–SIX–

The Catholic Counter-Attack

Let all our proceedings be in strict conformity with the law, that those who are on the opposite side may have no evil to say of us, and that our conscience or our posterity may not reproach us with having swerved from the patience and long suffering which our religion and our interest enjoin … For all the implacable enemies of our just claims … will seek new pretexts for continuing their injustice in the slightest indiscretion into which any portion or individuals of our body might be betrayed.

JAMES WARREN DOYLE¹

Yet the Irish, because a few here and there believe and fear, shall be reputed as all gaping and swallowing every extravagance. If they were, they have their excuse. They might expect miracles where politically and morally all things are extraordinary in their object and progress. Nor should they be reproached for believing abrupt interpositions of Providence; for in great misery the afflicted naturally ejaculate—those abandoned by man invoke God’s aid, and surely none should be more disposed to expect supernatural relief than the Irish, and none more likely to receive it, for who have endured such protracted and complicated affliction.

GEORGE ENSOR²

The Catholic Association has its emissaries in every part of the country … It pursues the same course of exciting the passions of the people by manifestoes and seditious harangues and above all by the active, insidious influence of the Roman Catholic clergy. Like the Catholic Committee, it levies taxes upon the people and assumes to itself all the prerogatives of government. What is to be done under such circumstances? Why, put it down. Let ministers appeal to parliament to suppress this monstrous evil, and the appeal will not be made in vain. If not soon extinguished, a rebellion more dreadful, more sanguinary, and more dangerous than any on record will be the consequence.

The Courier, 1824³

THE VINDICATION OF CATHOLIC IRELAND: BISHOP DOYLE AND PRINCE HOHENLOHE

Over a period of about eighteen months after Archbishop Magee’s famous ‘antithetical’ sermon in St Patrick’s cathedral in October 1822, Catholic leaders came together in a unified and sustained counter-offensive against every manifestation of Protestant supremacy and particularly against the aims and ambitions of those who claimed moral hegemony in religious and educational affairs. What ‘took off ’ among the Catholic population at this time was not the type of wildfire revival or awakening that the evangelicals had been predicting, but a popular democratic movement on a scale unprecedented in European politics. In 1823–4 the Catholic Irish were welded into a single force united behind the grand objective of winning Emancipation through constitutional means. Bishop Jebb, with his usual clear-sighted view of public events, described the achievement as something ‘we of this generation have never before witnessed … In truth, an Irish revolution has in great measure been effected’.⁴ In the early years of the century, Peter Burrowes had predicted such an eventuality as soon as some force—what he called ‘cement’—would rally the Catholic body into a unified whole. It remains to be seen to what degree this cement was provided by the defenders of Protestant supremacy and particularly by the proponents of the new Reformation.

The emergence of the priest-in-politics is continually cited as one of the major reasons behind the cohesive structure and eventual success of the Catholic Association. This is undoubtedly true. Less well known, however, is the manner in which priests and bishops were drawn into the political fray through a need to defend their faith and their office from the repeated denunciations of their detractors. In the aftermath of the controversy over Magee’s famous sermon, the tempers of educated Catholics in general and Bishop Doyle in particular were not readily appeased. Indeed, Doyle’s defiant gesture of picking up the gauntlet thrown down by Magee set the tone for his political pronouncements of the following year, which had an enormous impact, particularly on the key figures who dominated public opinion, such as W.F. Conway and Michael Staunton, editors of the Dublin Evening Post and the Freeman’s Journal respectively.

During the spring of 1823, dismayed by the stagnancy of the Emancipation question and the beaten state of the country, O’Connell and Sheil, who had long been at loggerheads over strategy and tactics (Sheil supported the veto while O’Connell opposed it), finally joined forces with the formation of the Catholic Association. Like the old Catholic Committee, the Catholic Association was organized to petition parliament for Catholic rights. O’Connell’s plan was to fashion it into a broader, more popular organization to publicize Catholic grievances, to collect money to help defend Catholic rights in a legal system dominated by Orange sympathizers, and to provide resources for the education of Catholic children.⁵

The modest nature of the initial collaborative effort that gave birth to the Catholic Association has since passed into historical legend.⁶ Equally inauspicious was the event that was to raise Doyle to the ranks of a political propagandist of the first order in the same year. During the early months of 1823, when O’Connell and Sheil were laying the foundations for their new campaign in a meeting room on the upper floor of Coyne’s bookshop in Capel Street, Dublin, Doyle was apparently watching for an opportunity to reinforce the authority of his Church and the morale of his followers. He discovered a worthy means of fulfilling his ambitions in the person of a German priest, Alexander Emmerich, dean of Bamberg and prince of Hohenlohe, whose reputation for effecting miraculous cures had recently gained wide currency in France and Germany.⁷

Doyle sent a letter to Prince Hohenlohe asking him to intercede on behalf of Maria Lalor, a young woman who had lost her speech as a child. The case afforded a perfect opportunity to test the particular method employed by the prince, who specialized in what can only be called ‘long-distance’ cures. Hohenlohe agreed to pray for the deaf woman’s recovery at a special Mass scheduled for 9 a.m. on 10 June; the deaf woman and her confessors were to join in prayer and Holy Communion at exactly the same time. The arrangement went ahead as planned. According to Fr O’Connor, the priest who administered the sacrament on the appointed day, the young woman, just as she was about to receive the host, heard a voice in the distance asking, ‘Mary, are you well?’ to which she replied, ‘Oh Lord, am I,’ and fell prostrate. Upon regaining consciousness, she was found to have recovered her powers of speech.⁸

When Doyle received word that Hohenlohe’s intercession had proved successful, he proceeded in haste to the scene of the miracle in order to verify it and to make a public pronouncement. Having established the authenticity of the miracle to his own satisfaction, he decided to publicize the case through a pastoral letter, which was circulated throughout Ireland and Britain as well as in some European countries. The letter itself was less a proclamation of gratitude for divine favour and more an intensely political statement designed to bolster the confidence of Irish Catholics by declaring that God was on their side. It was aimed directly at their detractors, especially the evangelicals:

At this time and in this place it was worthy of His providence that the light of His countenance should be shed upon His faithful people. We have long experienced the truth of His prediction to those who were to walk in His footsteps and carry after them their cross—namely ‘that the world would rejoice but that they would be sad’; and the present period has added sorrow to our sorrow, and pressure to our distress. Our religion is traduced, our rights are withheld, our good name is maligned, our best actions are misrepresented, crimes are imputed to us against which our very nature revolts, our friends are silenced, and our enemies insult us and glory in our humiliation. It is meet, therefore, and just that He for whose name and faith we suffer, should cast upon us a look of compassion, lest we faint in the way or be overcome by temptation—that He should comfort His people and renew to them by visible signs an assurance that He watches over them—that a hair of their heads will not perish—and that, possessing their soul in patience, they may expect His return ‘to wipe away every tear from their cheek and fill them with that joy which no one can take away’.⁹

In a plea worthy of a masterful diplomat, Doyle went on to explain the nature of the current anti-Catholic agitation and why it should be borne with Christian tolerance. He countenanced charity and understanding as the most effective antidotes against the bigotry and prejudice the enemies of the Catholic cause had imbibed with their mothers’ milk and that ‘nothing but education, of which many of them are destitute, and a free intercourse with Catholics could remove’. When every source of influence from the nursery to the law courts informed Protestants that Catholics were enemies of God and the State, how could things be different?

But, you will ask me, are we then to suffer in silence and not vindicate our good name: Far from it, brethren; you should uphold by every lawful means your own character and promote your own interests. These interests are the interests of truth and justice, and they must advance. The ways of their progress are obvious, and nothing can retard them but your own imprudence.¹⁰

In Doyle’s opinion the righteousness of the Catholic cause would triumph, not only because it was just in the eyes of God, but because His church on earth was coming forward as the instrument of deliverance:

You have increased in property, in numbers, and in strength; these give you a moral weight which carries you forward with an accelerated motion. Education has arrived to a state of excellence amongst those of you who are blessed with the means of obtaining it, and is united with a pure and sound morality. These will illuminate and enliven and direct the movements of our body that we may act in concert, dissipate prejudice, make our merits manifest, and attach to our cause the virtuous and intelligent of every creed and class. The progress of our religion, which is such as to excite even our own surprise, will of itself make known our principles and refute every calumny; the piety and zeal of your priesthood, the appearance of your places of worship, the multitudes who frequent them, their pious demeanour, their strict integrity, their faithful attachment to the ever faithful creed of the saints, will have—as they daily have—an insensible but powerful effect … These are the lawful and efficient means of mitigating the evils you now endure, and a few of the grounds of your future hope. These will plead for you in a language which will speak to the understanding of the wise, to the interests of legislators, and to the hearts of men. Supported on these pillars, let your cause rest.¹¹

This proclamation was nothing less than the theoretical foundation for the Emancipation campaign, for which O’Connell and Sheil were shortly to improvise a practical strategy. The timing of its publication was very significant. Throughout the summer of 1823 the activities of the Orange Order reached new heights of provocation. The government’s refusal to ban these demonstrations, especially those scheduled for the Twelfth of July, appeared as further evidence of Protestant triumphalism, and the Catholic Association, still in its infancy, was in no position to offer any meaningful resistance. In this context Doyle’s epistle had a galvanizing effect on Catholic public opinion; it was all the more effective because it was the dictate of a bishop who was universally acclaimed for integrity and moderation.¹²

The cure of Maria Lalor was held up as tangible proof that the Catholic faith enjoyed divine sanction, and Doyle’s letter publicly proclaimed the Church’s role as the instrument that would deliver its people from bondage and degradation. The impact of the Lalor case was further strengthened by another miraculous cure attributed to Prince Hohenlohe, this time involving a Carmelite nun, Maria Stewart, whose recovery was verified by the Catholic archbishop of Dublin, Dr Daniel Murray. Murray’s decision to follow Doyle’s example indicated that the Catholic resurgence initiated almost singlehandedly by Doyle was beginning to gain momentum.¹³

During the summer of 1823 Hohenlohe had become a household name in Ireland, synonymous with the legitimacy of the Catholic faith. In the decade leading up to Emancipation, perhaps no individual episode did more to unite the religious and the political aspects of the Catholic question than these ‘cures’ attributed to a German priest who had never set foot on Irish soil.¹⁴ Much of the publicity for the Hohenlohe cures derived from the taunts and jeers of the ultra-Protestant press at this affirmation of one of the most hallowed traditions of the Catholic faith. In the face of the sworn evidence of medical authorities and the relatives of the women who had been cured, as well as the testimony of leading members of the Catholic episcopate, however, such denunciations carried a hollow ring. What mattered in the long term was the amount of publicity that the events had received, and how this publicity acted as a conduit to bring Doyle’s ideas before the public.

