Notes

INTRODUCTION

1. Desmond Bowen, The Protestant Crusade in Ireland, 1800–70: A Study of Protestant–Catholic Relations between the Act of Union and Disestablishment (Dublin and Montreal 1978), p. XI.

ONE: EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ANTECEDENTS

1. Quoted on the title page of The Monstrosities of Methodism: Being an Impartial Examination into the Pretension of our Modern Sectaries, to Prophetic Inspiration, Providential Interferences, and Spiritual Impulse. With a preliminary notice of Dr Walker’s New Sect, and the Disputing Society in Stafford Street. By a Curate of the Church of England (Dublin 1808).

2. A.C.H. Seymour, The Life and Times of Selina, Countess of Huntingdon, by a Member of the House of Shirley and Hastings, vol. 1 (London 1839), p. 346.

3. Charlotte Brooke, Reliques of Irish Poetry (1789; Gainesville, Florida 1970), preface, pp. VII–VIII.

4. Jacob Boehme (1575–1624)—more commonly known as Behman in England—a German theosophist and mystic, was considered the source of continental pietism in the British Isles. His writings on the nature of God and the problem of evil were translated into many languages. William Law (1686–1761) was a devotional writer and a great admirer of Boehme. Law’s Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1728) deeply influenced the early evangelicals, especially the Wesley brothers. Mrs Law is most likely a reference to Hester Gibbon, sister of the historian Edward Gibbon, to whom in fact Law was not married. Along with a wealthy widow, Mrs Hutchinson (or Hutcheson), she shared Law’s household until his death in 1761. Nicholas Zinzendorf (1700–60), a German nobleman and native of Dresden, was inspired by Moravian refugees to devote himself to the religious life. He had a significant influence on the international evangelical movement, particularly through his conception of a ‘Pilgrim Church’, which was at the centre of the Protestant missionary enterprise. John Wesley (1703–91) and his brother Charles (1708–88) owed a great deal, in both practical and spiritual terms, to the influence of Law and Zinzendorf. George Whitefield (1714–70), the most active and travelled preacher of his day, began his career in close cooperation with the Wesleys but later diverged from them on theological grounds. Gordon Rupp, Religion in England, 1698–1791 (Oxford 1986), pp. 218–32 (Jacob Boehme and William Law); pp. 342–63 (John and Charles Wesley); pp. 339–42 (George Whitefield).

5. J.L. Kincheloe, Jr, ‘European roots of evangelical revivalism: Methodist transmission of the pietistic socio-religious tradition’, Methodist History, 18 (July 1980), 262–71; Susan O’Brien, ‘A transatlantic community of saints: The Great Awakening and the first evangelical network, 1735–1755’, American Historical Review, 91 (Oct. 1986), 811–32; W.R. Ward, ‘Power and piety: The origins of religious revival in the early eighteenth century’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library of Manchester, 63, I (1980), 231–52; Andrew F. Walls, ‘The eighteenth-century Protestant missionary awakening in its European context’ in Brian Stanley (ed.), Christian Missions and the Enlightenment (Grand Rapids, Michigan and Cambridge 2001), pp. 22–44.

6. Ward, ‘Power and piety’, 236–8.

7. Edward Langton, The History of the Moravian Church: The Story of the First International Protestant Church (London 1956), p. 75.

8. Ward, ‘Power and piety’, 242–3; David Hempton, Methodism and Politics in British Society, 1750–1850 (London 1984), p. 23.

9. Langton, Moravian Church, p. 67.

10. Ibid. pp. 72–5.

11. For the influence of the Moravian Church on the missionary movement in England in the late eighteenth century see J.C.S. Mason, The Moravian Church and the Missionary Awakening in England, 1760–1800 (Woodbridge, Suffolk and Rochester, New York 2001).

12. Langton, Moravian Church, pp. 131–2; John Warburton, Rev. J. Whitelaw, and Rev. Robert Walsh, History of the City of Dublin from the Earliest Accounts to the Present Time; containing its annals, antiquities, ecclesiastical history, and charters; its present extent, public buildings, schools, institutions, etc. to which are added, biographical notices of eminent men, and copious appendices of its population, revenue, commerce, and literature, vol. II (London 1818), p. 827.

13. Warburton et al., City of Dublin, vol. II.

14. Langton, Moravian Church, pp. 131–2. A full account of the Moravian colony at Gracehill is contained in S.G. Hanna, ‘The origin and nature of the Gracehill Moravian settlement, 1764–1855, with special reference to the work of John Cennick in Ireland, 1746–1755’ (unpublished ma thesis, Queen’s University, Belfast 1964).

15. David Hempton and Myrtle Hill, Evangelical Protestantism in Ulster Society, 1740–1890 (London and New York 1992), p. 7.

16. The standard account of the early development of Irish Methodism and John Wesley’s role is C.H. Crookshank, History of Methodism in Ireland (London 1885–8).

17. David Hempton, ‘Methodism in Irish society, 1770–1830’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5, 36 (1986), 117–42.

18. Robert Haire, Wesley’s One and Twenty Visits to Ireland (London 1947), p. 23.

19. Rupp, Religion in England, pp. 372–7.

20. Quoted in Haire, Wesley’s One and Twenty Visits, pp. 30–1.

21. Hempton, ‘Methodism in Irish Society’, 118.

22. The most comprehensive account of Ouseley’s career is William Reilly, Memorial of the Ministerial Life of Gideon Ouseley, Irish Missionary (New York 1852). For a more recent evaluation of his contribution to the Irish evangelical movement see David Hempton, ‘Gideon Ouseley: Rural revivalist, 1791–1839’, Studies in Church History, 25 (1989), 203–14.

23. Myrtle Hill, ‘Evangelicalism and the churches in Ulster society, 1750–1850’, (unpublished PhD thesis, Queen’s University, Belfast 1987), p. 31.

24. Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntington, played a pivotal role in spreading evangelical religion among the upper classes in eighteenth-century Britain. An early admirer of the Wesleys and Whitefield, she used the provisions of the Conventicle Act of 1687 to attach chapels to aristocratic houses where clergymen who were not ordained in the Church of England could preach without fear of the law. In order to train ministers for her Connexion she founded a college at Trevecca in North Wales. Her aristocratic associations did not always agree with the Wesleys, but her contribution to the growth of the evangelical movement in the Church of England is beyond question. Rupp, Religion in England, pp. 462–71. See also Boyd Stanley Schlenther, Queen of the Methodists: The Countess of Huntingdon and the Eighteenth-Century Crisis of Faith (Durham 1997).

25. Langton, Moravian Church, p. 41.

26. Walter Shirley to Lady Huntingdon, 20 Feb. 1760 (Westminster College, Cambridge, Cheshunt Foundation Papers, E41/1).

27. Henry Mead to Lady Huntingdon, 15 Nov. 1771 (Ibid. F1/139).

28. L.M. Cullen, The Emergence of Modern Ireland, 1600–1900 (Dublin and New York 1981), pp. 57–8.

29. Rev. Maiben C. Motherwell, A Memoir of the Late Albert Blest, for Many Years Agent and Secretary for Ireland of the London Hibernian Society (Dublin 1843), pp. 13–24.

30. Ibid. p. 35.

31. According to his biographer, ‘the motives which influenced Mr. Blest’s conduct contributed much to the cordiality of religious feeling which then prevailed between members of the Established Church and evangelical Dissenters in Sligo. Education in doing good and not the advancement of the sectarian interest was the characteristic feature of every measure adopted for general usefulness. The revival and extension of religion was accompanied by a corresponding solicitude for the welfare of the leading religious societies. Their respective anniversaries were well-attended and liberal contributions made to their funds.’ Motherwell, Albert Blest, p. 119.

32. Roger H. Martin, Evangelicals United: Ecumenical Stirrings in Pre-Victorian Britain, 1795–1830 (London and Metuchen, New Jersey 1983), p. 3.

33. Edwin Welch, Spiritual Pilgrim: A Reassessment of the Life of the Countess of Huntingdon (Cardiff 1995), pp. 120–4.

34. Martin, Evangelicals United, pp. 5–14. See also Rupp, Religion in England, pp. 368–72.

35. Motherwell, Albert Blest, pp. 145–6.

36. To take hospital care as one example, with institutions like Dr Steevens’s (1733), Mercer’s (1734), St Patrick’s (1757), and the Rotunda (1757), Dublin could compare with the best in the kingdom, if not in Europe. J.L. McCracken, ‘The social structure and social life, 1714–60’ in T.W. Moody and W.E. Vaughan (eds), A New History of Ireland, Vol. IV: Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 1691–1800 (Oxford 1986), p. 50.

37. Rupp, Religion in England, p. 309.

38. Warburton et al., City of Dublin, vol. II, p. 309.

39. Constantia Maxwell, Country and Town in Ireland under the Georges (Dundalk 1949), pp. 321–5. See also Toby Barnard, A New Anatomy of Ireland: The Irish Protestants, 1649–1770 (New Haven, Connecticut and London 2003), p. 277.

40. Helen M. Jones, ‘A spiritual aristocracy: Female patrons of religion in eighteenth-century England’ in Deryck W. Lovegrove (ed.), The Rise of the Laity in Evangelical Protestantism (London and New York 2002), pp. 85–94.

41. R.B. McDowell, Ireland in the Age of Imperialism and Revolution, 1760–1801 (Oxford 1979), p. 141.

42. Noel Annan et al., Ideas and Beliefs of the Victorians: An Historic Revaluation of the Victorian Age (New York 1966), p. 36.

43. V. Kiernan, ‘Evangelicalism and the French Revolution’, Past and Present, 1 (Feb. 1952), 44.

44. Harold Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780–1880 (London 1969), pp. 281.

45. Kiernan, ‘Evangelicalism’; E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York 1966), especially chapter 3, ‘The transforming power of the cross’, pp. 350–400.

46. Stuart Piggin, Making Evangelical Missionaries, 1789–1858: The Social Background, Motives, and Training of British Protestant Missionaries to India (Abingdon 1984), appendix 5, pp. 294–305; Paul Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837 (New York 1985), pp. 138–41.

47. Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1740–1830 (New York 1987), chapters 2–7.

48. Ibid. p. 234.

49. Ibid.

50. Ibid. p. 235.

51. Ian Bradley, The Call to Seriousness: The Evangelical Impact on the Victorians (London 1976), p. 156.

52. David Hempton, ‘Evangelicalism in English and Irish society, 1790–1840’ in Mark A. Noll, David W. Bebbington, George A. Rawlyk (eds), Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies of Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles, and Beyond, 1700–1990 (Oxford 1994), pp. 156–76.

53. Alan R. Acheson, ‘The Evangelicals in the Church of Ireland, 1784–1859’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Queen’s University, Belfast 1967), p. 30.

54. Ibid. p. 29.

55. Ibid. p. 77.

56. The most forceful argument to project Irish society of the eighteenth century as reflecting the general character and conditions of ancien régime Europe is S.J. Connolly, Religion, Law and Power: The Making of Protestant Ireland, 1660–1760 (Oxford 1995).

57. Cullen, Modern Ireland, p. 13.

58. S.J. Connolly, ‘Law, order, and popular protest in early eighteenth-century Ireland: The case of the Houghers’ in P.J. Corish (ed.), Radicals, Rebels, and Establishments: Historical Studies XV (Belfast 1985), pp. 51–68.

59. Thomas P. Power, Land, Politics and Society in Eighteenth-Century Tipperary (Oxford 1997); Kevin Whelan, ‘The Catholic Church in County Tipperary, 1700–1900’ in William Nolan and Thomas McGrath (eds), Tipperary: History and Society: Interdisciplinary Essays on the History of an Irish County (Dublin 1985), pp. 215–55.

60. For an account of the debate about conversion in the eighteenth century, see Connolly, Religion, Law and Power, pp. 294–9.

61. Brian Ó Cuív, ‘Irish language and literature, 1691–1845’ in Moody and Vaughan (eds), Eighteenth-Century Ireland, p. 375. John Richardson, A Proposal for the Conversion of the Popish Natives of Ireland to the Established Religion, with the Reasons upon Which It Is Grounded and an Answer to the Objections Made to It (London 1712), p. 95.

62. The most complete account of the Charter Schools is Kenneth Milne, The Irish Charter Schools, 1730–1830 (Dublin 1997).

63. Carl Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (London 1932; New Haven, Connecticut 1966), especially chapter 3, ‘The new history: Philosophy teaching by example’, pp. 71–118.

64. Among the practitioners of this kind of scholarship Charles Vallancey was the most famous, but he was by no means an isolated figure. An Essay on the Celtic Language: Showing the Importance of the Iberno-Celtic, or Irish Dialect, to Students in History, Antiquity, and the Greek and Roman Classics, which was published by Vallancey in 1782, was preceded by Rev. David Malcolme’s Letters, Essays and Other Tracts Illustrating the Antiquities of Great Britain and Ireland (London 1744), and by John Cleland’s The Way to Things by Words (London 1766), which advance more or less a similar argument.

65. David Dickson, New Foundations: Ireland, 1600–1800 (Dublin 1987), pp. 102–3.

66. Whelan, ‘Catholic Church in County Tipperary’, p. 216.

67. Power, Eighteenth-Century Tipperary, pp. 245–52.

68. Ibid, pp. 228–31.

69. James S. Donnelly, Jr, ‘The Whiteboy movement, 1761–5’, Irish Historical Studies, 21, 81 (March 1978), 20–54.

70. Ibid.; Power, Eighteenth-Century Tipperary, pp. 241–2.

71. Power, Eighteenth-Century Tipperary, pp. 263–5.

72. Ibid. p. 256; Dickson, New Foundations, pp. 134–5.

73. Cullen, Modern Ireland, p. 123.

74. J.C. Beckett, The Making of Modern Ireland: 1603–1923 (London 1972), p. 212.

75. Marianne Elliott, Partners in Revolution: The United Irishmen and France (New Haven and London 1982), p. 14.

76. James S. Donnelly, Jr, ‘The Rightboy movement, 1785–88’, Studia Hibernica, 17/18 (1977–8), 126–7.

77. Maurice Bric, ‘The Rightboy movement, 1785–1788’, Past and Present, 100 (Aug. 1983), 102.

78. Edited and introduced by James S. Donnelly, Jr, ‘A contemporary account of the Rightboy movement: The John Barter Bennett manuscript’, Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society, lxxxviii, 247 (1983), 1–50.

79. Ibid.

80. Ibid. 27–8.

81. Ibid. 12–13.

82. Dominic Trant, Considerations on the Present Disturbances in the Province of Munster, Their Causes, Extent, Probable Consequences, and Remedies (Dublin 1787), pp. 56–7.

83. Donnelly, ‘Rightboy movement’, 147.

84. S.J. Connolly, Priests and People in Pre-Famine Ireland, 1780–1845 (Dublin 1982), pp. 243–52; John A. Murphy, ‘The support of the Catholic clergy in Ireland, 1750–1850’ in J.L. McCracken (ed.), Historical Studies, vol. V (London 1965), pp. 103–21.

85. Bric, ‘Rightboy Movement’, 115.

86. Ibid. 114–15.

87. Donnelly, ‘John Barter Bennett manuscript’, 18.

88. A more complete account of Arabella Jefferies’ involvement with the Rightboy campaign may be found in Ann C. Kavanaugh, John Fitzgibbon, Earl of Clare: Protestant Reaction and English Authority in Late Eighteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin 1997), pp. 105–7; her difficult relationship with her brother is considered on pp. 205–8.

