNally, ‘”Irish and English Interests”: National Conflict within the Church of Ireland Episcopate in the Reign of George I’, Irish Historical Studies, 29 (1995), pp. 295–314. 92. King, A Great Archbishop of Dublin, p. 218. 93. Ibid., pp. 341–2. King’s reference to the character of the bill arose from the fact that the Irish Toleration Act was similar to that of Scotland ‘partly by the assistance of some English bishops’, despite King’s efforts to reduce it to the limits of the English Act. It was accompanied by an Indemnity Act securing from prosecution nonconformists holding civil or military office (W.E.H. Lecky, History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (London: Longmans, 1906), Vol. I, p. 435). Brodrick’s bill exempted dissenters and ministers from the penalties still in force for non-attendance at church and officiating without proper authority. Attempts to expand the scope of the bill were voted down by large majorities (Connolly, Religion, Law and Power, p. 165). The English Act, introduced by Earl Stanhope and entitled a ‘bill for strengthening the Protestant interest in these Kingdoms’, restored the legal position of dissenters to that of mid-1689. A clause to remove civil disabilities on dissenters was abandoned (Nicholas Tyacke, ‘The “Rise of Puritanism” and the Legalizing of Dissent, 1571–1717’, in Grell, From Persecution to Toleration, p. 49). For the English dissenters’ position then see B. R. White, ‘The Twilight of Puritanism in the Years before and after 1688’, in ibid.’, pp. 314–15. The Toleration Act of 1689 was not a law tolerating dissent, but one suspending some penalties for the benefit of some dissenters. 94. King to Dr. Charlotte, 16 July 1719, T.C.D. King MSS, 750/5/179–81. 95. King to Lord Southwell, 16 July 1719, in David Hayton, ‘Exclusion, Conformity, and Parliamentary Representation: The Impact of the Sacramental Test on Irish Dissenting Politics’, in Herlihy, The Politics of Irish Dissent, p. 73. 96. It is true that the Wood’s Halfpence affair has been regarded by some historians (and contemporaries) as (in the words of Archbishop Hugh Boulter of Armagh) uniting ‘people of every religion, country and party here’, even encouraging ‘intimacies’ between Catholics and Jacobites, and the Whigs ‘who before had no correspondence with them’ (J.L. McCracken, ‘The Rise of Colonial Nationalism, 1714–1760’, in T.W. Moody and W.E. Vaughan (eds), New History of Ireland, Vol. IV, Eighteenth Century Ireland, 1691–1800 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 114. But this is not an unknown phenomenon in Irish politics; it did not alter the fundamental contours of the relationship between the religious communities, nor did Swift intend that it should. 97. Dublin University Magazine, February 1834, pp. 208–30. Isaac Butt echoed these sentiments in his speech concerning proposals to reform the corporation of Dublin, 1840: Speech of Isaac Butt Delivered at the Great Protestant meeting in Dublin, on Thursday February 13th (London, 1840), esp. pp. 2, 15.

5 Public and Political Opinion in Ireland and the Idea of an Anglo-Irish Union, 1650–1800 James Kelly

Though the long-time contention of nationalist politicians and historiographers that the Act of Union was imposed on an unwilling Irish polity has yielded to a more sophisticated explanatory paradigm that emphasises the normality of patronage, the subject of Irish unionism before 1800 remains under-explored.1 Some aspects of the phenomenon, such as the appeal of a union to ‘the upper circles of the Irish Ascendancy’ in the late 1790s, the anti-union riots of 1759, and the Irish parliament’s calls for a legislative union in the early years of the eighteenth century, have been addressed from a variety of perspectives by MacDonagh, Murphy, Hill and Smyth.2 However, the fact that the only attempt to trace ‘the origins of the Act of Union’ over a longer time frame is largely devoted to an examination of changing attitudes in Britain highlights the need for a separate assessment of the ‘prehistory’ of unionism in Ireland.3 Attitudes in Ireland to the idea of a legislative union with England before 1707 and with Great Britain thereafter oscillated between attraction and antipathy. Largely disenchanted with the idea as a result of the disappointing Cromwellian union of the 1650s and eager themselves to govern Ireland, it was only in the late 1690s when it became clear that they would not be allowed the rights and freedoms enjoyed by Englishmen that Irish Protestants began seriously to favour this option. This tendency was accelerated by the inauguration of negotiations for an Anglo-Scottish union in 1702, but though both houses of the Irish parliament approved addresses calling upon the Crown to authorise an Anglo-Irish union in the years that followed, their interventions failed to elicit a positive response. The manifest lack of interest in political circles in England in a union with Ireland at this time combined with dissatisfaction with the practice of British government 110

The Idea of Anglo-Irish Union 111

to discredit the idea of an Anglo-Irish union in Irish Protestant consciousness. Discussion of the issue did not cease entirely, but the handful of ‘commonwealthmen’ and English appointees to the Irish civil and religious establishments who remained well disposed were soon dwarfed by the large and growing number who disapproved. As a result, when influential sections of British political and commercial opinion concluded in the 1750s that a legislative union with Ireland would be to their advantage after all, they met with a strongly negative response in Ireland. Having determined that their interests were best served by a domestic legislature, political opinion in Ireland passionately repulsed every suggestion that it should acquiesce in the abolition of its parliament. This continued to be the prevailing opinion for four decades, though the mounting appeal of a legislative union to British politicians and opinion makers won some support within the ranks of the most committed and informed supporters of the Crown from the 1770s. Their number remained small so long as the ascendancy of the Protestant interest in Ireland and the Anglo-Irish connection were secure. But when both came under threat in the 1790s, the hitherto small nucleus of Irish unionists grew appreciably until finally, and significantly, it was sizeable enough in the aftermath of the 1798 Rebellion to allow an Act of Union to be agitated with the prospect of success.

I As a result of the unhappy experiences of those nominated to represent the kingdom of Ireland in the 1650s when the Cromwellians imposed a legislative union, there was little support for the idea in Ireland on the restoration of the monarchy in 1660.4 Opposition derived as much from the inability of the representatives from Ireland to secure any amelioration of their major grievance – the high level of taxation imposed upon the country – as it did from the conviction that they would be better governed through an assembly of their own. For all that, the response to the parliament that met in Dublin between 1661 and 1666 was sufficiently positive to prevent significant leaching in political resistance to the idea of a legislative union with England in the years that followed. No less consequently, the Westminster legislature continued to fail to endear itself to Irish opinion by implementing a substantial corpus of mercantilist regulation in the 1660s and 1670s which subordinated Irish economic and commercial activity to that of England.5 Despite this, a union was not without champions. This is the

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implication of an intriguing report dating from 1708 that ‘a paper signed by most of the considerable persons of that kingdom’ on the subject of a union was transmitted from Ireland to Charles II in 1668.6 Nothing more is known of this. But taken together with the observation a decade later by Thomas Sheridan (a prominent revenue official and political writer) that he ‘heard some say … it is not only convenient but necessary to unite’ the two kingdoms, it can plausibly be suggested that there was more support for a union than the rather slim corpus of contemporary evidence suggests. Sheridan was certainly attracted to the idea, as he observed approvingly that if the two kingdoms ‘were made one’ he could not see how ‘their interest would be different from ours’.7 This was a development Sir William Petty was eager to foster. As the owner of substantial lands in Ireland, he was persuaded that a union would promote economic activity and strengthen England and English control over Ireland, and he drafted plans to achieve this end. Since he never consolidated his scattered musings into a complete scheme, his thoughts are not always consistent or compatible, but taken as a collection they represent the most complete and ambitious scheme for a union elaborated during the Restoration era. In summary, it was Petty’s contention that the union of England and Ireland would be of mutual economic benefit because the ‘wealth of both peoples united will increase faster than of both distinct’, and prove politically advantageous because it must ensure against future rebellions in Ireland by interrupting the process whereby ‘the Protestant and English interest’ became ‘in time degenerate … estranged and rebel’. This was a matter of profound concern to many English beneficiaries of the land transfers effected in Ireland in the mid-seventeenth century, but Petty was also very conscious of the wider geopolitical context. He calculated that as well as improving Ireland and enhancing the security of the English on that island, a union would make England ‘as strong and rich as … France’ and thereby enable it to achieve pre-eminence in international trade over Holland. This could be brought about, he suggested, if the Irish parliament was abolished and between 40 and 90 men were delegated to act as representatives for Ireland at Westminster. More ambitiously, he also favoured harmonising the demographic structures of the two islands by the extended ‘transplanting’ of people between the two kingdoms. This was hardly feasible since Petty envisaged nothing less than the transformation of Ireland into a mirror image of an English region; the example he had in mind was Wales, which, he opined, manifested all ‘the good effects of a union’.8


Petty was not alone in late seventeenth-century Ireland and England in wishing that Ireland bore a closer resemblance to Wales. However, the fact that no attempt was made either to replicate the Anglo-Welsh union of 1541 or to implement his schemes indicates that an AngloIrish union was not a realistic political option at this time. The generality of Irish Protestant opinion believed that an Irish parliament that met more frequently would serve them better. As a result, when the question of determining the most apposite form of government for Ireland arose following the military eclipse of Jacobitism in 1690–1, the proposals for a legislative union advanced either originated in England or with Englishmen with shallow roots in the Irish Protestant interest. Among other reasons, those English commentators who penned schemes advocating an Anglo-Irish union in the early 1690s did so to ensure that what one of their number termed the ‘irreconcilable antipathy’ of the Irish to the English did not precipitate a further rebellion. It was understandable that this should figure prominently in their thinking given recent events, but they also argued that a union was necessary to protect England’s commercial and strategic interests.9 Irish Protestants were no less agitated by the hostile demeanour of the Irish, but few were inclined to conclude that a union was to their advantage. In so far as one can tell, those proposals for a union prepared in Ireland originated with first-generation settlers or officials who, viewing Ireland as Englishmen did, had no difficulty devising plans of government which subordinated Irish interests to those of England. So, one anonymous settler advocated a union on the grounds that it was necessary to ensure Ireland remained open to Englishmen and to inhibit ‘English Planters’ in Ireland looking ‘upon our selves to be a distinct kingdom’. He apprehended that if the English in Ireland were allowed ‘legislative power’, it must over time cause them to ‘forget England, and … bandy and side with the Irish’, as had happened in the past. Convinced that their ‘interests’ must ‘very be different, while they are under different legislative powers’, he contended that ‘if the legislative power were the same and by consequence the laws and privileges the same, there will be no more clashing between [the two kingdoms] than between one shire of England and another’. Indeed, he forecast optimistically that it would greatly conduce to unite the Irish and English in this country; for while the Irish have hitherto liv’d under a separate legislative power from England they have look’d among themselves still as a distinct

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people; but their coming under the English legislative power, and being united to England, the privileges and immunities will by degrees carry them off from their old distinctions and they will begin to think themselves English men, and to be affected accordingly.10

This was an outcome that appealed greatly to the Accountant-General, James Bonnell, whose unionism was informed by the fact that, their recent reversals notwithstanding, ‘the Irish are in a much better condition than we hoped they would be in the end of this war and by consequence the condition of the Prot[estant]s so much worse’. He was of the opinion that it was necessary ‘to make this country a secure place for the English’ in order to prevent the Irish, whom he termed ‘a worming people’, generating differences between the English in Ireland and in England. With this in mind, he counselled against convening an Irish parliament in 1691 on the grounds that it must result in ‘this kingdom setting up for itself and having a different interest from England’. Indeed, he recommended a legislative union along the lines of that implemented by the Cromwellians in anticipation that it would ‘take this kingdom out of the hands of the Irish, and … take away all jealousy of it from the English, since it would seem then but to be a part of themselves as much as Wales’. Alternatively, if the presence at Westminster of ‘members’ from Ireland was unacceptable to English opinion, he recommended the establishment of a permanent committee of parliament to which Ireland could ‘send agents’.11 This was too extreme a proposition for both Irish Protestant and mainstream English political opinion, whose preference was an Irish parliament. The final decision lay with William of Orange and when he made it clear that he did not favour a union, all that remained was to fix the best time to convene such an assembly. Had unionists been more numerous and better positioned, the fact that the first meeting of the Irish parliament in 1692 was prorogued because the Commons insisted it had the ‘sole right’ to initiate money bills ought to have provided them with an ideal opportunity to advance their case. The fact that a union was barely mentioned suggests that having lost the argument in 1691–2, those of a unionist outlook concluded it was wiser to accept the existence of an Irish parliament.12 Some in Ireland avowed in the heat of battle that ‘they would rather be taxed by parliament in England’ than ‘quit the point’ of ‘sole right’, but this was not an invitation to ministers to inaugurate negotiations for a union. The commitment to parliamentary government remained strong, as MPs


demonstrated in 1695 when they resolved that ‘parliament ought to be held more frequently’.13 This was the voice of majority opinion in the mid-1690s. At the same time, the voice of unionism was not entirely silent, and one proponent, who wrote directly to William III in 1694, was hopeful that continuing difficulties in Ireland would tempt the English parliament to ‘imbrace a union of both kingdoms’ in the near future.14 The attraction of a union to many lay in the anticipated economic growth it would generate. Bishop William King of Derry expressed this conviction most pithily when he observed in 1697 that it would enable both kingdoms to ‘flourish effectively’.15 Such expectations were reinforced in the difficult years of the late 1690s when English mercantilist restrictions were seen to weigh onerously on the Irish economy. The appeal of a union was certainly enhanced by the ratification at Westminster in 1698 of a Woollen Act, which prohibited the export of wool from Ireland to countries other than England since it was assumed that a united parliament would not conduct itself after so partisan a fashion.16 The classic statement of Irish protest was prepared by William Molyneux, who, it appears, personally believed that a union would enable Irish Protestants to escape the unjustifiable humiliation of subordination to English interests deriving from their current dependent political and economic situation. At the same time, he was aware how remote the chances were that the English political establishment would agree voluntarily to share their privileges with Ireland in a united legislature, famously deeming it ‘an happiness we can hardly hope for’.17 William Molyneux’s preparedness to welcome a union emphasises the strength of belief of those who described themselves as the ‘English in Ireland’ that they were entitled to the same political and commercial rights as the English in England.18 It was not a solution that found universal favour, however. Writing in 1699 to Robert Southwell, William King explained that he fully understood, given ‘how our laws and priviledges are crampt and how unable we are to obtain or pass our laws that are really for our good’, why ‘many in Ireland wou’d readily hearken to … a proposall’ for a legislative union should it be made, but he was personally unconvinced. ‘I have’, he elaborated, ‘tho’t much on it and believe it is the interest of England much more than of Ireland.’19 This was an understandable conclusion given the lack of generosity of English policy towards Ireland, but it was also true that this treatment persuaded many Protestants to look upon the idea of a union with greater favour in the opening years of the eighteenth century. Even King was influenced because in 1702 he responded with grudging

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positivity to a ‘hint that there is some designe to unite Ireland to England’: Truly considering the breach made on our jurisdiction and the little ability or dexterity we have to help ourselves, how our parliaments are clogg’d and hampered by our own laws, and overturned by the invasion of our privileges I doe not see but it may be better for us than as it is at present.20 In the light of his suspicions of the intentions of English officials, it is hardly surprising that King should express concern that Ireland did not have a disadvantageous union settlement imposed on it. However, this is less significant than his willingness to broach such details as taxation levels and representation as it demonstrates that the difficult economic climate of the early years of the eighteenth century and the commencement of negotiations for an Anglo-Scottish union in 1702 gave Irish unionism a major fillip.21 William King did not entertain high expectations that the union negotiations with Scotland would either succeed or hasten a similar settlement for Ireland because he did not believe English politicians would accept either in their midst.22 Others were more hopeful. Henry Maxwell, the commonwealthman and MP for Bangor, was sufficiently encouraged to argue that it was in England’s as well as Ireland’s interest to conclude a union in a pamphlet he wrote outlining his opinions. Significantly, given what Molyneux had to say about the antiquity of parliamentary government in Ireland, Maxwell did not dispute English claims to legislate for Ireland; rather, he focused on the fact that their doing so was the cause in Ireland of ‘complaints, an alienation of affections and a natural desire of changing such uneasy state for one more easy’. Arising out of this, he maintained that it was incumbent on politicians on both sides of the Irish Sea ‘to take away the cause of complaint from Ireland, and the jealousy of England’ and that the optimal way of doing this was by a union since it would ‘be highly beneficial to England as well as to Ireland by enlarging the foundation of its power, wealth and trade, and by strengthening the inward frame of its constitution’.23 This reference to ‘constitution’ is important because, like all commonwealthmen, Maxwell was determined that constitutional liberties should be protected. Moreover, because he was convinced that the interruption of liberty in a colony must result in its endangerment in the metropolitan area, it followed that either England must suffer Ireland to live in Liberty, else they must maintain it in subjection by a constant force; and consequently


it must maintain that annex’d government by methods contradictory to its own constitution; which is such an inequality as must destroy the liberty of England.24 This was obviously unacceptable, so Maxwell urged ‘incorporating that kingdom into the kingdom of England, upon the same foot with Wales’ as the way out of the difficulty. By extension, since ‘the most effectual way to make any constitution firm and lasting is to make it the visible interest of the whole body of the people to preserve it’, he suggested that the best solution was to make ‘the constitution of England the constitution of Ireland’. Maxwell maintained that if this option was pursued, unkindness and jealousy would yield to ‘harmony, affection, willing protection, [and] a grateful and chearful obedience’ in AngloIrish relations. This was a prospect of virtually utopian proportion, but such were Maxwell’s hopes that he anticipated that if Ireland was treated no differently than ‘Devonshire or Kent’, the people of both kingdoms would be freed from the threat posed to their liberty by the large standing army currently needed to maintain control of Ireland. No less consequently, given the level of resentment in Ireland towards the restrictions upon their right to trade, he forecast that their removal through a union would allow British and Irish woollen producers to undercut their Dutch and French rivals and benefit the producers of other commodities as well. He conceded that Britain would profit more than Ireland. But because the increase in ‘the manufactures, trade and shipping of each nation … will prove a great increase of strength and power to the United Monarchy’ and rental income in Ireland would more than double to £6 million, the prospect he painted was strikingly encouraging.25 Forecasts of economic improvement were more likely to advance the unionist cause in Ireland at the beginning of the eighteenth century than Maxwell’s more idealised concerns with political liberty because of the kingdom’s continuing economic travails. This was clearly demonstrated during a debate in the House of Commons on 4 October 1703 on the state of the nation when ‘all’ who spoke ‘concluded that they did in the most earnest manner desire a union with England’. As a result, it was agreed to set aside a day ‘to consider the matter and how to represent it to the Lord Lieutenant … that her majesty may interpose with the parliament of England in that affair’. This was not viewed with equanimity in official quarters though the ‘calm’ and ‘good temper’ demonstrated by MPs was noted approvingly. Alarm bells began to sound when the Speaker, Alan Brodrick, suggested ‘an address relating to grievances and concluding for a union’, and Robert Molesworth, the

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radical Whig MP for Swords who chaired the committee on the state of the nation, presented a report which concluded with the statement that the English in Ireland should either ‘be restored to their ancient privileges or else united to England’.26 This was subsequently taken up by the whole Commons and by the House of Lords, arising out of which both ratified addresses to the throne rehearsing their many grievances and the ‘deplorable condition’ of the country as a preliminary to requesting ‘a full enjoyment of our constitution, or … a more firm and strict union with … England’.27 As the preparation of these addresses attest, political opinion in Ireland had moved a long way on the issue of an Anglo-Irish union in a very short time. A legislative union was not the only response to their grievances Irish Protestants were prepared to entertain, but it was identified by its warmest advocates such as Sir Richard Cox, the Tory Lord Chancellor, as the most ‘proper for both kingdoms’.28 However, this conviction was not shared in England as the non-committal response merely to take the addresses ‘into … consideration’ emphasises. As a result, nothing emerged from the Irish parliament’s appeals.29 This was a setback for the unionist lobby in Ireland, but they did not suspend their campaign. Spurred on by a mixture of resentment and encouragement as Anglo-Scottish negotiations neared conclusion, they were heartened by the high level of public interest in the issue and encouraged by the appearance of pamphlets in England advocating an Anglo-Irish union. For obvious reasons, arguments emanating from this quarter emphasised the strategic and material advantages a union with Ireland would bring England in its struggle for pre-eminence with France. But arguments that ‘the islands of Great Britain and Ireland seem intended by nature and providence for one state and civil government, our Terra Firma dividing us from the rest of Europe’; that ‘all … distinctions of English, Scots and Irish would be rendered obsolete in the common name of Briton’ if a union was implemented; that a union was in the interest of ‘our excellent constitution, … the Protestant religion and the established succession’; and that rents and the value of land would rise in the event helped affirm the unionist message in Ireland.30 They cannot be said to have influenced Archbishop King. He was concerned, if an Anglo-Scottish union was concluded, that Scottish representatives at Westminster would ‘have a vote in making laws for us’, as he apprehended that they would use it to do to the linen industry what the English had recently done to woollens.31 This was reason enough, King’s long-time correspondent, Francis Annesley, observed, to stir ‘the mighty patriots’ in Ireland to


reanimate their agitation for a union, but King entertained slim hopes that they would succeed unless ‘first directed by the government’.32 There was nothing to indicate that the government was likely to change its mind and, as the terms of the Anglo-Scottish union were debated during the winter and spring of 1706–7, the sinking feeling that the Scots had gained an advantage over them convinced many Irish Protestants that they were entitled to no less.33 This conviction was reinforced by the instruction that 1 May 1707 should be set aside as a day of ‘general thanksgiving … for the late happy conclusion of the treaty for the union of England and Scotland’. The occasion was celebrated with ‘due solemnity’ in Dublin, but the transmission from Cork of ‘an address’ requesting an equivalent Anglo-Irish settlement offers a more reliable guide to the public mood.34 It was a mood neither MPs nor peers could ignore, and within days of the opening of the session on 1 July 1707, both houses of parliament approved appropriately dutiful addresses congratulating Queen Anne on what had been achieved and appealing for what the Commons’ address termed ‘a yet more comprehensive union’.35 This time the replies were a little more forthcoming. At the same time, the assurance offered MPs that ‘nothing shall be wanting … to make the union of all … subjects as extensive as possible’ was not a commitment to action and the absence of any follow-up mention of the subject in subsequent political correspondence indicates that nothing more was done.36 Despite the Crown’s continuing refusal to take up their invitation to open union negotiations, optimists like Francis Annesley contrived to bolster the hopes of Irish unionists by advising that ‘you never had, and never will have such an opportunity for effecting that work’. Further encouragement was provided in the form of publications such as the broadside edition of a London pamphlet printed by an enterprising Dublin publisher in the spring of 1708 outlining the benefits to Britain of a union with Ireland.37 As a consequence, the subject of a union continued to figure in private correspondence. It was no surprise, therefore, when the House of Lords renewed its request in May 1709 that ‘in due time, her Majesty will perfect this great work by bringing her kingdom of Ireland also into the union’, but once again nothing was done to meet their wishes.38 The rejection of these overtures for a union was a sobering experience for Irish Protestants. They had to reconcile themselves to the realisation that political opinion in England simply did not accept their contention that they were entitled to the same rights as Englishmen. Jonathan Swift vividly captured their feelings of resentment and

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rejection in his allegory of ‘the injured lady’ (Ireland) who had been ruined by a gentleman (England) and forsaken for another (Scotland).39 Swift’s satire was characteristically barbed; it is significant at the same time that he should engender Ireland with a female persona given the dependant role accorded women in contemporary society. This certainly was the role that was conceived for Ireland by English politicians who shared Sir Joseph Jekyll’s enthusiasm for the ‘England a mother and Ireland a daughter’ metaphor, which was deemed to epitomise their relationship.40 Irish Protestants resented the dependence this familial image assumed. Their resentment was heightened when the Westminster legislature demonstrated its authority by unilaterally concluding the longrunning dispute as to whether the British or Irish House of Lords represented the dernier court of appeal in Irish law cases by enacting in 1719 that the final authority lay to the east of the Irish Sea and that the Westminster parliament had the right to legislate for Ireland.41 This struck a further telling blow at the pretensions of Irish Protestants to enjoy an equality of rights with Englishmen, and it reanimated public discussion of the merits of a union – an issue largely ignored during the previous decade. Significantly, interest in the issue was modest compared with what it had been over a decade earlier. The English appointee to the bishopric of Derry, William Nicolson, confidently pronounced in 1721 that if London agitated the point, Irish Protestants would gladly surrender their ‘independency’ for ‘such an incorporation into the United Kingdom of Great Britain as hath been allowed the Scots’, but there is little evidence to sustain this conclusion.42 The publication of two new editions of Molyneux (1719 and 1720) might suggest that political opinion in Ireland had changed little since the beginning of the century, but Archbishop King knew differently. Distressed by the Declaratory Act, which he termed ‘our enslaving bill’, King was now firmly against a union; it would, he claimed, be a ‘case of the lyons & beasts on their hunting together’, and he reinforced this negative assessment by pointing out that the Anglo-Scottish union had been of no particular benefit to either participant.43 This was a contestable claim. But the impact of the rejection of their overtures in the 1700s, the prolonged controversy over the appellate jurisdiction, the dispute over the proposed Bank of Ireland in 1720, and serious political and economic difficulties in the mid- and late 1720s convinced many that it would be of more advantage to Ireland if it retained its parliament and Irish Protestants looked to themselves rather than to a union for solutions to Ireland’s problems.44 As a result, the Irish political


nation opted increasingly for an economic and political analysis that no longer identified advantage in a union with Britain.

II The growing disenchantment of political opinion in Ireland with the idea of an Anglo-Irish union evident during the late 1710s and afterwards did not result in the complete eclipse of Irish unionism. It is, at the same time, a fair measure of its decline that it was seldom the subject of sympathetic public comment or sustained political argument during the three decades that followed. Paradoxically, the most committed Irish unionists during this period were to be found among the ‘commonwealthmen’ who made an important contribution to the embrace of a more self–reliant economic outlook in the 1720s and 1730s. One of their most influential voices was Arthur Dobbs, who represented Carrickfergus in parliament from 1727, and whose Essay upon the trade of Ireland, published in two parts between 1729 and 1731, was an important statement of the need for Ireland to embrace a culture of improvement and self-reliance. Ireland, Dobbs contended, did not make the most of its demographic and natural resources. However, he was also convinced that the mercantilist restrictions imposed at the behest of British commercial interests were a major hindrance to economic activity in Ireland because he circumspectly pointed out how economically advantageous a union which resulted in their neutralisation would be to Ireland.45 In later unpublished work, Dobbs was more explicit in his identification of the advantages that would accrue if Ireland was liberated from its current dependent colonial position and from commercial restrictions as a result of a legislative union, but he was still primarily motivated by economic considerations.46 So was Samuel Madden, who was a leading light in that quintessential mideighteenth century improving body, the Dublin Society. Madden maintained in his seminal Reflections and resolutions proper for a gentleman of Ireland that there was no reason why Ireland did not ‘share in the rights and privileges enjoyed in England, Wales and Scotland … since there is room enough in the world for five times the commerce we should all carry on were our stocks and labours joined by a union’.47 Bishop Berkeley was more elliptical, but if one marries his suggestive query ‘whether it be not the true interests of both nations to become one people’ with his undoubted interest in improvement, he belongs in the same category.48 Together, Dobbs, Madden and Berkeley represented a not insignificant strand within Irish Protestant opinion,

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but they were neither sufficiently influential nor consequential to generate either enthusiasm or momentum for a union. Commonwealthmen excepted, the paucity of reference to the matter of a union in Britain as well as Ireland in the 1730s and 1740s is indicative of the fact that political opinion in both countries was decidedly apathetic to the idea at this time.49 Opinion in Britain began to change during the late 1740s as doubts were expressed about the kingdom’s capacity to sustain its international ambitions. The trend in Ireland, by contrast, was the other way.50 This was publicly demonstrated in 1751 by the hostile reaction to a pamphlet by the Earl of Hillsborough (an Irish peer active in British politics) in which he argued that it was to Britain and Ireland’s mutual advantage to agree ‘a complete and perfect incorporation of the two kingdoms, inseparably and perpetually’. Hillsborough justified his conclusion with respect to Ireland by claiming that a union would enable the kingdom to triple its population from two to six million; it would increase the volume of land under cultivation thereby boosting agriculture; it would stimulate trade; and, by encouraging Protestants to settle there, would diminish ‘the Popish interest’. With respect to Britain, he maintained that it had little to fear from Irish commercial competition. Moreover, it would benefit from increased absenteeism and investment from Ireland, and from Irish tax revenue. More controversially, he observed that because the Irish economy was already growing at an impressive rate, it was a timely moment for Britain to pursue this option before wealth and confidence generated the ‘insolence and vanity’ that would cause the Irish to ‘refuse an union’.51 Hillsborough’s identification of advantages for both parties as good grounds for an Anglo-Irish union informed his conviction that it was the key to the creation of ‘a new national interest … productive to both nations [and] of more numerous and greater benefits than either of them can separately enjoy’.52 He also believed that the success of the Anglo-Scottish union was an incentive, but whereas the publication of such a proposal a half-century earlier would have been warmly greeted in Ireland, political opinion was now decidedly hostile. This certainly was the position of the author of the euphemistically titled Humble Address to the nobility, gentry and freeholders of Ireland in which Hillsborough was variously aspersed as a ‘blind stupid buzzard’ and a ‘brainless, short-sighted babbler’, and an Anglo-Irish union caricatured as a ‘praeposterous, unnatural scheme’ and a ‘hellish, abominable subject’. More consequently, the author (who has preserved his anonymity) reinforced his negative message by forecasting ‘black and dreadful


scenes of desolation, calamity and distress’ if a union was ratified and by alleging that any member of the Irish parliament who supported a union proposal ‘would betray their rights, their liberties and their country’.53 This was the view also of the author of An answer to the late proposal who was less belligerent in tone but who was equally firmly of the opinion ‘that not one single (substantial, real) advantage is proposed to Ireland by this far fetched scheme’. However, instead of demonstrating this by marshalling an original argument, he opted for a word-for-word refutation of Hillsborough’s claims with respect to Ireland by identifying disadvantages where his target had identified advantages and by pointedly endorsing the gains Hillsborough suggested would accrue to England.54 It was an unsophisticated, if not entirely unsuccessful tactic. Crucially, it was less effective than the comprehensive refutation proffered by Nicholas Archdall, MP for County Fermanagh. For obvious reasons, the largest part of Archdall’s impressive pamphlet was devoted to disproving Hillsborough’s claims that Ireland would benefit from a union. This was achieved by analysing his assertions individually and by challenging at every opportunity the exaggerated aspirations that pro-union propagandists resorted to in order to persuade Irish Protestant opinion that a union would benefit them commercially, economically and religiously. Archdall was greatly aided in this respect by his candour and common sense, and it proved a highly effective antidote to the hyperbole and wishful thinking that sustained the optimistic claims that underpinned Hillsborough’s tract. In addition, it enabled him to employ his detailed knowledge of the Irish economy and of Irish society to expose and invalidate Hillsborough’s exaggerated assertions on such matters as the impact of smuggling upon the Irish economy and, significantly, to demonstrate by reference to the Irish linen industry that Ireland did not need a union to prosper.55 As this bald outline suggests, the primary focus of the debate on an Anglo-Irish union in the early 1750s was economic development. This was first and foremost a consequence of the fact that the impetus for a union came from Britain at a moment in its history when national confidence was at a low ebb, and opinion-makers were preoccupied with identifying how it might stimulate economic growth that would enable it to prevail over France in the struggle for international pre-eminence.56 As their responses to Hillsborough’s intervention attest, Irish commentators were no less willing than their English equivalents to debate the issue on its economic merits. But what distinguished Nicholas Archdall’s response to Hillsborough from its peers was his additional capacity to

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advance cogent constitutional and political reasons as to why an AngloIrish union was inappropriate for Ireland. Indeed, as far as he was concerned, since Ireland was England’s ‘sister’ kingdom, ‘govern’d by its own laws made in a full parliament’ and possessed of a ‘constitution’ settled by the ‘REVOLUTION of eighty-eight’, it was improper that Hillsborough should regard Ireland ‘as a branch or colony of another kingdom’ by suggesting that it should acquiesce in ‘this destructive plan of an union’.57 Ireland was, he insisted, ‘an independent kingdom’. As such it was ‘one of the most valuable jewels belonging to the Crown of England’. Consequently, any attempt to interfere with its independence would have deleterious consequences for the empire at large, as well as for Ireland and its Protestant people, since such a measure will greatly weaken one of the main props of the Crown, and, also, be the utter ruin of Ireland, as it will absolutely destroy a brave, loyal and Protestant people, render the laws of that kingdom useless, and unhinge an excellent constitution, and thereby disable Ireland from supporting and preserving the Protestant religion, her people’s properties, liberties and laws, and of assisting his Majesty, … as they have hitherly done with all chearfulness and alacrity.58 Archdall’s defence of the autonomy of the kingdom of Ireland, of the antiquity of its parliament and of the legitimacy of its constitution was manifestly indebted to patriot thinking. One cannot conclude from this that all patriots were hostile to a union in principle, but the trend was certainly in that direction. In this context, it is noteworthy that the suggestion by the outspoken municipal reformer, Charles Lucas, in 1756 that Irish liberties might be better protected by a united rather than by a domestic parliament gave way within a few years to strong resistance to the idea.59 Lucas’s readiness, however tentative, to contemplate a union in the mid-1750s serves as a reminder that attitudes in Ireland to ‘an incorporating union’ were not as unanimously hostile as the published replies to Lord Hillsborough’s pamphlet suggest. This conclusion is reinforced by the fact that Arthur Dobbs chose to update his thoughts on an Anglo-Irish union at this time to take account of the new economic thinking of Mathew Decker, Malachy Postlethwayt and Josiah Tucker, all of whom adjudged that a union was in Britain’s economic and strategic interest.60 Significantly, Dobbs circulated but did not publish his revised views. The author of a pamphlet, Policy and Justice,


published in Dublin in 1755, was less reserved. Like Lucas, he was encouraged to contemplate a union by disenchantment with the current state of Irish politics arising out of the ongoing Money Bill dispute because he recommended a union as ‘the means of conciliating the minds of His Majesty’s subjects and [to] make the country happy’.61 A number of English politicians reached similar conclusions,62 but the generality of Irish political opinion had become so avowedly antiunionist that any suggestion that such an initiative was being contemplated must have provoked bitter political resistance and, possibly, public protest. This certainly was the implication of the anti-union riots of November and December 1759, when a conjunction of factors convinced the increasingly politicised Dublin populace that a union was in contemplation. In fact, the public conflated an innocent legislative proposal and a number of essentially serendipitous references to union into a deep-laid plot to abolish the Irish parliament by stealth when no such scheme was in contemplation. However, the fact that a ‘riotous’ protest outside the Houses of Parliament on 22 November was followed by a larger protest on 3 December when 50 or so parliamentarians were compelled to swear ‘a solemn obligation never to consent to an union’, several venerable officeholders were assaulted, and both houses of parliament were invaded, emphasises the hostility with which the proposition was now received.63 This was underlined a year later when the Duke of Bedford, who was Lord Lieutenant at the time of the 1759 anti-union riots, was unexpectedly precipitated into controversy by the malicious allegation of a disaffected Irish peer that he had engaged in ‘diabolical attempts’ to promote an Anglo-Irish union.64 Bedford was little damaged by the charge. It is of more than passing interest at the same time that the contribution to this unedifying spat originating in England dismissed the ‘alarm’ to which Irishmen succumbed ‘at the very mention of an Union’, while his Irish respondent rejected the idea as ‘totally inconsistent with the honour, peace and prosperity of this island’.65 This is not to say that attitudes in Ireland to an Anglo-Irish union had so hardened that one dared not express support for the idea of a union. It is clear that anti-unionism was becoming more firmly entrenched in the political nation inside as well as outside parliament. But the publication in Dublin in 1760 of ‘a dialogue concerning the union’, in which a proponent and opponent articulated their respective positions, and the preparedness of the Freeman’s Journal in 1764 to publish views for as well as against demonstrates that unionism was not without its supporters.66

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A striking feature of the exchanges that took place in the Freeman’s Journal was the tendency of those advocating a union to cite economic advancement as the main reason why it was in Ireland’s interest. Its opponents, by contrast, increasingly emphasised the damage that would be done to Ireland as an independent and separate kingdom if its parliament was abolished. This perception was reinforced by lengthy analyses of the negative impact of the union of Norway–Denmark which served to counter the authority the unionist cause derived from the prounion writings of Petty, Molyneux, Molesworth, Dobbs, Decker, Tucker and Postlethwayt.67 As a result, not only did public awareness of the issue increase in Ireland; it also entered the political mainstream. This was revealed, almost incidentally, by the readiness in 1762 to interpret rumours that the Castle was willing to support septennial legislation as ‘a preliminary step to an Union’, and in 1766 to conclude that a union would be agitated on the appointment of a residential Lord Lieutenant.68 There were no grounds for either conclusion, but this did not deflect the rumour machine. Indeed, the impact of the abolition of the undertaker system and the re-establishment of a residential Lord Lieutenancy during the Townshend vice-royalty (1767–72) prompted a veritable spate of claims that ministers had it in mind to press for a legislative union. This phenomenon was inaugurated, appropriately enough, with the appointment of Simon, Earl Harcourt, to succeed Lord Townshend as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in the autumn of 1772. Forecasts that Harcourt would come equipped with instructions ‘to procure a union’ were wide of the mark. But rumours that this remained the administration’s object were carried in the patriot press in 1772 and 1773 side by side with lengthy claims that a union would prove economically and politically detrimental to Irish interests.69 These rumours were sufficiently widely credited in the run-up to the 1773–4 session for freeholders in Counties Meath and Dublin to approve resolutions against a union which, it was confidently forecast, would (with a land tax and a stamp tax) form the centrepieces of the administration’s legislative agenda. Indeed, when a land tax was presented to the House of Commons in 1773, it was rejected in quarters that might otherwise have been expected to welcome it because it was perceived to be the forerunner of a union.70 Actions such as these were widely applauded in patriot ranks because of the prevailing conviction that the British government’s wish with respect to Ireland was to ‘reduce us to the wretched state of a dependent province’. This ensured that reports and rumours of union continued to


proliferate, and that the controversy they stirred heightened public resistance to the idea, as Arthur Young observed.71 This was, of course, extremely unwelcome to the rising number of British politicians for whom a legislative union with Ireland became an increasingly attractive option as the coalition of patriot MPs and Volunteers forged in the late 1770s to press for improved commercial rights was seen to endanger British influence in Ireland. So acute was this concern that following secret discussions at cabinet level, efforts were made in the late summer of 1779 to assess the likely support for a union in Ireland. It was known that a union had some Irish supporters arising out discussions in which the matter was referred to in 1778.72 In 1779, it was maintained that the influential Under-Secretary Thomas Waite, the borough magnates Lord Shannon and Lord Ely, the Primate Richard Robinson, the Bishops of Dromore ( James Hawkins) and Cloyne (Charles Agar), a number of MPs (William Brownlow most notably) and important commercial interests such as the linen merchants of Belfast were well disposed, but it is significant that they could not all be relied upon.73 Indeed, the most striking feature of the surviving correspondence on the matter, aside from the reluctance of most of those who were confided in to offer their support, is the advice that was forthcoming from Ireland that ministers would be ill-advised to embark upon a union at this time. This was sage counsel, for though no more than a hint of the government’s intentions reached the public domain, hostile statements by George Ogle, who likened a union to ‘the murder of my country’, Henry Flood and others indicated that any attempt to achieve a union would be resisted passionately.74 A contrary opinion was expressed by an anonymous pamphleteer, who recommended a union as the ‘most expedient’ means to counter the disposition towards ‘disunion, and a total disconnection’ he detected in public discourse in Ireland.75 He was misreading Irish opinion if he anticipated that this alarmist analysis would win support for a union, but the fact that Lord North requested Sir George Macartney, who had served as Chief Secretary in Ireland between 1768 and 1772, to sound out Irish opinion in the winter of 1779–80 indicates that he was not alone in his conclusion that a union was necessary to secure the Anglo-Irish connection into the future. However, Macartney’s report that ‘the idea of a union at present would excite a rebellion’ put an end to the hopes of those in the corridors of power that there was any point in pursuing the issue and active discussion of the subject at government level immediately ceased.76 The realisation that so long as the patriots retained the political initiative in Ireland, discussion of an Anglo-Irish union was counterproductive ensured that there was little public reference to a union in

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the early 1780s. Moreover, such reference as was made was overwhelmingly hostile.77 The prevailing point of view was tellingly illustrated by the omission from the 1782 Dublin edition of William Molyneux’s Case of Ireland of the now embarrassing clause in which the author expressed his support for a union.78 It was not possible, of course, for the patriots to control public or political discussion, but their command of the political agenda was so complete at this moment that a union was not among the options actively canvassed when the AngloIrish constitutional relationship was reconfigured in 1782–3. The Duchess of Leinster’s partner, William Ogilvie, did prepare a ‘plan for a foederal union’ (possibly at the request of the Duke of Portland) in the summer of 1782 in a vain attempt to define as well as to delimit the freedoms that would be allowed the Irish parliament. This sought to allocate the respective responsibilities of the Irish legislature and the British government following the modification of Poynings’ Law and the Declaratory Act, but since it assumed the Irish parliament would continue as a legislative assembly, it cannot be described as a plan of union in any real sense.79 Moreover, it was quickly overtaken by events as the patriot leadership pressed successfully for the unconditional acceptance of their demands. Buoyed up by the confident expectation that legislative independence would result in improved domestic government, opinion in Ireland remained resolutely hostile to the idea of an Anglo-Irish union throughout the 1780s. A strand of unionism survived because of the realisation that the constitutional gains made in 1782 encouraged British politicians to look upon a union with favour, but it kept a very low profile. The manifestations of separatism on display in the radical press in 1783–4 and suspicions that the advocates of parliamentary reform were implicated in intrigues with France helped restore their self-belief, and encouraged some to conclude that a union was the way to remove ‘all the difficulties and obscurity of ideas that at present divide and distract the kingdoms’.80 This perception was reinforced by the conclusion of the then Lord Lieutenant, the Duke of Rutland, that ‘without an union Ireland will not be connected with Britain in twenty years’.81 However, when Prime Minister William Pitt initiated a plan in 1785 to bind Britain and Ireland in an equal trade zone, the patriots resisted his scheme because, among other reasons, it was, in the words of Henry Grattan, an incipient and a creeping union; a virtual union, establishing one will in the general concerns of commerce and navigation and reposing that will in the parliament of Great Britain; an union


where our parliament preserves its existence after it has lost its authority … In opposing the … bill, I consider myself as opposing an union in limine.82 Grattan justified this stand in the name of the constitution of 1782. This was a popular position, but there were others reasons as well. Denis Browne voiced his opposition on the grounds that a union with Great Britain would necessitate debt and taxation and a loss of liberty that must prove ‘ruinous to the country’. According to Charles O’Hara the union that ‘would in a great measure result from the adoption’ of the commercial arrangement would ‘reduce Ireland to the state of a province’.83 These were arguments that could not easily be countered, not least because the number of Irish unionists was so small. They were a definite presence in the corridors of power, and included the Chief Commissioner of the Revenue, John Beresford, the influential UnderSecretary, Edward Cooke, the Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, Marcus Patterson, the Church of Ireland Bishop of Killaloe, Thomas Barnard, the Teller of the Exchequer, William Burton Conyngham and the Attorney-General, John Fitzgibbon among their ranks.84 However, since they kept their opinions on this subject quiet, they were poorly placed to discredit the alarmist arguments of those who perceived in the commercial arrangement a harbinger of a legislative union. No less significantly, the public discussion of union in 1785 served (in Ireland at least) to raise the profile of those who were anti-union more than it did those who were well inclined. As a result, cautionary rumours that the government was contemplating a union proliferated during the mid- and late 1780s.85 None was substantiated, though the occasional publication in Ireland of newspaper articles and pamphlets which maintained that ‘an union of the two kingdoms would be of the most essential service to your trade, your manufactures, your commerce, your wealth, your freedom and your happiness’ gave them credibility.86 While political opinion in Ireland remained defiantly anti-unionist throughout the 1780s, the pendulum of opinion in Britain continued to move in the opposite direction.87 This tendency was reinforced by the Regency crisis when the Irish parliament’s failure to follow the lead provided by Westminster prompted all sorts of dire warnings about ‘separation’ and disunion.88 There were some in Ireland, too, who were encouraged by this episode to conclude that a union was in the best interest of a secure Anglo-Irish connection, but they were not numerous enough to encourage the government even to contemplate such a démarche.89 Indeed, as matters stood at the beginning of the 1790s,

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there did not appear much prospect that a union could be concluded in the near future because, for all the evidence of growing enthusiasm for the idea in Great Britain, Irish public and political opinion remained overwhelmingly opposed.

III The first hints that Irish Protestant opinion was not as steadfastly antiunion as its rhetoric in the 1780s suggested were provided in the early 1790s when the question of admitting Catholics to the political process moved to centre stage. This was always destined to exercise a formative influence on the configuration of Irish Protestant opinion because it raised the critical question, if they were unable to enforce their wish to deny Catholics access to political power, just how Irish Protestants would react to ceding the ascendant position they had enjoyed for so long. Acceptance was obviously one possibility, but for those who found this intolerable, the choices that remained consisted of preventing it or evading its implications. Since prevention proved impossible, this meant that the only practical option remaining was to mitigate its impact by joining with the larger Protestant community in Great Britain. Irish Protestants, in short, found themselves forced to choose between two of their most cherished convictions – between admitting the Catholic population, whom they believed aspired to their destruction, to a role in parliamentary government or to agreeing to the abolition of the Irish parliament and to government by a united parliament based at Westminster. This was the alternative that faced Irish Protestants when it emerged late in 1791 that the British government was no longer prepared to accept that they should enjoy what Henry Dundas termed ‘exclusive pre-eminence’ in Ireland.90 Thirteen years earlier when the issue before them was the much less vital matter of admitting Catholics to enhanced property rights, it had ‘been insinuated’ that Protestants ‘might deem it necessary’ to press for a union ‘as a protection against the numbers and formidable influence of the Roman Catholicks’.91 This did not prove to be the case, not least because they successfully ensured that Catholics did not acquire political influence as a result of the concessions they were then granted. The situation was very different in the early 1790s because the main anti-Catholic laws still on the statute book appertained to their political exclusion. No less significantly, the mood of Irish Protestants was very different as the expansive patriotism that shaped Protestant politics in the 1770s had given way in the mid-1780s


to a primarily reactionary disposition to defend ‘Protestant ascendancy’ against further dilution.92 As a result, even before Henry Dundas informed Lord Westmorland in December 1791 that the government was no longer prepared to allow ‘one description of Irishmen … to enjoy a monopoly of pre-eminence’, worried voices within the Protestant interest alleged that the government might ‘take part with the Roman Catholics’ in order to ‘bring about an union with England’.93 This was not government strategy, but the fact that the Catholic Bishop of Kildare and Leighlin, Daniel Delany, let it be known that he favoured a union as the only way to square the circle of preserving Protestant ascendancy and of granting Catholics political rights gave Protestants serious grounds for unease.94 Certainly, once news of the British government’s intentions broke, many concluded that its real purpose was to pave the way for a union. This interpretation was most strongly articulated in Whig and liberal circles where the view quickly formed that the object of the government was to foment disquiet in order to heighten the appeal of a union. Lord Charlemont expressed this conviction clearly when he observed in January 1792 that the goal was ‘to promote such a disunion as may possibly end in an union’. Alternatively, some concluded that the object was to win Catholic support for a union.95 Neither assessment was correct. The aim of the government was to redress what ministers perceived were genuine grievances in order ‘to nurse up in the country a real determination to stand by the constitution when it is attacked’.96 However, for many Protestants Catholic enfranchisement was too high a price, and it was from their ranks that the most committed unionists emerged. Because the intentions of Pitt and Dundas that Catholic goodwill should be secured by generous concessions was frustrated by the refusal of the Irish administration to pilot the required legislation through the Irish parliament, the actual number of converts to unionism in the winter of 1791–2 was small. However, the fact that the British government responded to the failure to implement its instructions and to the intensification by the Catholic Committee of its campaign for admission to the franchise by insisting that its wishes were honoured in 1793 ensured that the drift towards unionism proceeded at a faster pace during the winter of 1792–3. Discussion of the advantages of a union resumed in the autumn of 1792, and within a few months the Earl of Westmorland reported to Pitt that ‘Protestants frequently declare they will have an union rather than yield the franchise to Catholics’.97 Since there was nothing Pitt would have liked better, his failure to take up Westmorland’s claim suggests that he realised

132 James Kelly

support for such an initiative was at too low a level to allow so potentially divisive a measure to be pursued successfully. Westmorland pointed out to Pitt on 28 November 1792 that ‘the leading people’ did not look upon a union ‘with disapprobation’, but since the Lord Lieutenant had few contacts outside conservative Protestant circles, this was not enough to cause the Prime Minister to change his mind.98 None the less, it is clear that the realisation that they had now to share, however incompletely, the political system with Catholics because ministers in London had concluded it was in Britain’s strategic interest in Ireland to do so99 caused a significant drift in Protestant attitude towards a union. This was well described by Westmorland in April 1793 when he observed that the subject of a union ‘is generally talked of by the Protestants with a sort of acquiescence, [when] two years ago a man would have been insulted for a mention’.100 The increased readiness of Irish Protestants to look positively upon a union did not mean that a union was imminent. William Pitt certainly had no intention of pressing the matter in the mid-1790s, as he made clear to Sylvester Douglas in January 1794 when he acknowledged that ‘Ireland has hitherto been, and must yet continue a government of expedients’.101 At the same time, an Anglo-Irish union was more likely now than it had been at any time since the 1650s because there was growing support for the idea in both kingdoms at the same time. This had not happened before. As their response to the empowerment of Catholics attests, support for an Anglo-Irish union among Irish Protestants was inextricably bound up with their sense of well-being and security. Such concerns diminished somewhat once the crisis attendant on Catholic enfranchisement passed, and with it active public interest in an Anglo-Irish union. Reference continued to be made to it,102 but it took the crisistorn conditions of the second half of the 1790s when extra-parliamentary politics became avowedly revolutionary to bring about a further increase in Irish unionism. This was manifest in the greater readiness, in the aftermath of the disastrous Fitzwilliam administration, of prominent political figures to declare their support for a union. In the case of known unionists such as the Earl of Clare and the Earl of Ely events served only to strengthen their conviction that a union was essential if Protestant ascendancy was to be perpetuated; in other cases, the outcome was less decisive, but the movement within mainstream Protestant opinion was unambiguously in the direction of a union. One may be unconvinced by reports such as that carried in the Dublin Evening Post in April 1795 that as many as 80 MPs were already well


inclined, but the higher profile accorded the issue is consonant with a significant growth in its political appeal.103 The rise in civil disorder and of revolutionary republicanism in the second half of the 1790s was quite clearly the major reason for the mounting attraction of an Anglo-Irish union to Irish Protestants. This was particularly evident during 1797 and early 1798 when the ‘alarming’ condition of the country caused Lord Clare, whose unionist convictions continued to strengthen, to advise that without a union the ‘connexion with the British crown’ would soon have to be maintained by force. Others were of the opinion that this point had passed. According to Brigadier General John Knox in April 1797, it was necessary to ‘subdue the people’ by military force in order to prepare the way for the concession to the people of parliamentary reform and Catholic emancipation ‘on condition of their acceding to an union’.104 Support for the imposition of a union, by force if necessary, bears out just how convinced many conservative Protestants were that what one of their number termed the ‘democratical delerium’ then gripping the country represented a real threat to their continued existence. Force was necessary, one observed, ‘to cut off all factions’ and to restore to Ireland proper government based on established principles, but if this was to be perpetuated a union had to follow. A ‘Great Union’ would, it was argued, ‘exterminate every future source of jealousy or discord; … give new security and life to the real liberties of Ireland, [and] animate her industry’. It would also benefit Britain since it would ‘elevate both nations to a higher destiny, by rendering them conjointly more powerful and happy’, though this was deemed less compelling than the necessity of ending disorder and protecting the interests of Irish Protestants in a strong Anglo-Irish connection.105 Given these sentiments, it is not surprising that support for a union grew sharply at this time. By no means all who considered it were fully convinced, but the preparedness of once firm opponents such as the Marquis of Abercorn and Thomas Conolly either to contemplate or to express their support for such a scheme underlines the sea change in opinion that was taking place.106 Protestant opinion continued its unionist drift over the winter of 1797–8, until the outbreak of rebellion in May served dramatically to strengthen the conviction that a union was vital for the future security of the Protestant population in Ireland. Indeed, according to Dean Warburton, while some busied themselves in the aftermath of the rebellion devising plans to penalise and punish ‘Papists’, the ‘more sensible party’ contrived to advance a union.107 It could certainly draw on a

134 James Kelly

larger support base than ever, and the announcement that the government intended to pursue a legislative union was widely welcomed as ‘the only means left to save us from a repetition of crime and war’. Sir John Blaquiere expressed the sectional as well as personal motives that caused many Protestants to look positively at the idea of an Anglo-Irish union when he observed that ‘nothing short of a legislative union can secure this kingdom to the empire or to myself property and life’.108 There were many distinctly less well inclined; others, both on the liberal as well as conservative wings of Protestantism, were positively hostile. But the size of the list of pro-union interests identified by Dublin Castle as it rallied support for the 1799 session indicated that they could draw on a sizeable unionist interest.109 This was not large enough to carry the measure in 1799. But given the speed with which support for an Anglo-Irish union grew in the 1790s, and the rapidly appreciating strength of Irish unionism in 1798–9, it deserves a more prominent place than it is generally accorded in the history of the origins and ratification of the Act of Union.

IV At no time during the 140 years between the dissolution of the Cromwellian union and the ratification of the Act of Union was an Anglo-Irish union without its advocates. At the same time, it was only in the 1790s that Irish political opinion and British political opinion came to see merit in the idea at the same time. Previously, it seemed inevitable that whenever political opinion in Ireland deemed a union in its interest, a contrary view prevailed in Britain. This is important because it highlights that – for all the appeals to ethnic English commonality, Protestant solidarity and strength in unity made by advocates of an Anglo-Irish union on both sides of the Irish Sea during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – the determining factor in deciding the positions that were taken was self-interest. This is as true of the calls for a union made in Ireland in the early years of the eighteenth century as it is in the opposition articulated subsequently. It is even truer of the rapid spread of unionism in Ireland in the 1790s. That this was so is hardly surprising since so much of what was written on the subject of a union in Britain as well as Ireland was shaped by intrinsically pragmatic and utilitarian considerations. It was, to be sure, often presented in a language that contrived to emphasise the common ethnic, political and religious identities of the Irish Protestant elite and its British counterpart. Despite this, it was clear that they


differed on how Ireland should best be governed and that this provided the dynamic for unionism and anti-unionism. This was sustainable so long as the question of Catholic participation in the political process did not rear its head to disturb this intra-Protestant dialogue. When this happened in the 1790s, the shadow-boxing that had previously characterised so much of the public debate on a union was forsaken and the reality of self-preservation took precedence. This inevitably ensured unionism a heightened appeal and unionist argument a more real quality which contributed to make a union with Britain more palatable to Irish Protestant opinion and to make its eventual implementation possible. This could not have happened had opinion in Ireland remained resolutely opposed to the idea.

Notes 1. G.C. Bolton, The Passing of the Irish Act of Union (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966). 2. Oliver MacDonagh, States of Mind: A Study of Anglo-Irish Conflict 1780–1980 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1983), p. 134; J.R. Hill, ‘Ireland without Union: Molyneux and his Legacy’, in John Robertson (ed.), A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the British Union of 1707 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 271–96; Sean Murphy, ‘The Dublin anti-Union Riot of 3 December 1759’, in G. O’Brien (ed.), Parliament, Politics and People: Essays in Eighteenthcentury Irish History (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1988), pp. 49–68; Jim Smyth, ‘“Like amphibious animals”: Irish Protestants, Ancient Britons 1691–1707’, Historical Journal, 36 (1993), pp. 785–97; idem, ‘Anglo-Irish unionist discourse, c. 1656–1707: from Harrington to Fletcher’, Bullán, 2 (1995), pp. 17–34. 3. James Kelly, ‘The Origins of the Act of Union: An Examination of Unionist Opinion in Britain and Ireland 1650–1800’, Irish Historical Studies, 25 (1987), pp. 236–63. 4. Kelly, ‘Origins’, p. 238. 5. J.G. Simms, ‘Restoration Ireland 1660–85’, in T.W. Moody et al. (eds.), A New History of Ireland, iii (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 443–4; F.M. O’Donoghue, ‘Parliament in Ireland under Charles II’ (unpublished MA thesis, University College Dublin, 1970). 6. Some thoughts towards an union between Great Britain and Ireland (London, 1708), p. 25. I have not located the 1668 paper. 7. Thomas Sheridan, A discourse on the rise and power of Parliaments (London, 1677), reprinted in Saxe Bannister, Some Revelations in Irish History (London: Longmans, 1870), p. 141; N.L. York, ‘American Revolutionaries and the Illusion of Irish Empathy’, Eire-Ireland, 21 (1986), p. 23. 8. Kelly, ‘Origins’, pp. 239–40; Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice, The Life of William Petty (London, 1895), pp. 277–8; Marquis of Lansdowne (ed.), The Petty Papers, 2 vols (London: Constable, 1927), I, 13–16, 232; William Petty, Economic Writings, C.H. Hull (ed.) 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1899), I, 300–1, ii, 551–8.

