–FOUR–

The Politics of Catholic Emancipation

I see that our pretended friends, but real enemies, the Grattans, the Greys etc. are all bent on ensnaring us: and I am convinced that the Veto is the least part of the Protestant reformation they mean to enforce upon us.

JOHN MILNER¹

You and I, sir, live at different sides of the channel, and as it is probable that you have never crossed it, allow me to tell you (and I fear my assertion will prove true) the Romanists want the tithes—the forfeited lands—the highest offices of the state—and power of every kind, not even excepting the kingly—and all as a right not as a favour. They ask like a sturdy beggar, armed with a bludgeon, and their language is—if you don’t give quickly, we will make you.

PETER ROE²

Surely an all wise and over-ruling providence is our only refuge from the gloomy swell that threatens us with (sooner or later, how late or soon is not in us to know) no common storm. How mysterious a thing it is, that this tempest whatever or whenever it be, is to be the result of so many good men. [my emphasis]

CHARLES FORSTER³

AMBITIONS AND FRUSTRATIONS

From the Act of Union onwards, the ‘Irish problem’ and the ‘Catholic question’ were virtually synonymous terms at Westminster. The essence of the problem was how to appease Catholic expectations generated by the Union settlement in the face of opposition from the Irish Protestant ascendancy and its supporters in parliament. And the crux of the problem was that opponents of Catholic political equality could now point to the 1798 Rebellion to bolster their arguments. During the first decade of the new century, the spectre of Catholic vengefulness unleashed during the 1790s provided material for a virtual cottage industry implicating the Catholic Church in the Rebellion and recasting the 1790s in the sectarian tradition of 1641 and 1690.⁴

The ink on the parliamentary act that secured the Union was barely dry when conservative Protestant opinion united to revive Bishop Woodward’s argument and to convince parliament and the public that the concession of what was called ‘Emancipation’ would spell the death of the Protestant interest in Ireland and the possible separation of the two islands. Once again the spectre of collusion between Catholic religious leaders and the fomenters of rebellion was raised in connection with the short-lived rising led by Robert Emmett in Dublin in 1803. The person who did the most to publicize this view was Lord Redesdale, who had been appointed to the office of lord chancellor in 1801. An acrimonious epistolary debate with a Catholic peer, Lord Fingal, appeared in published form in 1804 and provided a tremendous boost to the conservative cause.⁵ It was all the more powerful because Redesdale was an Englishman (a scion of the Mitford family) with powerful connections among the English nobility.

The intransigent opposition to Emancipation personified by Redesdale was substantial enough to cause the resignation of Pitt in 1801 and the downfall of the ‘Talents’ ministry in 1807, when the cabinet was about to consider partial relief measures for Catholics.⁶ The government’s failure to fulfil its verbal pledge of 1800 had the effect of hardening the opinion of Catholic leaders into the conviction that Emancipation would not be won without a protracted struggle. Catholic opinion in Ireland as to what constituted ‘Emancipation’ was itself marked by sharp division. The veto controversy delineated this cleavage and, within the space of a few years, exposed where the real source of Catholic power lay. The veto was regarded, particularly by liberal Protestants, as a means whereby a compromise settlement agreeable to all parties might be achieved. Specifically, the government would command a veto over the nomination of candidates to the Catholic episcopal bench, in return for the removal of the remaining disabilities suffered by Catholics. This provision, it was hoped, would curb the independence of the bishops, and consequently the lower clergy, and keep them loyal both to the crown and to the Protestant position of privilege in Ireland.⁷

Catholic clerics were at first almost unanimous in accepting this condition. On the eve of the Union, under the conservative leadership of Archbishop Troy, the Catholic bishops had consented to the notion of state payment for the clergy and the possibility of the government having a say in the appointment of Catholic bishops.⁸ It was, after all, the accepted practice in most countries in Europe (particularly in the lands of the Hapsburg Empire, the bastion of European Catholicism) for the monarch to claim an equal stake with the Pope in the nomination of episcopal candidates. The veto did not become a controversial political question in the immediate aftermath of the Union because Emancipation was shelved after Pitt resigned in 1801.⁹ But by the time a petition on Catholic reform was presented to parliament in 1807, the climate of opinion in Ireland had clearly undergone a marked change. Protestant intransigence and the defence of the cause by Lord Redesdale not only united people like Denis Scully and Theobald McKenna, but also drew Daniel O’Connell into the political fray. It was now clear that it was not clerical but lay opinion that would have to be taken into account. Under O’Connell’s guidance an anti-veto campaign was launched, which resulted in a majority of the bishops agreeing to reject any attempt by the government to interfere in episcopal appointments or indeed in any other matter having to do with Church authority.¹⁰

The decision of the hierarchy to follow the lead of O’Connell on this occasion was a telling revelation of the true nature of the Emancipation question. The issue of who should have the final say in the filling of vacant sees was directly related to the amount of autonomy that Catholics could exercise in the regulation of their own affairs, particularly those having to do with education, which, it was understood, would mould the political sympathies of the common people. The problem for Protestant opponents, of course, was the degree to which the political was linked to the religious. According to Oliver Mac-Donagh, the involvement of the Catholic clergy in politics during the first half of the nineteenth century was a step-by-step process in which ‘the main body of the church had been harnessed to a nationalist agitation’.¹¹ If so, then the first of these steps was taken in 1807, and with almost every passing year the advance would become more pronounced.

The rejection of the Catholic relief bill of 1814 was the first real display of Catholic power and the imposing leadership of O’Connell. The bill, introduced by Henry Grattan in 1813 and promoted by Canning in the following year, contained the safeguards that the government deemed necessary for internal security if Emancipation was to take effect, namely, a veto on episcopal appointments and the provision of state support for the clergy. Although the bill won the approval of the English Catholic Board and the aristocratic elite of the Catholic Committee in Ireland, it was rejected outright by O’Connell and his followers. In an attempt to thwart their influence, the English Catholic Board submitted the matter to Rome. The proposed law was returned by the secretary of propaganda, Dr Quarantotti, with a definitive recommendation that it be adopted. This rescript produced turmoil in Ireland, where the more conservative members of the hierarchy and the Catholic Committee favoured acceptance while the radicals led by O’Connell attacked it with undisguised vehemence.¹² When it was rumoured that the Pope was prepared to yield to a British demand for a veto, O’Connell took his campaign to the people. To offset any backsliding by the bishops because of pressure from Rome, he threatened that if they agreed to papal advice on the veto, they would soon find themselves without a congregation:

If the present clergy shall descend from the high station they hold to become the vile slaves of the Castle—a thing I believe impossible—but should it occur, I warn them in time to look to their master for support, for the people will despise them too much to contribute (great applause). The people would imitate their forefathers. They would communicate only with some holy priest who never bowed to the Dagon of power, and the Castle clergy would preach to still thinner numbers than attend in Munster or Connaught the reverend gentlemen of the present established Church.¹³

As a result of O’Connell’s agitation the controversial rescript was withdrawn for reconsideration by the Pope. Its successor, which appeared in May 1815, was still in agreement with the original demand for a veto and state support for the clergy and was equally unacceptable to the O’Connellites, and to the hierarchy, who had by now come out publicly in support of the popular position. As one of their pamphlets explained,