89. Donnelly, ‘Rightboy movement’, 175; Donnelly, ‘John Barter Bennett manuscript’, 22.

90. Donnelly, ‘Rightboy movement’, 175.

91. The origin of the term ‘Protestant ascendancy’ has provided fertile ground for debate among scholars of the late eighteenth century. See James Kelly, ‘The genesis of “Protestant Ascendancy”: the Rightboy disturbances of the 1780s and their impact upon Protestant opinion’ in Gerard O’Brien (ed.), Parliament, Politics, and People: Essays in Eighteenth-Century Irish History (Dublin 1989), pp. 93–127.

92. Richard Woodward, The Present State of the Church of Ireland, Containing a Description of Its Precarious Situation and the Consequent Danger to the Public, Recommended to the Serious Consideration of the Friends of the Protestant Interest, to which are Subjoined Some Reflections on the Impractability of a Proper Commutation for Tithes and a General Account of the Origin and Progress of the Insurrection in Munster (Dublin 1787), preface, pp. III–XV.

93. Ibid. pp. 75–6.

94. Patrick Duigenan [Theophilus], An Address to the Nobility and Gentry of the Church of Ireland as by law established. Explaining the real causes of the commotions and insurrections in the southern parts of the Kingdom resprecting tithes (Dublin 1787), p. 2–4.

95. Woodward, Present State of the Church of Ireland, pp. 87–92.

96. James Kelly, ‘Interdenominational relations and religious toleration in late eighteenthcentury Ireland: The “Paper War” of 1786–8’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 3 (1988), 39–67.

97. James Kelly, ‘Relations between the Protestant Church of Ireland and the Presbyterian Church in late eighteenth-century Ireland’, Éire–Ireland, xxiii, 3 (Fall 1988), 38–56.

98. Donnelly, ‘Rightboy movement’, 147.

99. Donnelly, ‘John Barter Bennett manuscript’, 38.

100. The ‘Protestant ascendancy’ debate of the late 1780s is discussed in Jacqueline Hill, ‘Popery and Protestantism, civil and religious liberty: The disputed lessons of Irish history, 1690–1812’, Past and Present, 118 (Feb. 1988), 124–6; and W.J. McCormack, Ascendancy and Tradition in Anglo–Irish Literary History from 1789 to 1939 (Oxford 1985), pp. 67–96.

101. Elliott, Partners in Revolution, p. 21.

102. McCormack, Ascendancy and Tradition, p. 66.

103. Norman Vance, ‘Celts, Carthaginians, and constitutions: Anglo–Irish literary relations, 1780–1820’, Irish Historical Studies, 22, 85 (1981), 218.

104. Ned Lebow, ‘British historians and Irish history’, Éire–Ireland, VIII (1973), 3–38.

105. Walter D. Love, ‘Charles O’Conor of Belnagare and Thomas Leland’s “Philosophical” history of Ireland’, Irish Historical Studies, 13, 49 (March 1962), 2–3.

106. Hill, ‘Popery and Protestantism’, 106.

107. Patrick Duigenan, A Fair Representation of the Present Political State of Ireland (Dublin 1800), p. 80.

108. Love, ‘O’Conor of Belnagare’, 2–6.

109. David Berman, ‘David Hume on the 1641 rebellion in Ireland’, Studies, XV (1976), 101–12.

110. John Curry, Historical Memoirs of the Irish Rebellion in the year 1641; Extracted from Parliamentary Journals, State-acts, and The Most Eminent Protestant Historians (London 1758).

111. Robert and Catherine Coogan Ward, ‘The Catholic pamphlets of Charles O’Conor’, Studies, LXVIII (1979), 259–64.

112. Love, ‘O’Conor of Belnagare’, 17–22.

113. Ibid. 11–15.

114. Ibid.

115. Donal MacCartney, ‘The writing of history in Ireland, 1800–1850,’ Irish Historical Studies, 10 (Sept. 1957), 347–63.

116. Hill, ‘Popery and Protestantism’, 118.

117. Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York 1978), pp. 3–22.

118. Newman, English Nationalism, pp. 115–18. The most famous contemporary example of this model was, of course, that advanced by the Abbé Joseph Sieyès in his celebrated pamphlet What Is the Third Estate? in which he charged the French aristocracy with being descendants of the invading Franks who had enslaved the native Gauls. For an evaluation of the role of Sieyès rhetoric in the events leading up to the French Revolution see William H. Sewell, Jr, A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution: The Abbé Sieyès and What Is the Third Estate? (Durham, North Carolina 1994).

119. Brooke, Reliques of Irish Poetry, preface, pp. vii–viii.

120. Newman, English Nationalism, p. 159.

121. Oliver MacDonagh, States of Mind: A Study of Anglo–Irish Conflict, 1780–1980 (London 1983), pp. 1–3.

122. Hill, ‘Popery and Protestantism’, 129.

123. James Kelly, ‘The context and cause of Thomas Orde’s Plan of Education of 1787’, Irish Journal of Education, xx, 1 (1986), 3–26.

124. Quoted in ibid. 18.

125. Ibid. 20–1.

126. Ian McBride, ‘The common name of Irishman: Protestantism and patriotism in eighteenth-century Ireland’ in Tony Claydon and Ian McBride (eds), Protestantism and National Identity: Britain and Ireland, c. 1650–1850 (Cambridge 1998), pp. 236–61.

127. Joseph Liechty, ‘Irish evangelicalism, Trinity College Dublin and the mission of the Church of Ireland at the end of the eighteenth century’ (unpublished PhD thesis, St Patrick’s College, Maynooth 1987), especially chapter 3, ‘Trinity College Dublin in the late eighteenth century: The Irish Establishment’s custodian of faith and morals’, pp. 121–82.

128. Ibid. p. 122.

129. Ibid. pp. 165–6.

130. Nancy Curtin, ‘The transformation of the United Irishmen into a mass-based organization, 1794–6’, Irish Historical Studies, 24 (Nov. 1985), 463–92.

131. Thomas Bartlett, The Fall and Rise of the Irish Nation: The Catholic Question, 1690–1830 (Dublin 1992), p. 153.

132. Quoted in McDowell, Ireland, pp. 396–7.

133. Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh, Ireland before the Famine, 1798–1848 (Dublin 1972), p. 45.

134. Quoted in McDowell, Ireland, p. 398.

135. Alexander Knox, Essays on the Political Circumstances of Ireland Written during the Administration of Earl Camden, with an Appendix Containing Thoughts on the Will of the People and a Postscript Now First Published (Dublin 1799), especially essay 2, ‘Remarks on Lord Fitzwilliam’s statement on the Roman Catholics’, p. 19.

136. Kevin Whelan, The Tree of Liberty: Radicalism, Catholicism and the Construction of Irish Identity, 1760–1830 (Notre Dame and Cork 1996), pp. 115–19.

137. Ian d’Alton, Protestant Society and Politics in Cork, 1812–1844 (Cork 1980), p. 55.

138. Ó Tuathaigh, Ireland, p. 31.

139. Bowen’s description of her ancestor Eliza Galwey provides a classic picture of the moral seriousness that overtook the Irish gentry in the early nineteenth century: ‘Her reforms were moral as well as spiritual, she is said among things to have purged the library—the absence from among Henry III’s family’s representative stock of eighteenth-century books, of any novel, has been traced to her.’ Elizabeth Bowen, Bowen’s Court (1942; New York 1979), p. 247.

TWO: THE AGE OF MORAL REFORM

1. Warburton et al., City of Dublin, vol. II, p. 886.

2. Fourth Report of the Sunday School Society for Ireland (1814), p. 13.

3. John Jebb to Charles Brodrick, 22 Oct. 1815 (NLI, Brodrick Papers, MS 8866/4).

4. Mark A. Noll, ‘Revolution and the rise of evangelical social influence in North Atlantic societies’ in Noll et al. (eds), Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies, pp. 113–36.

5. Perkin, Origins of Modern English Society, p. 280.

6. Peter Burrowes to Sir Laurence Parsons, 23 Oct. 1800 (PRONI, Rosse Papers, D/2/11).

7. Whitley Stokes, Projects for Establishing Internal Peace (Dublin 1799), pp. 44–8.

8. The Rev. Joseph Stopford, scion of a long-established clerical family and famous for his piety and charity, was well known as the spiritual benefactor of many of the younger generation of Trinity evangelicals. His best-known protégé was the Rev. Peter Roe of Kilkenny. Another case is that of Thomas Lefroy who was taken into the family of Peter Burrowes during his student days. Liechty, ‘Irish evangelicalism’, p. 149.

9. Ibid. pp. 165–6.

10. Rev. Singleton Harpur, A Sermon against the Excessive Use of Spiritous Liquors (Dublin 1788). The same clergyman was also the probable author of an anonymous pamphlet Observations on the Consequences of the Excessive Use of Spirituous Liquors and the Ruinous Policy of Permitting Distillation in this Country, also published in 1788. In both pieces the connection between improvements in manners and morals and the economic prosperity of the nation was strongly underlined.

11. Bradley, Call to Seriousness, pp. 95–7.

12. Hints on the Means of Forming a Plan for Advancing Religious Education, Addressed to the Members of the Association for Discountenancing Vice and Promoting the Practice of Religion and Virtue (Dublin 1788). Several sources, including Warburton et al.’s City of Dublin, cite 1792 as the year in which the Association was founded, although the above pamphlet makes it clear that it existed in some fashion four years earlier.

13. Warburton et al., City of Dublin, vol. II, pp. 887–91. For an account of Hannah More’s popularity in the 1790s see Niall Ó Ciosáin, Print and Popular Culture in Ireland, 1750–1850 (London and New York 1997), pp. 136–8.

14. Ford K. Brown, Fathers of the Victorians: The Age of Wilberforce (Cambridge 1961), p. 257.

15. Warburton et al., City of Dublin, vol. II, p. 87. Myrtle Hill, ‘Evangelicalism and the churches in Ulster society’, p. 112.

16. Acheson, ‘Evangelicals’, p. 70.

17. Samuel Madden, Memoir of the Life of the Late Rev. Peter Roe (Dublin 1842), p. 64.

18. Acheson, ‘Evangelicals’, p. 53.

19. Ibid. p. 72.

20. Madden, Peter Roe, p. 82.

21. Acheson, ‘Evangelicals’, p. 75.

22. Ibid. p. 68.

23. Madden, Peter Roe, p. 144. The Rev. Walter Blake Kirwan was the most famous preacher of the ‘charity sermon’ in Dublin during the early nineteenth century. He was a native of Galway and a convert from Catholicism who had been educated at Douay. There is no evidence that he sympathized with the evangelical doctrine, but he nevertheless put his preaching skills at the disposal of institutions with strong evangelical affiliations like the Magdalen Asylum. For an account of his background and career, see Desmond Bowen, Souperism: Myth or Reality? A Study in Souperism (Cork 1970), pp. 31–3.

24. Madden, Peter Roe, p. 152.

25. W.D. Killen, The Ecclesiastical History of Ireland from the Earliest Period to the Present Times, vol. II (London 1875), p. 382.

26. Ibid.

27. For an account of the background of the La Touche family and their extensive influence in banking and politics in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, see David Dickson and Richard English, ‘The La Touche dynasty’ in David Dickson (ed.), The Gorgeous Mask: Dublin 1700–1850 (Dublin 1987), pp. 17–29.

28. Diary of John David La Touche, 1799–1800 (NLI, MS 3153), p. 11.

29. Diary of John David La Touche, ibid. p. 29; Mathias Joyce to Thomas Coke, 21 Aug. 1804 (SOAS/MMSA [Ireland] 1802–25, box 74, no. 6).

30. William Urwick, Biographical Sketches of the Late James Digges La Touche (London 1868), p. 81.

31. A discussion of Cowper’s popularity among the religiously inclined is to be found in Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (Chicago and London 1987).

32. James Digges La Touche to John Synge, 19 Nov. 1808 (TCD, La Touche–Synge Correspondence, MS 6180/4).

33. William Urwick, La Touche, pp. 222–3.

34. Ibid. pp. 53–4.

35. The most complete account of the career of John Synge is to be found in P. Clive Williams, ‘Pestalozzi John: A study of the life and educational work of John Synge, with special reference to the introduction and development of Pestalozzian ideas in Ireland and England’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Trinity College Dublin 1966).

36. Emma Le Fanu, The Life of the Rev. Charles Edward Herbert Orpen MD (London 1860). For a personal account of Orpen’s European travels and his stay with Pestalozzi see the Christian Examiner (Oct. 1828).

37. The purity of the Celtic church and its independence from Rome was a popular theme with supporters of the Reformation in the sixteenth century. See Angus Calder, Revolutionary Empire: The Rise of the English-Speaking Empires from the Fifteenth Century to the 1780s (New York 1998), p. 30.

38. Sydney Lee and Leslie Stephen (eds), Dictionary of National Biography, vol. XII (London 1885–1901), pp. 1308–9.

39. He makes a brief appearance in English literary history as the young man with whom Jane Austen fell in love in the 1790s, though he eventually married the daughter of a County Wexford yeoman whom he met in Abergavenny in North Wales, where many Wexford Protestants had taken refuge during the Rebellion.

40. Valentine Browne Lawless, Personal Recollections of the Life and Times of Valentine, Lord Cloncurry (Dublin 1869), p. 376.

41. Thomas Lefroy, Memoir of Chief Justice Thomas Lefroy, By His Son (Dublin 1871); Lee and Stephen (eds), Dictionary of National Biography, vol. XI, p. 845.

42. Roger Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition 1760–1810 (London 1975), p. 175.

43. A Short Account of the Late Mr. Mathias Joyce, Preacher of the Gospel for Thirty Years in Ireland. Written by Himself (Dublin 1808), p. 9.

44. The correspondence of the Rev. George Hamilton to his wife and daughters affords powerful evidence of the love and affection that characterized evangelical family relations. See George Hamilton to Harriet Hamilton, 20 July 1822 (PRONI, Johnston of Kilmore Papers, MS D.1728/7/18).

45. Charles Edward Orpen to J.H. Pestalozzi, 4 June 1818, and John Synge to J.H. Pestalozzi (1816–1818) Zentralbibliothek, Zurich, Pestalozzi Papers, MS 54 A/272; 55 A/365); Williams, ‘Pestalozzi John’, pp. 148–54.

46. For an account of the impact of Captain Cook’s descriptions of his adventures in the South Atlantic see Kathleen Wilson, ‘The island race: Captain Cook, Protestant evangelicalism and the construction of English national identity, 1760–1800’ in Claydon and McBride, Protestantism and National Identity, pp. 265–90.

47. Martin, Evangelicals United, pp. 40–1; D.W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London 1989), p. 62.

48. For an evaluation of the attitudes of Dissenting evangelicals to interdenominational cooperation see Deryck W. Lovegrove, ‘Unity and Separation: Contrasting elements in the thought and practice of Robert and James Alexander Haldane’ in Keith Robbins (ed.), Protestant Evangelicalsm: Britain, Ireland, Germany, and America c. 1750–1950, Essays in Honour of W.R. Ward (Oxford 1990), pp. 153–77.

49. P.R. Thomas, ‘The concept of an ecumenical Bible society movement, 1804–1832’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Lancaster 1980), pp. 5–26.