136 James Kelly 9. ‘Remarks shewing it is not in the interest of England that Ireland should be a separate kingdom’ (1690), in Calendar of State Papers (henceforth C.S.P. (D).) 1690–1, pp. 201–6. 10. Considerations concerning Ireland in relation to England and particularly in respect of an Union ([Dublin] [1691]), pp. 2–4. 11. [Bonnell] to Harley, 3 November 1691, in H.M.C., Portland, iii, 479–81. 12. James McGuire, ‘The Irish Parliament of 1692’, in T. Bartlett and D.W. Hayton (eds), Penal Era and Golden Age: Essays in Eighteenth-century Irish history (Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation, 1979), pp. 1–32. 13. Sydney to Nottingham, 20 February 1693, in C.S.P. (D), 1693, p. 38; Journal of the House of Lords of the Kingdom of Ireland, 8 vols (Dublin, 1783–1800), I, 529. 14. [ ] to William III, ca. 1694 (B(ritish) L(ibrary), Southwell Papers, Add. Ms 21136 ff 13–14). 15. King to Southwell, 19 July 1697, cited in T.W. Moody and W.E. Vaughan (eds), A New History of Ireland, iv (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 7. 16. P.H. Kelly, ‘The Irish Woollen Export Prohibition Act of 1699: Kearney Revisited’, Irish Economic and Social History, 7 (1980), pp. 22–44. 17. William Molyneux, The case of Ireland’s being bound by acts of parliament in England stated (London, 1698); J.G. Simms, William Molyneux of Dublin (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1982), pp. 102–18; idem, Colonial Nationalism (Cork: Mercier Press, 1976), p. 48; [ William Johnston], Reasons for adopting an union between Ireland and Great Britain (Dublin, 1799), p. 59. 18. For illustrations of the use of this terminology see Considerations respecting Ireland, passim; and for some discussion of this issue and of the context see Joep Leerssen, Mere Irish and Fior Ghael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1986), pp. 340–5. 19. King to Southwell, 14 November 1699 (T(rinity). C(ollege). D(ublin)., King Papers, Ms 1489/1 ff 89–91). 20. King to Annesley, 12 February 1702 (T.C.D., King Papers, Ms 750/2/3 ff 106–7). 21. Ibid.; King to Bishop of Clogher, 11 February (T.C.D., King Papers, Ms 750/2/3 ff 104–5); Southwell to King, 14 March 1702 (ibid., Ms 1995–2008 f 890); Smyth, ‘Like Amphibious Animals’, p. 794. 22. King to Bishop of Killaloe, 24 March 1702 (T.C.D., King Papers, Ms 750/2/3 f 133). 23. [Henry Maxwell], An essay toward an union of Ireland with England, most humbly offer’d to the consideration of the Queen’s most excellent majesty, and both houses of parliament (London, 1703), pp. 3–6. 24. Ibid., pp. 7–8. 25. Ibid., pp. 9–56 passim. 26. Lords Justice to Ormonde, 30 January, [Southwell] to [Nottingham], 2, 4, 9, 15 October in C.S.P. (D), 1703, pp. 563, 141, 149–50, 156. 27. Smyth, ‘Like Amphibious Animals’, p. 795; Jacqueline Hill, From Patriots to Unionists: Dublin Municipal Politics 1660–1840 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 71. 28. Cox to Nottingham, 13 February 1704, in C.S.P. (D), 1703–4, p. 531. 29. Patricia Punch, ‘Queen Anne’s first Irish parliament 1703–04’ (unpublished MA thesis, University College, Dublin, 1982), pp. 48–51.

The Idea of Anglo-Irish Union 137 30. The Queen an Empress and her three kingdoms one Empire or brief remarks upon the present; and a prospect of the future state of England, Scotland and Ireland in a happy union for the consideration of parliament [Dublin, 1706], passim. See also A union between England and Scotland … prejudicial to England except also that Scotland is included (London, 1706). 31. King to Annesley, 17 September 1706 (T.C.D., King Papers, Ms 750/3/2 f 51). 32. Annesley to King, [October] (T.C.D., King Papers, Ms 1995–2008 f 1230); King to Annesley, 15 October, King to Southwell, 15 October 1706 (King Papers, Ms 750/3/2 ff 60, 61). 33. King to Southwell, 30 November 1706, 1 February 1707, King to Annesley, 18 February 1707 (T.C.D., King Papers, Ms 750/3/2 ff 67, 87, 91–3). 34. Sunderland to Ormonde, 8 April (P(ublic). R(ecord). O(ffice)., S.P. 67/3 f 144); King to Annesley, 17 April, 2 May 1707 (T.C.D., King Papers, Ms 750/3/2 ff 104, 111). 35. Commons Jn. (Irl.), iii, 365–8; Lords Jn. ( Irl.), ii, 161. 36. Commons Jn. (Irl.), iii, 420; Lords Jn. (Irl.), ii, 180; P.R.O., S.P., 63/366; P.R.O., S.P. 67/3 passim. 37. Annesley to King, 28 October 1707 (T.C.D., King Papers, Ms 1995–2008 f 1276); Dublin intelligence, 1 February 1708; Some thoughts humbly offer’d towards an union between Great Britain and Ireland (London, 1708). 38. Trench to King, 23 November, King to McCausland, 14 October 1708 (T.C.D., King Papers, Ms 1995–2008 f 1307, Ms 2531 f 5); Lords Jn (Irl.), ii, 247. 39. David Nokes, Jonathan Swift: Hypocrite Reversed (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 74. 40. Perceval to Dering, 5 March 1720 (B.L., Egmont Papers, Add. Ms 47029 ff 22–5). 41. See Isolde Victory, ‘The Making of the 1720 Declaratory Act’, in O’Brien (ed.), Parliament, Politics and People, pp. 9–29. 42. Nicholson to Wake, 30 April 1721 (Gilbert Library, Wake papers, Ms 27 f 283); J.R. Hill, ‘Popery and Protestantism, Civil and Religious Liberty: The Disputed Lessons of Irish History 1690–1812’, Past and Present, 118 (1988), p. 104. 43. King to Flower, 8 April, King to Annesley, 28 October 1721 (T.C.D., King Papers, Ms 750/6 ff 217, 20). 44. See Victory, op. cit.; Kelly, ‘Jonathan Swift and the Irish Economy in the 1720s’, Eighteenth-century Ireland, 6 (1991), pp. 7–38; Colin Kidd, ‘North Britishness and the Nature of Eighteenth-century British Patriotism’, Historical Journal, 39 (1996), p. 380. 45. Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-century Commonwealthman (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), pp. 145–52; An essay upon the trade of Ireland (2 parts, Dublin, 1729–31). 46. R. Gillespie, ‘The Ulster of Arthur Dobbs’, in D.H. Renkin and E.C. Nelson (eds), Curious in Everything (Carrickfergus: Carrickfergus and District History Society, 1990), p. 2; some thoughts in relation to an union of Britain with Ireland, ca. 1751, a short essay to shew the expediency … of an incorporating union, ca. 1751 (P.R.O.N.I., Dobbs Papers, D 162/58, 59). 47. Samuel Madden, Reflections and resolutions proper for a gentleman of Ireland (Dublin, 1738), pp. 120–2. 48. See Leerssen, Mere Irish, pp. 350–5.

138 James Kelly 49. See, for example, the Irish reaction (Pue’s occurrences, 18 July 1732) to the tract A letter to Sir R[obert] W[alpole] with a proposal for a union between G[rea]t B[ritai]n and I[relan]d ([London], 1732); Ellice to Price, 14 December 1742, in H.M.C., T.H.G. Puleston mss, p. 326. 50. Kelly, ‘Origins’, pp. 246–7. 51. [Lord Hillsborough], A proposal for uniting the kingdoms of Great Britain and Ireland (London, 1751), passim, but especially pp. 4–5, 8, 14–16, 30–3; R.B. McDowell, Irish Public Opinion 1750–1800 (London, 1944), p. 244. 52. [Hillsborough], A Proposal, p. 7. 53. An humble address to the nobility, gentry and freeholders of the kingdom of Ireland (Dublin, 1751), pp. 8, 13, 19, 23, 24 and passim. 54. An answer to the late proposal for uniting the kingdoms of Great Britain and Ireland … (Dublin, 1751). 55. Nicholas Archdall, An alarm to the people of Great Britain and Ireland in answer to a late proposal for uniting these kingdoms shewing the fatal consequences of such an UNION to the constitution, laws, trade and manufactures of both kingdoms; how destructive to the Protestant religion established in Ireland and how little beneficial to England (Dublin, 1751). 56. Kelly, op. cit., pp. 249–50; Eoin Magennis, ‘Debates on an Act of Union 1730–1760’ (unpublished paper, 1996). I wish to express my gratitude to Dr Magennis for a copy of his paper. 57. Archdall, An alarm to the people of Great Britain, pp. 5–6, 8, 22, 31, 34. 58. Ibid., pp. 35–6. 59. Hill, From Patriots to Unionists, p. 119; Hill, ‘Ireland without union’, pp. 290–1; Sean Murphy, ‘The Lucas Affair’ (unpublished MA thesis, University College, Dublin, 1981), pp. 154–5, 226. 60. As note 45. 61. Policy and justice (Dublin, 1755), cited in Magennis, op. cit., p. 7. 62. Kelly, ‘Origins’, p. 247. 63. See Murphy, ‘The anti-Union Riot of 3 December 1759’; Kelly, ‘Origins’, pp. 257–8; James Kelly, Henry Flood: Patriots and Politics in Eighteenth-century Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1998), pp. 72–4 and the sources there cited. 64. Copy of a letter from the E[arl] of C[lanricar]de to the D[uke] of B[edford] (Dublin, 1760) (in P.R.O., Chatham Papers, 30/8/83 ff 48–9); Kelly, ‘Origins’, p. 248. 65. A comment on a late extraordinary letter from the E[arl] of C[lanricarde] to the D[uke] of B[edford] lately handed about in London in which an Union between the two kingdoms is impartially considered (London, 1760); An answer to the comments on a letter from the Earl of Clanricarde to the Duke of Bedford, with some occasional thoughts upon the remarks relative to an union between the two kingdoms (Dublin, 1761). 66. Lysimachus or, a dialogue concerning the union of Great Britain and Ireland (Dublin, 1760); and note 67 below. 67. Freeman’s Journal, 30 June, 13 July, 18, 25 August, 1, 8, 29 September, 2, 6, 9, 13, 16, 20, 23, 30 October, 3, 13, 20, 27 November, 8, 15, 22, 29 December 1764. 68. Halifax to Egremont, 19 February 1762 (P.R.O., S.P. 63/421); Waite to Wilmot, 18, 25 September 1766 (P(ublic. R(ecord). O(ffice). N(orthern). I(reland)., Wilmot Papers, T 3019/5320); Freeman’s Journal, 25 October 1766.

The Idea of Anglo-Irish Union 139 69. Hibernian Journal, 23, 30 October 1722, 15, 18, 22 January, 17 February, 22 March 1773. 70. Finn’s Leinster Journal, 28 July, 6 November; Hibernian Journal, 12, 15, 17 November 1773; T.F. Moriarty, ‘The Irish Absentee Tax Controversy, 1773’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 118 (1974), pp. 388–90, 393, 403, 405; Hill, From Patriots to Unionists, p. 130. 71. Hibernian Journal, 17 November 1773; Finn’s Leinster Journal, 13 August 1774, 10 May 1775; Arthur Young, Tour in Ireland (2 vols, London: Bell & Sons, 1892), A.W. Hutton (ed.), I, 68–9; Moore to Frazer, 19 October 1775, in H.M.C., Laing, iii, 481. 72. Buckinghamshire to Germain, 24 June 1778 (N.L.I., Heron Papers, Ms 13036/12); Buckinghamshire to North, 20 August 1778 (N.L.I., Heron Papers, Ms 13036/12); Buckinghamshire to North, 20 August (B.L., Mackintosh Collection, Add. Ms 34523 f 221); Martin to Shannon, 29 May 1778 (P.R.O.N.I., Shannon Papers, D 2707/A2//2/39); Buckinghamshire to Germain, 23 August 1778, in H.M.C., Stopford-Sackville, p. 60. 73. Kelly, ‘Origins’, pp. 251–2; Hillsborough to Buckinghamshire, 4 October 1779 (N.L.I., Heron Papers, Ms 13038/14). 74. Kelly, ‘Origins’, pp. 252–3; Caldwell to Townshend, 25 October 1779 (N.A., Townshend Papers, Ms 5040 ff 105–6); Library of Congress, Cavendish’s Parliamentary diary, xvi, 212–3; Freeman’s Journal, 2, 9 October 1779; Finn’s Leinster Journal, 9, 30 October 1779; Kelly, Henry Flood, p. 259; [Henry Flood] A letter to the people of Ireland … with some cursory observations on the effects of a union (Dublin, 1779), pp. 62–71. 75. The first lines of Ireland’s interest in the year one thousand seven hundred and eighty (Dublin, 1779), pp. 57–9. 76. Macartney to North, 8 January 1780, in T. Bartlett (ed.), Macartney in Ireland 1768–1772 (Belfast: Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, 1978), p. 325; see also Buckinghamshire to Hillsborough, 2 January 1780 (B.L., Mackintosh Collection, Add. Ms 34523 ff 275–6). 77. A letter to Edmund Burke, esq … containing some reflections on patriotism, partyspirit and the union of free nations (Dublin, 1780), pp. 35–6. 78. P.H. Kelly, ‘William Molyneux and the Spirit of Liberty’, Eighteenth-century Ireland, 3 (1988), p. 143. 79. James Kelly, Prelude to Union: Anglo-Irish Politics in the 1780s (Cork: Cork University Press, 1992), pp. 47–8. 80. Ibid., pp. 81–2; Volunteer Journal, 29 December 1783, April–May 1784; Thoughts upon Ireland by Mr Vernon, [1784] (N.L.I., Bolton Papers, Ms 15817/1). 81. Rutland to Pitt, 16 June 1784, in Lord Mahon (ed.), The Correspondence between William Pitt and the Duke of Rutland (London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1890), p. 19. 82. The parliamentary register, or history of the proceedings and debates of the House of Commons of Ireland 1781–97, 17 vols (Dublin, 1782–1801), v, 356. 83. Ibid., v, 307, 451–2. 84. Cooke to Eden, 21 July 1785 (B.L., Auckland Papers, Add. Ms 34420 ff 47–7); Conyngham to Sydney, 26 April (N.L.I., Sydney Papers, Ms 52/L/4); Tyrone to Beresford, 15 June in W. Beresford (ed.), The Correspondence of John Beresford, 2 vols (London, 1854), I, 268; Patterson to Townshend,

140 James Kelly

85.

86.

87. 88.

89. 90. 91. 92.

93.

94. 95.

96. 97.

98.

99.

15 December (B.L., Townshend Papers, Add. Ms 38497 ff 74–5); Barnard to Boswell, 14 August 1785, in F.W. Hilles et al. (eds.), The Correspondence of James Boswell, 3 vols (London: Yale University Press, 1966–70), iii, 210; Henry Grattan Jr, Memoirs of the Life and Times of Henry Grattan, 5 vols (London: Colburn, 1839–46), I, 294–5. Dublin Evening Post, 4 March, 4 May, 29 July, 15 August, 14, 18 November; Flood to Charlemont, 6 November (R(oyal).I(rish).A(cademy)., Charlemont Papers, Ms 12R14/78); A candid view of the most important occurrences that took place in Ireland (Dublin, 1787), pp. 48–9. Letters to the people of Ireland on the subject of an union with Great Britain, letter the first (Dublin, 1786), p. 7; John Williams, An union of England and Ireland proved to be practicable and equally beneficial to each kingdom (London, 1787); The utility of an union between Great Britain and Ireland considered (London, 1788). Ibid.; Kelly, ‘Origins’, pp. 256–8; Sir John Dalrymple, Memoirs of Great Britain and Ireland (London, 1788). Harcourt to Harcourt, 7 January 1789, in W.E. Harcourt (ed.), Harcourt Papers, 15 vols (privately printed, 1876–1903), iv, 147–8; Grenville to Buckingham, 12 January, 7 February 1789, in The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos (ed.), The Courts and Cabinets of George III, 4 vols (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1853–55), I, 93, 103–4; Walpole to Mann, 12 February 1789, in W.S. Lewis et al. (eds.), The Correspondence of Horace Walpole, 48 vols (New Haven, 1937–83), xxv, pp. 681–2; P.J. Jupp, Lord Grenville (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 85. A.C. Kavanaugh, John Fitzgibbon: Earl of Clare (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1997), p. 149. Dundas to Westmorland, 26 December 1791 (N.A., Westmorland Papers, Carton 1, no. 29). Buckinghamshire to Germain, 24 June 1778 (N.L.I., Heron Papers, Ms 13036/12). James Kelly, ‘The Genesis of Protestant ascendancy’, in O’Brien (ed.), Parliament, Politics and People, pp. 93–127; idem, ‘Conservative Protestant Thought in Late Eighteenth-century Ireland’ (forthcoming). As note 89; T.J. Westropp (ed.), ‘A Glimpse of Trinity College, Dublin, under Provost Hely-Hutchinson’, Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, 18 (1887–8), p. 402. Troy to Hobart, 29 November 1791 (P.R.O., H.O., 100/34 f 330. Charlemont to Haliday, 21 January 1792 (R.I.A., Charlemont Papers, Ms 12R23 no 69); Drennan to McTier, February 1792, in D.A. Chart (ed.), The Drennan Letters (Belfast: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1931), p. 77. Cited in Jupp, Grenville, p. 142. Barry O’Brien (ed.), Autobiography of Theobald Wolfe Tone, 2 vols (Dublin, 1893), I, 126–7; Chart (ed.), Drennan Letters, p. 91; Westmorland to Pitt, 13 November 1792 (P.R.O., Chatham Papers, 30/8/331 ff 90–5). Pitt to Westmorland, 18 November 1792 (N.A., Westmorland Papers, Carton 1, no. 71); Westmorland to Pitt, 28 November 1792 (N.L.I., Union Correspondence, Ms 886 ff 17–26). See, inter alia, Dundas to Westmorland, January 1793 (N.A., Westmorland Papers, Carton 1, no. 87); Memorandum of a conversation … with Mr Dundas … on 21 and 22 January 1793 (N.L.I., Melville Papers, Ms 54A/74).

The Idea of Anglo-Irish Union 141 100. Westmorland to Pitt, 18 April 1793 (P.R.O., Chatham Papers, 30/8/331 ff 124–5). 101. Francis Bickley (ed.), The Diary of Sylvester Douglas, 2 vols (London: Constable, 1928), I, 35. 102. See Chart (ed.), Drennan Letters, pp. 145, 147; Knox to Abercorn, 15 April 1793 (P.R.O.N.I., Abercorn Papers, T 2541/1B1/4/18); Bickley (ed.), Diary of Sylvester Douglas, I, 35; Burke to Fitzwilliam, 26 September 1794, in R.B. McDowell (ed.), The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, vol. viii (Cambridge, 1961), pp. 20–1. 103. Kavanaugh, Fitzgibbon, pp. 309, 311; Fitzgibbon to Townshend, 9 June 1795 (N.A., Townshend Papers, Ms 725); Ely to Abercorn, 3 April 1795 (P.R.O.N.I., Abercorn Papers, T 2541/1B3/5/16); Dublin Evening Post, 18, 21 April, 30 May 1795; Mackelney to Pitt, 19 March–2 April 1796 (P.R.O., Chatham Papers, 30/8/324 9(I) ff 1–22. 104. Clare to Mornington, 20 April 1797 (B.L., Wellesley Papers, Add. Ms 37308 f 34); Knox to Pelham, 19 April, 28 May 1797 (B.L., Pelham Papers, Add Ms 33103 f 382, 33104 f 139). 105. George Dallas to [ ], 20 September 1797 (N.L.I., Melville Papers, Ms 54A/111); Hewetson to [ ], 16 November 1797 (Beinecke Library, Osborn Collection, Hewetson file). 106. P.R.O.N.I., Conolly Papers, T2825, p. 33; Abercorn to Stewart, 17 November 1797 (P.R.O.N.I., Abercorn Papers, T2541/1K/16/70). 107. Warburton to Bentinck, 11 July 1798, in A.P.W. Malcomson (ed.), Eighteenthcentury Irish Official Papers, vol. 1 (Belfast: Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, [1973]), p. 188. 108. Tighe to Ponsonby, November 1798, in G.H. Bell (ed.), The Harnwood Papers (London: Macmillan, 1930), p. 304; Blaquiere to Rutland, 7 January [1799] (N(ational). L(ibrary). I(reland)., Blaquiere Papers, Ms 877/19). 109. N.L.I., Union Correspondence, Ms 887 ff 23–32.

6 Ideas of Union in Anglo-Irish Political Discourse, 1692–1720: Meaning and Use David Hayton

In the century following the short-lived parliamentary experiment of 1653–9, public discussion of the prospect of another Anglo-Irish union was never more than sporadic. Among Englishmen, very few even gave the idea a second thought. One who did was Sir William Petty, the political economist and ‘indefatigable projector’, who devised grandiose plans of bringing representatives of all three kingdoms into a single imperial parliament, and toyed with fantastic ideas of transferring populations in order to bring Irish and English society into congruity.1 Operating in the world of practical politics, however, monarchs and their English ministers flinched at the likelihood of complicating the management of the Westminster parliament by an infusion of unpredictable Irish Members. In any case, the operation of Poynings’ Law, and the assumption by the English Parliament of a right to determine by itself all matters of Anglo-Irish concern, and indeed to legislate for Ireland if the need arose, meant that there was no constitutional imperative tending towards union; from an English point of view, no urgency to consider alternative arrangements to improve the efficiency of Anglo-Irish governance. Serious interest in the idea of an Anglo-Irish union was thus confined to Ireland and its Protestant propertied elite, from which, intermittently, proposals, recommendations and humble requests for union would issue. The first seems to have occurred in 1668 when, according to a pamphlet published some 40 years later, Charles II received a petition ‘signed by most of the considerable persons’ in Ireland requesting a union.2 After the Glorious Revolution and the Williamite war there was a further flurry of interest. Several pamphlets on the ‘problem of Ireland’ either argued for union directly or mentioned its desirability en passant. As an Anglo-Scottish union loomed nearer, and was eventually brought to completion in 1707, the 142

Ideas of Union in Anglo-Irish Political Discourse 143

possibility (albeit remote) that Ireland might be included in these new constitutional arrangements agitated the minds of a few political writers (among them Swift), and even featured in the debates of the Irish parliament, with both houses presenting addresses to Queen Anne expressing their hope that she might consider extending the geographical scope of the union treaty. These requests were predictably ignored, and little more was publicly heard of British–Irish union until the resurrection of the idea in a pamphlet published in two parts in 1729 and 1731 by the ‘patriot’ MP and apostle of economic improvement Arthur Dobbs, An essay upon the trade of Ireland,3 whose pleas for union as the ultimate guarantee of Ireland’s economic regeneration were echoed by his fellow improver Samuel Madden in Reflections and resolutions proper for the gentlemen of Ireland, which appeared in 1738. While some historians, including the present author,4 have been less than impressed by the quantity and quality of this evidence, as capable of demonstrating any great and continuing enthusiasm for union among Irish Protestants, others have taken a different view. In a pioneering work, published in 1959, on the survival and development of the ideas of the English ‘commonwealthmen’ into the eighteenth century, Caroline Robbins devoted an entire chapter to the Irish republican tradition and its exponents, who included at least one apparent devotee of union, Henry Maxwell, of Finnebrogue in County Down.5 Maxwell’s presentation of the case for an Anglo-Irish union, in a celebrated pamphlet of 1703, effected the link between the Irish ‘commonwealthmen’ and unionism, not least because its case rested in part on libertarian arguments which deliberately invoked the ‘Country’ ideology promoted by Robert Molesworth and his civic humanist circle in Dublin, to which Maxwell was said by Robbins to have belonged. Since English republicans in the 1650s had given careful consideration to the relationship of colonies to mother-states, and had recommended, and indeed practised, union as an option, Robbins was able to identify unionism as an element in the English republican tradition, and more particularly in Anglo-Irish republicanism.6 In 1987 a more comprehensive account of early Irish unionism was provided by James Kelly in an important article tracing the intellectual origins of the Act of Union back to the eighteenth century.7 Kelly’s primary argument was that there was a slow and steady growth in support for union, on both sides of the Irish Sea, in the second half of the eighteenth century. But in order to set the scene, he followed the development of the idea back to the seventeenth century, citing pamphlets, private letters and Irish parliamentary addresses as evidence that ‘there was widespread agreement

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in Ireland around 1700 on the advantage to Ireland of a union with England’, and that ‘support for a union [continued] into the 1730s’.8 More recently, this material has been worked over again, specifically in relation to the period between the Glorious Revolution and the Declaratory Act of 1720: by Jacqueline Hill, seizing upon a parenthetical remark in William Molyneux’s Case of Ireland stated … in 1698, that union was ‘an happiness we can hardly hope for’, to emphasise Irish Protestant eagerness for union in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution;9 and at greater length by Jim Smyth in two articles, focusing on Henry Maxwell’s pamphlet, where unionist ‘discourse’ is analysed as part of an exploration of Anglo-Irish identity that reaffirms the residual ‘Englishness’ of the early eighteenth-century Protestant ascendancy.10 That some Irish Protestants were intermittently interested in the idea of union with England (or after 1707 the newly created kingdom of Great Britain) cannot be denied; but doubt remains as to the seriousness of this interest. What has been missing from much of the discussion of these texts since Robbins first drew some of them to scholarly notice has been an exposition of context. The actual weight attached to union by those who raised the issue; the degree to which such would-be opinion-formers were, or were not, representative of the Irish ‘political nation’; above all, whether a handful of pamphlets, several parliamentary addresses, and the occasional flourish in private correspondence, can properly be said to constitute a ‘discourse’: these are questions that are difficult, perhaps impossible, to answer to absolute satisfaction. To resort to a cliché, one cannot conduct an opinion poll of the dead. What may be done, however, is to take a closer look at the evidence, and to try to set these stray references to union firmly in context; that is in the context of the documents in which they appear, and of the political circumstances governing the production of those documents.

I To begin with the printed propaganda. The first public recommendation for the cause of union after the Glorious Revolution appeared early in the reign of William and Mary: an undated broadsheet with the title Considerations concerning Ireland, in relation to England, and particularly in respect of an union.11 Internal evidence would indicate that it was written some time between the Battle of the Boyne and the calling of King William’s first Irish parliament in 1692, in other words during the closing stages of the Jacobite war. The tone and arguments identify


it as very much a product of that crisis, and of the tensions and difficulties which had bedevilled Anglo-Irish relations in the preceding decades. The prime concerns of the anonymous author were with the maintenance of English power in Ireland, against Catholic rebellion or invasion from abroad; and the freedom of Irish trade from English legislative restriction. A union of England and Ireland along the lines of the apparently successful Anglo-Welsh union, in effect the incorporation of Ireland into the English state, would create a unity of interest between England and Ireland, restore to the English in Ireland their political heritage, and thus encourage more Englishmen to settle in Ireland. Without union, relations between the two kingdoms would continue to be blighted by mutual antagonism, the root cause of which lay in English attitudes: an underlying contempt for the Protestant planters in Ireland, widely regarded in England as ‘men of desperate fortunes and the scum of the nation’, who had fallen still further through contact with the Irish and had ‘degenerated to their humours’; and a profound jealousy of English economic interests against Irish competition, expressed in the belief that Ireland’s prosperity must work to England’s disadvantage. This was in some respects a self-fulfilling prophecy: because ‘the people of England have disregarded and cut off the English here’, the author observed, ‘they have set themselves to suppress them, and keep them low; and this has made the English here more readily to close in with the Irish, and set up for an interest different from England’. These degenerate English were presumably the Old English Catholics who had supported the confederacy in the 1640s and James II in 1687–91, though the text is vague on this point, and seems inclined to suggest Protestant alienation. What is clear, however, is the nature of the principal grievance complained of: the passage of the Navigation and Cattle Acts in the 1660s, especially the latter, which were enough to make any Englishman settled in Ireland turn ‘an Irishman in his affections’. Plainly, this rhetoric was aimed at an English audience, and the intent may well have been as much to change attitudes as to promote a particular form of constitutional innovation. Not only did the text explain away the assumed ‘Irishness’ of Irish Protestants as a simple response to injustice, and emphasise their political rights as ‘Englishmen’; it also undersold Irish constitutional pretensions, questioning the legal foundation for the Irish parliament’s existence and declaring that the ‘Magna Carta’ from which Irish liberties were derived was no more than ‘the interest of England’ in supporting an English presence. Moreover, the argument itself was not without some glaring weaknesses. The author

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assumed, with breathtaking complacency and lack of realism, that the concerns of Englishmen living in England and those in Ireland would inevitably be harmonised in a united parliament, and restrictions on Irish trade would be willingly removed by a parliament that was likely to be dominated by English sectional interests; the important question was raised, but left unresolved, as to whether the Crown would ever voluntarily relinquish the powers conferred by Poynings’ Law, that ‘flower of the prerogative’; and the most serious, but usually unmentionable, reservation on the Irish side, the necessity under a union of raising Irish taxation to English levels, was similarly passed over with an uneasy expression of optimism. But the emphasis of the paper, again reflecting the nature of the intended readership, was what union could do for England: indeed, so the argument concluded, had a united parliament been in existence earlier, the contingent of Irish MPs might have been able to forestall the recent conflict (though by what means was left to the fertile imagination of the reader). The author of Considerations concerning Ireland … was not the only proponent of union in 1690–1. The state papers from the secretary’s office, preserved in ‘King William’s chest’ in the Public Record Office at Kew, contain another lengthy memorandum setting out the arguments for union, though this time very much from an English point of view, and on the basis that the ending of Irish separatism was essential to preserve English security and English liberties.12 The memorialist, who may well have been an official in William’s Irish administration, put his case with particular reference to the disastrous events of the previous two reigns, when unscrupulous monarchs had sought to strengthen Ireland, so that the country would ‘grow upon England’ and be a resource for the promotion of ‘arbitrary government’ in all three kingdoms. But with Ireland absorbed into the English body politic, not only would the Irish economy be managed for the benefit of England (no nonsense here about harmony and mutual prosperity), English constitutional principles would be brought to apply to central and local government, to the exclusion of any tendencies towards despotism and corruption. At the same time, there were some minor reverberations of the arguments in the Irish Considerations …, namely the attraction to England of an administrative arrangement which would lead in due course to the equalisation of the burden of taxation; and the danger that Irish Protestants left to their own devices would develop ‘patriotic’ ambitions of their own – ‘though Englishmen, yet by continuance in time and different conversation, they will become foreign in affection, as well as principle to us’.


The hopes of these early unionists on both sides of the Irish Sea were to be unfulfilled. Despite the alarmist warnings of some commentators against allowing an Irish parliament to meet, influenced by memories of difficulties in political management in the 1660s, English ministers decided that the post-war resettlement of Ireland should be accomplished by conventional constitutional means.13 After the necessary enabling legislation to establish the new regime had been passed at Westminster (for the transfer of the Crown and adaptation of the oaths of allegiance and supremacy), writs were issued for a parliament in Dublin in 1692. Ireland’s first experience of parliamentary government for 25 years was decidedly mixed. The 1692 session was stormy, unproductive and brief, and was terminated by the Lord Lieutenant, Sydney, without even a grant of supply. Three years later Sydney’s successor, Lord Deputy Capel, achieved a resolution of some of the conflicts which had bedevilled his predecessor’s administration, and secured the Crown a parliamentary subsidy, though not without disturbance, and renewed expressions of constitutional patriotism, as Members talked of ‘throwing off the yoke’ of subjection to the parliament at Westminster and the privy council in Whitehall.14 On the positive side, the prolonged session of 1695–7 showed that it was possible to complete a programme of legislative business in Dublin, with a degree of initiative restored to the Irish parliament in circumvention of the requirements of Poynings’ Law (which insisted that bills were drawn up in the Irish privy council, and scrutinised by the English council before being returned to Dublin for acceptance or rejection without amendment), through the development of the procedure by which most bills were first introduced into either the Commons or the Lords as ‘heads of bills’, and debated there before being sent to the Irish privy council to be engrossed. It was still possible for the two councils to interfere, and to provoke anger and resentment in Dublin by changing or suppressing bills. None the less, an Irish parliamentary system had evolved, which had the potential to answer some of the concerns articulated by pro-union propagandists. The idea of union surfaced again in another anonymous pamphlet, published in 1697, The true way to render Ireland happy and secure … , the main thrust of which was to promote the settlement of foreign Protestant refugees in Ireland, as a means of bolstering the Protestant population.15 This had been a theme of public and private writing on Irish policy, and indeed of Irish parliamentary legislation, ever since the revolution, once it had become clear that the prospect of attracting further English Protestant settlers, blithely assumed in the very early

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proposals for union, was actually hopeless. Discussion of the desirability of union arose naturally from the point, reached almost inevitably in any tract advocating the ‘improvement’ of Ireland and addressed to an English audience, at which it became necessary to counter the objection, said to have been current ‘in former times’, that it was in England’s interest to keep the Irish economy in an undeveloped state.16 If the English could stop thinking of Ireland as a conquered country, the interests of the two islands could be harmonised. More than that, if they were made one kingdom (which I wish that this reign, and our present great ministers of state in England may have the glory of accomplishing), I believe England would then reckon it their interest to help to make this country as considerable and strong as they could by promoting the increase of our wealth, and the growth of Protestant people; and they would no more grumble at our prosperity than the north of England does at the happiness of the south … Again, something like the Anglo-Welsh union was envisaged, with the advantages of a mutual increase in prosperity, a greater availability of resources to the English Crown, in terms of money and men, and a restoration of political liberty to Ireland – ‘to make us a free people’.17 The resort to libertarian arguments, and the fact that the pamphlet took the form of a letter to the ‘commonwealth’ Whig Robert Molesworth, could be used to suggest a ‘republican’ background for its author, although at the same time it is worth pointing out that the preface did not claim a close connection with the dedicatee, and that Molesworth’s would in any case have been an obvious name to invoke, given his past association with schemes for assisted Protestant immigration, and recent involvement in drafting an Irish bill for the ‘encouragement of Protestant strangers’.18 More significant, perhaps, in the context of the present essay, is the fact that the discussion of union as a political option was very much a by-way of the main line of argument being pursued. The same could be said, to a far greater degree, of the almost casual reference to union in William Molyneux’s Case of Ireland … stated, a work which was much more clearly a product of Irish Whiggism, coming as it did from a man who was a friend of Locke as well as Molesworth, and who wrote very consciously in the English civic humanist tradition.19 During Molyneux’s analysis of the historical precedents offered in defence of the English parliament’s claim to legislate for


Ireland, he was obliged to confront several clear instances of such English statutes having been passed in the fourteenth century, but explained these by arguing that Irishmen had been present in parliament at the time, as representatives, and had given their acquiescence. ‘If from these last mentioned records,’ he wrote, it may be concluded that the parliament of England may bind Ireland; it must also be allowed that the people of Ireland ought to have their representatives in the parliament of England. And this, I believe we should be willing enough to embrace; but this is an happiness we can hardly hope for.20 But thereafter Molyneux said nothing more on the subject; nor was his remark about union taken up by his English critics.21 How to interpret this obiter dictum remains problematic. Perhaps, as some have suggested, it represents a glimpse into the underlying beliefs and principles of Molyneux, as a representative member of the early eighteenth-century Protestant ‘ascendancy’: a revelation of a deepseated Anglocentricity, and of a common assumption among Protestants of English extraction that at bottom, union was preferable to any other political solution, including legislative independence, which even Molyneux himself only sought faute de mieux. However, one might equally regard it as a rhetorical trope: a means of explaining one or two difficult precedents in the course of a lengthy and complex argument. Overall, the fact that Molyneux chose to make so little in his pamphlet of the idea of union, and correspondingly emphasised the claims of the Irish parliament to legislative autonomy, could be taken as an indication of his own priorities. In part at least, what he was doing in this brief paragraph was simply anticipating some English objections to his analysis. There may be a useful comparison in a reference in an unpublished commentary from around the same time by Bishop William King of Derry, responding directly to a challenge made in the English pamphlet A letter from a gentleman in the country, to a Member of the House of Commons …,22 which had denounced Irish commercial competition and insisted that Ireland ‘hold no parliaments, but be governed by the parliament laws of England’. King’s prepared answer, set out at length in a private letter to Sir Robert Southwell, was as follows: As to his expedient that no parliaments be held in Ireland, but that it is like to be governed by the parliament laws of England, we shall

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like it very well, provided we be allowed our representatives in the English parliament as I find it has been formerly, but I hope the English that came into Ireland and by conquest enlarged the dominion of England, did not thereby forfeit the liberty of Englishmen, which I think consists in being governed by laws to which they have given their consent either in person or by their representatives.23 King is someone whom we know to have been at least interested in the possibility of union, but the full context of his remark, which like Molyneux’s was virtually a throwaway line in a text preoccupied by other matters, would suggest that at this moment he was doing little more than offer a standard rejoinder to a crude statement of English supremacism. The publication of Molyneux’s tract in 1698, and the sharp reaction it provoked in the English parliament, accelerated the deterioration in Anglo-Irish relations which had begun the previous year with a recrudescence of economic rivalry, this time over woollen manufactures, and a dispute between the two parliaments arising from the claim of the English House of Lords to an appellate jurisdiction in Irish suits. Animosities became even more pronounced when legislation was passed at Westminster in 1699 and 1700 to place an embargo on imports of Irish woollen cloth, and to resume the grants by the Crown of the forfeited estates of Irish Jacobites, many of which had already passed, by purchase or lease, into the hands of Irish Protestants. The resumption of the forfeitures, in particular, produced a war of words between the English Tory or ‘Country party’ progenitors of the Act and aggrieved Irishmen, who organised a national petition or ‘remonstrance’ in 1701 to appeal to King William over the head of the English parliament.24 In consequence, many Englishmen came to believe, or at least professed to believe, that Irish Protestants aimed at independence from England; a charge that Irishmen themselves hotly denied. Ministers were apprehensive enough not to recall the Irish parliament between January 1699 and September 1703, and with good reason, as it turned out, for when it did meet the session of 1703–4 saw renewed manifestations of ‘patriotic’ resentment, culminating in the expulsion from the Irish House of Commons of a Member who had unwisely agreed to serve on the forfeitures resumption trust. This in turn exacerbated English impatience. But although in general ‘public opinion’ in England was unfavourably disposed to Irish constitutional pretensions, there did seem to be a difference between the two parties at Westminster on the issue of the forfeitures, with Whigs rather more sympathetic to the


grievances of the Protestant interest in Ireland (perhaps as a means of implying that their Tory enemies were crypto-Jacobites and favourers of papists), which offered an opportunity to some Irish writers to attempt a rehabilitation of their compatriots. It was in this atmosphere of suspicion and recrimination that there appeared Henry Maxwell’s An essay upon an union of Ireland with England, first published in London in 1703 and reprinted in Dublin a year later. At least historians and bibliographers have consistently assumed that Maxwell was the author, taking their cue from the description in the British Library’s catalogue of printed books. In fact, the pamphlet was unsigned, and the attribution to Maxwell rests on a (more or less contemporary) manuscript annotation to the title page of the British Library’s copy of the first, English, edition.25 A further comment, inside the front cover, by W. Monck Mason identifies the hand of the annotator as Bishop Francis Hutchinson of Down (who would presumably have been a reliable source26) and adds that he (Mason) had purchased this copy from the executors of one of Hutchinson’s descendants. The attribution is thus plausible, but not watertight, and rests on two suppositions: first, Monck Mason’s, that the near-contemporary inscription is by Bishop Hutchinson; and second, Hutchinson’s (if indeed it was he), that the pamphlet was the work of Maxwell. Maxwell is an interesting figure, a Whig in his politics (in fact, a close follower of the future Speaker William Conolly) but also a committed ‘Churchman’ (as he himself put it),27 who would speak strongly in defence of the sacramental test after its imposition in Ireland in 1704, against repeated attempts at repeal. This particular combination of principles and prejudices could have encouraged a natural predisposition to unionism, as Professor Smyth has pointed out: not only a concern for the maintenance of the Protestant interest in Ireland, and the liberties guaranteed by the Revolution settlement, but a commitment to the Anglican ascendancy and thus to a distinctively Anglocentric view of Irish Protestantism.28 However, given that Maxwell’s identification as the author of the Essay is, to say the least, not entirely certain, it would seem more useful to examine the arguments and context of the pamphlet in order to understand its purpose. The Essay makes what will by now have become in many respects a familiar case, spiced with elements of classical republicanism. The Anglo-Welsh union was held up as the exemplar, and the benefits to England spelt out in terms of greater political and military security, increased resources (not only taxation and manpower but such miscellaneous benefits as the provision of cheap victualling for the Royal

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Navy and merchant shipping), and the preservation of English liberties. The libertarian refrain was particularly loud. Attention was drawn once more to the historical importance of Ireland to the absolutist intentions of Charles II and James II, as well as the ‘ambitious designs’ of their father, and, in an unusual twist, to the way in which control over Ireland, in an unequal union, had underpinned the Cromwellian usurpation.29 Moreover, it was pointed out that the only alternative to union (aside from the indulgence of Irish legislative independence, which was clearly unacceptable in England) would be the reinforcement of English power in Ireland by means of a standing army, thus endangering the constitutional balance at home.30 Of course, it was also necessary for the author to counter the customary English objection: that any economic gain to Ireland would be a corresponding loss to England (in other words, that it was essential for the English to keep Ireland in a low condition). Here was more innovation: a claim that English protectionism, or rather its most recent manifestation, the Woollen Act of 1699, had failed, because of the flourishing illicit trade to the continent, leaving union as the only way to restore to England her erstwhile monopoly of Irish trade; and reassurance that union could imperil neither English land values (by encouraging investment in Ireland), nor the special pre-eminence of London as an entrepôt and the hub of an expanding commercial empire. Throughout the pamphlet there was a strong emphasis on the essential community of interest between the two countries. What was being proposed was a family reunion, not a forced connection between strangers: ‘the people of Ireland’, by which the author presumably meant (as did Molyneux in his Case) the Protestants, ‘are naturally the offspring of the people of England’. They had long been the bulwark of the ‘English interest’ in Ireland, and had suffered dreadfully on this account. All this was very different from the case of the Welsh, who before their Act of Union had not shared England’s language, customs and laws; and if Anglo-Welsh integration could succeed, why not Anglo-Irish integration?31 Union would turn Ireland ‘into the nature of a county of England’, and thus harmony would naturally prevail.32 Elsewhere in the text, Ireland’s position in a united kingdom was likened to that of the English provinces.33 But if union did not take place, not only would the economy of Ireland decline and its population fall, there would grow up a great hostility to England among those Protestants who remained.34 Again, this was written for an English readership, since it was the English parliament and people who would determine whether or not a


union would take place, and who needed persuading of its advantages; but the author clearly argued from an Irish perspective, even though at the beginning of the pamphlet he had seemed to identify himself as an Englishman, stoutly vindicating ‘our right’, that is to say the right of the English parliament, to legislate for Ireland.35 The English pose was obviously a rhetorical device, adopted the better to persuade English readers of the merits of his case. Much the same could be said of the way in which the Englishness of the Irish Protestant community was emphasised; the short way taken with such difficult issues as the equalisation of tax burdens (in which the Irish were to receive no special treatment); and the extent to which the author distanced himself from Irish constitutional claims, and from the Irish patriotism which many had expressed in the struggles over wool, forfeited estates and the Lords’ jurisdiction, not to mention the furore over Molyneux (whose work received short shrift at the beginning of the Essay).36 However, there is room for more than one interpretation of the intention of the pamphlet. It may indeed have been an earnest appeal for union, by one who believed wholeheartedly in the importance of the project, and who saw union as the only way to permit the full development of Irish trade, a point that recurred time and again in the argument. Emphasis on the essential ‘Englishness’ of Irish Protestants may therefore reflect the author’s conception of his own identity, as Professor Smyth has argued, or have been designed to make an AngloIrish union more acceptable to the English, at least more acceptable than union with the Scots. In practical terms, however, the possibility that an Anglo-Irish union would be taken seriously by the English ministry or parliament was very remote. Responses to Molyneux, and to the various pamphlet attacks on the forfeited estates commission, had been imperious and dismissive. Clearly, from an English viewpoint, Ireland could be governed perfectly well from Westminster under the current dispensation. This being the case, could the author of the Essay have had some other intention? One possibility is that advocacy of union was a means to another end. In the context of Anglo-Irish relations in 1703, there was much to be said for seeking to rehabilitate Irish Protestants from the accusation that they fretted for independence; by emphasising their loyalty to England and the advantages which the English might discover for themselves should they choose for once to regulate the affairs of Ireland with an enlightened self-interest. There was certainly a determination in the Irish House of Commons, when it met again in September 1703, to make a public declaration, in their address to the queen, which would ‘vindicate the

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nation from those aspersions as if they desired to be independent of the crown of England’.37 Without labouring the point, it may be instructive to compare the amount of space which the Essay extends to a detailed analysis of the effects on the two economies of English protectionism, with the entire absence of any reference to the proposals being made for an Anglo-Scottish union, as an indication of where the author’s priorities lay. Certainly a more determined, or cleverer, exponent of Irish unionism might have attempted to exploit English suspicions of, and animosity towards, the Scots, and present Ireland as a safer and more desirable partner; although this would have meant appealing to English Tories, as the more pronounced Scottophobes, and there was probably more chance of finding sympathy for Protestant Ireland among the English Whigs. The Essay had no obvious effect on public opinion in England, and was not followed up in the press, but a few years later, around the time of the Anglo-Scottish treaty and its statutory ratification in 1707, there was another light shower of writings in favour of Anglo-Irish union.38 The tenor of these pamphlets differed significantly from anything that had come before, though some old arguments resurfaced. The Queen an empress, and her three kingdoms an empire …, published simultaneously in London and Dublin in October 1706, in the form of an open letter to Members of the Westminster parliament, was in essence a prolonged meditation on the merits of the union with Scotland, which extended the discussion to include a potential union with Ireland in order to strengthen its case. Its ambition was to see the integration of the three kingdoms into a new political unit, a ‘British empire’, rather than the incorporation of Ireland into the English state as previous Irish pamphleteers had envisaged, and in keeping with this quasi-Utopian spirit the author speculated upon various possible constitutional reforms: a rationalisation of parliamentary constituencies across the three kingdoms; a new place of meeting for the joint parliament, perhaps even a peripatetic assembly; and, at his most fantastic, an ‘imperial diet’, with twelve ‘imperial princes’ representing the different regions (including each of the four Irish provinces). Whether the pamphlet as whole should count as a serious contribution to the public debate on union is thus open to question: the preface candidly admitted that some of these ideas ‘at first blush may appear too chimerical on so important a subject’.39 The following year Swift published a squib on the Act of Union, The Story of the Injured Lady …, whose argument and purpose was adequately summarised in the subtitle, ‘a true picture of Scotch perfidy, Irish poverty, and English partiality’.40 Because of the identity of the


writer, this has some claim to be the most studied of any unionist tract of the period. It is also one of the slightest. Briefly and acidly Swift contrasted the English ministers’ ill-treatment of the deserving Irish with their courtship of the undeserving Scots, using the analogy of a gentleman wooing two ladies, the one unprepossessing, beggarly, quarrelsome and Presbyterian, the other ‘handsome’ (though ‘pale and thin with grief and ill usage’), possessed of a good estate, loyal, decent and Anglican.42 Having taken advantage of the weakness and trustfulness of the constant lover, in order that he might control and exploit her estate for his own benefit, the faithless swain had made up to her hideous rival, whose threats to abandon him hastened on a proposal of marriage, which at the time of writing was about to be consummated. The burden of the piece was as much an indictment of English policy and an attack on the Scots as an appeal for an Anglo-Irish union; an opportunity for Swift to give vent to his prejudices against Presbyterians, and to rehearse Irish grievances over commercial legislation and other instances of English injustice, in a way which would most embarrass the Whig administration. The conclusion accepted the inevitability of the marriage, and left the ‘injured lady’ contemplating ‘what measures I shall take with prudence, justice, courage, and honour, to protect my liberty and fortune against the hardships and severities I lie under from that unkind, inconstant man’.43 If, in one interpretation, Swift may be represented as taking a unionist position in this short offering, an alternative reading could just as easily fit his arguments into a more assertive, ‘patriotic’ attitude. Finally, after the Act of Union had been passed, there appeared in London in 1708 Some thoughts humbly offer’d towards an union between Great-Britain and Ireland, a pamphlet which began oddly, but developed into an orthodox exposition of the unionist thesis, suitably adapted to the changed constitutional circumstances (in so far as Irish Protestants were said to share a common ancestry and interest with their ‘British’ rather than ‘English’ neighbours). In the preface the author, Defoe-like, claimed that he had been sent to Ireland by Lord Treasurer Godolphin to investigate reports of the smuggling of wool, had returned with a full account of the condition of the country, the progress of trade there, and the ‘inclinations of the people’, and that the compilation of his report had set him ruminating on the possibility of expanding the Union of Great Britain to include Ireland. (No evidence survives among state papers to corroborate this alleged investigative mission, so one must assume that it was an elaborate authorial construction.) Thereafter, the line of argument followed predictable lines. The people

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of Ireland, that is to say the Protestant descendants of previous English and Scottish settlers, were presented as the proper allies of the peoples of Great Britain. They are bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh; their fathers were sent over to extend our dominions, and revenge the blood which was spilt by a bigotted and barbarous people; and ’tis by the lives of these brave men you have secured to yourselves a kingdom, whose sons make not only a considerable figure in your armies abroad, but their ports and country are a constant and safe retreat, both for your ships and trade. So that it seems natural, as well as the interest of Great Britain, to unite that kingdom to itself, and to render it a part of its own body.44 The advantages said to be offered by union were familiar: Britain would be more secure, this time through the acculturation of the native Irish for whom the continued existence of a separate kingdom served as an encouragement to separatist dreams; stronger, through the acquisition of Irish resources, in terms of the revenue from taxation, and military and naval bases; and more prosperous, through the working of a freer (though still not completely free) trade. The old ‘maxim, to keep Ireland low’ no longer applied, for ‘that was when the … natives were more strong and numerous’, whereas ‘the experience we have had of the fidelity of the Protestants there, with the necessity of keeping it [the country] in our own hands, and that no other should have it, methinks obliges us to use a more than common tenderness to it.’45 Here, then, in the final contribution to the early eighteenth-century pamphlet debate on union we find perhaps the clearest and most genuine example of a unionist tract, pursuing union as an end in itself rather than as a means to relieve Ireland of oppressive commercial legislation, rehearse old grievances for party-political advantage, or rehabilitate Irish Protestants from accusations of excessive patriotism. The difficulty is to identify the author’s viewpoint. Was he what he seemed at first glance, a disinterested Englishman convinced of the benefits of union by his own observations and calculations? Or was this instead the work of some devious Irishman, seeking to persuade Members of Parliament by adopting an elaborate cover? There is evidence to support either inference. The danger of alienating Irish Protestants was emphasised, as one might expect an Irishman to do, and their grievances once again recited, in particular the navigation and cattle acts,


just as in the Considerations of c. 1690–2. There was even a nod in the direction of Irish entitlements to English liberties: ‘’tis, methinks, a strange and melancholy change, in five hours wrought, that thus turns the same man, from being born under a free, into a despotic government, and still under the same prince’.46 But equally the author demonstrated no very clear understanding of the constitutional claims of the Irish, except for an instinctive belief that Ireland should not be treated as a conquered country (which would at the very least have put him closer to Maxwell, or the pamphleteer formerly believed to be Maxwell, than to Molyneux); he seemed willing to contemplate equality of taxation; and for all the complaints about the obstruction of Irish commerce he did not propose complete freedom of trade, reminding his readers that there were precedents for statutory restrictions and privileges within the English economic system.47

II Thus the handful of pamphlets and memorials in support of union composed between 1690 and 1708 are not only too sparse, but are insufficiently clear in their intentions and arguments, to provide adequate evidence of a vociferous unionist element in the early eighteenth-century Protestant ascendancy. Nor is it possible to supplement these public utterances with a plethora of private expressions of unionist enthusiasm. Certainly there are individual examples, but the cumulative effect is not strong. Most supporters of union spoke only for themselves: only Bishop Moreton of Kildare suggested a broader constituency when he wrote in October 1703 to the former Lord Justice, Sir Cyril Wyche, ‘we are very fond of an entire union with you in England, but whether our behaviour, both of late and now, be of a piece with that design you will best judge …’.48 Furthermore, the individuals concerned, admittedly selected by accident of documentary survival, were not representative of the Irish Protestant elite. Moreton, for example, was an English cleric who had come over to Ireland in 1677 as a chaplain to the first Duke of Ormond and had then made his career in the Church of Ireland. James Bonnell, the Irish Accountant-General, who in 1691 had represented union as the least destructive solution to the problem of settling Ireland, was another Englishman marooned in Dublin by the processes of preferment.49 Sir Robert Southwell, the superannuated bureaucrat who occupied the sinecure of Secretary of State for Ireland, and whose letters to Archbishop King repeatedly expressed a hope for union, was of Irish descent but permanently

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resident in England;50 as was another of King’s correspondents, the lawyer Francis Annesley, himself the victim of a ‘patriotic’ agitation when expelled from the Irish House of Commons in 1703 for serving on the resumption trust, who complained bitterly at the time of the Anglo-Scottish treaty that his previous tormentors were doing nothing to advance their country’s cause by seizing the opportunity to promote union, which ‘would have made you the most flourishing of all the nations in the world’.51 Of those Protestants who were Irish by birth and resident in Ireland, the clearest expression of unionism may be found in the letters of the lawyer and historian, Sir Richard Cox. A Hanoverian Tory in his politics, and the author of a history of Ireland, significantly entitled Hibernia Anglicana (1689), Cox explicitly identified himself and his fellow Protestants with the ‘English interest’ in Ireland, dependent for their survival on the maintenance of the English connection; and in this respect his unionism was of a piece with his general political principles.52 Otherwise, only the redoubtable Archbishop King expressed any interest in union, but he of course was by no means typical (in any respect), and his occasional comments are best described as supportive rather than enthusiastic: union was a good thing, even perhaps ‘the only way to make Ireland flourish effectually’, but would only happen when the English were willing.53 It may also be significant that in almost every case private expressions of unionist sentiment occurred when Anglo-Scottish union appeared on the political agenda: in 1690, following the appointment by the Scottish estates of commissioners to negotiate terms; again after 1702, when both the English and Scottish parliaments had debated proposals and reappointed commissioners; and of course before, during and after the conclusion and enactment of the treaty of 1706–7. Commentary on the desirability of an Irish union was very much a reaction to these events, stimulated either by envy of the Scots or fear that a ‘British’ state would discriminate even more brutally against Irish economic interests (or in the case of the Tory Francis Annesley, that the Scottish Kirk establishment would insist that preferential treatment be accorded to Presbyterians in Ireland).54 Often, what we can see is no more than a knee-jerk reaction. Union proposals aired in private correspondence were unlikely to be thoroughly worked out, nor even particularly sensible: Annesley’s suggestion, for example, that in a united parliament Ireland might be represented by its four archbishops, eight temporal lords and 32 county MPs (in a House of Commons which would have comprised 586 members and in which the Irish representatives would have constituted less than 6 per cent), does not suggest a realistic


assessment of what this under-strength Irish contingent might be able to achieve.55 Extracts from private correspondence cannot provide any statistically viable sample of opinion in this period; but resolutions and addresses in the Irish parliament, representing as they seem to do a considered public expression of a consensual, or at least a majority, view, do at first sight offer rather firmer evidence, and in the parliamentary sessions of 1703–4, 1707 and 1709 both houses of the Irish parliament publicly committed themselves to the project of Anglo-Irish union. On 1 October 1703 the Lords, in congratulating the Queen on her accession, declared: ‘as we are sensible, that our preservation is owing to our being united to the crown of England, so we are convinced it would tend to our further security and happiness to have a more comprehensive and entire union with that kingdom.’56 A follow-up attempt in one of the Lords’ committees, to prepare a representation on the condition of the kingdom which would persuade the queen of the benefits to both kingdoms of union, fizzled out, but the Commons echoed the upper house in appending a request for union to its own representation to the Queen on the state of the nation.57 Then, in the session of 1707, after the enactment of the Anglo-Scottish treaty, the Commons, reflecting on the events of the previous year, appealed for ‘a yet more comprehensive union’ of the queen’s subjects, and the Lords expressed the hope that Anne would ‘extend your favour to all your subjects, till none are excluded from so great a blessing’.58 Finally, in 1709, the Lords again asked the queen to ‘perfect this great work, by bringing her kingdom of Ireland, also, into the union’.59 Here is evidence which seems hard to gainsay, and historians interested in demonstrating the strength of unionist opinion have made full use of it.60 On closer inspection, however, the impact is less emphatic. Extracts taken from resolutions and addresses may well appear as explicit and unambiguous endorsements of union when read in isolation from their context, but take on a cloudier aspect when viewed in the perspective provided by the political circumstances in which they arose. The parliamentary session of 1703–4 was exceptional in several respects, and if union was ever to excite widespread interest among the political nation in Ireland this had to be the time. The idea of negotiations between England and Scotland had been broached at Westminster a year or so before, and was still provoking discussion in the press.61 At the same time Anglo-Irish relations had reached a low point, as a consequence of the controversy over the forfeited estates. In

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the Irish House of Commons a Whiggish opposition was hoping to harass the Tory Lord Lieutenant, the second Duke of Ormond, by exploiting the ‘patriotic’ sentiments of back-benchers (and, given that these opposition members numbered among them men like Henry Maxwell and Robert Molesworth, union, rather than legislative independence, might well have been expected to figure on their agenda). In the Lords, constitutional sensitivities were once again being infringed by the revival of the issue of appellate jurisdiction in the Earl of Meath’s case.62 The Commons’ representation on the state of the nation has to be viewed as one element in a broader campaign, which included the expulsion of the forfeitures trustee Francis Annesley, the recitation of economic grievances, denunciation of absentee pensioners and inquiries into official corruption. That a formal request for union would embarrass the Lord Lieutenant went without saying,63 and must certainly have figured in the calculations of Whig MPs such as Molesworth, the chairman of the committee on the state of the nation, and Speaker Alan Brodrick, effectively the leader of the Whigs, who actually proposed the wording of the representation.64 Here are all the marks of political opportunism. Even then, it is worth remembering that the Commons did not simply call for union tout court, but only as an alternative to a restitution of Ireland’s constitutional rights (that is to say, legislative independence), which, coming first in their text, and supported by a demand for frequent parliaments, would have appeared as the preferred option. The situation in the Lords was rather different. One may perhaps detect the influence of the sometime unionist Archbishop King, who served on the committee which drafted the first pro-union address, although the presence of the Earl of Meath himself on the same committee hints at a connection between this outburst of unionism and the continuing jurisdictional dispute over Meath’s lawsuit. But however genuine the Lords’ request may have been in the first instance, the fact remains that it was not repeated once Ormond had communicated the queen’s reply, and after October, for the remainder of the session, parliament said no more on the subject. Nothing whatsoever was said of union when the Irish parliament met again under Ormond in 1705, and it was only at the beginning of the following session, in July 1707, that both houses seemed to recover interest. For the historian, however, the difficulty with the two addresses made in 1707 lies in their careful, not to say ambiguous, wording.65 The Commons were responding to a statement by the new Lord Lieutenant, Pembroke, of the Queen’s expectation that her Irish


parliament would ‘find an expedient for strengthening the interest of her Protestant subjects in this kingdom’, a suggestion that related, not to any putative British-Irish legislative union, but to measures for the relief of Protestant dissenters in Ireland, more specifically the repeal of the sacramental test.66 As contemporary political correspondence makes abundantly clear, it was repeal of the test, rather than constitutional reform, which was the Members’ main concern at this time,67 and the wording of the Commons’ address, hoping for a ‘yet more comprehensive union’ could be interpreted as a sidelong reference to repeal, which in a subsequent draft address was described as a project for fostering ‘a firm and lasting unanimity’ among Protestants.68 The Lords’ address is worded even more obscurely. Having congratulated the queen on the success of her armies in Europe, and on the achievement of the union of Great Britain, it continued: May Your Majesty go on and extend your favour to all your subjects, till none are excluded from so great a blessing, but such as by their own forwardness or disaffection to the public good bar themselves from the general advantages of Your Majesty’s glorious reign. Again, whether this vague phraseology was intended to refer to the inclusion of Ireland with an enlarged Great Britain, or some other appropriate domestic reform, cannot be determined with any confidence. Finally, there is the Lords’ address of May 1709. On this occasion the political context is obvious. In his speech from the throne, the Whig viceroy, Wharton, had not only expressly recommended a repeal of the test but had made use of the queen’s name as an endorsement, in what many staunch churchmen and Tories would have regarded as an in improper, and indeed offensive, fashion. In doing so, he unwisely used the word ‘union’: ‘I will only add that the Queen, who is all goodness, never had anything so much at her royal heart, as the bringing to pass and perfecting the union of her subjects of Great Britain …’.69 The Lords, in debating their response, specifically ruled out any promise to relieve dissenters of their civil and religious disabilities, rejecting a clause which would have offered (albeit grudgingly) some form of toleration.70 They then picked up the reference to ‘union’, related it to the Act of Union, and expressed the hope that the queen would in due course ‘perfect this great work, by bringing her kingdom of Ireland, also, into the union’. The committee that prepared this address included several diehard opponents of a repeal of the test, including Archbishop King, and the High Church bishops Thomas Lindsay

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(Killaloe), Edward Smyth (Down and Connor) and Charles Hickman (Derry), as well as Lord Abercorn, who was proving to be a determined and highly troublesome opponent of the viceroy.71 The obvious inference is that the call for a British-Irish union was at least partly tonguein-cheek, intended to tease the viceroy rather than as a serious contribution to constitutional debate.72

III The evidence for Irish Protestant interest in the idea of union in the early eighteenth century does not therefore suggest a powerful groundswell of popular enthusiasm. Anonymity of authorship and the tendency to assume a false national identity for rhetorical purposes make the pamphlet literature difficult to interpret; references in private correspondence are equally inconclusive as an indication of ‘public opinion’; and even the various parliamentary requests for union in 1703–9 can take on a different colouring when examined in the context of political tactics. This is not to say, of course, that Protestant Irishmen were opposed to union; merely that it was not a practical possibility, so that representations of its desirability expressed at best little more than pious hopes. In these circumstances, to call publicly for union, whether in print or in parliament, may well have had other, less immediately obvious, purposes. The literal interpretation is not always the most satisfying when one looks at the uses to which language was put. Essentially, this Irish unionist ‘discourse’, such as it was, was directed towards England. It was there that any decision on union would be taken, but the English were supremely uninterested in the prospect. The Whig Junto may perhaps have ruminated upon the possibility in 1697, if one contemporary correspondent is to be believed, and in the constitutional and political crisis surrounding the passage of the Declaratory Act at Westminster in 1720 it was reported by one pamphleteer that prospects for union were being ‘whispered about in a very mysterious manner’, by ‘a man or two, who would be thought profoundly wise’, though it did not figure at all in ministerial correspondence.73 Otherwise there is a deafening silence. Thus any proposal for union emanating from Ireland would fall into a political vacuum. Other than during the negotiations for the Anglo-Scottish union, it is hard to see how Irishmen can seriously have expected their requests for consideration to have attracted a favourable response, or even to have been taken seriously, and it would therefore seem more useful to


look for other, tactical objectives behind their deployment of unionist rhetoric. Where Irishmen can be seen to have supported union for its own sake, they appear to have been principally concerned with its economic implications. Grievances over restrictive English legislation loomed large in pro-union pamphlets (and in the Irish House of Commons’ representation of 1703), and it was not merely the hope but the assumption that union would naturally involve the removal of these offensive statutes, especially the Navigation, Cattle and Woollen Acts, and the establishment of free trade. (The other common argument in favour of union – that it would improve the security of the Protestant establishment – carried more weight in England and was intended for English readers.) Determination to achieve free trade was such that it blinded enthusiasts to the likely practical effects of union. As a rule, union proposals lacked a firm intellectual basis. It was simply assumed, for example, that any union would take the form of integration on the Welsh model; alternatives, such as a federal system, were not even discussed. Nor were the likely repercussions of an incorporating union properly confronted: little consideration was given to the prospect that under an incorporating union Ireland would be called upon to bear a heavier, if not an equal, burden of taxation; and there was no attempt to calculate the political arithmetic of a united parliament, in which Irish members would constitute a small minority. In fact, during the early years of the Anglo-Scottish union, Ireland’s unreconstructed constitutional arrangements seemed to work to better advantage than the new privileges acquired by the Scots. The Irish had their own parliament to enact legislation, while the representatives of Scotland at Westminster were obliged to compete for parliamentary time with their vastly more numerous English and Welsh colleagues. Moreover, when Irish and Scottish interests came into conflict in the British parliament, as in 1712 over the encouragement to be given to the linen industry in the respective kingdoms, it was not inevitably the Scots who came off best.74 Whether the Irish really needed a union depended very much on the willingness of English MPs to pass discriminatory legislation in areas of mutual concern; and after 1700 this became a rare occurrence. Although a close scrutiny of the evidence for Irish Protestant unionism in the first two decades after the Glorious Revolution must cast doubt on the importance of the issue in serious political ‘discourse’, it would not require us to abandon what is now the received wisdom about Irish Protestant identities in this period; namely that a sense of

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common ethnicity, and common religious and political allegiances, held the propertied elite in Ireland firmly to the English connection. Union may not have been practical, but as an ideal (albeit unattainable) it still held an attraction for many Protestant Irishmen, whether Tories like Sir Richard Cox, or Whigs like Alan Brodrick. It is worth emphasising that there is no explicit evidence of anti-unionism in this period. The generation which had lived through the Glorious Revolution and the Jacobite war still regarded itself as representing the ‘English interest’ in Ireland and recognised that security lay in English military protection. As yet few were so passionate in their ‘patriotism’ as to contemplate constitutional separation. However enraged they might become at incidents of English discrimination, Irish Protestants were intensely pragmatic. Their political leaders tried to work the existing system to their own advantage as best they could. Union and legislative independence alike represented the possibility of jam tomorrow, whereas the interest of the ‘political nation’ lay in whatever less exciting delights might be acquired today.