Because however anxiously the temporal aggrandizement of a comparatively small number of Roman Catholics may solicit its revival and enactment, we know that it is abhorred by the great bulk of our community with so universal a ferment of detestation and with such convulsive alarm as we never before witnessesed.¹⁴

The negative response to the second rescript was the death knell of Canning’s 1814 relief bill. If nothing else was achieved by the agitation and the exchanges with Rome, it was at least made clear that the Catholic bishops could not, without great risk to their Church, commit themselves to a policy abhorrent to their lay followers. This was the real source of the Church’s power. Far from being the imperialistic arm of Rome, the Catholic Church in Ireland bowed more than a little in the direction of French democracy in its willingness to take popular feeling into account. The leadership role of the Catholic clergy in Ireland was described with stunning accuracy by a Presbyterian minister and long-time supporter of Catholic Emancipation Rev. James Carlisle as ‘somewhat like a power vested in the leaders of a combination of workmen’, which was almost absolute only so long as it led the people in the way in which they were determined to go.¹⁵ It was evidently not a case of the clergy leading their flocks into the political arena, but rather a response to a popular demand that they fulfil the role that history had thrust upon them: that of representatives of the downtrodden Catholic population and guardians of the faith.

Nobody understood or exploited this better than Daniel O’Connell. At a public meeting of Catholics in County Clare in March 1814, he spelled out clearly his concept of the Church and its relation to the people:

[The Church] has survived persecution; built upon a Rock, it has defied the storms of force and violence. But this emancipation bill would have undermined the church and the rock on which it is founded; and in the fall of both, the credulous people would be crushed to death and destruction … there would be placed in every diocese, and then in every parish in Ireland, a ministerial dependent obliged to support the minister by the tenure of the ecclesiastical office; and then the expectants of the office would as usual be under the necessity of using double diligence in the ministry. Thus Canning’s bill … would have brought more numerous, better disciplined, and more effective recruits into the ranks of corruption than any one political measure ever yet invented or even imagined.¹⁶

O’Connell and his supporters saw the Catholic Church and the independence of its clergy as a bulwark between the designs of a hostile establishment and the vulnerability of the Catholic population. On this account they were even prepared to fly in the face of papal authority when it ran counter to their interests. Nevertheless, in response to Protestant insistence on the Bible as the supreme source of moral authority, they were compelled to support an equally dogmatic assertion on behalf of the claims of the Catholic Church and apostolic succession.

It was the nightmare of Protestant conservatives to see Emancipation only as a means to an end, that naturally being the destruction of the Protestant presence in Ireland. For many Protestants the prospect of a popular mass movement, well regulated and well led by O’Connell and the priests, held more terror than a recurrence of the jacquerie of 1798. As Archbishop William Magee was to express it so lucidly at the height of the Emancipation campaign:

I do not believe that the Roman Catholic population attach to that specific object which is now looked upon as ‘Catholic emancipation’ any value of any moment. I consider that they look to it as a means, and that they have a greater object behind it; it is their country, their property, their religion. All this is incessantly forced upon them by persons who have a commanding influence over them.¹⁷

The growing strength of the Catholic movement had the effect of bringing Protestants closer together. It also added weight to one of the central elements of the evangelical world view: a deep-seated anti-Catholicism based on antagonism to the institutional forms and doctrinal beliefs of the Church of Rome. Evidence from a variety of sources indicates that evangelical influence in the Church of Ireland increased strikingly in the years 1812–16. Besides the domestic fear over the Emancipation question and the growing influence of O’Connell, it is clear that there was also an international dimension to be considered, and that events in Ireland were moving in tandem with others in Britain as a whole. Napoleon’s defeat in Russia in 1812 and his subsequent capitulation and exile to St Helena were interpreted as the ultimate signs of providential deliverance and a vindication of all who had clung steadfastly to ‘true religion’ and the Bible in the face of the infidelity and anarchy unleashed in the previous twenty years.

The surest sign that the evangelicals had the wind in their sails with regard to public opinion was their triumphant success in the campaign to open India to the missionary efforts of the Church of England. During this campaign they invoked their own version of popular democracy, flooding parliament with petitions to illustrate the depth of popular sympathy for the missionary cause. It was an innovative and brilliant use of public opinion to effect political change and its lesson was not lost on others like O’Connell. The CMS’s campaign of 1812–13 led by Wilberforce and others greatly exceeded the scope and extent of the abolition campaign and was considered by many in the evangelical camp to be a more important victory.

In the aftermath of that campaign three of the leading figures in the CMS organized a preaching tour in Ireland. Their first object was to promote the cause of the foreign missions and to organize an Irish branch of the Society, but they also had the effect of adding ballast to the revival currently gathering force in the Church of Ireland. The most obvious indication of this trend was the increase in the number of branches or auxiliaries of the HBS. From a total of eight such institutions founded between 1806 and 1812, the number had risen to fifty-three by the end of 1814.¹⁸ This was a clear illustration that the Established religion was in the process of answering the challenge of the Methodists and Independent evangelicals, not only in the area of foreign missions but equally with developments on the domestic front.

Besides the increase in affiliated bodies, the HBS in this period received the support of several Church of Ireland bishops. The bishops of Cashel and Kildare openly gave their blessings to the aims of the Society, and Thomas Elrington, the bishop of Ferns and Leighlin, declared at a visitation in 1812 his wish that ‘at no distant period we may expect to witness different auxiliary Bible societies established throughout the two dioceses’.¹⁹ In the same year Elrington applied to the lord lieutenant on behalf of the ADV to import bibles and prayer books duty free.²⁰

Even those who declined to support the HBS on grounds of churchmanship rejoiced at the launching of independent local organizations like the Cork Bible Society.²¹ The younger evangelical clergy were also by this point beginning to make inroads in their drive for the cause of serious religion among the landed classes. The Rev. William Digby of Elphin, for example, was responsible for drawing into the movement two of the greatest names in the west of Ireland, Lord Lorton of Rockingham and the bishop of the diocese, Power le Poer Trench. In 1812 a branch of the HBS was founded in the Elphin diocese under the patronage of Lorton and Trench, and arrangements were made for depositories for the sale of bibles and testaments to be opened in the towns of Elphin, Boyle, Strokestown, Roscommon, Sligo and Ahascragh.²² The combined influence of Lorton and Trench would form a nucleus from which the beams of the revival would radiate over all of Connaught in subsequent decades.