50. An Account of the Institution and Proceedings of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge and Practice and for Aiding and Assisting Sunday Schools in the Kingdom of Ireland (Dublin 1788).

51. An Address to the Proprietors of Irish Estates Residing in Great Britain (Dublin 1800), p. 2.

52. In a letter to William Wilberforce written in 1799 or 1800, Peter Roe described the feeling he experienced on first reading the Practical View, which ‘told me more than I ever knew before; brought fully to my conviction the corruption and depravity of my nature, and my need of a redeemer; and proved to me that instead of knowing my duty as a minister of Christ’s gospel, I did not know it as a man. It put me on a train of thinking, and to it I may in a great measure attribute any degree of zeal I may possess’. According to his biographer, the letter was left in an unfinished state. Madden, Peter Roe, pp. 52–3.

53. Madden, Peter Roe, p. 35.

54. Acheson, ‘Evangelicals’, p. 70; Killen, Ecclesiastical History, vol. II, p. 389.

55. Robert Shaw, Carrick-on-Suir, to Josiah Pratt, Secretary, Church Missionary Society, London, 4 April 1802 (CMS Archives, G/AC, 3/2, no. 66).

56. Peter Roe to Josiah Pratt, 16 May 1804 (CMS Archives, G/AC, 3/2, no. 22).

57. Killen, Ecclesiastical History, vol. II, p. 390.

58. Peter Roe to Josiah Pratt, 16 May 1804 (CMS Archives, G/AC, 3/2, no. 22).

59. George Carr to Josiah Pratt, 7 Jan. 1805 (CMS Archives, G/AC, 3/3, no. 84).

60. John Owen, The History of the Origin and First Ten Years of the British and Foreign Bible Society (London 1816), p. 104.

61. The Report of the Hibernian Society for the Year 1808, with a list of subscribers and benefactors (Dublin 1809), p. 7.

62. Acheson, ‘Evangelicals’, p. 66.

63. Hints for the Formation and Conducting of Auxiliary Societies and Associations of the Hibernian Bible Society (Dublin n.d.), p. 2.

64. William Canton, A History of the British and Foreign Bible Society (London 1804), p. 113.

65. Brown, Fathers of the Victorians, pp. 253–4.

66. Ibid.

67. This opinion was by no means unanimous, however. The famous abolitionist Granville Sharp believed that the Emancipation of Catholics would be ‘liberty of the sword’, and ‘The only mode of balancing the superiority of their numbers in Ireland, for the safety of the Irish Protestants, is surely to retain the constitutional limits of power in the hands of Protestants only: but, at the same time it is our duty as Christians to secure to the Romanists the free attainment of equal justice in the King’s Courts for the protection of their persons and property; and to treat them also with true Christian benevolence and kindness, as men and brethren, in every other respect except that of restraining their persecuting propensity, a restraint which is equally necessary for their peace, as well as our own.’ Granville Sharp to John Jebb, 26 March 1805 (TCD, John Jebb Papers, MS 6396–7/2).

68. Christian Observer (April 1814), 240.

69. John Jebb to Charles Brodrick, 26 July 1802 (NLI, Brodrick Papers, MS 8866/1).

70. In 1816, when the tithe question was once again a matter of national debate, Jebb penned a witty epigram in which he drew attention to the hypocrisy of landlords who colluded with the peasantry in opposing the payment of tithe: ‘What say the landlords in their grave debate: / “Taxes must be paid for rents are our estate / Taxes are fair, they feed the civil powers / Those persons guard property, and that is ours / But tithes—withhold,—resist them,—put them down / Tithes never brought our Worships half-acrown.” / Landlord and outlaw, thus, at length, proceed / And sordid selfishness theircommon creed / His worship prompts, and “Moonlight” deals the blow / And tithes, and Church, and pastor are laid low / But mark the strange event of human things / His worship gets the tithe, and “Captain Moonlight” swings.’ John Jebb to Charles Brodrick, 12 June 1816 (NLI, Brodrick Papers, MS 8866/5). For an account of Archbishop Brodrick’s attitudes as reflected in his personal correspondence see Deborah Jenkins, ‘The correspondence of Charles Brodrick (1761–1822), Archbishop of Cashel’, Irish Archives Bulletin (1979/80), 43–9. Dr Brodrick’s wife, Mary, was the daughter of Richard Woodward, Bishop of Cloyne, and his writings reflect many of the preoccupations of his well-known father-in-law.

71. The opinions of Jebb and Brodrick on the role of education in building a Christian society clearly reflect the teaching of Thomas Chalmers, the Scottish theologian and moralist whose influence was in the ascendant during the early years of the century. For an account of Chalmers’ life and influence see Stewart J. Brown, Thomas Chalmers and the Godly Commonwealth in Scotland (Oxford 1982).

72. R.A. Soloway, Prelates and People: Ecclesiastical Social Thought in England, 1783–1852 (London 1969), pp. 359–62.

73. D.H. Akenson, The Irish Education Experiment: The National System of Education in the Nineteenth Century (London 1970), pp. 20–9.

74. Quoted in ibid. p. 31.

75. Ibid. p. 32.

76. Ibid. p. 61.

77. Ibid. pp. 63–74.

78. An Address to the Proprietors of Irish Estates Residing in Great Britain (Dublin 1800), pp. 3–4.

79. Ibid. pp. 10–11.

80. Two Reports of the Committee of Education, Appointed by the Association for Discountenancing Vice and Promoting Religion and Virtue, on the Dioceses of Clogher and Kilmore (Dublin 1800), p. 13.

81. Report of the Committee of Education, Appointed by the Association for Discountenancing Vice and Promoting the Knowledge and Practice of the Christian Religion (Dublin 1803), p. 15.

82. Ibid. p. 9.

83. One commentator who noted the extraordinary increase of schools throughout Ireland in the early years of the nineteenth century was emphatic in his opinion that material advancement was what lay behind the demand: ‘the education of youth is only a secondary object with most parents—many are induced more by custom and necessity to educate their children, than on account of any moral or scientific advantages that might arise … the acquisition of gain seems to be the ruling passion of the present day …’ Patrick Carolan, An Essay on the Present State of Schools in Ireland (Dublin 1806).

84. Report of the Committee of Education, p. 10.

85. Ibid. pp. 13–14.

86. James Joseph Sullivan, ‘The education of Irish Catholics, 1782–1831’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Queen’s University, Belfast 1959), pp. 252–7.

87. First Report of the Commissioners of Irish Education Inquiry (1825), 400, XII, p. 34.

88. Ibid. p. 31.

89. Peter Burrowes to Laurence Parsons, 23 Oct. 1800 (PRONI, Rosse Papers, D/2/11).

90. Shute Barrington to Lord Redesdale, 8 June 1805 (PRONI, Redesdale Papers, T.3030/10/15/c.23).

91. Akenson, Irish Education Experiment, p. 77.

92. Quoted in ibid. pp. 77–8.

93. Warburton et al., City of Dublin, vol II, pp. 852–5.

94. Ibid. p. 872.

95. First Report of the Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in Ireland (Dublin 1813), p. 3.

96. Second Report of the Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in Ireland (Dublin 1814), p. 10.

97. Book Sub-Committee, 1815–40 (B.S.1–97). B.S.1 (Church of Ireland College of Education, Kildare Place Archives, box no. 13).

98. Second Report of the Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in Ireland (Dublin 1814), p. 12.

99. Ibid. p. 24.

100. Joseph Devonshire Jackson to Henry Monck Mason, 15 March 1815 (CICE/KPSA, CI/101).

101. Joseph Devonshire Jackson to Samuel Bewley, 16 March 1815 (CICE/KPSA, CI/102). Captain Harvey to Henry Monck Mason, 28 March 1815 (CICE/KPSA, CI/103).

102. Akenson, Irish Education Experiment, p. 86.

THREE: THE MISSION TO THE CATHOLIC POPULATION

1. An Address to the British Public on the Moral and Religious State of Ireland (London 1805), p. 15.

2. John Jebb to Charles Brodrick, 6 Oct. 1820 (NLI, Brodrick Papers, MS 8866/7).

3. Clarke H. Irwin, Famous Irish Preachers (Dublin 1889), p. 28.

4. Hempton, Methodism and Politics, p. 121.

5. Ibid. p. 120.

6. Charles Graham to Thomas Coke, 11 Sept. 1802 (SOAS/MMSA [Ireland] 1802–25, box 74).

7. Quoted in W.R. Ward, Religion and Society in England, 1790–1850 (London 1972), p. 118.

8. William Cornwall to the secretary of the Methodist Missionary Society, 26 Dec. 1817 (SOAS/MMSA [Ireland] 1802–25, box 74).

9. James Bell to Joseph Taylor, 29 Sept. 1819 (SOAS/MMSA [Ireland] 1802–25, box 74).

10. William Cornwall to Joseph Taylor, 6 Oct. 1818 (SOAS/MMSA [Ireland] 1818–20, box 74).

11. William Cornwall to Joseph Taylor, 25 Sept. 1819 (SOAS/MMSA [Ireland] 1818–20, box 74).

12. Charles Graham to Thomas Coke, 25 Jan. 1806; William Peacock and John Hamilton to Thomas Coke, 24 March 1806; R. Wilson to J. Taylor, 29 March 1819 (SOAS/MMSA [Ireland] 1802–25, box 74).

13. Mathias Joyce to Thomas Coke, 21 Aug. 1804 (SOAS/MMSA [Ireland] 1802–25, box 74).

14. The family of the duke of Wellington, for example, changed its name from Wesley to Wellesley to avoid association with the great Methodist leader. See R.B. McDowell, Social Life in Ireland, 1800-45 (Dublin 1957), p. 35.

15. Lawrence Kean to Thomas Coke, 28 Oct. 1802 (SOAS/MMSA [Ireland] 1802–25, box 74).

16. William Hamilton to Adam Averell, July 1806 (SOAS/MMSA [Ireland] 1802–25, box 74).

17. James Bell and William Hamilton to Thomas Coke, 31 Aug. 1804 (SOAS/MMSA [Ireland] 1802–17, box 74).

18. This growth is illustrated in Hempton, ‘Methodism in Irish society’, 117–42.

19. William Parnell, An Historical Apology for the Irish Catholics (Dublin 1807), p. 129.

20. Draft on Irish Missions for the Report of 1806 (SOAS/MMSA [Ireland] 1802–25, box 74).

21. Hempton, Methodism and Politics, pp. 125–42.

22. Ibid. p. 127.

23. Madden, Peter Roe, p. 127.

24. Motherwell, Albert Blest, p. 183; Killen, Ecclesiastical History, vol. I, p. 392.

25. Report of a Deputation of the London Hibernian Society (1808), p. 46.

26. Ibid. p. 20.

27. Ibid.

28. Ibid. p.26.

29. Victor Edward Durkacz, The Decline of the Celtic Languages: A Study of Linguistic and Cultural Conflict in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland from the Reformation to the Twentieth Century (Edinburgh 1983), pp. 82–5.

30. Ibid. pp. 96–153.

31. Charles W.J. Withers, Gaelic Scotland: The Transformation of a Cultural Region (London and New York 1988), pp. 151–2.

32. Alexander Haldane, The Lives of Robert Haldane of Airthrey, and his brother, James Alexander Haldane (Edinburgh 1855), pp. 104–23.

33. James Godkin, The Religious History of Ireland, Primitive, Papal, and Protestant, Including the Evangelical Missions, Catholic Agitations, and Church Progress of the Last Half-Century (London 1873), pp. 233.

34. Ibid. p. 83.

35. Ibid. p. 195.

36. Ibid. p. 182–3.

37. Sixth Annual Report of the London Hibernian Society (1812), p. 4.

38. Webster, London Hibernian Society, pp. 15–16; Motherwell, Albert Blest, p. 225.

39. Ninth Annual Report of the London Hibernian Society (1815), p. 5.

40. Motherwell, Albert Blest, pp. 245–51.

41. The following observation was made in the annual report of the LHS for 1816: ‘It is a remarkable instance of the divine favour that the priests who have been tolerant and friendly towards the society are situated in places where their power is absolute, and where the society has not a single friend to counteract their influence if it had been hostile.’ Tenth Annual Report of the London Hibernian Society (1816), p. 10.

42. Albert Blest to Charles King O’Hara, 27 Sept. 1814 (NLI, Charles King O’Hara Papers, MS 20,285).

43. John Jebb to Charles Brodrick, 12 March 1814 (NLI, Brodrick Papers, MS 8866/3).

44. For a more in-depth discussion of this subject see Ó Ciosáin, Print and Popular Culture, pp. 154–7.

45. John Owen, History of the British and Foreign Bible Society, pp. 9–10.

46. Durcacz, Decline, p. 119.

47. Christopher Anderson of Edinburgh was a disciple of the Haldane brothers and a prominent member of the Baptist Missionary Society. Brian Stanley, The History of the Baptist Missionary Society, 1792–1992 (Edinburgh 1992), p. 20.

48. Christopher Anderson, Memorial on Behalf of the Native Irish with a View to Their Improvement in Moral and Religious Knowledge through the Medium of Their Own Language (London 1815), pp. 28–34.

49. Daniel Dewar, Observations on the Character, Customs, and Superstitions of the Irish and on Some of the Causes Which Have Retarded the Moral and Political Improvement of Ireland (London 1812), p. 25.

50. Ibid. p. 34.

51. Ian Douglas Maxwell, ‘Civilization or Christianity? The Scottish debate on mission methods, 1750–1835’ in Brian Stanley (ed.), Christian Missions and the Enlightenment (Grand Rapids, Michigan and Cambridge 2001), pp. 123–40.

52. Tenth Annual Report of the London Hibernian Society (1816), pp. 34–5.

53. First Annual Report of the Baptist Society for the Promotion of the Gospel in Ireland (1815), p. 10.

54. Ibid. p. 37.

55. Second Annual Report of the Baptist Society for the Promotion of the Gospel in Ireland (1816),

p. 18.

56. Fourth Annual Report of the Baptist Society for the Promotion of the Gospel in Ireland (1818), pp. 37–8.

57. Joseph Belcher, The Baptist Irish Society: Its Origin, History, and Prospects (London 1845), pp. 25–6.

58. Sixth Annual Report of the Baptist Society for the Promotion of the Gospel in Ireland (1820), p. 8.

59. Seventh Annual Report of the Baptist Society for the Promotion of the Gospel in Ireland (1821), pp. 101–12.

60. Sixth Annual Report of the Baptist Society for the Promotion of the Gospel in Ireland (1820), pp. 4–8.

61. Fourth Annual Report of the Baptist Society for the Promotion of the Gospel in Ireland (1818), pp. 11–13.

62. FirstReport of the Commissioners of Irish Education Inquiry (1825), , XII, p. 736.

63. As L.M. Cullen has pointed out, the Sligo–Roscommon area, like Carlow and Wexford in the south-east, was a ‘shifting frontier’ characterized by heavy Protestant settlement. Between about 1780 and 1830 estate owners in this area followed a policy of introducing Protestant tenants, leading to a sharp increase in the Protestant population, and an accompanying rise in agrarian and sectarian outrages. See Cullen, Modern Ireland, p. 208.