Notes 1. James Kelly, ‘The Origins of the Act of Union: An Examination of Unionist Opinion in Britain and Ireland, 1650–1800’, in Irish Historical Studies, 25 (1986–7), pp. 239–40; T.C. Barnard, ‘Scotland and Ireland in the Later Stewart Monarchy’, in S.G. Ellis and Sarah Barber (eds), Conquest and Union: Fashioning a British State, 1485–1725 (Harlow: Longman, 1995), p. 259. 2. Some thoughts humbly offer’d towards an union between Great-Britain and Ireland (London, 1708), quoted in Kelly, ‘Origins of the Act of Union’, p. 238. No supporting evidence for this claim has yet come to light. 3. Kelly, ‘Origins of the Act of Union’, pp. 244–5. See also Desmond Clarke, Arthur Dobbs Esquire 1689–1765 … (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1957), pp. 28–30. 4. In a passing phrase in Daniel Szechi and D.W. Hayton, ‘John Bull’s Other Kingdoms: The English Government of Scotland and Ireland’, in Clyve Jones (ed.), Britain in the First Age of Party: Essays Presented to Geoffrey Holmes (London: Hambledon Press, 1967), p. 268. A gentle reprimand seems to be implied in the recording of this observation in Jim Smyth, ‘“No remedy more proper”: Anglo-Irish Unionism before 1707’, in Brendan Bradshaw and Peter Roberts (eds), British Consciousness and Identity: The Making of Britain, 1533–1707 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 302. 5. Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-century Commonwealthman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959), ch. 5. 6. Idem, ‘The “excellent use” of colonies’ in William and Mary Quarterly, 23 (1966), pp. 620–6; J.G.A. Pocock (ed.), The Political Works of James Harrington Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 71–2; Blair Worden, ‘Classical Republicanism and the Puritan Revolution’, in Hugh Lloyd-Jones,


7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

12. 13.

14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

19.

20.

21.

22. 23. 24.

Valerie Pearl and Blair Worden (eds), History and Imagination: Essays in Honour of H.R. Trevor-Roper (London: Duckworth, 1981), pp. 196–9. Kelly, ‘Origins of the Act of Union’. Ibid., pp. 242, 245. Jacqueline Hill, ‘Ireland without Union: Molyneux and his Legacy’, in John Robertson (ed.), A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the British Union of 1707 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 271–96, esp. pp. 277, 286–7. Jim Smyth, ‘Anglo-Irish Discourse, c. 1656–1707: from Harrington to Fletcher’, in Bullán, 2, no. 1 (1995); idem, ‘“No remedy more proper” ’. British Library, dept. of printed books, 816.m.17. (57.), no pagination. There is a manuscript copy in National Archives, Dublin, Wyche MSS, ser. 2, no. 143 (see Kelly, ‘Origins of the act of union’, 241). Printed in Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, 1690–1, pp. 201–6. J.I. McGuire, ‘The Irish Parliament of 1692’, in Thomas Bartlett and D.W. Hayton (eds), Penal era and Golden Age: Essays in Irish History 1690–1800 (Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation, 1979), pp. 4–5. Cal. S. P., Dom., 1695 and addenda, p. 213. The true way to render Ireland happy and secure; or, a discourse, wherein ’tis shewn, that ’tis the interest both of England and Ireland, to encourage foreign Protestants to plant in Ireland … in a letter to the Right Honourable Robert Molesworth … (Dublin, 1697). Ibid., pp. 18, 22. Ibid., pp. 22–3. History of Parliament, 1690–1715 section, draft biographical entry for Molesworth. I must acknowledge the permission of the Editorial Board of the History of Parliament Trust for permitting me to make use of this material, copyright of which remains with the Trust. For Molyneux, see in general J.G. Simms, William Molyneux of Dublin …, ed. P.H. Kelly (Blackrock: Irish Academic Press, 1982). Also of interest in this connection is P.H. Kelly, ‘Locke and Molyneux: the Anatomy of a Friendship’, in Hermathena, 121 (1979), pp. 38–54. Molyneux, The case of Ireland’s being bound by acts of parliament in England, stated (Dublin, 1698), p. 84. A modern reprint, edited by J.G. Simms, was published by Cadenus Press in Dublin in 1977 as the fifth volume in the series ‘Irish writings from the age of Swift’. Cf. Hill, ‘Ireland without Union’, p. 287. At no time during their proceedings on the pamphlet in May and June 1698 did the English House of Commons make an issue of Molyneux’s remarks on union: The Journals of the House of Commons, XII, pp. 281, 324–7, 331, 336–7; Cal. S. P., Dom., 1698, pp. 261–2. Published in December 1697. King’s reply is dated January 1698, in a letter to Sir Robert Southwell of 6 Jan. 1697/8 (B.L., Eg. MS 917, ff. 151–4). P.H. Kelly, ‘A pamphlet attributed to John Toland, and an unpublished reply by Archbishop King’, Topoi, 4 (1985), pp. 81–90, esp. 88. J.G. Simms, The Williamite Confiscation in Ireland, 1690–1703 (London: Faber and Faber, 1956), pp. 124–5; D.W. Hayton, ‘The “Country” interest and the Party System, 1689–c. 1720’, in Clyve Jones (ed.), Party and Management in Parliament, 1660–1784 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1984), pp. 60–3.

166 David Hayton 25. Catalogue number 8138.b.56. 26. As a contemporary and a neighbour in County Down. This pamphlet does not, however, appear by name in the annotated copy of A Catalogue of Books: Being the Library of the Right Rev. Francis Hutchinson, Late Bishop of Down and Connor… (London , 1756), in Queen’s University, Belfast, library, call-number wp ff Z997/1. 27. ‘Notes when the establishment was under consideration’ [19 Oct. 1703] (Surrey History Centre, Woking, Midleton MSS, 1248/4, f. 360, printed in D.W. Hayton, ‘A debate in the Irish House of Commons in 1703: a whiff of Tory grapeshot’, Parliamentary History, 10 (1991), p. 161). 28. Smyth, ‘“No remedy more proper”’, p. 317. 29. Essay, pp. 6–7. 30. Ibid., pp. 4–5. 31. Ibid., p. 12. At one point in the pamphlet, however, the author does talk of the ‘British’ interest in Ireland rather than the English (ibid., p. 20). 32. Ibid., p. 35. 33. Ibid., pp. 32–3. 34. Ibid., pp. 29–30. 35. Ibid., p. 3. 36. The power to legislate for Ireland ‘England claims, and is able to vindicate’ (ibid.). 37. [Edward Southwell] to Lord Nottingham, 30 Sept. 1703 (National Library of Ireland, MS 991, pp. 136–7). 38. Kelly, ‘Origins of the Act of Union’, p. 244, also notes the publication of A union between England and Scotland … prejudicial to England except also that Ireland is included (1706), which neither he nor the present author have been able to locate. There also appeared a second edition of Molyneux’s Case: Patrick Kelly, ‘William Molyneux and the Spirit of Liberty in eighteenth-century Ireland’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 3 (1986), p. 136. 39. The Queen an empress, and her three kingdoms one empire; or, brief remarks upon the present; and a prospect of the future state, of England, Scotland, and Ireland, in a happy union, for the consideration of the parliament. In a letter to a noble peer. (London and Dublin, 1706), pp. 2, 7–8, 21–7. 40. Jonathan Swift, The story of the injured lady. Being a true picture of Scotch perfidy, Irish poverty, and English partiality. With letters and poems never before printed (London, 1707), printed in Herbert Davis (ed.), The prose works of Jonathan Swift (14 vols, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941–68), IX, pp. 1–9. 41. See especially Godfrey Davies, ‘Swift’s The story of the injured lady’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 6 (1942–3), pp. 473–89; also Irvin Ehrenpreis, Swift: The Man, His Works, and the Age (London: Methuen, 1962–83), II, pp. 169–75; Joseph McMinn, ‘A Weary Patriot: Swift and the Formation of an Anglo-Irish Identity’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 2 (1987), pp. 104–5; N.L. York, Neither Kingdom nor Nation: The Irish Quest for Constitutional Rights, 1698–1800 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1994), pp. 43–6. 42. Davis (ed.), Swift’s Works, IX, pp. 3–4. 43. Ibid., p. 9. 44. Some thoughts humbly offer’d towards an union between Great-Britain and Ireland (London, 1708), pp. 2–3.

Ideas of Union in Anglo-Irish Political Discourse 167 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

62.

63.

64. 65. 66.

Ibid., pp. 28–9. Ibid., pp. 8–22, 26. Ibid., pp. 4–6, 23. Moreton to [Wyche], 30 Oct. 1703 (National Archives, Dublin, Wyche MSS 158/264). Bonnell to Robert Harley, 3 Nov. 1691 (B.L., Add. MS 70015, ff. 235–6, partly printed in Hist. MSS Comm., Portland MSS, III, p. 480). Southwell to King, 14 Mar. 1701/2 (Sir C.S. King, A Great Archbishop of Dublin … (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1906), p. 101); same to same, 9 Apr. 1702 (Trinity College Dublin, Lyons (King) collection, MS 1995–2008/904). Annesley to King, 1706 (King, A Great Archbishop, p. 117); same to same, Apr., 28 Oct. 1707 (T.C.D., MS 1995–2008/1255, 1276). Kelly, ‘Origins of the Act of Union’, 242; Cox to Lord Nottingham, 2 Oct., 6, 9 Nov. 1703 (B.L., Add. MS 29589, ff. 269, 308, 310); same to Edward Southwell, 1, 12 May 1707 (ibid., 38155, ff. 31, 41. For Cox, see S.J. Connolly, Religion, Law, and Power: The Making of Protestant Ireland, 1660–1760 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 81–3; Ian Montgomery, ‘The Career of Sir Richard Cox’ (University of Ulster unpublished MA thesis, 1993); idem, ‘“An entire and coherent history of Ireland”: Richard Cox’s Hibernia Anglicana’, Linen Hall Review, 12, no. 1 (1995), pp. 9–11. King to Sir Robert Southwell, 19 July 1697 (T.C.D., MS 750(1) p. 79); same to Capt. Oliver McCausland, 14 Oct. 1708 (ibid., MS 2531, p. 5). Annesley to King, 1706 (King, A Great Archbishop, p. 117). Same to same, 28 Oct. 1707 (T.C.D., MS 1995–2008/1276). Journals of the [Irish] House of Lords (Dublin, 1634–1786), II, p. 8. Ibid., 29, 85; Journals of the House of Commons of the Kingdom of Ireland (Dublin, 1613–1792), III, pp. 45, 66. Commons’ Jn. Ire., III, pp. 274, 313–14; Lords’ Jn. Ire., II, pp. 161–2. Lords’ Jn. Ire., II, p. 247. Kelly, ‘Origins of the Act of Union’, pp. 243–4; Smyth, ‘“No remedy more proper”’, pp. 302–3, 308. P.W.J. Riley, The Union of England and Scotland: A Study of Anglo-Scottish Politics of the Eighteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978), chs. 1, 6. F.G. James, Ireland in the Empire, 1688–1770: A History of Ireland from the Williamite Wars to the Eve of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), pp. 51–62; Patricia Punch, ‘Queen Anne’s First Irish Parliament, 1703–4: The First Session’ (unpublished MA thesis, University College, Dublin, 1982); Connolly, Religion, Law, and Power, pp. 78–9. For evidence of Ormond’s acute embarrassment, see Edward Southwell to Nottingham, 23 Oct. 1703 (C. S. P., Dom., 1703–4, pp. 170–1); Ormond to same, 25 Oct. 1703 (ibid., pp. 174–5). [Edward Southwell] to Lord Nottingham, 9 Oct. 1703 (N.L.I., MS 991, f. 142). Kelly, ‘Origins of the Act of Union’, 244 uses the description ‘delicately phrased’. Commons’ Jn. Ire., III, p. 364; Sir Richard Cox to the Duke of Ormond, 8 July 1707 (Hist. MSS Comm., Ormonde MSS, new ser., VIII, p. 300).

168 David Hayton 67. For example, Anderson Saunders to Edward Southwell, 17 June, 1 July (B.L., Add. MS 9715, ff. 164, 168–9); same to same, 10 July 1707 (Leicestershire Record Office, Finch MSS, box 4950, bundle 22); Sir Richard Cox to same, 3, 15 July (B.L. Add. MS 38155, ff. 71, 79); same to same, 10 July 1707 (Leics. R.O., Finch MSS, box 4950, bdle. 22). 68. Commons’ Jn. Ire., III, p. 367; Anderson Saunders to Edward Southwell, 10 July 1707 (Leics. R.O., Finch MSS, box 4950, bdle. 22). 69. Lords’ Jn. Ire., II, p. 244. 70 Ibid., p. 246. 71. Joseph Addison to Lord Godolphin, 7, 14 May, 25 June 1709 (Walter Graham (ed.), The Letters of Joseph Addison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941), pp. 137–8, 158). 72. Wharton himself brushed it aside as of no account: Wharton to [Lord Sunderland], 11 May 1709 (B.L., Add. MS 61634). 73. Bishop King to Sir Robert Southwell, 19 July 1697 (T.C.D., MS 750(1), p. 79); [John Toland,] Reasons most humbly offer’d to the hon[oura]ble the House of Commons, why the bill sent down to them from the most hon[oura]ble House of Lords, entituled, an act for the better securing the dependency of the kingdom of Ireland upon the Crown of Great Britain, should not pass into law (London, 1720), p. 25. 74. F.G. James, ‘The Irish Lobby in the Early Eighteenth Century’, English Historical Review, 81 (1966), 543–57; James, Ireland in the empire, pp. 154–8; Szechi and Hayton, ‘John Bull’s Other Kingdoms’, p. 248.

7 Ulster Presbyterians and the Confessional State, c. 1688–1733 Ian McBride

Historical research on Ireland between the 1690s and the 1730s has usually concentrated on two themes. First, these were the years when Protestant ascendancy was consolidated: the penal legislation enacted between 1695 and 1728 formally excluded Catholics from political and social influence, closing off the channels which had permitted their resurgence in the past. Secondly, this period also witnessed the first stirrings of Protestant patriotism, as William Molyneux and others demanded constitutional equality for the kingdom of Ireland within the British multiple monarchy. It has often been pointed out that a third source of conflict – the political and social rivalry between the Anglican establishment and the Presbyterian population – provoked so much bitterness during the reigns of William and Anne that it sometimes threatened to overshadow the central divide between Protestantism and popery. Until recently, however, the antagonism between church and dissent, so alien to twentieth-century Irish politics, has remained a curiosity rather than a subject for serious investigation. The indispensable point of departure for the study of ecclesiastical politics during this period remains J.C. Beckett’s Protestant Dissent in Ireland, now 50 years old. This characteristically incisive study delineates the relationship between the Anglican Church, the Presbyterians and the English administration. Denominational clashes over religious toleration, the validity of dissenting marriages and the implementation of the sacramental test (1704) are all interpreted as a struggle ‘over the spoils secured by the revolution – the established church in possession, the Presbyterians discontented with the conduct of their former allies’.1 In Beckett’s view, the offensive against Protestant dissent was motivated by a pragmatic concern with the political and economic challenges posed by the Presbyterians of the north. Anglican fears of 169

170 Ian McBride

an expansionist kirk, however, were combined with the knowledge that the Presbyterians could ultimately be relied upon to defend the existing regime from its Jacobite enemies. Consequently, MPs were emboldened to resist metropolitan pressures to remove the legal disabilities attached to nonconformity.2 As an analysis of political relationships, Protestant Dissent in Ireland is unlikely to be surpassed; but Beckett’s mechanistic view of political conflict is no longer wholly satisfactory. He was not interested in the ‘mere bigotry’ of the churchmen, or in ‘the arguments which they felt it expedient to use without putting any great reliance on them’. Religious discrimination, he believed, must have been founded on some ‘more reasonable principle’.3 One result was that he neglected the two central works of Presbyterian political thought produced during Queen Anne’s reign, John McBride’s A Sample of Jet-Black Prelatick Calumny (1713) and James Kirkpatrick’s An Historical Essay Upon the Loyalty of Presbyterians (1713), usually known simply as Presbyterian Loyalty. For Beckett, the value of Kirkpatrick’s treatise lay in the historical material which it contained, including a number of letters and documents, rather than the political and religious arguments which it advanced: his index does not mention McBride’s work at all. Other Presbyterian polemics, such as the responses to George Walker’s True Account of the Siege of Londonderry (1689), or John Abernethy’s attacks on the sacramental test in 1731–33, are mentioned only in passing.4 Since the publication of Beckett’s book the secondary literature on the late Stuart period has expanded dramatically.5 In Britain the Whig interpretation of the seventeenth century, still largely intact when Beckett carried out his research, has been challenged by revisionist historians who have overturned many conventional assumptions about the Revolution of 1688–9. Though they have reached different, often conflicting conclusions, most have emphasised the depth of ideological divisions in the decades after the Revolution, and in particular the vitality of confessional allegiances and political theologies. Such topics are now attracting attention from Irish historians too. Toby Barnard, David Hayton and Robert Eccleshall have taught us to view the quarter-century after 1690 as a time of Anglican revival, while Phil Kilroy and others have begun to establish the outlines of Presbyterian intellectual life.6 In his pioneering overview of the century between 1660 and 1760, Sean Connolly has gone so far as to describe Ireland as a confessional state where ‘religion remained a central aspect of personal and political motivation’.7

Ulster Presbyterianism and the Confessional State 171

This new sensitivity to the power of the pulpit takes us a long way from Beckett’s dismissal of religious ‘bigotry’, and calls for a re-examination of the antagonism between church and dissent. Even if we assume, as Beckett appeared to, that Anglican controversialists did not believe their own propaganda, their choice of arguments still requires explanation. For historians of political thought, the challenge is to reconstruct an intellectual world in which it made sense for high churchmen to claim, for example, that Presbyterians were responsible for the death of Charles I; and in which Presbyterian apologists such as McBride and Kirkpatrick went to great lengths to disprove such assertions. The aim of this chapter is to examine both the political pressures faced by dissenting spokesmen and the broad discursive context in which they operated. I hope to show that during the reigns of William and Anne, Presbyterian propagandists moved away from sectarian modes of thought and reformulated their case against establishment Anglicanism with the aid of new political languages borrowed from England – mixed constitutionalism, Whiggish contract theory and a variety of the latitudinarian theology associated with Benjamin Hoadly. Before examining the Presbyterian position, however, it may be useful to look at the historiographical background in more detail.

I The deposition of James II fractured the political elites of all three Stuart kingdoms, stimulating an intensive debate on the location and limits of political authority, the relationship between Crown and parliament, and the connection between church and state. The 1689 settlement, once viewed as a clear-cut victory for Whiggism, now appears as an uneasy compromise in which the fundamental issues were left unresolved. As revisionist scholarship has amply demonstrated, the Restoration theories of divine right monarchy, hereditary succession and passive resistance resurfaced after the accession of Queen Anne, whose Stuart ancestry and Anglican credentials revived Tory morale. While not openly repudiating the Revolution itself, Tory writers sought to minimise its implications, rejecting notions of contractual government, rights of resistance and popular sovereignty: the extent of their support was demonstrated during the trial of the controversial high church preacher Henry Sacheverell in 1710.8 Following the Tory electoral triumph of that year, a reversal of the Revolution appeared to be within reach, and the reconstruction of a strict confessional state was

172 Ian McBride

prevented only by the accession of George I in 1714 and the defeat of the Jacobite rising of the following year. If Toryism demonstrated a remarkable vitality, the Whigs, on other hand, failed spectacularly to establish a coherent account of ‘revolution principles’. For much of this period they remained on the defensive, always fighting to shake off the stigma of civil war radicalism, their ideology circumscribed by the need to create a consensus with at least a section of Tory opinion. While many believed that James II had broken the original contract that bound together king and community, such ideas, with their appeal to the nebulous ‘people’, raised more questions than they could satisfactorily answer. Williamite propagandists such as Gilbert Burnet accordingly relied on more conventional historical and legal arguments to portray 1688–9 as a restoration of the ancient constitution; alternatively, they avoided constitutional questions altogether, using a specifically biblical and Protestant language to construct an image of William as a godly prince who had been singled out by divine providence as an instrument of reformation.9 Although party divisions originated in the constitutional questions of the Exclusion Crisis, it was religion that provided the engine of Tory reaction, as demonstrated by the convocation controversy of 1696–1702, the occasional conformity bills of 1702–4 and 1711, and the suppression of dissenting academies in 1714. Tory ideology had crystallised during the Restoration, when the alliance of an hereditary monarchy and a powerful Anglican Church appeared to offer the only security against political and social upheaval.10 Profoundly disturbed by the proliferation of dissenting meeting-houses, the appearance of Deism and Socinianism, and the abolition of episcopacy in Scotland, high churchmen reasserted the indivisibility of church and state, which they believed to be ‘twisted and interwoven into the very being and principles of each other’.11 Ultimately, the defenders of the church were driven back still further into the traumatic decade of the 1640s. The cult of Charles the martyr thrived, Eikon Basilike was reprinted, and the anniversary of the regicide was observed with sermons claiming that dissenters ‘deserved to be boiled alive’ since they ‘had murdered more persons than the heathens and papists put together’.12 The Whigs, meanwhile, posed as the party of Protestant solidarity; amongst their traditional aims was the modification of the penal laws against nonconformity. In reaction to high church demands for the revival of convocation, Whig churchmen were forced to stress the subordination of the established church to the civil magistrate; the official line was set out in William Wake’s Authority of Christian Princes over


their Ecclesiastical Synods (1697), which endeavoured to prove that, since the age of Constantine, godly rulers had exercised control over ecclesiastical assemblies. Much more explosive, however, was the extreme low church position advanced by Benjamin Hoadly in 1717. The notorious Bishop of Bangor had already been censured by the lower house of convocation for his sermon The Measures of Submission to the Civil Magistrate Considered (1706), a sensational attack on the scriptural basis of the Tory doctrine of passive obedience. But the highpoint in a long career of unorthodox ecclesiology was his famous sermon, The Nature of the Kingdom or Church of Christ (1717), which asserted that Christ was the sole lawgiver of the church and the only judge of matters of conscience; that the rewards and punishments associated with the Christian faith were not temporal but purely spiritual; and that the church had no right to call on the civil power to uphold its doctrines. Hoadly’s full-blown Erastianism was rejected by the majority of churchmen, Whig and Tory alike, but it represented the logical culmination of the anti-clerical, pro-dissenter strand within Whiggism.13 In Scotland, too, political instability was fuelled by confessional antagonisms. The Presbyterian regime established in 1690 rested on precarious foundations. The bulk of the nobility and gentry remained attached to episcopacy, and landowners were further alienated from the kirk by the transference of their rights of ecclesiastical patronage to heritors and kirk sessions. William’s desire for a broad, moderate church settlement was frustrated as the revived General Assembly began a purge of ministers, probationers and elders who refused to subscribe to the Westminster Confession. The deprivation of those clergy who refused to accept the abolition of episcopacy – over half – took several years, and in the north-east was not completed until the Jacobite rebellion of 1715. Stories of the expulsion of Episcopalians from their parishes by violent ‘rabbling’ circulated among their brethren in Ireland. A deluge of Episcopalian pamphlets, often directed at an English audience, sought to undermine the new regime by publicising the intolerance of the Scottish Presbyterians; they also exploited the differences between the Erastian settlement favoured by William and the traditional ‘two-kingdoms’ ecclesiology of the Presbyterians which rejected the supremacy of the civil power over the ecclesiastical sphere. Presbyterian fears of being subsumed by the Church of England were exacerbated by the union of 1707, which entrusted the future of the Kirk to the Westminster parliament with its in-built Anglican majority. Government attempts to secure a toleration for Episcopalians,

174 Ian McBride

defeated in 1703, were successful under the Tory ministry of 1710–14, which also restored the right of nominating ministers to lay patrons. As in England, then, the heirs of the Revolution were repeatedly forced onto the defensive, as Presbyterian apologists such as Gilbert Rule, George Ridpath and Robert Wodrow found it necessary to distance themselves from the regicides of the 1640s and the Covenanter risings of 1666 and 1679.14 How far were party commitments and allegiances reproduced across the Irish Sea? Initially, the Dublin parliament was spared the full force of the Whig–Tory conflict, which determined events at Westminster, but recent work has demonstrated the purchase of party divisions in Irish politics, particularly after 1708. Thanks to David Hayton’s pioneering research into the parliaments of Queen Anne’s reign, we are now beginning to understand how Whig and Tory ideologies, imported from England, interacted with local confessional and social conditions. Irish Tories came to see themselves as ‘the Church party’, resolved to protect the hereditary monarchy of Anne and the privileges of the Anglican establishment. It was possible for at least one high churchman to believe that whereas papists were ‘Christians (though bad ones)’, dissenters were ‘such a medley of men, such a mixture of ill principles, such a herd, that he had not words bad enough to describe them with’.15 Conversely, the Whigs or ‘honest gentlemen’ sought to preserve the rights of the Irish parliament against the encroachments of the Crown and Westminster, celebrated the Williamite revolution, pushed for further anti-Catholic measures and extended at least a measure of protection to Protestant dissenters.16 The controversy over the loyalty of Irish Presbyterians was thus part of a much wider debate which cut across all three Stuart kingdoms. Once viewed on this British level, two features of the struggle between the Synod of Ulster and the Church of Ireland can be highlighted. The first concerns the practical context within which these ecclesiastical polemics took place. The war of 1688–91 had underlined Ireland’s status as a dependent kingdom, a position made explicit as the Westminster parliament gradually asserted its legislative supremacy. Henceforth, Irish politicians knew that the direction of policy-making lay in London: concessions depended on metropolitan goodwill. Secondly, the language employed by Irish parliamentarians and churchmen was shaped by English mainstream political discourse, as popular references to the Sacheverell trial of 1710, the Bangorian controversy and the conviction of the Jacobite traitor Francis Atterbury all demonstrate.17 The interaction of British and Irish political thought is evident in the


careers of Charles Leslie, the Irish non-juror who became the most articulate defender of divine right theory in England, and Daniel Defoe, who came to the defence of Irish dissent with his pamphlet The Parallel in 1705.18 At a more general level, it is possible to demonstrate the influence of newspapers and periodicals across the Irish sea: Defoe’s Review, for example, was being received in Carrickfergus in 1709.19 Increasingly, as we shall see, Irish political writers were brought to conform to the conventions of English party controversy.

II Once we appreciate the depth of the political uncertainty which characterised this period, the ideological schism within Irish Protestantism becomes less puzzling. Anglicans feared that episcopacy would be swept away by a Presbyterian revolution on the Scottish model, a fear fuelled by the influx of Scottish immigrants into Ulster in the 1690s, while dissenters could never discount the renewal of state persecution. The Revolution had certainly provided a boost to the Presbyterian community: shortly after his landing at Carrickfergus, William had restored and increased the regium donum to the Presbyterian clergy, and a year later the English parliament abrogated the oath of supremacy which had excluded dissenters from public office. On the other hand, organised dissent still had no legal standing, and attempts to pass a toleration bill in 1692 and 1695 ran up against the intransigence of an Anglican House of Commons. The insecurity of the Presbyterian position was revealed when the sacramental test – barring Dissenters from public office – was inserted in the 1704 Act to Prevent the Further Growth of Popery.20 During William’s reign, the deposition of James II was seldom openly questioned by Irish writers, but the issue of allegiance to the revolutionary monarchy weighed heavily upon Anglican clergymen who had invested so heavily in the doctrines of divine right and hereditary succession. There had been profound differences among Anglicans over the legitimacy of resistance to James, and although the experience of Jacobite occupation had cured the Protestant minority in Ireland of any lingering attachment to the Stuarts, open hostility to revolution principles would resurface in the last years of Anne’s reign.21 In his classic apologia, The State of the Protestants (1691), William King sought to defend the Williamite position against non-jurors such as Charles Leslie, while at the same time exonerating those Anglican bishops who had remained in Ireland under the Jacobite regime. The vacillating

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conduct of the Anglican hierarchy contrasted unfavourably with the behaviour of the Presbyterians, whose record in 1688–91 was undeniably impressive. As Leslie took great pleasure in pointing out, the Ulster colonists who had resisted James were predominantly Presbyterians. Furthermore, the open defiance of the garrisons at Derry and Enniskillen, he reminded his readers, had taken place before the supposed ‘desertion’ of James II. Bishop King, on the other hand, had been a zealous exponent of passive obedience before the Revolution and had denounced the defiance of the Derry citizens as ‘Rank Rebellion’.22 The publication of George Walker’s True Account of the Siege of London-Derry (1689) sparked off an indecorous pamphlet war which focused primarily on the scale and nature of the Presbyterian contribution to the siege. Anglican and Presbyterian writers disagreed over the respective roles of the garrison leaders, most notably George Walker himself, the respective strength of the two denominations within the garrison, and the charge of Jacobitism levelled at the dissenting minister Alexander Osborn. Nevertheless, each side also sought to manipulate the ideological context in order to marginalise their opponents. For his part, Walker conjured up the spectre of Presbyterian extremism with some spurious passages on the activities of the Cameronian minister David Houston, who was ‘very troublesome, and would admit none to fight for the Protestant Religion till they had first taken the Covenant’.23 In fact, Houston was not in Derry during the siege, and he had been disowned by the northern Presbyterians in any case. On the other hand, an anonymous critic triumphantly described how, when Ezekiel Hopkins, the Bishop of Derry, adhered to the doctrine of passive obedience, it was left to a young Presbyterian named Irwin and his friends to seize the keys and lock the gates of the city. The bishop, he observed with irony, ‘finding his Doctrine the oftener repeated, less credited by Church-rebel Jack Presbyter, left the City some days after to the disloyal Whiggs’.24 This localised dispute reflected sectarian tensions within Derry, where Presbyterian immigration had reversed Anglican predominance; but it was also related to the wider debate over the toleration bills, and in particular the question of whether the legal recognition of Protestant Dissent should be accompanied by a sacramental test to restore the Anglican monopoly of public office. Churchmen such as Bishop Tobias Pullen of Dromore argued that dissenters already enjoyed de facto freedom of worship and that official toleration would encourage the growth of nonconformist sects and thereby weaken the


established church, that great bulwark against popery. Significantly, Anglican warnings relied heavily upon the Scottish example: much of Pullen’s text was taken up with harrowing descriptions of the persecution which had followed the abolition of episcopacy in Scotland and signs of similar extremism among the expanding Presbyterian communities in Letterkenny and Derry.25 A Toleration Act, it was predicted, would encourage Scots immigrants, thousands of whom had already settled in Ulster since the war, and whose ministers, Pullen claimed, were sworn to extirpate prelacy.26 The same points were reiterated by Bishop Anthony Dopping of Meath, who complained of ‘frequent colonies coming out of Scotland’, and warned that ‘the commons are generally fond of the Solemn League and Covenant and retain affection for it’.27 At this time the chief defender of the Presbyterian position was the influential Dublin clergyman Joseph Boyse, whose outlook was shaped by the more inclusive and diverse dissenting traditions of the capital. Boyse’s arguments ranged from an appeal to natural rights to the contention that Presbyterians deserved full civil rights as a reward for their services to William, to the theological objection that the proposed Test Act was an abuse of the sacrament. As always, however, he adopted an irenic tone, seeking to minimise the differences among Protestants over modes of worship and church government.28 A rather less polished answer to Pullen, published by the John McBride of Belfast two years later, exemplified some of the differences between north and south. While Boyse claimed that his aim was to heal the divisions among Protestants, the representatives of that ‘great Body of Northern Scots’29 could afford to adopt a more aggressive tone. Although he included freedom of worship as one of ‘our birth-right-privileges as free-born Subjects’, McBride made it plain that he was seeking toleration for Presbyterians alone.30 The Ulster clergy were also capable of striking a more triumphalist note, as when Robert Campbell published a collection of nine sermons in 1696, which praised William for renewing the regium donum in Ireland and for ‘restoring to his people in Scotland their liberties, after great oppression and sad suffering, and breaking the yoke of Prelacy there, and setting up a godly ministry’.31 These differences were also reflected in theological disputes, where Boyse spoke favourably of occasional communion between churchmen and dissenters, while McBride condemned the ‘amphibious creatures’ who crossed the denominational divide.32 In the later 1690s, as attempts were made to reassert the authority of the episcopal courts in the areas of education, burials and marriages,

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high churchmen like Dr Edward Walkington stepped up their denunciations of the machinery of Presbyterian discipline whose very existence constituted a direct challenge to their position as guardians of the national faith. In 1693 Walkington had preached a sermon in Christ Church, Dublin, complaining of the ‘spirit of democracy’ which pervaded Presbyterianism; following his elevation to the bishopric of Down and Connor in 1695, he was able to observe the Presbyterian threat at close quarters.33 With the encouragement of William King he protested to Dublin Castle that dissenting ministers were celebrating marriage, holding large, open air communion festivals, and above all that they ‘openly hold their sessions and provincial synods for regulating all matters of ecclesiastical concern’.34 Anglican frustration was compounded by the fact that successive convocations of the established church were bullied and prorogued by government while the governing body of the Presbyterian church met without interference.35 Such complaints were an understandable reaction to the new visibility and prominence of Presbyterian clergymen and laymen since the revolution, but they also reflected the ecclesiological principles of Anglican ministers who were deeply offended by the self-governing nature of the Presbyterian polity. Hence Tisdall’s frequent allegation that the Synod of Ulster claimed ‘a direct jurisdiction over the Civil Magistrate, to Judge of his Right and Title; [and] to Absolve Subjects from their Allegiance’.36 Hence too the uproar caused by John McBride’s Sermon before the Provincial Synod at Antrim (1698), which asserted that the Presbyterians had the right to call synods without the sanction of the civil power. The sermon drew on scriptural examples and natural law to defend the traditional Presbyterian conception of the church as a distinct polity, with its own rulers, laws and courts, independent from the state.37 Its publication, apparently without McBride’s approval, prompted Walkington to protest to the lords justices, with the result that the author was summoned for trial before the privy council in Dublin.38 Although acquitted, McBride was again attacked by the House of Lords in 1712 on the grounds that his 1698 sermon had made synods ‘independent on the Civil Power’, and Archbishop King cited the sermon as example of Presbyterian arrogance as late as 1719.39 This apparently irrational obsession with Presbyterian courts and assemblies becomes more explicable when we remember that McBride’s sermon coincided with the convocation controversy, when Anglicans in England and Ireland demanded the recall of their own legislative bodies to spearhead a campaign against the progress of schism, heresy and immorality.40


As the above account suggests, the clashes of Anglicans and Presbyterians over the Siege of Derry, the sacramental test and the operations of church courts were not simply manifestations of a provincial power struggle, but were related to the profound constitutional, political and ecclesiological questions thrown up by the Glorious Revolution. These connections were further clarified during the last four years of Queen Anne’s reign, when Irish high churchmen launched an assault on Whig political theory which extended to uncompromising defences of passive obedience and non-resistance. One of the best examples is a sermon preached by the Revd Edward Mathews to the Antrim assizes in 1713, which denounced those who substituted ‘a wild and imaginary State of Nature’ for God’s providence, warned against subversive notions of contract and resistance, and ridiculed the notion that the security of government depended on ‘the Ebbings and Flowings of the wavering Passions of the Crowd’. The targets of this invective, if not already obvious, were identified in Mathews’ footnotes, where he cited Calvin and the Scottish resistance theories of John Knox, Samuel Rutherford and the militant Covenanter tract Naphthali (1667).41 Another opponent of ‘what they call Revolution Principles’ was John Winder of Kilroot, who insisted that the transfer of allegiance from James to William could be defended ‘without having recourse to such Principles as make Sovereign Princes the Creatures, nay the very Slaves of the People’.42 Far from establishing any general rules, the revolution was simply ‘one Act Extraordinary’ justified only by ‘absolute Necessity’.43 Both clerics invoked the memory of the royal martyr Charles I, and represented the Presbyterians as ‘the Inheritors of the Fortunes and Principles of the detested Instruments of Cromwel’s Rebellion’.44 Presbyterian clergymen, such as James Kirkpatrick, John Abernethy and James Blair, lived up to the expectations of their high church detractors by expounding the political theory of mixed election elaborated by sixteenth-century Calvinist divines, now updated with the aid of revolution principles.45 All three discussed the nature of monarchy by reference to the Davidic kingdom of the Old Testament where legitimate governors, they argued, had been instituted as the result of a choice made by God and – crucially – ratified by the people. Thus Abernethy searched the history of biblical kings to prove that there was no scriptural warrant for divine right, but that the rulers of Israel had been limited monarchs, whose authority was derived from ‘ORIGINAL CONTRACT’ and popular consent.46 Divine revelation, as Kirkpatrick explained, was confirmed by the law of nature, by which ‘the Ends and

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Designs of Civil Government in General are settled’ and the people ‘enter into such a Compact, and model such a Constitution, as may best answer these Ends’.47 Just as the Anglican controversialists endeavoured to establish a link between dissent and political subversion, so the Presbyterians concentrated on the dangers of Jacobitism in an effort to discredit the high church movement. Thus Kirkpatrick’s massive Presbyterian Loyalty was prefaced by an sustained assault on ‘the slavish Doctrine of Non-Resistance and Passive Obedience’ which appealed not to Knox or Rutherford but to impeccably Whiggish sources: Hoadly’s Measures of Submission to the Civil Magistrate (1705), Burnet’s Enquiry into the Measures of Submission to the Supreme Authority (1688) and the speeches from the Sacheverell trial.48 On the basis of this brief survey, then, we can isolate a number of distinct strands in the ideological conflict between church and dissent. Most obviously, there was the appeal to expediency: the central question here was whether legal penalties against dissenters strengthened or weakened the Protestant interest. Secondly, there were theological controversies – concerning the Book of Common Prayer, the authority of bishops, the retention of ‘unscriptural’ practices in Anglican worship, etc. – in which dissent might still be characterised in terms of heresy and schism. Thirdly, Anglicans elaborated an ecclesiological argument that the Presbyterian polity was a clerical tyranny which absolved its adherents from the ties of civil obedience. Finally, all of these issues were linked to the historical debates which focused on the alleged links between Presbyterian doctrine and regicide, republicanism and social subversion. It was in the last two areas, where religious and political modes of discourse intersected most clearly, that the Presbyterians came under pressure to rethink their ideological inheritance.

III Among the Presbyterian works of this period the two outstanding contributions were the lengthy rejoinders to William Tisdall compiled by McBride and Kirkpatrick, the two Belfast ministers who had been appointed by the Synod in 1712 to compile an official history of Irish Presbyterianism. A number of other ministers also took issue with the vicar of Belfast, most notably John Abernethy of Antrim, who would lead the final campaign against the sacramental test in 1731–3.49 Though they shared the same enemies and cited each other’s writings, it is important to note the theological and political differences that existed between them. McBride, an orthodox Calvinist, was a product


of the Restoration whose rigidity prevented him from taking the oath of abjuration introduced in 1703 on the grounds that it included an obligation to uphold the English church. Kirkpatrick and Abernethy, on the other hand, were educated in Scotland after 1690 at a time when the Scottish kirk was already moving away from ius divinum ecclesiology towards a more pragmatic accommodation with the government.50 Their moderation extended to theological matters also: since 1705 both had been members of the Belfast Society, a discussion group whose attempts to push Presbyterianism in a more latitudinarian direction would later lead to a public breach with the Synod on the question of compulsory subscription to the Westminster Confession of Faith. It was not surprising, then, that Kirkpatrick adopted a more irenic tone than his elder colleague, appealing to the ‘Substantials and Vitals of Religion’ which the Protestant denominations held in common.51 At the centre of Tisdall’s assault was the memory of Presbyterian rebellion and radicalism, represented in extreme form by the National Covenant of 1638 and the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643. According to the Calvinist idea of a covenanted community, political and social organisation was subordinated to the pursuit of godliness. The duty of the civil magistrate, therefore, was to uphold the laws of God and to punish heresy and idolatry: failure to meet these obligations placed the people under a duty to resist their ruler. During the Scottish ‘second reformation’ of the 1630s and 1640s, Presbyterians had also drawn upon natural rights theory and ancient constitutionalism, but these strands were always framed by the Covenanting idea, and resistance to Charles I was ultimately grounded less on notions of popular sovereignty than on the conviction that the king had offended God by fostering idolatry.52 It was to this pattern of beliefs that high church polemicists attributed the collapse of the Stuart monarchy and, ultimately, the regicide of 1649: hence the repeated insistence of Tisdall and his allies that the Solemn League and Covenant was still sold in Ulster by Scottish pedlars, that it had been reprinted in Belfast, and that Presbyterian preachers were still obliged to take it as part of their ordination.53 In their repudiation of civil authority over Christ’s kingdom, the Covenanters came into conflict with the royal supremacy which had emerged from England’s magisterial reformation. Anglican political theology emphasised the duty of obedience to an imperial Crown which possessed sovereignty over all matters both temporal and spiritual. Indeed, for many established clergymen such as the Irish Tory

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bishop Theophilus Bolton, the civil supremacy, modelled on the primitive church, was the defining feature of the Anglican establishment. This concentration on the just rights of Christian magistrates was a well-worn theme of anti-Catholic polemic, but it also enabled Anglicans to bracket the presbyter together with the papist. Echoing the Anglican royalist writers of the Restoration, Bolton portrayed the Calvinist duty of resistance against idolatrous rulers as the bastard offshoot of the papal claim to depose heretical princes.54 The same argument was commonly employed by high churchmen such as Charles Leslie, who denounced ‘the Deposing Doctrine, and placing the Power in the People’ as ‘the Spittle of the Papists and Jesuits, which our Whigs and Dissenters have Lick’t up’.55 It is in this context that we must view Tisdall’s repeated accusations that Presbyterians asserted the ‘inherent Right of Christ’s Kingdom’, convened in presbyteries and synods when they pleased, and pretended to exercise ‘a Jurisdiction Superior to, and independent of the Civil Magistrate’.56 Was there any basis for these accusations? During the Restoration the Ulster Presbyterians had wisely avoided controversy on civil or ecclesiastical matters. It is true that militant Covenanting preachers continued to find a receptive audience in parts of Ulster. Itinerants from Scotland, such as David Houston and Alexander Peden, were reported to have preached ‘up the people’s liberties’, distributed radical tracts printed in the Netherlands and incited physical violence against the established clergy.57 Their apocalyptic pronouncements looked forward to a Calvinist revolution on the model of 1638, a time when ‘Britain and Ireland shall be overthrown with judgements, and drowned in blood’ and the ‘children of the persecuted captivity’ would come into their own.58 But these extremists were repudiated by the Ulster leaders who dissociated themselves from the Covenanter uprisings of 1666 and 1679 and adopted a policy of quiet accommodation with the Anglican authorities. Declarations of loyalty were produced by various Presbyterian bodies, though no real attempt was made to reconcile their anti-Erastian ecclesiology with their temporal obedience to the monarchy on a theoretical level.59 In the post-Revolution period, however, Presbyterian leaders explicitly distanced themselves from the sectarian idioms of the ‘second reformation’ and the Solemn League and Covenant in particular.60 Both Kirkpatrick and McBride denied that the Covenant was taken by ordinands, though McBride offered a measured defence of Covenanting, citing the second book of Samuel to show that ‘David, tho’ the Lord[’]s Anointed, was not put in the full Exercise of his Regal Power, till he made a


League with the Elders of Israel before the Lord’.61 Both also contended that the Covenant, far from being a conspiracy against the Stuarts, was a strongly royalist document which had obliged its adherents to work for the restoration of the monarchy.62 On the central goal of the document, the extirpation of prelacy, they defended Presbyterian objections to episcopal government but disavowed the use of physical force to impose the true religion. Thus Kirkpatrick defended the Covenant as an expression of the desire for further reformation along Presbyterian lines, but made plain his disapproval of ‘Tumultuous, Oppressive, Persecuting and other Illegal Methods’.63 In answer to the historical components of Tisdall’s case, both writers presented Presbyterian resistance to Charles I, not so much as a renewal of a covenanted community as a renovation of the ancient constitution. In his justification of the Scottish rebellion, which he presented as a defensive war for religion, liberty and property, McBride cited the Dutch natural rights theorist Hugo Grotius, and deployed the constitutional argument that parliaments ‘have joint Stock with the Prince in the Soveraignty [sic] … our Monarchy not being Absolute but mixed’.64 In a similar vein, Kirkpatrick insisted that the civil war was not the result ‘of some few single Acts; but of a constant Series of MaleAdministration, to the Endangering of the Protestant Religion, the subverting of the Privileges of Parliament, and the Overthrow of the Liberties and Properties of his Subjects’, and that the Presbyterians had taken up arms only after all constitutional means of redress had been tried.65 Interestingly, his account of Charles I’s reign was focused exclusively on the conflict between the monarchy and the English parliament: in over 80 pages he managed to avoid the subject of the Scottish Covenanters altogether.66 Indeed the most striking thing about both authors is their instinctive anglocentric framework, and in particular the surprisingly small proportion of space devoted to the history of Ireland. These sanitised histories of the seventeenth-century kirk were underpinned by a moderate restatement of Calvinist ecclesiology. According to Presbyterian orthodoxy, church and state formed two distinct kingdoms, entirely different in their jurisdictions, their ends, and their rewards and punishments. Since the church formed its own spiritual kingdom, with Christ as its sole king, magisterial supremacy was a usurpation just as much as popery itself. Kirkpatrick, who dealt with the subject at greater length, explained that Presbyterians could not allow a formal appeal to the civil magistrate in matters of doctrine, since this suggested that the powers of church and state were of the

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same kind and nature. At the same time, he demonstrated that the ‘Inherent Power’ of the church, which had so troubled Tisdall, was simply the power to administer the word and sacraments.67 McBride, too, emphasised that the only authority claimed by the church was ‘ministerial’ and did not extend to the political sphere.68 ‘Infidelity or Difference in Religion’, he insisted, ‘does not make void the Magistrates[’] Just Legal Authority, nor free the People from their due Obedience to Them’.69 And if these assurances were not enough, Kirkpatrick reminded his readers that even the strict Covenanters had allotted to secular authorities the responsibility for the suppression of blasphemy and heresy, a role which he now described as ‘a Political Civil SUPREMACY in Ecclesiastical Matters’ similar to that defined in the thirty-seventh article of the Church of England.70 Both ministers defended the Westminster Confession of Faith, McBride pointing out that it was an essential part of the dual ecclesiastical establishment created by the revolution and confirmed by the Act of Union.71 Internal theological divisions, although they probably existed, had not yet been publicly articulated. It was not until 1719, the year after McBride’s death, that the first open attack on the Westminster Confession was made in Abernethy’s famous sermon to the Belfast Society, Religious Obedience Founded on Personal Persuasion. Although the theological allegiances which lay behind this latitudinarian stance are still obscure, the general effect was summed up by the leading subscriber John Malcome, who accused Abernethy of ‘pretending to give new light to the world, by putting personal persuasion in the room of church government and discipline’.72 Abernethy’s quarrel was not so much with the substance of the Confession as with the right of church courts to compel professions of belief. In their rejection of all human formulations of faith in favour of the sufficiency of the scriptures, Abernethy and his ‘new light’ colleagues greatly accelerated the process by which Presbyterians came to define their differences with Anglicanism less in terms of ecclesiastical polity, liturgy and discipline, than as a generalised struggle between the right of private judgement and the enforcement of religious uniformity by earthly rewards and penalties.73 The subscription controversy is still imperfectly understood by historians. While there is not room for a full consideration of the subject here, I would like briefly to highlight some of its political implications. The internal convulsions of the 1720s were regarded as ‘downright madness’ by the Whig parliamentarian William Conolly, who saw that disunity within the Synod would weaken the campaign against the


sacramental test.74 If we turn from practical politics towards the ideological struggle, however, the non-subscribing challenge may be viewed as the completion of the process of revisionism described above. The essential background to Abernethy’s sermon was the ferocious Bangorian controversy launched by Hoadly’s controversial sermon on the text, ‘My kingdom is not of this world’. Hoadly’s call for the subordination of the established church to civil authority sat uneasily with the traditional anti-Erastian temper of Presbyterianism, but his advocacy of dissenters’ rights served as the manifesto of the Sunderland–Stanhope ministry of 1717–20, whose pro-dissent measures included the restoration of the regium donum, the Irish Toleration Act of 1719 and the Indemnity Act of the same year. In place of the traditional Presbyterian conception of the church as a distinct polity with its own rulers, laws and courts, Abernethy substituted the individual conscience, thus aligning himself with the anti-clerical, latitudinarian wing of English Whiggism. Under the Walpole regime he would restate the Presbyterian position on the basis of straightforward Gothic constitutionalism and appeals to ‘true British patriotism’, combined with a Bangorian protest against the exercise of state compulsion in matters of religious belief.75 The transformation was evident even to some defenders of the Anglican establishment, who recognised that ‘the modern System of what they call New Light’ signalled a new challenge.76 It is true that the campaign to repeal the test unleashed all the familiar accusations, as Anglicans once more recalled the destruction of the Stuart monarchy, and imagined swarms of Scottish immigrants filling up the meagre offices of the civil and military establishments.77 A number of pamphlets from earlier clashes, such as Swift’s Letter Concerning the Sacramental Test (1708), were reprinted.78 But others noted the recent developments within Protestant dissent. The author of The Correspondent (1733) focused on the dangerous notion that ‘the Civil Magistrate has no Right to any degree of coercive Power to restrain these Perswasionists from asserting and propagating their Opinions’. The non-subscribing position, he argued, offered an umbrella to ‘the whole Clan of Hereticks and Schismaticks of all Denominations’, allowing them to form a temporary coalition to destroy the established church.79 Other rejoinders to Abernethy and his colleagues ignored the old sectarian debates over church government and liturgy and set out instead a general defence of ecclesiastical establishments as an indispensable part of the political and social order.80 At the same time, they addressed the natural rights arguments employed by the dissenters, replying that ‘No Subject has a

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Right to any Office under a Civil Government, the Equality of a State of Nature being taken away by political Constitutions’.81 The anti-test campaign of 1731–3 thus marked the culmination of a long process of translation in which the Calvinist concept of the covenanted community was replaced by an understanding of civil society as a contractual association, and the duty to oppose idolatrous rulers was reformulated as a Whiggish right of resistance against civil tyranny.82 There had, of course, been both historical and conceptual links between dissent and Whiggery since the Exclusion crisis: the resistance theories developed by Scottish Calvinists and French Huguenots in the sixteenth century had already been blended with Scotland’s own constitutional tradition to justify the deposition of tyrants. Yet it was during the reigns of William and Anne that Presbyterian leaders first found it necessary to assert claims for religious liberty against political repression, and found the materials in a Whiggish discourse that would have surprised their more orthodox predecessors. Moreover, like other marginalised groups within the British composite monarchy, they not only absorbed the discourse of Whig constitutionalism and of its ecclesiastical counterpart, Hoadleian latitudinarianism, but incorporated the more oppositional and subversive readings of those traditions.