Increasingly landlords (and more particularly their wives) were coming forward to donate land for schools, to provide salaries for teachers, and to purchase quantities of bibles and testaments for free distribution. Nor were they exclusive in their support of the Church of Ireland. Lady O’Brien of Dromoland, for example, gave a hospitable reception to itinerant Baptists, was glad to subscribe to their society, and expressed her desire to open a female school on her estate.²³ Testimony to the popularity of the cause is also to be found in the voice of the opposition. Alarmed at the spread of Bible societies, a Protestant rector of County Kilkenny, Andrew O’Callaghan, warned that the distribution of bibles might produce ‘less fruit than expected, [or] fruit in abundance but of a poisonous quality’. The liberal O’Callaghan questioned the value of circulating the Bible without note or comment. He also wondered why supporters of the scheme did not see fit instead to teach the peasantry the laws of their country and to circulate among them cheap editions of Blackstone or Littleton, which might help ‘to humanize their minds, lessen their taste for nocturnal depredations, and quench their thirst for blood’.²⁴

A more forceful argument was put forward by Rev. William Phelan, a convert from Catholicism and a rising star among those who defended the orthodoxy of the Established Church. Phelan argued essentially against the populist implications of the spread of Bible societies and compared the movement with the rise of democracy and ‘mob rule’ in the political world.²⁵ He objected, not to the distribution of the scriptures as such, but to this new mode of distribution that heralded interdenominationalism and lay involvement on a large scale.²⁶

Still, the most obvious source of opposition to the evangelical missions was the Catholic clergy. On an individual level priests throughout the country had for years fulminated against itinerant preachers, Bible and tract distribution, and proselytizing schools. Among the bishops, however, there was for many years a tendency to minimize or ignore the implications of the evangelical crusade. As always, there were strong political motivations behind their long-held silence.

THE BIBLE SOCIETY CRISIS OF 1819–20

Between 1810 and 1818, when the evangelicals were assembling the institutional and ideological machinery necessary for a frontal assault on the sources of Catholic power in Ireland, the Catholic hierarchy remained judiciously silent about this challenge. The policy espoused by the bishops at this time was based on the twin pillars of political loyalty to the crown and religious toleration. To compensate for supporting O’Connell in his rejection of the relief bill, Catholic bishops made every effort to assuage fears of a Catholic ascendancy. Respect for the religious beliefs of non-Catholic denominations was encouraged, as were cordial relations between the different religious communities. This was the basis of the ecumenism of the pre-Emancipation period that has more than once been misinterpreted as a golden age of religious accommodation before the storms of the 1820s.²⁷

On occasion, it appeared to some members of the Catholic episcopate, fealty to Rome took second place to the softening of religious differences within Ireland. At the height of the Bible War of 1824, Bishop Doyle of Kildare and Leighlin advocated a union between the Catholic Church and the Church of Ireland, somewhat reminiscent of the Gallican model in France.²⁸ He argued that doctrinal differences could be overcome by a conciliatory approach on the part of both churches, and that in any case it was ‘pride and points of honour which keep us divided on many subjects, not a love of Christian humility, charity, and truth’. This opinion was shared by the archbishop of Tuam, Dr Oliver Kelly, who clearly thought Doyle’s idea worthy of consideration but hoped that it might be preceded by a ‘union in the bonds of Christian charity between the two religious groups’.²⁹

These sentiments were undoubtedly a reflection of the bishops’ concern over the chasm that sectarian controversy was creating between the religious communities. That a union might ever be brought to fruition was wishful thinking on the bishops’ part. When Catholic bishops began to respond to the evangelical challenge, they defended their rights on civil and political as well as religious grounds. To withdraw while the debate was at its height in 1824–5 would be to concede defeat and to risk the loss of spiritual as well as temporal authority. As O’Connell had warned, without the strength of an independent Catholic Church in Ireland, the common people would be left, like so many sheep without a shepherd, ‘to be crushed to death and destruction’. This was not idle rhetoric on O’Connnell’s part, if one considers ‘the elbowing aside of the resident population by powerful landowners’ that was currently occurring in rural Wales and particularly in the Scottish Highlands where the poor were being cleared off the land in the name of economic efficiency and progress.³⁰ The economic and political dimension of the Catholic response to the evangelical challenge was therefore much more intense than the religious. While the evangelicals played against Catholics the trump cards of religious intolerance, the breaking of faith with heretics, and other forms of persecution believed to be sponsored by the Church of Rome, the Catholic defence was constructed upon a broad-based criticism of the establishment and its responsibility for the sufferings and miserable condition of the native population.³¹

The most significant feature of the Catholic defence was its origin in the lay-clerical alliance of O’Connell and the younger members of the episcopate. While older bishops like John Troy, archbishop of Dublin (1786–1823) deplored evangelical invective against Catholicism and prayed for peace between Catholic and Protestant, they were usually reluctant to go further. It was the younger members of the hierarchy, James Warren Doyle of Kildare and Leighlin (1819–34) and John MacHale of Maronia (1825–34) and later of Tuam (1834–81), who took the lead in defending their Church and its followers from attack. The alliance with O’Connell was mutually rewarding and highly effective. Throughout the 1820s, as the lines between the political and the religious became even more difficult to determine, this union developed into a behemoth of popular power that wrung Emancipation from a frightened government and legislature. Predictably, the successes of the alliance, instead of lessening evangelical anti-Catholicism, pushed it to greater heights of intensity.

The catalyst that set the wheels of Catholic reaction in motion was a letter in 1818 addressed to the Irish bishops by Cardinal Fontana, the prefect of Propaganda Fidei in Rome. Again, this was part of the larger canvas of religious affairs in England and Europe and not exclusively the product of particular conditions in Ireland. One of the consequences of the trammelling of papal power by Napoleon, and of the papacy’s indebtedness to Britain for its major role in putting an end to his ambitions, was a tendency to ignore the challenge to papal power implicit in the launching of a Protestant missionary movement with global ambitions. This situation changed after the Congress of Vienna, when the Pope, as it were, woke up to discover the BFBS marching all over the globe, distributing its bibles in the vernacular and assisting modernizing rulers (such as Tsar Alexander I of Russia) with the organization of schools and the provision of educational material.³² The first area in which the papacy locked horns with the BFBS was in Poland, where Catholic authorities opposed the starting up of Bible society activities in the Duchy of Warsaw, which was under Russian dominion at this time. Because the society had the official sanction of Tsar Alexander, it was able to proceed freely with its plans, which left the Catholic leader, Archbishop Raczynski, with no recourse but to appeal to Rome. Pius VII lost no time in informing Raczynski that ‘these [Bible] societies are abhorrent to me, they tend to the subversion of the Christian religion, even to its very foundation; it is a plague which must be arrested by all possible means’.³³

It was only a matter of time—given the dimensions and objectives of the evangelical mission in Ireland, and the diplomatic connections between Irish Catholic leaders and the Vatican over the vexed question of the veto—before news of what was afoot in Ireland reached the ear of Pius VII.³⁴ Indeed, for some time before the appearance of the Fontana letter, word was spreading through the evangelical grapevine that the Catholic bishops were about to issue an ordinance against the dissemination and reading of the Bible without note or comment.³⁵ Had Fontana’s address never appeared, it is debatable how long the Catholic bishops in Ireland would have remained silent while their traditional territory was invaded by Protestant missionaries. What is certain, however, is that John MacHale took the Fontana letter as a clarion call to the Catholic clergy. In the famous Hierophilus letters of 1820–23, MacHale assumed the lead in responding to the evangelical challenge and raised the curtain on an era of bitter sectarian conflict that was to plague social, political, and religious life in Ireland for over half a century.