64. Christian Observer (Feb. 1818), 172.

65. Christian Observer (1822), appendix, 846.

66. Christian Observer (May 1825), 330.

67. First Report of the Commissioners of Irish Education Inquiry (1825), 400, XII, p. 70.

68. Akenson, Irish Education Experiment, p. 82.

69. William Stewart to Charles Brodrick, 1815 or 1816 (NLI, Brodrick Papers, MS 8869/8).

70. John Jebb believed emphatically that the benevolence of the Church of Ireland clergy was the most effective instrument of moral reform: ‘were the clergy placed, not on weaker but on stronger grounds … their benevolence would have a free and unimpeded channel in which to flow … and they could be more popular than any other class of society, from the contrast between their generosity, and the hard dealings of lay proprietors, who are too seldom, in an equal degree, liberalized by education and softened by religion. The truth is, I cannot conceive a measure which would be more likely, eventually, to bring over the Roman Catholics to our reformed faith, than strengthening the hands of the clergy. Were this effectively done, could any measure be devised which would make it the interest of the people to settle quietly, the clergyman, instead of waging defensive warfare to protect his rights, would be at full liberty to bend all his power towards conciliation: and it cannot be doubted that conciliation is the best, as it is the only legitimate origin of conversion.’ John Jebb to Charles Brodrick, 14 May 1815 (NLI, Brodrick Papers, MS 8866/3).

71. Quoted in Urwick, James Digges La Touche, pp. 411–12.

72. Christian Observer (Dec. 1814), 845.

73. Robert Daly, A Sermon Preached at St. Anne’s Church in Aid of the Funds of the Sunday Schools Society for Ireland, on Sunday the 28th of February 1819 (Dublin 1819), p. 30.

74. Tenth Report of the Sunday School Society for Ireland (1821), p. 11.

75. Tenth Report of the Sunday School Society for Ireland (1821), appendix.

76. First Report of the Commissioners of Irish Education Inquiry (1825), pp. 62–3.

77. Sullivan, ‘Education of Irish Catholics’, p. 285.

78. Eva Stoter, ‘“Grimmige Zeiten”: The Influence of Lessing, Herder and the Grimm Brothers on the nationalism of the young Irelanders’ in Tadhg Foley and Seán Ryder (eds), Ideology and Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Dublin 1998).

79. Christopher Anderson to the committee of the Irish Society, 6 Nov. 1818 (TCD, Irish Society Proceedings, MS 7644/5). For a discussion of the use of Gaelic script see Ó Ciosáin, Print and Popular Culture, pp. 160–2.

80. Tomás Ó hÁilín, ‘The Irish Society agus Tadhg Ó Coinnialláin’, Studia Hibernica, 8 (1968), 68–9.

81. Irish Society Proceedings, 16 Sept. 1819 (TCD, MS 7644), p. 30.

82. Ninth Report of the Sunday School Society for Ireland (1819), p. 17.

83. Irish Society Proceedings, 17 March 1819 (TCD, MS 7644), pp. 17–18.

84. Irish Society Proceedings, 23 June 1821 (TCD, MS 7644), p. 85.

85. First Report of the Commissioners of Irish Education Inquiry (1825), , p. 84.

86. Lefroy, Memoir of Chief Justice Lefroy, pp. 89–92.

87. Charles Forster to John Jebb, 9 Oct. 1818 (TCD, John Jebb Papers, MS 6396–7/70).

88. John Jebb to Charles Brodrick, Oct. 1820 (NLI, Brodrick Papers, MS 8866/7).

89. Irish Society Proceedings, 23 June 1818 (TCD, MS 7644), p. 1.

90. Charles Edward Orpen, The Claims of Millions of Our Fellow Countrymen to Be Taught in Their Own and Only Language—the Irish (Dublin 1821), pp. 21–3.

91. Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘The invention of tradition: The Highland tradition of Scotland’, in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds) The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge 1984), p. 16.

92. Orpen, Claims of Millions, p. 9.

93. Ibid. p. 11.

94. W.J. McCormack has drawn attention to the similarities between the experiences of religious and national awakening. In raising the question as to why the Irish Literary Revival was called a ‘revival’, he speculates, ‘Is it not in several of its personalities, Yeats, Synge … O’Grady, and in a varied form, Lady Gregory, the achievement of displaced Irish evangelicals?’ See McCormack, Ascendancy and Tradition, p. 231. For a further analysis, see Vivien Mercier, ‘Victorian evangelicalism and the Anglo–Irish Literary Revival’ in Peter Connolly (ed.), Literature and the Changing Ireland (Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire 1980), pp. 59–101; and Terence Brown, ‘The Church of Ireland and the climax of the ages’ in Terence Brown (ed.), Ireland’s Literature: Selected Essays (Mullingar and Totowa, New Jersey 1988), pp. 49–64.

95. Irish Society Proceedings, 22 Oct. 1818 (TCD, MS 7644), p. 3.

96. An account of the career and work of Canon Goodman is provided in an article by Breandán Breathnach, ‘Séamus Goodman (1828–96): Bailitheoir cheoil’ (James Goodman [1828–96]: Music collector), Journal of the Kerry Archaeological and Historical Society, VI, (1973), 152–71.

97. David H. Greene and Edward M. Stephens, J.M. Synge, 1871–1909 (New York 1989), pp. 28–30.

98. Lefroy, Memoir of Chief Justice Lefroy, p. 83.

99. Fifth Annual Report of the London Hibernian Society (1811), appendix, p. 26; First Annual Report of the Baptist Irish Society (1815), appendix, p. 45; Motherwell, Albert Blest, pp. 215–16.

100. First Annual Report of the Baptist Society for the Promotion of the Gospel in Ireland (1815), appendix, p. 54.

101. Anderson, Memorial, pp. 64–6.

102. Dewar, Observations, p. 122.

103. Quoted in Reilly, Gideon Ouseley, pp. 203–4.

104. Fourth Annual Report of the London Hibernian Society (1810), pp. 17–19.

105. John Jebb to Charles Brodrick, 23 Nov. 1803 (NLI, Brodrick Papers, MS 8866/1).

106. The first mention of this institution occurred in 1809 at the annual meeting of the LHS. It was described as having been established by a Mr Jones and not exclusively connected with any one denomination. Young men were admitted at the age of eighteen and later recommended for situations; in 1809 the LHS undertook to sponsor four candidates whom it later expected to employ as teachers. Report of the Committee of the Hibernian Society at the Annual Meeting, 12 May 1809, pp. 4–5.

107. John Jebb to Charles Brodrick, 23 Oct. 1814 (Brodrick Papers, NLI, MS 8866/3)

108. William Maunsell to William Walker, secretary to the Board of Education, 24 July 1817 (NLI, Dr Michael Quane Papers, MS 17,945).

109. Ó hÁilín, ‘The Irish Society agus Tadhg Ó Coinnialláin’, pp. 60–78.

110. Quoted in ibid. p. 63.

111. Quoted in Sydney Owenson [Lady Morgan], Patriotic Sketches of Ireland Written in Connaught, vol. II (Baltimore, Maryland 1809), p. 211.

112. Quoted in ibid. p. 206.

113. Thaddeus Connnellan to Charles King O’Hara, 7 July 1834 (NLI, Charles King O’Hara Papers, MS 20,324).

FOUR: THE POLITICS OF CATHOLIC EMANCIPATION

1. John Milner to Daniel Murray, 10 March 1817 (DDA, Troy-Murray Papers, 30/3–105).

2. Quoted in Madden, Peter Roe, pp. 229–30.

3. Charles Forster to John Jebb, 9 Oct. 1818 (TCD, John Jebb Papers, MS 6396–7/70).

4. Whelan, Tree of Liberty, pp. 133–8.

5. S.J. Connolly, ‘The Catholic question, 1801–12’, in W.E. Vaughan (ed.), A New History of Ireland, Volume V: Ireland Under the Union, I: 1801–1870 (Oxford 1989), pp. 241–6.

6. G.I.T. Machin, The Catholic Question in English Politics, 1820–30 (Oxford 1964), p. 136; John Wolffe, The Protestant Crusade in Great Britain, 1829–1860 (Oxford 1991), p. 22.

7. Oliver MacDonagh, ‘The politicization of the Irish bishops, 1800–1850’, Historical Journal, XVII, 1 (1975), 39.

8. Bartlett, Irish Nation, pp. 250–1; Daire Keogh, ‘Catholic responses to the Act of Union’ in Daire Keogh and Kevin Whelan (eds), Acts of Union: The Causes, Contexts and Consequences of the Act of Union (Dublin 2001), pp. 159–70.

9. Machin, Catholic Question, p. 12.

10. MacDonagh, ‘Irish bishops’, 39. For an account of the political background in which O’Connell launched his campaign against the veto, see Oliver MacDonagh, O’Connell: The Life of Daniel O’Connell, 1775–1847 (1988–9; London 1991), pp. 92–116.

11. MacDonagh, ‘Irish bishops’, 38.

12. Machin, Catholic Question, p. 15.

13. Quoted in MacDonagh, ‘Irish bishops’, 40.

14. From a pamphlet on the Quarantotti Rescript (n.p. n.d.) (DDA, Troy–Murray Papers, Green File no. 7, 30/2).

15. R.J. Rodgers, ‘James Carlisle, 1784–1854’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Queen’s University, Belfast 1973), p. 70.

16. John O’Connell (ed.), The Select Speeches of Daniel O’Connell, M.P.: Edited with Historical Notices, etc., by His Son, John O’Connell, vol. I (Dublin 1854-5), p. 240.

17. Quoted in Walter Alison Phillips (ed.), A History of the Church of Ireland from the Earliest Times to the Present Day, vol. III (London 1933), p. 293.

18. Canton, History of the BFBS, p. 27.

19. Owen, Origin and First Ten Years of the BFBS, pp. 526–7.

20. Thomas Elrington to Lord Lieutenant, 11 Nov. 1813 (NAI, Calendar of Official Papers, vol. II, 552/389/5).

21. In a report on clerical matters in West Cork, John Jebb reported that there was an increasing demand for bibles, prayer books, and testaments among the parochial clergy: ‘The Cork Bible Society has kept itself altogether distinct from the Hibernian. It is managed exclusively by clergy of the establishment, and through them bibles and testaments are quickly distributed to those who want them. The Hibernian Bible Society made a struggle to have it otherwise, but fruitlessly.’ John Jebb to Charles Brodrick, 8 March 1814 (NLI, MS 8866/2).

22. Joseph D’Arcy Sirr, A Memorial of the Honourable and Most Reverend Power le Poer Trench, Last Archbishop of Tuam (Dublin 1845), p. 44.

23. William Thomas to the secretary of the Baptist Irish Society, 8 June 1820, Sixth Annual Report of the Baptist Society for the Promotion of the Gospel in Ireland (1820), appendix, p. 31.

24. Andrew O’Callaghan, Thoughts on the Tendencies of Bible Societies as affecting the Established Church and Christianity Itself as a ‘reasonable service’ (Dublin 1816), pp. 5–17.

25. William Phelan, The Bible, not the Bible Society: Being an Attempt to Point out that Mode of Disseminating the Scriptures, which Would Most Effectively Conduce to the Security of the Established Church and the Peace of the United Kingdom (Dublin 1817), pp. 168–71.

26. Ibid. p. 14.

27. Desmond Bowen’s description of Protestant–Catholic relations in the first two decades of the nineteenth century defies credibility: ‘During that period, to a remarkable degree, the Catholic majority people and the minority Protestant ascendancy seemed to be able to tolerate each other. Revolutionary sentiments had been crushed by the savage reprisals following 1798, the Emmet rising had been quickly smothered, and local famines had taken away what little spirit was left in the rapidly increasing rural population. Religious peace existed generally, for, although agrarian secret societies were active in some parts of the country, neither the Catholics nor the Protestants wanted to add to social unrest by raising sectarian issues.’ Bowen, Protestant Crusade, introduction, p. X. For a more balanced but equally nostalgic account, see Ignatius Murphy, ‘Some attitudes to religious freedom and ecumenism in pre-Emancipation Ireland’, Irish Ecclesiastical Record, vol. CV (Feb. 1966), 93–104.

28. James Warren Doyle, Letters on a Reunion of the Church of England and Rome (Dublin 1824).

29. Murphy, ‘Religious freedom and ecumenism’, 101–3.

30. Eric Richards, A History of the Highland Clearances: Agrarian Transformations and the Evictions, 1746–1886 (London 1982), p. 29.

31. A good example of Catholic attitudes towards the evangelical mission is provided in a speech by Richard Lalor Sheil delivered at a famous meeting of the Cork Ladies’ Auxiliary of the Bible Society in September 1824. Sheil and O’Connell attended the meeting and used the opportunity to pour scorn on the objectives of the voluntary evangelical agencies. Sheil declared that the Irish poor were less in need of bibles than of bread, and that the purveyors of vital religion would be better employed if they exerted their energies among the higher orders, to whom they might teach a little humanity. FJ, 14 Sept. 1824.

32. While Pius VII was the first pope to warn Catholics against the Bible Society his successor Leo XII (1823–9) issued the famous bull Ubi Primum in which he accused the evangelicals of attempting through ‘a perverse interpretation of the Gospel of Christ’ to turn the Bible into ‘a human Gospel, or, what is still worse, into a Gosepel of the Devil’. The Encyclical Letter of Pope Leo the XII to his venerable brethren, the patriarchs, primates, archbishops, and bishops of the Catholic Church with an English translation of the same. To which are annexed Pastoral Instructions for the R.C. archbishops and bishops, to the clergy and laity of their communion throughout Ireland (Dublin 1824), p. 16.

33. Quoted in Thomas, ‘Ecumenical Bible society’, p. 146.

34. Because of the strength of British influence at the Vatican the anti-veto lobby in Ireland had taken great pains to inform papal authorities why the veto would never be acceptable to the Catholics of Ireland: ‘It would require the most intimate knowledge of the intricacies and of the various contradictory statements that pervade the history of Ireland at various periods to form an adequate opinion on the value that should be attached to the professions of public functionaries, as well as the faith that should be placed in the authoritative assurances that have been made to the Catholics since the Reformation, which have been invariably violated. The most recent example is proof of the deep-seated conviction which occurred during the proceedings on the legislative union between Great Britain and Ireland. On this occasion the greater part of the Catholics of Ireland became the dupes of their passive obedience in expectation of their immediate emancipation. [my emphasis] Punic faith was never more proverbial among the Romans than English faith is with the Irish people. Since the invasion of Ireland in the twelfth century this conviction is exemplified in the Irish language by the term “Sassenagh” [Saxon]. Since the Reformation, and the consequent persecution of Catholics, this epithet of horror is equally applied to a Protestant and an Englishman. In later times any Catholic that had adventured in any act of oppression was included in this national term of reproach; and to complete the climax all Catholics that are suspected to be friendly to the veto are branded as enemies of God and their country.’ Edward Hay, Secretary of the Catholic Committee, to Cardinal Litta, 15 Aug. 1817 (reprinted DEP, 26 Jan. 1822).

35. In 1817 a correspondent of the Baptist Society reported that ‘there are signs that the opposition of the priests will soon be encouraged and stimulated by the highest ecclesiastical authorities’. Third Annual Report of the Baptist Irish Society (1817), p. 24.