In October 1823, with the publication of the famous Vindication of the Rights and Civil Principles of Irish Catholics, Doyle secured his reputation as the theorist of Catholic resurgence. The Vindication, which appeared in the form of a letter to the lord lieutenant, the marquess of Wellesley, has been described by Fergus O’Ferrall as having had the same effect on the consciousness of Irish Catholics as Tom Paine’s Common Sense on the Americans in 1776.¹⁵ A more appropriate parallel, perhaps, would be the impact of the Abbé Joseph Sieyès’ celebrated pamphlet What Is the Third Estate? during the debates leading up to the convocation of the Estates General in May 1789.¹⁶ This is true more especially if the Vindication is taken together with Doyle’s other political writings of the 1820s, in particular the famous Letters on the State of Ireland … (1825).

Invoking the principles of utility and the ‘career open to talent’ so evocative of the rhetoric common to both the French and American revolutions, Doyle attacked the colonial gentry as having enslaved the native Catholic population, and described them as a useless and parasitical entity on the health and well-being of the whole:

Their esprit de corps—the prejudices which encompass them—their family circumstances—the insolence, often, and immorality of their sons—the pomp and vanity of their wives and daughters—their ephemeral and transitory rank unfit them for the office of gentry. Lighten the pressure of them on the country, give good and equal laws, and talents and industry will produce a gentry.¹⁷

Describing the Church of Ireland as an establishment ‘as should not be suffered to exist in any civilized country’¹⁸ he questioned its legal and ecclesiastical legitimacy, and claimed it enjoyed its illegal patrimony at the expense of the suffering and degradation of the majority Catholic population. As Sieyès did when he attacked the feudal privileges of the French aristocracy, Doyle went far beyond mere criticism when he attacked the tithe system, the economic foundation of the Church of Ireland and the ultimate guarantor of its legitimacy and permanence. His rhetoric embodied all the indignation and anger of an unacknowledged and despised class suddenly awakening to a realization of its own power and importance in the nation. In a pattern that was remarkably evocative of the impact of Sieyès’ famous pamphlet, Doyle combined moral righteousness with rational analysis to provide a script for the revolution in consciousness that was about to unfold. The Catholic cause had unquestionably found its theorist and propagandist, who hammered the moral and legal justification for Catholic equality into place as O’Connell assumed the mantle of tactical strategist and political spokesman.¹⁹ That the theorist was the most respected member of the Catholic hierarchy was perhaps the most consequential event in the entire Emancipation campaign.

With Doyle’s response to the problems of the time, the spiritual and the political were never far apart. A native of County Carlow, he had been educated in the Augustinian seminary at Coimbra in Portugal, where he witnessed the Peninsular Campaign and came to know the duke of Wellington. A professed admirer of John Locke and the British constitutional tradition (which he considered far superior to the governing systems of the old regime he had been exposed to in Spain and Portugal), he returned to Ireland and was appointed bishop of Kildare and Leighlin in 1819 at the age of thirty-three. His youth, his European education, his political liberalism, and not least his courage and eloquence immediately set him apart from his episcopal colleagues. He could not be branded an ingratiating ‘Castle bishop’ by the radicals, nor an uncouth peasant raised by the influence of Maynooth and the power of the Roman collar to arrogance and demagoguery, as the evangelical press continually represented his vociferous colleague, Rev. John MacHale. Doyle commanded universal respect, even from his enemies, who liked to point to the Protestant element in his family background (his mother’s family, the Warrens, had originally been Quakers) and allegedly circulated the rumour that he converted to the reformed faith on his deathbed in 1833.²⁰

Doyle’s thinking on the Catholic question had a long pedigree, extending back to Charles O’Conor and Edmund Burke in the eighteenth century, but more thoroughly developed as a political ideology by Denys Scully, Theobald McKenna, William and Henry Parnell, and the poet Thomas Moore, among others, in the early nineteenth century. The essence of this ideology, which has been variously described as ‘liberal unionist’ or ‘Catholic liberal’, was that loyalty to the constitution (as opposed to French republicanism) was the most effective way to secure the political rights still denied to Catholics; that legal and constitutional justice demanded the restoration of such rights; and that once restored to their rights the Catholics of Ireland would be proud to see their country rehabilitated and admitted as a full and equal partner in the British union of nations and would prove the equal of any of the other nations when it came to loyalty.²¹

Doyle seldom appeared on a public platform, preferring to spread his influence through pastoral letters, pamphlets, and his favourite journalistic mouthpiece, the liberal-Protestant Dublin Evening Post. His endorsement of political action was remarkable for a churchman, and his attitude may be gauged from a statement in his private correspondence:

Much is granted to prayer, much to importunity, much even to clamour, but the silent slave will be converted into a beast of burden. ‘Arise,’ says the apostle, ‘and Christ will enlighten thee’. And another, ‘he that is in filth, let him lie in filth still’.²²

Through his writings and sermons in 1823 he demonstrated to fellow clerics how the spiritual office might be employed in the temporal service of alleviating the conditions under which the Catholic population was forced to live. The events of 1823 brought about a remarkable change in the consciousness of Irish Catholics. From this point onward, there can be discerned a sense of confidence and unity in the pursuit of a common goal, more obvious at first among prominent figures in political and religious life, but soon reaching the urban middle classes and the peasantry.

Doyle articulated two major objectives to which O’Connell and the Catholic Association wholly subscribed. The first was to wean the popular classes away from their reliance on secret societies and addiction to millennial prophecies by advocating obedience to the leadership of the clergy and hierarchy, and by substituting a program of constitutional action in which Catholics of every social class could participate. The second was to undermine the criticism of ultra-Protestants by demonstrating Catholic loyalty to the constitution, and to uphold the prestige of the Catholic Church against evangelical charges that it was a subversive and tyrannical force in Irish affairs. No force in Irish society at this time provided a stronger incentive towards the accomplishment of these ends than the provocative and triumphalist tactics of the ultra-Protestant party.

It had long been the practice of ultra-Protestant polemicists and supporters of the Orange Order to engage in provocative anti-Catholic agitation through commemorations of anniversaries and public festivals as well as inflammatory rhetoric in the popular press. After the impact of Archbishop Magee’s 1822 sermon, however, it became clear that a strategy that focused more specifically on the Catholic hierarchy and priesthood was beginning to take shape. In March 1823, for example, the famous controversialist, the Rev. Robert McGhee, urged Lord Farnham to introduce a motion in the House of Lords requiring that Catholic bishops and priests be made to answer openly to the government for their beliefs, particularly on the question of whether they considered all Protestants ‘accursed heretics’.²³

In August of the same year at St Kevin’s churchyard in Dublin, a Catholic burial service was interrupted and the priest, the Rev. Michael Blake, prevented from officiating at the grave. This situation had arisen because graveyards were usually sited alongside churches that had been Catholic in medieval times but had been expropriated by the Church of Ireland during the Reformation. Catholics were thus obliged to use burial facilities in Protestant property, a situation that was permitted so long as priests did not attend with the usual accoutrements of their office such as vestments, prayer books, and holy water on open display. As a result, the custom had developed whereby priests attended the funeral without any mark of distinction and stepped forward at the appropriate moment to offer, from memory, prayers for the deceased.²⁴ By his own account, this is what the Rev. Blake had been doing when ‘the order of Dr Magee was rung in my ear’, as he put it, and he was obliged to retire from the scene.²⁵ Dr Magee, it would appear, had insisted that the practice of accommodation in use for centuries was yet another example of the Catholic priesthood’s flagrant disregard for the law and the rights of the Established Church, and had ordered his chaplains to discountenance it. Amid the uproar and indignation that ensued, the Catholic Association organized a petition to persuade parliament to introduce a burial bill that would allow Catholics to purchase land for their own graveyards and also to collect funds to provide for the costs of purchase.²⁶

The controversy over burials extended into the new year and also into other parts of the country. An incident similar to that at St Kevin’s reportedly occurred in January at a Presbyterian funeral in Holywood, County Down, where the pastor was interrupted on the instructions of the bishop of Down, Dr Mant, who ordered that he not only be prevented from officiating but be put out of the churchyard.²⁷ In Limerick, Bishop Jebb lamented the ‘incalculable mischief ’ done by a Church of Ireland minister named Fitzgibbon, who antagonized the crowd by putting in a personal appearance at one funeral, then proceeded to call out the military, and followed it up by engaging in a newspaper war. Jebb’s evaluation of Fitzgibbon’s influence speaks to the amount of damage such an individual could do:

Had Mr. F. [itzgibbon] (for he is the only established clergyman of Limerick who continued to get into these scrapes) conducted himself from the beginning with common prudence, all might now be well. But the sword is drawn perhaps beyond my power of getting it replaced in the scabbard. I do not mean to say that there is not a systematic plan, adopted on the instigation of O’Connell, for usurping authority in the Church of England burial ground and exhibiting to a heated populace the triumphant insignia of popish superstition; but I will say that but for the intemperance of ultra-protestants who know little, and feel less, of that faith for which they think themselves particularly zealous, Limerick would at this day exhibit a fair specimen of mutual toleration and goodwill.²⁸

The burial controversy was temporarily shelved when parliament passed a bill that granted Catholics the right to hold funeral services according to the rites of their own Church once they had secured permission from the sexton. The matter did not end there, however, and eventually Catholics bought land for their own graveyards, usually quite near to the lavish new churches that were springing up all over the country at this time.²⁹

