Part Three
15
Enter America and France
The British Parliament’s Declaratory Act of 1766 stated baldly that its colonies in America were, like all its possessions, ‘subordinate unto and dependent upon the imperial crown and Parliament of Great Britain’. That Parliament’s authority, rooted in military might, allowed it ‘to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the colonies and people of America’. Despite that affirmation of supremacy, the Americas were considered the pride, even the jewel, of Britain’s empire, the embodiment of good achievement.
This was particularly true of New England. Its mostly expatriate citizens enjoyed widespread favour among London politicians, who described them as ‘being our own people, our brethren’. One of them, the Englishman Thomas Pownall (1722–1805), was governor of first New Jersey and then Massachusetts Bay before returning to become a British MP. He campaigned for American representation in the Westminster Parliament, advocating that the empire become ‘a grand maritime domain’ under one legislative authority. The British government did not agree. The American colonists gained no presence at Westminster and, while they enjoyed virtual self-government, this did not extend to foreign affairs, trade or taxation.
When, in 1773, London introduced complex new rules and duties for tea, the Massachusetts colony promptly rebelled. In this it had considerable support in Britain, the Irish Tory Edmund Burke warning the government of George III (r.1760–1820) to ‘leave the Americans as they anciently stood … to tax themselves. If you impose on them the unlimited and illimitable nature of supreme sovereignty, you will teach them by these means to call that sovereignty into question.’ He asked in a query redolent of his native Ireland, ‘If freedom and [British] sovereignty cannot be reconciled, which will they take?’
The government seemed at a loss how to react. In America, where orders from London took weeks to arrive, there was no Parliament or federal forum in which to debate policy or treat with the rebel leaders. A tax protest and a guerrilla uprising escalated into a war of independence. Over eight years, error followed disaster until the Americans, crucially assisted by the French, defeated a British army at Yorktown in 1781. George III was baffled and mortified. What was termed the ‘first British empire’ in North America was no sooner assembled than it began to disintegrate.
The blow to Britain’s pride was severe, but when in 1785 George III greeted John Adams as the first American ambassador to London, he welcomed him as ‘of the same language, a similar religion, and kindred blood’ as England. A special relationship was formed, aided by a shared lexicon and culture. A similar if briefer welcome accompanied the French Revolution in 1789. Everywhere a new radicalism entered political discourse. The prime minister, William Pitt the Younger (1759–1806), declared that the revolution in France marked a ‘new chapter of peace’.
Neither revolution was read by London as suggesting any need to change policy towards Scotland or Ireland. Instead, the authorities sought to suppress any sign of revolutionary fervour, in particular towards the new French regime. By 1793 Pitt’s government was proclaiming that any revolutionary opinion, even the advocacy of ‘political reform’, was an offence against public safety.
The lesson strikes home
One place where events in France were watched with keen attention was on the streets of Ireland. London’s disregard of the 1691 Treaty of Limerick were coming home to roost. There had been no promised advance in Catholic civil rights. There had been no extension of the franchise to Catholics or access to public jobs or land-holding. The Irish parliament, despite being packed with Protestants, remained shackled by Poynings’ Law. Its every decision was subject to a London veto.
Absentee English landownership had by now extended to virtually the whole of Ireland’s productive farmland. Catholic tenants were required to pay rents to English landlords and tithes to Anglican churches. The unfairness was ingrained and toxic. An additional source of Irish tension in England was the uncontrolled migration into England of landless Irish labourers. Squatter encampments sprang up wherever a canal needed to be built or a London estate extended. The infrastructure of Britain’s industrial revolution and of London’s bourgeoning middle class was largely constructed on Irish labour.
The result was rising anti-immigrant resentment. A modest parliamentary measure, the Papists Act of 1778 easing penal restrictions on Catholic employment in England and Ireland, was met, on its passing in 1780, with street demonstrations not seen in London since the Civil War. The so-called Gordon Riots attacked Catholic houses and churches with a violence exacerbated by the incompetence of London’s hopelessly amateur constabulary. When armed soldiers were summoned as a last resort, they killed some 300 rioters.
The Gordon Riots galvanised politics in Ireland at the very moment in the 1780s when London was losing control of America. A Patriot Movement was formed in which were joined not just Catholics but Protestants and Dublin’s Anglo-Irish community, all collectively exasperated at London’s draconian authority over their country. A senior MP in Dublin’s parliament, Henry Grattan (1746–1820), warned London to repeal Poynings’ Law and install home rule, or face another rebellion on the scale of 1641.