36. John MacHale, The Letters of the Most Rev. John MacHale, D.D., vol. I (Dublin 1888), pp. 6–19.

37. Akenson, Irish Education Experiment, p. 90.

38. The following commentary, which appeared in an ultra-Protestant newspaper, perfectly captured the political ideology of religious revivalism in the post-Napoleonic period: ‘He who would arrest the march of the Bible Society is attempting to stop the moral machinery of the world and can expect nothing but to be crushed in pieces. The march must proceed. These disciplined and formidable columns which, under the banner of divine truth, are bearing down upon the territories of death have one word of command from on high, and that word is “Onward” … May it go onward, continuing to be, and with increasing splendour, the astonishment of the world, as well as the most illustrious monument of British glory.’ The Patriot, 26 March 1818.

39. ‘Thoughts submitted to the Rt. Hon. Charles Grant on the subject of the education of the Irish poor by Lord Fingall and Dr. Troy’ (CICE/KPSA, memoranda 1, 1812–28, MI/13).

40. ‘Draft of speech made by Mr. Plunket at a meeting held at the Rotunda, 2 February 1821’ (Ibid. MI/12).

41. ‘Draft of speech made by Lord Cloncurry at the Rotunda, February 2nd, 1821’ (Ibid.).

42. Valentine Browne Lawless, Personal Recollections of the Life and Times of Valentine, Lord Cloncurry (Dublin 1869), p. 376.

43. DEP, 7 March 1820.

44. Duke of Leinster to Joseph Devonshire Jackson, 3 March 1820 (CICE/KPSA, general correspondence ii, 1819–26, CII 1–162, CII/7).

45. Duke of Leinster to Joseph Devonshire Jackson, 3 March 1822 (Ibid. CII/47).

46. O’Connell, Select Speeches, vol. II, p. 81.

47. Eugene Stock, The History of the Church Missionary Society: Its Environment, Its Men, and Its Work, vol. I (London 1899-1916), p. 153.

48. DEP, 6 Oct. 1821.

49. Thomas Lewis O’Beirne, Circular Letter of the Lord Bishop of Meath to the Rural Deans of his Diocese (Dublin 1821), p. 3.

50. Ibid.

51. Even though Bishop Doyle was willing to admit that, on an individual level, the clergymen of the Established Church could be amiable, humane and helpful to their communities, his description of the general body was as harsh as anything that ever came from the pen of O’Connell. See James Warren Doyle, Letters on the State of Ireland: Addressed by JKL to a Friend in England (Dublin 1825), pp. 75–7.

52. Information on the ancient Irish Church was most frequently taken from Bede’s account of the argument over the dating of Easter, which caused the Irish Church to break with Rome at the Synod of Whitby in 664 AD. ‘They [Columba’s adherents] followed indeed uncertain rules as to the time of the great festival: since, being so far distant from the rest of the world, no one had brought them the synodal decrees for the observance of Easter. They diligently observed only those works of piety and chastity which they could learn in the prophetical, evangelical, and apostolical writings.’ Joseph Belcher, The Baptist Irish Society: Its Origin, History, and Prospects (London 1845), p. XV.

53. DEP, 19 Dec. 1819; 6 Jan. 1820.

54. DEP, 20 Dec. 1819; 6 Jan. 1820.

55. DEP, 18 Jan. 1820.

56. Doyle, Letters on the State of Ireland, p. 167.

57. Urwick, La Touche, p. 404; M. Comerford, Collections on the Diocese of Kildare and Leighlin, vol. III (Dublin 1886), pp. 412–13.

58. L.M. Cullen, An Economic History of Ireland since 1660 (London 1972), p. 103.

59. DEP, 11 Jan. 1817; 27 Feb. 1817; 7 March 1817.

60. Power le Poer Trench to Charles King O’Hara, 7 Feb. 1817 (NLI, Charles King O’Hara Papers, MS 20,313–7).

61. William Harty, An Historic Sketch of the Causes, Progress, Extent and Mortality of the Contagious Fever Epidemic in Ireland during the Years 1817, 1818, and 1819 with Numerous Tables, Official Documnets and Private Communications, Illustrative of Its General History and of the System of Management Adopted for Its Suppression (Dublin 1820), pp. 117–19.

62. Ibid. p. 10.

63. See James S. Donnelly, Jr, ‘Pastorini and Captain Rock: Millenarianism and sectarianism in the Rockite movement of 1821–4’ in Samuel Clark and James S. Donnelly, Jr (eds), Irish Peasants: Violence and Political Unrest, 1780–1914 (Madison, Wisconsin 1983), pp. 102–39.

64. Patrick O’Farrell, ‘Millenarianism, messianism, and utopianism in Irish history’, Anglo-Irish Studies, II (1976), 45–68; J.J. Lee, ‘The Ribbonmen’ in T.D. Williams (ed.), Secret Societies in Ireland (Dublin and New York 1973), pp. 26–35.

65. Donnelly, ‘Pastorini and Captain Rock’, pp. 110–18.

66. Michael Barkun, Disaster and the Millennium (New Haven, Connecticut and London 1974), p. 34.

67. The most recent scholarship on the retreat of the Irish language indicates that the ascendancy of English was a direct consequence of the spread of the market economy, and reinforces the belief that the decline of Irish was strongly associated with the rise of the Catholic Church in the late eighteenth century. See Garret Fitzgerald, ‘Estimates for baronies of minimum level of Irish-speaking amongst successive decennial cohorts, 1771–1781 to 1861–1871’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 84, 3 (1984); and Seán de Fréine, The Great Silence: The Study of a Relationship between Language and Nationality (Cork 1978), especially chapters X and XI.

68. Barkun, Disaster and the Millennium, p. 38.

69. Ibid. p. 1.

70. Quoted in Donnelly, ‘Pastorini and Captain Rock’, p. 115.

71. Earl of Rosse to Lord Redesdale, 19 April 1822 (PRONI, Redesdale Papers, T.3031/13/2).

72. Donnelly, ‘Pastorini and Captain Rock’, p. 114.

73. See Douglas Hyde, Abhráin atá Leagtha ag an Reachtuire, or Songs Ascribed to Raftery, Being the Fifth Chapter of the Songs of Connaught (1903; Shannon 1973).

74. Earl of Rosse to Lord Redesdale, 19 April 1822 (PRONI, Redesdale Papers, T3030/13/2).

75. Anonymous (a Dissenter) to the chief secretary, April 1822 (SCP, 2373/10).

76. DEP, 15 April 1822.

77. Paul Johnson, The Birth of the Modern: World Society, 1815–1830 (New York 1991), p. 797.

78. DEP, 30 March 1822.

79. The influence of Thomas Chalmers is of profound importance in this context. Chalmers’ response to the nightmare of overpopulation was ‘moral restraint’, which could only be achieved through a reformation of the national character which, in turn, could only be accomplished through universal evangelical Christian education disseminated by the parish churches and schools of a national religious establishment. See Brown, Thomas Chalmers, pp. 197–9.

80. A blunt exponent of this position, described as an ‘Orange’ visitor to Renvyle in County Galway in 1823, informed his hosts of his proposition for tranquilizing Ireland by ‘the banishment of all the priests and two-thirds of the population’. Letters from the Irish Highlands of Connemara. By the Blake Family of Renvyle House (1823/4) (London 1825; Clifden 1995), pp. 23–4.

81. Barkun, Disaster and the Millennium, p. 77.

82. Ibid.

83. In his study of Irish Catholicism before the Famine, S.J. Connolly concludes that ‘the triumph of the post-Famine Church was also the victory of one culture over another, and when modern Irish Catholicism came into its inheritance, it did so only by means of the destruction of a rival world’. S.J. Connolly, Priests and People in Pre-Famine Ireland, 1780–1845 (Dublin 1982), p. 278.

84. Emmet Larkin, ‘The devotional revolution in Ireland, 1850–75’, American Historical Review, lxxvii (1972), 625–52.

85. Thomas McGrath, Religious Renewal and Reform in the Pastoral Ministry of Bishop James Doyle of Kildare and Leighlin, 1786–1834 (Dublin 1999). For a critique of the Larkin thesis, see Thomas McGrath, ‘The Tridentine evolution of modern Irish Catholicism, 1563–1962: A re-examination of the “Devotional Revolution” thesis’, Recusant History, 20, 4 (Oct. 1999), 512–23.

86. In the case of the Cattle Killing movement in Natal in 1856–7, the links between missionary activity, destructive millenarianism and imperial domination were obvious. When a new and devastating disease known as lung-sickness began to spread among the Xhosa cattle herds in the 1850s, a teenage prophetess educated by Christian missionaries began to preach that if all the cattle, including the healthy ones, were killed that the entire herd would be brought back in a ‘born again’ state by new people who would save the tribe from the depredations of British colonists. The slaughter made what was an emergency situation into a catastrophe and was exploited by the British governor, Sir George Grey, who used the opportunity to force the native peoples off their lands and into accepting exploitative labour contracts in the mines. See J.B. Peires, The Dead Will Arise: Nongqawuse and the Great Cattle Killing Movement of 1856–7 (Oxford 1989).

FIVE: THE ‘SECOND REFORMATION’ 1822–7

1. DEP, 29 Oct. 1822.

2. DEP, 24 Jan. 1824.

3. James Edward Jackson, Reasons for Withdrawing from the Hibernian Bible Society, Founded on the Public Documents of that Institution (Dublin 1822), p. 37.

4. In 1822–3 the disturbed condition of counties Cork and Limerick prompted many observers to compare the situation with the Rebellion of 1798. DEP, 29 April 1823; D. Woodward to John Jebb, 30 March 1822 (TCD, John Jebb Papers, MS 6396–7/151).

5. Fifth Annual Report of the Baptist Society for the Promotion of the Gospel in Ireland (1819), pp. 41–2.

6. An oath found on a suspected Rockite, Denis Egan, captured near Roscrea, County Tipperary, in April 1822, contained the following exchanges: ‘What are you? A Christian. Who made you a Christian? St. Peter the Rock. How do you prove yourself a Christian? By being baptized and openly professing and adhering to the Catholic Church and the sign of the cross until death.’ DEP, 19 April 1822. Similar references to the Catholic Church as ‘the rock’ appeared frequently in the rhetoric of Daniel O’Connell as well as in the the oral tradition of the Irish-speaking commnity, as, for example, in the long poem of Anthony Raftery called ‘The Catholic Rent’: ‘But not of blown sand is the foundation of this wall / Christ, as is read, is beneath it, together with Peter / A work that shall not fail and that shall not burst is this Rock / The One-son set it up, who was crucified on earth for us / It was James, no lie, who left Ireland to the English / But we have near home the Revelation, / And I think not far from us is satisfaction’. Hyde, Abhráin atá Leagtha ag an Reachtuire, p. 119.

7. The Rev. Mortimer O’Sullivan claimed that bibles were welcomed by people who could not otherwise obtain copies of Pastorini, so that they might study and discuss the book of Revelation, the traditional source of millenarian prophecy. See Donnelly, ‘Pastorini and Captain Rock’, p. 120. In 1828 a notice posted at the Catholic chapel of Drumkerrin, County Sligo, declared that any Catholic who dealt with Protestants deserved to be beaten with cudgels because Protestants were the locusts mentioned in the book of Revelation. British Critic (Jan. 1828), 39.

8. DEP, 8 July 1819.

9. Referring to the government’s failure to exercise a restraining influence on the virulence of ultra-Protestants in 1823, the Dublin Evening Post commented: ‘… while they permit such mad dogs to run through the streets, who can tell what the consequences will be. We said it before and we repeat it now, that these people are looking for a rebellion in the expectation that it may give them the fling which they exercised in the last—and that it may end in the same way. They forget that there was then a conspiracy, which, when reached at its fountain, was certain to dissolve in ruin to the cause of the conspirators … In short, times have changed. Conspiracy was the danger then, the danger now is, there is no conspiracy.’ DEP, 25 Nov. 1823. The influence of a Church of Ireland clergyman, Sir Harcourt Lees, was singled out for its particularly inflammatory character, of which the paper gave the following sample: ‘Were the [Catholic] population 10,000,000 I would not value them a rush, for in a week I could raise an army of Protestants in Great Britain and Ireland that would annihilate them even with their Popish Pastors at their head. Therefore, my lads, take care of yourselves; I know how to manage you, if you are not better than Lord Wellesley or the King himself. Political power you shall never have. You are the first fellows I shall make an example of, for depend on it, if I take the field against you it is not nut-cracking but priest-cracking I will be.’ DEP, 9 Dec. 1823.

10. Donnelly, ‘Pastorini and Captain Rock’, pp. 127–35.

11. DEP, 1 Aug. 1822.

12. DEP, 6 July 1822.

13. DEP, 31 Oct. 1822.

14. George Ensor, A Defence of the Irish and the Means of Their Redemption (Dublin 1825), p. 3.

15. DEP, 23 Feb. 1822; 22 Aug. 1822.

16. D. Woodward to John Jebb, 30 March 1822 (TCD, John Jebb Papers, MS 6936/151).

17. In his famous inauguration sermon Archbishop Magee outlined the position of the Church of Ireland in the following terms: ‘It will not do … to content ourselves with exclaiming against what is called new light, without endeavouring to extend to our flocks the benefit of the old, to be fearful of an excess of zeal, without any alarm as to the consequence of indifference.’William Magee, A Charge Delivered at His Primary Visitation in St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, on Thursday the 24th of October, 1822 (Dublin 1822), p. 14.

18. The ‘Second Reformation’ movement as part of the campaign to consolidate a Protestant United Kingdom has been examined by Stewart J. Brown in ‘The New Reformation movement in the Church of Ireland, 1801–29’ in Stewart J. Brown and David W. Miller (eds.), Piety and Power in Ireland: Essays in Honour of Emmet Larkin (Belfast and Notre Dame 2000), pp. 180–208; and Stewart J. Brown, The National Churches of England, Ireland, and Scotland, 1801–1846 (Oxford 2001).

19. In his inaugural sermon, Bishop Jebb called on the Church of Ireland ‘to manfully assert and defend the faith … which, we are persuaded, is the faith of the true Catholic and Apostolic Church—but, to also maintain unity of spirit with brethren of the Church of Rome … to contend, not by reviling or undervaluing, but by being better Christians.’ John Jebb, A Charge Deliverd to the Clergy of the Diocese of Limerick at the Primary Visitation in the Cathedral Church of St. Mary, on Thursday, the 19th of June, 1823 (Dublin 1823).

20. Catholics were present on this occasion out of gratitude for the relief work that Archbishop Trench had engaged in during the famine that swept the western counties in 1822. See chapter 7.

21. W.J. Fitzpatrick, The Life, Times, and Correspondence of the Right Rev. Dr. Doyle, Bishop of Kildare and Leighlin, vol I (Dublin 1861; 1890), p. 207.

22. According to his biographer, Archbishop Magee had been a lifelong opponent of Catholic claims and had drawn up a petition to oppose the endowment of the Catholic seminary at Maynooth in 1795. A.H. Kenney, Memoir of the Late Right Rev. William Magee (Dublin 1842), p. ix.