As one of the grievances the Catholic Association used to increase its political capital with the Catholic clergy, the burials controversy was of great importance. But it was minor compared to the uproar that took place in March 1824 when English MP John Henry North, in his maiden speech in the House of Commons, charged the Catholic priesthood with neglecting the education of Irish children because of their opposition to the use of the scriptures. He managed to add insult to injury by alleging that Moll Flanders was commonly used as a schoolbook in Ireland. North was Irish by birth and a member of the KPS. While his speech might have been foolhardy and ill-conceived, it was hardly unique at the time; similar charges had been the common currency of evangelical critics from the very beginning of the moral crusade. What touched the sensitive nerve of national pride was his open assertion before the assembled parliament of the kingdom that Irish Catholic children were being educated through the medium of immoral and licentious literature while the word of God was being purposefully denied them.³⁰

First to reply to North’s allegations, predictably, was Bishop Doyle in the Dublin Evening Post. The particular source of Doyle’s outrage was the fact that the Catholic clergy were denied money for educational purposes from public funds while their critics and detractors were in open receipt of such resources. Doyle’s letter was taken by his great supporter, W.F. Conway of the Dublin Evening Post, to a meeting of the Catholic Association on 6 April. Conway astutely suggested that the Association solicit accounts from priests all over the country about the state of education in their parishes. The ostensible reason was to get some measure of the educational picture at the national level, the better to counter North’s allegations, and also to see to what degree the suspicion of proselytism on the part of the KPS was warranted. But the real motive was the linking of the impassioned debate over education to the political movement.³¹

Despite the crescendo of criticism that had been growing ever since John MacHale’s Hierophilus letters had revealed that public money was being made available to proselytizing agencies, nothing had changed with regard to the allocation of government funds. Until the Catholic Association stepped into the breach, priests could counteract the designs of the societies only on an individual level by warning their congregations, writing letters to the papers, or other gestures of this kind. The emergence of the Catholic Association as a vehicle to gather and publicize information at the national level rapidly changed this situation. Not only did it provide a forum for the airing of grievances about proselytism, but it also gave priests experience in participatory democracy that would reap enormous dividends in the future. In addition it bolstered confidence by revealing how successful were the voluntary efforts of the Catholic community to provide an acceptable education for their children in the face of poverty and the well-financed competition afforded by the Protestant societies.

The response of the Catholic clergy and hierarchy to the appeal for information on education and proselytism was so overwhelming that the Catholic Association threatened to sink under its weight. Members began to complain about the amount of time spent at public meetings listening to Conway reading aloud from the thousands of letters that began to pour in from all over the country. The letters contained information about the organization and financing of schools, the curriculum used, and often the denominational interests involved. They revealed a mixed picture of voluntary effort at every level, from the most humble hedge schools to those run by religious orders.³² It was a matter of great pride with many of the priests to point out, as did Fr James Roche of Donard to Archbishop Murray, that ‘there is not, even in England, a peasantry better informed with respect to religion than in Ireland, notwithstanding all the persecution of ages’.³³ Although many instances were given where the Kildare Place schools were run on principles perfectly acceptable to Catholics, the overall consensus suggested that the suspicion of proselytism could never be overcome, and that the Catholic community would never be satisfied with the Kildare Place system. The testimony of the Rev. James O’Shaughnessy, bishop of Killaloe, reflected the general opinion of Catholics on the subject:

So convinced are the Catholic clergy and laity that proselytism is the avowed aim of the Kildare Place Society that they have zealously set their face against them … These bible schools are in general a source of acrimony … and are the cause of diminishing considerably that mutual harmony and friendship between Catholics and Protestants that had subsisted until the unfortunate period of their existence.³⁴

O’Shaughnessy’s evidence, like much of its kind, was reprinted in the Dublin Evening Post. By the end of May, after six weeks of debate in the national newspapers, it was clear that education had superseded every other item on the Catholic list of grievances. The opinion was virtually unanimous that the KPS schools should be rejected and the government called upon to establish a commission of inquiry to investigate charges of proselytism and to establish how its money was being spent.³⁵ This laid the issue to rest momentarily, but as far as the clergy’s attachment to the Catholic Association was concerned, the link was established. As a result of their politicizing of the education question, the Association had shown the priests what could be accomplished by political influence backed by public opinion. It was a lesson they would make good use of.

The public debate over the burials controversy and the education question resulted in the Catholic hierarchy and clergy becoming deeply politicized by the summer of 1824. Their mood of open defiance became evident in the autumn and winter of that year when they opted to respond to public challenges to defend their faith and their office at a series of meetings organized by evangelical societies throughout the country. It was this affair above all others that spread the militancy of the Catholic Association down the social ranks and into every part of the country. By the year’s end the authorities and the sources they depended upon for their information were speaking in terms that suggested their fear of a national rebellion or revolution.

THE BIBLE WAR OF 1824

The celebrated confrontation between representatives of the Catholic Church and the evangelical mission was occasioned by a preaching tour that involved two well-known speakers who were scheduled to attend anniversary meetings of various evangelical societies in the autumn of 1824.³⁶ The event was unquestionably designed to precipitate a confrontation with the priests. Subsequent accounts of the proceedings in the evangelical press portrayed the meetings as having been forcibly interrupted and broken up by garrulous priests, supported by Catholic mobs, despite clear evidence that the priests had in most cases been invited to participate. The strategy was apparently to ‘cordially invite’ priests to attend the meetings on the assumption that if they stayed away, as the evangelicals apparently believed they would, the Catholic cause would appear to have lost face. If, on the other hand, the priests did accept, it was assumed that the moral strength of the Protestant position would easily win the day.

As it happened, the Catholic clergy not only accepted the invitations but were accompanied in some cases by the most prominent political figures of the day. Besides featuring debates on spiritual questions, the Bible society meetings of 1824 became forums for the discussion of major political issues, including the tithe system, the disturbed state of the country, and especially Catholic Emancipation. The whole affair lasted three months and received extraordinary coverage in the newspapers. The Freeman’s Journal printed the complete speeches of all the leading orators, including Daniel O’Connell, who made full use of the opportunity to assert himself as the champion of Catholic rights.

The two preachers who arrived in the country in September 1824 were the Rev. Baptist Wriothesley Noel, an evangelical minister prominently associated with the Clapham Sect, and Captain James Edward Gordon of the Royal Navy, who was closely connected with the Independent evangelical community in Sligo. Both Noel and Gordon had Scottish connections, and Gordon already had an established reputation as stalwart of the evangelical moral crusade and a particular foe of Catholic ambitions.³⁷ The Freeman’s Journal portrayed them as a pair of misguided enthusiasts completely out of their depth in the stormy waters of Irish religious controversy. This opinion seems to have been widespread, and shortly after their arrival in the country the two became known as ‘the Scotch captain’ and ‘the schoolboy’, and their tour through the provinces provided a great deal of amusement to the wags of the time. In their progress from town to town Noel and Gordon left a trail of controversy and sectarian strife in their wake, to the extent that the police and even the military had to intervene frequently.

The first major incident occurred in Cork early in September at a meeting of the Cork Ladies’ Auxiliary of the HBS. The meeting was well publicized, for among those present were O’Connell and Sheil to defend the Catholic position, and the Rev. Richard Pope, a Church of Ireland minister whose stock in trade was religious controversy.³⁸ The speeches of Noel and Gordon cited the usual evangelical explanation for the cause of the country’s woes: the lack of knowledge of the scriptures. Sheil countered that the Irish poor were less in need of bibles than of bread, and that the visiting speakers would be better employed if they exerted their energies among the higher orders, to whom they might teach a little humanity. When the discussion turned to the state of morality in Ireland, O’Connell took the floor and left nothing unsaid on the same subject in England. Using the evidence of a recent parliamentary report on the poor laws, he asserted that nineteen out of twenty women in England were already mothers a month before they were married. For the representatives of religion and morality in that country to attempt to educate poor Irish women was in his view a ludicrous state of affairs; they had more than enough to do in looking after their own. Sheil and O’Connell were successful in preventing the passage of a motion on the value of scriptural education in Ireland, and the meeting was adjourned.

When the company reassembled on the following day to complete the proceedings, a repeat performance took place. Eventually, both parties reached a gentleman’s agreement to end the discussion, with neither conceding defeat.³⁹ The marathon debate was not accompanied by physical violence, but the Catholics of Cork were roused to the point of organizing a defence committee to counter the activities of the HBS. When the bishop of Cork, Dr Murphy, was urged to support such an organization, he issued a public statement to the effect that he wished the people themselves to express their opinions freely, because the supporters of the Bible society had asserted that the Irish people would be favourable to the evangelical preachers were it not for the work of the priests.⁴⁰

The meetings in the smaller towns of the south and south-west took place without disturbance, presumably because Catholic spokesmen were not in attendance. At the Waterford meeting in early October the priests played no part in the discussions, but a large group of Catholics gathered outside the hall where Gordon and Noel were speaking; troops were stationed nearby to prevent violence. The crowd was addressed by a local priest, who ordered them to keep the peace and disperse quietly, which they apparently did.⁴¹ Catholic clerics and laymen accepted the invitation to attend the Kilkenny meeting on 14 October. Only a select few were admitted, however; the mayor’s bailiffs and the city police stood guard at the door to prevent undesirables from entering and to keep order in the hall. At this particular meeting, which was chaired by Lord Ormond, the evangelical cause was well represented by the ubiquitous Richard Pope and the local stalwarts, Peter Roe and Robert Shaw.⁴² Great indignation was expressed in the Freeman’s Journal because a reporter sent to cover the event was roughly prevented from doing so. Having waited three days to obtain an account, the editor finally exposed what had happened, adding that the anti-Catholic press in both islands, particularly the Dublin Evening Mail, had published false accounts of the proceedings.⁴³

The most notorious event of the whole campaign occurred on 19 October at Loughrea, County Galway. The meeting was to be held at the Quarter Sessions House, with the archbishop of Tuam, Dr Power le Poer Trench, in the chair. When the bishop and his colleagues went to enter the courthouse, they found it packed with Catholic clergy and their supporters; the priests had apparently been invited by a letter circulated among them during the previous week. Inside the building the clamour was so great that the bishop and the guest speakers could make their way to the platform only with the help of the police. When the leading Catholic spokesman, Fr Peter Daly, attempted to speak, the archbishop refused to allow him to proceed on the grounds that he was not a subscribing member of the Bible society. At this point John Guthrie, a liberal Protestant barrister, interposed on behalf of the Catholics and was also refused a hearing. In the tumult that followed (according to the Catholic account), the Catholics attempted to leave the meeting in indignation at the way they had been treated, but found their way barred by a unit of the 10^th Hussars with drawn sabres.⁴⁴ According to the Protestant account, the Catholics raised such a racket and so interrupted the proceedings that the archbishop and his colleagues were forced to leave.⁴⁵ The large and hostile crowd in the street outside the courthouse made the presence of the military a necessity for the safe exit of the Protestant group.