The deposition of James II, as recent work has shown, did not resolve the structural problems of the Restoration monarchy but merely recast them within a new political context. Historians are now in a position to appreciate, as Beckett perhaps could not, the continuing relevance of idioms and images from the civil war to the high church polemic of the late Stuart period. It has also become easier to understand the particular political circumstances which constrained Presbyterian propagandists in constructing their response. Throughout a quarter-century of ministerial instability, Dissenters seized new opportunities to consolidate their position in Ulster, while maintaining a defensive posture against the possible renewal of Tory assault. In this volatile situation, the increasing subordination of Irish affairs to English party politics made it essential for the Synod to curry favour among parliamentarians in both Dublin and London. As Presbyterian leaders found it necessary to align themselves to an Erastian Whig regime, they were encouraged to articulate their aspirations in a language which was acceptable not only to their own confessional community but to their potential allies within the establishment.


The relationship between political discourse and political action during the Anglican/Presbyterian conflicts of 1688–1733 was thus more complicated than Beckett’s contrast between ‘expediency’ and ‘principle’ implies.83 In this essay I have sought to demonstrate that these apparently unprincipled squabbles aroused important ideological concerns among the clergy, at a time when the sermon was still the main vehicle of political debate. I have also tried to explain the relationship between the practical objectives of Irish ecclesiastical politicians, and the vocabulary they employed to justify and describe their activities. What appears from a distance as Anglican bigotry can now be recognised as the theory of the confessional state as elaborated by its Restoration exponents and revived during Queen Anne’s reign. Similarly, Beckett’s observation that Presbyterians were concerned with advancing their own denominational interests rather than ‘religious liberty or religious equality in the modern sense’ should not be pushed too far.84 After 1690 those who had once looked for a Calvinist revolution began to assert their right to toleration as a dissenting community which had served the Protestant interest faithfully: eventually they would construct a theory of religious liberty which defended the right of the individual to worship freely and challenged a state that discriminated between its citizens purely on grounds of confessional affiliation.

Acknowledgement I am grateful to John Erskine, Alan Ford and Colin Kidd for comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.

Notes 1. J.C. Beckett, Protestant Dissent in Ireland 1687–1780 (London: Faber and Faber, 1948), p. 16. 2. Ibid., p. 18. 3. Ibid., p. 17. Cf. his ‘Swift: The Priest in Politics’, in Confrontations: Studies in Irish History (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), pp. 111–22, which takes religious belief more seriously. 4. Ibid., pp. 27, 58, 93, 148. 5. An excellent survey can be found in the relevant chapters of Tim Harris, Politics under the Later Stuarts: Party Conflict in a Divided Society 1660–1715 (London: Longman, 1993). 6. See, e.g., T.C. Barnard, ‘Reforming Irish Manners: The Religious Societies in Dublin during the 1690s’, Historical Journal, 35 (1992), pp. 805–38; idem, ‘Protestants and the Irish Language, c. 1675–1725’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 44 (1993), pp. 243–72; Robert Eccleshall, ‘Anglican Political Thought

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7. 8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

in the Century after the Revolution of 1688’, in D. George Boyce, Robert Eccleshall and Vincent Geoghegan (eds), Political Thought in Ireland since the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 36–72; and the contributions by Barnard, Connolly and Hayton in Alan Ford, James McGuire and Kenneth Milne (eds), As by Law Established: The Church of Ireland since the Reformation (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1995). For the Presbyterians, see Peter Brooke, Ulster Presbyterianism: The Historical Perspective (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1987), chs. 3–4; Phil Kilroy, Protestant Dissent and Controversy in Ireland 1660–1714 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1994). Sean Connolly, Religion, Law and Power: The Making of Protestant Ireland, 1660–1760 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 2. For a general account, see J.P. Kenyon, Revolution Principles: The Politics of Party 1689–1720 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). On Toryism, see Mark Goldie, ‘Tory Political Thought 1689–1714’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Cambridge, 1977). Kenyon, Revolution Principles, chs. 1–4; Tony Claydon, William III and the Godly Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). See also Mark Goldie, ‘The Revolution of 1689 and the Structure of Political Argument’, Bulletin of Research in the Humanities, 83 (1980), pp. 473–564; idem, ‘The Roots of True Whiggism, 1688–94’, History of Political Thought, 1 (1980), pp. 196–236. G.V. Bennett, The Tory Crisis in Church and State 1688–1730: The Career of Francis Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), esp. ch. 1. Sacheverell, quoted in Kenyon, Revolution Principles, p. 92. Ibid., p. 72. The best account is still Norman Sykes, ‘Benjamin Hoadly, Bishop of Bangor’, in F.J.C. Hearnshaw, The Social and Political Ideas of Some English Thinkers of the Augustan Age (London: G. Harrap, 1928), pp. 112–56. Colin Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo-British Identity, 1689–c.1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), ch. 4; Ian B. Cowan, ‘Church and State Reformed? The Revolution of 1688–9 in Scotland’, in Jonathan Israel (ed.), The AngloDutch Moment: Essays on the Glorious Revolution and its World Impact (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 174–83; Thomas Maxwell, ‘The Presbyterian–Episcopalian Controversy in Scotland from the Revolution Settlement till the Accession of George I’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Edinburgh, 1954), counted 385 pamphlets on this debate. Cited in D.W. Hayton, Ireland after the Glorious Revolution 1692–1715 (Belfast: Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, Education Facsimile Series, 1976), p. 17. David Hayton, ‘A Debate in the Irish House of Commons in 1703: A Whiff of Tory Grapeshot’, Parliamentary History, 10/2 (1991), pp. 151–63; idem, ‘The Crisis in Ireland and the Disintegration of Queen Anne’s Last Ministry’, IHS, 22/87 (March 1981), pp. 193–215. S.J. Connolly, ‘Reformers and Highflyers: The Post-Revolution Church’, in Ford, McGuire and Milne (eds), As by Law Established, p. 159; idem, Religion, Law and Power, p. 241; Bishop Nicholson to Wake, 7 May 1723, British Library, Add MS. 6116, ff. 131–2; [William Tisdall], The Conduct of the Dissenters of Ireland (Dublin, 1712), p. 20.

Ulster Presbyterianism and the Confessional State 189 18. [Daniel Defoe], The Parallel: or, Persecution of Protestants the Shortest Way to Prevent the Growth of Popery in Ireland (Dublin, 1705). 19. J.A. Downie, Robert Harley and the Press: Propaganda and Public Opinion in the Age of Swift and Defoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 2. 20. For the political background see J.S. Reid, History of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, ed. W.D. Killen, 3 vols (3rd edn., Belfast, 1867), pp. ii–iii, chs. 20–3; Ian McBride, ‘Presbyterians in the Penal Era’, Bullán, 1/2 (Autumn, 1994), pp. 73–86. 21. Raymond Gillespie, ‘The Irish Protestants and James II, 1688–90’, IHS, 28/110 (Nov. 1992), 124–33; Eccleshall, ‘Anglican Political Thought’, pp. 37–8; J.I. McGuire, ‘The Church of Ireland and the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688’, in Art Cosgrove and Donal McCartney (eds), Studies in Irish History Presented to R. Dudley Edwards (Dublin: University College Dublin, 1979), pp. 137–49. 22. [Charles Leslie], An Answer to a Book, Intituled, The State of the Protestants in Ireland (London, 1692), pp. 74–6, 78, 114. 23. George Walker, A True Account of the Siege of London-Derry (London, 1689), p. 21. For the background, see Ian McBride, The Siege of Derry in Ulster Protestant Mythology (Dublin, 1997), pp. 20–32. 24. An Apology for the Failures Charg’d on the Reverend Mr George Walker’s Printed Account of the Late Siege of Derry (n.pl., 1689), pp. 13–14. See also John MacKenzie, A Narrative of the Siege of Londonderry (London, 1690), pp. 3–4. 25. [Tobias Pullen], A Defence of the Answer to a Paper intituled The Case of the Dissenting Protestants of Ireland ([1695], repr. Dublin, 1719), pp. 12–13, 22–5, 34–7. 26. Ibid., p. 12. 27. Quoted in Kilroy, Protestant Dissent and Controversy, p. 191. 28. [Joseph Boyse], The Case of the Protestant Dissenters of Ireland in Reference to a Bill of Indulgence Represented and Argued (Dublin, 1695); [idem], The Case of the Dissenting Protestants of Ireland in Reference to a Bill of Indulgence Vindicated from the Exceptions Alleged against it in a Late Answer (Dublin, 1695). 29. Apology for the Failures Charg’d on the Reverend Mr George Walker’s Printed Account, p. 2. 30. [John McBride], Animadversions on the Defence of the Answer to a Paper Entitled The Case of the Dissenting Protestants of Ireland in Reference to a Bill of Indulgence ([Belfast], 1697), pp. 25–6; quotation from p. 114. 31. Robert Campbell, A Directory of Prayer for a Gracious King (London, 1696), quoted in Thomas Witherow (ed.), Historical and Literary Memorials of Presbyterianism in Ireland, 2 vols. (Belfast, 1879–80), i, p. 107. 32. [McBride], Animadversions, p. 113. 33. Edward Walkington, A Sermon Preached in Christ’s Church Dublin. At the Consecration of the Right Reverend Father in God, John Lord Bishop of Ossory (Dublin, 1693), p. 16. 34. Reid, History, ii, p. 473. 35. William Tisdall, The Nature and Tendency of Popular Phrases in General (Dublin, 1713), p. 18. 36. Ibid., p. 12. 37. John McBride, A Sermon before the Provincial Synod at Antrim ([Belfast], 1698), p. 15. In the same year, following a series of clashes between the Crown and

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38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46.

47.

48. 49.

50.

51. 52.

53. 54.

55.

56. 57.

the Scottish kirk, the General Assembly drew up a statement repudiating Erastianism and asserting that ‘Jesus Christ is the only Head and King of this church’: Cowan, ‘Church and State Reformed?’, p. 182. Reid, History, ii, p. 476. The Present State of Religion in Ireland (London, [1712]), p. 3; Beckett, Protestant Dissent, p. 65, n. 3; see also William Tisdall, The Case of the Sacramental Test Stated and Argu’d (Dublin, 1715), p. 21. Bennett, Tory Crisis, ch. 3. E[dward] Mathews, The Divine Original of Civil Government (Dublin, 1713), pp. 10–11, 23. John Winder, The Mischief of Schism and Faction to Church and State (Dublin, 1714), p. 13. Ibid., p. 14. Mathews, Divine Original of Civil Government, p. vii; Winder, Mischief of Schism and Faction, p. 12. James Kirkpatrick, God’s Dominion over Kings and other Magistrates (Belfast, 1714), pp. 5–7; James Blair, Divine Providence, the Security of the Crown and Subject: Two Sermons Preach’d in London-Derry December 8. 1714 (Belfast, 1715), pp. 6, 11. John Abernethy, The People’s Choice, the Lord’s Anointed. A Thanksgiving Sermon for his Most Excellent Majesty King George his Happy Accession to the Throne (Belfast, 1714), pp. 5, 8–9. Kirkpatrick, God’s Dominion over Kings, p. 6. For the law of nature see also Thomas Govan, The Necessity of Standing Fast by our Christian Liberty (Belfast, 1714), pp. 4, 6. [James Kirkpatrick], An Historical Essay Upon the Loyalty of Presbyterians in Great Britain and Ireland ([Belfast] 1713), pp. 3–21. Abernethy, People’s Choice; see also Joseph Boyse, ‘Remarks on a Pamphlet publish’d by W. Tisdall, D.D. and intituled, The Case of the Sacramental Test Stated and Argued’, in The Works of the Reverend and Learned Mr Joseph Boyse, of Dublin, 2 vols. (London, 1728), ii, pp. 313–32. See Colin Kidd, ‘Religious Realignment between the Restoration and the Union’, in John Robertson, (ed.), A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the Union of 1707 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 145–68. [Kirkpatrick], Presbyterian Loyalty, p. [iv]. John Coffey, ‘Samuel Rutherford and the Political Thought of the Scottish Covenanters’, in John R. Young (ed.), Celtic Dimensions of the British Civil Wars (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1997), pp. 75–95. [Tisdall] Conduct of the Dissenters, pp. 67, 73, 91. Theophilus Bolton, A Sermon Preach’d in St. Andrew’s, Dublin: before the Honourable House of Commons, on Monday, October 23. 1721 (Dublin, 1721), pp. 16–17, 29. Quoted in Harris, Politics under the Later Stuarts, p. 161. For the ideological background see Mark Goldie, ‘John Locke and Anglican Royalism’, Political Studies, 31 (1983), 71–3. [Tisdall], Conduct of the Dissenters, p. 48. Richard L. Greaves, ‘“That’s No Good Religion that Disturbs Government”: The Church of Ireland and the Nonconformist Challenge, 1660–88’, in Ford, McGuire and Milne (eds), As by Law Established, p. 128.

Ulster Presbyterianism and the Confessional State 191 58. Quoted in Norman Vance, Irish Literature: A Social History (Oxford, 1990), p. 36. 59. For Presbyterian circumspection under the Restoration, see Kilroy, Protestant Dissent and Controversy, pp. 15–35. 60. Present State of Religion in Ireland, p. 33. 61. [John McBride], A Sample of Jet-Black Prelatick Calumny (Glasgow, 1713), p. 213. 62. Ibid., p. 89; [Kirkpatrick], Presbyterian Loyalty, pp. 548–9. 63. Ibid., p. 545. 64. [McBride], Jet-Black Prelatick Calumny, p. 209. 65. [Kirkpatrick], Presbyterian Loyalty, p. 173. 66. Ibid., pp. 168–249. 67. Ibid., p. 27. 68. [McBride], Jet-Black Prelatick Calumny, p. 27. 69. Ibid., pp. 25–6. 70. [Kirkpatrick], Presbyterian Loyalty, pp. 24, 38, 40, 49. Although the civil magistrate had no concern with the ‘inward’ matters of doctrine, he was obliged to punish the ‘outward’ expressions of blasphemy and heresy since these were not purely spiritual offences but also civil disorders. 71. [McBride], Jet-Black Prelatick Calumny, p. 23; [Kirkpatrick], Presbyterian Loyalty, p. 402. 72. Quoted in Witherow, (ed.), Historical and Literary Memorials, i, p. 219. 73. A.W.G. Brown, ‘A Theological Interpretation of the First Subscription Controversy (1719–1728)’, in J.L.M. Haire, et al., Challenge and Conflict: Essays in Irish Presbyterian History and Doctrine (Antrim: W. and G. Baird, 1981), pp. 28–43; R.B. Barlow, ‘The Career of John Abernethy (1680–1740), Father of Nonsubscription in Ireland and Defender of Religious Liberty’, Harvard Theological Review, 78 (1985), 399–419. 74. Connolly, Religion, Law and Power, p. 169. 75. John Abernethy, The Nature and Consequences of the Sacramental Test Considered (Dublin, 1731), pp. 310, 27–33. The Whiggery in this case was taken from the French Huguenot Paul Rapin de Thoryas, whose Dissertation sur les Whigs et les Torys was published in London, 1717. See also A Vindication of the Protestant Dissenters, from the Aspersions Cast upon them, in a Late Pamphlet, Intitled, The Presbyterians[‘] Plea of Merit (Dublin, 1733); The Case of the Episcopal Dissenters in Scotland, and that of the Dissenters in Ireland Compar’d; with Relation to Toleration and a Capacity for Civil Offices (Dublin, 1733). For the later development of Presbyterian political thought see Ian McBride, Scripture Politics: Ulster Presbyterians and Irish Radicalism in the Late Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 76. The Correspondent (Dublin, 1733), p. 1. 77. I am grateful to Gerard McCoy for allowing me to read his unpublished paper, ‘Ascendancy Ireland and the Repeal of the Sacramental Test, 1731–1733’. See also Toby C. Barnard, ‘The Government and Irish Dissent, 1704–1780’, in Kevin Herlihy (ed.), The Politics of Irish Dissent, 1650–1800 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1997), pp. 9–27. 78. These also include Edward Synge, A Peaceable and Friendly Address to the Non-Conformist. Written upon their Desiring an Act of Toleration without the Sacramental Test (Dublin, 1732), originally circulated in manuscript.

192 Ian McBride 79. Correspondent, pp. 1, 4. Another anonymous defender of the test noted that ‘many monstrous Heresies’ had sprung up in the north: A Prelude to the Grand Clash about Taking off the Test (Dublin, 1732), p. 9. 80. The Test-Act Examined by the Test of Reason (Dublin, 1733), esp. pp. 11, 22–3, 25. 81. Plain Reasons against the Repeal of the Test-Act (Dublin, 1733), p. 6. For an earlier example see Edward Synge, A Sermon against Persecution on Account of Religion: Preached … on Monday, October the 23d. 1721 (Dublin, 1721), pp. 7–8. 82. There are similarities here with the process described by Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), ii, chs. 7–9. 83. Beckett, Protestant Dissent, p. 16 84. Ibid., p. 15.

8 The Languages of Politeness and Sociability in Eighteenth-century Ireland Toby Barnard

A mural tablet in Killarney Cathedral eulogises Gerald Teahan, the Bishop of Kerry, who died in 1797. He was endowed with ‘the easy politeness of a gentleman’ and remembered for ‘his affable manners and instructive conversation’. In stressing these attributes, the memorialist at once revealed contemporary expectations about what was needed to prosper in polite society and the eagerness with which the leaders of the Irish Catholic Church were conforming themselves to these standards. Priests, by virtue of their lettered calling and their training on the continent, were perhaps uniquely well placed to acquire the necessary polish. This had long been the case.1 What was novel at the close of the eighteenth century was the pervasiveness of the ideals of sociability and politeness. Linked with this cultural shift was an argument about where these accomplishments were most clearly located: whether in bustling towns or somnolent countryside; among the hereditary aristocracy or among an alternative aristocracy constituted from virtue and service; in the ranks of civic activists or of indolent rentiers.2 Much of this debate, together with the altered social values which it reflected, echoed what was heard in Britain and continental Europe. Yet, in Ireland, politeness and sociability had further resonances. They were terms which could be added to the list of assets the upholders of the English and Protestant interests in Ireland uniquely possessed. Their supposed absence from so much of the Catholic population was adduced as further evidence of the backwardness and primitivism of the majority. In large measure, these novelties, of politeness and sociability, supplanted the older desiderata of civility and industry in the propaganda on behalf of English rule over Ireland. Just how Irish Catholics could be berated for their failure to exhibit politeness and sociability can be illustrated from numerous 193

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commentators. On 23 October 1757, for example, the Reverend John Brett mounted the pulpit of St Bride’s church in Dublin. From it he commended a measure recently propounded by Lord Clanbrassil. The peer had revived familiar efforts to separate loyal from disorderly Irish Catholics, and to accord the former some legal rights. Brett, in backing Clanbrassil’s bill, distinguished conventionally between safe and dangerous Catholics. Like many before him, he argued that papist tenets resembled those of the Protestant dissenter. In particular, he accused both of ‘dissociability’. Its worst manifestations, he believed, were an unwillingness to live amicably with others of divergent confessions and an urge to impose ‘this dogmatizing, cruel, enslaving principle’.3 In Brett’s formulation, ‘dissociability’ had more to do with an intolerance born of erroneous religious teaching than with the physical arrangements of living favoured by Irish Catholics. Even so, material conditions could not altogether be disentangled from the resultant mental systems. So much had been evident in the disquisitions of Brett’s predecessors. In 1698 the Bishop of Waterford, Nathanael Foy, had preached at the same feast as Brett. Bishop Foy warned his fellows in the House of Lords that they were menaced still by the Irish Catholics. Part of the threat arose from the manner in which the latter lived. Foy stated, ‘’tis manifest to a considering person that most of their barbarous usages and customs, their depredations and outrages, their profound ignorance, gross superstition and foul idolatry, are all owing if not as to their original, yet as to their long continuance amongst them, to their wild savage way of living in single cottages, and dismal uninhabitable places, at great distances one from another’. Foy’s remedy – proposed often enough before – would be to dragoon the unruly indigenes into nucleated settlements focused on the Protestant church and Englishstyle manor.4 Foy’s model of social organisation, if not its concrete forms, could be traced directly to Aristotle. The bishop regretted that too many Irish Catholics lived in an ‘unnatural state, nature inviting to contagion and society’.5 Thus, although Foy did not anticipate the use of Brett’s abstraction, what he condemned was in effect Irish Catholic ‘dissociability’. Dissociability explained why Irish life differed so strikingly from what English, Welsh and Scottish settlers expected. It also accounted for the slow and jerky spread of prosperity throughout Ireland during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Moreover, as sociability was credited with being the unique incubator of the refinement and politeness increasingly valued throughout eighteenth-century Europe and

The Languages of Politeness and Sociability 195

America, its absence from substantial parts of Ireland was disquieting. Under the force of these concerns, the project of anglicisation, already inseparable from the propagation of Protestantism, fused with a drive to mend Irish manners and refine the uncouth. The obvious benefits of English habits – both ethical and monetary – were expected to recommend them to the indigenous Irish. A contemporary of Bishop Foy, Sir Richard Cox, a judge and future Lord Chancellor, shared the optimism that this transformation would occur. Cox blamed Catholicism for leaving its adherents in Ireland, ‘slovenly in your habits and in your houses’. He confidently described stubborn papists as ‘generally more slovenly and unfashionable, more slattering in their clothes, and more sluttish in your houses’. Cox believed that the malign influence of Catholicism had stunted the inclinations of the Irish ‘to be neat and clean about your persons and in your houses, and to be civil, genteel and orderly in your conversation …’.6 To free the unfortunates from the thrall of their priests and creed, Cox backed an assortment of public and private initiatives. Landlords like himself, through their well-run estates, could popularize better ways among their tenants. For a time, Cox also grasped at the possibility of a formal union between Ireland and Scotland as a means to assist the project of cultural reform. If such a measure were to be enacted, he predicted the enthusiastic embrace of English behaviour, ‘as that which only will be fashionable, and as that to which our nobility, gentry and lawyers will be educated’.7 No union resulted. But, pace Cox, it was scarcely needed to quicken the already brisk traffic in ideas, people and commodities between Britain and Ireland. Among the imports were the concepts and varieties of sociability and politeness. When some celebrants of Protestant Ireland looked back on what they termed the progress of the eighteenth century, including a percolation deeper into the kingdom of polished manners and enlightened conversation, they attributed much to the Glorious Revolution. In Britain, thanks especially to the reflections of Lord Shaftesbury, the changes of 1688–9 were felt to have made possible the subsequent cultural revolution.8 In Ireland, Shaftesbury’s arguments were seldom acknowledged directly.9 However, in a variant of the hypotheses that he and other Whig analysts had proffered, the Williamite victories in Ireland had created the unique conditions which enabled a refined society to flourish. Earlier exclusions were confirmed and Catholic disabilities worsened. During the 1690s English overlordship and Protestant mastery were secured. As a result, the essentials of a Protestant Ascendancy were put in place. Thus, as later analysts contended, there opened an era of liberty, in

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which material betterment would lead ineluctably to ethical and cultural refinements.10 In this settled and modestly prosperous society, politeness would develop. By the 1730s and 1740s when a succession of reporters scrutinised the Irish localities, they happily charted the reception and diffusion of these virtues. Inevitably, some bewailed the slow pace of change. Here it was customary to lament the brake to progress applied by the prevalent Catholicism. Notwithstanding such reservations, what Cox had prophesied had come to pass. Thus, in 1738, a writer chiefly familiar with Ulster enthused that the locals ‘run fast into the neatness and plenty of the English way of living’.11 Neither the mechanisms nor the results of these transformations were universally applauded. Politeness and refinement, if taken to extremes, could degenerate into artificiality and deceit. How best to avoid these perils preoccupied English writers, such as Shaftesbury, Addison and Steele, no less than their European contemporaries. In Ireland, self-appointed patriots regularly warned against the damage from excessive imports. The craze for both the ideals and accessories of politeness was accordingly excoriated as slavish deference to intimidating neighbours. In vain did reformers rail against ‘our present reigning fashions and follies, of indulging in foreign luxuries and manufactures of all kinds …’. Equally frustrating was the bid to popularise frugality as the basis of ‘that simplicity of manners and content of mind which is the best foundation for human happiness’.12 Throughout, the literature generated by the theory and practice of sociability and politeness in eighteenth-century Ireland run unresolved contradictions. Much of what purported to describe was intended rather to prescribe and proscribe. As has already been stressed, propagandists such as Foy, Cox and Brett enlisted the modish catchwords in order to contrast the sociability and urbanity of Protestants with the dissociability of the Catholics. Nevertheless, what they implied about the unequal access to and embrace of polite standards by Protestants and Catholics does not always accord with the surviving evidence about behaviour. Towns, it is conventionally averred, offered the sites where politeness could most readily be learnt and sociability indulged. Yet this theme, the spread especially among the professional and middling orders of the larger towns, so illuminatingly explored for British and European societies, has attracted little attention from historians of Ireland.13 Only recently, thanks particularly to the researches of David Dickson and Jacqueline Hill, have these trends been discerned in the most populous Irish cities, notably Dublin.14 If the urban setting was indeed the most conducive to the development of desirable social skills, then the presence within


the larger Irish towns of substantial communities of successful Catholic traders and craftworkers makes it less convincing to exclude – as so many contemporaries did – the papists from the softening and civilising effects of urbanisation.15 Hitherto the topics of politeness and sociability may have been neglected because they are regarded as tangential to the stuff of eighteenth-century Irish history. Exceptions exist. Patrick Kelly’s meticulous investigation shows how Mandeville’s defence of luxury reached Ireland, and informed the debate there.16 The continuing reach into Ireland of Francis Hutcheson’s philosophy of rational happiness and civic activity long after he had departed to Glasgow has also been sketched.17 However, the classic texts of Irish political writing concern themselves, not with the issues of sociability and politeness, but with the practical and theoretical implications of the regular malfunctioning of Ireland’s relationship with England. It is unusual for cultural transformations to be addressed other than parenthetically in praise or admonition of Protestant Ireland. Accordingly it is a rarity when, for example, in the 1730s, luxury is justified in an Irish publication. Thomas Rundle, happily berthed in the opulent see of Derry, defended conspicuous consumption, of which he was a notable practitioner, in terms which recalled Mandeville.18 Useful and instructive as a systematic review of such writings might prove, canonical political texts help little towards delineating the shifts in the vocabulary and practice of sociability and politeness. Instead it is in the chance comments in letters, the mundane accounts of the daily round and such inert sources as newspaper advertisements that the subject can best be apprehended. Ireland was drawn inevitably into the vibrant and highly diversified worlds of virtue, sociability and politeness. Voluntary associations, sociable gatherings and opportunities for talk proliferated. Among numerous signs is one from the 1730s. In 1737, Captain Cobbe jotted down his observations on County Down for a projected collaborative history of Ireland. He noted the lately built Town House and Exchange in Belfast. The fine room on the first floor accommodated several groups, including a fortnightly assembly. At these assemblies, Cobbe insisted, ‘you shall see as fine appearance of ladies and gentlemen, so trade don’t always spoil politeness’.19 The existence of similar events – in Waterford during the same decade,20 later in such widely scattered spots as Kilkenny, Cavan, Enniscorthy and Mullingar21 – suggested an enthusiastic if sometimes tardy adoption of some of the forms of urban conviviality which had swept through Britain over the previous century. What is unclear is whether these Irish gatherings were dominated

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by the gentry from the nearby countryside, organised by the officers of the garrison or orchestrated by the townspeople themselves. Certainly in Belfast and Waterford, the inhabitants of the corporations had taken on themselves the invention of occasions when fashionable taste could be defined and demonstrated. At the same time, it must be conceded that the populations of town and countryside were too intermeshed to segregate the pastimes of the one from the other, or to label particular diversions as exclusively urban and urbane. The assembly, with entry regulated through subscriptions and conduct overseen by directors, matched an English equivalent.22 In this particular, as in many more of the entertainments of Irish towns, the risk arose lest the Irish obsession with politeness be dismissed as the latest example of an uncritical imitation of English fads. The mechanisms through which refined tastes were spread into Irish boroughs have still to be uncovered. Frequent travel between Ireland and England, and especially the early and astonishing popularity among Irish visitors of Bath, ensured the swift arrival in Ireland of imported novelties.23 In addition, the readiness with which the classic texts which expounded the values of sociability and politeness entered Ireland rendered unnecessary many manuals designed uniquely for the Irish market. For this reason, in familiarising the Irish with the ways to a fulfilled and happy life of public utility, most significant among the volumes on their shelves were not Spenser’s View, Davies’s True Causes or Molyneux’s Case, but editions of The Tatler, Spectator or popular novels, such as Pamela. The roles of Addison, Steele and Richardson in commending sensibility and sensitive conduct are now widely appreciated.24 When and how they were received by the respectable in Ireland have yet to be documented. These authors are listed regularly in libraries in Ireland during the first half of the eighteenth century. Two members of the Dublin parliament, Cornelius O’Callaghan and Jeffrey Paul, otherwise with little in common, possessed these instructive works.25 In the later 1740s, the Bishop of Elphin, Edward Synge, anxiously attended to the upbringing of his only daughter. Tools which he valued highly in this task included Richardson’s novels.26 Another Member of Parliament, the amiable John Digby of Landenstown in County Kildare, eager to bring up young relations correctly, improvised parables of his own which owed much to Addison and Steele. This firm moral grounding was, nevertheless, combined with a frank relish for pleasure. Digby regularly described a circuit of the houses of his kinsfolk. There he danced, gardened, enjoyed al fresco parties and undertook agrarian


improvements. In short, his hectic sociability was moderated by a studied politeness.27 Except when a correspondent, such as Bishop Synge, elaborated on the lessons to be drawn from particular books, it is hazardous – although tempting – to deduce much about philosophies and actions in individuals from the recording of a volume in their libraries. To illustrate the problem, and how it hampers any effort to be precise about the chronology and dynamics through which the modes of politeness and sociability caught on in eighteenth-century Ireland, it is worth returning to the libraries of O’Callaghan and Paul. Other evidence about their possessions shows how by the 1720s and 1730s they were subscribing to the fashions which crowded their homes with more, and more varied, possessions. O’Callaghan, a convert embarked on assimilation to the dominant Protestant order, personified the trend which reformers wished to intensify and accelerate.28 O’Callaghan needed books to instruct him in his career as a barrister: at least 25 volumes catered to this calling. Utilitarian, too, were Salmon’s Cookery, Forbes ‘On Bills of Exchange’ and a medical dispensary. When we turn to the publications which may have shaped the ways in which O’Callaghan viewed and conceived his worlds, it is difficult – maybe, indeed, impossible – to evaluate their impact. He had collected a confusingly eclectic range of history: lives of Oliver Cromwell and Charles XII of Russia, Memoirs of the late Revolution, an English version of Caesar’s Commentaries, a work on Roman antiquities and The Present State of Great Britain. One group suggested most strongly interests which distinguished O’Callaghan from the likes of Paul. The former owned copies of Geoffrey Keating’s Irish History (probably in the recently published English translation), Hugh MacCurtin’s ‘History of Ireland’, Molyneux’s Case and another, anonymous History of Ireland.29 Yet, if these gave O’Callaghan a sharper sense of his own ancestry and the Irish past in which his forbears had featured, it is not so easy to connect them with the little that is known of his own political outlook. Moreover, the political tuition provided by these texts on Ireland could be complemented, modified or negated by his eight volumes of The Spectator or Hobbes’s Tracts. Paul’s books, a larger collection – 188 titles to O’Callaghan’s 106 – revealed differences in emphasis, which in turn may have influenced political stance and affiliations. Notable is Paul’s stock of Protestant theology and polemic, some of it of distinctly dissenting cast. A copy of the Large Catechism of the General Assembly and sermons by the prominent Dublin Presbyterian, Joseph Boyse, were consistent with

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Paul’s ties to one of the most conspicuous dissenters in Dublin, the smart doctor, Duncan Cumyng.30 Significant, too, is the lack of any investigation of the Irish past other than Temple’s partisan account of the Irish rebellion of the 1640s. Instead, Paul had made a respectable library of recent English history: Baker, Burnet, Clarendon, White Kennet and Ludlow’s Memoirs. Curiosity about wider worlds could be satisfied, both through accounts of classical antiquity and through Vertot on the Roman, Portuguese and Swedish revolutions.31 He also had Raleigh’s History of the World. On this evidence, it would be possible to posit in Paul an orientation towards a Protestantism of a strongly Calvinist tone and towards England rather than Ireland. He seemed, too, especially in comparison to O’Callaghan, to incline towards reason and experiment. He possessed, after all, Locke’s Essay on Understanding, Graverend’s Experiments, Pemberton’s View of Newton’s Philosophy and Kyrle’s Introduction to Natural Philosophy.32 Even so, these moderns sat alongside Tacitus and Cicero. Furthermore, the possible influence of Locke and Newton may have been no greater, perhaps even less, than that of Pope’s poems, Gulliver’s Travels and the ubiquitous Addison and Steele. Looking along the shelves of book-owners in eighteenth-century Ireland guides uncertainly towards the processes through which politeness and sociability were instilled. Books, their ownership and uses, were commonly connected with polite society. In some hands, they furnished instruments through which the rudiments of these new attributes could be acquired; in others, they served merely as the elegant backdrop to polite play. Already by the late 1730s some in Ireland used books for the mise en scène while they displayed their refinement.33 A traveller to Augher in County Tyrone recorded approvingly how the learned bishop of Clogher, John Stearne, ‘had a remarkably fine collection of books, but his library like everything else about him was free from ostentation and his books shut up in wainscoat presses’. This modesty, the reluctance to dazzle with the size and rich bindings of the library, was of a piece with Stearne’s self-effacement. One of his guests remembered pleasurably, ‘the polite, cheerful hospitable entertainment’ to which he had been treated.34 Already, in this account of Bishop Stearne is to be discerned a discrimination between a true and counterfeit politeness or sociability. Restraint and moderation were to be cultivated. How best to do so set new obstacles in the way of the Irish who aspired to join the society of the truly polite. Books were important in the spread of politeness: less as a source than as an adjunct. Other factors can also be suggested: urbanisation,


travel, education and more widely diffused prosperity.35 Of these forces, only the last has been analysed in convincing detail. Another indicator was how contemporaries responded to environments and predicaments of Hanoverian Ireland. Something of the altered responses can be captured. In part, what was changing was the language which observers and participants used. An altered vocabulary may mask enduring values. The urban and anglicised continued to pit themselves against rustic and supposedly feckless Gaels, as they had since the twelfth century. But now the terms of sociability, dissociability, politeness and gentility were utilised.

II Throughout the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries successive schemes aimed to report more accurately on the topography and antiquities of Ireland. These enquiries borrowed heavily, in conception, format and language, from similar surveys in Britain. As a result, the idiosyncrasies of Ireland might either be smoothed away or judged by anachronistic English criteria. Underlying these investigations was a wish to release the untapped potential of Ireland and to transform it into ‘West England’.36 Developments were praised or lamented in proportion to how far they realised this objective. Even so, some of the surveyors enlisted by William Molyneux in the 1680s, while endorsing the anglicising intention of the project, appreciated the individuality of their habitats. Thus, Sir Richard Cox noted the abundant improvements in housing and husbandry according to English models in southern Munster. At the same time, he was bewitched by the beauties of his region. He applied terms like ‘beauty’ and ‘romantic’.37 This willingness to celebrate what previously has been despised told of a fresh confidence that an unimproved and natural landscape of mountains and bogs did not invariably hide aboriginals bent on the overthrow of the English and Protestant order. Cox, although he reacted petulantly to the setbacks in his political career – debarred from high legal office as a partisan of the Tories – by threatening to retire permanently to England, never did so. Apart from an exile in England during James II’s brief reign, he devoted himself, when not in or near Dublin, to his estate in the far west of County Cork. There, he and his heirs aimed to introduce English practices and amenities. The resulting community, Dunmanway, at least in the highly coloured description by the second Sir Richard Cox (grandson of the first), encouraged through its compact

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plan and subsidised manufacturers a society in which polite manners as well as industry could flourish.38 Already in the elder Cox we detect the slow modification of the crude dichotomy which so often had marked accounts of Ireland: between industrious and civilised English and Scots settlers on the one hand; and the primitivism and indolence of the original occupiers. Cox believed the Irish to be capable of the refinements which distinguished the newcomers. What held them back was their benighted religion. Many commentators had noticed and bewailed the tendency of later planters to be assimilated to the habits of the indigenes. This gaelicisation was viewed as a kind of degradation and carried damaging connotations of the hitherto sociable newcomers being infected with ‘dissociability’. So long as the immigrant population remained small, acculturation was likely. By the early eighteenth century, the Protestant population had grown enough to be no longer so obviously at risk. There persisted among observers a propensity to labour what the intended exemplars of English civility, politeness and society had neglected. However, the omissions and failures seldom endangered the very survival of English and Protestant Ireland. In this more relaxed mood, the quirks of the Irish now amused and might even be relished.39 (The ways of those who had gone native were regarded less indulgently.) Not until the last quarter of the eighteenth century did romantic notions of the picturesque turn the remoter uplands of Britain and Ireland into places to be treasured. Just as the Highlands and Islands of Scotland or the mountainous wilds of Wales ceased to be fastnesses in which the enemies of the Hanoverian state lurked, so too in Ireland the majesty of the scenery enticed the intrepid to sites, such as Killarney, earlier dreaded as the heartland of an untamed savagery.40 The growth of this tourism can be linked to a fusion of expanding prosperity and a changing aesthetic, but in ways which still await their historian. The images of Jonathan Fisher and William Pars, together with excited responses to Muckross, testified to the appreciation of the region.41 The dawning of a new aesthetic as part of a more relaxed attitude to the terrain and peoples of Ireland, if much of its detail remains vague, can be illustrated from the example of a single county: Fermanagh. Between 1718 and 1719, T. Dolan, a member of a Gaelic family eminent in the area, compiled an account of County Fermanagh.42 Obedient to the programme adopted by the Irish correspondents of Molyneux in the 1680s and later (in the 1730s) by those drawn into a scheme of the Physico-Historical Society, Dolan concentrated on the natural and built


features. He further followed tradition by conceiving local society in terms of its leading families and their houses. Himself a convert to the ascendant Protestant interest, Dolan united often odd and sometimes contrary ideas. Capable on occasion of a scepticism which aligned him with a ‘modern’ rationalism, he prefaced one story, ‘’tis in the ancient histories of the Irish’. He then added the disclaimer, ‘If true? It must be of long standing …’.43 Dolan, like Cox in County Cork, expressed a precocious delight in the locality. The hills of Fermanagh, he averred, were valued, ‘for beauty, pleasure, profit and stately situation’. Similarly, ‘the waters and islands of this county are so highly conducing to the prosperity and pleasure of the inhabitants’.44 Disappointingly, Dolan did not specify just how the locals took pleasure in their variegated landscape. It may be, as sometimes he implied, these places were settings for venery and excess rather than valued for their looks. In characterising the inhabitants, Dolan represented them as riveted still to tradition. He reported, approvingly, that the nobility were ‘much given to recreation and pastimes of hunting, hawking, riding, drinking, feasting and banqueting with each other’. They admired harp music, played at chess or ‘tables’, and were ‘lovers of sciences and comical pastimes, standing much for their credit and reputation, free and bountiful in spending and gifting on all necessary causes’.45 The commonalty, as far as resources permitted, imitated the behaviour of their superiors. In particular, they begrudged hospitality to none.46 Many of their customs were those against which the champions of the English interest in Ireland had valiantly battled. Dolan, however, hardly promoted the reforming aims of the ascendant English (or British), despite his adherence to them. Rather he admired the processes of acculturation which he had noticed and which were transforming the newcomers into simulacra of the old. ‘The British,’ he announced, having outlined the culture of the region, ‘are nothing inferior to the Irish in performing these customs.’47 Since the sixteenth century, County Fermanagh had seen an influx of immigrants from Scotland, Wales and England, both planned and unplanned.48 The names of the majority of the leading families which he catalogued confirmed this process, and its success in displacing most of the Gaelic septs. Yet, if Dolan is to be trusted, these immigrants had failed to implant the expected industry and restraint. The persistence of alternative values was revealed when Dolan wrote happily of the newcomers, ‘they hold a poor liberal man at more respect than a stingy rich man. Their chiefest extraordinary is drinking strong waters, in which their commonalty are more expensive yearly than their rent.’49

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Reputation, it would appear, depended on the ability to stage lavish feasts. Open air gatherings of the type which he reported smacked of an archaism which was withering into an ethnographic curiosity. More explicitly, and in more detail than other contemporaries, Dolan chronicled how the lately established had fortified these customs. At the same time, he traced the processes of cultural change which were entrenching alternative notions of politeness and sociability felt to be more appropriate to the leaders of an anglicised and Protestant society. He enumerated a county elite composed of 61 individuals. The bulk was composed of Scots and English – Archdall, Brooke, Balfour, Caldwell, Cole, Gore, Hassard, Hume and Montgomery – who had arrived since the sixteenth century. Even so, pride of place went to the venerable tribe of the Maguires.50 He praised their exploits promiscuously, indifferent apparently to whether they had fought on behalf of or against the English. Eager to trace obscure offshoots from the central trunk of the Maguires, he invoked attributes both traditional and novel. In this spirit, Dolan memorialised James Oge Maguire, esquire, who had died in 1719, as ‘a gentleman of learning and honour, bearing several callings in the public, as being a justice of the peace, surveyorgeneral, agent and trustee for several great qualities’.51 This Maguire had purchased estates in Down, Dublin, Leitrim and Longford. Other Maguires who conformed better to orthodox English expectations of loyal public service included Morgan, sub-sheriff of the county, ‘a man of credit and ability’, and Richard, a banker ‘of great credit in Dublin, who is a person under a most commendable reputation in honour, honesty and true nature to kindred, being a quill of the same feather’.52 Of other Maguires, scattered obscurely, Dolan had to conclude lamely, that they ‘were gentlemen of estate and stroke in the country’. Almost in despair, he wrote of a Maguire who had removed himself into Limerick, ‘whose station I can’t explain save that he was a gent of great renown, ability and credit’.53 Dolan deferred to those who had established themselves as the principal proprietors in his locality. He expressed no opinions about the events which had elevated some and tumbled others. A concept central to Dolan’s assessment of these notables is that of ‘credit’. As used by him, it denoted local repute, which in its turn was created and sustained by an ample manner of living. How that expansive style was financed did not detain Dolan (notwithstanding his mention of the banker Maguire). So far as the leading Maguires were concerned, Dolan apparently endorsed ways which by his day were looking to be endangered as well as dangerous. The Maguires, we learn, had distinguished


themselves by being ‘forward, high-spirited people, much given to hunting, riding, war-like exercises and idle diversions, free and liberal people, well-respected in this country’.54 As has been emphasised, some of the immigrants who now disputed for the supremacy of the region with the Maguires had adopted similar habits. Dolan described these cultural accommodations either neutrally or favourably. Prodigality was not the only expression of this acculturation which he isolated. Caught in a society moving from one in which lineage predominated to one where commercial and contractual relationships increasingly mattered, Dolan conveyed – often involuntarily – the flux. A blend of new and customary values informed his vignette of John Cole, patron of Enniskillen borough and ‘one of the most leading men in the county’. Cole was venerated for ‘very costly and sumptuous building on his estate … so that by his contrivance and notable improvements many poor families are supported, being a man of high spirit, quick and sharp of apprehension, very forward in his undertakings and of great retinues’.55 In particular, that final phrase, ‘great retinues’, conjured the martial ethos, once so disruptive of stable government, now somewhat precariously harnessed to the Hanoverian state through the institutions of army and militia. Other incongruous mixtures appeared in Dolan’s pen portraits of Fermanagh magnificoes. Sir James Caldwell, for example, was remembered as ‘a man of lofty principles, love of sciences and great lavisher among nobility’. He was further personified as ‘a portly able man as to person, a skilful headpiece in law suits, a terror to his adversaries and a tower of defence for his adherents’.56 Customary obligations to dependants and followers were discharged by native and newcomer alike. In general, the followings built up by the more recent settlers, while sometimes used to overawe rivals, were not deployed to challenge the state. Their spending was still expected to benefit or gratify immediate adherents and, in so far as it did, was approved. Concurrently, Dolan showed how display and excess were being channelled into fresh forms. Buildings, allegedly not prized by footloose Gaels, now consumed much money. The works associated by Dolan with, among others, John Corry, the Reverend William Green, Sir Gustavus Hume and Hugh Montgomery of Derrygonnelly, spoke of the wish to provide different and more elegant locations for the practices of hospitality and sociability. Hugh Montgomery, for example, was praised for modernising or creating ornamental structures ‘fit for any country gentleman for his abode’.57 In this preoccupation with architecture of a regular and classical type, leading proprietors might

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seem to retreat into a private world to which only others of comparable standing and refinement would be permitted. This was far from being the case: the public functions of these accommodations continued to exceed the occasions on which even a stage-managed privacy was needed.58 Furthermore, the interest in building as a fitting outlet for the spending of the polished was not confined to private houses. Landlords were to the fore in promoting and subsidising works, which added to the facilities of their towns, notably through market houses and council chambers. Institutions also saw the need to relocate their meetings. So it was that the municipal corporations, guilds and voluntary groups adapted the repertoire of a simple classicism to purposebuilt structures.59 For Dolan, as for others, the zest with which local gentlemen spent on building, if it threatened in extreme cases to become so competitive or manic as to ruin, showed them meeting conventional expectations. In addition, it was an activity with clear ideological implications. A willingness to build in the now prevalent classical manner repudiated the primitivism and barbarism connected with the Gothic.60 It spoke also of an awareness of metropolitan and international norms in regard to politeness and refinement. In the Irish context, it proclaimed values, notably of settlement and civility, at variance with those thought still to control indigenous Irish society. Where Dolan noted an enthusiasm on the part of a squire for architectural novelty he often found a readiness to undertake other public duties. His elite in Fermanagh was composed largely of those who accepted office in the militia, the shrievalty, the commission of the peace and – more rarely – as a Member of Parliament. This civic dutifulness, an acceptance of the obligations as well as the privileges attendant on property, showed how the values promoted by the state were permeating Hanoverian Ireland. These values not only affected attitudes, but determined the very structures of county society. At the same time, at least in the idiosyncratic formulations of Dolan, the notion of the commonwealth as the primary focus of useful endeavour was not universal. Rather it subsisted with other loyalties, a few of which still carried the whiff of archaism and even of peril. Dolan wrote at a moment when the composition as well as the attitudes of the local elite were still crystallising. Moreover, he approached his task with a vocabulary and even an outlook derived from a different world. Understandably, then, inconsistencies and contradictions abound in his account. These same qualities, which prevent Fermanagh society being squeezed neatly into the ready-made categories of lineage or civil society, may accurately mirror how patchily


politeness, sociability and moderation had overlaid customary hospitality, display, coshering and hosting. Something of the velocity of change, both in physical conditions and in the reactions of reporters, can be gauged from a second description of Fermanagh, written nearly 20 years after Dolan’s. In 1737 the Reverend William Henry turned his gaze on the county as an element in a bigger project to hymn the transformations in north-western Ireland accomplished by the busy Scots and English.61 Henry, dedicated to improvement, politeness and sociability, had also mastered the cant vocabulary. On his own account he was developing a model settlement in Ballymote in County Sligo.62 One factor explained much of the visible transformation during the interval since Dolan wrote. The manufacture of linen was identified by Henry as the decisive agent in first pacifying and then enriching the county.63 In these circumstances, it was possible to be confident that a more prosperous population would soon embrace sociability and politeness. The needs of the industry alone required the abandonment of the dissociability which had previously marked much of the population. Henry, in his descriptions, offered occasional examples of cultural change. However, it was at best a subsidiary theme in his story. In general, he followed a traditional format. As with his predecessor, Dolan, so with Henry, topography, the principal families and their habitations dominated. Unlike Dolan, however, Henry betrayed scant nostalgia for the past and its relics. He held up for admiration those owners who undertook publicspirited improvements. Journeying across the northern holdings of Lord Limerick, Coote, Newburgh, Brownlow, Rawdon and Upton, he evoked a pleasing prospect, ‘tilled like a garden, crowded with industrious Protestant inhabitants’. This he contrasted with the situation which he had observed outside Ulster. A traveller in the south, as imagined by Henry, ‘at length spies in the midst of a wide waste, a solitary house, the owner of which, without the comfort of doing the least good to mankind, or even enlarging his own fortune, reigns as a petty tyrant over a herd of beasts and a few slaves more wretched than the beasts’.64 Implicit in this hyperbole is Henry’s belief that those recently entrusted with Irish land frequently failed as comprehensively as their predecessors had to fulfil the social responsibilities which went with it. Understandably, then, he lionised those whom he regarded as worthy of their acres. For Henry a telling indicator of the requisite public spirit was an owner’s enthusiasm for rebuilding in the correct Vitruvian idiom and for reordering the demesne according to the latest theories. Judged by these exacting standards, even the Bishop of Kilmore’s new

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place was defective because ‘it fails in that regularity which shines in most modern pieces of architecture which are begun and executed in one plan’.65 Some sense of the pace with which Fermanagh, like other Irish counties, was being transformed is offered by the family which Henry singled out for special commendation: the Maddens of Manor Waterhouse. In Dolan’s survey, he had left blank the space under the heading for the Maddens, presumably because these settlers were beyond his ken. Now, in 1737, recent building at Manor Waterhouse was approved by Henry as an admirable instance of ‘classical taste and elegance’. Henry transcribed the inscription which had been set in a lintel over an artfully contrived ossuary in the park. ‘Throughout all this wilderness nature appears in her native beauty and charming wildernesses. The strokes of art are scattered with so loose and easy an hand as to serve only to display nature the more while they are scarce perceived themselves.’66 Here Henry caught a gleam from the dawn in Ireland of an appreciation of the picturesque. So far had the taming of the unruly progressed that it was now possible for confident landlords to recreate awesome wildness.67 Dolan, as we have seen, enjoyed an unadorned nature; so, too, did Henry. At Castle Balfour, the latter remarked how, despite the several improvements, ‘awful mountains, whose heads are generally wrapt in clouds, change the scene from beautiful to grand’. By doing so, these peaks ‘afford a welcome diversification of the prospect to a person who, having sailed so far down the Lough, has had his eyes almost glutted with the repetition of so many and so charming landskips’.68 In some spots Henry enthused over the grandeur of the scenery; in others, he regretted it. In the environs of Haselwood outside Sligo, another example of the modern classicism which Henry puffed, he bemoaned the closeness of ‘the black scalps of the mountains … which rise rather too near’. At least man had intervened to improve matters: trees had been planted to soften the harsh contours.69

III The human geography of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Ireland was constantly changing. Concurrently attitudes and responses to this environment altered. But the latter did not necessarily arise from the same causes, or proceed at the same rate, as the physical transformations. The eyes with which a landscape was appraised registered messages emanating from the brain as much as from the sights themselves. How


a landscape or building was read depended on training: a training, as had been suggested, based on assorted devices which ranged from formal education through serendipitous reading and travel to the imperatives of the dictators of taste. These forces aroused sensibility, and even sentimentality. They prepared neophytes for the exacting demands of a polite and polished society. As an extreme example of the hazards which the fashionable had to negotiate may stand a warning from an Ulsterman who had thrived in the Low Countries thanks to the War of Spanish Succession and was installed after 1714 as George I’s emissary in Brussels. Among other services, he acted as intermediary when acquaintances in Ireland wanted works of art and furnishings. In 1720 he informed a potential customer in Dublin not to fall into the trap of commissioning Brussels tapestries ornamented with floral borders for these were no longer in vogue.70 Usually any interest in building, landscaping, collecting and furnishing is segregated from the public and ‘useful’ activities of landowners. When noticed, if not dismissed as evidence of mania, such enthusiasms are connected with the quest for and exercise of power. Undoubtedly, such expenditure often had strong public and competitive aspects. It is only the myopia of modern scholars which consigns these matters to a rarefied realm at best peripheral, and at worst irrelevant, to the business of Irish politics. Dolan frequently used the cultural patronage of his elite to illustrate and explain their political dominance. Dolan seldom obtruded his own opinions, and, other than to endorse the benefits of the Williamite victories, revealed nothing of his political affiliations. In this respect, Henry differed. An unabashedly political parson, a concern with the public good seconded a quest for professional advancement. He bombarded successive ministries and viceroys with projects: some idiosyncratic, others enlightened. Patrons, particularly in the Irish parliament, allowed him a public platform from which to expound his visions. He also created his own opportunities. Like many another projector in Ireland who deluged and eventually wearied the government with admonitions, exhortations and fancies, it is difficult to know how seriously he was taken. Since most of his ambitious notions were still-born, his influence over official policy was probably severely limited. However, as a reflector of current ideas and ideals he is more valuable. Relevant to this enquiry into ideas and practices of politeness and sociability is the ease with which Henry moved between local and national arenas. He knew at first hand the personnel who deliberated in the Dublin legislature and who ran their own estates. Unbidden, he

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instructed the Lord Lieutenant on the shortcomings of his predecessors. When he analysed recent Irish politics in 1753, he evaluated different political bosses. In explaining why Henry Boyle, the first Earl of Shannon, had reigned so long, Henry gave appropriate weight to factors such as Boyle’s local following, inherited principles and his office as Speaker. In addition, it was allowed that the Boyles’ ‘hospitality in entertainments’ had underpinned his following.71 Others concurred that Boyle’s manner, as a hard-drinking and bluff squire, accessible to others of the same genus, whether or not assumed, was vital to his political success.72 In isolating the practice of hospitality, Henry concurred with others. Hospitality remained one of the readiest signs of whether or not a notable, either in Dublin or back in the localities, was meeting his responsibilities. Dolan had approved those, of Irish, Scottish and English lineage alike, who answered these conventional expectations. Henry similarly attached importance to the matter. Indeed, when he wheedled for preferment, he couched the request as a device ‘to support the dignity of the station and support charity and hospitality’. In 1767 he boasted that during the sixteen years for which he had ministered in Strabane, he had dispensed ‘universal hospitality’. In doing so, he added, not only had he dipped deep into his private resources, but thereby had assisted in ‘supporting his majesty’s government’.73 He continued a tradition already tenacious in the town and associated especially with its resident clergy.74 Hospitality remained a duty incumbent on all with property and with public functions. Not only could it be read as an index as to how well proprietors, patrons and clergy were fulfilling their roles, but as a measure of how far Ireland met or lagged behind Lowland Britain or smart Europe. It also belonged to increasingly complex practices of politeness and sociability. Contradictory impulses had to be reconciled, since the sociable tended to an amplitude which could end in riot and ruin. Politeness reined in this excess, but could be mistaken for or become parsimony: the stinginess, so much decried, according to Dolan, by the settlers of Fermanagh. Those mindful of the need to elevate hospitality into something worthy of a refined society now had recourse to a bewildering battery of furnishings, utensils, gestures, conversational gambits and accoutrements.75 William Henry wrote no manual with which the nervous could steer through the rapids of polite society. Other than to rage against the evils of alcohol, he did little to mend manners. He blamed illicit distilleries and excessive drinking of spirits for the ‘barbarity’ and ‘fierceness of manners, too visible in other places’.76 Thereby Protestant Ireland and


the British Interest were enfeebled. Like other incipient Irish Protestant patriots he execrated the foreign. Luxury was gaining hold. It increased the risks of ‘habitual rioting and drunkenness … vain pomp and equipage; and … the introduction of foreign, more specially French commodities and manufactures to the ruin of our own’.77 Cultural manifestations were detected alongside more conventional political failings – discriminatory English policies towards Ireland, the intemperance of self-styled Irish patriots or the mistaken systems adopted by too many Lords Lieutenant – as he diagnosed Ireland’s malady. The matters of politeness and sociability, conceived as integral to the English (and British) mission in Ireland, could not be isolated from the critique of where and why that programme was failing. Indeed, many agreed with Henry when he criticised the foremost agency through which anglicisation should have been forwarded: the viceroyalty.78 Customarily each Lord Lieutenant caressed the locally important with a sequence of public receptions and festivities, and invited the favoured (or unlucky) to private parties. Few occupants of this high office ever entirely satisfied the exigent locals. Viceroys, and their consorts, were berated either for being too stiff or too casual in their manners. Nevertheless, the events staged in Dublin Castle were occasions for forceful display. In the throng, niceties tended to be overlooked or impossible to sustain. Instead the remarkable, even the outlandish, in dress, dancing and demeanour, impressed. Lords Lieutenant, their vicereines and entourages, so far from being thanked for introducing Ireland to politeness and sociability, were often reviled for comporting themselves in ways felt to be inferior to those of the people over whom they towered.79 If, too frequently, the viceroyalty failed to set a fitting tone, plenty in Ireland supplied the lack. In any case, regardless of how the Lord Lieutenant pleased or displeased, he was at best an occasional presence. In these conditions, others easily set up as arbiters and impresarios of local society: first in Dublin, then in the provincial towns, places where refinements could be learnt and later exhibited proliferated. Many of those amenities which have been inventoried by Peter Borsay as evidence of a striking urban renaissance in England after 1660 appeared, albeit belatedly, in eighteenth-century Ireland.80 The many voluntary groups and clubs, some charitable and religious, others masonic, musical, professional and libertine, offered the Dubliner in particular abundant chances to perfect and practice politeness. As in Britain and continental Europe, so in relation to Ireland, both contemporaries and later analysts, disagree about the pioneers and paragons of

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politeness. The urban understandably prided themselves on their urbanity. Professionals looked scornfully at the unlettered squirearchy and a self-indulgent aristocracy. City-dwellers, particularly in the ports, most easily picked up the newest intonations and necessary props of politeness. Measured and entertaining talk was vital to this consciously enlightened society. Conversation came as readily over the punch bowls and bumpers of a country mansion as in the taverns, parlours and assemblies of Georgian Dublin.81 Yet, recalling that edifying conversation had to be learnt rather than falling spontaneously from the speaker’s lips, the greater availability in Dublin of mentors and books, made the capital the ideal location in which to hone these modern techniques.82 Two particular impediments worried those in Ireland anxious to prosper in polite society. Clumsy gestures were ridiculed, and marked out the malapert as interlopers. So, too, did the distinctive sounds of the Irish ‘brogue’. Those ambitious to pass for the polite, especially in the salons and drawing-rooms of London, were at pains to eradicate the incriminating accent. In 1751 a landowner in County Laois decided to have his sons educated in Dublin so ‘that they may lose the Irish brogue which they contract at the country schools’. He went on to expand on his reasoning: ‘the fear of their not getting rid of the Irish pronunciation which is very disagreeable to an English ear and renders those not well looked upon … and held cheap in their opinion. This is what I would have them endeavour by all means to avoid since nothing appears so vulgar as the Irish twang.’83 The strenuous efforts of parents to prevent their offspring speaking with an ‘Irish twang’ resembled the anxiety of provincials in Britain lest their own regional dialects slow their ascent.84 In Ireland, while it is clear that the polite wished to avoid the brogue, it is less obvious how the fashionable in Dublin responded to the voices of Ulster and Munster, or indeed how the people of each province regarded the speech of the others. For those bilingual in Irish and English, and used to rhythms and emphases of Gaelic, talk, as much as their names and ancestry, marked them off from monoglot English speakers.85 In a similar way, those whose Scottish lineage and continuing connections were betrayed by idiom and vocabulary were differentiated.86 Schooling aimed to solve these problems, though in at least one case, that of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, shuttled between Irish and English schools in the 1750s, it worsened matters, and exposed him to even greater contumely.87 Instruction could also steady the ungainly so as not to disgrace themselves when they ventured into polite society. Of


the array of specialists who now ministered to an increasingly affluent but uneasy Irish society none was more in demand than the teachers of music and dancing. By the 1750s, a county town such as Cavan enjoyed these adepts, together with regular assemblies where the charges of the local instructor could display their new if dearly obtained proficiency.88 In Ireland, no less than in the rest of Europe, dancing masters were suspect. Thanks to their intimacy with pupils, they subverted accepted distinctions of gender and social ordering. In addition, they implanted skills which extolled subterfuge and artifice.89 Also, in both their persons and their arts, they exemplified the triumph of the foreign over the native. Masters, when not by birth continentals, assumed names which implied that they were. They taught imported steps. In Ireland, dance and music, as so much other cultural activity, raised perplexing problems about the proper relationship between the indigenous and imported. Irish music was linked ominously with the values and structures of the vanishing Gaelic system. By the eighteenth century, some newcomers were attempting to preserve or revive these older modes. Seemingly, these patrons were motivated by a variety of impulses: simple liking for the fiddle, pipes or harp; the value of annexing traditional culture in order to buttress local position; or a taste for the newly fashionable primitive.90 Evidence of the need to initiate novices in the intricacies of dance and gesture comes from the career of Lawrence Delamain. Before he died at Cork in 1763, Delamain had established himself as the foremost dancing master of the town. So great was his fame that the district of Cork harbour where he resided was renamed ‘Hop Island’ as a tribute to his accomplishment.91 He counted among his pupils members of many of the leading families of the county, including the younger Sir Richard Cox, the Bernards, Moores and St Legers, and of the city. Among the 92 recorded names, women outnumbered men by two to one. Having assisted so many within the local elite, Delamain was rewarded with the style of ‘gentleman’.92 Maybe this was no more than a courtesy, and he never passed as the true alloy among the established gentry. But his success also had a material aspect: he accumulated an impressive portfolio of leases on at least six local properties as well as on the house in which he lived. Moreover, the stylish fittings of his own dwelling, in part a necessity since he worked at home, told of resources and tastes which placed him squarely among the avatars of genteel Cork society. In particular, his array of silver, glass and porcelain, stored in a buffet within the back parlour, constituted possessions greater in number, variety and value than those bequeathed by the

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Member of Parliament, Colonel O’Callaghan, a mere 25 years earlier. Also indicative of the enlarged opportunities for the acquisition and display of polite trappings were the numerous glazed prints which hung in the Delamain house: 26 decorated the dining room; another six the front room on the second floor. In addition, a portrait had been taken of Mrs Delamain; she also owned a gold watch.93 Maybe the city of Cork, populous and prosperous as it had become by the 1760s, could support only one dancing master in a manner which allowed him to be designated a ‘gentleman’.94 This vagary of social classification and oddity of social advancement imports little beside the larger question of the society to which Delamain belonged and to which he had catered. Members of at least 92 locally important families availed of his services. Delamain clearly was not the sole agent through which a polite gloss could be gained and entry into society eased. In the houses of some of the 92 there may have been books which expounded the complex configurations of the dance, the bow and the curtsey. In this matter, nevertheless, as in so many others, it was simpler to learn by example and practice than by reading. What was true of the exacting physical arts of dancing, fencing and deportment might also apply to the more cerebral task of conceptualising Ireland. Here, certainly, printed and manuscript texts mattered. Yet even among the literate on whose shelves the writings of Spenser, Davies and Molyneux stood, more of the essence of Ireland and its relationships with Britain and the rest of the world could be picked up through direct observation of the realities – as Dolan and Henry exemplified. Equally, attitudes were formed in, or often in reaction to, what was encountered in the assemblies and convivial circles of London, at Dublin Castle or in the taverns, lodges and parlours of cities and provinces across Ireland. Pamphlets, squibs, newspapers and broadsides informed and inflamed. As more onerous requirements of dress, talk and conduct were demanded of would-be entrants, so a language of politeness had to be learnt in order to succeed in these sociable settings. Seldom were the key writings of Shaftesbury or Mandeville to be discovered in Irish collections. At best, their influential theories about the naturalness and true nature of sociability and refinement were mediated through others. As the inhabitants of eighteenth-century Ireland were admonished and exhorted, so fresh justifications were provided for customary pursuits such as hospitality and exuberant conviviality filched from the Gaels. Any suspicion of an unnatural dissociability was brusquely repudiated. In the end, a Laurence Delamain, able to equip novices for the regimen of sociability and politeness, may


turn out to have been more powerful in the cultural formation of the elites of Hanoverian Ireland than Locke, Molyneux, Newton or even Francis Hutcheson.