23. Magee, A Charge Delivered at his Primary Visitation, p. 22.

24. Killen, Ecclesiastical History, vol. II, pp. 420–1.

25. Fitzpatrick, Doyle, vol. I, p. 211.

26. Ibid. Doyle’s representation of the acuteness of peasant awareness of the tithe problem was borne out by another source. Mortimer O’Sullivan engaged in a conversation with a countryman as to the distinction between tithes and debts: ‘I asked him what he meant by debts, if he did not allow tithes to be such; his answer was prompt: “Anything that I get value for, and sure the minister never gave me value for the tithe.”’ See Mortimer O’Sullivan, Captain Rock Detected or the Origin and Character of the Recent Disturbances amd the Condition of the South and West of Ireland Considered and Exposed. By a Munster Farmer (Dublin and Edinburgh 1824), p. 195.

27. Patrick Curtis, Two Letters Respecting the Horrible Act of Placing a Calf ’s Head on the Altar of the Chapel of Ardee, and also His Answer to the Protestant Archbishop Magee’s Charge Against the Roman Catholic Religion (Dublin 1822).

28. Charles Simeon to T. Thomason, 26 April 1822. Quoted in Lefroy, Memoir of Thomas Lefroy, pp. 94–8.

29. Jackson, Reasons for Withdrawing from the Hibernian Bible Society, p. 4.

30. Seventh Report of the Baptist Society for the Promotion of the Gospel in Ireland (1821), appendix, p. 19.

31. Ibid. p. 21.

32. Doyle, Letters on the State of Ireland, pp. 76–7.

33. Diary of Lady Anne Jocelyn (unpaginated, NLI, MS 18,430).

34. Ibid.

35. Eyre Crowe Evans, Today in Ireland (1825; New York and London 1979), p. 14.

36. Lord Farnham, who was, according to W.J. Fitzpatrick, ‘in the main a sincere and wellintentioned man, perfectly honest as a politician’, was said later in life to have fallen a victim, ‘with an immense number of old ladies, to much of the fanatical folly then so prevalent in Ireland’. Fitzpatrick, Doyle, vol. II, p. 1.

37. This is the argument advanced by Linda Colley in her study of the formation of British national identity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. See in particular her chapter on ‘Dominance’. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, Connecticut and London 1992), pp. 147–93.

38. Christian Observer (Feb. 1822), 127.

39. Urwick, James Digges La Touche, p. 78.

40. Mícheál McGrath (ed. and trans.), Cinnlae Amhlaoibh Uí Súilleabháin (The Diaries of Humphrey O’Sullivan) (London 1936–7), p. 236.

41. The controversial preacher Rev. Robert McGhee remarked of the typical Irish evangelical that ‘if he professes to make the gospel the guide of his public principle, whether he be a clergyman or a layman, he is styled as an epithet of singular contempt, a “saint”’. Robert J. McGhee, Truth and Error Contrasted (Dublin 1828), p. 303.

42. This should not be confused with the term ‘New Light’ as used by Irish Presbyterians in the eighteenth century; for the difference between this and the more widespread use of the term in the American colonies see Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Oxford 2002), p. 98.

43. Crowe Evans, Today in Ireland, pp. 21–2.

44. Ibid. p. 24.

45. Cullen, Modern Ireland, pp. 20–1.

46. F. K. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford 1980).

47. McDowell, Social Life in Ireland, pp. 28–9.

48. Ibid.

49. Crowe Evans, Today in Ireland, pp. 158–9.

50. Ibid. pp. 175–8.

51. DEP, 1 June 1824; 4 Sept. 1824.

52. James Roche to Daniel Murray, 12 Oct. 1827 (DDA, Murray Papers, MS 30 [10], no. 2).

53. Eighth Report of the Baptist Society for the Promotion of the Gospel in Ireland (1822), p. 12.

54. In the same locality Otway made the following observation about the anti-Protestant tradition in popular culture: ‘I may here remark that in almost every religious ruin I have ever visited, the neighbouring people, besides telling you of the original destruction by bloody Bess or cursed Cromwell with his copper nose, always have some more recent instances to narrate of Protestant mischief-doers. The children have got these stories at their fingers’ ends: it seems part of a system by these means to preoccupy the minds of the young Roman Catholics with deep and hateful prejudices against their Protestant countrymen …’ Caesar Otway, A Tour in Connaught, Comprising Sketches of Clonmacnoise, Joyce Country, and Achill (Dublin 1839), p. 308.

55. Crowe Evans, Today in Ireland, pp. 159–60.

56. Daniel Murray to Marquis of Lansdowne, 5 Nov. 1827 (DDA, Murray Papers, MS 30 [10], Later File, no. 3).

57. Baptist Wriothesley Noel, Notes of a Short Tour through the Midland Counties of Ireland in the Summer of 1836, with Observations on the Condition of the Peasantry (London 1837), p. 103.

58. This was not as uncommon as might have been supposed, and was clearly indicative of the move away from the self-assured confidence of the eighteenth century towards the more rigid polarization of the nineteenth. Among the roster of active evangelical clergymen were offspring of families who had been famous for their championing of the Catholic cause (such as Rev. William Bushe, the nephew of Charles Kendall Bushe), many from families who had recently been Catholic, such as the Rev. Edward Nangle, and others (often the most vehement of all) who had converted from Catholicism, such as the O’Sullivan brothers, Mortimer and Samuel, and the famous propagandist, the Rev. William Phelan.

59. Noel, Notes of a Short Tour, p. 103.

60. The Irish Society: Quarterly Extracts of Correspondence, no. 16 (1825), pp. 3–4.

61. J.R.R. Wright, ‘An evangelical estate c. 1800–25: The influence on the Manchester Estate, County Armagh, with particular reference to the moral agencies of W. Loftie and H. Porter’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Northern Ireland Polytechnic 1982).

62. ‘Since I have returned to England, I have been induced to think that Ireland is blessed in a much greater degree than I thought when I was there. I have made enquiries with regard to the religious state of England since I have been at Hereford, and from what I can collect, the progress towards EVANGELISATION is by no means so rapid here as in Ireland. Preachers of the gospel are not so plentiful, and the schools are not so numerous in proportion.’W.H. Krause to Robert H. Inglis, 21 Dec. 1824. Quoted in C.S. Stanford, Memoir of the Late W.H. Krause, with Selections from his Correspondence (Dublin 1854), p. 208.

63. Ibid. p. 7.

64. Ibid. pp. 180–1.

65. T.P. Cunningham, ‘The 1826 General Election in Co. Cavan’, Breifne: Journal of Cumann Seanchas Breifne, ii, 2 (1965), 5–46.

66. Stanford, Krause, p. 225.

67. J.K.L.’s Letter to the Rt. Hon. Lord Farnham (Dublin 1827), p. .

68. John Jebb to Robert H. Inglis, 7 April 1827. Quoted in John Charles Forster, The Life of John Jebb, D.D., Bishop of Limerick, Ardfert, and Aghadoe (London 1845), pp. 668–9. The more aggressive features of the ‘Second Reformation’, such as controversial preaching, itinerancy, and the parading of converts, did not meet with the approval of Bishop Jebb. Nevertheless, he considered the conversion of Catholics a most desirable objective and never departed from his lifelong dream that it could be effected through the quiet and steady work of the parochial clergy of the Church of Ireland.

69. Blackwood’s Magazine (Jan. 1827), 61–73.

70. Ibid. May 1827, 575.

71. Hansard, 2nd ser., vol. XVII (1826–7), p. 807.

72. George Ensor, The New Reformation: Letters Showing the Inutility and Exhibiting the Absurdity of What Is Rather Fantastically Termed ‘The New Reformation’ (Dublin 1828), p. 26.

73. Ibid. p. 8.

74. Ibid. p. 37.

75. W.H. Crawford, Domestic Industry in Ireland: The Experience of the Linen Industry (Dublin 1972), p. 26.

76. Noel, Notes of a Short Tour, pp. 92–3.

77. Ensor, New Reformation, p. 37.

78. Ibid. pp. 38–9.

79. Ibid. p. 53.

80. British Critic (Jan. 1828), 49.

81. The correspondence of Lord Farnham for 1831–2 is full of accounts of agrarian crime in County Cavan in the early 1830s. One informant in 1831 described gangs of young men rampaging through the streets on market days attacking any Protestant they could lay hands on. At the Christmas fair in Virginia, Protestants were unable to appear on the streets and had to take refuge overnight with sympathetic Catholics, who had their houses attacked and windows broken as a result. Local Protestants were also out of fear said to be contributing to ‘emissaries’ who were going through the surrounding townlands collecting funds for O’Connell. John King to Lord Farnham, 10 Jan. 1831 (NLI Farnham Papers, MS 18, 1612/10).

82. Fifteenth Report of the Irish Society for Promoting the Education of the Native Irish through the Medium of Their Own Language (1833), p. 7.

83. Noel, Notes of a Short Tour, p. 106.

84. Robert Winning to Lord Farnham, 23 July 1830 (NLI, Farnham Papers, MS 18,612/9).

85. Noel, Notes of a Short Tour, pp. 95–109.

86. British Critic (Jan. 1828), 11.

87. Ibid. p. 27.

88. Ibid. p. 30.

89. Hansard, 2nd ser., vol. XVII (1826–7), p. 809.

90. John Jebb to Robert H. Inglis, 7 April 1827, quoted in Forster, John Jebb, p. 680.

91. Ibid. p. 672.

92. Ibid. pp. 672–7.

93. Connolly, Priests and People. See in particular his chapter ‘Vile and wicked conspiracies’, pp. 219–63, for a thorough treatment of popular anti-clericalism in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

94. John Jebb to Charles Brodrick, 3 May 1816 (NLI, Brodrick Papers, MS 8866/5).

95. Ibid.

96. DEP, 13 Nov. 1819.

97. John Jebb to Charles Brodrick, 18 Dec. 1821 (NLI, Brodrick Papers, MS 8866/8). The following resolutions were unanimously adopted at the meeting: ‘Resolved: that we altogether disapprove of these secret associations and private meetings, which, in opposition to the laws and to religion, have for some time past unhappily prevailed in different parts of the country.

   ‘Resolved: that we consider it an offence against the laws of God and man to administer and take oaths, which, under the seal of secrecy, have been tendered and still are tendered by designing persons to many of our deluded fellow countrymen.

    ‘Resolved: that we have learned with deep sorrow and hold in utter abhorrence the barbarous atrocities which, in consequence of such oaths and meetings, have been committed in this and in adjoining counties.

    ‘Resolved: that we rejoice in the peace and tranquility hitherto maintained in the parish of Abingdon; and are determined by every means in our power to preserve to ourselves this honourable distinction.’

98. Cullen, Modern Ireland, pp. 205–6.

99. Ignatius Murphy, The Diocese of Killaloe, 1800–50 (Dublin 1992), pp. ‒. See also Bowen, Protestant Crusade, pp. 150–3; and Noel, Notes of a Short Tour, pp. 224–9.

100. Forster, John Jebb, p. 674.

101. Hyde, Raftery, p. 115. It is worth noting that Douglas Hyde, himself the product of a Protestant clerical background, was not at all familiar with the implication of the term ‘New Light’ and confused it with ‘some religious sect’ of Scottish origin because he had seen it mentioned in a poem by Robert Burns. Yet the movement for the restoration of the Irish language, in which he played so prominent a role, can trace one of its most visible roots to the Reformation crusade of the earlier part of the century.

102. Noel, Notes of a Short Tour, pp. 102–9.

103. Ibid. p. 97.

104. Ibid. pp. 130–7.

105. Quoted in Acheson, ‘Evangelicals’, p. 247.

106. On the consequences of one sermon, the Rev. Winning wrote: ‘On Sunday last the priest of Ballytrane denounced from the altar the reading of the Irish Scriptures and said the men who were teaching were destroying the country and must be stopped. The following night a party of about thirty broke into the houses of the Irish scholars within a circuit of about seven miles between Carrickmacross and Ballybay and beat the poor men with stones in the most shocking manner … One poor man had not a tooth left; when thrown down they trod them out and drove them down his throat with their ironshod brogues. Four of the men who have suffered most will not (if they survive) be for months able to earn anything for their families.’ Miss Lyster to Mrs Cairns, 4 Jan. 1836 (PRONI, Roden Papers, mic. 147/reel 5, pp. 16–18).

107. British Critic (Jan. 1828), 31.

108. In 1828–9 the influence of the Catholic Association was said to be especially strong in the Sligo area, both in pressuring converts to return to the Catholic fold and in heightening political expectations among the common people that the existing order was soon to be overturned. One guileless tenant informed his landlord, obviously a kindly man, that he should not continue to spend money renovating his house ‘until the world should be more settled than it is’ and other admonitions suggesting how uncertain he considered his landlord’s possession to be. Christian Examiner (March 1829), 232–3.

109. Ibid.

110. The fostering of such an attachment was self-consciously pursued by certain landlords involved in the education enterprise. Consider the case of Richard Smyth of the Ballintray Estate, who made every possible compromise, from employing Catholic schoolmasters, to permitting the use of the Douay Bible, to inviting the priest to scrutinize what was going on. The reason given for his desire to see the children in attendance, besides the obvious one of education, was that he wanted to become better acquainted with those who were going to be his future tenants: ‘I feel it is a natural consequence that, having taken an interest in their improvement as children, I shall be more disposed to regard them with kindness and to promote their happiness and welfare when they grow up into manhood.’ Richard Smyth to tenants of Ballintray Estate, 31 May 1827 (CICE/KPSA, General Correspondence III, CIII/17).

111. British Critic (Jan. 1828), 38–9.

112. In a debate on the state of Ireland in the House of Commons in 1825, Alexander Dawson described the priests as ‘the most mischievous set of men in Ireland. There was no ill-feeling or disturbance they were not the cause of. The Roman Catholic priest causes all the bad feelings between landlord and tenant, and all the evils consequent thereupon.’ DEP, 19 Feb. 1825.

113. David Thomson and Moyra McGusty (eds), The Irish Journals of Elizabeth Smith, 1840–50 (Oxford 1980), p. 11.

114. Ibid. pp. 11–12.

115. Blackwood’s Magazine (May 1827), 582.

SIX: THE CATHOLIC COUNTER-ATTACK

1. James Doyle to John Whelan, secretary of the Abbeyleix Rent Committee, printed in DEP, 27 Nov. 1824.

2. Ensor, Defence of the Irish, p. 24.

3. DEP, 4 Dec. 1824, quoted from an editorial in the pro-Orange Courier.

4. John Jebb to Robert H. Inglis, 19 Nov. 1824, quoted in Reynolds, Catholic Emancipation Crisis, p. 22.

5. Fergus O’Ferrall, Catholic Emancipation: Daniel O’Connell and the Birth of Irish Democracy, 1820–30 (Dublin 1985), pp. 37–9.

6. Reynolds, Emancipation Crisis, pp. 14–16.

7. Thomas A. Kselman, Miracles and Prophecies in Nineteenth-Century France (Brunswick, New Jersey 1983), p. 23.

8. Fitzpatrick, Doyle, vol. I, pp. 248–50.

9. Quoted in ibid. p. 251.

10. Quoted in ibid. pp. 244–5.

11. Quoted in ibid. p. 253.

12. As recently as late November 1822, William Conyngham Plunket had claimed that one of Doyle’s addresses to his congregation ‘would do honour to a Fenelon or Bailey’ and hoped it would be circulated and studied in England as an example of the ‘liberal and enlightened piety which belongs to a prelate of the Roman Catholic Church’. William Conyngham Plunket to James Doyle, 30 Nov. 1822 (DDA, Murray Papers, Green File II, 1822–3, 30/6/14).