After Trench and his followers had taken their leave, the company who remained behind elected John Guthrie as chairman and proceeded to pass several resolutions condemning the activities and objectives of the Bible society. Most of the proposals were put forward by Protestants sympathetic to Catholic claims, including Matthew St George of Kilcolgan, and Robert D’Arcy of Woodville, the agent of Lord Clanricarde.⁴⁶ The event was celebrated by Anthony Raftery, a contemporary poet well known in the Loughrea area:

Gannon and Daly were reading the commission

Long life to Dan Egan and Councillor Guthrie

True flower of the Powers country, and no doubt Bob D’Arcy

The people who eat meat on Good Friday were stealing away and departing

And they could not see the door for shame.⁴⁷

Outrage over the events at Loughrea was expressed in several newspapers and periodicals. The loudest voice in defence of the Catholics was as usual Daniel O’Connell’s in the Freeman’s Journal. A week after the Loughrea debacle, he made a point of attending a public dinner there that grateful Catholics held in honour of John Guthrie ‘for his constant advocacy of Catholic freedom and especially for his conduct among the Saints last week’. In the course of the evening O’Connell expressed the wish to form a committee to prepare an address to the people of England, explaining why Bible societies were opposed in Ireland. In his opinion the various evangelical bodies were raising a torrent of fanaticism among the Protestant gentry, which was completely destructive to all the decencies and normal intercourse of social life. Reinforcing this proposal was a motion, introduced by a priest and seconded by a Protestant gentleman, that no more public Bible meetings be held, ‘as they appear to create disunion and widen the breach that exists between the two religions’.⁴⁸

The Loughrea experience did not deter Noel and Gordon from proceeding to Ballina in the following week. Once again, the meeting turned into a melee when local priests were refused permission to address the crowds, and one priest was assaulted by a policeman.⁴⁹ The next venue on the west coast was Easky, a small town near Sligo, where by all reports an exemplary meeting was held. Three priests of the locality were matched against the Rev. William Urwick and two scripture-readers. The discussion was confined to doctrinal issues, and both sides came away satisfied that their cases had been well represented.⁵⁰ At Carrick-on-Shannon in early November three Catholic priests—Fathers Browne, McKeown and O’Beirne—were appointed to speak against Oldfield, Percy, and Bushe, ministers of the Established Church. No ugly incidents were reported in the press, but as the Freeman’s Journal sarcastically commented, ‘admirable arrangements were made to preserve the peace’.⁵¹

An air of intense expectation surrounded the Carlow meeting, which began on 18 November. The debating teams included some of the best orators in the country, including Robert Daly and Richard Pope on the Protestant side and Fr Edward Nolan on the Catholic. But the centre of attention was Bishop Doyle, who had recently published a pamphlet attacking the work of Bible societies.⁵² Contrary to expectations, however, Doyle did not participate in the discussions, much to the disappointment of the editor of the Freeman’s Journal, who had stopped the press at three o’clock on 24 November to inform readers that the meeting had been resumed for the third day, and that the bishop was expected to take up the cudgels at any moment.⁵³

Doyle preferred to leave the task to his coadjutor, Fr Nolan, who was to succeed him as head of the diocese ten years later.⁵⁴ Nolan presented a sane and reasonable account of why the Catholic Church opposed the ambitions of the various Bible and education societies, and made no attempt to disguise the fact that such opposition was based on self-protection:

When they [i.e. the societies] take the field against the Catholic Church and unfurl the banner of evangelical licentiousness, we need no prophet to warn us of the danger. Many of the individuals who support it, I am sure, are activated by good motives, but the principles and objectives of the society are essentially hostile to the Catholic Church.⁵⁵

The Carlow gathering was the last event of the tour to appear in the national headlines, although Gordon and Noel remained in the country until December. The controversy surrounding the public meetings had a catalytic effect on public opinion. The Catholic clergy emerged from the contest secure in the knowledge that they had established the authority of their Church on the use of the scriptures, and they were therefore even more firmly determined to keep evangelical missionaries from influencing their flocks. Henceforth, their opposition to the evangelicals became more organized, involving sophisticated methods of defence and attack, especially in their collaboration with the Catholic Association and in their use of propaganda. They also lived up to the reputation that the evangelicals had been ascribing to them for years, namely, as the strongest opponents of free distribution of the Bible and the chief obstacle in the way of the new Reformation. After 1824 hostility between the evangelical vanguard and the priests subsided in proportion to the degree that the Protestant landed classes lost their social and political power, except in the province of Ulster, where religious division continued to defy all political solutions.

PROPAGANDA AND COUNTER-PROPAGANDA

One of the more significant facts highlighted by the Bible controversy of 1824 was the importance of propaganda. The forces arrayed against each other had always had their slogans, pamphleteers, and partisan journals and newspapers. Nevertheless, a new dimension was introduced with the extensive coverage given to the debates on education, proselytism, and the Bible controversy in the pages of national daily newspapers like the Freeman’s Journal and the Dublin Evening Post. After 1824 it appeared that sectarian controversy had become a staple diet of the reading public, and no contemporary political issue gave rise to such a deluge of pamphlets, newsletters, journals and other polemical literature.

In the area of printed matter generally, the evangelical press for years had had the upper hand. Once the Catholics embarked on a counter-offensive, many of the methods they employed to publicize their cause were borrowed directly from their opponents. No Protestant Bible society was without its handbook of general rules and its series of monthly reports, often supplemented by extracts of correspondence. In general, these carried accounts of regular business matters, lists of patrons and subscribers, and statements on the intake and outlay of funds. Special attention was always given to the correspondence of workers in the mission stations or of clergymen on the preaching circuits. Very often, the reports carried news about other agencies engaged in similar activities, and the societies also enjoyed access to journals such as the Christian Observer (the official mouthpiece of the Church of England), The Quarterly Review, The British Critic, Blackwood’s Magazine and the Edinburgh Review. By the 1820s the evangelical press in Britain was one vast publicity machine that was certainly doing more to inform the reading public about foreign countries and their inhabitants than any journalistic enterprise up to that time. After 1824 the Irish organizations became especially adept at getting their material into British journals, where they had a particularly powerful influence on the debate over Catholic Emancipation.

The furore over the notorious Bible meetings in 1824 had almost as much effect on public opinion in England as it did in Ireland. The Christian Observer, which had always adhered to a moderate position on the Emancipation question, now assumed a distinctly hostile tone, especially towards the Catholic Church. The Bible society meetings were reported as having been tumultuously interrupted by Catholic clergy and laymen, who in some cases, as at Loughrea, allegedly proceeded to gross outrages.⁵⁶ Attention was drawn to recent meetings at which Catholics had not only proposed to start a fund-raising campaign to halt the progress of scriptural education in Ireland but had even appointed an agent to manage their affairs in London. The City of London Bible Auxiliary denounced the ‘conspiracy’ against the Bible in Ireland and claimed that the society had sent ‘arms’ to support it, and would send more in the future, ‘for the people of Ireland were beginning ardently to desire the bible and it would be unjust to withhold it from them’.⁵⁷ This attitude reflected the view generally propagated in the British evangelical press that the Catholic Irish were themselves conscious of their spiritual enslavement and anxious to be liberated from the controls of Rome. It was deftly exploited by anti-Catholic propagandists, increasingly in receipt of fresh material to support their claim that Catholicism was indeed subversive of the constitution. Such material flowed mainly from two sources: the writings of talented propagandists like the Rev. Caesar Otway and Bishop Robert Daly; and second, the eyewitness accounts disseminated by preachers like the Rev. Mortimer O’Sullivan and the Rev. Robert McGhee, who began the practice of preaching tours in England on behalf of the evangelical cause at home.⁵⁸

Of the many polemicists who involved themselves on behalf of the Bible in Ireland, no single individual contributed more to the substance and success of evangelical propaganda than the Rev. Caesar Otway. A younger son of a Tipperary landed family, Otway was yet another minister of the Church of Ireland who had attended Trinity at the close of the eighteenth century. He began to make a name for himself as a controversialist in the early 1820s, and in 1825, along with Rev. Joseph Singer, he founded the Christian Examiner and Church of Ireland Magazine. This was the first periodical of its kind to represent the Established Church in Ireland, and in some ways it was modelled on the Christian Observer. Its main purpose was to promote and defend Protestant opinion in the face of the current ‘Roman controversy’.

Otway’s personal speciality lay in exposing the superstitions believed by Catholics, especially those connected with pilgrimages and the miraculous powers attributed to the priesthood. Besides editing the Christian Examiner he was personally responsible for much of its content. An intrepid traveller with a keen appreciation for popular culture, he was also the author of several travel books on Ireland, especially the far-western fastnesses of Connemara and Donegal that were currently in the process of being ‘discovered’ as fashionable tourist venues by the wealthy and sophisticated. Invariably composed with a view towards exposing Romish superstition, these works contain valuable material on folk life in the immediate pre-Famine period and betray a sympathy, if not a love, for the customs of the country people that is seldom matched in contemporary accounts of other foreign visitors.⁵⁹ Ironically, Otway was never more entertaining than when he was describing the petty sectarian tensions that gave spice and hilarity to everyday affairs, and that he personally appreciated more than most people. His travel books abound with stories of suspicious Protestants and inscrutable Catholics managing to live side by side, seldom escaping the influences of each other’s religion, and frequently showing remarkable tolerance and good humour in their dealings with one another.

