CHAPTER V
More Persecution of Catholics Under George II—Secret Committee Formed—Snubbed by the Speaker—Received by the Viceroy—Anti-Union Riot in Dublin
THE Duke of Bedford became Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in 1757, and came as a “conciliator,” with a smile on his face “and a bribe in his pocket.” His mission was to “soften” the penal laws, which had again become too scandalous for the “liberal” and “civilized” reputation of England on the Continent. One Miss O’Toole, a Catholic, had been pressed by some Protestant friends to “conform” to the Established Church, so as to avoid persecution, and fled to the house of a relative named Saul, who resided in Dublin, in order to escape disagreeable importunity. Mr. Saul was prosecuted and convicted, under the penal code, and the judge who “tried” the case said, in his charge, that “Papists had no rights,” because the “law” under which poor Saul was punished “did not,” in the language of the court, “presume a Papist to exist in the kingdom, nor could Papists so much as breathe the air without the connivance of government!” This judge, harsh as his language may now seem, did not misstate the case, for such, indeed, was the barbarous “law of the land” at that period, and for a considerable time afterward.
The bigots in the Irish Commons, soon after the arrival of the Duke of Bedford in Dublin, had prepared a new and even more drastic bill of penalties against Catholics than already existed, and so intolerable were its proposals that several leading Catholics among “the nobility, gentry, and professional [clandestinely] classes” got together, and, after a time, formed, in out-of-the-way meeting places, the first “Catholic Committee” of Ireland—the precursor, by the way, of the many similar organizations conducted by John Keogh, Daniel O’Connell, and other Catholic leaders of succeeding generations.
The chief men of this committee were Charles O’Conor, the Irish scholar and antiquary; Dr. Curry, the historical reviewer; Mr. Wyse, a leading merchant of the city of Waterford; Lords Fingal, Devlin, Taaffe, and some others less known to fame. These amiable gentlemen were, at first, frightened by the sound of their own voices, but they gradually grew bolder, although they did not proceed far enough to bring down upon their heads the full wrath of “government.” Indeed, they were, on most occasions, obsequiously “loyal” to the “crown,” which meant the English king and connection. But the iron had entered their souls, and the stain of its corrosion lingered long in their veins. When the Duke of Bedford, by the instructions of the elder Pitt (Chatham), who acted for King George, informed the Irish Parliament that France contemplated a new invasion and called upon the Irish people to show their loyalty to the House of Hanover, Charles O’Conor drew up an abjectly “loyal” address, which was signed by 300 leading Catholics, and had it presented at the bar of the House of Commons (Dublin) by Messrs. Antony MacDermott and John Crump. The speaker, Mr. Ponsonby, received the document in dead silence, laid it on the table in front of him, and coolly bowed the delegation out. The Duke of Bedford, however, took “gracious” notice of the address, and caused his answer thereto, which was appreciative—England being then in mortal terror of the French—to be printed in the Dublin “Gazette,” which was the “government’s” official organ. And the poor Catholic gentlemen, who had signed the cringing document, went into convulsions of joy because of this “official recognition” of their slavish professions of “loyalty” to a foreign king, who cared less for them than for the blacks of the West Indies!
But Mitchel, the Protestant historian, who understood his country’s sad story better, perhaps, than any writer who ever dealt with it, makes for the Catholic committee this ingenious apology: “We may feel indignant,” says he, “at the extreme humility of the proceedings of the committee, and lament that the low condition of our countrymen at that time left no alternative but that of professing a hypocritical ‘loyalty’ to their oppressors; for the only other alternative was secret organization to prepare an insurrection for the total extirpation of the English colony in Ireland, and, carefully disarmed as the Catholics were [and still are], they, doubtless, felt this to be an impossible project. Yet, for the honor of human nature, it is necessary to state the fact that this profession of loyalty, to a king of England, was, in reality, insincere. Hypocrisy, in such a case, is less disgraceful than would have been a genuine canine attachment to the hand that smote and to the foot that kicked.”
But Bedford, in his policy of conciliation, had even a deeper motive than fear of France. The statesmen of England, jealous of even the poor and almost impotent colonial Parliament of Ireland, so early as 1759, contemplated that “legislative union,” which was to be effected in later times. Bedford’s design was the truly English one of arraying the Irish Catholics against the Protestant nationalists, who had, with England’s willing aid, so cruelly persecuted them. When this project got mooted abroad, the Protestant mob of Dublin—the Catholics were too cowed at the time to act, and their leaders were committed to Bedford by their address—rose in their might, on December 3, 1759, surrounded the Houses of Parliament and uttered tumultuous shouts of “No Union! no Union!” They stopped every member of Parliament, as he approached to enter the House, and made him swear that he would oppose the union project. They violently assaulted the Lord Chancellor, whom they believed to be a Unionist, together with many other lords, spiritual and secular, and “ducked” one member of the Privy Council in the river Liffey. The Speaker and Secretary of the House of Commons had to appear in the portico of the House and solemnly assure the people that no union was contemplated. Even this assurance did not quell the tumult, and, finally, a fierce charge of dragoons and the bayonets of a numerous infantry, accompanied by a threat of using cannon, cleared the streets. Following up the policy of “conciliation,” the Catholic leaders, with slavish haste, repudiated the actions of the Protestant mob, and thus produced a contemptuous bitterness in the Protestant mind, which aggravated the factious feeling in the unfortunate country. England’s work was well done. She had planted, as a small seed, the idea of absorbing the Irish Parliament some day, and was willing to let it take its own time to ripen into Dead Sea fruit for Ireland. The Catholic helot had been cunningly played off against his Protestant oppressor, and thus the subject nation had been made the forger of its own fetters—at least in appearance, although England was the real artificer. Many Catholics in humble life may have joined in the Dublin anti-union riots, but the Catholic chiefs, who had their own axe to grind, were resolved to appear “loyal”—all the more so because some of the Protestant leaders in the late disorders sought to fasten the responsibility on the members of the proscribed faith. The outbreak, as was well known, was mainly the work of the followers of Dr. Lucas, then in exile, but soon to be a Member of Parliament, and the fiercest opponent of a legislative union with Great Britain.
“It deserves remark,” says a historian of the period, “that on this first occasion, when a project of a legislative union was really entertained by an English ministry, the Patriot party which opposed it was wholly and exclusively of the Protestant colony, and that the Catholics of Ireland were totally indifferent, and, indeed, they could not rationally be otherwise, as it was quite impossible for them to feel an attachment to a national legislature in which they were not represented, and for whose members they could not even cast a vote.”
George II died of “rupture of the heart”—probably from the bursting of an arterial aneurism in that region—in 1760. He was never popular in England, because of his German ways and affections, and the Irish people regarded him with indifference. They had never seen him, and he was about as much of a stranger in his Irish realm as the Shah of Persia or the Khan of Tartary. His reign had lasted twenty-eight years, and, in all that period, the estimated population of Ireland—for there was no regular census—increased only 60,000. Presbyterian and Catholic emigration to the colonies—superinduced by the penal laws against both—was mainly the cause of this remarkable stagnation. There had been two famines also, and the victims of artificial scarcity—a condition produced by restrictions on trade and manufacture—were numerous.