In 1782 the warning struck home and Pitt’s government conceded reform. A new act stated baldly that the ‘right claimed by the people of Ireland to be bound only by laws enacted by His Majesty and the parliament of that kingdom [Ireland] … is hereby declared to be established and ascertained for ever, and shall, at no time hereafter, be questioned or questionable’. Poynings was repealed. The assertion of home rule seemed explicit and final. London had heard the message of America.
Although the Dublin executive was still appointed by London, the new ‘Grattan’s Parliament’ proved to be Ireland’s last chance of an orderly progress to self-government. In 1792–3, under Grattan’s leadership, it enacted laws extending the role that Catholics could play in Ireland’s political and economic life. In this it was supported by the viceroy, Lord Fitzwilliam. But London became increasingly hostile to this emancipation, aware of the strong opposition to it of the implacably anti-Catholic George III, who retained the royal prerogative to veto it and indicated he would use it. He was acting, so he said, ‘as guardian of the Church of England’. The law could not pass.
This act of royal defiance by a monarch whose decisions had just lost America left Grattan with no option but to resign, warning London that Ireland was on the brink of rebellion. Irish legislative independence was clearly not ‘for ever’ and ‘unquestionable’, as Pitt had pledged, but strangled at birth in the name of religion.
The Irish rebellion of 1798
Ireland erupted. In 1796 a young Irish radical of Protestant parentage, Theobald Wolfe Tone (1763–98), rose to prominence as co-founder of a radical party known as the Society of United Irishmen. The society was actually founded in Belfast by Protestants angered, like the Catholics, by London’s baulking of home rule. Many Irish Protestants were Presbyterians and thus outside the ‘ascendancy’ of the Church of Ireland. They joined their Catholic countrymen in swearing ‘never to desist in our efforts until we have subverted the authority of England over our country and asserted our independence’.
Tone travelled to America, where George Washington had declared in 1788, ‘Patriots of Ireland, your cause is identical to mine.’ But he suffered an unsympathetic reception from Americans who seemed content to leave Britain to its fate. In Paris, Tone’s welcome was fulsome. The Bourbons might be gone, but Paris still offered comfort to anyone with a grievance against London, be they Welsh princes, Stuart pretenders or Catholic revolutionaries. The Paris Directorate was happy to offer Tone practical support, initially with enthusiasm.
In December 1796 a French force of forty-three ships and nearly 14,000 men was sent to the west coast of Ireland, where they were assured of an imminent Irish uprising. As so often with overseas invasions, the weather was the British Isles’ best defender. The sea was so rough that, to Tone’s dismay, the army could not land and decided to return home. French support now waned. A bizarre French landing in Pembroke occurred in early 1797, hoping to stir a Welsh uprising and a march on Bristol. A rabble of 1,200 men landed near Fishguard, ran drunkenly amok and were rounded up by the local militia. One group was arrested with a pitchfork by a woman, Jemima Nicholas, who was duly celebrated as the ‘Pembrokeshire heroine’.
Britain at the time was formally at war with France, and for the Irish to have openly welcomed French troops onto British territory was intolerable. It recalled the Tudors’ reaction to Scottish flirtation with the same foe. However, by 1798 the British authorities in Dublin faced a rebellion by a reputed 280,000 Irishmen under arms, embracing Catholics and northern Presbyterians. British soldiers on the ground were operating under de facto wartime powers, and the result was extremes of violence against the Irish and their forces.
The war dragged on. Lesser French raids in 1798 were partly successful. Wexford and Wicklow were at one point lost to government control and Wexford was briefly declared a republic. In the course of one naval encounter Tone was arrested and imprisoned, as a result of which he committed suicide. An able and articulate man, he joined the ranks of Irish heroes cheated of any chance to put his talents to his country’s service.
By the end of the year the rebellion had petered out. The rebels were subject to mass executions, with estimates ranging from 10,000 to 50,000 dead. The historian Roy Foster described it as ‘the most concentrated outbreak of violence in recorded Irish history’. A tree in Wicklow to which a group of prisoners had been tied for shooting was so full of lead no saw could bring it down.
A most unequal marriage
The 1798 Irish rebellion was significant in embracing almost all Ireland’s communities, Catholics and Nonconformist Protestants, Belfast merchants and Dublin professionals, even landowners and gentry. This was no Catholic confederacy but an all-Ireland independence movement. For its part, London had learned some lessons from the American secession, but they applied to its new empire and not its old one. The India Act of 1784 and the Canada Act of 1791 were both designed to grant a measure of local devolution under imperial authority. There was no such devolution to Dublin, even to its Protestant ascendancy.