Notes 1. Links between the background and behaviour of the Irish Catholic episcopate can be traced through: D. Cregan, ‘The Social and Cultural Background of a Counter-Reformation Episcopate, 1618–60’, in A. Cosgrove and D. McCartney (eds), Studies in Irish History presented to R.D. Edwards (Dublin: University College, 1979), pp. 85–117; D. Keogh, ‘Archbishop Troy, the Catholic Church and Irish Radicalism, 1791–3’, in D. Dickson, D. Keogh and K. Whelan (eds), The United Irishmen (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1993), pp. 124–34; D. Keogh, ‘The French Disease’: the Catholic Church and Radicalism in Ireland, 1790–1800 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1993). 2. The debate on politeness is illuminated by, among others, P. Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727–83 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), ch. 3; N. Phillipson, ‘Politics, Politeness and the Anglicization of Early Eighteenth-century Scottish Culture’, in R. A. Mason (ed.), Scotland and England, 1286–1815 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1987), pp. 226–42; J.G.A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); A. Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 225–84. 3. John Brett, A Friendly Call to the People of the Roman Catholick Religion in Ireland (Dublin, 1757), p. 12. 4. N. Foy, A Sermon Preached in Christ’s-Church, Dublin on the 23rd of October, 1698 (Dublin, 1698), pp. 27–8. 5. Foy, Sermon, p. 27. 6. R. Cox, An Essay for the Conversion of the Irish (Dublin, 1698), pp. 10–13. 7. R. Cox to E. Southwell, 14 November 1699 (BL, Additional Ms, 38153, f. 25v). 8. L.E. Klein, ‘Liberty, Manners and Politeness in Early Eighteenth-century Ireland’, Historical Journal, 32 (1989), pp. 583–605; Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early EighteenthCentury England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 9. Potentially, Molesworth was an important link, but the impact in Ireland of his writings, like his presence there, was intermittent. For the latter, see Historic Manuscripts Commission, Various Collections, viii, pp. 274–350. 10. W. Henry, A Sermon Preached in the Parish-Church of St. Werburgh’s, Dublin, the 4th Day of November, 1753 (Dublin, 1753); Thomas McDonnell, The Spirit of Christianity and the Spirit of Popery Compared (Dublin, 1761), pp. 18–19; Joseph Story, A Sermon Preached at St. Andrew’s Church, Dublin, on Monday, November 5th, 1739 (Dublin, 1739); E. Tenison, A Sermon Preached in ChristChurch, Dublin … on Monday, the 5th Day of November, 1733 (Dublin, 1733), pp. 14–15. 11. S. Madden, Reflections and Resolutions Proper for the Gentlemen of Ireland (Dublin, 1738), p. 35.

216 Toby Barnard 12. Ibid., p. 4. 13. P. Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town, 1660–1760 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); J. Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: HarperCollins, 1997); P. Clark, Sociability and Urbanity: Clubs and Societies in the Eighteenth-Century City (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1986); P. Corfield, The Impact of English Towns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982); P. Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class: Business, Society and Family Life in London, 1660–1730 (London: Methuen, 1989); Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter. 14. D. Dickson, ‘”Centres of Motion”: Irish Cities and the Origins of Popular Politics’, in L. Bergeron and L. M. Cullen (eds), Culture et pratiques politiques en France et en Irlande: XVIe–XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Centre de Recherches Historiques, 1991), pp. 101–22; J.R. Hill, ‘Corporate Values in Hanoverian Edinburgh and Dublin’, in S.J. Conolly, R.A. Houston and R.J. Morris (eds), Conflict, Identity and Economic Development: Ireland and Scotland, 1600–1939 (Preston: Carnegie Publishing, 1995), pp. 114–24; J. Hill, From Patriots to Unionists: Dublin Civic Politics and Irish Protestant Patriotism, 1660–1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 15. T.C. Barnard, ‘The Gentrification of Eighteenth-century Ireland’, EighteenthCentury Ireland, 12 (1997), pp. 141–8. 16. P.H. Kelly, ‘“Industry and Virtue versus Liberty and Corruption”: Berkeley, Walpole and the South Sea Bubble Crisis’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 7 (1992), pp. 57–74. 17. I. McBride, ‘The School of Virtue: Francis Hutcheson, Irish Presbyterians and the Scottish Enlightenment’, in D.G. Boyce, R. Eccleshall and V. Geoghegan (eds), Political Thought in Ireland Since the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 73–99; F. McKee, ‘Francis Hutcheson and Bernard Mandeville’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 3 (1988), pp. 123–32; M.A. Stewart, ‘John Smith and the Molesworth Circle’, ibid., 2 (1987), 89–102; Stewart, ‘Rational Dissent in Early Eighteenth-century Ireland’, in K.A. Haakonssen (ed.), Enlightenment and Religion: Rational Dissent in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 43–59. 18. T. Rundle, A Sermon Preach’d in Christ-Church, Dublin, on Thursday the 23d of October, 1735 (Dublin, 1735), pp. 33–4. 19. Notes on Co. Down (Armagh Public Library, Lodge Mss.). 20. M. Mason to J. Mason, 31 October 1737, 26 November 1737, 10 December 1737, 4 January 1737[8] (Dromana, Co,. Waterford, Villiers-Stuart Mss, T. 3131/B/1/19, 22, 27, 34, 47); H. Alcock to M. Mason, 6 October 1739 (ibid., B/5/0). 21. Kilkenny: J. Alcock to H. Aland, 12 May 1739 (ibid., B.5/2); autobiography of H. Thompson (Bodleian Library, Oxford, Ms. Eng. Hist. d. 155, f. 40v); W. Colles to B. Colles, 5 April 1766 (National Archives, Dublin, Prim Ms. 87); Mulligar: Edgeworth account books, 12 and 13 October 1732 (N[ational] L[ibrary of] I[reland, Dublin], Ms. 1510); Enniscorthy: S. Povey to W. Smythe, 18 December 1762 (ibid., PC 448); Cavan: account book of Bishop Joseph Story, 1 June 1756, 21 July 1756, November and December 1761; July, August and September 1762, February, March, October and December 1763,


22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

27. 28.

29.

30.

31.

32. 33.

34.

June 1766 (Story Mss, Bingfield, Co. Cavan). See also: J. McVeagh (ed.), Richard Pococke’s Tours (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1995), p. 92. Borsay, English Urban Renaissance, pp. 150–62, 336–49; Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, pp. 549–50; Langford, A Polite and Commercial People, pp. 101–2. T. Vesey to D. Green, 8 November 1703 (NLI, Vesey Mss, J/5); Lady Bellew to Lord Raby, 28 November 1717 (BL, Additional Ms. 22228, f. 42v); Edgeworth account books, 28 September 1743, 5 March 1743 [4] (NLI, Ms. 1516). G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in EighteenthCentury Britain (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, ch. 3: J. Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: the Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). Paul’s inventory is in NLI, Ms. 13991; O’Callaghan’s is Ms. Acc. 1985.65 (Mss. of Lord Lismore) in the South Riding Museum, Clonmel. I owe my knowledge of both documents to the kindness of Dr. David Hayton. M.L. Legg (ed.), The Synge Letters: Bishop Edward Synge to his Daughter, Alicia, Roscommon to Dublin, 1746–1752 (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1996), pp. 145, 149, 151, 173, 210, 402, 408, 432. J. Digby to W. Smythe, 23 January 1733[4], 17 March 1735[7], 4 December 1746 (NLI, PC 445); letters of J. Digby, D. and A. French (ibid., Ms. 19821). On the O’Callaghans’ strategies, T.C. Barnard, ‘Sir William Petty as Kerry Ironmaster’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 82, sec. C (1982), pp. 22–3; A.C. Elias (ed.), Memoirs of Laetitia Pilkington (Athens, GA and London: University of Georgia Press, 1997), ii, p. 486; D.W. Hayton, ‘Dependence, Clientage and Affinity: The Political Following of the Second Duke of Ormonde’, in T.C. Barnard and J. Fenlon (eds), The Dukes of Ormonde, 1610–1745 (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2000). Mac Curtin’s A Brief Discourse in Vindication of the Antiquity of Ireland was published in Dublin 1717. The apparently anonymous history might be: Peter Walsh, A Prospect of the State of Ireland (London, 1682); James Ware, The Antiquities and History of Ireland (Dublin, 1705); or, less likely, Hugh Reilly, Ireland’s Case Briefly Stated (n.p., 1695). NLI, Ms. 13991, openings 3, 15, 19, 21. For Cumyng, see T. C. Barnard, ‘The Professionalization of the Ministry?’, in K. Herlihy (ed.), The Ministry and Irish Dissent (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999). René Aubert de Vertot d’Aubeuf’s The History of the Revolutions in Sweden and Portugal had been published in Dublin in 1727. In the same year The History of Revolution in Sweden was issued separately. There were Dublin editions of The History of the Revolutions that Happened in the Government of the Roman Republic in 1724 and 1736. Henry Pemberton’s View of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosopohy had been issued in Dublin in 1728. T.C. Barnard, ‘Learning, the Learned and Literacy in Ireland, c. 1660–1760’, in T. Barnard, D. Ó Croinín and K. Simms (eds), ‘A Miracle of Learning’: Studies in Manuscripts and Irish Learning (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), pp. 209–35. Autobiography of A.J. Oughton, p. 42 (London: National Army Museum, Ms. 8808. 36.1).

218 Toby Barnard 35. Langford, A Polite and Commercial People, ch. 3. 36. T.C. Barnard, ‘The Hartlib Circle and the Cult and Culture of Improvement in Ireland’, in M. Greengrass, M. Leslie and T. Raylor (eds), Samuel Hartlib and Universal Reformation: Studies in Intellectual Communication (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 281–97; K.T. Hoppen, The Common Scientist in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970). 37. J.C. Walton (ed.), ‘Two Descriptions of County Waterford in the 1680s: ii. Sir Richard Cox’s account’, Decies, 36 (1987), p. 30. 38. R. Cox to J. Barry, 26 August 1703 (NLI, Ms. 13247); same to E. Southwell, 6 September 1716 (BL, Additional Ms. 38157, f. 147); A Letter from Sir Richard Cox, Bart. to Thomas Prior, Esq; Shewing from Experience a sure Method to Establish the Linen-Manufacture (Dublin, 1749); C. Smith, The Ancient and Present State of the County and City of Cork (2nd edn, Dublin, 1774), I, pp. 253–6. 39. D.W. Hayton, ‘From Barbarian to Burlesque: English Images of the Irish, c. 1660–1750’, Irish Economic and Social History, 15 (1988), 5–31. 40. M. Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760–1800 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1989); I. Ousby, Englishmen’s England: Taste, Travel and the Rise of Tourism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). For altered notions (and conditions) in Scotland: R. Clyde, From Rebel to Hero: the Image of the Highlander, 1745–1830 (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1995); A.I. McInnes, Clanship, Commerce and the House of Stuart, 1603–1788 (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1996). 41. T.C. Barnard, ‘Art, Architecture, Artefacts and Ascendancy’, Bullán, 1/2 (1994), pp. 25–6; D. Herbert, Retrospections (new edn, Dublin: Town House, 1988), pp. 2–3, 149–56; D. Fitzgerald, Knight of Glin and A. Crookshank, The Watercolours of Ireland (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1994), pp. 82–9; E. MacLysaght (ed.), Kenmare Manuscripts (Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 1942), pp. 82–3; McVeagh (ed.), Pococke’s Irish Tours, p. 184. Cf. T.C. Barnard, ‘Sir William Petty, Irish landowner’, in H. Lloyd-Jones, V. Pearl and A.B. Worden (eds), History and Imagination: Essays in Honour of H.R. Trevor-Roper (London: Duckworth, 1981), pp. 201–17. 42. NLI, Ms. 2085. This has been printed by P. O Maolagain as ‘An Early History of Fermanagh’, in The Clogher Record, 1 and 2 (1955–62). There the author is identified as the otherwise unknown John Dolan. However, the initials of the author’s name in his manuscript, read as ‘J.D.’ by O Maolagain, are clearly ‘T.D.’. 43. NLI, Ms. 2085, p. 7. 44. Ibid., pp. 15, 17. 45. Ibid., p. 22. 46. Ibid., p. 22. 47. Ibid., pp. 22–3. 48. Generally, Peadar Livingstone, The Fermanagh Story (Enniskillen: Cumann Seanchais Chlochair, 1969). 49. NLI, Ms. 2085, p. 22. 50. The strategies of different members of the Maguire sept can be traced through B. Cunningham and R. Gillespie, ‘The Purposes of Patronage: Britan Maguire of Knockninny and his Manuscripts’, The Clogher Record, 13 (1988), 38–49; W.A. Maguire, ‘The Lands of the Maguires of Tempo’, ibid.,


51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

68. 69. 70.

71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

12 (1985–7), 305–19; Maguire, ‘The Estate of Cu Chonnacht Maguire of Tempo: A Case History from the Williamite Land Settlement’, Irish Historical Studies, 27 (1990), pp. 130–44. NLI, Ms. 2085, p. 61. Ibid., pp. 58–9, 70. Ibid., p. 58. Ibid., p. 64. Ibid., p. 105. Ibid., p. 106. See too J.B. Cunningham, A History of Castle Caldwell and its Families (Monaghan: Watergate Press, n.d. [c. 1982]), pp. 26–41. NLI, Ms. 2085, pp. 11, 125, 128, 129. Some recent notions about privacy and private spheres are robustly challenged in Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter. In addition, for Ireland: T.C. Barnard, ‘Public and Private Use of Wealth in Ireland, c. 1660–1760’, in J.R. Hill and C. Lennon (eds), Luxury and Austerity: Historical Studies, XXI (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 1999), pp. 78–9. L. Proudfoot, ‘Landownership and Improvement, ca. 1700–1845’, in L.J. Proudfoot (ed.), Down: History and Society (Dublin: Geography Publications, 1997), pp. 203–38; Proudfoot and B.J. Graham, Urban Improvement in Provincial Ireland (Athlone: Group for the Study of Historic Irish Settlement, 1994), pp. 22–38. For English parallels: Borsay, English Urban Renaissance; R. Tittler, Architecture and Power: the Town Hall and the English Urban Community, c. 1500–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). Barnard, ‘Public and Private Uses of Wealth in Ireland’, pp. 78–9. National Archives, Dublin, M. 2533. Henry to Hardwicke, 23 September 1765 (BL, Additional Ms. 32970, f. 25v.). National Archives, Dublin, M. 2533, pp. 409–10. Ibid., pp. 410–11; W. Henry, A Philippic Oration against the Pretender’s Son (Dublin, 1745), p. 15. National Archives, Dublin, M. 2533, p. 450. Ibid., p. 455. This garden is discussed and an earlier estate map reproduced in D. Fitzgerald, Knight of Glin and E. Malins, Lost Demesnes: Irish Landscape Gardening, 1660–1745 (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1976), pp. 43–4. National Archives, Dublin, M. 2533, p. 468. Ibid., pp. 374, 450. Other examples are mentioned in Barnard, ‘Art, architecture, artefacts and Ascendancy’, pp. 25–6. W. Leathes to Castlemaine, 17 January 1720 (? new style), same to General F. Hamilton, 9 March 1720 (? new style) (Ipswich: Suffolk County Record Office, Leathes-de-Mussenden Mss. HA 403/1/5, 12). Henry to Abp. T. Herring, 21 December 1753 (BL, Additional Ms. 32980, ff. 226–7v). S.J. Connolly, Religion, Law and Power: the Making of Protestant Ireland, 1660–1760 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 95–6. Henry to Hardwicke, 8 February 1767 (BL, Additional Ms. 32980, f. 58v). Autobiography of Oughton, p. 52 (National Army Museum, Ms. 8808.36.1). T.C. Barnard, ‘Integration or Separation? Hospitality and Display in Protestant Ireland, 1660–1800’, in L.W.B. Brockliss and D.S Eastwood (eds),

220 Toby Barnard

76.

77. 78. 79.

80. 81. 82.

83.

84. 85.

86.

87.

88.

89.

A Union of Multiple Identities: the British Isles, c. 1750–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), pp. 125–46; Barnard, ‘Private and Public Uses of Wealth in Ireland’, pp. 66–83. Henry to Abp. T. Herring, 21 December 1753 (BL, Additional Ms. 35592, f. 231); Henry, An Earnest Address to the People of Ireland Against the Drinking of Spiritous Liquors (Dublin, 1753). W. Henry, Religion and Virtue the Foundation of Courage and Victory (Dublin, 1744), pp. 20–1. Henry to Abp. T. Herring, 21 December 1753 (BL, Additional Ms. 35592, f. 228); same to Hardwicke, 13 October 1763 (ibid., 35596, ff. 400–1v). Annals of Fr. White (NLI, Ms. 2714, pp. 134–5); journal of C. O’Hara (ibid., Ms. 20389, pp. 10–11); W. Crosbie to ?J. Ponsoby, 1761 (ibid., TalbotCrosbie Mss, folder 64); Bessborough to Brandon, 3 June 1767 (ibid., folder 69). For a lord lieutenant who fully reciprocated the locals’ disdain, see a fragment of a journal of Lord Halifax, 1761 (ibid., Ms. 8064). Borsay, English Urban Renaissance. A preliminary discussion of these tensions occurs in Barnard, ‘Gentrification of Eighteenth-century Ireland’, pp. 137–55. Insights into these worlds are offered by J. Verdon’s account of a visit to Ireland during the 1690s in Cardiff Central Library, Ms. 4. 370; J. Dunton, The Life and Errors, 2 vols (London, 1818), ii, pp. 545, 572, 582, 591–2; Elias (ed.), Memoirs of Laetitia Pilkington, I, pp. 22–3. Letters of Bland to Debrisay, 1751 and 4 January 1753 (Bland Mss. in private possession), quoted in D. M. Beaumont, ‘County society in the King’s and Queen’s Counties’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Trinity College, Dublin, 1999). I am grateful to Dr. Beaumont for allowing me to read and cite his valuable dissertation. Langford, A Polite and Commercial People, pp. 116–17. A. Carpenter (ed.), Verse in English from Eighteenth-Century Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 1997), pp. 12–23. The ways of Connacht squires were, for example, ridiculed in The Down-Fall of the Counts: a New Ballad (Dublin, 1722). Reactions to a heavy Ulster-Scots accent heard in Dublin are conveyed in An Elegy Occasion’d by the Death of the Reverend Mess. Alexander Sinclare (Dublin, 1722). T.C. Barnard, ‘Protestantism, Ethnicity and Irish identities, 1660–1760’, in T. Claydon and I. McBride (eds), Protestantism and National Identity: Britain and Ireland c. 1650–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 216–17. Account book of Bishop Joseph Story, 1 June 1756, 1 and 21 July 1756, November and December 1761, February, March, October and December 1763 (Story Mss, Bingfield, Co. Cavan). Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, pp. 546–50; T. Fawcett, ‘Dance and Teachers of Dance in Eighteenth-century Bath’, Bath History, 2 (1988), pp. 27–44; Fawcett, ‘Provincial Dancing Masters’, Norfolk Archaeology, 35 (1970), pp. 135–41; Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter, pp. 241, 264. In the Irish context: F. Fleming, The Life and Extraordinary Adventures, the Perils and Critical Escapes of Timothy Ginnadrake (Bath, n.d.), i, pp. 16, 20; McVeagh (ed.), Pococke’s Tours, p. 118.

The Languages of Politeness and Sociability 221 90. For preliminary remarks on the patronage of music: H. White, The Keeper’s Recital: Music and Cultural History in Ireland, 1770–1970 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1998), pp. 13–35; T.C. Barnard, The Abduction of a Limerick Heiress: Political and Social Relations in Mid-Eighteen-Century Ireland (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1998), p. 38; Barnard, ‘The Gentrification of Eighteenth-century Ireland’, pp. 141–2, 145–6. 91. G.L. Lee, The Huguenot Settlements in Ireland (London: Longmans and Co., 1936), pp. 65–6. 92. Trinity College, Dublin, Ms. 2015/395. 93. Op. cit. 94. The fullest history of the Cork region in this period remains D. Dickson, ‘An Economic History of the Cork Region in the Eighteenth Century’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, 2 vols, Trinity College, Dublin, 1977).

9 Politics and the Writing of History: The Impact of the 1690s and 1790s on Irish Historiography Jacqueline Hill

During the last 20 years considerable attention has been paid to the writing of the history of Ireland during ‘the long eighteenth century’. Building on the work of Donal McCartney published over 40 years ago, historians have examined such themes as antiquarianism, romanticism and the Gaelic past,1 the interplay between Enlightenment and confessionalism,2 and the rise of nationalism.3 The present chapter seeks to build on such studies by examining some of the histories that were written within a decade of the 1798 rising and the subsequent Act of Union, and comparing them with those produced after the Williamite revolution of the 1690s. It will be argued that while it is possible to detect the effect of the developments noted above, there were also several similarities between the histories produced in the two periods, as well as significant differences that have as yet received little notice. The last decade in both the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were watersheds in Irish history. The 1690s ushered in a new era of penal laws for Catholics and witnessed the start of regular meetings of a more assertive Irish parliament; the 1790s saw the virtual dismantling of those laws and the abolition of that parliament. The events of those decades were highly contentious in their own time. Inevitably, the contention spilled over into the writing of Irish history. Rival interpretations of the past appeared, the former producing Williamite, Jacobite and Patriot accounts, the latter prompting conservative, Whig/liberal and nationalist versions. As examples of the process, this chapter will focus on six works, all appearing during or within a decade of the key events of the two periods. Sir Richard Cox’s Hibernia Anglicana: or, the History of Ireland from the Conquest thereof by the English, to the Present Time. With an Introductory Discourse Touching the Ancient State of that Kingdom, 2 vols 222

Politics and the Writing of History 223

(London, 1689–90) was dedicated to King William and Queen Mary; Cox’s political career flourished under the Williamite regime and he became Lord Chancellor in Queen Anne’s reign. Hugh Reily, who followed James II into exile, had been the king’s Clerk of the Council in Ireland; his Ireland’s Case Briefly Stated, covering the period from the Reformation onwards, appeared in 1695; it was frequently reprinted in Ireland and in London as The Impartial History of Ireland, and in 1799 and 1837 as The Genuine History of Ireland. William Molyneux’s The Case of Ireland’s Being Bound by Acts of Parliament in England, Stated (Dublin, 1698) synthesised arguments, chiefly of a historical nature going back to the Norman era, that were to be drawn on by generations of Patriots in the eighteenth century. For the later period, Sir Richard Musgrave’s Memoirs of the Different Rebellions in Ireland from the Arrival of the English … in Two Volumes (1801) (3rd edn, Dublin, 1802), was to become a seminal work in the formation of a conservative outlook in early nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland. Francis Plowden’s An Historical Review of the State of Ireland, from the Invasion of that Country under Henry II to its Union with Great Britain, 2 vols, London, 1803), was written by an English Catholic, and adopted a position that (although somewhat ahead of its time) may be described as ‘liberal’. Finally, Denis Taaffe’s An Impartial History of Ireland, from the Period of the English Invasion to the Year 1810, 4 vols (Dublin, 1809–11) bore several of the hallmarks of a nationalist work; its author had taken part in the United Irishmen’s rebellion in Wexford in 1798.4 Among the issues to be discussed in respect of these works are: What similarities and what contrasts between the writings of the two periods can be detected? How far did they set the agenda for future historical writing? And how far did they reflect the impact of wider scholarly and philosophical developments in historiography as it was developing in Europe during the periods in question? To begin with parallels: a striking similarity between all these works lies in the preoccupation that they displayed with opinion in Britain. For Cox, this was hardly surprising. A former recorder of Kinsale and a strong Protestant in outlook, on the accession of James II he had left Ireland for England, where he worked on Hibernia Anglicana.5 After William of Orange had staged his momentous intervention in English affairs and James had fled, Cox went to London to urge that William should take the Crown. The ‘epistle dedicatory’ of Hibernia Anglicana pointed out the advantages to the Crown of maintaining Ireland as a subordinate kingdom, advantages that accrued particularly from Ireland’s situation, ports and trade, and the opportunity to propagate the

224 Jacqueline Hill

Protestant religion. Ireland too had benefited from the link, by obtaining justice, civility, riches and other improvements. Hence William should complete his work of ‘rescue’ of the English and Scottish kingdoms by recovering Ireland. Addressing the reader directly, Cox showed a desire to educate English opinion about Ireland, for even England (‘skilled beyond comparison in the Histories of all other Countries’) was, in Cox’s view, ill-informed about Irish history.6 Although Hugh Reily seems to have intended his history for Jacobites in general, he too was preoccupied with English opinion: ‘The Affairs of Ireland … have been so strangely misrepresented abroad, especially in England, … that it is no easy matter for ordinary Enquirers to trace out the naked Truth of any Thing transacted in that Country, these hundred years past … ’ In particular, Reily castigated the histories produced by Protestant settlers in Ireland (‘malicious and groundless Fictions … impos’d for Truth not only on the inferior Sort of English historians … but even upon those of the first magnitude, particularly the Learned Antiquary Mr Cambden’).7 William Molyneux, like Cox, dedicated his work to William III, indicating that he was especially concerned to correct the ‘want of due Information’ that, he thought, must have been responsible for the instances in which the English parliament had invaded the rights of its Irish counterpart.8 A century later, Sir Richard Musgrave complained of the arts used to deceive the people of England as to the real state of Ireland,9 and took issue with Irish antiquaries of the eighteenth century for their portrayals of the early Irish church.10 Francis Plowden’s Historical Review at first sight appears to have been written solely for an Irish audience: the author indicated that it was ‘intended as an act of justice to the Irish nation’. But Plowden also expressed the hope that the work would promote the growth of ‘one people’ (British and Irish) ‘in affection as well as interest’,11 and he was anxious to promote the abolition of the remaining penal laws. This ensured that his history was at least as much intended for a British readership (it was dedicated to the Prince of Wales).12 Denis Taaffe, for his part, explained that he wrote in the hope that Ireland’s governors might learn from the lessons of the past, and like Reily he took issue with a host of historical works produced by English observers and settlers.13 If the works in question all displayed a concern with British opinion, this was because they were all, implicitly or explicitly, polemical works with political overtones, and the authors perceived London as the ultimate seat of power. The political agenda was apparent in their


discussions of the past, sometimes subtly, often quite directly. Anxious to ensure that William III did not shirk the task of recovering Ireland, Cox stressed in Hibernia Anglicana that William and Mary’s predecessors had always kept Ireland united to the Crown of England; the granting of the lordship of Ireland to Prince John by Henry II (1177) and to Prince Edward by Henry III (1254) did not, in Cox’s view, represent real departures from this principle.14 Protestants of earlier generations were remodelled to give them a decidedly ‘Williamite’ cast. Reaching the reign of Queen Mary (1553–8) Cox posed the (somewhat contrived) question as to why Irish Protestants had accepted Mary as ruler, since in the eyes of their church she was the product of an incestuous marriage. His explanation was that the laws of God and of the land showed that ‘it was not the Duty of the Subject to dispute the Title of the Prince in Possession; this were to make the Rabble Judges of the Rights of Princes, and to erect a Judicature above the Legislative Power, and to introduce an Appeal from the Parliament to the People’.15 Using Hobbesian arguments, Cox contended that there could be no other monarch than the de facto monarch: no other could call parliaments, fulfil the executive power or give protection to the people: such a monarch therefore ought to have the subjects’ allegiance. In fact ‘the Words, King de jure, are but terms of Art … to signifie an Imaginary Notion’: otherwise, there would be ‘no Peace upon Earth since there is not a Crown in Europe to which there are not several plausible Pretenders’.16 In this way Cox displayed his own Williamite credentials, and (however anachronistically) bestowed them on earlier generations of Irish Protestants. Hugh Reily’s history of the post-Reformation era in Ireland was equally coloured by political considerations. The burden of his view of events during and since Elizabeth’s reign was that government and Protestant settlers had cynically used religion as a pretext for stripping Irish Catholics of their land. The work abounded with sarcastic comments about the Protestant religion and the motives of Elizabeth and of the settlers.17 However, Reily’s most poignant passages concerned the Stuart monarchs, whose treatment in the work was far more sympathetic than that extended to the Tudor Elizabeth. It is clear that much had been expected from the Stuarts (on dynastic and religious grounds) by way of support for the interests of Irish Catholics (‘these unfortunate Loyalists’).18 It was the Catholics, Reily argued, who during the 1640s had kept faith with Charles I, and had on that account suffered great losses of life and property at the hands of the Cromwellians. They had accordingly expected some recompense by

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way of a new land settlement following the restoration of Charles II in 1660. The dashing of expectations was all the harder to bear because Charles II’s mistaken generosity to the former Cromwellians had been rewarded only by plots and ingratitude.19 Reily’s Jacobitism, however, was far from uncritical: although there was some attempt to excuse royal failings by placing the blame on ministers, the point was repeatedly made that rulers must recognise the need for justice in their public dealings. Failure to do so would bring divine punishment, as shown in the fate of Charles I.20 Molyneux’s Case of Ireland did not pretend to be the ‘entire and coherent’ history promised by Cox, nor did it offer ‘to trace out the naked Truth’ about the past, as did Reily.21 This was an avowedly polemical work, prompted by concerns about legislative attempts in England to curb the export potential of the Irish woollen industry, and about the appellate jurisdiction of the English house of lords. Most of the arguments on behalf of the rights of the Irish parliament, which drew in part on manuscripts compiled by Sir William Domville,22 rested on medieval precedent, adapting the language of the ‘ancient constitution’ to Ireland. Such language was familiar to English Whigs, and might have been expected to appeal to them. It was perhaps a mistake (from the point of view of influencing opinion in England) for Molyneux to have added some (admittedly few) appeals to natural rights, in the manner of his friend, John Locke, since Locke’s political ideas were regarded by the establishment as dangerously radical.23 The historical works of the later period were more openly didactic. Sir Richard Musgrave indicated that he hoped his Memoirs of the Different Rebellions would help to reconcile the public mind to the act of union; he revisited the troubles of the past, he claimed, only to show the need for radical remedies to prevent their recurrence.24 Plowden’s history had actually been commissioned by the Addington government for the purpose of bolstering support for the union, and the author argued from his study of the past that only a union could transform Ireland’s unhappy relations with Britain.25 Denis Taaffe asserted that history, ‘written in the spirit of conciliation and truth [is] the school of moral and political wisdom’.26 The political and didactic overtones in the later as well as the earlier works were not unusual. It was a feature of the European Enlightenment that the past should be used in an instructive way (‘philosophy teaching by example’), and lessons about statecraft and the tendency of different religious systems were thought to be particularly important.27 Thus Taaffe indicated in his introduction that Ireland’s


turbulent history ‘will afford a most instructive lesson to statesmen and to people, teaching the remedy of present ills from the experience of the past ages’.28 However, it would be wrong to suppose that there were no significant differences between the works of these two eras. A principal difference concerned the issue of conquest. This had loomed large in the works of the 1690s: whether discussing the revolution of 1688–9 in England or the Williamite wars in Ireland, the language of conquest was frequently employed. In this respect it needs to be borne in mind that this was an era in which biblical, Aristotelian and humanist ideas concerning conquest, subject peoples and ‘natural’ servitude still retained much currency. The sixteenth-century English humanist Thomas More, for instance, had depicted his Utopians as detesting war, but nevertheless engaging in it for various reasons, among which was the ‘just war’. There was nothing new in that, but to the customary grounds for prosecuting a just war More had added a new one: the injustice of a people who left their land idle and uncultivated, and denied the use of it to others.29 In view of the tendency of English writers from Giraldus Cambrensis onwards to depict the Irish in such terms, humanist writings lent justification to projects for conquest in Ireland. As for ideas of the natural inequality of man, natural rights theorists from Protestant backgrounds, notably the influential Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), had begun to make inroads into Aristotelian norms by arguing that natural man possessed certain rights: liberty might be regarded as a species of property.30 However, like most rights theorists of the seventeenth century, Grotius had continued to endorse slavery; even John Locke was equivocal on this point. And for Grotius the ius gentium (law of nations: what nations commonly observed in their dealings with each other) allowed the right of conquest in a just war, the confiscation of the property of the vanquished and the absorption of the vanquished by the victors.31 Thus Grotian ideas took their place alongside older Catholic and humanist traditions concerning the just war. The currency of such ideas in seventeenth-century Europe had the effect of lending ideological support to absolutism, especially where absolutist claims rested in whole or in part on conquest. In Restoration England, well before William of Orange staged his intervention in English affairs in 1688, there had been debate about whether the legacy of William I (‘the conqueror’) had been an absolutist one, as opposed to the ‘ancient constitution’ model of English state evolution espoused by many supporters of the common law tradition. Certain

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Tories had begun to argue that the ‘Norman conquest’ constituted a sharp break with the past, reflected principally in the subsequent introduction to England of (continental) feudalism.32 During the 1690s, the view that William of Orange’s incursion represented a conquest held considerable appeal for Tories, and even for some Whigs. It had the advantage of undercutting the radical view that James II had been deposed for misgovernment, and for those with a mind to accept the revolution it also legitimised the breaking of oaths to James and the transfer of loyalty to the new regime. The disadvantage of this interpretation – that the new rulers could confiscate property and otherwise disregard the rights of the conquered – could be countered by the claim that it was only James II, and not the English people, who had been conquered.33 In Ireland the prevalence of the language of conquest and the rights of conquerors may be judged from its importance both to medieval works such as Giraldus Cambrensis’s Expugnatio Hibernica (which appeared in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century editions), and also to later works such as Geoffrey Keating’s ‘Foras Feasa ar Éirinn’ (c. 1634).34 Certainly, the writers under consideration from the 1690s showed themselves to be very much at home with the language and legitimacy of conquest. Thus in Hibernia Anglicana Sir Richard Cox made use of several types of conquest theory. He took it for granted that the Norman incursion of the twelfth century constituted what he called ‘the English Conquest’ of Ireland.35 In this he followed Giraldus Cambrensis and English writers generally. With the fate of his fellow Irish Protestants under the Jacobite regime still undecided, Cox was unable to follow Keating in his benign view that just as successive waves of invaders had integrated with the Irish, so the Old English would integrate in their turn. On the contrary, Cox asserted that (despite a common religion) there were still great antipathies between those of Irish and English descent ‘as usually there is between the Conquerors and the Conquered’.36 However, for Cox the legitimacy of any attempt to reconquer Ireland did not rest solely on historic precedent. He introduced a ‘just war’ dimension into the argument by cataloguing the sufferings of Protestants at the hands of Irish Catholics during the rebellion of the 1640s and the Jacobite era, culminating most recently (he claimed) in the expulsion from Ireland of the ‘Body of the English’.37 (The recovery of property and punishment of wrongs were among the criteria Grotius had outlined as constituting the basis for a just war, particularly when waged by a foreign prince.)38


Cox also drew on Aristotelian and humanist ideas to portray the native Irish as a people framed for subjection. Whether in the matter of government, learning, religion, or the economy, they were dependent (and always had been) on outside influences for ‘improvement’. Indeed, one of the purposes of Hibernia Anglicana was to show that ‘the Irish did continue in their Barbarity, Poverty and Ignorance until the English Conquest’. And even though the Irish might seem in the circumstances of 1689 to have the upper hand, this should not be a cause for dismay: ‘for they are but the same People our Ancestors have so often triumphed over’. Their nature had not changed, and they would again bow to a victorious English army.39 William Molyneux’s quarrel was less with the Irish than with the English parliament. Nevertheless, The Case of Ireland was essentially an extended consideration of the issue of conquest. Could Ireland be said to have been conquered, in what sense, and with what constitutional consequences? Molyneux drew on precedent, statute and common law to argue that there had never been a royal conquest of Ireland. Rather, there had been a voluntary submission to Henry II. Even if there had been such a conquest, Molyneux contended, and if the cause had been a just one, by the law of nations and natural law (here citing his friend John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government) the conqueror still obtained only limited rights over the conquered.40 However, Molyneux’s antiabsolutist arguments did allow for an aristocratic conquest of Ireland in the persons of those adventurers who had come with the blessing of the king; the point of this was to enable him to argue that such ‘conquerors’ and their descendants had lost none of their liberties and were entitled to defend the integrity of their own parliament.41 Molyneux thus contributed to the development of an origin myth for those he called the ‘present People of Ireland’, by whom he meant essentially the Protestants.42 Hugh Reily made less overt use of conquest theory. There were no references to the law of nations, although there was an appeal to natural and fundamental law in defence of the Catholic role in the 1641 rebellion. However, Reily’s account of the ill-treatment of the Irish at the hands of false Protestants was shot through with biblical images of a chosen people in a state of captivity: while the Protestants, he alleged, behaved as if they were the chosen people, enjoying divine licence to plunder and oppress the Catholics.43 A century later the works under consideration by Musgrave, Plowden and Taaffe still employed the language of conquest, but it had undergone significant changes. References to the biblical variety had vanished

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altogether, and Aristotelian forms had lost further ground to the idea of the natural equality of man – although Plowden did observe that despite the ‘homogeneous’ nature of man, the differences among ‘portions of the human race’ amounted almost ‘to a difference of species’.44 Most striking of all, the connotations of ‘conquest’ were now overwhelmingly negative. Musgrave, for instance, appeared to be making considerable efforts to avoid using the term altogether. His title made reference to ‘the arrival’, rather than ‘the conquest’ of the English; while the text’s brief treatment of the Norman incursion contained no reference to conquest. And unlike Cox, who had blithely rehearsed Campion’s comment that the Irish were ‘beholding to God for being conquered’, Musgrave contented himself with remarking that it was ‘a peculiar favour from heaven to send a civilised people among them [the Irish]’.45 For his part, Plowden seemed uncertain as to whether there had been a conquest of Ireland or not, but in so far as one had taken place he indicated that it had had ill effects; while Taaffe was sure that conquest had occurred, with wholly negative effects.46 What had happened to produce such changes? All three works reflected the influence of the eighteenth-century historiographical controversy over Laudabiliter (1155–6), the bull of the English Pope Adrian IV, which granted Ireland to Henry II for the purpose of promoting church reform. None of the writers approved of this papal action, but they recognised that it had helped to lend an air of legitimacy to Henry II’s assumption of lordship.47 The impact of Patriot views of the past (notably Molyneux’s The Case of Ireland) was particularly influential. As far as the issue of a royal conquest was concerned, it was Molyneux’s verdict that served as the standard version: not that the writers all agreed with his view, but it was with his views that they engaged. Hence Musgrave simply depicted the ‘wiser’ elements among the Gaelic population accepting the laws of England and allegiance to the Crown, while Plowden referred to ‘the nominal or pretended conquest of the whole kingdom of Ireland by Henry II’.48 Taaffe, on the other hand, invoked the Treaty of Windsor (1175) between Henry II and Rory O’Connor of Connacht, the high king, to challenge the Patriot tradition: This humiliating treaty between the feeble expiring monarchy of Ireland and its oppressors, refutes the vanity of Irish patriots endeavouring to maintain that Ireland was never conquered by the English … Could anything but defeat and despair induce the monarch of Ireland to become tributary to Henry?49


In fact, as noted above, Molyneux had not disputed a conquest by ‘the English’: it was the idea of a royal conquest that he had questioned. However, a century later, developments associated with the European Enlightenment had produced challenges to the very idea of conquest in a just war. These challenges took several forms. The writings of the Physiocrats in France, reinforced by Scottish political economists such as Adam Smith, cast doubt on the compatibility of war and commerce. Following Locke, man’s natural goodness was stressed; if free trade were adopted it would release the natural laws of human cooperation and promote the creation of wealth far more effectively than war and conquest. At the same time absolutism had come in for criticism, together with the warrior elites, or aristocracies, that underpinned absolutism. For Rousseau and others kings and nobilities (unlike members of the third estate) were inherently warlike. Such critiques reached a climax in the 1790s, with Tom Paine’s Rights of Man (1791–2) and Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace (1795).50 The latter had the effect of undermining Grotius’s carefully constructed principles of international law, in which absolutism and conquest had an accepted place.51 Instead, utilitarian values were beginning to emerge. The institution of slavery had begun to attract hostile notice. The effects of such critiques should not be overstated. In Britain, admittedly, the slave trade was abolished in 1807; but the early decline of the seigneurial system, the lack of fiscal privileges and a tradition of opposing royal absolutism enabled the British aristocracy to survive the revolutionary era with its privileges intact.52 However, by the end of the eighteenth century aristocracies in general could expect their role to come under greater scrutiny. In respect of the Irish aristocracy Adam Smith himself recorded a highly pejorative judgement in the Wealth of Nations (1776). He favoured a legislative union between Ireland and Britain as the best means to bring about free trade, but he saw an additional advantage: By a union with Great Britain the greater part of people of all ranks in Ireland would gain an equally complete deliverance from a much more oppressive aristocracy; an aristocracy not founded, like that of Scotland, in the natural and respectable distinctions of birth and fortune, but in the most odious of all distinctions, those of religious and political prejudices; distinctions which, more than any other, animate both the violence of the oppressors, and the hatred and indignation of the oppressed … Without a union with Great Britain,

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the inhabitants of Ireland are not likely, for many ages, to consider themselves as one people.53 Subsequently it was the formidable figure of Edmund Burke who delivered the most telling blow. In his widely read Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe (1792) Burke accused the victors in the Williamite wars in Ireland of having introduced, with the penal laws, an ‘unparalleled code of oppression … manifestly the effects of national hatred and scorn towards a conquered people’. Irish Catholics had been looked on as ‘a race of bigoted savages who were a disgrace to human nature itself’.54 These strictures were made in the context of Protestant opposition to the extension of political rights to Catholics. Coming from the pen of the celebrated scourge of the French revolution, they could not simply be ignored. A century earlier the idea of descent from a race of conquerors had been an aspect of their identity in which Protestants could take pride: now conquest – at least in the European context55 – had become a term of opprobrium, and this was reflected in Musgrave’s efforts to avoid using it at all. And yet Musgrave revealed a certain ambivalence when he discussed the transfer of forfeited Irish land in the seventeenth century: it had been granted to those who had showed courage and loyalty ‘in conquering the rebels’.56 Another aspect of the Irish Protestant role – that of a defence against popery – had also become more problematic since the 1790s, when the Catholic Church became a victim of the French Revolution, and was depicted by Burke and others as a bastion of traditional Christian and counter-revolutionary values. None of this need have mattered very much had it not been for the continuing unsettled state of Irish society, reflected most dramatically in the 1798 rebellion. Clearly, society was still far from that harmonious and cooperative condition that ought, in principle, to have flowed from the untrammelled operation of the laws of nature. It was difficult to pin the blame on royal absolutism: there was widespread agreement by the 1790s that the British monarchy was a constitutional one.57 The penal laws, too, had in large part been repealed, and during the 1790s a wide range of political rights had been granted to Catholics. Contemporaries were offered two main explanations: either Irish Catholics really were incorrigible, or their treatment as a ‘slavish’ people by Irish Protestants was continuing to generate bitterness and division. In these circumstances there was a great deal at stake. Neither side relished being branded in the eyes of the British public or at


Westminster – legislating for Ireland from 1801 onwards – as responsible for Ireland’s unhappy condition. If Protestants were perceived to be to blame, they might find their remaining privileges – including the established status of the Church of Ireland – withdrawn. This was a serious matter in the aftermath of a rebellion which, contrary to the wishes of the United Irish leaders, had unleashed sectarian passions, including the expectation of the overthrow of Protestantism.58 But equally for Catholics the prospect of being labelled inherently rebellious was anathema. It would condemn them, perhaps permanently, to exclusion from parliament and to a second-class status at home. In the ensuing battle for public opinion in Britain it was inevitable that history would be recruited. At the heart of the debate lay the issue of religion and especially the nature of Catholicism. The writers of the 1690s, at any rate Reily and Cox,59 had made reference to doctrinal differences between Protestants and Catholics, and both had been prepared to defend their own faith as ‘true religion’: the other was false. The later writers followed Molyneux60 in treating religion chiefly from the (Enlightenment) perspective of its relation with the state. Musgrave made some attempt to distinguish between the Roman Catholic religion and ‘popery’: he conceded that the former, in so far as it accorded with the gospel, was worthy of respect, but the latter was a system that was inherently intolerant, with a head who continued to claim temporal was well as spiritual powers. Its presence in Ireland had given rise to a species of ‘imperium in imperio, or two separate sovereign powers, civil and ecclesiastical’, which could not coexist in the same state ‘without perpetual collision, producing discord and rebellion’. In Ireland, he suggested, the authorities had rejected the option of extinguishing the ecclesiastical power in favour of the ‘milder procedure’ of ‘incorporating’ it with the civil power.61 Implicitly, this was a recognition that there could be no returning to the age of the penal laws. But history showed that it had been a mistake to fall in with Burke’s views and adopt ‘visionary’ concessions to Irish Catholics. In view of the persisting threat of violence and instability stemming from the rebelliousness of lower-class Catholics, spurred on by their priests, it was unrealistic for Catholics to expect exactly the same political rights as those who were loyal to the state. In other words, whatever the experience in other countries, popery remained a real threat in Ireland.62 Musgrave refrained from describing Irish Protestants as ‘conquerors’, but the reader of his Memoirs was meant to understand that certain aspects of that historic role survived: to resist popery and to maintain the link with Britain. Accordingly, the Protestants deserved to be

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supported by measures to increase investment and (Protestant) immigration.63 Such recommendations were not new, nor was Musgrave’s resort to the past to support his arguments. What helped to render his work so influential in British conservative circles in the early nineteenth century was not merely the disillusion that followed the 1798 rising, but the reaction against the Catholic Church after the concordat between Pope Pius VII and Napoleon in 1801, the pope’s consecration of Napoleon as emperor in 1804, and the authoritarianism of the postNapoleonic papacy, which breathed new life into the perception of Rome as absolutist and despotic.64 Denis Taaffe’s portrait of the Irish Catholics was a mirror image of Musgrave’s. From earliest Christian times, Taaffe asserted, the Irish were ‘Catholics, in the true sense of that word, who allowed the pope spiritual but not temporal supremacy. From this rock, no seduction or coercion, not all the efforts of Popish England first, nor of Protestant England afterwards, could drive them.’65 In an attempt to turn the tables on the critics of Irish Catholicism, Taaffe suggested that the medieval papacy had favoured English encroachments precisely because ‘the English admitted popery [the pope’s temporal power] in its fullest extent’.66 Taaffe pictured the alliance of pope and king against the Irish, ‘filling the sees with staunch English papists, instead of Milesian catholics’.67 This was an allusion to the contentious veto question: at the time of the union the Catholic bishops had been prepared to agree that a government veto over episcopal appointments might be conceded in return for full Catholic ‘emancipation’. Taaffe was implying that such a veto would constitute a greater danger to liberty than leaving appointments as they were. Taaffe’s Catholics also displayed the counter-revolutionary virtues so much prized by Burke: ‘the Irish were then [in the sixteenth century] what they now are, a religious people, tenacious of antiquity, and enemies to innovation’.68 Nevertheless, they had been treated like slaves by the ‘Protestant negro drivers’, just as their ancestors had been reduced to a condition of ‘bondage’ by the (Catholic) lords of the pale.69 As an Englishman who was at one remove from the great Irish political issues of the day, Plowden was able to take a somewhat more detached view of Irish history than either Musgrave or Taaffe. However, as an English Catholic (and in this period English Catholics enjoyed fewer political rights than their Irish counterparts) Plowden was no more willing than Taaffe to allow the Musgrave view of Irish Catholicism


to pass unchallenged. Like Taaffe, he criticised papal claims to temporal power, and challenged the tendency of many writers since the Reformation to attribute revolutions in the state to religion.70 Plowden conceded that there had been an imperium in imperio in Ireland, but he differed from Musgrave in identifying this with settler interests who had kept the benefit of the laws in their own hands, forcing the native Irish to remain in a state of ‘incivility’.71 And, while avoiding the colourful language of Taaffe (and casting doubt on a royal conquest of Ireland), Plowden echoed Adam Smith’s verdict on Ireland. History showed that ‘the arrogance of conquest begat oppression’: accordingly, Ireland could only be happy through a legislative union.72 Faced with the need to explain why the different communities on the island had hitherto failed to become one people, it is noteworthy and perhaps not surprising that all three later writers displayed a willingness to place at least some of the blame on the past record of England.73 Plowden (following Sir John Davies) condemned medieval governments for failing to grant requests from the Irish to be governed by English laws; Taaffe commented of the medieval period that ‘[t]he enmity of races, fomented by the policy of England, extended to everything’. And even Musgrave argued that government could have done more to help the English and Irish to ‘cordially unite, and coalesce into one people’; he instanced the penal laws, responsibility for which, he claimed, was to be imputed more to the English than the Irish parliament.74 The negative view of conquest, and willingness to make England bear some of the responsibility for internal animosities, was to be taken much further in the self-consciously nationalist histories of the 1840s. By that time the granting of Catholic emancipation and other liberal reforms seemed to open up new prospects for overcoming religious divisions. Irish Protestants might still need to be reminded that they had exercised ‘a dangerous power’ over ‘a nation of helots’;75 but too much denigration was likely to impede the work of reconciliation and the drive for repeal of the Act of Union. No such restraint entered into discussion of Anglo-Irish relations; on the contrary, there was much to be gained by heaping the odium of conquest on ‘England’ (Molyneux’s careful distinctions between royal and aristocratic conquest no longer seemed so important) and hinting that the spirit of conquest would sooner or later be turned against the Protestants, unless they made haste to unite with Irish Catholics.76 The authors of such works were also influenced by the great French historians, Augustin Thierry, whose acclaimed History of the Conquest of England by the Normans (1825)

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identified conquest as the key to English history, and Jules Michelet, whose History of France, written in the 1830s, gave a central role to the nation and the spirit of liberty.77 It was in keeping with such works that the Young Irelander Thomas Davis could portray Ireland as ‘still a serf nation’,78 and commend the task of compiling a ‘record of English crime and Irish suffering, in order to explain the past, to justify the present, and caution the future’.79 Thus the issue of conquest was pressed into service of the nationalist agenda. That transformation was possible because by the 1840s the Young Irelanders were writing primarily for an Irish readership.