The primary purpose of MacHale’s Hierophilus letters was to expose the proselytizing nature of evangelical societies involved in education and Bible distribution. The most damaging of the many charges issued by the author was aimed at the KPS, an organization hitherto free from the taint of proselytism and openly supported by many leading champions of the Catholic cause, notably Daniel O’Connell and Lord Cloncurry, both of whom sat on the board of directors.³⁶ From the time the Society was set up Catholics had willingly participated in the development of the system, and two places on the board of directors were reserved for Catholic laymen. By 1819–20, however, a number of trends that had been developing over the previous decade combined to heighten Catholic fears about the true nature of the Society’s objectives. One was the ascendancy of evangelical opinion on the board of directors, in particular the influence of Thomas Lefroy, who was widely known as an intransigent foe of Catholic political demands and a staunch supporter of the evangelical crusade. Another was the growing suspicion that all educational and philanthropic enterprises directed by Protestants were working in unison towards the evangelization and ultimately the conversion of Catholics. The government’s decision in 1816 to award an annual grant to the KPS, which would be deployed as the directors saw fit and would increase the scope of their activities enormously, lent further weight to the fear and indignation of Catholics.

The point on which O’Connell, no doubt taking his cue from the recent papal dictate, joined battle with his fellow directors of the KPS was the rule concerning the reading of the Bible without note or comment. This had not always been such a bone of contention for Catholics. In the early days many priests had even welcomed the idea. For those who were opposed to the reading of the Bible in the classroom a number of ‘artful compromises’ had been devised that enabled Catholics to meet the Society’s demands without forsaking their religious principles. One of these involved the reading of the weekly scripture lesson from the altar on Sunday and the catechetical instruction of the pupils during school hours but outside the classroom. Another entailed what opponents labelled ‘pious fraud’, that is, the daily reading of the Bible in the classroom in the absence of the pupils.³⁷ By 1818, however, the ‘Bible without note or comment’ had entered political culture as a symbol of the triumph of Protestant Christianity over secularism and infidelity, and it was elevated as the standard under which British Protestantism would conquer the globe.³⁸ It is hardly surprising that Irish evangelicals would not tolerate the expenditure of government money on a school system that denied pupils access to this one fundamental source of Christianity. Neither is it difficult to see why Catholics interpreted this condition as a manifestation of Protestant cultural and political supremacy and saw it as part of a scheme to undermine the authority of their Church.

Moderate Catholics and their supporters in parliament went to great lengths to make a case for the damage that would ensue if the Kildare Place system were to fall apart over this issue. Catholic bishops were the first to agree that a want of education was responsible for so many of the country’s problems, and that the Catholic body by itself could not meet the need as effectively as the KPS could. Archbishop Troy and Lord Fingal urged Charles Grant to recommend that the Catholic archbishop of Dublin be appointed to the board of directors and that an evangelical Life of Christ be made available as a religious text for use by Catholic children.³⁹ The great liberal champion of Emancipation, William Conyngham Plunket, turned to the wisdom of Montesquieu to make the point that ‘nations have ever been tenacious of their customs, and the only mode of effecting change would be to engage the people themselves to change them’.⁴⁰ Lord Cloncurry (the well-known liberal peer who had been imprisoned in the aftermath of 1798 for his suspected sympathies with the republicans), claimed that the achievement of the Kildare Place schools was incalculable, and that children were not now being educated to display ingratitude and contempt for their parents, as had been the case in the Charter Schools.⁴¹ Within a short time there was no room for moderates like Cloncurry, who struck a plaintive note years later in recounting the clash:

As soon as the nature of the difficulty became fully known to me, I did all that in me lay to induce the society to remove it, and so, at all events, to secure for the children of the poor a free opportunity of moral and intellectual education. The committee, however, was in the hands of a few professional fanatics who in that day were in the habit of seeking, through Protestantism and piety, a ready road to the bench; and so my warnings were disregarded, and a barrier of bibles built up between the people and civilization. Here was a new grievance brought above ground and within reach of professional agitators upon the other side; and as they did not at all lack the disposition to use it, a new war of opinion forthwith sprang up. [my emphasis]⁴²

The most prominent of those ‘not lacking the disposition’ to attack the KPS was Daniel O’Connell. As a member of the board of directors, O’Connell had first voiced his opposition to the rule concerning the reading of the Bible at the annual general meeting in April 1819. He also convinced the other Catholics on the board, the duke of Leinster and Lord Cloncurry, that the system would never be acceptable to Catholics because of this condition. During the following year the controversy was heightened by the emergence of MacHale as an outspoken critic of every aspect of the evangelical mission. Both O’Connell and MacHale based their argument on the belief that the KPS could never win the approval of Catholics if its present constitution remained unchanged. In O’Connell’s opinion government funds were not only being wasted but also abused. At the annual general meeting in February 1820 O’Connell proposed that the Society elect a subcommittee to examine the possibility of an alternative to the current reading of the Bible without note or comment. His proposal was answered by the assertion that this particular rule could be changed only with the assent of the directors—an unlikely event. At this point O’Connell resigned his seat on the board of directors. Shortly afterwards he publicly announced in the Dublin Evening Post how he had been ‘rudely and violently hissed at merely for a necessary and unpresuming assertion of Catholic principles’ on this occasion, and that this treatment was the result of the influence of a small number of partisans whom he described as ‘the bitterest enemies of Catholic rights and religious liberty’.⁴³

O’Connell’s departure precipitated a crisis among Catholic and liberal Protestant supporters of the society. The duke of Leinster, an eminent Catholic peer and patron of the Society, assured the secretary, Joseph Devonshire Jackson, that he would not resign as patron but that he agreed with O’Connell that the Catholic poor were being deprived of education because of the regulation about the Bible.⁴⁴ Two years later, under the conviction that the Society had become more, not less, intransigent on this issue, he resigned his office as president of the Society.⁴⁵ The organ of liberal Protestant opinion, the Dublin Evening Post, likewise agreed that the Society had accomplished a great deal (particularly in its influence on popular reading matter), but that its work would be of no consequence if the priests chose to oppose it.

O’Connell’s attack on the KPS and the consequent withdrawal of the leading Catholic patrons was a turning point in the history of Protestant–Catholic relations in Ireland. In the short term it meant that O’Connell and the hierarchy would participate in a government-sponsored educational system only on terms that recognized their right to an equal say in the moral and cultural agenda of the revolution in education. In the long run it secured the almost total exclusion of Protestant influence from Catholic educational concerns. The events of 1819–20 exposed a deep rift between the country’s two main religious groups, a rift that widened over the following decade. O’Connell had taken the lead in confronting the evangelical mission, which he viewed as designed to prevent the emergence of the Catholic Irish as an independent and autonomous force. He interpreted the crusade as political rather than religious in nature, as yet another attempt to frustrate Catholic aspirations for full political freedom:

In this country the bigots at last are compelled to confess among themselves the impossibility of long withholding emancipation; and so they would fain discount it. They would fritter away its value as much as they could; force failing them, they are resorting to every expedient of miserable and odious fraud. Look to the Kildare Place Society, established for the education of Irish children—necessarily of Catholic children. Watch their efforts and manouevres. See how insidiously they go to work—how active and persevering in their efforts to pervert the youthful mind of Ireland. Look to the tract distributors and the proselytizing societies of every name and shape, and say, do I allude to things of the imagination? Are not these facts, realities most necessary to be duly appreciated, attended to, and counteracted? How necessary, then, that we would show an equal vigilance with our enemies.⁴⁶

The controversy over the use of the Bible without note or comment in the schools conducted by the KPS precipitated a furore at every level of religious life in Ireland. Sectarian conflict became more marked at the popular level, and clerical leaders of all denominations found it necessary to establish and defend their position with regard to the dissemination of the Bible. Even among the Catholic clergy, opinion on this subject was by no means unanimous. The greatest consternation, however, was experienced by some of the Church of Ireland bishops, who looked upon the rise of evangelical influence as the most serious threat to the security of their Church. When the policy of distributing the Bible without note or comment, ‘thus encouraging the notion that men might draw their own religion from it’,⁴⁷ was condemned by leading theologians of the Church of England, the bishops acting as vice-presidents of the BFBS (the majority of whom were Irish) were obliged to resign. The HBS suffered a similar exodus.