Instead, London decided to take Ireland down the same path to enforced matrimony as it had taken Wales in 1536 and Scotland in 1707. It was merged politically and legislatively with England. The Dublin parliament, in one of its last acts, voted in 1799 against a union bill sent from London. It changed its mind a year later, as had Scotland’s in 1707, in a flurry of bribed votes. A sick Grattan staggered into the chamber and gave a seated but storming two-hour speech in opposition. He declared his ‘fidelity to the fortunes of my country, faithful to her freedom, faithful to her fall’.
The Dublin parliament now ceased to exist and a hundred pro-union Irish MPs, two-thirds of them from small Anglo-Irish boroughs, took ship for London and swore loyalty to the crown. A lord lieutenant continued to govern Ireland from Dublin Castle, but unaccountable to any assembly. The Anglican Church of Ireland was merged with the Church of England and an archbishop and three bishops came to sit in the House of Lords.
The name of the new union that came into being in 1801 was the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. When the question of the title of the monarch arose, it was provocatively proposed that George III be named as Emperor of the British Isles. This he declined, but James I’s Union Jack was squeezed to include a new cross of St Patrick. Wales was again omitted as a ‘home nation’. The flag was imperial propaganda, bequeathing to the United Kingdom one of the most bizarre banners in the world. People were to ask, did it represent one nation, three or even four?
To London, the crushing of Grattan’s Parliament was necessitated by a wartime emergency. Like most such emergency measures it outlasted its cause. The United Kingdom that came into being on 1 January 1801 was in effect the restoration of Cromwell’s Commonwealth. There would be no Irish national assembly, no local autonomy beyond the county magistracy and no home rule. Laws concerning Ireland were to be passed in London. To the British government this presented no ideological problem. The nations of the old English empire all shared one monarch and were present in one parliament. As under the Normans, unity would be achieved not by confederal institutions but by political assimilation.
For most of the eighteenth century Scotland and Wales had begun to acclimatise themselves to this centralised form of union. Optimists now hoped that, in the afterglow of the Hanoverian ‘golden age’, the British Isles could indeed fuse four peoples into one. The concept of Britishness was already widening to embrace an overseas empire – in which Scots, Irish and Welsh were playing an equal role. Surely the past grievances and imbalances of power implied by an English empire could pass into history.
An inauspicious birth
It was not to be. As Linda Colley has pointed out, imperialism acquires an authoritarian voice largely through the mechanisms of its formation, those of violence. Great Britain might be tolerable to the Scots, for many of whom the British empire had become a source of pride. They could see the English as in some degree partners rather than rulers. The Irish had never seen themselves in those terms. As Colley put it, Ireland saw ‘Great Britain as an invented nation, superimposed onto much older alignments and loyalties … and forged above all by war.’ Back in time, Hibernia had been independent of Roman Britain. The Gaelic tongue had little in common with Brythonic. Ireland had been conquered by Britain and ruled as a conquered people. So much was fact.
In particular, George III was still appalled that a part of his domain should be so emphatically Catholic. In 1793, the few Catholic property-owners even won the vote. The king was insistent that his Church of England ‘govern’ in Ireland as did his parliament and he was determined to ensure that the new United Kingdom conformed to that insistence. Under the 1800 union agreement, Catholics would be allowed to sit in Parliament and hold public offices. This concession had been agreed by Pitt but it was blocked by the king, now on the brink of mental breakdown. So blatant was this reneging that in 1801 Pitt felt obliged to resign, though he later returned.
Ireland was yet again enraged. A new generation of Irish politicians stepped forward to take up the mantle of Tone and Grattan. In 1823 Daniel O’Connell (1775–1847) founded the Catholic Association and five years later won a well-financed by-election to Westminster in County Clare. His victory, the first for a Catholic in over a century, was so emphatic that the House of Commons in London dared not force on him the customary oath of loyalty.
The following year, in 1829, with George III dead, a breakthrough in Catholic emancipation was achieved in another Catholic Relief Act. This admitted Catholic householders to the franchise and to jobs in the law and civil service. Faced with the certainty of a resumed Irish rebellion, even the High Tory prime minister Lord Wellington saw that he had to push the bill through Parliament. He still had to survive a mock duel on Battersea Fields with a fanatical anti-Catholic peer.
In Ireland O’Connell was now viewed as ‘the Liberator’, though a furious George IV called him ‘King of Ireland’ while he himself was merely ‘Dean of Windsor’. At the next, ‘Reform Bill’ election of 1832 a third of Irish votes went to candidates demanding the repeal of the 1801 union. By 1843 Ireland was again at fever pitch with O’Connell making a rousing speech on the ancient Hill of Tara to a crowd estimated at 750,000. His voice must have required an army of ‘barkers’ to be repeated across the hillside. He demanded land ownership reform, an end to Anglican tithes and full home rule for Ireland within the United Kingdom.