Notes 1. Donal McCartney, ‘The Writing of History in Ireland 1800–1830’, Irish Historical Studies, 10 (1957), pp. 347–62; Ann de Valera, ‘Antiquarian and Historical Investigations in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century’ (NUI (Dublin) M.A. thesis, 1978); Joseph Leerssen, Mere Irish & Fior-Ghael (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1986); Colin Kidd, ‘Gaelic Antiquity and National Identity in Enlightenment Ireland and Scotland’, English Historical Review, 109 (1994), pp. 1197–1214. 2. Jacqueline Hill, ‘Popery and Protestantism, Civil and Religious Liberty: The Disputed Lessons of Irish History 1690–1812’, Past and Present, 118 (1988), pp. 96–129; Clare O’Halloran, ‘“The Island of Saints and Scholars”: Views of the Early Church and Sectarian Politics in Late-Eighteenth Century Ireland’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 5 (1990), pp. 7–20. 3. Leerssen, Mere Irish and Fior-Ghael; R.F. Foster, ‘History and the Irish Question’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 33 (1983), pp. 169–92. 4. See DNB. 5. See DNB. 6. Richard Cox, Hibernia Anglicana, 2 vols (London, 1689), I, Epistle Dedicatory, sig. A3v, sig. b1r. 7. Anon. [Hugh Reily], Ireland’s Case, Briefly Stated; Or, a Summary Account of the Most Remarkable Transactions in That Kingdom Since the Reformation (n.p., 1695), Preface, sig. aii r-v, aiii r. William Camden’s Britannia (1586) had enhanced his own and England’s prestige among continental scholars (Ernst Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval and Modern (2nd edn, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 175). 8. William Molyneux, The Case of Ireland’s Being Bound by Acts of Parliament in England, Stated, reprint (Dublin: Cadenus Press, 1977), p. 23. 9. Richard Musgrave, Memoirs of the Different Rebellions in Ireland from the Arrival of the English, 2 vols (3rd edn, Dublin, 1802), I, pp. viii-xi. 10. Ibid., I, p. 1. 11. Francis Plowden, An Historical Review of the State of Ireland, from the Invasion of that Country under Henry II to its Union with Great Britain, 2 vols (London, 1803), I, p. iv.

Politics and the Writing of History 237 12. Ibid., I, p. iii. 13. Dennis Taaffe, An Impartial History of Ireland, from the Period of the English Invasion to the Year 1810, 4 vols (Dublin, 1809–11), I, Introduction, p. iv. 14. Cox, Hibernia Anglicana, I, sig. a1r. 15. Ibid., I, sig. Ffff2v. The very small numbers of committed Protestants in Ireland at the outset of Mary’s reign doubtless helped account for their acceptance of her title (Colm Lennon, Sixteenth-Century Ireland: The Incomplete Conquest (Dublin, Gill and Macmillan, 1994), pp. 305–7). 16. Cox, Hibernia Anglicana, I, sig. Gggg1r. 17. Reily, Ireland’s Case, Briefly Stated, Preface, sig. aiii r, pp. 2–5, 63. 18. Ibid., p. 112. 19. Ibid., Part II, passim. 20. Ibid., pp. 84, 113–32. 21. Cox, Hibernia Anglicana, I, sig. b1v; Reily, Ireland’s Case, Briefly Stated, Preface, sig. aii v. 22. J.G. Simms, ‘Introduction’, in Molyneux, The Case of Ireland, pp. 12–13. 23. J.P. Kenyon, Revolution Principles: The Politics of Party 1689–1720 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 17–19. 24. Musgrave, Memoirs of the Different Rebellions, I, pp. 4–5. The DNB is mistaken in describing Musgrave as ‘strongly opposed to the Act of Union’. 25. Plowden, An Historical Review, I, p. 10; McCartney, ‘The Writing of History in Ireland’, p. 355. 26. Taaffe, An Impartial History of Ireland, I, p. iv. 27. Breisach, Historiography, p. 209; cf. McCartney, ‘The Writing of History in Ireland’, p. 352. 28. Taaffe, An Impartial History of Ireland, I, p. iii. 29. Michael Howard, War and the Liberal Conscience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 17. 30. Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 60–61. 31. Ibid., pp. 3, 176; John Robertson, ‘Empire and Union: Two Concepts of the Early Modern European Political Order’, in John Robertson (ed.), A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the British Union of 1707 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 18–19. 32. J.G.A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), pp. 179–98. 33. Mark Goldie, ‘Edmund Bohun and Ius Gentium in the Revolution Debate, 1689–1693’, Historical Journal, 20 (1977), pp. 569–86. 34. ‘Foras Feasa’ circulated in manuscript during the seventeenth century. For its significance see Brendan Bradshaw, ‘Geoffrey Keating, Apologist of Irish Ireland’, in B. Bradshaw, A. Hadfield and W. Maley (eds), Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origin of Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 166–90. For the English translation of 1723 see Hill, ‘Popery and Protestantism, Civil and Religious Liberty’, pp. 102–4. 35. Cox, Hibernia Anglicana, I, sig. g2r. 36. Ibid., sig. c1r. See also Geoffrey Keating, The History of Ireland, D. Comyn (ed.) (London: Irish Texts Society, 1902), I, pp. 31–3. 37. Cox, Hibernia Anglicana, I, sig. d1r, L2v.

238 Jacqueline Hill 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51.

52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

Goldie, ‘Edmund Bohun and Ius Gentium’, pp. 580–1. Cox, Hibernia Anglicana, I, sig. L2r-v. Molyneux, The Case of Ireland, pp. 34–40. Ibid., pp. 32–5. Cf. C.D.A. Leighton, Catholicism in a Protestant Kingdom: A Study of the Irish Ancien Régime (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1994), pp. 31–7; Jacqueline Hill, ‘Ireland without Union: Molyneux and his Legacy’, in Robertson (ed.), A Union for Empire, pp. 271–96. It is difficult to agree with Anthony Carty (Was Ireland Conquered? International Law and the Irish Question (London and Chicago: Pluto Press, 1996), that Molyneux’s claims represented ‘the very antithesis’ of an origin myth (p. 69). Reily, Ireland’s Case, Briefly Stated, pp. 63–6. Plowden, An Historical Review, I, p. 2. Cox, Hibernia Anglicana, I, sig. A3v; Musgrave, Memoirs of the Different Rebellions, I, p. 5. Plowden, An Historical Review, I, pp. 33–4; Taaffe, An Impartial History of Ireland, I, p. 31. Musgrave, Memoirs of the Different Rebellions, I, pp. 2–3; Plowden, An Historical Review, I, pp. 27–30; Taaffe, An Impartial History of Ireland, I, p. xiv, 143. For the controversy, see O’Halloran, ‘”The Island of Saints and Scholars”’, pp. 16–19. Musgrave, Memoirs of the Different Rebellions, I, pp. 5–6; Plowden, An Historical Review, I, 34. Taaffe, An Impartial History of Ireland, I, p. 31. Howard, War and the Liberal Conscience, pp. 21–30. Richard Tuck, ‘The “Modern” Theory of Natural Law’, in Anthony Pagden (ed.), The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 99–119, at p. 101. See M.L. Bush, The English Aristocracy: A Comparative Synthesis (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 7. The semi-feudal powers of the Scottish nobility had been abolished in 1746. Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) (Edinburgh, 1846), p. 403. Edmund Burke, Works, Bohn’s Standard Library (London: George Bell, 1896), III, p. 321. The Utilitarian Jeremy Bentham was prepared to allow for conquest in colonial situations (Howard, War and the Liberal Conscience, p. 35). Musgrave, Memoirs of the Different Rebellions, ii, p. 520. Linda Colley, Britons (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 206–12. Nancy J. Curtin, The United Irishmen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 160–2. Reily, Ireland’s Case, Briefly Stated, Part I; Cox, Hibernia Anglicana, I, sig. L1r. Molyneux, The Case of Ireland, p. 103. Musgrave, Memoirs of the Different Rebellions, I, Preface, p. xvi, p. 4. Ibid., I, Preface, p. vi. Ibid., I, Preface, p. vii. For the impact of Musgrave’s Memoirs of the Different Rebellions in Britain, see James J. Sack, From Jacobite to Conservative: Reaction and Orthodoxy in


65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

76. 77.

78. 79.

Britain, c. 1760–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 230–45. Taaffe, An Impartial History of Ireland, I, p. 166. Ibid., I, p. 174. Ibid., I, p. 175. Ibid., I, p. 327. Ibid., III, p. 44; IV, pp. 10, 18. Plowden, An Historical Review, I, pp. 27–8, 47. Ibid., I, pp. 10, 36–7. Ibid., I, p. 33. Cf. Leerssen, Mere Irish and Fior-Ghael, pp. 434–5. Plowden, An Historical Review, I, p. 36; Taaffe, An Impartial History of Ireland, I, p. 174; Musgrave, Memoirs of the Different Rebellions, I, p. 6, II, p. 520. J[ames] Godkin, ‘The Rights of Ireland’, in Repeal Prize Essays: Essays on the Repeal of the Union to which the Association Prizes were Awarded (Dublin: James Duffy, 1845), pp. 61–2. Godkin also quoted Adam Smith’s criticism of ‘the oppressive aristocracy’ of Ireland (p. 130). Ibid., pp. 56, 173–4. For Thierry and Michelet see Breisach, Historiography, pp. 239–43. Godkin’s prize essay cited or made reference to Thierry’s History of the Conquest on pp. 2, 7, 10–13, 25, 38, and to Michelet’s History of France on p. 7. Thomas Davis commended these works when he outlined materials and models for a new history of Ireland. See ‘The History of Ireland’, in Thomas Davis, Literary and Historical Essays (Dublin: James Duffy, [1845]), p. 37. Davis, ‘The History of Ireland’, p. 28. Ibid.

10 Republicanism before the United Irishmen: The Case of Dr Charles Lucas Jim Smyth

In the pantheon of the new Irish republic, imagined by Theobald Wolfe Tone in 1796, Charles Lucas took his place alongside Rory O’More, William Molyneux and Jonathan Swift. In the 1780s Henry Joy espoused the moderate Whig cause in the pages of his own Belfast News-Letter under the pseudonym ‘Lucas’, while a few years earlier, in 1779, a statue of him had been erected in Dublin’s Royal Exchange.1 Thus in the late eighteenth century Lucas’s niche in the patriot canon appears secure. Unlike Tone, however, and to a lesser extent Henry Grattan, the Dublin apothecary’s reputation did not survive the transition from eighteenth-century ‘patriotism’ to nineteenth-century ‘nationalism’. One reason for this may be that he, unlike Tone or Grattan, did not have the foresight, or good luck, to have himself memorialised by an admiring son.2 Nor did his reputed antiCatholicism endear him to the predominantly Catholic nationalists of the O’Connell era, and that, more than anything, probably accounts for his drift into obscurity (although Swift ought to have been dispatched on the same charge). But that anti-Catholicism, or more accurately anti-popery, needs to be properly contextualised. It will not do, like Persse McGarrigle’s study of the influence of T.S. Eliot on Shakespeare,3 to read Lucas by way of Tone, and issue reprimands for his falling short of the standards of a later age. Twentieth-century historians have mimicked too readily the late eighteenth-century habit, exemplified by Grattan’s ‘spirit of Swift, spirit of Molyneux’s’ speech, and by Tone’s ‘pantheon’, of treating the development of oppositional, patriot, or ‘colonial nationalist’, ideas as a sort of torch-passing relay in which Lucas takes over from Swift and hands on to Grattan. However, after rejecting the simplicities of the old ‘apostolic succession’ model it

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Republicanism before the United Irishmen 241

should still be possible – and useful – to locate Lucas and others within more complex ideological continuums. Lucas’s life and career can be briefly outlined.4 He was born in Balingaddy, County Clare, in 1713. The family moved to Dublin, where young Charles served his apprenticeship as an apothecary, setting up shop in the 1730s. In 1735 Lucas first entered the public domain with a pamphlet which prefigures his lifelong battle with corruption: A Short Scheme for Preventing Frauds and Abuses in Pharmacy, humbly offered to the consideration of the legislature. In 1741 he published a further exposé of sharp practice, Pharmacomastix, and was selected as a representative of the Barber-Surgeons’ Guild to the common council, or lower house, of Dublin corporation. This proved the turning point of his career. In uneasy alliance with James Digges La Touche of the Merchants’ guild, Lucas sat on a reformist committee of inquiry into the city constitution. It is worth noting here, that the aspiring ward politician must also have been a voracious autodidact, since the search of the municipal charters and records often entailed translation from the original Latin.5 According to the Remonstrance published on foot of that investigation in 1743, the Board of Aldermen had manipulated the ‘New Rules’ of 1672 to usurp the right of all the freemen to vote for representatives to the upper house and set itself up as a self-selecting oligarchy. Naively, or disingenuously, Lucas professed the belief that the Aldermen would themselves remedy the situation.6 Predictably, though, they ignored the Remonstrance. Lucas then published a more confrontational pamphlet, Divelina Libera: an apology for the civil rights and liberties of the commons and citizens of Dublin, and with La Touche filed a suit against the Aldermen which, equally predictably, was struck down. The Board then refused to confirm the (re)nomination of their critics as representatives on the common council. Round one had gone to the ‘oligarchs’. Lucas’s next major intervention in public affairs resulted from a quintessentially eighteenth-century fracas in the Smock Alley theatre. In late 1746 a performance had been interrupted by a group of aristocratic bucks, soon labelled the ‘Gentlemen’, who became embroiled in some rough-house feuding with the ‘Players’, led by the actor-manager, Thomas Sheridan, and supported by the notoriously boisterous Trinity students. This episode sparked off a minor paper war in Dublin, and Lucas entered the fray on the side of the Players. Trivial as it may seem, real issues were at stake. As the appellation ‘Gentlemen’ suggests, the Smock Alley incident was widely perceived as a clash between highhanded aristocrats and honest citizens. Lucas championed the citizens in his Barber’s Letters, but more controversially raised a sectarian banner

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by accusing the leader of the Gentlemen, Edmund Kelly, of being a ‘Connaught man and a Papist’, intent on fomenting French invasion, western insurrection and ‘UNIVERSAL MASSACRE’. No one could have missed the allusions to 1641 or the Jacobite ’45. The following year, 1748, one of the city’s two MPs, Sir James Somerville, died, prompting both Lucas and La Touche to stand for election against the Aldermanic candidate, Sir Samuel Cooke, thus splitting the ‘popular’ vote. Then, in May 1749, the other Dublin MP, Nathaniel Pearson, obligingly died also, clearing the field for a straight contest between the self-appointed tribunes of the freemen on the one hand, and the government and Aldermen-backed candidates, Cooke and Charles Burton, on the other. One of the bitterest, most fiercely fought election campaigns of the century ensued. Lucas founded a newspaper, The Censor, to publicise his views, and issued some twenty addresses to the ‘free citizens of Dublin’, later collected under the title The Political Constitutions of Great-Britain and Ireland. Nor were his opponents any less busy. Anti-Lucas pamphlets, and anti-Lucas newspapers, The Tickler, and, later, The Church Monitor, helped to sustain the political excitement. Lucas’s platform, which included electoral and municipal reform, reiterated Molyneux’s defence of Ireland’s constitutional status. His campaigning style, which combined speeches in the guildhalls with printed polemic – and not least his appeal to the tradesmen, as a tradesman himself – amounted to an unprecedented, and intolerable, challenge to the tightly managed, deference-based, grandee-controlled, parliamentary system of the mid-eighteenth century. On 10 October, the Lord Lieutentant, Harrington, made known his displeasure in the speech from the throne opening parliament. Sir Richard Cox picked up the signal and moved to have Lucas and his printers summoned to the bar of the Commons. Condemned as an enemy to his country, intent upon stirring up jealousy between the sister kingdoms, Lucas on the advice of his supporters fled to the Isle of Man, and thence to England. From England he moved on to France, and eventually to the University of Leyden, where he obtained his doctorate in medicine. Returning to England in 1753 Lucas concentrated on his medical practice, publishing the results of his research on European spas in An Essay on Waters in 1756. He proved incapable of refraining from politics, however, and that same year he also published An Appeal to the Commons and Citizens of London. By Charles Lucas, the last Free Citizen of Dublin. His exile ended with the accession of George III in 1760. ‘The last Free Citizen’ stood once more for election in 1761 and on this


occasion won. In parliament Lucas aligned himself naturally with the emerging ‘Patriot’ party later associated with the name of Henry Flood. He resumed his efforts to secure more frequent, regular, elections, and the Octennial Act of 1768 owed much to his persistence. Out of doors he contributed, under the pseudonym ‘Civis’, to the Freeman’s Journal, founded by his old ally, Henry Brooke, in 1763. His last big political fight but one was entirely consistent with his whole career: a defence of the liberties and privileges of the Dublin Corporation. The 1760s witnessed attempts to have the exaction of quarterage payments to the guilds, by non-freemen, who were mostly Catholic, given statutory force.7 The guilds were Lucas’s constituency, and corporate privilege and liberty formed the bedrock of his political philosophy. It is no surprise that he championed the freemen’s cause, that he saw no injustice in Catholics paying fees for no goods or services in return, or that he chose the pamphlet form to articulate his position. At the very end of his career he challenged publicly the then Lord Lieutenant’s right to prorogue parliament. Dr Lucas died in 1771. An investigation of the origins of United Irish republicanism in the 1790s would not begin with Lucas. Rather it would look back further, to the Belfast Presbyterian intellectual avant garde of the early eighteenth century, for example, and its relationship with the Scottish Enlightenment,8 or to Robert, Viscount Molesworth, and even, at a stretch, to John Toland. Molesworth ‘gloried in the name commonwealthman’, audaciously grounding his political principles in the English Republic of the 1650s. In 1700 Toland brought out an edition of the theoretical master-work of the republic, James Harrington’s Oceana, and a subsequent subscription-supported Dublin edition linked the ‘Molesworth Circle’ with the ‘New Light’ Presbyterians of Belfast. Such high intellectual enterprise may seem a long way indeed from the gritty realities of municipal politics, but Sean Murphy notes that Lucas’s great-grandfather was a Cromwellian officer granted lands in Clare for service in the wars of the 1640s, and that the family intermarried with that of the republican conspirator Colonel Thomas Blood, before advancing the intriguing speculation that ‘given his background, commonwealth ideals would have played a part in shaping his [the young Lucas’s] political awareness’.9 There is some evidence that the ‘Good Old Cause’ of seventeenth-century republicanism retained a resonance in Lucas’s Dublin. At the time of the Mayorial dispute in 1711–13 Joseph Trapp, the High Church Tory chaplain to the Lord Chancellor, Constantine Phipps, claimed that certain malcontents in the city drank ‘to the pious memory of Oliver

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Cromwell’. In 1743 La Touche attacked those ‘who drink in public the rights and liberties of Dublin, and in private the memory of Oliver Cromwell [sic].’ This may have been an underhand swipe at his ally, and despite Lucas’s later condemnation of Cromwell as a corrupt and perfidious usurper and ‘an arbitrary tyrant’,10 the charge was repeated.11 In 1759 the Lord Lieutenant and Chief Secretary at first blamed the antiunion riot on the ‘protestant weavers’, ‘new light presbyterians’ and ‘descendants of Cromwellian settlers, who exhibited a dislike of monarchy and the established church’ and lived in the Earl of Meath’s Liberty.12 Of course, too much should not be read into the rhetoric of abuse. English Jacobites, after all, routinely castigated Hanoverians as ‘Rumpers’. Towards the end of the century Charles James Fox was often compared to Cromwell.13 Lucas himself, denounced as a Jacobite agent and a ‘Jesuits brat’, responded in kind, calling Sir Richard Cox a ‘Cavalier’, the ‘mock’ or ‘court Patriots’ Tories, and himself a ‘good old, real Whig’.14 Clearly, by Lucas’s own account – he warned his readers not to be deceived by ‘mere names’ or ‘unmeaning words’15 – such verbal incontinence alone does not provide sufficient evidence to conscript him into the ranks of the eighteenth-century commonwealthmen. Still, he did draw on the commonwealth ‘tradition’ in more substantive ways. He shared, for instance, in the ‘classical republican’ habit of arguing from ancient, particularly Roman, precedents. But Lucas came closest to commonwealth views in his stance towards the church. Just as church and state were bound together in practice and theory, so political radicalism and Protestant dissent were inextricably bound in the conservative imagination. Trapp’s insistence in 1712 that ‘factious protestants had their share in [the 1641 rebellion] and a considerable share it was’, and that ‘the principles of the ancestors are rooted in the progeny’, anticipates the position of The Church Monitor in 1749 which noted that ‘the church interest had more to fear from kirks, than papish chapels’. Significantly, The Monitor first appeared after Lucas’s flight and his replacement as La Touche’s running mate by the ‘New Light’ Presbyterian, Thomas Ried. ‘The curtain is now drawn,’ it commented, ‘and, in plain English, the motto of the city-stage is, whether churchmen or independents shall rule this city.’16 Lucas undoubtedly enjoyed the support of Dublin’s small Presbyterian community, including that of William Bruce, one of the group which had republished Oceana in 1737.17 He despised ‘priestcraft’ and clerical meddling in politics – not least because the pulpits were mobilised against him.18 Indeed, he registered the depth of his rancour by choosing the moment of victory, his election in 1761, eleven years after his enforced


exile, to round on those clergymen who had joined with the ‘temporal power … to obstruct the freedom of elections.’19 J.C.D. Clark has argued powerfully that much eighteenth-century British radicalism can be traced back to religious heterodoxy.20 Yet if Lucasian invective is sometimes reminiscent of the jeremiads of seventeenth-century covenanter conventicles, the inspiration for it was ultimately political, not theological. His clerical opponents were lambasted as the foot-soldiers of corruption; but this fell far short of a sustained critique of church–state relations. Lucas’s religious opinions were probably conventional and he remained a member of the established Church of Ireland. In terms of his political philosophy it is instructive that he considered that the one great advantage which the moderns enjoyed over the pagan, but otherwise exemplary, ancients of the Athenian and Roman republics was ‘that inimitable charter of eternal liberty’, the Christian dispensation.21 But there is another reason why he did not push his anti-clericalism into a more searching analysis of the confessional state: as the champion of Dublin’s corporate privileges he was himself, de facto, a defender of that state. And with Lucas everything always came back to what he once called ‘my narrow sphere … this city’22 – to Dublin. Lucas’s lifelong fix on municipal government raises questions about his status as a political thinker. As a practising politician, rather than a theoretician, all his writing had immediate polemical purposes, and much of it had, in fact, a ‘narrow’ focus: Dublin’s guilds and corporation. This locates him firmly within an ancien régime world and, arguably, rendered him an anachronistic figure within a generation. At least one historian sees him as such, ‘rather than heir to the radical whig tradition [or] forerunner of [the] constitutional nationalism of Grattan and O’Connell’; while another regards him as having played ‘a pivotal role in the transition to republican separatism’.23 Both are right; both are wrong. That is, there is enough evidence in Lucas’s voluminous output to support or refute either claim. Similarly, equally plausible cases can be made for both his ‘unionism’ and his ‘nationalism’. However, the immediacy and contingency of Lucas’s compositions, his apparent inconsistencies and his particularism disguise an underlying coherence and a more general import. His diagnosis of Dublin’s malaise, his diagnostic methods and his proposed remedies were all, fairly straightforwardly, applied to a broader sphere: the ailing Irish body politic. As others have pointed out, Lucas’s ideas were derivative. Nor did he claim originality, promiscuously acknowledging as his ‘principal guides’

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such standard authorities for eighteenth-century discourse as Sir Edward Coke, John Locke, the now unremembered Whig jurist, Roger Acherley,24 and, in the Irish context, William Molyneux. Consequently, his political theories are in large part indistinguishable from the Whig commonplaces of his time. According to those theories civil society resulted from an original compact, entered into voluntarily, by men in a state of nature. Political rulers commanded obedience in return for laws which maintained public order and protected lives and property. An anarchic, predatory freedom was traded for specific, legally defined liberties. Society consisted of three estates: monarchy, aristocracy and ‘the people’, which tended, respectively, towards tyranny, oligarchy and democracy (understood in a perjorative sense as a species of mob rule). The most just and efficacious political arrangement thus resided in a system of checks and balances between the three estates, of which the mixed or ‘Britannic constitution’ – Lucas borrowed this term from Acherley’s book of that title – consisting of king, lords and commons, represented the best example.25 That great achievement was ‘precarious and insecure’ however. ‘All men have naturally a thirst of power’,26 and, as a glance at the fate of parliamentary institutions across Europe demonstrated, the forces of corruption and monarchical despotism were strong and unrelenting. The constitution, therefore, had to be constantly patrolled. So far, so familiar. Indeed, on the basis of the foregoing summary Lucas’s writings appear to confirm R.B. McDowell’s minimalist contention that ‘Irish thought at this time was largely a reflection of current British opinion or of the general eighteenth-century outlook’ – although he added that ‘in some respects Irish conditions were unique’.27 On the contrary, it is argued here, Lucas’s political ideas were more dynamic than McDowell and others have allowed.28 His polemic and ‘apocalyptic style’29 are suffused by a republican ethos and a ‘levelling’ tendency which pushed at the radical limits of domesticated Whiggery.30 His reading of Irish history came near to turning the received Protestant version on its head. But if these elements of the Lucasian oeuvre look forward to the advanced republican nationalism of the latter 1790s, there are equally important differences. Most notably, Lucas refused to break through the confessional barriers and embrace his Catholic fellow countrymen as full citizens. Quite the reverse: the corporate privileges and immunities which he so passionately defended were founded upon denominational exclusivity. In that sense John Giffard, the guild politician who piloted through the Dublin Corporation’s declaration of Protestant Ascendancy in 1792, is as much Lucas’s heir as the more obvious candidate, the United Irishman, James Napper Tandy. As late


as 1840 the Protestant-sectional dimension of Lucasian politics is recalled by a Protestant diehard pamphleteer signing himself ‘The Ghost of Lucas’.31 Another difference between this mid-century radical and the post-1789 generation which witnessed the explosive overturnings of the French revolutionary crisis is that he never considered himself a moderniser. Quite the reverse: Lucas always insisted that he had no wish to innovate. He intended merely to preserve those immemorial liberties which had survived the encroachments of centralising power, and, ultimately, to restore the constitution to the purity of the past. But preserve and restore what, precisely? The answer lay readily to hand in custom, legal precedent, statute, usage and royal charter. Lucas privileged the specific and the documentary record over universal principles and abstract reasoning – although these are not, and were not for him, mutually exclusive. Legalistic appeals to the past in order to legitimate present politics was a well-established practice by the 1740s. Ireland’s William Molyneux, England’s William Atwood and Scotland’s George Ridpath all provide earlier examples of the discourse of ‘ancient constitutionalism’.32 It is revealing that the authority most often cited by Lucas is not, say, the political theorist John Locke, but the early seventeenth-century constitutional lawyer Sir Edward Coke.33 Yet the relevance of such arguments was by no means axiomatic. Sir Richard Cox ridiculed the parade of ‘musty old documents, hardly legible’, and considered the invoking of charters granted by King Henry II or King John ‘flat nonsense’. ‘In truth,’ he asserted, ‘it is hard to trace in ancient times, anything like a settled constitution’.34 Without dismissing the claims of the distant past another conservative dismissed the claims that Lucas make for it: ‘his boasted knowledge of our civil constitution,’ he scoffed, ‘is superficial.’35 These intellectually feeble rebuttals none the less struck at the foundations of the Lucasian project. ‘In order to give you a clear and rational view of your rights and privileges,’ he informed his readers, ‘it will be necessary to trace them to the original.’36 He began, characteristically, with Dublin – whose charter he transcribed, translated and published – and his investigations led him near to an affirmation of popular sovereignty. In 1743 he concluded that the government of this city and Liberties, with the estates and revenues thereof, are vested entirely and solely in the corporation of this city; either by the aforesaid grants from the sovereign power, by prescription, or by the rights and privileges incident to the creation or constitution of a corporation … the citizens always had a right,

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and heretofore constantly exerted the power of prescribing to foreigners the terms on which they should be allowed to inhabit or trade within the franchises … the city has ever had the right of electing and appointing the several magistrates and other officers, of the corporation, before the NEW-RULES, made as your Remonstrant humbly apprehends without the consent of the people …37 Six years later he wrote: no individual, whether magistrate, officer or member of the corporation has, or can have, any power privilege, or authority, but what he derives, mediately or immediately, from the body of the citizens, to whom, and in whom, all that the crown by its prerogatives, or the legislature by its authority, could grant, were granted and vested, for the sole emolument of the citizens and their successors for ever …38 Dublin mattered to Lucas not simply because he was a Dubliner. Rather, the defenders of local liberties against the hireling of corruption and the attrition of executive power stood on the front line of the struggle between public virtue and freedom on the one side, and tyranny and slavery, on the other. Local rights counted intrinsically. ‘Liberty’ consisted of the aggregate of liberties; and eighteenth-century patriotism, it has been suggested, consisted mainly in the guarding of local immunities and autonomies.39 Local rights, moreover, were strategically vital. Every breach in the constitution, however small or trivial it might seem, opened ‘inlets’ which sapped the entire structure. ‘Cities,’ remarked Lucas, ‘are the strength of every nation; and a city cannot be taken without entering the most remote outworks; therefore they should never be given up, nor ever left unguarded or defenceless.’40 Dublin, with its proud record as a ‘nursery of liberty’ and of resistance to Tory misrule, enjoyed pre-eminent status. As the capital it occupied a critical position. ‘No nation was ever known to preserve her freedom long after the chief city was dispossessed of her privileges.’ And, fortunately for Ireland, Dublin – ‘the only body corporate in the realm that has preserved freedom and independence in elections’41 – had so far held the line. Lucas’s celebration of cities is a distinctive and, from a ‘commonwealth’ perspective, a problematic, feature of his work. He greatly admired London, for example, and its history of oppositional politics. In his view ‘well-constituted cities’ are, quite simply, ‘the best form


of civil society [and] have ever been the firm and secure bulwarks of popular government.’42 This was no abstract principle. Revealingly, his most trenchant statement on the subject is contained in a pamphlet supporting quarterage. ‘As cities are the strength and glory of every nation,’ he argued, the nurseries of literature, policy and arts, the seminaries of commerce, and the bulwarks of liberty, it has always been judged good policy in all countries, whether barbarous or civilized, to found and adorn cities, and to distinguish the citizens with peculiar privileges, liberties and immunities. Such distinctions acted as incentives to attract and retain an active citizenry.43 Yet some otherwise likeminded thinkers, before and after, did not share in that enthusiasm. ‘Experience has taught us,’ observes one of the protagonists in Andrew Fletcher’s Account of a Conversation, ‘that no human prudence can preserve the manners of men’s lives in great cities for long.’ In Thomas Jefferson’s opinion, cities posed such a threat to public virtue and the independence of the individual that they were best confined to Europe!44 But, as Lucas showed, cities are not necessarily antipathetic to republican values. As a good Hanoverian he never questioned the institution of monarchy; ‘republicanism’ rather, refers to a politics of inclusiveness – in terms of citizenship but not denomination – accountability, openness and participation. It entails duties as well as rights. ‘Public’ virtue is, by definition, active. In terms of rights government, of the city or of the nation, is constituted for the benefit of all. In the case of Dublin, ‘all public affairs ever have been, to this day are, and cannot otherwise be transacted, than by, or in the name of, the commons.’ In the case of the nation, or realm, ‘no part, or member of the state has, or can, justly, or lawfully, exercise any power, or authority, but what is derived from, and held in trust for, the people; who are the confessed origine, or spring of the sovereign power.’45 In Dublin that power had originally been vested in the Court of Darein Hundred. All freemen were entitled to attend assemblies and to cast a veto on proposed legislation. Only the logistics of growing numbers had obliged the freemen to delegate authority to their elected representatives in the commons. Lucas called for the revival of the court and for greater openness in the transaction of public business, including the building of public galleries in council chambers and public access to the city accounts.46 However, rights involved responsibilities. Everyone had a responsibility

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to participate in the political process. ‘Private interest must ever be freely and readily sacrificed to the public [good]’. ‘Every good citizen,’ maintained Lucas, ‘must always be a candidate for every office you can confer on him from the lowest in the city, to the highest in the state’, just as no MP ‘can, without a breach of his duty, and the trust reposed in him, absent himself a single day from parliament’.47 Conservatives were quick to pounce on the inescapable social implications of these nostrums, accusing Lucas of agitating ‘tinkers, cobblers and drug-vendors’ and of stirring up the ‘giddy unthinking mob’, who ‘are anciently and naturally levellers’.48 They also mocked the effrontery of a mere apothecary standing for parliament. His candidature, they argued, flouted a social hierarchy sanctioned by providence. As a poor man his vote was more likely to be up for sale than that of his ‘superiors’.49 The apothecary responded with vigour. Ritually conceding that ‘subordination is, to be sure, necessary to society’, he insisted, none the less, that a trading city ought to be represented by a tradesman; hinted that MPs should be paid, and proposed merit as the best qualification for office. ‘The blacksmith, carpenter [or] weaver’, if he displayed the ‘integrity and capacity’ to ‘fulfil his duties’ deserves the citizens’ votes ‘though he had the very morning of his election, come out of his forge, his shop, or his workhouse’. Lucas did not apologise for his humble status; he revelled in it. ‘It is my utmost pride,’ he trumpeted, ‘that I am a tradesman and citizen of Dublin … in this despised class my pride would place me, if my fortune had not.’50 What is more, virtue tended to concentrate among the lower class of men, whereas wealth, luxury, corruption and power are so intimately connected that those who write in the public interest and against ‘folly, or vice, must attack men of rank and station’.51 In politics the form, or style, of attack is as important as the content. ‘Graceless, verbose, and wearying’ is a rather typical judgement of Lucas’s prose.52 Certainly it is repetitious and abrasive. More than once he acknowledged hasty composition and defects of diction, pleading the pressure of events and lack of formal education.53 Nevertheless the medium is part of the political message. Lucas set out to ‘state plain, certain facts, in artless truth and simplicity’. The acts of writing, publishing and reading can be democratic – or levelling – gestures.54 Lucas thought of himself as a patriot and a Whig, and not as a republican or nationalist (a word unknown to the mid-eighteenth century). Yet next to his alleged demagoguery he stood most often accused of fomenting national discord between Ireland and Great Britain. He did, it is true, supply his accusers with plenty of ammunition, but the


charge is misleading. What sort of Irish ‘nationalist’ could adopt the pseudonym ‘Britannicus’?55 His views were framed by the British constitution. His commitments to defend liberty against arbitrary power (and popery), to government by the consent of the governed, to a free press and to free and regular elections, mirrored exactly those of English real whiggery. Not until the tenth of his 20 addresses to the Dublin freemen in 1748–9 did he turn to the matter of Ireland and Anglo-Irish relations. And when he did turn thereto he disclaimed any prejudice in favour of the ‘Irish’, being himself, by blood, entirely English.56 Lucas consistently denied any intention of creating ‘jealousies’ between the sister kingdoms, and repeatedly proclaimed his loyalty to the connection between them. He spoke for the ‘offspring’ of ‘our ancestors, brave free-born Britons’, and of the ‘mutual and reciprocal interest … the inseparable and invariable connection’ of ‘a people united, not only in blood and affinity, but in the same common prin ciples’.57 On one occasion he actually advocated a legislative union on the Anglo-Scottish model.58 Even assertions of Irish national rights had a British dimension. Liberty is indivisible. The decay of the Roman republic began in its ‘remote colonies’. Britain too had a selfish interest in the political well-being of its dominions and dependencies. If Irish liberties were snuffed out – and this reasoning would soon be applied to the American colonies – British liberties would surely follow. ‘England cannot weaken us, in any point, without weakening herself.’59 Conversely, the redress of national grievances would actually strengthen relations. ‘In order to make a perfect and inseparable union,’ he contended, ‘all foreign substances, that have made, or [are] introduced into, the disuniting wound, must be removed.’60 Lucas’s exposition of Ireland’s constitutional status recycled William Molyneux’s The Case of Ireland being bound by acts of parliament in England, stated, first published in 1698, and republished at the height of the by-election campaigns in 1749.61 According to the Molyneux thesis Ireland had never been conquered and had thus never been an English colony or province. Rather the princes, prelates and people of Ireland had entered into a voluntary ‘compact’ with Henry II, pledging obedience in return for his protection, free parliaments and English common law. Ireland thereby became a kingdom, under the English Crown, but ‘free and independent … separate and distinct’ from the realm of England.62 The English parliament’s jurisdiction no more extended to the neighbouring island than it did to Scotland before 1707. Only within the preceding century, ‘not before’, and most flagrantly in the instance of the Woollen Act which Molyneux

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attacked, had the English parliament assumed ‘a superiority over the king and constitution of Ireland’.63 Sir Richard Cox’s reply to these propositions is remarkably frank. Molyneux’s Case, in his view, ‘hurried our [Ireland’s] fate … by bringing upon us very severe laws’. Fortunately, however, relations had since recovered due to the ‘wise submission’ of the Protestants of Ireland. Demands for ‘independency’ were both futile and dangerous. There was no point ‘in disputing a sovereignty which they [the English] are in possession of, and able to hold, and doubtless resolved to do so.’ Separation would result in ‘total ruin’.64 All this is familiar territory. Lucas struck out across new ground when he ventured onto the rough field of Irish history. In the tenth and especially the eleventh address he essayed what looks suspiciously like a Catholic-nationalist interpretation of Ireland’s troubled past. Claiming to find the task disagreeable because it exposed ‘the misconduct of our Mother-Nation, England’, his professed uneasiness – his ‘shame and grief’ at the story he told – did not muffle the rhetoric. ‘The Mexicans were never used worse by the barbarous Spaniards than the poor Irish were.’ They were ‘upon all occasions treated worse than any christian nation treats her own open enemies … worse than a good man could treat brutes.’ The fundamental injustice and political miscalculation of generations of English governors and judges lay in their refusing the native Irish admission to the benefits of the constitution and the English common law.65 It is hardly surprising that men designated by statute ‘Irish enemies of the crown’ should behave like outlaws – they were outlaws. It is not surprising either that they sometimes rebelled. They were ‘impelled to it’ by ‘oppression and tyranny’.66 The novelty of that analysis, as Cox realised, stemmed from its provenance more than its content. This attempt by a Protestant of Cromwellian stock effectively to appropriate a Gaelic and Catholic past had parallels in cultural life, and looked forward to the United Irish project, but in 1749 Cox could only splutter in amazement: ‘behold him sporting with the grievous persecution and massacres of your ancestors; justifying the internal barbarism of their Irish enemies and murderers; provoking and inciting the papists of this age to renew the bloody scenes of 1641.’67 The author of the Barbers Letters, it seems, had changed his mind. Until recently Lucas has fared poorly with the historians. There is, for instance, no biography. The reasons for this neglect can be traced to a canonical approach to the history of political thought. In the great relay race of ‘great thinkers’ Lucas is hobbled by serious handicaps. His


ideas have been characterised as derivative, eclectic and second-rate. Arguably such evaluations underestimate the quality, vitality and range of his writings, and overlook the strange and fertile conjunctions they sometimes throw up. More importantly, if the history of eighteenthcentury Irish political thought is conceived as the mapping of thickly contextualised political ‘languages’ – republicanism, for example – then the debates of the 1740s can be seen as a critical juncture – or, to coin a phrase, as a ‘Lucasian moment’.

Notes 1. Thomas Bartlett (ed.), The Life of Theobald Wolfe Tone (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1998), p. 490; John Gray, ‘A Tale of Two Newspapers: The Contest between the Belfast Newsletter and the Northern Star in the 1790s’, in John Gray and Wesley McCann (eds), An Uncommon Bookman, Essays in Memory of J.R.R. Adams (Belfast: The Linen Hall Library, 1996), p. 176; Neil Longley York, Neither Kingdom nor Nation: the Irish Quest for Constitutional Rights, 1698–1800 (Washington DC: Catholic University Press of America, 1994), p. 78. 2. Jacqueline Hill, From Patriots to Unionists, Dublin Civic Politics and Irish Protestant Patriotism, 1660–1840 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 84. 3. David Lodge, Small World (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985), pp. 51–2. 4. The following account of Lucas’s life draws on the Dictionary of National Biography; Hill, From Patriots to Unionists, pp. 83–111; C.D.A. Leighton, Catholicism in a Protestant Kingdom: A Study of the Irish Ancien Régime (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1993), pp. 77–83; Robert Munter, The History of Irish Newspapers, 1685–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), pp. 170–85; Sean Murphy, ‘Charles Lucas and the Dublin Election of 1748–1749’, Parliamentary History, 2 (1983), pp. 93–111; idem, ‘Charles Lucas, Catholicism and Nationalism’, Eighteenth Century Ireland, 8 (1993), pp. 83–102, and York, Neither Kingdom nor Nation, pp. 59–68. 5. This commitment to education is underlined by the fact that his son Henry – the son of a mere tradesman – won a scholarship to Trinity College. 6. Lucas, A Remonstrance against certain infringements on the rights and liberties of the commons and citizens of Dublin (Dublin, 1743), p. 37. 7. Maureen Wall, ‘The Catholics of the Towns and the Quarterage Dispute in Eighteenth-century Ireland’, in [Gerard O’Brien (ed.)], Catholic Ireland in the Eighteenth Century; Collected Essays of Maureen Wall (Dublin: Geography Publications, 1989), pp. 61–72. 8. See A.T.Q. Stewart, A Deeper Silence, the Hidden Roots of the United Irish Movement (London: Faber and Faber, 1993); and Ian McBride, Scripture Politics. Ulster Presbyterians and Irish Radicalism in the late Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 9. Murphy, ‘Charles Lucas: A Forgotten Patriot?’, History Ireland, 2 (1994), p. 26. 10. Joseph Trapp, Her Majesty’s prerogative in Ireland (London, 1712), p. 5; Divelina Libera (Dublin, 1744), p. 39; Hill, Patriots to Unionists, p. 101.

254 Jim Smyth 11. The Tickler, March 1748; ‘A New Ballad’ (Dublin, 1748), Cambridge University Library, Bradshaw Collection (hereafter – following Hill – CULBC) Hib.3.748.1/7. Verse vi of this satiric attack on Lucas warned: Thus Cromwell us’d liberty as a pretence, to stir up the people and murder his prince, but soon as with power they did him invest of charters and liberties made but a jest. 12. Bedford Correspondence, ii, pp. 399–404; Henry Grattan Jnr (ed.), Life of Henry Grattan, I (London: H. Colburn, 1839), pp. 75–6. 13. Paul Monod, Jacobitism and the English People 1688–1788 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); L.G. Mitchell, Charles James Fox (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), p. 73. 14. ‘Anthony Litten’ [Sir Richard Cox], The Cork Surgeon’s Antidote against the Dublin Apothecary’s Poyson, no. 1 (Dublin, 1749), 5, 17–18; Lucas, A letter to the citizens of Dublin (Dublin, 1749), p. 10; idem, The Political Constitutions of Great Britain and Ireland asserted and vindicated; the connection and common interest of both kingdoms demonstrated (London, 1751) [hereafter Pol.Con.], xxvi. 15. Lucas, An Address to the Freemen and Citizens of Dublin no. 5; Pol.Con., 40. 16. Trapp, Her Majesty’s prerogative in Ireland, p. 5; The Church Monitor no. 1, 27 October 1749; CULBC Hib.3.748.1/43. 17. Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century, Commonwealthman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959), p. 173. For an account of Dublin dissenters earlier in the eighteenth century, see Stewart’s chapter ‘Ministers of Grace’ in A Deeper Silence, pp. 102–12. 18. Lucas, Address no. 5; Pol.Con. 40; idem, A mirror for the Mock-Patriot, or the Cork-Surgeon displayed … (Dublin, 1749), p. 17. 19. Lucas, An address to the free electors of the city of Dublin (Dublin, 1761).CULBC. Hib.3.748.1/58. 20. J.C.D. Clark, English Society 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancien Régime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), especially ch. 5, pp. 277–348. 21. Lucas, Address no. 5; Pol.Con., 41. 22. Lucas, Magna Carta Libertatum, Civitatis Dublin (Dublin, 1749), pp. viii. 23. Leighton, Catholicism in a Protestant kingdom, p. 77; Murphy, ‘Forgotten Patriot’, p. 29. 24. Address no. 4; Pol.Con., 24. 25. Lucas sets out these views most explicitly in Addresses nos. 4 & 5 Pol. Con., 20–3, 32–4. 26. Address no. 9; Pol.Con., 106. 27. R.B. McDowell, Irish Public Opinion, 1750–1800 (London: Faber and Faber, 1944), p. 5. 28. Caroline Robbins describes Lucas as ‘a much less complex or original’ thinker than Swift: Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman, p. 153; Jacqueline Hill finds ‘nothing new’ in his ‘eclectic’ works: Patriots to Unionists, p. 89. 29. The phrase is Hill’s: Patriots to Unionists, p. 126. 30. As Neil Longley York has remarked, Lucas was ‘somewhat of a leveller’ and ‘stripped’ the arguments of Molyneux and others ‘of their moderate tone’: Neither Kingdom nor Nation, pp. 60, 63.

Republicanism before the United Irishmen 255 31. Hill, Patriots to Unionists, p. 376. 32. William Molyneux, The Case of Ireland being bound by acts of Parliament in England, stated (Dublin, 1698); Atwood and Ridpath feature in William Ferguson, ‘Imperial Crowns, A Neglected Facet of the Background to the Treaty of Union of 1707’, Scottish Historical Review, LIII (1974), 22–44. For the ancient constitution generally, see J.G.A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, a Study of English Political Thought in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), and for a different view, Glenn Burgess, The Politics of the Ancient Constitution, an Introduction to English Political Thought, 1603–1642 (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave, 1992). 33. For example, Divelina Libera, p. 37, Addresses nos. 4, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 14; Pol.Con., 24, 61, 83, 99, 119, 154, 334, The liberties and Customs of Dublin asserted and demonstrated, upon the principles of law, justice, and good policy: with a comparative view of the constitution of London and Dublin, and some considerations on the customs of intrusion and quarterage (2nd edn, Dublin, 1768), p. 59. 34. [Lucas], A letter to the Citizens of Dublin, p. 8, [Cox], The Cork Surgeon’s Antidote … no. 2 (Dublin, 1749), p. 10. 35. James Taylor, Lucas Detected (Dublin, 1749), p. 14. 36. Address no. 2; Pol.Con., 10. 37. Remonstrance, pp. 20–1. 38. Address, no. 17; Pol.Con., 265. 39. Leighton, Catholicism in a Protestant Kingdom, p. 81; J.T. Leerssen, ‘AngloIrish Patriotism and its European Context: Notes towards a Reassessment’, Eighteenth Century Ireland, 3 (1988), 7–24. 40. Magna Carta Libertatum Civitatis Dublin, vi; Divelina Libera, p. 77. 41. Divelina Libera, p. 70, Introduction & Address no. 1; Pol.Con., ix, 1. 42. Pol.Con., ix. 43. The Liberties and Customs of Dublin asserted and demonstrated, p. 7. 44. Andrew Fletcher, ‘An Account of a Conversation Concerning a Right Regulation of Government for the Common Good of Mankind’, in John Robertson (ed.), The Political Writings of Andrew Fletcher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 179, C. Randolph Benson, Thomas Jefferson as Social Scientist (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1971), pp. 99–101. 45. Remonstrance, 26; Address no. 4; Pol.Con., 23. For an alternative view of the role of the Court of Darein Hundred, see Taylor, Lucas Detected, p. 14. 46. Divelina Libera, 15, 87; Address no. 8; Censor, no. 12; Pol.Con., 89, 514. 47. Addresses nos. 1, 2 & 8; Pol.Con., 2, 6, 89. 48. The Tickler, no. 2; Taylor, Lucas Detected, 4; [Cox], A Letter from Mr Anthony Litten of Cork, to his friend in Dublin , CULBC Hib.3 748.1./28. 49. The Patriot no.1 CULBC Hib.3.748.1/3, L–s dissected, or an Alderman’s man in the Apothecary’s coat (1749). 50. Address no. 2; Censor, no. 12; Pol.Con., 7, 512–15. 51. Censor, no. 9; Pol.Con., 492. Italics added. 52. Munter, History of the Irish Newspaper, p. 177. 53. Introduction, Address no. 10; Pol.Con., iii–iv, 130; Divelina Libera, 84. 54. Divelina Libera, 8. For the political implications of prose style later in the eighteenth century, see Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language, 1791–1819 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).

256 Jim Smyth 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

Hill, Patriots to Unionists, p. 6. Address no. 11; Pol.Con., 132. Divelina Libera, 7, Introduction, Pol.Con., xiv–xv. An Appeal to the Commons and Citizens of London. By Charles Lucas the last free Citizen of Dublin (London, 1756), p. 8. Introduction, Address no. 10; Pol.Con., ix, xviii, 127; An Appeal to the Commons and Citizens of London, p. 8. Italics added. Censor, no. 9; Pol.Con., 496. Address no. 10; Pol.Con, 113–14. Dedication, Magna Carta Libertatum Civitatis Dublini, p. xi. Dedication, Magna Carta Libertatum, p. xxi; Address no. 10; Censor, no. 6; Pol.Con., 120–1, 478. Cox, The Cork-Surgeon’s Antidote, no. 2, pp. 7–8. Here Lucas drew on the theories of Sir John Davies. Address no. 11; Pol.Con., 132–7. Cork-Surgeon’s Antidote no. 1, 4.