This did not mean, however, that the Irish bishops were about to abandon their sympathies for the evangelical movement. On the contrary, it appears that their support was strengthened as a result. What the resignations did encourage was the freedom of those members of the episcopate who disapproved of the evangelical crusade to voice their opinions in public. At his annual visitation in the cathedral city of Armagh in October 1821, the Protestant primate of Ireland, the Rev. Dr John George Beresford, issued a clear condemnation of the HBS. He urged that strict attention to the duties of clerical office was necessary if the Established Church was to be protected from ‘the machinations so busily in operation to injure, if not destroy, the established religion [and] emanating, not from Dissenters who openly and candidly avowed their dissent, but from concealed enemies who were nourished and upheld by it, and were insidiously striving with all their energies to effect its destruction’.⁴⁸

In the same year the outspoken bishop of Meath, Dr Thomas Lewis O’Beirne, penned a well-publicized letter to the rural deans of his diocese, warning them of the spread of Bible societies and the profusion of ‘false teachers who are leading people astray’ and ‘who profess to teach articles of faith but actually pervert them by deducing doctrines which have been universally condemned as unknown in the Bible’.⁴⁹ Like most churchmen, O’Beirne did not object to the dissemination of the scriptures as such, but insisted that due regard be paid to the educational level of the recipients and to the need for careful instruction and interpretation of material that could easily be misconstrued by the uneducated. He also supported the idea that Bible reading form part of the education of Catholic children, but he believed that it should not be supervised by fanatics.⁵⁰

While Catholic opponents of the Bible crusade were inclined to interpret the advocacy of the Bible without note or comment and the concerted efforts to proselytize among the Catholic population as one and the same thing, this was not true of the Protestant clergy. The thinking of Protestant clerics and laymen who opposed the evangelicals on grounds of churchmanship but who upheld the objectives of the Reformation movement is not as inconsistent as it appears. Legitimacy was the first concern of the Church of Ireland in the early nineteenth century, and no group defended it more strongly than the episcopal evangelicals. The cornerstone of the Church’s legitimacy was its role as supreme arbiter in moral and spiritual matters. That it fulfilled this role only for a minority of the population was an unpleasant reality, one forcefully underscored by able Catholic polemicists, particularly Bishop Doyle of Kildare and Leighlin, who was goaded into action by the anti-Catholic polemics issuing from the ultra-Protestant press in the early 1820s.⁵¹ The insecurity of the Church establishment was such that any offensive from the Catholic quarter was likely to guarantee a general outcry of ‘the Church in danger’.

This is in fact what occurred after 1820. If the Church of Ireland could not justify its existence on grounds of representing the majority population, it could claim legitimacy on the basis of apostolic succession from the ancient Celtic Church founded by Saint Patrick. This was also a favourite theme of evangelicals, who liked to point out that the early Christian Church in Ireland had broken with Rome and had followed its own version of Christianity according to what it found in the scriptures.⁵² This doctrine had a long-established pedigree, going all the way back to Wales in the sixteenth century when supporters of the Reformation had insisted that the independence of the ancient Celtic Church had set a precedent for separation from Rome and the founding of the Church of England.

The fact remained, nevertheless, that the allegiance of the majority population of Ireland still had not been won by the ecclesiastical body that claimed the mantle of Patrick: hence the demand for a ‘reformation’ both within the establishment and among the Catholic population. The evangelicals, both episcopal and Dissenting, had unquestionably laid the foundation of the new Reformation movement, and at the time when it was given official expression in 1822 by Archbishop Magee, they held control of all the agencies through which its expansion was to be attempted. Yet the movement was supported by many who were not evangelical in the sense of basing all spiritual authority on a personal interpretation of the Bible. Gradually, the finer points of distinction between the two groups became blurred, and evangelicals came to be defined, especially by their Catholic opponents, as all those who espoused converting Irish Catholics to the Protestant faith, regardless of the source to which they looked for spiritual authority, and regardless of whether they supported the distribution of the Bible without note or comment.

The evangelical attack on the Catholic religion in Ireland focused especially on the rule of the Catholic Church regarding the reading of the Bible. Once the lower orders were exposed to this true source of Christianity, the argument went, they would see for themselves the bondage of ignorance imposed on them by the servants of Rome. Once released from their state of spiritual darkness, they would proceed to moral and civil righteousness by casting off the rebellious spirit that inspired acts of outrage and murder. The alleged disavowal of the Bible by the Catholic priesthood was denounced as the most oppressive of the elements by which the peasantry were kept ignorant and poor.

To criticism of this kind the first response of Catholic leaders was to defend their Church’s policy on the use of the Bible. In December 1819, obviously embarrassed at the recent uproar over the Fontana letter, Bishop Walsh of Waterford issued a pastoral letter urging his parishioners to study the scriptures.⁵³ Shortly afterwards, the Douay Bible, the version universally approved by the Catholic Church, was reprinted in a new translation, and a society was founded in Dublin for its distribution.⁵⁴ This was the beginning of a vast outpouring of literature, religious and otherwise, that was to issue from the Catholic press in the following decades in direct response to the taunts and threats of the evangelicals.

In contrast to Walsh, Archbishop Oliver Kelly of Tuam took his cue from the Fontana letter to warn about the dangers of distributing bibles among an illiterate people, and condemned the forces that ‘under the semblance of a Christian education’ were resorting to every art and insinuation ‘in order to make proselytes among the innocent and unsuspecting youth of our communion’. Kelly used strong language to condemn the subversive workings of evangelical agencies, which, he claimed, were ‘embellished with a thousand specious names but at the bottom of which evil lies concealed …. The enemies of our faith … like the serpent, creep and give death under flowers’.⁵⁵ The Catholic position on scripture reading and distribution was ably defended by Bishop Doyle, who accused the evangelicals of attempting to ‘substitute the reading of the scriptures with the office of the ministry itself ’.⁵⁶

Although Doyle and his fellow ecclesiastics never departed from the principle that the dissemination of biblical material must be supervised by the priesthood, evangelical charges that they were consciously denying their followers access to the scriptures obliged the Catholic clergy to pay more attention to religious education. Catholic Sunday schools became very popular during the 1820s as a result, and enterprises like the breakfast institute set up by the Patrician Brothers in Galway ‘for the purposes of opposing the inroads of proselytism’ also had their origin in this period.⁵⁷ The revival underway in the Catholic Church was most obviously manifested in the increased construction of new churches, convents, monasteries and schools.