O’Connell now ran into headwinds of controversy. He insisted on non-violent campaigning and thus split his own supporters between moderates and militants. He also added that Irish identity ‘lay in religion’ and that Ulster’s Protestants were ‘northern holders of foreign heresies’. This ensured him the hostility of much of Ulster as the lingering divide between Ireland’s north and south became a chasm. A Belfast newspaper even opined, presciently, that the north might one day need partition and ‘its own distinct kingdom’.
The 1841 census was dramatic. Ireland’s population had been 4 million in 1800 and had now more than doubled to 8.5 million. This was more than half England’s 16.5 million. For England’s nervous Anglicans, Catholic emancipation was now not an issue only of religion but also of demography. With Scotland at 2.6 million and Wales at 1.1 million, almost two-fifths of the population of the British Isles were not English. At this rate of growth, it was conceivable that one day Irish, Welsh and Scottish voters might be the tail wagging the British bulldog. This was not how empires were supposed to turn out.
The great famine
Fate now offered the grimmest of correctives. The Irish famine that broke out in 1845 resulted from a blight hitting Ireland’s staple source of calories and protein, the potato, an easy-to-grow all-purpose foodstuff. A virtual potato monoculture over much of the west of Ireland left no alternative source of food. There were now no seed potatoes for the following year’s crop and there was no cash spare for food imports. To maintain the Irish trading economy, the London government refused even to ban Irish grain exports, which continued from Dublin throughout the five years of famine.
The consequence was that by 1850 over a million Irish had died of starvation or related causes. Another million piled into ships to reach safety in Britain and America. In just half a decade, the population fell from 8.5 million to 6.5 million and continued down to 5 million. Unknown numbers became vagrant across Ireland, their bodies lying by the road. The population of the poorest western province of Connacht reportedly plummeted from 1.4 million to 400,000. Emigration meant that by 1851 a quarter of the population of Liverpool was Irish and much the same proportion of Glasgow. For a developed and supposedly united European kingdom already living amid the fruits of an industrial revolution, this seemed an inexplicable disaster.
British governments – whether under the progressive Tory Robert Peel or the Whig Lord Russell – were adamant that they had no obligation to change policy. They believed Ireland’s food should rely on the market’s laws of demand and supply. Only after two years, in 1847, was poor law relief introduced, but since this was financed by local taxation on absentee landlords, the impact was patchy. Landlords could avoid the burden of new taxes through evictions, and many paid for their tenants’ passage to America. One prominent landowner, Britain’s foreign secretary Lord Palmerston, reportedly evicted no fewer than 2,000 tenants from his Irish estates.
Potato blight afflicted much of Europe, including Scotland, but only in western Ireland did the population’s total reliance on the vegetable render it disastrous. London officials in Dublin were closer to the front. One of them, Lord Clarendon, wrote to Russell, ‘I don’t think there is another legislature in Europe that would disregard such suffering as now exists in the west of Ireland, or coldly persist in a policy of extermination.’ He was ignored. London was finding £20 million to compensate British plantation-owners for the abolition of slavery. Irish relief eventually ran to £7 million.
The famine demonstrated an uncomfortable reality, that the people of Ireland were seen by many in Victorian England as a separate tribe, descendants of those cleared from England by the civilising Anglo-Saxons. The British official charged with organising famine relief, first in Ireland and then in Scotland, was Sir Charles Trevelyan (1807–86). Before moving on to become a noted civil service reformer, he believed the famine should be left to the market to correct. He declared, ‘The judgment of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson … as a mendicant community.’ Trevelyan saw part of his task as to rid the British Isles of the Catholic Irish, preferably by sending them across the Atlantic. They should be replaced by Germans, ‘an orderly, moral, industrious, frugal people, less foreign to us than the Irish or Scotch Celt’. It was a rare use of the word Celt.
The famine reduced most of Ireland to numb exhaustion, a struggle for survival by communities made worse by the emigration of their able-bodied males. Forty per cent of men and women born in Ireland over the mid-nineteenth century were by 1890 living abroad, mostly in America, though it should be said that Italy and Spain experienced similar emigrations across the Atlantic. Half of America’s forty-five presidents were to be of Irish extraction, fourteen of them Scots-Irish from Ulster. Back in Ireland the post-famine era was called the Great Silence.