11 Volunteer Thought: William Crawford of Strabane Norman Vance

Whatever might be said of political thought, political feeling in Ireland was running very high in and around 1782. This was the year the Volunteer Movement reached its peak of power and influence at its Dungannon Convention; it was also the year which inaugurated Grattan’s Parliament. A sense of violated rights had precipitated the successful armed revolt of the American colonists, some of whom were disaffected Irish, or of Irish descent, and the Volunteers, formed in response to domestic fears of invasion, had remembered that their country too had violated rights. Volunteering soon became a focus of patriotic pride and the Volunteers represented a stimulus to constitutional reform.1 Henry Flood summed up the Volunteer achievement for the benefit of a slightly uneasy Irish parliament, asking: ‘Who gave you the free trade? Who got you the free constitution? Who made you a nation? The Volunteers!2 Patriotic balladists such as Edward Lysaght naturally celebrated the Volunteers in the same breath as the ‘free constitution’, the achievement of parliamentary independence, forever linked with Grattan’s name: Oppos’d by hirelings sordid, he [Grattan] broke oppression’s chain, On statute-books recorded, his patriot acts remain; The equipoise his mind employs of Commons, King and Peers, The upright man who led the van of Irish Volunteers.3 But despite the rhetoric of freedom and deliverance there were sectarian tensions underlying this moment of patriotic excitement and restored national self-respect. These surface in the sharp humour of an anonymous ballad which compares the state of the nation in 1776 and 1783, noting the compulsive and compulsory democratic and liberal 257

258 Norman Vance

spirit of the day which extended towards rather than arose from the still beleaguered Catholic community, denied full constitutional rights by the law and according to traditional Protestant polemic also denied freedom of conscience by their priests. Thanks to the Volunteers and the renewal of national pride, the ballad claimed, older patterns of subservience had passed away, and by 1783 We could look at a king without much admiration, And a Lord we considered the scruff of the nation; That each member of Parliament was but our servant, And this was our creed most solemn and fervent. Derry down, etc. […] We made no distinction ‘twixt meeting or Mass, And every God’s creature was welcome to us; We wish’d freedom to mankind as well as ourselves, And judg’d all opponents mere priest-ridden slaves. Derry down, etc.4 The tensions between Protestant toleration, often seen (by Protestants) as the (theoretical) consequence of the Williamite victory in Ireland, and arguably ‘priest-ridden’ Catholic sentiment, and the overlapping and converging but at times conflicting traditions of patriotic political thought which gave rise to such tensions, can be inspected in the libertarian but still very Protestant writings of the scholarly Volunteer chaplain and Presbyterian minister Rev. Dr William Crawford of Strabane, particularly in his popular but now forgotten History of Ireland (1783). This book was published by subscription in Strabane, birthplace of the printer of the American Declaration of Independence. The numerous subscribers, from England, Scotland and America as well as Ireland, included the Volunteer Earl Lord Charlemont himself, Major James Lendrick of the Glorious Memory [of William III] Battalion and many other Volunteer commanders and chaplains, not to mention political patriots such as the Right Honourable Barry Yelverton. It was in effect a Volunteer History, singing the praises of William III, but loyal to the Williamite ideal of ‘civil and religious liberty’ rather than the actual Revolution settlement in Ireland. It stipulated in its opening paragraph that ‘Our best inheritance, our dearest rights have been violated’ and proceeded to trace the cause of Irish constitutional liberty through many centuries to the glorious present of the Dungannon Volunteer Convention of February 1782 and Grattan’s Parliament when ‘The Genius of Liberty has

Volunteer Thought: William Crawford of Strabane 259

dispersed the darkness that covered our political horizon, and opened to us the brightest prospects that can be presented to a free people.’5 Crawford, who had established a promising but ultimately unsuccessful dissenting academy in Strabane, was a liberal or ‘New Light’ Irish Presbyterian, concerned about the various disadvantages Presbyterians faced at the hands of an Anglican establishment, associated with other progressive Presbyterians such as Rev. Dr William Campbell of Armagh in attempts to promote higher education for Presbyterians in Ireland and to secure parliamentary support for an increase in the regium donum, a small royal grant which supported ministerial stipends.6 But in common with some of the more advanced ‘New Lights’ such as the poet and United Irishman William Drennan, son of a Presbyterian minister, his interest in public affairs went well beyond the particular concerns and civil disabilities of his own denomination. Some of these had already been addressed by the repeal of the Sacramental Test secured by the Protestant Dissenter Relief Act of 1780, and Crawford hardly mentions them in his History. He took his stand on the violated rights and liberties of the people of Ireland, not just his own people, so for Volunteer purposes at least the gradually diminishing dissenters’ quarrel with the Anglican establishment is laid to one side and the sense of oppression is extended to include Catholic grievances, notably the penal laws, which the Dungannon Convention had asked to be redressed. Drennan’s indignant Letters of an Irish Helot (1784) were addressed to his ‘Fellow Slaves’, the people of Ireland, and Crawford developed a similar rhetoric in his Volunteer sermon on The Nature and Happy Effects of Civil Liberty (1780). The Children of Israel had been enslaved in the land of Egypt and their liberation was commemorated by the institution of the Jubilee in Leviticus 25 : 10, which was his text. As Crawford pointed out, according to Leviticus the Jubilee, to be held every 50 years, restored lands which had had to be sold to the original owner and granted freedom to those who had been reduced to slavery by misfortune. This emancipationist rhetoric of Jubilee was later used to great effect by American slaves and their abolitionist friends before and during the American Civil War.7 Like Drennan, Crawford had much in common with the highly cultivated politicised ‘rational dissenters’ in England, notably the radical preacher and pioneer chemist Joseph Priestley.8 Crawford’s brother, the scientist Adair Crawford, was in fact well known to Priestley for his once-celebrated treatise on heat.9 Thanks partly to his brother, thanks partly perhaps to Charlemont, Crawford’s voice had already been

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heard in metropolitan circles: his urbanely moralising Remarks on the Late Earl of Chesterfield’s Letters to his Son (1776), cast in the form of dialogues between Eugenius and his mentor Constantius, garnished with tags from Juvenal and Horace, had been brought out in London by Adair Crawford’s publisher John Sewell, in conjunction with Gibbon’s publisher Cadell. Crawford’s translation from the Latin of the Discourses on Natural Theology of the Genevan theologian J.A. Turretine or Turretinus, published by subscription in Belfast (1777), included well-turned verse-translations of quotations from classical poets, and allusions in his own appended notes to the work of Milton and of Addison, one of Priestley’s models for the polished discourse of ‘Rational Dissent’. The subscribers for the translation, as for the History, included Scottish professors and Irish peers and parliamentarians. But the material in Crawford’s History was selected and shaped not just by the libertarian preoccupations of ‘New Light’ Presbyterianism and ‘Rational Dissent’ and the sense of a sophisticated and partly metropolitan audience, but by the Anglo-Irish economic patriot tradition, associated most notably with Jonathan Swift, which had long opposed the disadvantageous conditions of Irish trade imposed by British governments. Constitutional freedom was important because it could provide greater opportunities for economic freedom and prosperity. The History was also influenced by a quite separate patriotic tradition of gentlemanly Catholic antiquarianism, Jacobite in origin, discreetly associated with the Catholic campaign to repeal the penal laws. This can be traced back to Roderic O’Flaherty’s Latin treatise Ogygia (1685), dedicated to James II and designed among other things to enhance the position of Ireland under a (Catholic) British monarchy by elaborating on existing accounts of the Irish descent of the Stuart kings. But it was particularly associated with the more recent work of Charles O’Conor of Balanagare, a founder of the Catholic Committee, editor of O’Flaherty’s Ogygia Vindicated, posthumously published in 1775, and author in his own right of Dissertations on the History of Ireland (1753, 2nd edition 1766). With this should be linked the work of O’Conor’s friend Dr Sylvester O’Halloran, author of an Introduction to the Study of the History and Antiquities of Ireland (1772). It is tempting to add to these three traditions of ‘rational dissent’, economic patriotism and Catholic antiquarianism the far-reaching republican tradition which has been identified or selected by J.G.A. Pocock and rather ponderously labelled ‘neo-Harringtonian civic humanism’.10 Through the Scottish republican theorist Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun this tradition has connections with the militia debates and an associated


episode of aroused national feeling in Scotland 80 or 90 years before the (at least superficially) similar Volunteer excitement in Ireland.11 Pocock himself has recently suggested that the Irish Volunteer Movement needs to be reassessed from this point of view, discreetly conjuring up the ghost of Fletcher of Saltoun at the Dungannon Convention which ‘seemed for a moment to presage the triumph of Fletcherian alternative politics’.12 But neither Crawford nor the Volunteers can be satisfactorily enlisted as neo-Harringtonians, which may raise some questions about the coherence of the alleged neo-Harringtonian tradition. Crawford’s commitment to the patriot cause of Irish commerce is at odds with the neo-Harringtonian perceived tension between (political) virtue and commerce and there is no actual evidence that the work of Fletcher of Saltoun was well known in Ireland at this time, even among Presbyterian ministers such as Crawford himself who had studied at the University of Glasgow. Crawford’s personal pantheon as a Whiggish dissenter and Irish patriot included the Whig republican heroes ( John) Hampden, (Algernon) Sidney and (Lord William) Russell, mentioned as a secular trinity in both of his published Volunteer sermons,13 as well as the economic patriot Viscount Molesworth, author of Considerations for Promoting Agriculture (1723), a republican theorist often claimed for the neo-Harringtonian camp. Molesworth receives extremely honourable mention in Crawford’s History as ‘One of the most strenuous assertors of liberty, and of [Williamite] revolution principles, in this country’ (History II, p. 264). But the presiding genius of Crawford’s political thought is neither Molesworth nor Harrington but William Molyneux and the European natural law tradition of Grotius, Pufendorf and Locke which lies behind Molyneux’s famous Case of Ireland being Bound by Acts of the Parliament in England Stated (1698), the Bible of the economic patriots. This treatise was originally written to make the case for Irish legislative independence in anticipation of a Woollen Act passed in 1699 by which the English parliament banned Irish woollen exports to any country except England. While modern economic historians argue that the economic damage and increase in smuggling resulting from this legislation have been considerably exaggerated, it is clear that for most of the eighteenth century the consequences were generally regarded as catastrophic. This popular belief interacted with periodic excitements about constitutional matters to keep Molyneux’s work before the public. It was much discussed and reprinted in Ireland in the eighteenth century as discussion of parliamentary independence intensified.14

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Crawford the New Light Presbyterian and Glasgow graduate would have had independent access to this natural law tradition in any case. As his notes to Turretinus make clear, he knew his Locke, and he had studied the work of the Glasgow professor Francis Hutcheson, himself an Irish Presbyterian whose son subscribed to the translation of Turretinus. Both Locke and Hutcheson invoked Pufendorf’s treatise On the Duty of Man and Citizen According to Natural Law (De Officio Hominis et Civis juxta Legem Naturalem) (1673). Pufendorf’s leading British commentator Gershom Carmichael had been Hutcheson’s predecessor in the Chair of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, and late in life Crawford himself examined ordination candidates in Moral Philosophy, which included as set books ‘Hutcheson’ and ‘Locke’, for the progressive Presbytery of Antrim. In the course of explaining and defending Turretinus’ anti-Hobbesian ‘moral realist’ position in the natural law debate, insisting that there are natural moral and social instincts in man prior to imposed ordinances, Crawford thought it best to invoke the moral intuitionism of ‘the celebrated Dr Hutcheson’.15 If Hutcheson, theorist of ‘the common rights of the community’,16 collaborated with the dissenting tradition of resented political disadvantage in supplying Crawford with a vocabulary of violated rights, Molyneux’s propagandist constitutional history provided him with his patriotic tone and offered specific guidance for the history of Irish parliaments from the reign of Henry II. Thomas Leland’s History of Ireland from the Invasion of Henry II (1773), the most ambitious attempt to date at a ‘philosophical’ or scientific history of Ireland,17 had explicitly taken issue with Molyneux’s central argument that Henry II recognised Ireland as a sister kingdom to England with parallel rather than subordinated rights of parliamentary discussion, and had quoted at length from a previously unpublished speech of 1613 by Sir John Davies to the effect that Ireland had been ‘unyted and annexed to the imperiall crowne of the realme of England’.18 Where Leland is cautious and sceptical, conceding only that Irish subjects felt they had had the right and privilege of debating national affairs from the time of their first settlement, Crawford unequivocally and explicitly follows Molyneux, insisting with him that Henry presented the Kingdom of Ireland with an authentic roll setting out a form or modus for holding parliaments (History I, p. 111). But Crawford goes back much earlier in time than Molyneux, and, unlike Leland who had prudently called a halt in 1690, he carries his narrative beyond the late seventeenth century when Molyneux had


written right down to 1782 and the Dungannon Volunteer Convention. To some extent the spirit of Molyneux stays with him all the way. Molyneux, like his friend Locke and like Viscount Molesworth, was interested in the alleged ancient or ‘Gothick’ constitution which had enshrined the constitutional liberties of the citizen imperilled by the actions of the Stuarts in the seventeenth century. For Molyneux perhaps only contemporary Poland, with its elective monarchy requiring the quasi-democratic consent of the political nation, preserved vestiges of this glorious liberal tradition. But Crawford, not content with frequent appeals to the constitutional freedoms allegedly underwritten by Magna Carta, boldly imputes a Whiggish, almost Polish, ancient constitution to pre-Christian Ireland, about which remarkably little is definitely known. The old seventeenth-century arguments about the legitimacy or otherwise of a standing army, which had been rehearsed during the Scottish militia debates and discussion of the Volunteers, suddenly acquire an unexpected precedent in Crawford’s narrative: ‘In early times, ever favourable to Liberty, the prince retained no soldiers; the number of fighting men, with which he was provided by his subjects as the occasion might require, was the sole force on which he relied’ (History I, p. 14). Seizing on the evidence of monarchical succession not by primogeniture but by various kinds of negotiated consent Crawford invests his country with an elective monarchy more or less on the Polish model. ‘The throne, and all the subordinate offices of state were elective … the will of the people was the source of power …’ Teuthal’s unsuccessful attempt to confine the succession to his own immediate family is represented as ‘inconsistent with Liberty, and a violation of the original form of the constitution’ (History I, p. 48). A largely druidical ‘senatorial order’ was instituted ‘to balance with an equal hand the power of the king and that of their constituents’. Crawford applies the same honorific Roman terminology to later Irish parliamentarians within a balanced constitution, for Grattan himself is dignified as ‘This faithful senator’ (History II, p. 367). Ancient Ireland was much troubled by disunity even in times of common danger, but this was blamed on the weakness of the great popular assembly, ‘unable to control the rage of contending chieftains … insensible to honor and the love of their country’ (History I, pp. 11, 23). The implication was that Volunteers and constitutional patriots and the issues they addressed went back a long way in Ireland. Much of the detail of all this comes from O’Conor’s Dissertations on the History of Ireland. Crawford generally follows O’Conor and the

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Catholic historians for early Ireland and its lost glories, sharing their influential view that the Danish or Viking depredations anticipated and could stand as a metaphor for a long tradition of (mainly English) cultural and political aggression against Ireland, ‘an example so disgraceful to a people that pretended to civilization and polished manners’ (History I, p. 4) But he changes the emphasis of his sources. O’Conor had had no great respect for the ‘ancient constitution’ and its associated liberties, perhaps because it was not apparent that modern enthusiasts for it had any particular interest in the liberties of Catholics such as himself, so unlike Crawford he avoids the language of elective monarchy and lays no particular stress on very early constitutional arrangements in Ireland which might or might not provide a suitable pattern for later centuries. There are, however, problems for Whiggish and Protestant-minded Irish historians if the ancient constitution appears too superior to all modern arrangements. If the pre-Christian or even pre-Reformation past appears too rosy this confuses the preferred narrative pattern of progressive enlightenment. On the one hand, Crawford the patriot was perfectly prepared to side with the Catholic patriots O’Flaherty and O’Conor in defending Ireland against Scottish aspersions that there was no writing in the country before St Patrick. With the help of surviving Ogham inscriptions the anciently famous land of saints and scholars is given a preChristian pre-history of literate civility. Though modern linguistic scholarship discriminates much more severely than Crawford’s contemporaries were able to between late forgeries and genuinely ancient Ogham inscriptions, the preponderance of very simple non-Christian inscriptions among the earliest of those now held to be genuine, dating probably from the fourth and fifth centuries, suggests that the Catholic antiquarians were, roughly speaking, correct, in that Ogham seems to have preceded rather than followed Christian settlement. On the other hand, Crawford the Presbyterian clergyman and rational dissenter needed to believe that Christianity, particularly Protestant Christianity, made a difference. Early Christianity in Ireland stood in considerable need of enlightenment: the first missionaries, ‘blinded by superstition’, simply burnt ‘all the monuments of druidical learning they met with’ (History I, p. 4). Crawford permits himself some scepticism about the degree of enlightenment that could be attributed to the ancient learning of Ireland. Some of this was historical and genealogical. Where it suited him, Crawford himself could be as credulous as any, confidently reaching back in time far earlier than was safe or


prudent, so it would be inaccurate to claim that he was a critical historian in the modern sense, but this did not stop him from affecting an enlightenment rhetoric of penetrating the darkness of unreliable ancient sources unscientifically mishandled by others: ‘As the historian descends darkness gradually disappears. The light begins to dawn …’ (History I, p. 3). The Irish learning celebrated at the court of Charlemagne was philosophical, but Crawford remembers that it would have been merely ‘scholastic philosophy’, the learned lumber which accumulated throughout the middle ages until its authority was triumphantly overthrown by John Calvin and John Knox. Yet Crawford occasionally feels the need to complicate simple Whiggish teleologies. In so far as historical development, if not progress, might involve gradually increasing Roman influence in the Irish church, there might be something to be said for more ancient ways after all. He described the papal reorganisation of the Irish Church at the Council of Kells in 1152 as subjecting the Church to ‘the usurped power of a foreign dominion’, and he praised those who in opposing it ‘contended with spirit in support of their ancient constitution’ (History I, p. 91). This is not simple unreconstructed Protestant prejudice, though it looks rather like it. At this point, as in his subsequent discussion of James II in Ireland where Crawford argues that the absolute power over conscience claimed by the Papacy tends to weaken the principle of civil liberty (History II, p. 221), he in effect distinguishes between personal devotion and public authority, the religious and the political nature of the Roman Church. To some extent this is in line with the stance of Irish Catholic apologists of the time such as Charles O’Conor who for partly tactical reasons were not themselves particularly sympathetic to Ultramontane claims or the political exercise of papal authority.19 It is also in line with the thinking of Viscount Molesworth, who argued that popery represented a special case of religion conniving tyrannically with an aggressive civil authority to the detriment of liberty: ‘It is not popery as such but the doctrine of a blind obedience, in what religion soever it be found, that is the destruction of the liberty and consequently of all the happiness of any nation.’20 Crawford was honest enough to be prepared to apply this lesson across the board. Protestant-inspired state intolerance of Catholic public worship in Ireland under Charles I attracts his fair-minded censure (History II, p. 6), as does what he sees as anti-Catholic distortion and misrepresentation by Sir John Temple and others of the alleged atrocities of the 1641 rebellion (History II, p. 45). It was this particular still-inflammatory

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issue that O’Conor and his Catholic friends had hoped Leland would address in his History, only to be disappointed. Crawford was prepared to be more generous, if not always more philosophical, than Leland. This irenical spirit has direct connections with Crawford’s ‘New Light’ Presbyterianism. In politics as in theology he believed with Turretinus in the principles of free will and natural equality under God, irrespective of confessional discipline. The Glasgow curriculum he had followed had brought him into contact with Grotius and Pufendorf who had laboured to transcend the ravages of continental wars of religion and construct a modern national and international polity which could accommodate religious difference. Even in Calvin’s Geneva there were attempts to heal at least some of the divisions stemming from the Reformation. Doctrinal tests such as the Genevan Consensus, the Presbyterian Westminster Confession of Faith or even the Anglican Thirty-nine Articles tended to strain liberal consciences and emphasise and stimulate such divisions. Johannes Alphonsus Turretinus, son and grandson of Genevan theologians, was prominent in the campaign against the Genevan Consensus as a test for ministers, abandoned in 1734, and in consequence was enrolled in the ranks of dissenting champions in Britain.21 ‘New Light’ Irish Presbyterians constantly worried about the requirement of their own denomination to subscribe to the Westminster Confession of Faith, and this may have been why Crawford was originally attracted to Turretinus. It may also have helped that Turretinus greatly admired William III and published a Latin panegyric on him in 1702. But Turretinus also tried to promote Christian unity by outlining a minimalist theology to which he hoped all Protestants at least could give their assent.22 Crawford translated some of Turretinus’ work under the titles Dissertations on Natural Theology (Belfast, 1777) and Dissertations on Revealed Religion (Belfast, 1778) and tried without success to interest subscribers in a third volume which would include the Panegyric on William III, Turretinus’ proposal for the ‘composing of disagreements subsisting among Protestants’ and a Prayer for the Peace of Europe.23 The example of Grotius and Turretinus may have made it easier for Crawford the dissenter to stay in charity with the mainly Anglican economic patriots. Though Dean Swift had defended the Test Acts, Crawford observes he had also, nobly, attacked abuses such as Wood’s Halfpence, ‘an infamous job’ (History II, p. 286). Charles Lucas, ‘the incorruptible Lucas’ (History II, p. 303), comes in for his full share of praise for his struggle for citizens’ rights and constitutional liberties in relation to the choice of Dublin magistrates. Popular grievances and


disturbances in Ulster which precipitated emigration to America could be blamed on repressive Anglican landlords but Crawford blames the landlords rather than their Anglicanism. Anglicans and Presbyterians alike had combined to form the Volunteers, ‘the pride and the ornaments of our country, who have rescued it from bondage and disgrace, whose virtues the historian will transmit with merited esteem and veneration to posterity’ (History II, p. 340). Sadly, historians have had little encouragement to linger on the virtues of the Volunteers because by 1798 it was tragically apparent that the constitutional promise of 1782 was not enough. Some Volunteers became United Irishmen and rose in arms, some joined the troops which fought against them. Though one of his brothers became a United Irishman, and Rev. Dr William Steel Dickson who had subscribed to both the Turretinus translations and the Volunteer History was arrested and imprisoned (1798–1802) for his activities as a United Irishman, Crawford was unhappy with this development. There is some evidence that his congregation in Strabane was more sympathetic than he was to the United Irishmen since his successor in that pulpit had been involved with their activities. This, as well as family circumstances, may have prompted his reluctant move to the distant and much poorer congregation of Holywood.24 He died on 4 January 1800 without encountering an answer to his heartfelt prayer that Omnipotent Providence should ‘establish and preserve to us the blessings of peace and liberty and transmit them to the latest posterity’ (History II, p. 385).

Notes 1. For the events of 1782, with background, see R.B. McDowell, ‘Colonial Nationalism and the Winning of Parliamentary Independence, 1760–82’, in Eighteenth-Century Ireland 1691–1800, T.W. Moody and W.E. Vaughan (eds.), A New History of Ireland IV (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 196–235; and R.B. McDowell, Irish Public Opinion, 1750–1800 (London, Faber, 1944) is still invaluable. I am particularly indebted to Ian McBride and Brian Young for scholarly advice and help with aspects of this discussion. 2. Henry Flood, Speech in the Irish Parliament reprinted in C.A. Read (ed.), The Cabinet of Irish Literature, 4 vols (New York: P. Murphy, 1903), II, p. 6. 3. Edward Lysaght, ‘To Henry Grattan’, in The Cabinet of Irish Literature II, p. 89. 4. ‘Ireland’s Glory, or a Comparative View of Ireland, in the Years 1776 and 1783’ (Newry [c. 1783]), quoted in G.-D. Zimmermann, Irish Political Street Ballads and Rebel Songs 1780–1900 (Geneva: La Sirène, 1966), p. 123. 5. William Crawford, A History of Ireland from the Earliest Period to the Present Time, 2 vols (Strabane: John Bellew, 1783), I, pp. 1, 2.

268 Norman Vance 6. For Crawford’s discussions with his local MP Colonel James Stewart of Killymoon on the regium donum issue, see the Campbell MSS in the Presbyterian Historical Society of Ireland, Belfast: Crawford to Campbell, 23 September 1783 and 24 October 1783. Stewart for his part had always found Crawford ‘a very sensible man’ (Stewart to Charlemont, 2 August 1781, Public Record Office of Northern Ireland D.3167/1/2). For a recent discussion of ‘New Light’ issues in Irish Presbyterianism, see R. Finlay Holmes, ‘The Reverend John Abernethy: the Challenge of New Light Theology to Traditional Irish Presbyterian Calvinism’, in Kevin Herlihy (ed.), The Religion of Irish Dissent 1650–1800 (Blackrock, Co Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1996), pp. 100–11. 7. See, for example, the chorus of Henry Clay Work’s famous song, ‘Marching through Georgia’, ‘Hurrah! hurrah! we bring the Jubilee!’ and D.W. Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1989), esp. p. [vii], quoting Douglass: ‘We want … to record the death and burial of slavery, and to sing the glad song of jubilee to the sable millions.’ 8. For ‘Rational Dissent’, see Knud Haakonssen (ed.), Enlightenment and Religion. Rational Dissent in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 9. For Adair Crawford, and for William Crawford, see Dictionary of National Biography. 10. See, for instance, J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment. Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), esp. p. 507. 11. The standard account is John Robertson, The Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1985). 12. J.G.A. Pocock, ‘Empire, Revolution and the End of Early Modernity’, in J.G.A. Pocock (ed.), The Varieties of British Political Thought, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 289f. 13. William Crawford, The Connection between Courage and the Moral Virtues Considered in a Sermon Preached before the Volunteer Company of the Strabane Rangers (Strabane: James Blyth, 1779), p. 17; The Nature and Happy Effects of Civil Liberty Considered in a Sermon Preached before … the Strabane Volunteers (Strabane: James Blyth, 1780), p. 26. 14. For the economic background and its historiography, see L.M. Cullen, ‘Economic Developments, 1691–1750’, in T.W. Moody and W.E. Vaughan (eds.), Eighteenth-Century Ireland, pp. 123–40. There were new editions of Molyneux, variously published in Dublin, Belfast and London, in 1719, 1720, 1725, 1749, 1770, 1773, 1776, 1777 and 1782. 15. For details of these ordination examinations, which were intellectually demanding, see the unpublished Records of the Presbytery of Antrim, vol. 2 (1783–1817), Public Record Office of Northern Ireland T.1053/1, pp. 26, 60. Hutcheson is invoked in John Alphonso Turretine, Dissertations on Natural Theology, tr. William Crawford (Belfast: James Magee [printer], 1777), Dissertation VIII ‘Of the Laws of Nature’, p. 279n. 16. Francis Hutcheson, A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy (Glasgow, 1747), pp. 303f, 310.

Volunteer Thought: William Crawford of Strabane 269 17. See W.D. Love, ‘Charles O’Conor of Belanagare and Thomas Leland’s “Philosophical” History of Ireland’, Irish Historical Studies, 13 (March 1962), pp. 1–25. 18. Thomas Leland, The History of Ireland from the Invasion of Henry II, 3 vols (Dublin: R. Moncrieffe, 1773), II, pp. 491, 507. 19. See R.B. McDowell, Irish Public Opinion 1750–1800, p. 16f, citing the anonymous Catholic pamphlet Historical Remarks on the Pope’s Temporal and Deposing Power (1778). 20. An Account of Denmark (1694), p. 258f, quoted by Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 98n. 21. Turretinus’ previously unpublished speech against the Consensus is translated in the English Dissenter Samuel Chandler’s The Case of Subscription … Review’d (London: J. Noon, etc., 1748). 22. Towards the end of his life, in 1798, Crawford left Strabane for the Presbyterian church in Holywood, Co. Down, associated with the Presbytery of Antrim which did not require any form of subscription to the Westminster Confession of Faith. See Turretinus’ Nubes Testium pro moderato et pacifico de rebus theologicis judicio (1719), translated (1720) as A Discourse concerning fundamental articles in religion. In which a method is laid down for the more effectual uniting of Protestants and promoting more general toleration among them. 23. John Alphonso Turretine, Dissertations on Revealed Religion, tr. William Crawford (Belfast: James Magee [printer]), Preface. 24. See A. Albert Campbell, Notes on the Literary History of Strabane (Omagh: Tyrone Constitution Office, 1902), pp. 64–9. The annual stipend attached to the Strabane congregation in 1799 was estimated as some £105, among the top twelve congregations in the Synod of Ulster, while the Holywood stipend was only £36. See C. Vane, Memoirs and Correspondence of Viscount Castlereagh, 12 vols (London: Henry Colburn, 1849), II, pp. 165–71.

12 ‘A Perfect Liberty’: The Rise and Fall of the Irish Whigs, 1789–97 Nancy J. Curtin

Was early modern Ireland a kingdom or a colony? Ciaran Brady and Raymond Gillespie argue that it was a bit both: The relative strength of these images of Ireland as kingdom and colony varied among the different power groupings in the island, and over time. Neither held sway to the exclusion of the other, each rather coexisted in a delicate balance in the minds of political actors. The effect of each was at all times influenced by the presence of its rival, … and it was this interaction which made Irish society so distinctive.1 Certainly Ireland by the 1790s was just enough of a colony to generate colonial resistance, and just enough of a kingdom to render extremely problematic British ministerial control over its political structures.2 This ambivalence lay at the heart of political discourse in the decade before the Act of Union, itself a half-measure.3 The parliamentary union may have defined Ireland legally and constitutionally as a province within the newly imagined United Kingdom of 1801, yet the ambivalence of its colonial status was hardly definitively resolved, as pre-union political discourse was repeated over and over again. Three positions emerged to challenge the conundrum of Ireland’s ambiguous constitutional status. Loyalism maintained that property was best secured through Protestant ascendancy and subordination to the British connection, even at the price of liberty. The United Irishmen, concluding that the Irish legislature could never be independent whilst the connection with Britain persisted, brooked no compromise with Irish liberty and espoused republican separatism. The Irish Whigs sought to have it both ways – the best security for both the 270

The Rise and Fall of the Irish Whigs 271

liberty and the property of the nation was an independent Irish legislature attached through ties of affinity and affection to Britain. Irish Whiggism was thus an ideology in denial, an anti-colonial discourse that refused to acknowledge Ireland’s colonial situation. Irish political leaders such as Daniel O’Connell, Charles Stewart Parnell and Arthur Griffith embraced the via media of Irish Whigs as promising the substance of Irish independence within a shared AngloIrish constitutional tradition, and through the nineteenth century historians such as Lecky saw Henry Grattan and his party as the last best hope to avert the political, cultural and religious polarisation of Ireland.4 ‘It would have been happy if the conduct of the reform question had rested in hands that were at once so responsible and so moderate.’5 Grattan would, no doubt, have been gratified that posterity shared his analysis of his own heroic position, acknowledging the moral triumph of his own failure, in the 1790s. Defending himself in 1800 against the taunt of having fomented treason, Grattan maintained: On the one side was the camp of the rebel; on the other, the camp of the minister, a greater traitor than the rebel. The strong hold of the constitution was nowhere to be found. … Two desperate parties were in arms against the constitution. … the treason of the minister against the liberties of the people was infinitely worse than the rebellion of the people against the minister.6 In the middle were the Whigs, the constitution’s true defenders, who alone possessed the formula that would have set Ireland on a course of cordial union with Great Britain combined with liberal constitutional independence, but the polarising context of a revolutionary decade did them in. In a sense, then, the Whigs were appealing visionaries of the centre who confronted the intractable problem that in troubled times the centre will not hold. Sometimes the centre will not hold because the extremes have appropriated the best of its arguments. Thus the Whigs and the United Irishmen shared the same rhetorical assault on the system of corruption and patronage which reduced the Irish parliament to the sham of independence. Both agreed that the influence of British ministers was the bane of Ireland and thwarted the nation’s self-development. But the Whigs retreated from the hard logic of this analysis to their middle ground, while the United Irishmen forged ahead in embracing the radical cure of republicanism. ‘By them,’ an attendee at a United Irish meeting in November 1791 predicted, ‘I am pretty certain the whigs

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must fall.’7 Where the United Irishmen offered a detailed programme of full civic inclusion, the Whigs tended to offer fine speeches. Similarly, the Whigs shared with loyalists the belief that Ireland’s best interests were served in concert with Great Britain: that in the war with revolutionary France it was, in Grattan’s oft-quoted words, in Ireland’s interest and duty, ‘with a fixed, steady, and unalterable resolution to stand or fall with Great Britain’. The words preceding this assertion, however, indicate where Grattan and the Whigs departed company from the loyalists: I have ever had, and shall ever continue to have but one opinion, – that Ireland should improve her Constitution, correct its abuses, and assimilate it as nearly as possible to that of Great Britain; that whenever Administration should attempt to act unconstitutionally; but above all, whenever they should tamper with the independence of the Parliament, they ought to be checked by all the means that the Constitution justifies.8 Assimilation, then, meant in Grattan’s mind the adoption of responsible parliamentary government. For his opponents like the Lord Chancellor, John Fitzgibbon, Earl of Clare, it meant extinguishing the Irish parliament and all the messy constitutional ambiguity it represented. Emerging from a Patriot tradition which emphasised the rights of the Irish parliament, the newly inaugurated Whig Club set up a formal party status in the immediate aftermath of the Regency crisis in 1789.9 The founding principles of the club asserted ‘that the great object of this Society, is the Constitution of the Realm, as settled by the Revolution in Great Britain and Ireland in 1688 – and re-established in Ireland in 1782’.10 The excesses of the Buckingham administration in purchasing on a lavish scale parliamentary majorities threatened this constitution. ‘We apprehend these proceedings and principles avow a design to govern this Country unconstitutionally, and must, if successful, render the Minister absolute in the Parliament of Ireland, by Corruption.’11 But lest such a stand against the ministry raise concerns to the contrary, the Whigs affirmed ‘that we will ever maintain as sacred and indissoluble our connection with Great Britain, being in our opinion indispensably necessary for the freedom of this kingdom in particular, and for the freedom, strength and prosperity of the Empire in general.’12 The starting point for the Whigs was the Revolution of 1688, which they interpreted as submitting monarchical government to the


scrutiny and judgement of the legislature. A common crown provided the genetic link between the sister kingdoms, but Irish Whigs maintained that ‘the Irish crown is annexed to, but not merged in, the crown of Great Britain’.13 The true connection, they insisted, was a common constitution. The rise in the status of parliament on both sides of the Irish Sea and cabinet government in Britain confused this simple two kingdoms, one crown theory so beloved of Irish patriots. Ministers represented the monarchy, responsible for but not yet to parliament. Whigs who challenged ministerial corruption were obliged to comprehend in their charges the crown which employed them, and so Grattan and his friends rehearsed the familiar arguments against Stuart absolutism in their attack on state venality. ‘An attempt on the part of the executive power to corrupt the legislature, is a breach of trust, which, if carried into system, is one of the causes of a dissolution of the government.’14 Certainly, Ireland was no ‘mixed monarchy, with parts happily tempered, and so forth, the cant of grave and superannuated addresses; but a rank, and vile, and simple, and absolute government, rendered so by means that make every part of it vicious and abominable, – the executive who devours the whole, and the other two parts which are this extinguished.’15 Cordial union between Britain and Ireland, John Philpot Curran maintained, must rest on constitutional parity. In an argument seething with anti-colonial indignation, he warned the Irish people that England is marked by a natural avarice of freedom, which she is studious to engross and accumulate, but most unwilling to impart; … If it require additional confirmation, I should state the case of the invaded American, and the subjugated Indian, to prove that the policy of England has ever been, to govern her connexions more as colonies than as allies; and it must be owing to the great spirit indeed of Ireland, if she shall continue free.16 In a pamphlet of 1795, Curran went even further, comparing the current government of Ireland to Stuart absolutism: At the worst period of the reign of James II that people possessed a perfect freedom, compared with the present actual state of Ireland, and its government; yet it is her boast to have appealed to heaven against the tyrant, and to have vindicated her rights even at the hazard of war and revolution. I would ask that generous people then, upon what principle it is that they can wish for the captivity

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of Ireland? Or is it in Britons only that the love of freedom is a virtue?17 An appeal to heaven of sorts had been made successfully in 1782 with the achievement of at least nominal legislative independence. But by the 1790s it became clear that the freedom acquired by the Patriots and Volunteers in the previous decade had required the strengthening of the Irish executive and the corollary weakening of the legislature, underscoring Ireland’s anomalous kingdom/colony status. Lord Clare blamed all the convulsions of 1798 on the Whigs: ‘But I state with perfect confidence that the seditious and treasonable conspiracies which have brought this country to the verge of ruin, are the natural offspring of the adjustment of 1782.’18 Grattan countered Clare’s accusation with one of his own. The constitution of 1782 was, admittedly, an ‘experiment’, but one betrayed by British ministers who ‘took two methods to accomplish their crime, both of which, they proclaimed with much public immodesty, but without danger; a project to pack a Parliament and a project to abolish it’.19 Sir Laurence Parsons, in a speech which strongly influenced the United Irishmen, asserted: ‘it has been the object of English ministers ever since [1782] to countervail what we obtained at that period, and substitute a surreptitious and clandestine influence for the open power which the English Legislature was then obliged to relinquish.’20 Not surprisingly, republicans shared the Whigs’ analysis of the doleful aftermath of the pyrrhic victory of 1782, famously described by Theobald Wolfe Tone as ‘a revolution which enabled Irishmen to sell, at a much higher price, their honour, their integrity, and the interests of their country’.21 And yet having approached the brink of an amendatory appeal to heaven once the trust of government had been broken, the Whigs held back. Indeed, until 1793 their only prescriptions for ‘completing the constitution’ were the tepid measures of place, pension and responsibility bills, all designed to make an Irish executive accountable to the legislature.22 Once these incremental reforms were secured, the Whigs had to address the central questions now placed before both parliament and public – war, reform and the future of the Protestant ascendancy in Ireland. Linking these questions together was Ireland’s anomalous constitutional relationship to Britain. From the ministerial point of view the war with France underscored Ireland’s strategic importance to Britain, and the ties of Ireland to Britain needed to be strengthened. The bottom-line logic of Dublin Castle on the Catholic question was simple: ‘The connection between England and Ireland


rests absolutely upon the Protestant ascendancy. Abolish distinctions, and you create a Catholic superiority. If you are to maintain a Protestant ascendancy, it must be by substituting influence for numbers.’23 Thus the connection between the two kingdoms required, first, that the British ministry be able to control the Irish executive, and second, that the Irish executive be able to control the Irish legislature. Catholic emancipation or parliamentary reform, measures advanced as making the government more responsible to population, had to be resisted in order to retain ‘influence’ or executive management. ‘As long as Ireland remains under circumstances to be useful to England,’ the viceroy wrote to the Home Secretary in 1797, ‘my opinion is that she must be governed by an English party. … I am convinced it would be very dangerous to attempt to govern Ireland in a more popular manner than the present.’24 Dublin Castle could resort to executive influence to carry its agenda. The United Irishmen invoked the sovereignty of an aggressively mobilised people. The Whigs once again occupied the middle ground, inconsistently lurching between being the party of the people and the party of property in Ireland, the party of reform, but not too much reform. It was with considerable distaste that Whig grandees found themselves forced to stave off the alienation of popular support by the United Irishmen and adopt their own versions of parliamentary reform and Catholic emancipation. It was with even greater difficulty that they sought to square their loyalty to the British connection and their support for the war with continued opposition to his majesty’s ministers in Ireland. Unwilling to court the masses as the United Irishmen were doing, and equally unable to apply the mercenary and effective tactics of parliamentary management employed by Dublin Castle, the Whigs fell back on the only strategy left to them – rhetorical eloquence.25 Whig rhetoric certainly appealed to later generations of politicians and historians, but it seemed to leave their parliamentary audience cold. In 1791 the Whigs could count themselves as a party of 55, peaking at near 100 in 1793, and declining rapidly thereafter to a mere ‘seven wise men’, as a former comrade taunted them, in 1797.26 Yet it is that ineffective but rousing eloquence, an eloquence required by sheer powerlessness, which has assured Grattan and his party their revered corner in the liberal constitutional nationalist pantheon. The Whigs were clearly the party of the talented, with the impeccable probity of Grattan defining their moral authority. ‘On the one side, indeed,’ Valentine Lawless recalled, ‘was the noblest patriotism, backed by the most brilliant genius; on the other, the purse of the

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nation, and the power of the minister to open it to the servile partisan.’27 Sir Jonah Barrington expressed the greatest respect for Grattan and his friends, but chose to take his place in parliament behind the government bench, arguing that the ‘opposition had the advantage in point of ability, and therefore nothing but supreme talent had any chance amongst them of rendering its possessor useful or valued. … The supporters of the Irish government … were certainly inferior, except in patronage and power, to the opposition.’28 Even the admiring Lecky acknowledged that peerless rhetoric was of little avail, describing the Irish Commons as ‘a body which contained a group of statesmen who in ability, patriotism, and knowledge would have done honour to any legislature, but also a body in which eloquence and argument dashed uselessly and impotently against a great purchased majority.’29 Yet this rhetorical genius tended to mask the internal contradictions of Whig discourse from beguiled later generations, contradictions clearly apparent when the Whig positions on the central questions of war, emancipation, and reform are scrutinised. Grattan pledged the Whigs and Ireland to stand or fall with Britain, a sentiment he was later forced to qualify. By the time Earl Fitzwilliam arrived in Ireland in 1795, Grattan was still speaking warmly and unequivocally – this time as the unofficial leader of the government in the Commons – in denouncing anti-war sentiment within Ireland. ‘Her [France’s] liberty is death, and her state, bedlam, where the sceptre is broken into ten thousand scorpions, in the hands of ten thousand maniacs, scourging one another for offenses, that are only exceeded by the barbarity with which they are punished. … Such a revolution must be a war.’30 It was in Ireland’s interest, ideologically and politically, to support Britain which had to demonstrate gratitude. ‘The garden of empire is before her; but touch not the plant of Gallic growth, its fruit is death, though it is not the Tree of Knowledge.’31 By 1796, however, Fitzwilliam had been recalled, dashing Whig expectations of moderate reform and emancipation to unite Ireland in fraternal affection with Britain, and the administration was justifying a concerted policy of coercion as integral to its war strategy. It was then that the Whigs began to challenge a war which was beginning to go quite badly, and which sanctioned further assaults on constitutional liberties. ‘I confess I am of the number of those who originally agreed to support the war,’ Curran declared to parliament in early 1797, but by passing coercive legislation and making the Irish people appear traitorous and rebellious, the government was virtually inviting the French to invade.32 Grattan was still ever ready to denounce French


principles, so his newly acquired opposition to the war was directed at its conduct in what he regarded as the incompetent hands of the King’s ministers: I supported the war, it is true; I now oppose the minister who cannot conduct the war; I oppose the ministry, who, giving up the alleged objects of the war, give no promising hopes of their capacity to conclude a peace with honour, because they proved themselves incompetent to conduct a war with success. I now oppose a ministry, who, in the course of the war, had obtained from Ireland unparalleled support, and who had requited that unparalleled support by unparalleled duplicity, and had neither given equality to her trade, nor emancipation to her Catholics, – two measures stipulated by our patriotism, and withheld by their perfidy.33 Grattan was still licking his wounds over Fitzwilliam’s maddening recall, which in demonstrating the subservience of the Irish executive to the British cabinet, exposed Ireland as merely a ‘monarchy of clerks’.34 This spurning of Ireland’s generous offer of support, the associated frustration that while Pitt’s ministry lasted there would be no moderation in Irish policy, and the diminishing ranks of his parliamentary supporters, provoked Grattan and his friends into assuming what Lecky has described as ‘a more violent and a more distinctly party character’.35 This raised hopes among erstwhile republicans like William Drennan that their erstwhile patriot leader might finally put himself at the head of a truly popular party in Ireland. ‘I think he wants to gain all the popularity for himself and his party at this critical time, for they are infallibly outed.’36 What prevented Grattan from assuming command of the popular party, however, was the Whigs’ vehement denunciation of those French principles so cherished by the republicans. After Fitzwilliam’s recall, Grattan, Curran and Ponsonby met United Irish and Catholic leaders in Dublin, attempting to woo them to the opposition’s ranks. The response was cool. Grattan warned them that ‘the French would merely treat Ireland in a manner most calculated to weaken England; that they would halloo the lower class against the higher, and make the whole country a scene of massacre; that in a year or two, it would be given up by the French again to Great Britain, and that the convulsion would be the ruin of the country.’37 The Whigs detested the French, but they equally detested the Irish administration. ‘What is the Jacobinical system?’ Grattan asked his colegislators during the debate on the disarming of Ulster in March 1797.

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‘It is contempt for human rights, and a violent encroachment on the laws. What has been our system of coercion, but a violent contempt of the rights and franchises of our fellow-subjects, and a violent outrage on the laws.’38 Unable to support political measures to uproot internal sedition, the Whigs were equally uneasy in championing the cause of the seditious. Necessity – indeed, their own survival as a force in Irish politics – forced them to embrace Catholic emancipation and parliamentary reform, and for many Whigs, it was through gritted teeth: Mr. Ponsonby, in declaring that nothing can save the country but a complete, real and just Reform in Parliament, with a complete emancipation of the Catholics, has, I think, with all his party, surrendered at discretion to the United Irishmen. … The word of the administration is – Emancipation is Separation, and Reform a Republic – and Toler told Ponsonby in the House that such a proposal at this crisis was little short of treason.39 Thus Drennan described the hardened positions of both the republicans and the loyalists, and the quick evaporation of the middle ground following Fitzwilliam’s departure. Grattan and Curran were early and warm supporters of Catholic emancipation, though the more socially exalted members of the Whig Club found the prospect of expanding the political nation to include Catholics distasteful. Catholic relief had not been included in the Whig agenda in the early 1790s until the British ministry thrust the question before the Irish parliament in 1792. ‘The Catholics hate the Whig Club,’ Drennan observed in 1791, and while Grattan and the Duke of Leinster were somewhat favourable, the Ponsonbys ‘were violently against them.’40 Charlemont warned that Catholic relief would threaten Protestant property.41 The Whiggish Duke of Richmond urged his sister, Lady Louisa Conolly, to persuade her husband Thomas that Catholic emancipation could lead only to Catholic ascendancy, and also that a union would be the best solution to resolve the ambiguity of the Anglo-Irish connection.42 Among Grattan’s more attractive qualities perhaps is his recognition that Irish legislative independence would forever be compromised by a Protestant exclusivity which permitted Britain to employ a divide-andrule strategy to affect such a union. In 1792 he justified his support for Catholic relief to his ultra-Protestant Dublin constituents on the ground that ‘the removal of all disabilities is necessary to make the Catholic a freeman, and the Protestant a people’.43 He mocked the very


notion of Protestant ascendancy in a dependent Ireland: ‘As the Protestant Parliament is now composed, that which you call the Protestant ascendancy is a name. We are governed by the ascendancy of the treasury.’ The ascendancy in elections was ‘a ministerial and an aristocratic ascendancy’.44 If Protestant ascendancy was to have any meaning, it would be expressed by an independent parliament able to guard the constitution and the liberties of the subject. Such an ascendancy would acquire strength only by bringing Catholics into the constitution. To those who claimed Catholic emancipation would endanger the British connection, Grattan countered that the empire itself would be strengthened by attaching the Catholics to the state, for if they failed, Catholics would be seduced by republicans.45 This support for the Catholics, however sincere on Grattan’s part, created something of a rhetorical dilemma for the Whigs. In advancing the Catholic question Whigs used the words ‘people’ and ‘nation’, arguing that Catholics must be comprehended in those terms if Ireland was to be governed properly. The United Irishmen argued that population should be the basis of representation: Catholic emancipation was a logical corollary of such a premise. But the Whigs could never argue a case on the basis of demographics without seriously qualifying it. It was Irish property which required representation, something which the ministerial oligarchy had subverted. Rehearsing in 1793 the familiar statistic that of over 300 MPs, two-thirds were chosen by 100 individuals, Grattan exposed the non-propertied basis of the current government: This oligarchy was as little the representative of property as of population. 200 of these members were returned by persons whose property did not average above 4,000 l. a-year; … They recovered in stipend from the Crown an income bearing a great proportion to their own property; so that they were an oligarchy taxing for their own provision, and representing nothing but their dependency.46 The security of the country required that men of property must assume their rights as well as their responsibilities, and it was to the country gentlemen of Ireland that Grattan appealed. Ministerial corruption exposes ‘the country gentleman’s shattered mask’ and diminishes ‘your natural superiority in your native land’.47 The distaste of Whigs for popular representation was no less glaring when they argued for parliamentary reform. Sir Jonah Barrington fairly summed up the Whigs’ ambivalent relation to the masses when he described the ‘incorruptible’ Grattan as a man who ‘worshipped

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popularity, yet there was a tinge of aristocracy in his devotion, which whilst it qualified its enthusiasm, still added to its purity’.48 Part of the overall Whig strategy to put some teeth into the constitution of 1782 was to convince the British ministry to replace its lackeys in Dublin Castle with safe men who had the confidence of the people. Whigs therefore cultivated the appearance of a popular party by seeking to attach Catholics, which they had succeeded in doing in 1795 until Fitzwilliam’s recall dashed all prospects of securing emancipation in parliament. After 1793 cultivation of a popular image also meant advocating parliamentary reform to stave off the advance of the radicals. Being Whigs, however, they presented a very limited measure of parliamentary reform for consideration by the Commons in 1793 – calling merely for an expansion of borough boundaries to include a hoped-for independent electorate. A fundamental difference between Whigs and radicals was that the former regarded the system of representation as essentially a good one, requiring only minor tinkering. The newly converted Whig borough-mongers, Ponsonby and Conolly, introduced the doomed proposal to enthusiastic encomiums by Grattan: Those are the gentlemen who ought to lead in this great question; the men who make the sacrifices, to them belongs the laurel; … They pledge it right; their natural situation in this country is so considerable that whatever sacrifices they make to the public weal, they must always occupy a prime condition, from their property, character, integrity, and talents.49 Tone was underwhelmed. ‘[The Whigs] are not sincere friends to the popular cause, they dread the people as much as the Castle does.’50 While denouncing the United Irishmen’s proposal for personal representation and their extraparliamentary exploits, Whigs nevertheless offered eloquent rhetorical support for the radical position. Curran claimed that the best defence against France was a reformed Ireland which would rally the people in loyalty, and implied a rejection of representation based on property. ‘What is the people? Is it the soil of Ireland, or the men who live upon it? I do not know of any moral or political quality that an acre of land can possess. And, therefore, for my part, I have no other idea of any country, with respect to its rights, than the aggregate of its inhabitants.’51 Such rhetoric would have found a home in United Irish pronouncements, but the Whigs clearly meant something far less than democracy when they advocated a popular government in Ireland. ‘Combat the


Spirit of Democracy by the Spirit of Liberty; the wild Spirit of Democratic Liberty by the Spirit of Organized Liberty such as may be found in a limited Monarchy, with a free Parliament,’ Grattan declared.52 His theory of parliamentary reform was thoroughly Whig. He abhorred the levelling principles of the French Revolution. Ireland was yet unfit for democracy because of social and religious divisions as well as the still perceived instability of the seventeenth-century property settlements. He advocated Catholic emancipation but believed in Protestant ascendancy, which he interpreted as placing the government of Ireland in the hands of its property and its intelligence. Places and pensions degraded the true elite in Ireland, weakening their moral authority: This plan [of the United Irishmen] of personal representation from a revolution of power would speedily lead to a revolution of property, and become a plan of plunder as well as a scene of confusion. For if you transfer the power of the State to those who have nothing in the country, they will afterwards transfer the property.53 But, as Curran argued, ‘the honest representation of the people is swallowed in the corruption and intrigue of a cabinet of another country.’ The solution, however, was not separation; ‘a monarchy, properly balanced by a fair representation of the people, gives a perfect liberty as the most celebrated republics of old.’54 But having defined a modest plan of reform that would, at best, have reinforced the authority of an honest ‘natural’ elite in Ireland, Whigs advanced it as the only means to secure their kingdom and constitution from both foreign and domestic subversion. It was here that the rhetoric designed to persuade came closest to rhetoric that inflamed. After Fitzwilliam’s recall the dwindling number of Whig politicians concentrated on dissuading the government and its ministerial backers in Britain from a campaign of counter-revolution. The opposition had all too many opportunities to take the floor and denounce one coercive measure after another. Calling on the Commons to repeal the Insurrection Act (only 15 members voted for the motion), George Ponsonby proclaimed that the system of coercion had failed and, worse, made Ireland even more vulnerable to a French invasion which a disaffected and persecuted people might support: The people of Ireland, but particularly the inhabitants of the North, were a high-spirited people. Than the inhabitants of the North there

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did not exist men of more intrepid minds, or of more inflexible resolution. Parliament in taking harsh measures against them, kindled the fire of their dispositions, and caused them to consider themselves, as pursuing the same course against arbitrary power, which has immortalized so many names in the English history. … Rely on it (says he) coercion will never do, to defend the country against the French, or your system against the people. You may hang some, you may transport others, and you may imprison more. But remember, that the purpose of the people of Ireland is to pursue liberty, and somehow or other they will accomplish it.55 Charles James Fox was attempting to drive the same point home to British ministers. The people of Ulster, he proclaimed, anticipating Conservative and Unionist politicians of a century later, ‘are indeed the old leaven, that rescued the country from the tyranny of Charles I. and James II. – they are of that leaven which asserted and defended the principles of liberty – they are of that leaven which fermented, which kneaded together the freedom of the British constitution. If these principles were carried to excess; it is an excess to which I am more partial than to the opposite extreme.’56 As early as 1790, Grattan had been denouncing the current system on the ground that it was rooted in Stuart tyranny, and as such was likely to provoke a just rebellion. The selling of offices was an impeachable offence that went back to the loathsome Stafford; and, like Stafford, the current administration was ‘in enemy to law’, and as such was destroying the very basis of legitimate authority in Ireland: It has attempted to poison the true sources both of legislation and of justice: and however the friends of that Administration may talk plausibly on the subject of public tranquillity, they are, in fact, the ringleaders of sedition placed in authority. Rank majorities may give a nation law, but rank majorities cannot give law authority.57 By 1797 his eloquence on the subject achieved new inflammatory heights. The borough system with its origins in Stuart absolutism was a ‘Court instrument, that murders freedom without the mark of blood, palls itself in the covering of the Constitution, and in her own colours, and in her name, plants the dagger, a Borough Parliament.’58 Loyalists were not far from the mark in accusing Whigs of inciting rebellion, whether from naivety or vanity. Charles Bushe placed his


colleagues in the best light by accusing the Whigs of being the dupes of the republicans: I am convinced that many of the Right. Hon. and Hon. Gentlemen are (what I hope they all are) the friends and advocates of a constitutional patriotism; but I am sure they are the dupes of Republican artifice, and that the men whom they act with out of doors, laugh at and deride the moderation of those measures, which they consider the mere introductory preliminaries of Democracy, while the Right Hon. and Hon. Gentlemen look to them as the ultima of Reform.59 The men within the doors of the Commons were equally derisive, and none more scathing than former Whigs themselves. John Egan tauntingly asked: ‘were all the gentlemen who constituted that House dupes and fools, except the Seven Wise Men who opposed every measure which tended to save the country?’60 Charlemont, responding to Haliday’s concerns about the decline of the opposition, was equally scathing: ‘shall [it] be deemed defection to follow the dictates of our own unbiased reason rather than implicitly to assent to the peevish and ill-timed motions of a few.’61 Even that champion of Irish Catholics, Sir Hercules Langrishe, opposed Grattan’s motion on Catholic emancipation in 1796 on the ground that raising the question at that time might be injurious to Catholics by implying that their loyalty was somehow conditional.62 The Whigs put on a brave face and dismissed with arrogantly smug virtue such abuse and criticism. ‘It is now become the common artifice of Ministers to decry the characters which they cannot purchase, and sink the reputation of those men who are too firm to bend to their measures.’63 Yet if Whig rhetoric had the unintentional consequence of seeming to sanction the resistance of the United Irishmen to the corrupt system of government that had been so eloquently dissected by the Whigs themselves, what else could Grattan and his friends do but bear witness? Lecky claimed that the country gentlemen were behind Grattan in calling for conciliation rather than coercion.64 Certainly hindsight might credit the Whigs with a more constructive policy for restoring tranquillity to Ireland. But a tranquillity based on the most tepid of reforms was hardly appealing to republicans. And even the most tepid reforms might jeopardise the anticipated union of the two kingdoms that Pitt and his supporters in Dublin and London considered the only answer to Ireland’s constitutional ambiguity.65 Rhetoric alone was unable either to harness the popular party behind more moderate

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constitutional aims, or to stay the harsh coercive hand of government. ‘The truth is,’ Charles James Fox wrote to Grattan in April 1797, ‘that without a change of ministry no good can be done, either with you or with us: – without it we cannot have peace: you cannot have reform; nor real independence.’66 Thus, for Irish Whigs, the realisation of real legislative independence and liberation from British ministerial tampering depended upon the introduction of a new crew of tampering British ministers. If Whigs were conscious of the irony involved, they failed to show it. They were aware, however, of their impotence. In the crowded month of May 1797, a secret committee of the Lords reported on the immensity of the internal security crisis confronting the state, the United Irishmen were proclaimed an illegal society by the Lord Lieutenant, the Foxite Whigs resigned in frustration from the British parliament, Ponsonby introduced a reform bill which was greeted by an overwhelming vote to adjourn, and the handful of Irish Whigs withdrew from the Commons.67 ‘The plan of peace, proposed by a Reform, is the only means that I and my friends can see left to us,’ Curran explained: It is certainly a time for decision, and not for half-measures. I agree that unanimity is indispensable. The house seems pretty nearly unanimous for force; I am sorry for it. I will retire from a scene where I can do no good – where I certainly would interrupt that unanimity. I cannot, however, go, without a parting entreaty, that gentlemen will reflect on the awful responsibility in which they stand to their country and to their conscience, before they set the example to the people of abandoning the constitution and the law, and resorting to the terrible expedient of force.68 Republicans interpreted this as a vindication of their root-and-branch strategy, as the Whigs seemingly abandoned ‘all hopes of reforming the constitution by the constitution’.69 Certainly Grattan, in explaining his resignation to his Dublin constituents, implied as much when he admitted that the United Irishmen might be the lesser of the two evils confronting Ireland. ‘So here there may be conspiracy, there may be republicanism, there may be a spirit of plunder mixing in the public cause; but it is a public cause; and let no man persuade you that it is not the cause of liberty on one side, and tyranny on the other.’70 Yet with typical ambivalence, it was precisely because they feared to sanction republican extremism that the Whigs withdrew. ‘The reason why we seceded was, that we did not approve of


the conduct of the United Men, and we could not approve of the conduct of the Government,’ Grattan explained 20 years later: We were afraid of encouraging the former by making speeches against the latter, and we thought it better in such a case, as we could support neither, to withdraw from both. … The object of the opposition was and should have been to prevent the victory of either party. … Our error was in not having seceded sooner; for the Opposition, I fear, encouraged the United Men by their speeches against the Government.71 It is a statement of abject defeat, for ‘Seven Wise Men’ could never hope to materially influence state policy. At best they might irritate and perhaps even embarrass an impregnable parliamentary majority, poor consolation for proud men. At worst they might inflame popular disaffection from the constitution and the British connection which the Whigs were sworn to defend. Having been squeezed from even that narrow middle ground, they left the field. But not entirely. Once again ambivalence defined Whig strategy. While choosing not to countenance sedition by denouncing the government in parliament, Grattan and his friends still hoped to reconcile republicans to the moderate Whig programme. They worked assiduously with William Sampson in preparing Lord Moira for his denunciation of coercive state policy in the Lords in both Britain and Ireland.72 In April 1798 the Whig Club issued a pamphlet, presented as a petition to the King to change his ministers. The current set had ‘aggravated, by a most unseemly and unbecoming intemperance of manner, and incontinence of language, lost the confidence of the country, and greatly agitated the same; they then proceeded to a system of coercion, to support their plans of corruption, and to dragoon the people, as they had bought the parliament.’73 In further seeking to temper what he regarded as the state’s trampling on the constitution and the liberties of the subject, Grattan even journeyed to Maidstone, along with many Foxite Whigs, to testify for Arthur O’Connor in his treason trial. It was a timely intervention for Grattan, for it removed him from Ireland when the rebellion broke out, and may have saved his life – or at least secured him from the humiliation of arrest for aiding and abetting the rebels.74 By October 1798 Drennan noted a number of signs of Grattan’s public fall from grace: ‘Grattan’s portrait was taken down the other day from the Examination Hall in the College. A street in Cork, called by his name, is changed to Duncan Street, and another street in

286 Nancy J. Curtin

this city is to be rebaptized in the same way to Nelson Street. Thus sinks the idol of ’82.’75 The idol of ’82 was, of course, to re-emerge as the idol of 1800 when Grattan returned to parliament to protest against the union of the two kingdoms, the prevention of which had been one of the enduring objects of the Whig Club: To impress on Great Britain the conviction, that as Ireland is necessary to her, so is complete and perfect liberty necessary to Ireland, and that both islands must be drawn much closer to a free Constitution, that they may be drawn closer to one another.76 The union threatened everything which the Whigs held dear – a true connection with Britain, Irish constitutional liberty, and the ascendancy of Irish property. Once again eloquent rhetoric failed to persuade but endured as testimony of that appealing and attractive liberal constitutional middle ground which would resolve Ireland’s colonial and constitutional ambiguity by denying it while asserting an equally ambiguous anti-colonial imperialism.

Notes 1. Ciaran Brady and Raymond Gillespie (eds), Natives and Newcomers: Essays on the Making of Irish Colonial Society, 1534–1641 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1986), p. 17. 2. James Kelly, Prelude to Union: Anglo-Irish Politics in the 1780s (Cork: Cork University Press, 1992). 3. Alan Ward, The Irish Constitutional Tradition: Responsible Government and Modern Ireland, 1782–1992 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1994), ch. 2. 4. See, e.g., W.E.H. Lecky, Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland, 2 vols. (Orig. Pub. 1861, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1903); for more recent assessments lamenting the failure of the Whigs to chart Ireland on a liberal constitutional course, see Edith Johnston, Great Britain and Ireland 1760–1800: A Study in Political Administration (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1963), p. 270; James Kelly, Henry Grattan, Historical Association of Ireland Life and Times Series, No. 1 (Dundalk: Dundalgan Press, 1993), p. 50; for an iconoclastic assessment of the Whig legacy, see Gerard O’Brien, ‘The Grattan Mystique’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 1 (1986): 177–94. 5. W.E.H. Lecky, A History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, 5 vols. (London: Longman, Green, 1898) iii, 5. 6. Thomas Davis, The Life of the Right Hon. J.P. Curran and a Memoir of the Life of the Right. Hon. Henry Grattan, by. D.O. Madden, of the Inner Temple. With addenda, and a letter in reply to Lord Clare (Dublin: James Duffy, 1846), p. 172.

The Rise and Fall of the Irish Whigs 287 7. Jerome Fitzpatrick to government, 20 Nov. 1791 (PRO, Home Office Papers Relating to Ireland, 100/24/25–7). 8. Henry Grattan, Jnr. (ed.), The Speeches of the Right Honourable Henry Grattan, in the Irish, and in the Imperial Parliament, 4 vols. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1822) iii, pp. 116–17. 9. Denis Kennedy, ‘The Irish Whigs, Administrative Reform, and Responsible Government, 1782–1800’, Eire-Ireland, (1973) pp. 61–3. 10. Resolutions and Declarations of the Whig Club (Dublin: n.p., 1789), p. 58. 11. Ibid., pp. 61–2. 12. Ibid., p. 60. 13. Grattan, Speeches ii, 329. 14. Ibid., p. 208. 15. Ibid., pp. 343–4. 16. The Speeches of the Right Honourable John Philpot Curran. Edited with Memoir and Historical Notices by Thomas Davis (3rd edn, orig. pub. 1845, Dublin: James Duffy, 1865), pp. 69–70. 17. John Philpot Curran, A Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke on the Present State of Ireland (Dublin: J. Chambers, 1795), p. 39. 18. John Fitzgibbon, Earl of Clare, The Speech of the Right Honourable John, Earl of Clare, Lord High Chancellor of Ireland, in the House of Lords of Ireland, on a Motion Made by Him on Monday, February 10, 1800 (Dublin: J. Milliken, 1800), pp. 72–3. 19. Henry Grattan, An Answer to a Pamphlet entitled the Speech of the Earl of Clare, on the Subject of a Legislative Union between Great Britain and Ireland (Dublin: J. Moore, 1800), p. 19. 20. Quoted in Lecky, Ireland, iii, p. 7. 21. Theobald Wolfe Tone, An Argument on Behalf of the Catholics of Ireland, in Life of Theobald Wolfe Tone. Memoirs, Journals and Political Writings, Compiled and Arranged by William T.W. Tone, 1826, ed. Thomas Bartlett (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1998), p. 281. 22. Kennedy, ‘Irish Whigs,’ pp. 63–7; for a more sceptical assessment of the Whig programme, see Gerard O’Brien, Anglo-Irish Politics in the Age of Grattan and Pitt (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1987), pp. 119–30. 23. Quoted in Lecky, Ireland, iii, p. 51. 24. Quoted in ibid., iv, p. 66. 25. For a discussion of Irish rhetoric in the eighteenth century, see Katherine O’Donnell, ‘Burke’s Irish Accent’ (PhD thesis, Cork, 1998). I wish especially to thank Dr. O’Donnell for her insights and our conversations on this topic. 26. Kennedy, ‘Irish Whigs,’ pp. 62, 69; Report of Debates in the House of Commons of Ireland, Session 1796–7, on the following important topics: Mr. Grattan’s Amendment on the Address to His Majesty on Opening the Session. – On the Attorney General’s Bill for Suspending the Habeas Corpus Act. – On Mr. Grattan’s Motion for Catholic Emancipation. – On Disarming the Province of Ulster. – And on Mr. Ponsonby’s Motion for a Repeal of the Insurrection Bill. To Which are Annexed, Debates in the British Parliament upon Mr. Fox’s Motion, Touching the State of Ireland (Dublin: H. Fitzpatrick, 1797), p. 156 [hereafter cited Debates 1796–7]. 27. Valentine Lord Cloncurry, Personal Recollections of the Life and Times, with extracts from the correspondence of Valentine Lord Cloncurry (Dublin: James McGlashan, 1849), p. 30.