The evangelical challenge not only underlined the necessity for an educational system designed exclusively for the needs of Catholics, but it also ensured that control of such a system would be so jealously guarded that Protestant influence of any kind would be construed as an attempt to subvert the Catholic faith. It was some years, however, before this trend became starkly apparent. In the immediate context of the sectarian controversy of 1819–24 the preoccupation of the Catholic clergy was to prevent an explosive situation from developing among a peasantry beset by worsening economic conditions and driven by a millenarian belief that the downfall of the Protestant interest in Ireland was at hand.

MILLENARIANISM AND POPULAR SECTARIANISM

There was little cause for optimism about the general state of Ireland at the time of the outbreak of sectarian controversy in 1819–20. The conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars had ended a long period of prosperity in Britain and Europe generally, and the depression that followed had serious implications for the Irish economy, whose difficulties had to some extent been concealed during the boom years. The decline in grain and cattle prices, coupled with potato failure and increased population pressure, spelled disaster for many of the poorer peasants of the south and west.⁵⁸ Bad harvests in 1816 were the cause of widespread privation in many parts of Europe during the following winter and spring, but Ireland was unique for the degree of suffering and social unrest that accompanied the dearth. The effects of the scarcity began to be felt in the autumn of 1816 and increased alarmingly in the spring and summer of the following year. Reports of food riots began to arrive from several different parts of the country in the early months of 1817, with descriptions of hundreds of people breaking open grain and potato warehouses and preventing the transit of provisions.⁵⁹ Deprivation during the spring months brought with it the spread of contagious fever, and the summer was marked by a raging typhus epidemic.

The impact of the crisis on a population that was already deeply alienated from the political system was a source of concern to all who were familiar with conditions in Ireland. It was the opinion of the bishop of Elphin, the Rev. Dr Power le Poer Trench, ‘that there has hardly been a period in which a scarcity of food for the lower orders was more to be apprehended and the consequence of such scarcity from the difficulties and pressures of the times more to be dreaded’.⁶⁰ One estimate of the mortality for 1817 put the number of deaths at 40,000 out of an approximate population of four million, mainly the consequence of the fever epidemic.⁶¹ As the quantifier, William Harty, claimed,

Without fear of exaggeration, a more general epidemic never existed in any country of equal dimensions and population … According to every account, whether public or private, not only every city, town, and village were visited by the disease but very few of the isolated cabins of the poor escaped.⁶²

The recovery of the harvest and the waning of the typhus epidemic after the terrible summer of 1817 did little to mitigate the economic difficulties of spiralling unemployment and falling wages. The years 1821–3 were especially marked by economic hardship and warranted the organization of relief on a considerable scale. Public and private charity, however, did little to stem the tendency of country people to redress their grievances through the traditional means of the secret society. From 1821 to 1824 the Rockite movement (so called because its adherents styled themselves the followers of ‘Captain Rock’) spread throughout the south and south-west and visited upon landlords, large farmers, and the forces of the law an almost daily tally of murder and outrage. The Rockite movement in many respects contained elements common to such earlier agrarian rebellions as those of the Whiteboys (1761–5) and the Rightboys (1785–8). The recruitment of followers through the ritual binding of oaths, the raiding of houses for arms and ammunition, the use of various methods of intimidation and torture, and often the execution of hapless victims were all employed by the Rockites in their efforts to make the dominant classes bend to their notion of social justice. One of the singular characteristics of the movement, however, was a strain of millenarianism propelled by an anti-Protestant bias more vehement than in any of the earlier outbreaks of agrarian unrest.⁶³

More than one commentator on the social history of Ireland in the nineteenth century has remarked on the absence or diminished influence of the millenarian vein in Irish culture.⁶⁴ This viewpoint is open to question. The spread of millenarian beliefs based on the prophecies of Pastorini, which coincided with the ascendancy of Captain Rock, contained many of the ingredients recognized as characteristic of a well-developed millenarian tradition. The theme common to all millenarian movements—that the current order would be overturned and the oppressed delivered from their state of bondage—was the central focus of the phenomenon. The governing impulse of Pastorini’s disciples was the belief that the Protestants of Ireland would be swept away by a specific date, in this case 1825, after which the long-suffering Catholics would restore the golden age that they had enjoyed before the invasion of the heretical interlopers spawned by Henry VIII.

The ultimate source of this prophecy was an obscure treatise on the book of Revelation by an English Catholic bishop, Charles Walmesley, whose work entitled A General History of the Christian Church was published in Dublin in 1790 under the pen name of Signor Pastorini. Basing his predictions on a reading of the Apocalypse, he prophesied that a general punishment of heretics would occur about fifty years after 1771. In Ireland the date for retribution and deliverance was generally set at 1825, though the reasons for this are not clear. Neither is it evident at what point or on what account the widespread dissemination and acceptance of the prophecies began, though undoubtedly the phenomenon was connected with the impact of the famine and typhus epidemic in 1816–17. Apparently unknown at the popular level before 1817, Pastorini became a household name in Munster by 1822 and, according to contemporary evidence, kept the authorities and the Protestant population in a state of constant anxiety.⁶⁵

The popular appeal of Pastorini was an embarrassment to the Catholic clergy, all the more so because the evangelicals were willing to seize upon it as further evidence of the covert anti-Protestant workings of the priests. There is nothing to suggest that there was any truth to this suspicion. The Catholic clergy as well as the Catholic middle classes were loath to ascribe any significance to the Pastorini phenomenon, and with good reason. As firm supporters of Emancipation, their first concern was to persuade the government and the Protestant establishment in Ireland of the loyalty and tolerance of the Catholic body. Nevertheless, the clergy often found it necessary to admit the influence and to condemn the prophecies from the pulpit and through pastoral addresses. Despite such opposition the prophecies enjoyed continued, though diminished, currency even after the year 1825 had passed without any remarkable happenings.

The mysterious appearance and rapid spread of the millenarian beliefs associated with Pastorini, and the way the challenge was met by both the Catholic Church and the Protestant establishment, provide important insights into the cultural conflicts at work in Irish society at this time. Some of the concepts used by social historians and anthropologists to explain the appearance of millenarian movements in different countries at various times can be usefully applied to Ireland in the early nineteenth century. The most obvious is the colonial hypothesis, which stresses the general conflict arising out of the pressures of a technologically advanced society on a backward or traditional one.⁶⁶ Forced acculturation and a sense of relative deprivation are particular aspects of the colonial experience emphasized in connection with millenarianism. With respect to forced acculturation, two trends may be noted as indicative of a society under threat. The first is the widespread demand for education, or the ‘thirst for knowledge’ that made its appearance in the late eighteenth century and was in full flower during the first two or three decades of the nineteenth. The second, a direct offspring of the first, was the general adoption of the English language during the same period.⁶⁷ It is not difficult to see in these complementary developments attempts at what A.F.C. Wallace called revitalization, ‘the essence of [which] lies in the need of a society under excessive stress to either reinforce itself or die’.⁶⁸ This is yet another ingredient conducive to the growth of millenarianism.