13. DEP, 19 Aug. 1823.

14. For an account of the Hohenlohe miracles and their impact on denominational relations see Thomas McGrath, Politics, Interdenominational Relations and Education in the Public Ministry of Bishop James Doyle of Kildare and Leighlin, 1786–1834 (Dublin 1999), pp. 109–15.

15. O’Ferrall, Catholic Emancipation, p. 42.

16. William H. Sewell, Jr argues that the rhetoric of Abbé Sieyès’ famous pamphlet ‘crystallized the resentments of the politically active elite of the Third Estate and charted the political course of the Revolution through the crucial summer of 1789. Moreover, it presaged and prepared the climactic night of 4 August, when the National Assembly abolished the privileges of the aristocracy and the clergy, destroyed the vestiges of feudalism, and established equality of citizens before the law. The night of 4 August was the logical culmination of Sieyès’ revolutionary script.’ Sewell, Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution, pp. 64–5.

17. James Warren Doyle, A Vindication of the Religious and Civil Principles of the Irish Catholics in a Letter Addressed to His Excellency the Marquis Wellesley, K.G. (Dublin 1823), p. 38.

18. Ibid. p. 30.

19. For a complete account and analysis of Doyle’s political writings see McGrath, Politics, Interdenominational Relations and Education, pp. 1–75.

20. The standard biography of Bishop Doyle is W.J. Fitzpatrick’s The Life, Times, and Correspondence of the Right Rev. Dr. Doyle, Bishop of Kildare and Leighlin (Dublin 1861; 1890). Despite his status as a giant among contemporaries, Doyle’s reputation went into an eclipse in the twentieth century from which it has only recently been rescued by the work of Thomas McGrath.

21. O’Ferrall, Catholic Emancipation, pp. 39–49.

22. Quoted in Fitzpatrick, Doyle, vol. I, p. 371.

23. Robert McGhee to Lord Farnham, 28 March 1823 (NLI, Farnham Papers, MS 18,604/1).

24. The customary practice for a Catholic funeral in a Protestant graveyard was thus described by a number of Dublin clergy in 1824: ‘the invariable practice until the late unfortunate interruption in St Kevin’s was that one of the clergy recited at the grave a form of prayer for the soul of the deceased, that the remaining clergy, if more than one were present, and sometimes the laity, joined in the responses to this prayer, and that during the recital both the Catholic clergy and laity remained with their heads uncovered in a way that would be likely to attract the notice of all present’. Resolutions Passed by the Dublin Clergy at the Special Meeting Held on March 25th, 1824 (DDA, Troy–Murray Papers, MS 30/8–83).

25. DEP, 23 Sept. 1823.

26. DEP, 18 Nov. 1823.

27. DEP, 24 Jan. 1824.

28. John Jebb to Richard Jebb, 27 Feb. 1824 (TCD, John Jebb Papers, MS 6396–7/179).

29. That it was still a subject of dispute was evidenced in 1828 in a communication from Spring-Rice to Archbishop Murray, who described it as a measure which, ‘intended and passed as a relief, has acted unfortunately in an opposite manner and introduced fresh causes of jealousy, strife, and collision’. Thomas Spring-Rice to Daniel Murray, 6 Feb. 1828 (DDA, Murray Papers, MS 30/11–1). See also McGrath, Politics, Interdenominational Relations and Education, pp. 119–21.

30. O’Ferrall, Catholic Emancipation, p. 21.

31. Ibid. pp. 61–5.

32. Hundreds of these letters catalogued in the Murray Papers at the Dublin Diocesan Archives provide an enormous body of information on the state of education in Ireland prior to the setting up of the National Board in 1831, and the disposition of the Catholic clergy at this time.

33. James Roche to Daniel Murray, 27 July 1824 (DDA, Murray Papers MS 30/8–67).

34. DEP, 27 April 1824. For an overview of the attitude of the Catholic hierarchy and clergy towards the Kildare Place Society’s schools see McGrath, Politics, Interdenominational Relations and Education, pp. 157–206.

35. James Doyle to Daniel Murray, 4 Nov. 1824 (DDA, Murray Papers, 30/8/70).

36. The meetings organized for September, October and November of 1824 were sponsored by various branches, associations and ladies’ auxiliaries of the HBS, The Sunday School Society for Ireland, the CMS, and the LHS. According to Rev. James Godkin the meetings were deliberately organized for the purpose of drawing the Catholic clergy into a public conflict: ‘To these meetings the Roman Catholics of the neighbourhood were “affectionately invited” and their priests were challenged to come forth and defend their system if they dared.’ Godkin, The Religious History of Ireland, p. 238. The schedule, according to information taken from the DEP and the FJ, was as follows:

37. John Wolffe, The Protestant Crusade in Great Britain, 1829–1860 (Oxford 1991), p. 34.

38. DEP, 14 Sept. 1824.

39. FJ, 14 Sept. 1824.

40. FJ, 12 Oct. 1824.

41. FJ, 15 Oct. 1824.

42. FJ, 18 Oct. 1824.

43. FJ, 21 Oct. 1824.

44. FJ, 24 Oct. 1824.

45. For a full account of the Loughrea meeting by a Protestant sympathizer, see D’Arcy Sirr, Trench, pp. 466–71. Details of the proceedings and the motions adopted by the Catholic body are also documented in Hyde, Raftery, notes, pp. v–vii.

46. FJ, 27 Oct. 1824; 30 Oct. 1824.

47. Hyde, Raftery, p. 121.

48. FJ, 26 Oct. 1824.

49. DEP, 30 Oct. 1824; FJ, 1 Nov. 1824.

50. Killen, Ecclesiastical History, vol. ii, p. 243. See also Bowen, Protestant Crusade, p. 104.

51. DEP, 6 Nov. 1824; FJ, 10 Nov. 1824.

52. FJ, 17 Nov. 1824.

53. FJ, 24 Nov. 1824.

54. Comerford, Kildare and Leighlin, vol. I, p. 132.

55. DEP, 24 Nov. 1824.

56. Christian Observer (Nov. 1824), 727.

57. Ibid.

58. For the careers of Robert McGhee and Mortimer O’Sullivan, see Bowen, Protestant Crusade, pp. 113–23.

59. The books that made Otway’s reputation as a travel writer were his Sketches in Ireland (Dublin 1827); Sketches in Erris and Tyrawley (Dublin 1831); and A Tour in Connaught, Comprising Sketches of Clonmacnoise, Joyce Country, and Achill (Dublin 1839).

60. Sir Samuel Ferguson (1810–86), a Belfast-born poet, is chiefly remembered as a nationalist writer, and especially as the author of the patriotic ‘Lament for Thomas Davis’. Isaac Butt (1813–79) was a native of County Donegal and is chiefly known as the founder of the Home Rule movement. Because they blended loyalty to the crown with a passionate interest in the literary and cultural heritage of Celtic Ireland, the circle to which Butt and Ferguson belonged in the 1830s and ’40s was known as ‘Orange Young Ireland’. Lady Gregory put it even more succinctly later in the century when she described Ferguson as a ‘Fenian Unionist’. For a discussion of their place in the cultural history of the nineteenth century, see F.S.L. Lyons, Culture and Anarchy in Ireland, 1890–1939 (Oxford 1979).

61. Benedict Kiely, Poor Scholar: A Study of the Works and Days of William Carleton, 1794–1869 (Dublin 1972), p. 115.

62. Ibid. pp. 73–91.

63. Barbara Hayley, ‘Irish periodicals from the Union to the Nation’, Anglo-Irish Studies, II (1976), 88.

64. Quoted in ibid. p. 87.

65. John Jebb to Robert H. Inglis, 29 Nov. 1824, quoted in Reynolds, Emancipation Crisis, p. 81.

66. In 1825 Bishop Doyle urged his congregation ‘to cast from you with horror or contempt all soothsayings, and divinations, and pretended prophecies: they are unworthy of a Christian people, and fit only to be classed with the ravings of itinerant biblemen, or with the productions of some tract society at which we laugh with scorn’. James Warren Doyle, Pastoral Instructions for the Lent of 1825 Addressed to the Catholic Clergy of the Dioceses of Kildare and Leighlin (Carlow 1825), p. 19.

67. Quoted in Bowen, Protestant Crusade, p. 16.

68. McGrath, Politics, Interdenominational Relations and Education, pp. 121–5.

69. The Dublin Evening Post recorded that Doyle’s letter on the union of the churches fell upon the public ear like the sound of a trumpet, ‘coming from an ornament and pillar of the Catholic Church in Ireland, from a Prelate as distinguished for his piety as for his profound erudition—for his Christian humility as for the boldness and energy of his eloquence, it has already caused a sensation as general and as extraordinary as we ever recollect to have witnessed in Dublin’. DEP, 22 May 1824.

70. R.F.B. [Fergus] O’Ferrall, ‘The growth of political consciousness in Ireland, 1823–47: A study of O’Connellite politics and political education’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Trinity College Dublin 1978), pp. 381–401.

71. DEP, 28 Sept. 1824.

72. DEP, 30 Oct. 1824.

73. Lee and Stephen (eds), Dictionary of National Biography, vol. X, pp. 777–81.

74. Fergus O’Ferrall, ‘The only lever …? The Catholic priest in Irish politics, 1823–29’, Studies, lxx, 280 (1981), 308–24.

75. Reynolds, Emancipation Crisis, p. 17.

76. Thomas Lloyd to Francis Blackburn, 15 Dec. 1824. Minutes of Evidence Taken before the Select Committee of the House of Lords Appointed to Inquire into the State of Ireland, Parliamentary Papers (1825), xiv, 15.

77. James Tandy to Henry Goulburn, 9 Jan. 1825 (NAI/SPO 1825, 2731/1).

78. William Magee to John Jebb, 31 March 1824 (TCD, John Jebb Papers, MS 6396–7/184).

79. I am deeply indebted to Donnelly’s ‘Pastorini and Captain Rock’ for much of this argument.

80. The tradition of the poet as wandering minstrel was still thriving in Connaught at this time. Raftery was not the only ‘poet of the people’ in the province. His contemporaries Michael MacSweeney of Connemara and Thomas Barret of the Erris peninsula in Mayo were at least as well known and, according to the older people who were Hyde’s informants, were better poets than Raftery. All were transitional figures who composed in the traditional idiom but whose themes had to do with contemporary social and political happenings. Much of their work was lost with the decline of the language and the decay of the oral tradition. See Hyde, Raftery, p. 15, and Tomás Ó Máille, Mícheál Mac Suibhne agus Filí an tSléibhe (Michael Sweeney and the Poets of the Mountain) (Galway 1937).

81. Hyde, Raftery, p. 117.

82. Ibid. p. 313.

83. With reference to this stanza Hyde asserts that Raftery had in mind the schools of the National Board. This is by no means clear from the Irish text. Raftery died in 1834, only three years after the Board was established. It would appear more likely that he was referring to the schools of the evangelical societies. Hyde’s translation of these verses is very loose, and he generally tends to play down the sectarian content, which comes across much more powerfully in the Irish version. For example, the line ‘to train up the spy and informer’ is used to convey what in the vernacular reads, ‘you will betray yourselves to the breed of Luther’. Ibid. p. 23.

84. Ibid. p. 115.

85. Ibid. p. 123.

86. An advertisement for books recently published by Dublin’s chief purveyor of reading material for Catholics had included the Bull of Leo XII Granting an Extension of the Universal Jubilee, Pastoral Instructions of Catholic Bishop, the Douay Bible, The Key of Heaven; The Imitation of Christ, The Poor Man’s Catechism, Think Well On’t and The Devout Life of St. Francis de Sales. DEP, 25 Feb. 1826.

87. In his pastoral instructions for 1825, Bishop Doyle urged his congregation to purchase and read the religious material on faith and morals available from Richard Coyne of Capel Street, Dublin, or Mr Nolan and Mr Price in Carlow. He charged his clergy to collect money after Mass on Sunday for the purchase of such material, which was distributed to the children of the poor. Doyle, Pastoral Instructions, p. 20.

88. Reynolds, Emancipation Crisis, p. 67.

89. O’Ferrall, Catholic Emancipation, pp. 80–1.

90. For a discussion of the influence of Moore and Cobbett on public opinion in Ireland in 1824–5 see ibid. pp. 79–81.

91. McGrath, Politics, Interdenominational Relations and Education, pp. 185–7.

92. Doyle, Letters on the State of Ireland, p. 152.

93. Thomas Wall, ‘Catholic periodicals of the past (2): The Catholic Book Society and the Irish Catholic Magazine’, Irish Ecclesiastical Record, 5, CI (Jan.–June 1964), 290.

94. Quoted in ibid. 291.

95. Ibid. 289–95.

96. Ibid.

97. Catholic Penny Magazine (6 Sept. 1834), 332.

98. Noel, Notes of a Short Tour, pp. 22–7.

99. Hayley, ‘Irish periodicals’, 83.

100. Ibid. 101.

101. Thomas Wall, ‘Catholic periodicals of the past (1): The Catholic Penny Magazine, 1834–5’, Irish Ecclesiastical Record, 5, CI (Jan.–June 1964), 234–44.

102. Catholic Penny Magazine (14 March 1835), 128.

103. Ibid. (21 March 1835), 131.

104. Wall, ‘Catholic Book Society’, 298.

105. Wall, ‘Catholic periodicals of the past (6): Duffy’s Irish Catholic Magazine, 1847–8’, Irish Ecclesiastical Record, 5, CII (July–Dec. 1964), 98.

106. Hayley, ‘Irish periodicals’, 93.

107. James Godkin, The Religious History of Ireland, pp. 237–8.

108. Bowen, Protestant Crusade, pp. 106–7.

109. Quoted in Thomas Wall, ‘Catholic periodicals of the past (4): The Catholic Luminary, 1840–1,’ Irish Ecclesiastical Record, 5, CII (July–Dec. 1964), 19.

110. Godkin, Religious History of Ireland, p. 239. For a more complete account of the debate, see Bowen, Protestant Crusade, p. 107.

111. D’Arcy Sirr, Trench, pp. 507–8.

112. Ibid. p. 512.

113. Ibid. p. 510.

114. Bowen, Protestant Crusade, p. 106.

115. Wall, ‘Catholic Book Society’, 301; D’Arcy Sirr, Trench, p. 512. For a complete account of the trial and its implications for denominational relations in the north Leitrim area see Proinnsíos Ó Duigneáin, The Priest and the Protestant Woman: The Trial of Rev. Thomas Maguire, P.P., Dec. 1827 (Maynooth 1997).

116. Catholic Penny Magazine (21 March 1835), 152.

117. Quoted in Wall, ‘Catholic Book Society’, 301.

118. David Fitzpatrick, ‘Class, family, and rural unrest in nineteenth-century Ireland’ in P.J. Drudy (ed.), Ireland: Land, Politics, and People (Cambridge 1982), pp. 611–12.

119. Christian Examiner (June 1829), 442–3.

120. Christian Examiner (July 1827), 79; (Dec. 1827), 469.

121. McGrath, Diaries of Humphrey O’Sullivan, p. 331.

122. Christian Examiner (Dec. 1827), 435.

123. DEP, 30 Aug. 1825.

124. Arabella Graves to Dowager Countess Massereene, 25 Sept. 1827 (PRONI, Foster–Massereene Papers D.562/3148).

125. During the period of controversial sermons in Ballymahon, County Longford, in 1827, local Catholics were said to be claiming as converts from Protestantism those who had engaged in mixed marriages, a practice ‘so common for many years past and so instrumental to apostasy among the Protestant population’. Christian Examiner (July 1827), 79.