288 Nancy J. Curtin 28. Sir Jonah Barrington, Personal Sketches of His Own Time, 2 vols. (3rd edn, London: George Routledge, 1869) i, p. 98. 29. Lecky, Ireland, iii, p. 337. 30. Grattan, Speeches, iii, p. 151. 31. Ibid., pp. 154–5. 32. Curran, Speeches, pp. 262–3. 33. Grattan, Speeches, iii, pp. 244–5. 34. Ibid., p. 181. 35. Lecky, Ireland, iv, p. 74. 36. William Drennan to Samuel McTier, 16 Mar. 1795 (The Drennan Letters, ed. D.A Chart [Belfast: HMSO, 1931], p. 225). 37. Quoted in Lecky, Ireland, iii, pp. 383–4. 38. Grattan, Speeches, iii, p. 304. 39. Drennan to Martha McTier, Feb. 1797 (Drennan Letters, p. 251). 40. Drennan to Samuel McTier, 3 July 1791 (ibid., p. 57). 41. Earl of Charlemont to Alexander Haliday, 15 Dec. 1791 (Manuscripts and Correspondence of James. First Earl of Charlemont, vol. ii [1784–1799] Historical Manuscripts Commission, 13th report, appendix, part viii [London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1894], pp. 181–5). 42. Quoted in Lecky, Ireland, iii, pp. 369–70. 43. Henry Grattan, Jnr., Memoirs of the Life and Times of the Rt. Hon. Henry Grattan, 5 vols. (London: Henry Colburn, 1841) iv, p. 61; for Dublin Corporation’s hostility to Catholic relief, see Jacqueline Hill, From Patriots to Unionists: Dublin Civic Politics and Irish Protestant Patriotism, 1660–1840 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). 44. Grattan, Speeches, ii, p. 369. 45. Ibid., p. 191. 46. Grattan, Memoirs, iv, p. 116. 47. Ibid., p. 30. . 48. Sir Jonah Barrington, The Rise and Fall of the Irish Nation (first pub. 1833, Dublin, James Duffy, 1843) p. 418. 49. Grattan, Speeches, iii, p. 18. 50. Quoted in Lecky, Ireland, iii, p. 16; for a discussion of Whig opportunism in embracing parliamentary reform, see Kelly, Grattan, 27–8. 51. Curran, Speeches, p. 150. 52. Henry Grattan, The Address of the Right Hon. Henry Grattan, to his constituents (the citizens of Dublin) on his retiring from the Parliament of Ireland (2nd edn, London, J.S. Jordan, 1797), p. 39. 53. Quoted in Lecky, Ireland, iii, pp. 17–18. 54. Curran, Speeches, p. 273. 55. Debates 1796–7, pp. 178–9. 56. Ibid., p. 220. 57. Grattan, Memoirs, iii, pp. 453–4. 58. Grattan, Address, p. 24. 59. Debates 1796–7, p. 198. 60. Ibid., p. 158. 61. Charlemont to Haliday, 1 Feb. 1797 (Charlemont Mss., p. 295). 62. Debates 1796–7, pp. 110–11. 63. Ibid., p. 113.

The Rise and Fall of the Irish Whigs 289 64. Lecky, Ireland, iv, pp. 26–7, 61–4. 65. Lecky claims that in November 1792 Pitt expressed his belief that only a union would settle Ireland (ibid., iii, p. 74). 66. Fox to Grattan, 7 Apr. 1797 (Grattan, Memoirs, iv, pp. 315–16). 67. For this chronology and the pamphlet controversy which surrounded it, see Robert Mahony, ‘The Pamphlet Campaign against Henry Grattan in 1797–99’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 2 (1987) 148–66. 68. Curran, Speeches, p. 275. 69. Drennan to Martha McTier. 1 Aug. 1797 (Drennan Letters, p. 260); Lawless claimed the Whig secession originated with The United Irishmen: ‘I was one of a deputation, with Lord Edward Fitzgerald and Arthur O’Connor, appointed to carry an address to Messrs. Grattan, Curran, and George Ponsonby, requesting them to discontinue the mischievous mockery of attending parliament – a request which was complied with’ (Cloncurry, Personal Recollections, p. 54). 70. Grattan, Address, p. 31. 71. Grattan, Memoirs, iv, pp. 345–6. 72. Drennan to Martha McTier, 8 Feb. 1798 (Drennan Letters, p. 267). 73. Petition of the Whig Club to the King; as transmitted to be presented by the Earl of Moira and Mr. Fox (Dublin: n.p., 1798), p. 7. 74. Kelly, Grattan, pp. 35–6. 75. Drennan to Martha McTier, 15 Oct. 1798 (Drennan Letters, pp. 279–80). 76. Grattan, Address, p. 23.

Index Abercorn, 1st Marquis of 133 Abercorn, 6th Earl of 133, 162 Abernethy, John 179 attacks on sacramental test (1731–33) 170, 180, 185 Religious Obedience Founded on Personal Persuasion (1719 sermon) 184, 185 absolutism 51, 231 confessional 55 and corruption 65 Acherley, Roger 246 Act of Union (1707) with Scotland 50 Act of Union (1801) with Ireland viii, 270 Addington, Henry, Viscount Sidmouth, Prime Minister 226 Addison, Joseph 196, 198 Adrian IV, Pope, grant of Ireland to Henry II (1155–6) 5, 6, 230 Agar, Charles, bishop of Cloyne 127 Alciati, Cardinal 26–7n American Civil War 259 American colonists, compared with Irish Anglican elite 72 American Revolution viii Declaration of Independence 64 radical influence of 64, 257 Anglesey, Earl of 40 Anglo-Scottish union, influence on Irish proposals for union 154–5, 158–9, 162 Anne, Queen 50, 143, 160–1 Annesley, Francis 76 on nature of colonies 75 support for idea of union 118–19, 158–9 An Answer to the late proposal (Hillsborough’s) 123 anti-union riots (1759) 125 antiquarianism 201, 224 Crawford’s use of 264–5 Jacobite 260

Antrim, Randal MacDonnell, Marquis of 39–40 Appellants (English Catholic secular clergy) 8, 16 appellate jurisdiction controversy 90–1, 120, 150, 160, 226 Archdall family, Fermanagh 204 Archdall, Nicholas, MP for Fermanagh, defence of Irish autonomy 123–4 architecture 205–6 classical 205, 206–8 and furnishings 213 aristocracy British 231 Irish 231 and polite society 193 see also gentry; Protestant Ascendancy Aristotle 227 army English, in Ireland 117 Irish 42, 73 assemblies, subscription 197, 198, 213 Atterbury, Francis, Jacobite 174 Atwood, William 247 Augustine, Saint 39 authority 1688 debate on 171 and dissolution doctrine 67–8 temporal and spiritual 6, 8–10, 11–18, 21 see also church and state; Papacy Balfour family, Fermanagh 204 ballads 254n, 257–8 Ballymote, Co. Sligo 207 Bangorian controversy 174, 185 Bank of Ireland, proposals for 96, 101, 120 Barclay, William, right to resist tyranny 69

290

Index Barnaby, Francis 10, 16–17 Barnard, Thomas, bishop of Killaloe 129 Barnwell, Patrick 14 Barrington, Sir Jonah 276, 279–80 Bath, Irish visitors to 198 Bath, Sir John, modified oath of allegiance proposed 20–1 Beckett, J.C., Protestant Dissent in Ireland 169–70 Bedell, William, bishop of Kilmore 33, 37 Bedford, Duke of, Lord Lieutenant (1759) 125 Belfast linen industry 127 Presbyterianism in 243 public buildings 197 social gatherings 198 Belfast News-Letter 240 Belfast Society 181, 184 Bentham, Jeremy 238n Beresford, John, Commissioner of the Revenue 129 Berkeley, George, bishop of Cloyne 121 Bernard family, Cork 213 Bethell, Slingsby, advocate of toleration 37 Bilson, Thomas, right to resist tyranny 69 Blair, James 179 Blaquiere, John 134 blasphemy 184, 191n Blood, Colonel Thomas 243 Bolton, Theophilus, bishop 182 Boniface VIII, Pope, Unam Sanctum bull (1302) 3–4 Bonnell, James, proposals for union 114, 157 books of Irish history 199 popular novels 198 private libraries 198, 199–200 Protestant theology 199–200 boroughs, boundary reforms 280, 282 Boulter, Hugh, Archbishop of Armagh 109n

291

Boyne, battle of the (1690) 88 Boyse, Joseph, defence of Presbyterianism 105n, 177 Brett, Revd John 196 condemnation of ‘dissociability’ 194 Brodrick, Alan, Speaker of Irish Commons 91, 117, 160, 164 Brooke family, Fermanagh 204 Brooke, Henry 243 Browne, Dennis, opposition to union 129 Brownlow, William, Irish MP 127 Bruce, William, Presbyterian 244 Burke, Edmund 32 Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe (1792) 232 Burnet, Gilbert 172 Enquiry into the Measures of Submission … 180 Burton, Charles 242 Bushe, Charles 282–3 Caldwell family, Fermanagh 204 Caldwell, Sir James 205 Calvin, John 265, 266 Calvinism idea of covenanted community 181 and resistance theory 186 Cambrensis, Giraldus 227 Expugnatio Hibernica 228 Campbell, Robert 177 Campbell, Revd Dr William 259 capital punishment, Sheridan’s view on 35, 39 Carmichael, Gershom 262 Caryll, John 48, 49 Castle Balfour 208 Catholic Church French Revolution and 232 and Napoleon 234 Ultramontanism 265 see also Catholicism; Papacy; papal deposing power Catholic church in Ireland banishment of clergy (1697) 18, 49 development of administrative structure 23

292 Index Catholic church in Ireland – continued early Roman influence on 265 financial concessions proposed 18–19 leaders, and polite society 193 see also Catholic emancipation; Catholics Catholic emancipation x, 232, 235, 274 Irish Whigs and 275, 278–9, 281, 283 and Protestant Ascendancy view of union (1790s) 130–2 Catholic Emancipation Act (1829) 25 Catholic uprising (1641) vii, 6, 24, 229, 265 Catholicism centrality of papal authority 4, 6 debate on nature of 233–5 as distinct from ‘popery’ 233 as malign influence 195, 196, 202 papal authority limited to spiritual matters 7–8, 265 see also Catholic Church; papal deposing power Catholics Charles I’s policies towards 19–22 ‘dissociability’ of 194, 195 as ‘the Enemy at our Doors’ 66 enforced conformity 12, 15 exclusion from political power 15, 20, 232 as lawyers 16, 19, 22 and oath of allegiance 13–18 penal laws against vii, 23, 65, 74, 83, 169 perceived as ‘serf nation’ viii Protestant hostility towards 6–7, 103, 104, 232, 234 and Union with England x urban communities of 197 see also Gaelic Irish Cattle Acts (1660s) 145, 156, 163 Cavan, social life 197, 213 Censor, The (Lucas’s newspaper) 242 Charlemont, Lord 131, 258, 259, 278, 283

Charles I, King 18, 225 cult of martyrdom of vii, 172, 179 modified oath of allegiance to 19–21, 24 policy towards Irish Catholics 19–22 Charles II, King 226 pension for Sheridan 40 petitioned for union (1668) 112, 142 checks and balances, in ‘Britannic’ constitution 246 Christianity, primitive 34, 264–5 Chrysostom, John 39 Church of England as check on Catholic and nonconformist power 103–4 dependence on civil supremacy 87, 181–2 doctrine of passive obedience 48 scriptural foundations of 84 Thirty-nine Articles 266 Church of Ireland vii, 15, 103–4 attack on Whig political theory 179 authority of episcopal courts 177–8, 179 coercive strategies towards Catholics 12, 37 conflict with Presbyterian political theory 180 conflict with Synod of Ulster 174–5 finances 91 King’s moves for reform of 89–90 King’s support for 82–3, 84 opposition to toleration 12 relations with Presbyterians 82, 169–71 Swift’s support for 82, 83, 84, 102, 103 threat from dissenters 83–4, 169–71, 175–80 under James II 82 Church Monitor, The 242, 244 church and state Anglican Tory ideology of 172, 181–2 debate on (1688) 171–5

Index church and state – continued Hooker’s theory of 83 in Ireland 1, 233, 234 James II’s views on 82 King’s views of 87–8 Musgrave on 233–4 in Presbyterian theory 181, 182, 183–6 theories of ix, 3–6, 7–8, 25 Whig theory of 172–3 cities, Lucas’s view of 248–9 citizenship 249–50 civic humanism 63, 143, 148 neo-Harringtonian 260–1 civil disorder, 1790s 133 civil liberty ix weakened by papal absolutism 265 civil power, and promotion of religion 87–8 Clanbrassil, Lord, parliamentary bill (1757) 194 Clare, John Fitzgibbon, Earl of, Attorney-General 129, 132, 133, 272, 274 classical architecture 205, 206–8 Clement VIII, Pope, reluctance to support O’Neill 7 Clifford, Martin, advocate of toleration 37 Cobbe, Captain 197 Coke, Sir Edward 246, 247 Cole family, Fermanagh 204 Cole, John, patron of Enniskillen 205 colonial elite, Anglican Ireland’s selfimage as 63–4, 73–4, 75–6 colonial nationalism 72 colonies, theories of 75, 270 Comerford, Patrick, Catholic bishop of Waterford and Lismore 2–3, 21, 26n common law tradition 227–8 commonwealth ideas 64 influence on Lucas 243 see also popular rights commonwealthmen and Irish Anglican patriotism 72 and proposals for union 116, 121–2, 143

293

confessional state defended by Swift and King 102, 104 ideological debate on 172–5 Tory attempt to reconstruct (1710–14) 171–2 Congregationalism 86 Conolly, Lady Louisa 278 Conolly, Thomas 133, 278, 280 Conolly, William, Speaker of Irish Commons 151, 184 conquest concept of viii, 227–8, 236 Cox’s perception of 228–9 hostility to theory of 229–30, 231, 232, 235 legitimacy of 71 Molyneux’s use of theory of 229 consent in church government 83 in Sheridan’s theory of monarchy 47 Considerations concerning Ireland … in respect of an union (1690/2) 144–5 constitution, ‘Britannic’ 246 constitutionalism 171, 181 ancient 247 contract, theory of ix, 47, 180, 246 Tory rejection of 171, 179 Convenanters 174 conversation, art of 212 convocation controversy (1692–1702) 172, 178 Conyngham, William Burton, Teller of the Exchequer 129 Cooke, Edward, Under-Secretary 129 Cooke, Sir Samuel 242 Cork, Earl of, Lord Justice of Ireland 22 Cork, genteel society 213–14 Correspondent, The 185 corruption 271, 272 Corry, John 205 covenanted community, concept of ix, 181 Covenanters, in Ireland 181–3

294 Index Cox, Sir Richard (grandson) 201–2, 213 replies to Lucas 242, 247, 252 Cox, Sir Richard, Lord Chancellor 68, 71, 164, 196 criticism of Molyneux 252 economic improvements 201 Hibernia Anglicana 222–3, 225 on historic links with England 225 on malign influence of Catholicism 195 on religious differences 233 support for Irish union 118, 158, 223–4 use of conquest theory 228–9 Crawford, Adair, scientist 259, 260 Crawford, Revd William x History of Ireland (1783) 258, 260, 262–7 influences on 259–61 The Nature and Happy Effects of Civil Liberty (1780) 259 Remarks on the Late Earl of Chesterfield’s Letters to his Son (1776) 260 translation of Turrentine 260, 262, 266 Cromwell, Oliver 45 and later republicanism 243–4 legislative union under 110, 111 persecution of Catholics under 24, 225 cultural assimilation of Gaelic Irish 66, 201, 203–4 cultural revolution, eighteenthcentury 195, 206–7 culture ancient scholastic 265 traditional Irish 36–7, 53, 203, 204, 213 Curran, John Philpot 273–4, 276, 277, 278 and parliamentary reform 280, 281, 284 Daborne, Robert, Protestant Chancellor of Waterford dancing masters 213–14 Davies, Sir John 235, 262

2

Davis, Thomas, Young Irelander 236 Decker, Matthew, economist 124 Declaratory Act (1689) 54 Declaratory Act (1720) 96, 120, 128, 144, 162 Defoe, Daniel 175 Deism 172 Delamain, Lawrence, dancing master in Cork 213–14 Delany, Daniel, bishop of Kildare and Leighlin 131 Dickson, Dr William Steel 267 didacticism, of historical works on Ireland 226–7 Digby, John, Landenstown 198 dissenters civil disabilities 92 English ‘rational’ 259–60 King’s non-toleration of 83–7 links with radicalism 244 links with Whiggery 186 numbers of 105n and sacramental test 88, 175, 179, 259 see also Presbyterians; Test Act; Toleration Act dissenting academies, suppressed (1714) 172 dissociability, of Irish Catholics 194, 195 dissolution, doctrine of 67–8 Dobbs, Arthur 124 Essay upon the trade of Ireland (1729–31) 121, 143 Dolan, T. 209, 210 account of Fermanagh (1718–19) 202–7 Domville, Sir William 226 Douglas, Sylvester 132 Drennan, William 277, 278, 285–6 Letters of an Irish Helot (1784) 259 drink and drunkenness 210–11 Dublin Board of Aldermen 241 Court of Darein Hundred 249 declaration by Corporation of Protestant Ascendancy (1792) 246 dissenters in 105n, 244

Index Dublin – continued guilds 243, 245 Lucas’s defence of liberties of ix, 242, 243, 244, 247–50 polite society in 196, 211–12 Dublin Evening Post 132 Dublin Society 121 Dublin University Magazine 103 Dundas, Henry 130, 131 Dungannon Convention (1782) 257, 258, 261, 263 Dunmanway, Co. Cork 201–2 economy 95–7, 120 benefits of union to 120, 121, 122, 123, 124–5 English control over 95, 102, 111 improvement schemes 201–2 mercantilist restrictions on 111, 115, 121, 145, 163 see also woollen industry Edgeworth, Richard Lovell 212 education Sheridan’s case for 35, 37 for social improvement 212–13 Egan, John 283 Eikon Basilike, reprinted 172 elections, Dublin (1749) 242 Elizabeth I, Queen death of 1 excommunication 5 Ely, Earl of, unionist 127, 132 Engagement controversy (1650s) 70 England advantages of Irish union to 122, 274 ancient constitution model 227 Catholics in 8–9 colonialism 273 constitutional relationship with Ireland (1782) 128 growing enthusiasm for union (1790s) 129–30 Henrician settlement 4 interests of vii–viii, xi, 74, 91–2 perception of Irish interest 99 Sheridan’s view of 53, 54 superiority of political system 73

295

weakened by religious intolerance 34–5 English government consideration of union (1770s) 127 control of Irish affairs (Toleration Act 1719) 101 economic policy towards Ireland 95, 102, 111, 145, 148 indifference to union with Ireland 110–11, 118, 119 leanings towards dissent 102 Enlightenment, and concept of conquest in just war 231 Enlightenment liberalism, among Anglican Irish elite 62, 64, 65 Enniscorthy, social life 197 equality of man, concept of 230, 266 Europe support for Catholics in Ireland 5, 7 see also France; Spain Exclusion Crisis (1679) 38, 39, 172 factionalism, growth of 47 Falkland, Lord, Lord Deputy of Ireland 16, 22, 24 fashion 196 demands of 209 feasts 204 Fermanagh county elite 204–5 Dolan’s account of (1718–19) 202–7 Revd William Henry’s account of (1737) 207–8 Fisher, Jonathan 202 Fitzgerald, Lord Edward 289n Fitzgerald, James Fitzmaurice 5 Fitzgerald, Thomas, rising (1534) 5 Fitzgibbon, John see Clare, Earl of Fitzsimon, Henry, Jesuit 12, 16 Fitzwilliam, Earl, Lord Lieutenant (1795) 132, 276, 277, 280 Fletcher, Andrew 260–1 Account of a Conversation 249 Flight of the Earls (1607) 7 Flood, Henry 127, 243 on Volunteers 257

296 Index forfeitures of Catholic lands vii, 112, 150 Fox, Charles James 244, 282, 284 Foy, Nathaniel, bishop of Waterford 66, 194, 196 France England’s rivalry with 118, 123 fear of invasion of Ireland 274, 276, 277, 280, 281–2 fear of war with 34, 35 and Jacobite restoration 50 religious toleration in 4, 7, 10 support for Ireland (against William of Orange) 45 war with 274, 276–7 free trade 163, 231 and support for union 231 free will, principle of 266 Freeman’s Journal (1764) 125–6 French Revolution viii, 276, 281 furnishings 213 Gaelic Irish attempts to convert from Catholicism 33 cultural assimilation proposed 66, 201 in Fermanagh 203–4 and James I’s Celtic genealogy 9, 36 primitivism of 202, 213 relations with Old English 23–4 see also Catholics Gascoigne, Helen, wife of Sheridan 40 Geneva, Consensus 266 gentry customary obligations 204–5, 206–7, 210 Grattan’s appeal to 279, 283 public duties 206 self-interest ix and urban social gatherings 198 Giffard, John 246 Glasgow, University of 262, 266 Glorious Revolution (1688) ix, 62 and constitutional debate 171–5 vindication of 63, 65 Whig interpretations of 170, 272–3

Godolphin, Lord, Lord Treasurer 155 Gookin, Valentine 22 Gore family, Fermanagh 204 grace and bounty proposals of Charles I 19, 21–2 Grattan, Henry ix–x, 240, 263, 271 fall of 285–6 importance of 275–6 opposition to union 128–9, 272, 286 Parliament (1782) 257, 258–9 and parliamentary reform 279, 280–1 resignation 284–5 support for Catholic emancipation 278, 281, 283 Green, Revd William 205 Gregory XIII, Pope, moderation of policies 7 Griffith, Arthur 271 Grotius, Hugo 69, 71, 227, 261, 266 quoted by McBride 183 guilds, Dublin 243 Gunpowder Plot (1605) 8, 12 Haliday, Alexander 283 Halifax, George Savile, 1st Marquis of 43 Hammond, Henry, right to resist tyranny 69 Hampden, John 261 Hanoverian succession 50 Harcourt, Simon, Earl 126 Harrington, James, Oceana 243, 244, 261 Harrington, William Stanhope, Earl of, Lord Lieutenant 242 Haselwood, Co. Sligo 208 Hassard family, Fermanagh 204 Hawkins, James, bishop of Dromore 127 Hayton, David 74 Henry II, King 225, 229, 251, 262 granted Ireland by Adrian IV (1155–6) 5, 6, 230 Henry III, King 225 Henry VIII, King, King of Ireland (1541) 5

Index Henry, Revd William 209–10 account of Fermanagh 207–8 heresy 184, 191n objective and subjective 10 Hickman, Charles, bishop of Derry 162 Hillsborough, Earl of, proposals for union (1751) 122–3 historiography 1690s compared with 1790s 222–36 controversy over Laudabiliter (papal bull) 230 of dissent in Ireland 169–71 Whig interpretations 170 Hoadly, Benjamin, bishop of Bangor Bangorian controversy 185 latitudinarianism 171, 185–6 Measures of Submission to the Civil Magistrate Considered 173, 180 The Nature of the Kingdom or Church of Christ (1717) 173 Holywood, Co. Down 267, 269n Hooker, Richard 83 Hopkins, Ezekiel, bishop of Derry 84, 176 hospitality, tradition of 203, 207, 210 Houston, David 176, 182 Huguenots 7, 51 and resistance theory 186 humanism 227 Humble Address to the nobility, gentry and freeholders of Ireland (1751) 122–3 Hume family, Fermanagh 204 Hume, Sir Gustavus 205 Hutcheson, Francis, rational happiness 197, 262 Hutchinson, Francis, bishop of Down 151 Hyde, Henry, Lord Lieutenant 69 immigrants, to Fermanagh 203 Indemnity Act (1719) 109n, 185 Insurrection Act, call to repeal 281 Ireland and 1689 Settlement 174–5 Catholic resistance to royal authority 4–5

297

as ‘colony for empire’ 75 concern with English opinion 223–5 as confessional state 170 constitutional status 242, 251–2, 270–1, 283, 285–6 defence against Spain 19 as dependent kingdom 71–2, 174 early Christianity in 264–5 historical view as barbarous 227, 229 as independent kingdom 74, 124 Jacobite occupation 68, 175 nature of state 95 and oath of supremacy 15 as papal fiefdom 27n as parallel kingdom 72, 262, 273 public discussion of union (1785) 129 relationship of church and state 10, 233, 234 Swift’s portrayal as ‘injured Lady’ 96, 120 tradition of rebellion 4–5 under Cromwell 24, 45 William of Orange’s campaign in 45 Irish army, Catholics in 42, 73 Irish constitution ancient ix, 226, 247, 263, 264 legitimacy of 124 limiting mechanisms 94 Presbyterians as threat to 94 reformed (1782–3) 128, 129, 272, 274 see also Irish parliament Irish government coercive measures 276, 278, 281, 285 denounced as corrupt (1790s) 276, 277–8, 281, 283–4, 285 laws against recusancy 11, 13, 17, 22 powers of executive 274–5, 277, 282 Irish parliament 1692 session 71, 74, 114, 147 1695–7 session 146 1755 Money Bill dispute 125

298 Index Irish parliament – continued addresses on union (1707 session) 160–1 antiquity of ix, 124, 145 commitment to 113, 114–15, 126 debate on union (1703) 117–18, 159–60 failure to confirm Charles I’s graces 22 Grattan’s view of 275, 276–7, 278–9 and idea of union (1661–6) 111 independence of ix, 128, 163, 271, 272 and jurisdiction of Westminster 90–1, 120, 128 legislative procedures 147 Lords’ address (1709) 161–2 powerlessness 274, 276 and Presbyterian synods 178 Protestant support for 113, 149–50 relationship with Westminster 62–3, 71–2, 75–6 role in support of church 89, 90, 99–100, 101 Swift’s criticisms of 100 Whig reform measures 274 see also Parliament (Westminster); penal laws; Whigs, Irish Irish people ‘framed for subjection’ 229 see also Catholics; Gaelic Irish Irish Volunteers see Volunteer Movement Israel, parallels drawn with 63, 66 Jacobite Rebellion (1715) 92, 172, 173 Jacobites compounding and noncompounding 48–9 Irish 54 Sheridan’s relations with 48–50 Jacobitism Reily’s 225–6 and Sheridan’s defence of James II 46–8 Sheridan’s support for 50, 52, 53–4, 55

James Francis Stuart (Jacobite James III) 50 James I, King 1 Celtic genealogy of 9, 36 and Irish delegation (1614) 13–14 and oath of allegiance 13, 14–18, 24 and papal deposing power 8–9, 10, 13, 21 policy towards Irish Catholics 10–18 relations with Spain 18–19 James II, King death 50 and Declaratory Act (1689) 54, 82 depicted as despot 69 deposed for his Catholicism x, 47, 48, 55 deposition 47, 171, 186 as Duke of York 33, 39 exile 43, 49 policy of toleration in Ireland 40–1 Sheridan’s defence of 46, 47–9 Jefferson, Thomas, on cities 249 Jekyll, Sir Joseph 120 Jephson, Michael 68 Jones, Thomas, bishop of Meath 6 Joy, Henry 240 Jubilee, institution of 259, 268n just war, theory of 69–70, 227, 231 Cox’s use of 228 Kant, Immanuel, Perpetual Peace (1795) 231 Keating, Geoffrey, Foras Feasa ar Éirinn (c.1634) 228 Kells, Council of (1152) 265 Kelly, Edmund 242 Kilkenny, social life 197 Killarney, tourism in 202 Kilmore, bishop of 207–8 see also Bedell, William King, William, archbishop of Dublin viii, 68–9, 161 Admonition to the Dissenting Inhabitants of Derry 86 calls for reform of Church of Ireland 89–90

Index King, William, archbishop of Dublin – continued on danger of dissenters 83–7, 88–9, 92–3, 94 defence of Irish parliament 149–50 on dispute with English parliament 75–6, 96–8, 101 enthusiasm for conversion 89 The Inventions of Men … (1694) 85 lawsuit with Londonderry Corporation 90 mistrust of Scots 118 opposition to toleration 102 politics 82–3 providentialism of 67 relations with Swift 81–2, 86–7 The State of the Protestants in Ireland … 65, 68, 175–6 views on union 89–90, 115–16, 120, 158 Kinsale, battle of 1 Kirkpatrick, James 179–80, 181 defence of Presbyterianism 182–4 An Historical Essay Upon the Loyalty of Presbyterians (1713) 170, 180 Knox, Andrew, bishop of Raphoe 15, 17 Knox, Brigadier General John 133 Knox, John 179, 265 la Touche, James Digges 241, 242, 244 labour market, English 37 Lactantius, Lucius Caelius, Christian apologist 39 lands Cromwellian forfeitures vii, 112 forfeitures of Jacobite estates 150, 159 landscape 207–8 perception of 208–9 Langrishe, Sir Hercules 232, 283 language English 36 Irish, as medium of religious conversion 89 Irish ‘brogue’ condemned 212

299

latitudinarianism 171, 185–6 Laudabiliter (papal bull 1155–6) 230 law, to preserve religion 87–8 Lawless, Valentine 275–6, 289n lawyers, Catholics as 16, 19, 22 Lecky, W.E.H., on Irish parliament 276, 283 Leinster, Duke of 278 Leinster, Emily, 1st Duchess of 128 Leland, Thomas, History of Ireland … (1773) 262, 265 Lendrick, Major James 258 Leslie, Charles 68–9, 175–6, 182 Letter from a gentleman in the country... (1697 anon.) 149 Letterkenny, Presbyterian community in 177 liberty viii, 251 of conscience 39 constitutional 116, 148, 246 Crawford’s sermon on 259 effect of religion on 265, 266 Irish entitlements to 157 local rights 248 as natural right 38 and radicalism x Limerick, Earl of, Fermanagh properties 207 Limerick, Treaty of 25, 89 Lindsay, Thomas, bishop of Killaloe 161–2 linen industry 95, 123, 127, 163 Fermanagh 207 Locke, John 64, 226, 231, 246 Essay Concerning Human Understanding 65 influence on Crawford 261 Letter Concerning Toleration 32 on overthrow of tyrants 67 on slavery 227 Two Treatises of Government 64, 229 Loftus, Adam, Viscount, Lord Justice of Ireland 22 Lombard, Peter, archbishop of Armagh 18, 21 De Regno Hiberniae (1600) 5–6 Episcopalis Doron 9–10

300 Index Lombard, Thomas, Catholic priest 1, 3 Londonderry dissenters in 105n, 177 siege of (1691) 105n, 176, 179 Lords Lieutenant executive powers 274–5 resident 126 social role criticised 211 loyalism Catholic x Protestant 270, 282–3 Lucas, Charles ix, 240, 266–7 aligned with Patriots 243 An Appeal to the Commons and Citizens of London 242 Barber’s Letters 241–2 commonwealth influences on 243–4 defence of liberties of Dublin ix, 242, 243, 247–50 Divelina Libera 241 influence of Molyneux on 223, 251–2 legacy of 240–1 life and career 241–3 as MP (1761) 242–3 municipal reformer 124, 249–50 nationalist interpretation of Irish past 252 as political thinker 245–6, 251, 252–3 Remonstrance (1743) 241 support for union 251 The Political Constitutions of GreatBritain and Ireland 242 Lucy, Sir Kingsmil 38 Luttrell, Thomas 14 luxury, defence of 197 Lysaght, Edward, balladist 257 Macartney, Sir George 127 McBride, John 177, 180–1 defence of Presbyterianism 182–4 A Sample of Jet-Black Prelatick Calumny (1713) 170 Sermon before the Provincial Synod at Antrim (1698) 178

MacGeoghegan, Abbé James, Jacobite 54 MacGibbon, Maurice, archbishop of Cashel 26n Madden family, Manor Waterhouse 208 Madden, Samuel 143 Reflections and resolutions proper for a gentleman of Ireland (1738) 121 magistrates, duties of 87 Magna Carta 145, 263 Church of England and 87 Maguire family, Fermanagh 204–5 Maguire, James Oge 204 Maguire, Morgan 204 Maguire, Richard 204 Malcome, John 184 Mandeville, Bernard, defence of luxury 197 manners 210–11 etiquette of 212–13 marriages, legality of dissenting 93, 169 Marsh, Narcissus, Archbishop of Dublin 86 Martin of Tours 39 Mary I, Queen 225 Mathews, Revd Edward 179 Maxwell, Henry An essay upon an union … (1703) 151–4 proposals for union 116–17, 143, 144, 160 Meath, Earl of, law suit 160 Melfort, Lord, Jacobite 48, 49 Michelet, Jules, History of France 236 Middleton, Charles, 2nd earl of 49–50 Midleton, St John Brodrick, Viscount 98 militia debates, Scotland 260, 263 Moira, Lord 285 Molesworth, Robert, Viscount 243, 263 Considerations for Promoting Agriculture (1723) 261 as Irish radical MP 117–18, 143, 148, 160

Index Molyneux, Samuel 97 Molyneux, William 240 and agricultural improvement 201 influence on Crawford 261, 262–3 Ireland as independent kingdom 74, 247 on religion and state 233 rights of Ireland 96, 169, 224, 226 suggestion of union 115, 128, 144 The Case of Ireland’s being bound by acts of parliament in England 64, 72, 120, 128, 148–50, 223, 251–2, 261 use of conquest theory 229 monarchy absolutist 51, 55 British constitutional 232 de facto 70, 225 divinely ordained x, 8, 171 elective (Crawford) 263, 264 hereditary succession 48, 55, 70, 171, 263 in Presbyterian political theory 179 secular authority of 8–10 Sheridan’s theory of 46–8 Montgomery family, Fermanagh 204 Montgomery, Hugh 205 Montrose, Marquis of, epitaph on Charles I 82 Moore family, Cork 213 More, Thomas 227 Moreton, William, bishop of Kildare (1703) 157 Mountjoy, Lord, Lord Deputy, at Waterford 1–3, 16, 24 Mullingar, social life 197 municipal corporations 206 Munster, agricultural improvement in 201 Musgrave, Sir Richard 224, 226 and Catholic church 233–4 and conquest theory 229–30, 232 Memoirs of the Different Rebellions in Ireland (1802) 223 Patriot views of 230 music, Irish 213 music teachers 213

301

Nagle, Sir Richard 46 Nantes, Edict of (1598) 7, 10 Naphthali (Covenanter tract) 179 Napoleon Bonaparte, and Catholic church 234 National Covenant (1638) 93, 181 nationalism, and concept of conquest 236 natural law 38, 231 European tradition of 261–2 natural rights 64, 181, 185–6, 227 and natural law 38 Navigation Acts (1660s) 145, 156, 163 New English in Ireland 23–4 as parliamentary representatives 100–1 relations with English parliament 24 newspapers 214 circulation in Ireland 198 influence of 175 pro-union articles 129 radical 128 Nicolson, William, bishop of Derry 120 Nine Years War (1594–1603) 3, 5 non-resistance ix, 69, 179 non-toleration viii of Protestant dissent 83 see also toleration North, Lord 127 Norway, union with Denmark 126 oath of allegiance 3, 13, 14–18 James I’s use of 8–9, 13 modified 19–22, 24–5 oath of supremacy 14, 15–16, 25, 92 oath of allegiance a secular alternative to 9, 17, 20–1 oaths, nature of 14, 17 obedience due to de facto ruler 70, 181, 225 subjects’ absolution from 65, 69 see also passive obedience O’Callaghan, Cornelius, Irish MP 214 library 198, 199

302 Index Occasional Conformity Act (1711) 172 O’Connell, Daniel 271 O’Connor, Arthur 285, 289n O’Connor, Rory, of Connacht, and Treaty of Windsor 230 O’Conor, Charles, Dissertations on the History of Ireland (1753, 1766) 260, 263–4, 265, 266 Octennial Act (1768) 243 O’Devany, Conor, Catholic martyr 16–17 O’Flaherty, Roderic, Ogygia (1685) 260 Ogham inscriptions 264 Ogilvie, William, plan for union 128 Ogle, George, anti-unionist 127 O’Halloran, Dr Sylvester, Introduction to the Study of the History and Antiquities of Ireland (1772) 260 O’Hara, Charles, opposition to union 129 Old English in Ireland (Catholics) and allegiance to English crown 9, 14, 16, 54 demand for religious toleration 11, 12–13, 17 relations with Old Irish 41, 52–3, 145 Old Irish, Tyrconnell’s dislike of 41 O’Loughran, Patrick, Catholic martyr 16, 17 O’More, Rory 240 O’Neill, Hugh, Earl of Tyrone death (1616) 9 rebellion (1594) 1, 5, 6, 35 O’Neill, Rose, widow of marquis of Antrim 39–40 Optatus 39 Ormond, James Butler, 1st Duke of as Lord Lieutenant 38 patron of Sheridan 33, 39–40 Ormond, James Butler, 2nd Duke of, as Lord Lieutenant 160 Osborn, Alexander 176 Paine, Tom, Rights of Man (1791–2) 231

pamphlets 214 advocating Anglo-Irish union 118, 119, 142, 144–8, 154, 155–7 anonymity of 162 on siege of Londonderry 176 Papacy moderation of policies 7 veto over episcopal appointments 234 see also Adrian IV; Catholic Church; Clement VIII; Gregory XIII Papal deposing power 3–4, 8–9, 10, 13, 16 Catholic criticisms of 234, 235 Charles I’s policy on 21 compared with Calvinist duty of resistance 182 parliament rising status of 273 sovereignty of 55, 171 Parliament (Westminster) appellate jurisdiction 90–1, 120, 150 pro-dissent measures (1717–20) 185 prospect of Irish members in 142, 149, 158–9 relations with Irish government 24, 62–3, 71–2, 75–6 resignation of Foxite Whigs (1797) 284 right to legislate for Ireland 116, 120, 251–2 Scottish members in 90, 91 see also Irish parliament parliamentary reform, Irish Whigs and 275, 278, 280 Parnell, Charles Stewart 271 Pars, William 202 Parsons, Sir Laurence 274 Parsons, Robert, Jesuit 8 passive obedience ix, 171 Anglican doctrine of 48, 69 Church of Ireland defence of 179 Patriots and patriotism and anti-union debate 126, 127 Catholic 264 Crawford’s 260

Index Patriots and patriotism – continued and demand for constitutional equality 169, 272 economic 260 of Irish Anglican elite 72–3 language of 65 Lucas and 243 Molyneux’s The Case of Ireland 230 of Swift and King 101, 260 patronage 209–10 political 271 Patterson, Marcus, Chief Justice of Common Pleas 129 Paul IV, Pope 26n Paul V, Pope 18 Paul, Jeffrey, Irish MP, library 198, 199–200 Pearson, Nathaniel, Dublin MP 242 Peden, Alexander 182 Pembroke, Earl of, Lord Lieutenant (1707) 90, 160 penal laws vii, 23, 24, 25, 65, 74, 83, 169 condemned by Burke 232 criticised by Plowden 235 Volunteer movement opposition to 259 Whig modification of 172 periodicals, popularity in Ireland 198 Pett, Sir Peter 57n Petty, Sir William influence on Sheridan 36, 37, 38 proposals for union 36, 112–13, 142 Philip II, King of Spain 7, 26n Philip IV, King of Spain 18 Phipps, Constantine 243–4 Physico-Historical Society 202 Physiocrats (France) 231 picturesque, fashion for 202 Pitt, William, Prime Minister 128, 131–2, 277, 283 Pius V, Pope, excommunication of Elizabeth 5 Pius VII, Pope, and Napoleon 234 plantation, threat of 21 Plowden, Francis

303

An Historical Review of the State of Ireland (1803) 223, 230 concern for English opinion 224, 226 perception of oppression in Ireland 235 poets, Irish 9 Policy and Justice pamphlet 124–5 polite society vii, 193, 209–10 and book ownership 199–201, 214 social arts 213–14 political parties and accession of William 68 factionalism of 47 in Ireland 68, 71, 100, 174–5 see also Tories; United Irishmen; Whigs Ponsonby, George 277, 278, 280, 281–2 reform bill (1797) 284 Pope, Alexander 100 Popish Plot (1678) 38, 39 popular rights 68, 249–50 popular sovereignty 171, 247–8, 249–50 population transfer Petty’s scheme for 112, 142 settlement of Protestant refugees in Ireland 147 Portland, Duke of 128 Postlethwayt, Malachy 124 Poynings’ Law 142, 146, 147 modified (1782) 128 Presbyterians in Belfast 243 conflict with Anglicans 175–80 democratic tendencies of 178 held responsible for death of Charles I 171, 179 King’s attacks on 85–7, 92 links with Whiggery 186 loyalty of Irish 174, 178 ‘New Light’ progressive 243, 259, 260, 266 penal laws against vii, viii political theory ix, 170, 179–80, 182–6 relations with Anglicans 93, 94, 169–71

304 Index Presbyterians – continued relations with Covenanters 182–3 role in siege of Londonderry 176 in Scotland 173–4 press see ballads; newspapers; pamphlets Priestley, Joseph 259 professional classes 212 progress, concept of 195–6 property, as basis of franchise 279 prosperity, expansion of 201, 202 Protestant Ascendancy ix, 274–5, 278–9 Catholic emancipation and debate on union (1790s) 130–2 change in self-identity 71–4 connections with England viii, 134, 149, 163–4 as constituting polite society 193, 195–6 criticism of treatment of Catholics 232–3, 235 Dublin Corporation’s declaration of (1792) 246 economic interests 101 Fermanagh county families 204–5 Molyneux and ‘origin myth’ of 229 opposition to concessions to Catholics 19, 22, 232 patriotism of 72 public duties 206 resentment at rejection of union proposals 119–20 self-identity as colonial settlers 63–4, 73–4, 75–6 self-image 63–4, 66–7, 71 support for idea of union 110, 133–4, 142, 153–4, 157–62 vindication of Williamite accession 63, 65, 67–71 see also gentry Protestant Dissenter Relief Act (1780) 25, 259 Protestant refugees, scheme to settle in Ireland 147 Protestantism authority of princes 4, 6

and chosen people image 63, 66, 73, 229 providentialism 67, 70 public opinion 162 and benefits of Anglo-Irish union (1700s) 118–19 English view of union 150–1 opposition to Hillsborough’s union proposals 122 resistance to idea of union in Ireland 126–7, 129–30 Pufendorf, Samuel 261, 266 On the Duty of Man … (1673) 262 Pullen, Tobias, bishop of Dromore 176–7 Quakers 105n The Queen an empress … (1703 anon.) 154 radicalism and liberty x links with dissent 244 of Lucas 246–7 roots of 245 rebellions tradition of 4–5 see also Catholic uprising (1641); Jacobite Rebellion (1715); O’Neill, Hugh; United Irish uprising (1798) Reformation 4, 25 in Ireland 5, 25 regium donum demand for increase 259 restoration of 175, 177, 185 Reily, Hugh concern with English opinion 224 Ireland’s Case Briefly Stated 223 Jacobitism 224, 225–6 on religious differences 233 use of conquest theory 229 Relief Act see Protestant Dissenter Relief Act (1780) religious conformity 12d fine for non-attendance 19 enforced 12, 51 Occasional Conformity Act (1711) 172

Index religious uniformity as axiomatic 3, 4, 51 Presbyterian attacks on 184, 185 Remonstrance (1661) 25 remonstrance (1701) against forfeitures 150 republicanism 74, 270 and citizenship 249 Irish Whigs and 276–7, 278, 284–5 revolutionary 133 Roman precedents for 244, 245, 263 Tone’s 240 and unionism 143 reputation, dependant on customary hospitality 203–4, 205, 210 resistance, rights of 67, 69, 172, 186 Richardson, Samuel, novelist 198 Richelieu, Cardinal 51 Richmond, Duke of 278 Ridpath, George 174, 247 Ried, Thomas, Presbyterian 244 Robinson, Richard, Archbishop of Dublin 127 Rothe, David, bishop of Ossory 10, 13, 21 Analecta sacra 11–12 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 231 Royal Society, Sheridan’s fellowship of 33, 37, 38 Rule, Gilbert, Presbyterian apologist 174 Rundle, Thomas, bishop of Derry, justification of luxury 197 Russell, Lord William 261 Rutherford, Samuel 179 Rutland, Duke of, Lord Lieutenant 128 Sacheverell, Henry, trial (1710) 171, 174, 180 St Leger family, Cork 213 Sampson, William 285 Scotland abolition of episcopacy 172, 173 debate on confessional state 173–4 French influence in 35 linen industry 95 national Covenant (1638) 93, 181

305

Presbyterian regime 173–4, 177 Sheridan’s views on 50, 53 Union (1707) 50, 90, 154–5, 163 union negotiations 116, 118, 142–3 Scots, Presbyterian itinerants in Ireland 182 Scottish Enlightenment 243 Scottish immigrants, Anglican fear of 76, 175, 185 Scottish political economy 231 sectarianism, after United Irish uprising 233 sermons influence and importance of 187 political 63, 66–7 Shaftesbury, Antony Ashley-Cooper, Earl of 195, 196 Shannon, Henry Boyle, 1st Earl of 210 Shannon, Richard Boyle, 2nd Earl of 127 Sheridan, Dennis 33 Sheridan, Thomas 32–3 case for religious toleration 32, 33–5, 44, 54–5 Catholic loyalism of x, 50–5 conversion to Catholicism 32, 40, 55 defence of liberty 38, 39 A Discourse of the Rise & Power of Parliaments … 33–7, 38, 46–7, 53 and idea of union 36, 52, 112 ideas on Ireland 36, 51–4 The King of Great Britain’s Case (defence of James II) 46, 47–9 A Letter from a Nobleman 43–6 paper for Tyrconnell 41, 45 patronage of James, Duke of York 33, 39, 40–1, 43 Political Reflexions on the history and Government of England (1709) 50–6 relations with Jacobites 48–50 relations with Tyrconnell 40, 41–3 reminiscences (1702) 48–9 repudiation of toleration 50–1, 55 restrictions on toleration 35, 38–9

306 Index Sheridan, Thomas – continued and Sir William Petty 38 support for Jacobite restoration 50, 52, 53–4, 55 Sheridan, Thomas, actor-manager 241 Sheridan, William 33 Sherlock v. Annesley case (1718) 97 Sidney, Algernon 261 slave trade abolished (1807) 231 slavery 227, 231 Smith, Adam 231–2 Smock Alley theatre (Dublin) 241 smuggling 123, 152, 155, 261 Smyth, Edward, bishop of Down and Connor 73, 162 sociability and fashion 196 value of 194–5 Socinianism 172 Solemn League and Covenant 93, 181, 182 Some thoughts humbly offer’d towards an union … (1708) 155 Somers, Lord 91 Somerville, Sir James 242 Southwell, Sir Robert 38, 75, 89, 115, 149, 157–8 sovereignty of parliament 55 popular 171, 247–8, 249–50 Spain and O’Neill’s rebellion 35 peace treaty with (1604) 7, 12 relations with England 7, 18–19 standing armies, debates on 263 state, and religious uniformity 3, 4 Stearne, John, bishop of Clogher 200 Steele, Sir Richard 196 as arbiter of taste 198 Stewart, Colonel James, MP 268n Strabane 258, 267, 269n dissenting academy 259 Strange, Thomas 10 Stuart monarchy absolutism of 273, 282 divinely ordained x, 8, 171 dynastic roots in Ireland 9, 36

Reily’s view of 225–6 Sheridan’s hopes for restoration of 50, 51–2 subscription controversy (1731–3) 170, 184–6 Supremacy, Act of (1559) 14 Swift, Jonathan viii, 119–20, 240 attacks on dissenters 99–101 Drapier’s Letters 101, 108n, 266 indictment of Anglo-Scottish union 154–5 and Irish economy 95–7 Letter Concerning the Sacramental Test (1708) 185 Letter from a Member of the House of Commons in Ireland … 98–100 opposition to repeal of Test Act 98–100, 266 opposition to toleration 102 politics of 82, 103, 108n A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture (1720) 95 relations with William King 86–7 sermon on brotherly love (1717) 108n The Story of the Injured Lady 96, 120, 154–5 support for Church of Ireland 82, 83, 84, 91–2 ‘To His Grace the Archbishop of Dublin’ (poem 1727) 81–2 Synge, Edward, bishop of Elphin 198 Synge, Samuel 71 Taaffe, Denis An Impartial History of Ireland (1809–11) 223, 224, 230 didacticism 226–7 portrait of Irish Catholics 234 on Treaty of Windsor (1175) 230 Talbot, Sir William 14 Talon, Monsieur, cabinet secretary to Louis XIV 43 Tandy, James Napper 246 taxation 111, 116, 146, 153, 157, 163 Teahan, Gerald, bishop of Kerry 193 Temple, Sir John 265

Index Temple, William, advocate of toleration 37 Tertullian, Christian theologian (2nd–3rd centuries) 39 Test Act (1704) (Ireland) 88, 90, 105 campaign against 180–1, 184–6 implementation of 169 repeal proposed 91, 92–3, 98–100, 161, 185 see also Toleration Act (1719) Thierry, Augustin, History of the Conquest of England by the Normans 235–6 Thomond, Earl of, Lord President of Munster 2 Tickler, The (anti-Lucas newspaper) 242 Tisdall, William 178, 180, 181 tithes 18, 91 Toland, John 243 Toler, John 278 toleration x, 10, 258 by connivance 23, 176 for dissenters 88, 169, 175, 176 French example 4, 7, 10 King’s opposition to 83–7, 88–9, 92–3, 94, 102 as negative concept 27n restrictions on (Sheridan’s) 35, 38–9 Sheridan’s case for 33–5, 44 struggle for in Ireland under James I 10–18 Swift’s opposition to 98–100, 102 see also Catholic emancipation Toleration Act (1689) 109n Toleration Act (1719) 101, 102–3, 109n, 185 Tone, Theobald Wolfe 240, 274, 280 topography fashionable improvements to 207–8 Fermanagh 203 and study of aesthetic 201–3 Tories and established church 104 and providentialism 70 revival at accession of Anne 171–2 view of Ireland 151

307

Tories, Irish, as Church party 174 Tory political theory 172, 181–2 tourism 202 towns importance of 248 public buildings 206 sociability of 196–7 Townshend, George, 4th Viscount, Lord Lieutenant 126 trade dangers of restrictions on 76 demand for improved rights 127, 155–6 Dobbs’s essay on 121, 143 Irish resentment of restrictions on 117, 152, 153, 163 and war 231 Trapp, Joseph, chaplain to Lord Chancellor 243, 244 Travers, John 65, 68, 74 Trinity College, Dublin 42 The True way to render Ireland happy and secure … (1697) 147–8 Tucker, Josias 124 Turretine (Turretinus), Johannes Adolphus 266 Crawford’s translation of 260, 262 tyranny, right to resist 67, 69 Tyrconnell, Lord, Lord Deputy of Ireland pro-Catholic policies 41–2, 73 relations with Sheridan 40, 42–3 Tyrone’s rebellion see O’Neill Ulster 196, 282 debate on disarming of 277–8 emigration from 267 plantations 53 Presbyterianism in viii, 82, 105n Synod of 174 Tyrconnell’s dislike of 41 Uniformity, Act of (1559) 12 union advocated by Petty 36, 112–13, 142 anti-union riots (1759) 125 benefits to England 145–6, 151–2, 156

308 Index union – continued and Catholic emancipation debate (1790s) 130–2, 135 Cromwellian (1653–9) 110, 111, 142 decline in support for 121 economic benefits of 120, 121, 122, 123, 124–5 English proposals for 113, 149, 226, 283 imposition by force contemplated 133 influence of Anglo-Scottish union on proposals 154–5, 158–9, 162 Irish opposition to 126–9 Irish settlers’ proposals for 113–14 Irish support for (1798–9) 134 Irish Whig opposition to 286 King’s views on 89–90, 115–16, 120, 158 Maxwell’s proposals for 116–17, 143, 144, 151–4 memorandum (1690–1) 146 Molyneux’s suggestion of 115, 128, 144 Ogilvie’s plan for (1782) 128 pamphlets proposing 118, 119, 142, 144–8, 154, 155–7 Plowden’s support for 235 proposals for ix, x, 142–4 Protestant ascendancy support for 110, 133–4, 142, 153–4, 157–62 public discussion (1785) 129 self-interest as main factor in 134 Sheridan’s ideas on 36, 52, 112 support of Adam Smith for 231–2 United Irishmen 267, 270, 271–2 and Irish Whigs 277, 279, 280, 283, 284–5, 289n origins of republicanism of 243, 270 outlawed 284 uprising (1798) viii, 133, 232 urban charters 42 urban renaissance 211–12 urbanisation, to civilise Irish 66, 194 Ussher, James, archbishop of Armagh 13, 16 utilitarianism 231

Vesey, John, Archbishop of Tuam 66–7, 68, 70 voluntary associations 197, 211 Volunteer Movement x, 127, 257, 258, 261, 263, 267 Waite, Thomas, Under-Secretary (Ireland) 127 Wake, William, Authority of Christian Princes over their Ecclesiastical Synods (1697) 172–3 Wales, as model for Irish union 145, 148, 163 Maxwell 117, 151, 152 Petty 112–13 Walker, George, True Account of the Siege of Londonderry (1689) 170, 176 Walkington, Dr Edward, bishop of Down and Connor 73, 74, 178 Wandesford, Christopher 23 Warburton, Dean 133 wards, courts of 19, 22 Waterford 1–3 social life 197, 198 Watson, William, English Appellant priest 16 Wentworth, Lord, Lord Deputy of Ireland 22–3 Westminster Confession of Faith 173, 184, 266 Westmorland, Earl of 131 Wetenhall, Edward, bishop of Cork 62, 66, 70, 71 Wharton, Earl of, Lord Lieutenant 90, 93, 94, 161 Whig Club 272, 278, 285 Whig political theory ix, 62, 272–3 and 1689 settlement 171, 172–3 dissenters’ use of 186–7 resistance to democratic ideas 64, 279, 280–1 Whigs, English 150, 162, 284 Whigs, Irish 174 and Catholic emancipation 275, 278–9, 281, 283 and independent Irish legislature 270–1, 274

Index Whigs, Irish – continued opposition to Test Act (1704) 106n, 186 and parliamentary reform 277–8, 279, 280 relations with loyalists 271, 272, 282–3 and republicanism 276–7, 278, 284–5 rise and fall of ix–x, 275–7, 281 secession from parliament 284, 289n and United Irishmen 277, 279, 280, 283, 284–5 White, Dr James, Catholic bishop of Waterford and Lismore 1–3, 16 William I, King, nature of conquest 227–8 William III (of Orange), King 43, 224, 225 accession vindicated 63, 65, 67–71 compared with William I (the Conqueror) 70, 227, 228 depicted as godly conqueror 69 opposition to union 114 and Presbyterians in Ireland 175

309

and Scottish Presbyterian settlement 173–4 Sheridan’s criticism of 43–5 war in Ireland 45 Winder, John, of Kilroot 179 Windsor, Treaty of (1175) 230 Wodrow, Robert, Presbyterian apologist 174 Wolseley, Charles, advocate of toleration 37 Wood, William, coinage monopoly 81, 101 Wood’s Halfpence 101, 102, 109n, 266 Woollen Act (1699) 71, 96–7, 115, 150, 152, 163 Molyneux’s attack on 115, 226, 251–2, 261 woollen industry 72, 74, 117 English destruction of 91, 96, 226 Wyche, Sir Cyril 157 Yelverton, Rt Hon Barry Young, Arthur 127 Young Irelanders 236

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Political Discourse in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth- Century Ireland

Political Discourse in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth- Century Ireland

Marriage in Seventeenth-Century English Political Thought

From the royal to the republican body: incorporating the political in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France

Poetry and Jacobite Politics in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge Studies in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Thought)

Writing and Political Engagement in Seventeenth-Century England

Ireland and Medicine in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (The History of Medicine in Context)

The Politics of Consumption in Eighteenth-Century Ireland

Francis Bacon and the Seventeenth-Century Intellectual Discourse

Warfare in the Seventeenth Century

Modern Philosophy: The Seventeenth And Eighteenth Centuries

A Political Biography of Jonathan Swift (Eighteenth-Century Political Biographies)

Exile and Journey in Seventeenth-Century Literature

Modern Philosophy: The Seventeenth And Eighteenth Centuries

A Political Biography of John Toland (Eighteenth-Century Political Biographies)

Church and Culture in Seventeenth-Century France

Warfare in the Eighteenth Century

Down and out in eighteenth-century London

Communication in Eighteenth-Century Music

Communication in Eighteenth-Century Music

Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Seventeenth-Century Spanish Poetry

Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Insiders and Outsiders in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Routledge Studies in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy)

Ireland: Social, Political, and Religious

Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century Ireland

Beckett's Eighteenth Century

The genius of parody: imitation and originality in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English literature

Political Discourse in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth- Century Ireland