As one seeks to place the Irish evangelical movement in cultural perspective, the seemingly contradictory aspect of Otway’s regard for the ‘hidden Ireland’ of the Catholic peasantry is of the greatest importance. Along with a small group of fellow travellers, he bridged the gap between the earlier phase of the evangelical movement and the emergence of a literary and intellectual trend among Protestant conservatives who looked to culture as well as religion as a possible foundation for uniting the interests of native and colonial. This ethos was propagated through the Dublin University Magazine and inaugurated a new phase in the study of Irish antiquities and literature. Otway was a regular contributor to the magazine, as were Samuel Ferguson and Isaac Butt.⁶⁰ Of equal importance in securing Otway’s place in Irish literary history was his sponsorship of the young William Carleton.

The career of William Carleton offers a unique portrait of an ambitious Catholic caught up in the cultural and religious tensions of the times. A native of the Clogher Valley in County Tyrone, Carleton arrived in Dublin in 1817 as a penniless youth hoping to earn a living by teaching or writing. Within a few years he married and took up employment as a clerk with the Sunday School Society. His entry to the world of letters began when he read Otway’s first travel volume, Sketches in Ireland, published in 1827. Among the aspects of Catholic superstition discussed in this book, considerable attention was paid to the penitential station on an island in Lough Derg in County Donegal. When Carleton met with Otway and told him how he had made the pilgrimage as a boy and why he agreed with the way it had been described in the Sketches, Otway invited him to submit his own recollections for possible publication in the Christian Examiner. The result was ‘The Lough Derg pilgrim’, the first of Carleton’s masterly sketches of peasant life before the Famine.⁶¹

Otway recognized talent when he saw it. For the next four years Carleton became a regular contributor to the Christian Examiner, combining his marvellous and intimate knowledge of peasant life with ‘a sectarian bias laid on with a trowel’ as Benedict Kiely has described it. By the time of his first meeting with Otway, Carleton had already become a Protestant, which he remained until his death. Religious controversy was never his forte, however, and many critics insist that the bigotry with which his earlier literary efforts abound was the result of Otway’s skilful editing. In the 1830s, especially after the publication of Tales of Ireland (1834), he began to move away from the influences of Otway and evangelicalism, and towards the cultural and political outlook of the literary intellectuals later known as Young Ireland. In the 1840s, in what amounted almost to a public recantation, he expressed regret for having previously misrepresented the Irish people, their religion and their clergy. Whether to redress the balance, or simply to depict the true nature of the evangelical mission as he saw it, he drew one of the most damning fictional accounts ever penned of the new Reformation in Valentine McClutchy (1848). This contribution notwithstanding, Catholic writers of later generations never forgave his betrayal of their religion and his decision to live and die a Protestant. It was mainly through the efforts of another Protestant, William Butler Yeats, that his place in Irish literary history was established.⁶²

By the 1830s Otway was himself beginning to widen his literary horizons, though it is clear that while his writing may have become more ‘national’ in character, it lost little of the old animosity towards the doctrines and practices of the Catholic Church. In 1831 he resigned as editor of the Christian Examiner and thereafter gave of his literary talents to the Dublin University Magazine, which he had helped to found in 1833. Hardly less unionist in spirit than the Christian Examiner, this publication did not concern itself directly with sectarian matters and gave an elevated tone to literary and intellectual subjects in general. Under the editorial supervision of Isaac Butt and later Charles Lever, it promoted the country’s most talented writers, including William Carleton, Sheridan Le Fanu and James Clarence Mangan.

Otway’s resignation as editor of the Christian Examiner did not dampen that magazine’s taste for religious controversy, and it continued to enjoy reasonable success until the Church of Ireland was disestablished in 1869. To the end it retained its official status as the voice of the Irish evangelical movement, but as Barbara Hayley has observed, ‘without the literary and fictional content that [Otway] had commissioned or supplied himself, it degenerated into a run-of-the-press pious bickering’.⁶³ Neither did Otway’s literary ambitions serve to lessen his personal antagonism to Catholicism. In books published in the mid-and late 1830s, which made his name as a travel writer, he seldom lost an opportunity to comment on the moral and intellectual slavery imposed on the peasantry by the Church of Rome and its agents. The following is characteristic:

The truth is that it is not only the bible but the accompaniments of the bible that the priest dreads; he fears the spirit of inquiry, the illumination that succeeds the liberality of feeling, the disenthralling of intellect; above all he fears the contact with Protestantism. Let but the serene and manly front of that creed be presented to popery, which, prostrate before its clergy is only erect in subordination, and that clergy will fear lest the attitude belonging to man will be assumed by their vassals too.⁶⁴

Up to 1824 the anti-Protestant sentiment in Catholic literature was to be found mostly in the popular ballads and poetry that were the preserve of the peasantry and the urban working classes. Pastorini, of course, was a prime source of inspiration for compositions of this kind, which were filled with dire predictions of the downfall of Protestants and the resurgence of the Catholics. Because of their openly seditious character, they were a matter of great irritation to the Protestant authorities. As Bishop Jebb, who always kept a watchful eye on public opinion at the lower end of the social scale, remarked:

These ballads are listened to and bought up with great avidity. The itinerant minstrels, by way of interlude, haranguing the people after each stanza with much vehemence and gesticulation and inciting them to nothing short of rebellion. Several have been taken up both in Cork and in this city [Limerick] in the very act.⁶⁵

The tone of many clerical pronouncements in the early 1820s indicates that the Catholic clergy and hierarchy were willing almost to bend over backwards to suppress sentiments that the more vulgar among their flocks were circulating in broadsides or cheerfully bellowing from street corners.⁶⁶ Bishop Murray, intensely conscious of the power of words and how they might be used against his Church, informed a parliamentary commission in 1825: ‘we at present use the word “heretic” very sparingly; we chose, rather, as it is an offensive word, to say “our dissenting brethren”, or “our separated brethren” or something of that kind’.⁶⁷ Bishop Doyle was prepared to advocate remarkable compromises, such as mixed education and even a union of the Catholic Church and the Church of Ireland.⁶⁸

This last gesture, which was one of the most radical ever put forward as a solution to the Irish problem, was an effort to forestall the polarization that Doyle saw as inevitable in the spring of 1824 if events should continue on their present course.⁶⁹ After the Bible War of the following autumn and winter, however, Doyle’s ambitions in this direction were increasingly fruitless. Once the priests had taken to the public platform, there was no stemming of either their political involvement or their anti-evangelical belligerence. When the forceful (and often highly entertaining) polemics of the folk hero Fr Tom Maguire came in the door, as it were, the soothing words of Doyle and Murray went out the window.

The events of the latter part of 1824 are critical to understanding the fusion of religion and politics that endowed the Emancipation campaign with such extraordinary strength and unity. During the controversy generated by the Bible War in the autumn and winter of 1824, the priests began to combine their role as public defenders of the faith with that of local organizers of the Catholic Association. Since their involvement with the education survey in the previous spring and summer, most were familiar with the aims and objectives of the Association. It was hardly a coincidence that the controversial meetings organized by the evangelical societies gave rise to the formation of defensive alliances of Catholics. In Waterford, for example, the campaign that succeeded in electing a pro-Emancipation candidate in the general election of 1826 was launched at a meeting to counteract the work of the Bible societies.⁷⁰ Side by side with lengthy accounts of the Bible meetings in the national press, there appeared news of recently organized branches of the Catholic Association and membership lists that grew longer by the day. The Bible debates probably did at least as much to mobilize priests and people behind the Catholic Association as the exhortations of O’Connell. A forthright commentary in the Dublin Evening Post accurately predicted the popular response to the inflammatory attacks on the Catholic religion:

We admit that these things are constantly done in pamphlets and newspapers, charges and in sermons; but this is the first time in Ireland or in any country that two sets of orators have been found discussing knotty points of scripture in an aggregate assembly. The Catholics of Ireland, the priests of Ireland, have long been accustomed to outrage and insult; but this is the first time that the experiment has been tried of rousing a whole population into madness.⁷¹

But it was not only Catholics who were successfully welded to the side of O’Connell and Emancipation by the events of 1824. Liberal Protestants, angered and disgusted by the blatant inflammatory attacks on their Catholic countrymen, were also driven into the O’Connellite camp. Immediately after the famous Bible meeting at Loughrea, John Guthrie came forward and declared that the whole purpose of the meeting had been the assembly of Catholics ‘for the predetermined purpose of insulting them’, and that while

Biblicals of all sects, whether Established Church or Dissenters, were heard, [there was] not a word from a Roman Catholic. The Catholic pastors were to look on, and with indifference to behold their flocks seduced from them. The Catholic clergy were to stand by in silence, like convicted criminals, to hear sentence passed on themselves and their religion. He felt the injustice done to his Catholic brethren and entreated as a Protestant to be heard but Bishop Trench would not hear anyone who was not a member of the Bible Society.⁷²

Similarly, in 1828, William Smith O’Brien (the son of Lady O’Brien of Dromoland, County Clare) declared his support for O’Connell and Emancipation because he wished to express his ‘concurrence in any act which would put an end to the ascendancy of a faction which already revelled in the anticipated triumph of a civil war’.⁷³ Without the support of those liberal Protestants who threw the weight of their influence behind the Emancipation campaign, O’Connell would never have broken the hold of conservative landlords on electoral politics in 1826.