Among the theories employed to explain the phenomenon, the two that bear most immediately on the Pastorini episode are those of relative deprivation and the disaster syndrome. In both the general and the particular senses, the causes of a deeply felt deprivation were abundant in Ireland, especially after 1815. Not only were deteriorating social and economic conditions working towards this end, but they were exacerbated by the perception of cultural loss exemplified in the reverence (so readily admitted to travellers, and so well documented by evangelical missionaries) that the country people bestowed upon their native language at precisely the same time that they were sloughing it off in favour of English. The fortunes of the campaign for Catholic Emancipation (seen by the common people as a general panacea for their many grievances), which reached its nadir between 1815 and 1822, would have added to the general sense of devastation. The events that drew these various forces together and filled the consciousness of the popular classes with hopes of their coming deliverance were probably the failure of the potato crop in 1816 and the famine and typhus epidemic of 1817. Disaster or the anticipation of disaster is one of the elements most common to millenarian outbreaks, according to Michael Barkun, because ‘men cleave to the hopes of imminent worldly salvation only when the hammer blows of disaster destroy the world they have known and render them susceptible to ideas which they would have earlier cast aside’.⁶⁹

The famine of 1821–2 witnessed the high-water mark of Pastorini’s popularity in the counties most affected by agrarian violence, particularly Cork and Limerick. So widespread were the prophecies in County Limerick in the early 1820s that a government official who had specifically set out to collect information on what was currently influencing the minds of the peasantry in this disturbed region was obliged to admit: ‘I do not think [that] in a single instance has one of these papers been produced to me that there was not a distinct allusion to the prophecies of Pastorini and the year 1825.’⁷⁰ The most alarming aspect of the prophecies for the authorities and for Protestants in general was the unbounded faith they appeared to inspire among the country people that, though Catholics were currently enveloped by a dark night of oppression, it had been ordained by God that the glorious morning of their deliverance was soon to dawn.

In 1822 an old woman on the earl of Rosse’s estate in King’s County told a Protestant neighbour to look to his life and property, for the Catholics ‘were coming on like the waves of the Shannon, wave after wave, until they would overturn everything’. In the same area the belief was reportedly widespread that ‘the Protestants will be green and flourishing in the evening, but that before midday they will be cut down and withered like thistles in the sun’. The words of a song that the earl of Rosse forwarded to his Tory colleague Lord Redesdale, designed to illustrate the fanaticism that had taken possession of the minds of the lower orders of Catholics, reveal similar metaphorical links between oppression and deliverance and night and morning:

On yonder bower there grows a flower

And some do call it Orange

And over that there grows a branch

That’s called the blooming laurel

It spreads so wide all in the night

And in the morning early

When the Orange rood it is cut down

The laurel will flourish cheerly

Our Church is built upon a Rock

Founded by our Saviour

And the gates of Hell that’s roaring wide

Shall ne’er prevail against her

There is a spark from France to Rome

Call’d the glimmering light of Erin

There is a spark from France to Rome

Shall ne’er cease constant blazing

May it ne’er flinch, nor quench an inch

But still keep constant blazing

Till it destroy the race of Troy

King Henry’s generation. [my emphasis]⁷¹

Regardless of whether this kind of imagery originated in Catholic expectations or Protestant fears, what clearly emerges from these verses is the popular faith in the Catholic Church and religion as the source of strength and hope for the Irish, paralleled by the anticipated destruction of their enemies, less because they were English than because they were Protestant. The latter sentiment appeared repeatedly when Catholics who fraternized with Protestant neighbours were warned to have nothing further to do with them because their days were numbered.⁷² The belief that the downfall of Protestantism in Ireland was imminent was not confined exclusively to the teachings ascribed to Pastorini. Anti-Protestant sentiments were also displayed in the Irish poetry of this period, along with appeals to the children of the Gael to stand firmly behind their Church. The verses of Anthony Raftery, for example, contain numerous references to the ‘breed of Luther’ as the cause of the country’s afflictions.⁷³

Sectarian animosity was not limited to popular ballads and poetry. Several of the outrages connected with the Rockite movement, such as the burning of Protestant churches, carried distinctly sectarian overtones. Open hostility was also shown by parents who withdrew their children from evangelical schools, and by crowds who threatened and harangued Bible preachers foolhardy enough to ply their trade in the streets. By 1824 the Catholic populace had been roused to the point that it was necessary to have troops stationed nearby to preserve the peace while the anniversary meeting of provincial auxiliaries of the HBS were in progress in the larger towns of the south and west. Hostility was returned in like manner by Protestants, especially those connected with the Orange Order. With the power of the State and the forces of the law in their favour, extremist Protestants did not find it necessary to adopt an apologetic tone in defence of their interests. Many, like the earl of Rosse, were ready to believe that if the Catholics rose, ‘this time will be as memorable for the massacre of Protestants as 1641’.⁷⁴

Protestant fears were fuelled in part by rumours that the plotters of rebellion were purchasing arms abroad to be used ‘for the annihilation of reputed heretics which they are led to believe would be rendering a service to their God’.⁷⁵ When Sir Harcourt Lees, an ordained minister of the Church of Ireland with a penchant for incendiary polemics, warned the Catholic clergy that if they did not exhort the peasantry to surrender the ‘immense store’ of arms in their possession, he would consider it his duty ‘to summon the Orangemen of Ireland to prepare themselves for the field, in defence of the king, the church, and the constitution’, he gave expression both to the triumphalist attitude of Irish Protestants and to the fear inspired by rumours that the annihilation of Protestants was nigh.⁷⁶

The atmosphere of fear and distrust generated by macabre prophecies at the popular level and verbal sabre-rattling among the upper classes inevitably found its way into the journalism and political discourse of the day. Eventually, it gave rise to new forms of expression in the controversial oratory of religious ‘champions’ and monster debates. What appeared to be at issue was cultural hegemony, in the struggle for which religion was to be the deciding factor. At one level the evangelical crusade may be seen as an attempt by the most intransigent and conservative of Irish Protestants to effect, through a process of cultural domination, the final stage of colonization. In the wider context of the global expansion of British power in the nineteenth century, however, it was a harbinger of the ‘new imperialism’ of the Victorian period in which the colonizing power would seek, through education and the legal system, to infiltrate and control the culture of the colonized, the better to improve their happiness and thus justify their subjection. India is the most familiar example of this model at work. As the colonizers of the seventeenth century had learned their trade in Ireland before they moved across the Atlantic, however, so too in the nineteenth would the model of cultural imperialism be attempted there before it was moved further afield.