126. The career and background of Margaret Anna Cusack are treated at length in a biography by Irene ffrench Eager, Margaret Anna Cusack: A Biography (Dublin 1979).

127. No Catholic religious order contributed more, either at home or abroad, to the campaign to save the Catholic poor from falling into the hands of evangelical missionaries than the Mercy Order founded by Catherine McAuley in 1831. By the second half of the nineteenth century its convents and orphanages had spread all over Ireland, Britain, the United States, Canada and Australia. For an account of Catherine McAuley’s background and the early years of the Mercy Order see Mary C. Sullivan, Catherine McAuley and the Tradition of Mercy (Notre Dame 2000).

SEVEN: NEW DIRECTIONS, 1828–40

1. The Watchman, 3 Feb. 1827.

2. M.G. Beresford to Lord Farnham, 9 July 1834 (NLI, Farnham Papers, MS 18,608/10).

3. Dublin University Magazine (Oct. 1833).

4. Bartlett, Irish Nation, pp. 333–42.

5. Hereward Senior, Orangeism in Ireland and Britain, 1795–1836 (London 1966), pp. 227–30.

6. Bartlett, Irish Nation, p. 342.

7. McGrath, Politics, Interdenominational Relations and Education, pp. 152.

8. Hans Hamilton to Lord Farnham, 29 March 1831 (NLI, Farnham Papers, MS 18,612/10); Notebook of Henry Maxwell (NLI, Farnham Papers, MS 3504).

9. Akenson, Irish Education Experiment, p. 91.

10. First Report of the Commissioners of Irish Education Inquiry (1825), , XII, p. 90.

11. Ibid. p. 2.

12. Connolly, Priests and People, p. 86.

13. Annual Report of the Hibernian Bible Society (1831), p. XL.

14. Annual Report of the Hibernian Bible Society (1832), appendix III.

15. Noel, Notes of a Short Tour, pp. 221–3.

16. D’Arcy Sirr, Trench, pp. 2–3.

17. Michael Davitt, The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland, or the Story of the Land League Revolution (London and New York 1904), pp. 31–2.

18. A complete account of the Trench family is provided in A Memoir of the Trench Family, Compiled by Thomas Richard Frederick Cooke-Trench (Dublin 1896).

19. Bowen, Protestant Crusade, pp. 138–9.

20. D’Arcy Sirr, Trench, pp. 17–18.

21. Ibid. pp. 28–38.

22. Ibid. pp. 45–6.

23. Quoted in ibid. pp. 46–7.

24. Quoted in ibid.

25. Quoted in ibid. p. 79.

26. Motherwell, Albert Blest, p. 112.

27. Quoted in ibid. pp. 82–4.

28. Quoted in ibid. p. 92.

29. As early as 1811 Trench had openly sanctioned cooperation with the Dissenters, and he and Archdeacon Digby had since that time enjoyed warm relations with Albert Blest and the LHS. In 1818 the Society printed a circular to refute claims made in the Christian Guardian that it was a bigoted organization patronized mainly by Dissenters. (SOAS/MMSA, Methodist Papers [Ireland] box 74, file 2, no. 105).

30. According to S.J. Connolly, the number of Catholics per priest in the Tuam archdiocese in 1834–5 was 4199, compared with 1941 in the more prosperous diocese of Ferns. Poverty and population growth were the main barriers to improvement in Connaught; ‘the rate of population growth was faster than in other regions, while at the same time a largely impoverished population were unable to support even the same inadequate rise in clerical numbers which was achieved elsewhere’. Connolly, Priests and People, p. 35.

31. Quoted in D’Arcy Sirr, Trench, p. 144.

32. Ibid. p. 149.

33. Once the threat of famine had passed, much of the money collected by the London Tavern Committee was used to purchase looms and spinning wheels for the peasantry of the west in an attempt to foster the linen industry. What little progress was initially achieved was quickly negated by the dissolution of the Linen Board and the collapse of the domestic linen industry because of the introduction of mechanization. Ibid. pp. 151–64.

34. Quoted in D’Arcy Sirr, Trench, pp. 152–3.

35. Ibid. p. 146.

36. Ibid. p. 147.

37. DEP, 27 Oct. 1824.

38. Quoted in D’Arcy Sirr, Trench, p. 132.

39. Quoted in ibid. p. 133.

40. The Rev. Stoney’s trials in the Newport area began when he established schools and actively sought the conversion of local Catholics. In addition to the usual denunciations from the altar, he was also the recipient of threatening notices commonly associated with the Whiteboys. An example provided in the Trench biography gives some indication of how he was regarded by at least one belligerent but imaginative representative of the local Catholic community: ‘May the devil pull the tongue from root and branch out of your ugly mug. We will leave the devil to punish hypocrite Stoney—amen. Have a care of yourself, or by hell, we will coffin you. You are not fit to be a clergyman over a regiment of monkeys. You are a devil in the shape of a man—all that is wanting is a pair of horns and a tail … Bad luck to you, Stoney; I am afraid all your prayers won’t keep you from hell’s fires, when the devil will be laughing with joy to get his brother Stoney, you hypocrite, rascal, scoundrel, swaddler … We all shakes in our skins when we meet you, you d—d rascal; and I ask you, who wouldn’t when they would meet the devil?” Quoted in ibid. p. 207.

41. Because of its isolation Connemara became a refuge for Catholics and Protestants fleeing the troubles in the north and later the dragooning of Mayo in 1798. It was notorious as a haven for smugglers because of its indented shoreline and freedom from the forces of law and order. When asked if the King’s writ ran in Connemara, Richard Martin was said to have given the reply, ‘Egad it does, as fast as any greyhound, if any of my good fellows are after it.’ Patricia Kilroy, The Story of Connemara (Dublin 1989), p. 71.

42. Ibid. pp. 62–76. For an account of the rise of a new elite in the Celtic fringe based on an influx of new money and well-connected matrimonial alliances, see Colley, Britons, pp. 158–64.

43. Ibid. p. 78; see in particular Letters from the Irish Highlands of Connemara for the views of Henry Blake and his wife on Connemara as a tourist venue.

44. For the career of Richard Martin see Shevawn Lynam, Humanity Dick Martin: ‘King of Connemara’, 1754–1834 (Dublin 1989); Peter Philips, Humanity Dick: The Eccentric Member for Galway. The Story of Richard Martin, Animal Rights Pioneer 1754–1834 (Tunbridge Wells, Kent 2003).

45. Kathleen Villiers-Tuthill, History of Clifden, 1810–1850 (Galway 1981), pp. 11–13.

46. DEP, 29 April 1824.

47. Quoted in D’Arcy Sirr, Trench, pp. 112.

48. Many Ulster Catholics fled to the western counties in 1796 and 1797. The estate of Lord Altamont, which extended over a vast area of western Mayo between Westport and Louisburgh, was a particular haven for these refugees. Their homeless and destitute condition was a source of grave concern to Lord Altamont, who feared that they would be driven to plunder on this account. W.E.H. Lecky, A History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, vol. IV (London 1892), p. 140.

49. D’Arcy Sirr, Trench, p. 630–6.

50. Ibid. pp. 637.

51. Ibid. p. 641.

52. Ibid. p. 639.

53. Irene Whelan, ‘The stigma of souperism’ in Cathal Poirteir (ed.), The Great Irish Famine (Thomas Davis Lecture Series, Cork 1995), pp. 135–54; Bowen, Protestant Crusade, pp. 215–18.

54. D’Arcy Sirr, Trench, p. 645.

55. Ibid. p. 643.

56. Lord Farnham’s agent, W.H. Krause, for example, in a letter to his sister in 1832, expressed his conviction that the wrath of God had fallen on the Protestants of Ireland because ‘popery [is] cherished and encouraged by the rulers of the land’ and ‘Protestants are emigrating in hundreds, feeling that they have no protection from the government, and that they are not allowed to protect themselves’. Stanford, Krause, p. 175.

57. Dublin University Magazine (March 1833), 266; (May 1833), 30.

58. Address and Prospectus of the Protestant Colonisation Society from the Meeting of December 18th, 1829.

59. Ibid.

60. Dublin University Magazine (26 Nov. 1829).

61. Protestant Colonisation Society of Ireland: Transactions … at a Public Meeting of Subscribers (Dublin 1832), p. 2.

62. No records beyond the first prospectuses of 1829 and 1832 exist.

63. DEP, 26 Jan. 1839. For an account of the Brunswick Clubs see Machin, Emancipation Crisis, p. 151.

64. Protestant Colonisation Society of Ireland: Transactions … at a Public Meeting of Subscribers (Dublin 1832), p. 12.

65. Ibid. p. 25.

66. Ibid. p. 6.

67. J.G. MacWalter, The Irish Reformation Movement in Its Religious, Social, and Political Aspects (Dublin 1852), p. 70.

68. Anthony John Preston to Lord Farnham, 30 Nov. 1835 (NLI, Farnham Papers, MS 18,612/27).

69. Acheson, ‘Evangelicals’, p. 35.

70. Ensor, New Reformation, p. 21.

71. The Watchman, 25 Nov.; 2 Dec. 1826.

72. Acheson, ‘Evangelicals’, p. 194.

73. D.P. Thompson, A Brief Account of the Rise and Progress of the Change in Religious Opinion Now Taking Place in Dingle and the West of the County of Kerry (Dublin 1846), pp. 7–8.

74. John Jebb to Charles Forster, 17 Nov. 1830 (TCD, John Jebb Papers, MS 6392/22).

75. Ibid.

76. Ibid. Further details of the life of the Rev. John Goodman of Dingle may be found in Breathnach, ‘Séamus Goodman’, 154.

77. John Jebb to Charles Forster, 17 Nov. 1830 (TCD, John Jebb Papers, MS 6392/22). According to the official chronicler of the Dingle Mission, the Rev. Gubbins came to the Dingle area in the first instance to assist in famine relief. There is no mention of the involvement of Bishop Jebb in the affair. Thompson, Brief Account, pp. 7–9.

78. Ibid. p. 69.

79. Ibid. p. 10.

80. An account of Charles Gayer’s family background and career in Ireland is provided by Arthur Edward Gayer, Memoirs of the Family of Gayer (privately printed, London 1870).

81. Thompson, Brief Account, pp. 38–40; Bowen, Souperism, pp. 83–4.

82. Thompson, Brief Account, p. 29.

83. Ibid. pp. 45–6.

84. Ibid. p. 27.

85. Ibid. pp. 140–4.

86. Ibid. p. 36; Bowen, Souperism, p. 84.

87. Ibid. p. 149.

88. Ibid. p. 151.

89. Ibid. pp. 85–6.

90. Ibid. p. 84.

91. Ibid. p. 175.

92. Asenath Nicholson, Ireland’s Welcome to the Stranger, or an Excursion through Ireland in 1844 and 1845 for the Purpose of Personally Investigating the Condition of the Poor (New York 1847), p. 368.

93. Ibid. pp. 369–72.

94. Bowen, Souperism, p. 88.

95. Interview with Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, poet and native of Ventry, County Kerry; Greenwich, Connecticut, 28 Feb. 1993.

96. Henry Wilberforce, Proselytism in Ireland: The Catholic Defence Association vs. the Irish Church Missions on the Charge of Bribery and Intimidation: A Correspondence between the Rev. A.R.C. Dallas and the Rev. Henry Wilberforce (London 1852), p. 21.

97. Henry William Wilberforce (1807–73) was the youngest son of William Wilberforce, the famous philanthropist. He had a brilliant career as an undergraduate at Oxford, where he became closely associated with John Henry Newman. Like Newman, he was ordained a clergyman in the Church of England, became involved in the Tractarian movement, and eventually became a Catholic in 1850. In 1852 he became secretary of the Catholic Defence Association, a Dublin organization established to counter the work of Alexander Dallas and the Irish Church Missions and to defend the Catholic cause during the height of the ‘No Popery’ controversy of the early 1850s. Between 1854 and 1863 he edited the London-based Catholic Standard. He spent much of his time in the 1850s in Ireland. He died in Gloucestershire in 1873 and was buried in the Dominican Friary at Woodchester. David Newsome, The Wilberforces and Henry Manning: The Parting of Friends (Cambridge, Massachussets 1966), pp. 404–5.

98. Wilberforce, Proselytism in Ireland, p. 41.

99. FJ, 22 June 1852.

100. Otway, Tour in Connaught, pp. 426–7.

101. In an account of the Irish Society’s schools in Kingscourt that the Rev. Winning submitted to the Christian Examiner in October 1828, it is clear that the Society was already thinking in terms of territorial expansion and expected eventually to extend its system from the Irish Sea to the Atlantic. Christian Examiner (Oct. 1828), 306.

102. D’Arcy Sirr, Trench, pp. 556–61.

103. Alfred Clayton Thiselton, A Memorial Sketch of the Life and Labours of Mrs. Henrietta Pendleton, Forty Years Secretary of the Irish Islands and Coasts Society (Dublin 1895), p. 7.

104. Ibid. p. 16.

105. Ibid. p. 21.

106. D’Arcy Sirr, Trench, p. 598. Historical Sketches of the Native Irish was the second of Christopher Anderson’s studies of Ireland. One of the outstanding features of the book was its emphasis on the islands and coasts of the west as areas where the English language had made very little impact. Besides stressing the usefulness of Irish in promoting the Protestant religion, Anderson insisted that the national interest would be greatly served by halting its decline, and even suggested the establishment of a model school in Dublin where children could be educated exclusively in Irish.

107. Seventeenth Annual Report of the Baptist Society for Promoting the Gospel in Ireland (1831), appendix, p. 48.

108. The Irish Society’s report of 1833 mentioned the Achill project as an admirable example of a growing concern to evangelize the inhabitants of the western islands. It also made it clear that it had originated from sources other than the Society. Fifteenth Report of the Irish Society (1833), p. 16.

109. Quarterly Extract of the Irish Society, 42 (Dublin, 1832), 242–4.

110. Henry Seddall, Edward Nangle, the Apostle of Achill: A Memoir and A History With an Introduction by the Most Rev. William Conyngham Plunket (London 1884), pp. 54–62.

111. For a complete account of the Achill Mission, see Irene Whelan, ‘Edward Nangle and the Achill Mission, 1834–52’ in Raymond Gillespie and Gerard Moran (eds), A Various Country: Essays in Mayo History, 1500–1900 (Westport 1987), pp. 113–34.

112. Samuel Carter Hall, Mr S.C. Hall and the Achill Mission: Correspondence between S.C. Hall and Edward Nangle (Dublin 1844), p. 12.

113. James Johnson, A Tour in Ireland With Meditations and Reflections (London 1844), p. 239.

114. Otway, Tour in Connaught, p. 413.

115. Nicholson, Ireland’s Welcome, p. 443.

CONCLUSION

1. Colley, Britons, pp. 11–54.

2. Gertrude Himmelfarb, On Looking Into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society (New York 1994), pp. 112–3.

APPENDIX A

1. NLI, Brodrick Papers, MS 8866/1.

APPENDIX B

1. Quoted in Fitzpatrick, Doyle, vol. II, pp. 22–3.