The genius of O’Connell’s scheme to make the Catholic Association the representative organization of the entire Catholic community was the so-called ‘Catholic rent’: the penny-a-month that every Catholic in the country would pay to subscribe. O’Connell’s strategy had been developed earlier in 1824 in connection with his ambition to broaden the base of the Catholic Association; it was not a new idea, and indeed it owed not a little to the example of the penny-a-week subscriptions collected by the Methodists and Bible society supporters. What O’Connell lacked was a network of organizers to implement his strategy at the local level. The priests were the ideal candidates for this task, and once their services were engaged in organization and rent collection, the scheme took off with phenomenal success.⁷⁴ It marks, as J.A. Reynolds has stated,

the transition of the Catholic Association from a small club into a mass movement. With the rent scheme the organization in Dublin shot out roots into the soil of Ireland to provide countrymen everywhere with a diet of political food as universal and staple as the national potato.⁷⁵

Both priests and people were politicized in the process, to the great consternation of the authorities. A correspondent of Francis Blackburne of Rathkeale described the situation as 1824 drew to a close:

The influence of the clergy over the people is now greatly increased; this system of the Catholic rent has brought the people and their clergy closer than ever to one another; their connection before was religious, now it is political. The priests tell the people that it is for their good to pay the rent; they tell them this and significantly withhold any further explanation. This undefined and mysterious mode of acting leaves the people to their own construction; therefore, a rumour or a feeling prevails among them universally that we are to have a rebellion. I find that Pastorini’s prophecies about the extinction of heretics in 1825 are again revived. [my emphasis]⁷⁶

The evidence coming in from government informers suggested something even more alarming: that the Catholic forces were engaged in preparations for a general rebellion. One of Chief Secretary Henry Goulburn’s informants described the situation in Imaal in County Wicklow, where priests, middle classes, and peasantry were all united in a plot to stage an armed uprising and ‘had received instructions to behave civilly to Protestants until the time arrives to throw off the mask’. The informant did not know who was at the head of the planned rebellion, but ‘the people say that Counsellor O’Connell is an instrument appointed by God almighty to effect their wishes’. The local priest Fr Kavanagh, when exhorting his congregation in the chapel to pay the rent, reportedly stated ‘it will be one side or the other this year 1825’. The informer went on to add that

the opinion of the people on leaving the chapel was that they would certainly succeed. Everything that passes convinces them more and more that the prophecies of Pastorini will be fulfilled in 1825. All are sure of an explosion but do not know when it will take place.⁷⁷

The most immediate and powerful evidence of a revolution in consciousness was the pride attached to the word ‘Catholic’. If revolutions are brought about by words (as the critic La Harpe had claimed of the French Revolution), then it was fitting that that master of the rhetorical device, Archbishop Magee, should be among the first to recognize what had occurred. In a letter to John Jebb in the spring of 1824 he referred to the petition currently before the House of Lords:

Instead of petitioning on behalf of Roman Catholics, they decided on deliberation to use the word ‘Catholic’ … you may therefore see the determination of defiance. In truth, in the very term ‘Catholic’ the papists in Ireland have a strength that even now is difficult to resist.⁷⁸

Clearly, Bishop Doyle’s ambition had been realized. The symbolism and expectation previously attached to Captain Rock and Pastorini was now being transferred to O’Connell and the Catholic Association.⁷⁹

The linkage between these two phases of the popular politicization that occurred during the 1820s is clearly reflected in the work of the poet Anthony Raftery. Born in Mayo, Raftery spent most of his life in east Galway and built up a reputation as one of the last of the wandering bards.⁸⁰ Blind from youth onwards, he was evidently well acquainted with history and contemporary politics. He wrote in Irish and his work constitutes one of the few and certainly one of the most valuable channels through which to observe the mentality of pre-Famine Gaelic Ireland. Raftery’s poems dealing with political or religious themes reveal how the peasantry identified and blended the forces of political, religious and social oppression. As a resident of the part of County Galway dominated by the Trench family and affected by the sectarian conflict of the early 1820s, Raftery would have found it difficult to avoid commenting on the close alignment between the evangelical movement and Protestant supremacism. Time and again, he warned his readers to have no truck with the evangelicals and their Bible. Unlike anti-clerical poets of an earlier generation such as Eoin Ruadh Ó Suilleabháin, Raftery strongly approved of the priests’ right to speak unconditionally on behalf of the people and gave his readers the following advice:

But trust ye the clergy and the discourse of the church

And the holy sermon that the saints and apostles have written for us

Do not seek the bible or it shall come across you.⁸¹

His condemnation of the unauthorized use of the scriptures was taken straight from Catholic dogma:

Many is the humpbacked lying discourse

That was drawn out of the Irish bible

Every man out of his own head, picking learning from it

Asserting the right on top of the perjury.⁸²

The following passage on the dangers of proselytizing schools shows how effectively the message of O’Connell and Doyle about the symbiotic relationship between church and people, and the Church as the instrument of deliverance, was making its way into the popular consciousness:

I heard, if it be true, a rumour strange and new

That they mean to plant schools in each corner

The plan is, for scaith, to steal away our faith

And to train up the spy and informer

Our clergy’s word is good, then seek no other food

God’s church has his own arm around her But if ye will embark on this vessel in the dark

It will turn in the sea and founder⁸³

Raftery’s most famous exposition of popular Catholic feeling is to be found in a long poem called ‘The Catholic rent’, evidently written shortly after the famous Bible meeting at Loughrea in October 1824. It is at once an attack on tithes and Bible preachers and an invocation of O’Connell and Catholic rights. The underlying theme is the usurpation of the Irish Catholics’ rights and religion by a Church founded on false doctrines. According to his interpretation of Pastorini, this ecclesiastical edifice and its fanatical representatives would be the first to fall:

On observing the signs, I see fear for the fanatics

Who fast not on Fridays and jeer at the Catholics

Success is denied them, defeat shall be absolute

As Peter and Jesus have spoken.

Wrote Pastorini, you’ll see it made manifest

A rascally meeting each month in each hamlet

But Clonmel shall make pieces of New Lights and Orangemen

And Loughrea shall defeat them and beat their rascality;

We have lost our good Clayton, but Daly’s as bad for them

Their bible’s mendacious, we’ll shame them and sadden them

We’ll give them (’twill please us) a token.⁸⁴

Although Catholic deliverance had been prophesied by Pastorini and the book of Revelation, it would be secured, according to Raftery, only if the people cooperated with the methods of O’Connell:

I call ye, ye people, and be not under reproach

I shall praise ye forever if ye pay the Catholic rent

It is very little in the month is a farthing a week

And do not earn for yourselves scandal and shame

It is a little thing in the rent and it will free the land

Tithes shall not be called for, as used to be done to ye before

There shall be right and law for ye in respect to country and land

There is no danger of us forever, so long as O’Connell lives

Believe ye with truth the saints and the apostles who say the foreigners shall be scattered.⁸⁵

Popular poetry and street ballads were not the only literature that condemned the Reformation movement, nor were they perhaps the most effective vehicles of opposition. During the period 1824–7 the foundations were laid for the vast outpouring of popular theological pamphlets that became a feature of Irish Catholicism in the nineteenth century.⁸⁶ The importance of such literature in regularizing religious observance and in enshrining Catholic doctrine as the supreme moral authority in the country stands as yet another example of how the Protestant evangelical movement served to entrench Catholicism in the lives of ordinary people.

The demand for what might be called ‘serious’ theological literature first became evident in the aftermath of Magee’s sermon and gathered momentum in 1823–4.⁸⁷ The debates themselves contributed to the demand. Not only were they carried in national newspapers, but additional accounts, always highly partisan in tone, were later published by rival printing houses in Dublin. Shortly after the campaign began, the priests of Dublin, ‘not hesitating to accept as an ally the importer of Tom Paine’s bones’, as J.A. Reynolds sardonically notes, were circulating copies of William Cobbett’s History of the Protestant Reformation among the Catholic population. This particular history was remarkably popular in Dublin in early 1825. A correspondent of Robert Peel described the scene outside a bookshop where the work was on sale as resembling ‘a mob pressing to the galleries of a theatre’. The bookseller, a man named Scully, who was considered Cobbett’s agent in Dublin, was overheard telling a friend that ‘he was at that moment writing to London for ten thousand copies by return of the mail, and that he had no doubt of requiring ten thousand more’.⁸⁸

Whether the priests were actually responsible for the popularity of Cobbett’s work is open to question. Cobbett was one of O’Connell’s strongest supporters in London, and his Reformation was written with the very specific end of supporting the Catholic cause. He argued that the Reformation had its origins in an insatiable greed and materialism that had devoured the medieval Church and victimized in perpetuity the unfortunate inhabitants of Ireland.⁸⁹ The appeal of this argument (like that of the other contemporary bestseller that defended the Catholic cause, Thomas Moore’s Memoir of Captain Rock), was its insistence on a secular cause (and by implication, a secular solution) for the country’s problems, in contrast to the ultra-Protestants’ insistence that Rome was the source of every evil.⁹⁰ The popularity of Cobbett and Moore notwithstanding, the Catholic clergy still felt pressed by the need to establish the teachings of their Church on the proper use of the scriptures and to proclaim the precise basis of their opposition to the evangelical moral crusade.

Bishop Doyle’s most influential writings on education and the use of the scriptures appeared in 1825 in his Letters on the State of Ireland.⁹¹ As much as he disavowed religious controversy, his sweeping condemnation of the methods and objectives of the Bible and education societies could only have encouraged the militancy of priests at the local level. Besides furnishing a lengthy and learned defence of Catholic teaching on the use of the scriptures, he attempted to place the evangelical mission in historical perspective. Striking a chord that went much deeper than the purely spiritual or theological, he unhesitatingly underlined the connections between political and religious persecution, with an explicit recognition of the ideology behind the ‘Second Reformation’:

Behold … the conditions implied on which alone these societies and their dupes and abettors will educate the poor of Ireland. Behold also and at the same time the force with which these societies press on an impoverished and broken-hearted people. Funds to the amount of, or exceeding £200,000 a year are at their disposal; the influence of the landlord—an influence paramount to every other; the zeal of the inspector, the power of the press and of the tongue—calumnies incessantly repeated against the hallowed name of the Word of God; the thirst of the people for education, all these form a moral phalanx more formidable than that of Macedon, and if God and the spirit of the people did not assist us, we could not resist it. We have borne many things, but we have never borne a persecution more bitter than what now assails us … What we suffer from these societies, and the power and prejudice they have embodied against us, is more tormenting than what we endured under Anne or the second George.⁹²

Doyle and his episcopal colleagues were clearly aware of the need for something more than a display of theological acumen to counter evangelical successes and the enormous publicity that accompanied them. The appointing of Eneas McDonnell to represent the opinion of the Catholic Association in London was part of this strategy. An unashamed defender of ultramontane Catholicism, McDonnell was the individual who, more than any of his contemporaries, gave journalistic vent to the idea that the evangelicals were out to destroy Catholicism. But McDonnell’s attempts at counter-propaganda were not on their own sufficient.