At the heart of what Paul Johnson calls ‘liberal imperialism’ was a moral superiority manifested in the guise of a tolerant and benevolent attitude which demanded that ‘the ruling power must respect the religion, customs, and susceptibilities of the ruled’.⁷⁷ This was precisely the line of approach followed by English evangelicals when they considered the condition of Ireland. The tone was perfectly expressed by William Wilberforce at a meeting of the London Auxiliary of the Irish Society at the Freemasons’ Tavern in 1822. Ireland had once been great and had known the experience of liberty and a national character, he argued. She had also known Christianity and Enlightenment before England had and, as many circumstances continued to remind her of her former superiority, she could not easily be brought to acknowledge her subjection. He also conceded that the Irish differed from the English in customs and manners, and that the term ‘English’ in their country evoked nothing but antipathy and alienation.⁷⁸

Implicit in his address (and in the general line of English evangelical thought on the Irish question) was the idea that the time had come for this to change: through the benevolent impact of true Christianity, Ireland would be gently reinstated to a position of honour and respect in the ‘moral empire’ (the phrase is Paul Johnson’s) governed by the blessings of British constitutional politics and the Protestant religion. Implicit also in this approach was an unspoken demand for the elimination of all obstacles that stood in the way of this necessary rehabilitation, not only the Catholic religion and its priests, who kept the population spiritually enslaved, but equally the attitudes and practices accumulated over centuries of neglect, which had given rise to the profligate economic habits of both rich and poor and which were seen as responsible for the alarming growth of a redundant surplus population. For the new moral order to succeed it was necessary that it be accompanied by a new economic order, one based on the interests of the market system in which sound fiscal management and the dictates of property-owners and the profit motive prevailed.

It was hardly a coincidence that the landlords who were most emphatic in their support of the evangelical crusade were also those committed to ‘improvement’ in the form of better estate management and stricter control over the lives of their tenants. This could be translated into the provision of schoolhouses, dispensaries and clothes depots and the supply of food in times of dearth. But it could also involve population clearance, for which an excuse, if such were deemed necessary, was provided in the refusal of parents to comply with the demand to send their children to schools in which the reading of the Bible was mandatory. The standard description applied to such landlords was that they were ‘exterminators’—a term with roots in the eighteenth century but with particularly dangerous implications in the inflamed sectarian atmosphere of the nineteenth. The most hardline among them, such as Lord Lorton of Rockingham, were known to favour the introduction of Protestant tenants to lands from which Catholics had been evicted.

The obvious question that must be addressed in relation to the connection between evangelical religion and the new economic order is whether the trend that the marriage between the two had produced would have succeeded if its promoters had been allowed a free hand.⁷⁹ With manpower and financial resources—both public and private—available in abundance from Britain, and with colonies like Canada and Australia available for the transfer of displaced tenants, was it not realistic to think in terms of making Ireland a wholly Protestant country?⁸⁰ What stood in the way of such a projection, of course, was the Catholic Church with its claims to spiritual and pastoral leadership and its own revival underway after a century of the Penal Laws. By the early 1820s, the Catholic leadership was strong enough to provide effective resistance to the evangelical mission by laying claim to and finally taking control over the chief agency of modernization, namely, education. More than any other event it was the battle over education that brought the bishops and priests openly into the world of popular politics where they acted as a unifying force behind the campaign for Emancipation.

In reacting to the challenge of the evangelical moral crusade, the native population of Ireland rallied to the Catholic Church. The sense of identity, solidarity, and leadership it provided united the various manifestations of Catholic discontent, the rural followers of Pastorini as well as the politically sophisticated supporters of O’Connell, into an entirely new force in Irish life. In certain respects it is possible to see in this coalition the process of ‘defensive structuring’ to which Michael Barkun points, along with millenarianism and apathy or decay, as one of the three possible responses of the disaster-prone society.⁸¹ Defensive structuring most frequently appears in the aftermath of a millenarian phase, but it requires certain conditions if it is to develop successfully: ‘It can only work when it is possible to institute control of communications with other cultures, strong self-discipline, and authoritarian control.’⁸² No student of Irish religious history would dispute the existence of ‘strong self-discipline’ and ‘authoritarian control’ as among the essential characteristics of Irish Catholicism as it took shape in the nineteenth century. Some would even see in these features the assumption, if not the imposition, of an entirely new culture in comparison with that of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.⁸³

The Great Famine of 1845–51, which is usually taken as a watershed in modern Irish history, has also been regarded as the dividing line between the traditional peasant religion of the pre-Famine years and the more severe and exacting ‘Roman’ Catholicism associated with Paul Cardinal Cullen in the post-Famine period. As Emmet Larkin has pointed out, however, all the ingredients of the ‘devotional revolution’ were in place before the Famine.⁸⁴ Recent research on the diocese of Kildare and Leighlin by Thomas McGrath has shown the extent of pastoral reform in the Catholic Church in the decades before the Famine, which suggests that the ‘devotional revolution’ was already well established by the 1820s in a part of the country fortunate enough to be endowed with a relatively wealthy population and a conscientious, energetic bishop.⁸⁵

Unquestionably, the social consequences of the Famine contributed greatly to the ease with which the Catholic Church consolidated its position of moral and religious hegemony in Ireland. Nevertheless, the origins of its strength in this regard cannot be properly explained by pointing either to the devastating impact of the Famine or to the political designs of Rome. The integral role of Catholicism in Irish society can only be understood in the broadest sense against the background of economic and cultural transition that occurred throughout the British Isles during the period of modernization between 1750 and 1850. Although the historical roots of the phenomenon extend back to the seventeenth century, it was not until the early nineteenth century, particularly the decade of the 1820s, that the Catholic Church really assumed its role as the protector and defender of the interests of Irish poor. Its leaders understood the danger implicit in the combination of economic crisis and cultural destabilization threatened by the evangelical moral crusade. Colonial history is strewn with examples of indigenous peoples who fell prey to the destructive power of millennial visions, often informed by religious beliefs introduced from outside, during periods of destabilization brought on by imperial incursion. The Tai Ping rebellion in China (1851–64) falls into this category, as does the Cattle-Killing movement among the Xhosa of Natal in the 1850s and the Ghost Dance phenomenon of the Native Americans in the 1890s.⁸⁶

In the crisis situation of the early 1820s Catholic leaders showed themselves able and willing to step into the breach and take control of the Emancipation movement, at once protecting the most vulnerable from self-destructive behaviour likely to draw the wrath of the authorities, and offering a sophisticated model of political action to the wealthier and more educated. In the final analysis what was at stake in the great cultural collision of the 1820s was what would define the terms on which the Catholic Irish would be integrated into the Union—whether they would join as free and equal subjects of a dominantly Protestant Union in spite of their denominational allegiance to Rome, or whether they would submit to the dictates of a ‘new moral order’ that demanded a radical realignment of their cultural and religious traditions alongside a restructuring of the economy with its implications of population transfer.

The stakes involved were high, and resistance to the conservative Protestant vision for the future of Ireland was not for the faint-hearted, as witnessed by the belligerence that characterized the tactics and rhetoric of the Emancipation campaign. It was not for nothing that the evangelicals, the vanguard of triumphalist Protestantism, focused upon the priests as their greatest enemies. No calumny was too great to heap on the heads of those they considered artful, wicked and designing, who kept their flocks in a perpetual state of ignorance. Confronted with such a formidable Catholic bastion in the early 1820s, the evangelicals had no choice but to close ranks and abandon the subtleties and blandishments that had characterized their previous efforts. The time for open warfare had arrived.

Notes

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).