As early as 1824 discussion was begun on the need for some kind of organization that would provide reading material sanctioned by the Catholic Church: in other words, a Catholic equivalent to the HBS. The leading light behind this scheme was a Dublin publisher named William Joseph Battersby. From the beginning Bishop Doyle gave his full support to the enterprise and was responsible for drawing up the plans on which it would be organized.⁹³ These bore a remarkable similarity to the system in use by the HBS. The headquarters were to be located in Dublin and the chief officers to be residents of the city. The Society was to spread through the provinces by means of cooperative societies, which would oversee the development of distribution centres, such as book depositories and lending libraries. On the regional and local levels these activities were to be under the direct sanction of the bishops and the clergy. Close ties were to be maintained between the local chapters and the headquarters in Dublin. As Doyle himself proclaimed when the Society was inaugurated in 1827:

Every parish clergyman, nay, every society and confraternity concerned in the education of youth, are at liberty and would do well to place themselves in communication with the secretary or agent of the society. By that means they could forward their contributions without difficulty; they could have their orders for books executed without delay; they could obtain in the easiest manner the most useful information respecting the selection of books, the formation of parish libraries, as well as the improvement and management of schools, and the supplying of them with lessons and books of elementary instruction.⁹⁴

The formal title of the organization launched by Doyle and Battersby and sanctioned by the Catholic episcopate was the Irish Catholic Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. It shortly came to be known as the Catholic Book Society. With the exception of an ancillary body—the Catholic Society of Ireland, founded in 1834 to promote the free distribution of religious material—the Catholic Book Society appears to have been the only organization of its kind in nineteenth-century Ireland. One of the resolutions put forward by Doyle when the initial plans were under discussion in 1824 was that ‘such books as are calculated to excite dissensions amongst Irishmen be carefully excluded’. In 1836, however, the Catholic Directory (another of Battersby’s projects) asserted that the objectives of the Book Society were: ‘to furnish people in the most cheap and convenient manner with useful information on the truths and duties of the Christian religion; to supply all classes of persons with satisfactory refutations of the prevailing errors and heresies of the present age; and to assist in supplying schools with the most approved books of elementary instruction’.⁹⁵ These objectives, especially the second, breathed hostility to the evangelical mission.

By 1836 it was claimed that the Catholic Book Society had already published 5 million books and circulated them in cheap editions, not only in Ireland but also throughout Britain and the overseas possessions of the empire.⁹⁶ It seems likely that much of the material distributed in Ireland consisted of prayer books, tracts and bibles in the vernacular, which came into widespread use for the first time in the 1830s. This was partly in keeping with the Church’s strategy of enlightening its flock on the doctrinal foundations of the Catholic religion, and partly a response to the evangelicals’ repeated taunts that the priests were withholding the scriptures from the people in order to keep them in ignorance.

In 1834 Dr William Crolly, bishop of Down and Connor, arranged with the Catholic publisher Richard Coyne of Capel Street to publish an entire version of the Catholic Bible; Crolly even applied to the excise office to have the paper tax removed so that it might be sold more cheaply. Coyne’s edition of 1224 octavo pages was sold by the Catholic Book Society for eight shillings, an extremely low price considering the amount of print. The first edition of ‘Crolly’s Bible’ was sold out within a few weeks, with the bishop himself spending £600 on copies, which presumably were distributed for free.⁹⁷

In 1836 the Rev. Noel met a Catholic tradesman in Drogheda who informed him that Crolly’s Bible, then selling for six shillings and threepence, was enjoying great popularity among Catholics. Noel was also shown two smaller works—The Abridgement of Christian Doctrine, Permissum Superiorum and The Christian’s Guide to Heaven (both published in Dublin in 1835)—that he painstakingly combed for evidence of the Catholic Church’s opposition to the free interpretation of the scriptures. Like most evangelicals, Noel preferred to see some version of the scriptures in use by Catholics rather than none at all. What he abhorred, however, was that the teaching contained in the tracts and catechism further instilled Catholic orthodoxy in the minds of ordinary people, thus rendering them more inimical than ever to the evangelicals and to the Bible without note or comment.⁹⁸

While the literature distributed by the Catholic Book Society was definitely designed to undercut that of the evangelical agencies, the tone and indeed the very nature of the material—prayer books, catechisms, and the like—were aimed more at building up Catholicism than at pulling down Protestantism. This could not be said of the many Catholic journals that sprang up to challenge the Christian Examiner and others of its kind. Up to 1829 the market for periodicals in Ireland was occupied, according to Barbara Hayley, by magazines that were ‘almost exclusively polemical, disseminating violently Protestant or Catholic, unionist or anti-unionist propaganda, and very little else’.⁹⁹ With the exception of the Christian Examiner, most of these, especially the Catholic ones, enjoyed only a brief existence, the reasons for which will be considered presently.

The first of the blatantly pro-Catholic journals (that is, in the religious as opposed to the political sense) was the Irish Catholic Magazine, which began publication in Cork in 1829 and ‘struck the Christian Examiner from the Catholic side’.¹⁰⁰ Little is known about its popularity or lifespan. A somewhat better-known publication was The Catholic Penny Magazine, launched by W.J. Battersby in 1834 and envisaged as the mouthpiece of the Catholic Book Society. It was a weekly booklet, similar in form to those published by the British missionary societies, containing articles on the lives of the saints, Catholic religious observance, new churches and religious houses, foreign intelligence, and contemporary social and political events of particular importance to the Catholic Church.¹⁰¹ The refutation of the anti-Catholic propaganda emanating from the evangelical press became one of the magazine’s standard features. Readers were urged to ignore rather than to take personal action against proselytizers. News of converted priests and laypeople was often exposed as fraudulent. One evangelical author who called himself the ‘Rev. E.B. Delany, formerly a Catholic priest’ was said to be only a poor, deluded schoolmaster.¹⁰² Another report that appeared in several evangelical periodicals concerning the content of controversial sermons delivered by a leading Catholic polemicist in 1835 was attacked as grossly untrue.¹⁰³

Two years after it was founded, The Catholic Penny Magazine encountered serious financial difficulties and was forced to cease publication. It was superseded by the Irish Catholic Magazine of Entertaining Knowledge, another project of Battersby’s. Even more than its predecessor, this journal became embroiled in sectarian controversy. As Thomas Wall remarks:

Gone is the elation over the building of new churches, and the reader is given instead page after page of religious polemic. And how dreary, inglorious, and even shabby was the religious controversy of the eighteen-thirties. There was then no thought of dialogue, no quest of a common ground of agreement, no scruple over offending charity. There was a small group of renegade priests who made Maynooth the particular target of their scurrilous attacks, and the Irish Catholic Magazine gave too many pages to exposing their iniquities.¹⁰⁴

Both of these magazines, like the Christian Examiner, contained some cultural and intellectual content, publishing articles on travel, literature, history, and antiquities. Neither enjoyed much success, however, and it was the repeated complaint of Battersby that although there were seven million Catholics in Ireland, he could sell only 3000 copies of his weekly magazine. Wall has described Battersby’s magazines as ‘rather mean and shabby in appearance … with something of the catchpenny in all of them’.¹⁰⁵ This, and the often vulgar tone of their polemics, was probably responsible for alienating many of the more respectable Catholics, including the clergy. The poorer classes provided no market for literature of this kind, a fact for which poverty and illiteracy have been held accountable.¹⁰⁶

CONTROVERSIAL SERMONS AND MONSTER DEBATES

Great public meetings associated with voluntary philanthropy, particularly the home and foreign missionary endeavours, had become a standard feature of religious life in Britain by the 1820s. Usually associated with the anniversaries of organizations like the CMS and the BFBS, they attracted people from all over the country and from various walks of life. For an entire week they would attend lectures and sermons by preachers and workers in the field, fraternize with like-minded colleagues and renew their commitment to the evangelical way of life. The ‘April meetings’, as they were called, were soon as popular in Dublin as they were in London and they brought something like a festive spirit to the capital each spring.

Just as the Orange activities of July and August did for the lower classes, they provided an opportunity for ‘respectable’ Protestants to display solidarity with one another and also to partake in the excitement generated by the feeling that they were part of a great national movement. Fifty years later the well-known Nonconformist minister, the Rev. James Godkin, gave a nostalgic account of the annual event as he knew it in his youth:

for a young man who attends the April meetings now, it would be very difficult to conceive the excitement they produced and the attraction they put forth forty or fifty years ago. The spirit of revival seemed to pervade the very atmosphere; every eloquent speaker was a champion, a hero, who was looked upon with admiration as he passed along the streets. For hours, day after day, as society after society came upon the stage to tell the story of the year and record its triumphs, a select audience from all parts of the kingdom, of which a majority were ladies, sat listening with rapt attention or were thrilled into wild excitement by the impassioned appeals of their favourite orators. Some of these were certainly the most eloquent men that ever appeared upon a religious or political platform. Their speeches were fully reported in the Protestant newspapers, which were circulated by thousands throughout the country.¹⁰⁷

This account captures the excitement of a community who felt that the wind was at its back. There was little to compare with such displays on the Catholic side. In the Bible debates of 1824 the priests defended themselves ably, but they stayed within their own districts, and no clerical figure emerged to compare with the well-known (but unfortunately named) Rev. Richard Pope, who travelled and debated tirelessly on behalf of Protestant cause, winning national recognition as a result. Not until 1826 did the Catholics discover an orator capable of rivalling Pope in public debate. This was the celebrated Fr Tom Maguire—‘from the bogs of Leitrim’—one of the most colourful figures of the pre-Famine period and the bane of evangelical controversialists. Maguire’s oratory raised the art of polemic to a new and altogether more entertaining level.

Fr Maguire first drew attention to his oratorical skills when he visited Dublin in 1826 to deliver a series of Lenten sermons at the Franciscan church.¹⁰⁸ The supporters of religious controversy on the Catholic side, especially the publishers, evidently saw in the big country priest an opponent likely to raise the hackles of the Protestant controversialists. Shortly thereafter, Maguire moved to the capital, where his natural talent for polemic was nurtured. A unique and mutually rewarding relationship sprang up between him and the publisher Richard Coyne. As the largest distributor of Catholic literature in the country, Coyne had a vested interest in religious controversy. He was well versed in obscure theological detail, and he put his knowledge at Maguire’s disposal. He also acted as Maguire’s agent in scheduling public appearances and debates, and he held the copyright to all material that went into print. The cooperation and friendship between the two was described by Bishop Ullathorne and repeated by Thomas Wall in Dickensian terms:

Father Maguire was a ‘tall man with a high tapering forehead, broad jaws, florid features, and a small mouth, with tall teeth, and for his proportions, narrow shoulders’. Coyne was a small man, dapper and dainty, with a precise mind well-stored with references, especially in controversial literature. The priest addressed the printer familiarly as ‘Dicky, my father’, and the printer spoke to the priest as ‘Tom, my son’.¹⁰⁹

The event that made a national hero of Maguire was a marathon debate with Pope held in the Sackville Institute in Dublin in April 1827. Lasting all of six days, it proved to be the most publicized event connected with the Reformation crusade since the Loughrea affair of 1824. It ended in a resounding victory for Maguire, and Pope was said to have lost his health as a result.¹¹⁰ In October 1827 it was reported in the Dublin Evening Post that Fr Maguire had made a statement during a meeting of the Catholic Association in Roscommon town to the effect that an unnamed Protestant parson, acting on behalf of a Protestant archbishop, had offered him £1000 at once and £800 a year for life if he would join the Protestant side.¹¹¹ This item of news produced a storm of denials and counter-denials by the parties concerned and inevitably ended up in the law courts. Maguire claimed that the account of his speech given to the newspaper was false to begin with. While advances were certainly made to him by a Protestant clergyman, it looked in retrospect like a case of entrapment. He strongly denied that he had ever mentioned the name of Dr Trench in connection with the affair.¹¹² The Morning Herald of 8 November had announced that Trench was indeed the archbishop alluded to, and moreover that this information had been volunteered to the Herald by Maguire.¹¹³ Trench promptly sued the editor of this newspaper for libel, but Maguire was able to clear his name once again by showing that his statement had been misrepresented.¹¹⁴

Hot on the heels of this flap came another, more serious case against Maguire: a paternity suit in which he was charged with having seduced the daughter of Bernard McGarahan, an innkeeper of Drumkerrin, County Leitrim. Daniel O’Connell acted as his counsel and managed to prove that the slander had been concocted by members of an Orange faction who wished to punish Maguire for having trounced Pope earlier in the year. The Catholics of Dublin illuminated their houses when the court ruled against the prosecution.¹¹⁵

Throughout the 1830s Maguire maintained his reputation as the leading Catholic orator and was always in great demand in the Dublin area. The busiest time of year for controversial sermons and debates was the Lenten season just before Easter. Catholic observance of Lent gave Protestant critics an opportunity to pour obloquy on the practices of fasting and abstaining from meat on Fridays, as well as on the use of images, rosary beads, scapulars, etc. The drama was naturally heightened by the April meetings that took place around the same time. In March 1835 The Catholic Penny Magazine noted that Fr Maguire was preaching controversial sermons to overwhelming congregations in St Teresa’s Church in Clarendon Street on Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. In the same issue it was reported that Protestant fanatics were engaged in putting up scurrilous anti-Catholic posters all over the city.¹¹⁶ Maguire certainly contributed his share to stoking the fires of discord. It was the strength of his oratory rather than his grasp of theology that served to overwhelm his opponents. When he could not prompt an opponent to come forward and engage in a platform debate, he struck out at his written work. As the following passage illustrates, theology was not always the object of his attack; in this case it was the writing style of the Rev. Robert McGhee, one of the most famous of the Protestant orators:

From such English as this, O Lord deliver us! I defy any man to make either grammar or sense out of such language. I have always hated pettifogging and all supercilious criticism … I know a man may be a very good Christian without knowing the rules of Etymology, Syntax, or Prosody, but I would leave it to this respectable assembly, if a man is not bound to make restitution when he makes money for teaching what he knows nothing of? … I have discovered not less than seventeen violations of the rules of grammar in one of his columns alone.¹¹⁷

It is not surprising that Maguire was almost as much of an embarrassment to later generations of Catholics as he was to Protestants during his own lifetime. He died in 1847, poisoned by one of his own relatives in a dispute over land.¹¹⁸

Theological debates occurred less often in the provinces, but they did become a familiar feature of local life in the period between 1825 and 1830. Often lasting several days at a time, they provided an open forum for debates about Church structure and Church–State relations, as well as doctrine, and could involve some peculiar alliances. At one such debate that took place in Downpatrick in April 1828, for example, the subjects for discussion were ‘The right of Luther to Dissent from the General Church’, and ‘The alleged dependence of the Established Church of England and Ireland on the State’. The second topic, according to the Christian Examiner,

was one which afforded them [the Catholic priests] full scope for declamatory addresses to their own people; and it was one which they probably calculated that the Presbyterian part of the audience would be at least neutral, if not inclined to take their part. In fact, it was from the Presbyterian armoury that they took the greater part of their weapons, with which they carried on this part of the combat. Towgood’s Dissent Justified and Palmer’s Catechism which have been circulated pretty extensively through the north of Ireland were carefully studied and what appeared to be their strongest points were adopted in many cases verbatim.¹¹⁹

Besides the marathon debates lasting days at a time between clerical (and sometimes lay) representatives of the rival denominations, the regular scheduling of controversial sermons in Protestant churches appears to have become widespread during the late 1820s. One such series was begun at Ballymahon, County Longford, in the spring of 1827, which was said to have been ‘well attended by Roman Catholics’ and another at Newtownmountkennedy, County Wicklow, in December of the same year.¹²⁰ Even small-scale local venues were made use of to air the controversy. The diarist Humphrey O’Sullivan, for example, recorded an event that took place in County Kilkenny in a ‘poor school’ between a local priest, Fr Doran, and a Protestant minister, the Rev. Dobbin. According to O’Sullivan, ‘Fr. Doran gave enough to Mr. Dobbin.’¹²¹

The era of controversial sermons and debates was marked by increasing unity among different Protestant denominations. This was not especially remarkable among the Baptists and Congregationalists of the southern counties, who had a similar stake as the Church of Ireland in the Reformation crusade. But a new note was sounded, to the alarm of local Catholics, when the Presbyterian clergy of the northern counties began to take up the practice during the course of 1827.¹²²

The level of controversy in any given district was almost always a measure of the involvement of the local clergy—whether the Protestant minister was sympathetic to the evangelical cause, and whether his Catholic counterpart was willing to respond to the challenge. In some dioceses, such as Kildare and Leighlin, the priests were actually forbidden to attend controversial meetings.¹²³ In others they simply kept quiet, sometimes to the disappointment of the local Protestants. Writing from Cork in 1827, a correspondent of the dowager Countess Massereene regretted that there had not been any sectarian debate for several years ‘the R.C. clergy having declined it long since’. She occasionally attended the Bible society meetings in Kinsale, ‘which go on without any disputings, as our two quiet priests do not attend them’.¹²⁴

Indeed, the entertainment value was no small factor in the popularity of the theological disputes, and the rivalry inevitably tended to spill over into many other areas of popular culture. During the 1830s it began to appear that competition and controversy had become the preferred mode of discourse between the denominations, and this fashion embedded itself in Protestant–Catholic as well as Anglo–Irish relations. Theological differences were naturally at the centre of the division, and it followed as a matter of course that there was always a good market for controversial material, whether written or oral. If the public could not attend controversial sermons, the mass circulation of pamphlets and debates would sustain their interest. The mixture of religion, politics, popular entertainment and profit was marvellously captured in a squib published by Richard Lalor Sheil (originally a playwright of some talent) about the attempts to perform an exorcism on Archbishop Magee at Clongowes Wood College, to rid him of the ‘devil of polemics’—a task even the Jesuits were unable to accomplish (see appendix B).

The output of propaganda from the Catholic side seems generally to have been lower than that of the evangelicals. The main reason for this was that the hierarchy, through the priests, had direct access to the mass of the Catholic population. Episcopal guidelines on any matter of controversy could be read from the altar on Sunday. Such dictates, of course, could always be supplemented by the priests’ own advice on the most effective deterrents to be used against Bible preachers. The example to which evangelical apologists loved to refer in this regard was the advice that homeowners should always keep on hand a pot of boiling water with which to douse the missionaries before they could cross the threshold.

Since it was the evangelicals who were engaged in a missionary endeavour, it might be expected that they would tout statistics of converts, school enrolments, and other indictors of their progress. Catholics, however, were not slow in responding with their own figures on the number of converts from Protestantism. ¹²⁵ No other aspect of the religious conflict gave rise to such distortions of reality or indeed, in many instances, to severe personal psychosis.

Nineteenth-century Irish history is strewn with cases of people ‘jumping’ from one religion to the other and often back again. Consider the case of Margaret Anna Cusack (a niece of the rabidly anti-Catholic Rev. William Stoney of Newport, County Mayo), who converted to Catholicism, took religious vows, gained prominence in the latter part of the century as the eccentric Nun of Kenmare and ended her days back in the Protestant fold.¹²⁶ A milder but more significant case was that of Catherine McCauley, a young woman from a mixed background who was raised in a Protestant household. Her anger at the prejudice against Catholicism she saw exhibited by her Protestant relatives inspired her to found the Sisters of Mercy, a religious order dedicated to the education of the poor in direct imitation of a Protestant ladies’ organization with an emphasis on ‘lack of ceremony’ and dedication to the ‘useful’ works of nursing and teaching.¹²⁷

The distortion of reality went much wider than the individual cases mentioned above. If Catholic opinion on the subject were to be accepted at face value, the evangelical mission, aside from its negative impact on sectarian relations, amounted to nothing more than what William Conyngham Plunket had called it in 1827 in the House of Commons: ‘the merest chimera that ever bewildered the mind of man’. Meanwhile the evangelicals were predicting a rout of popery in the outlying and impoverished regions of Connaught and Munster. Neither side, as it turned out, was correct in its assessment of the situation. So deep-seated was the division between them, however, that neither could appreciate that the other had some grounds for adhering to its beliefs.

Notes

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).