Irish History and the Irish Question

by Goldwin Smith

In Presbyterian Belfast, hatred of the State Church and the English government which supported it, bred by Episcopal intolerance, had developed, especially among the young men, into rationalism and acceptance of the doctrines, both religious and political, of Tom Paine. The connection of sympathy with the exiles in America had been kept up, and the spirit of the American was combined with that of the French Revolution. Thus was formed the circle of United Irishmen. The professed aim of this association, perhaps originally its real aim, was only the reform of Parliament. But it soon became revolutionary, aiming at independence of England and the foundation of an Irish republic, to be brought about by the aid of revolutionary France. Its soul was Wolfe Tone, a young man of talent, literary and practical, and of generous instincts, wild, dissipated, recklessly adventurous, burning with hatred of England. Other leading members of the circle were Jackson and Emmett. Most of the set were plebeian. But there was one recruit from the aristocracy, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, son of the Duke of Leinster, fired, like Lafayette, with the enthusiasm of liberty, but distinguished and made an object of sentimental interest only by his rank and by his tragical end.

The outbreak was now imminent. Grattan, with his few steadfast adherents, seceded from Parliament, where he had better have stayed to moderate as far as he could the fury of repression. This he owed to the country on which he had imposed the constitution of 1782, a system fraught, as he might have seen, with disruption and capable of being worked only as it had been worked, by Castle influence. The bond of loyalty to England, which was strong in his own breast, he assumed to be general. Neither he nor, with reverence be it said, Burke, excellent as the general principles of both might be, correctly read the situation, which was one of a very special kind. Burke’s letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe on the subject of religious emancipation is accounted one of the greatest of his works. But Fitzgibbon might with reason have replied to it that of the real Irish problem it offered no practical solution. It did not show how a national Parliament of Ireland, with a great Catholic majority, and uncontrolled by Castle patronage and influence, to which reform would have put an end, could be kept in secure harmony with the Parliament of Great Britain. Burke, however, now and then, glances timidly at the policy of union. Grattan could think of nothing but his two Parliaments linked by eternal affection. After Grattan’s secession, the oligarchy closed its ranks, and the Parliament thenceforth went thoroughly with the government, or even beyond it, in the policy of repression.

The Castle understood its danger. In Irish conspiracies the informer is never lacking. Besides, there were Catholics, who though patriots, wishing to avert civil war, communicated with the government, and furnished it with information for that purpose. Among these may fairly be numbered Arthur O’Leary, on whose connection with the government and acceptance of a small pension from it, lately revealed, prejudice pounces as a proof that the best reputed and most eminent of Irish Liberals was a rogue. Arthur O’Leary wrote well, and the spirit of his writings was thoroughly liberal as well as loyal. Nothing seems to have been expected of him beyond general information of Catholic tendencies and movements such as one who desired to avert civil war might honestly give. By its secret intelligence the government was enabled at a critical moment to seize some of the leaders of the conspiracy, while Lord Edward Fitzgerald met his death in resisting arrest.

The fire, smouldering everywhere, burst into a flame in Armagh, a Protestant district into which Catholics had intruded by outbidding Protestant holders of farms whose leases had expired. The Protestants, banding together under the name of Peep o’Day Boys, proceeded to oust the intruders, burning some of their houses. The Catholics combined for mutual protection under the name of Defenders. Outrages were committed on both sides. In a pitched battle, on a small scale, called the battle of the Diamond, the Catholics were worsted and a number of them were killed. Many Catholics were driven from their homes, and the fugitives spread through the country the belief that the Protestants were bent on extermination.

The United Irishmen, disciples of Tom Paine, cared nothing for the quarrels of sects. But disaffection of any kind was grist to their revolutionary mill. They coalesced with Defenderism, and by superior intelligence got control of the movement, which they organized as an expectant army of revolution. Their task was made easy by the habits of conspiracy formed among the peasantry in the agrarian war. There were secret oaths, passwords, military gradations of command. There were even reviews under pretence of digging the potatoes of patriots who were in prison. Everything was ready for a rising as soon as French succour should appear. All the blacksmiths were making pike-heads, the young trees were being everywhere cut down for the shafts. Muskets in plenty would come with the auxiliary army from France. Wolfe Tone had visited Paris, of which in its revolutionary phase he gives a lively picture, and received a promise of aid; Hoche, with whom he had an interview, being eager for the enterprise.

Among the people generally the rebellion was agrarian rather than religious, religious only as the Catholic peasantry believed that they saw in Protestantism a badge of general enmity. But that belief made the war between the sects internecine. It does not appear that any but a few of the lowest and coarsest of the priesthood took an active part in the rebellion. The order, as a whole, could hardly look with pleasure for the conquest of Ireland by an atheist revolution. The French, in fact, had they become masters of Ireland for a time, would probably in the end have found themselves there, as in Spain, confronted by a hostile priesthood carrying with it the people.

In the extremity of danger, surrounded by gathering rebellion, Castle government had now to strike or fall. It struck, practically proclaiming martial law. But it was without the only safe means of military repression. Of regular soldiers it had few. Those few behaved well. Some of them earned by their conduct the blessings of the people. But in the main repression had to be entrusted to yeomanry and fencibles, little controlled by discipline, and infected, as a militia is always apt to be, and as in this case they were in an extreme degree, by the passions of the hour. These men, sent forth to disarm the people, in their search for concealed arms burned, slew, pitch-capped, flogged without stint or mercy, and turned a great district of the north and midland into a hell. The people retaliated with equal atrocity where they had the power. A large number of suspects were arbitrarily shipped on board the fleet, where it was believed they helped by their infection to beget the mutiny at the Nore. Lord Moira, a patriot Irish nobleman, protested vehemently in the House of Lords, but his exaggeration and partiality broke the force of his appeal. To control the excesses of repression and restore military discipline, the gallant Abercrombie was put in command; but he lost his self-control, reviled the troops in an imprudent manifesto, broke with the government, and left matters worse than they had been before.

In Ulster, fraternities of strong Protestants, which had existed informally since 1689, were now formally organized as Orange Lodges. They embodied an intensely sectarian feeling and committed their share of outrages, but they lent the government powerful aid.

Conspicuous among the ruthless agents of repression was the head of the Beresfords, whose riding-house at Dublin was a daily scene of torture. Conspicuous also was Judkin Fitzgerald, the field of whose operations was Tipperary. Fitzgerald’s apologists plead that his policy was successful. It might be so, but the cause of public order does not gain in the end by outraging that law of natural justice on respect for which public order must ultimately depend. Fitzgerald, savagely flogging a man on whom he had found a note in the French language, which not knowing French himself he could not read, was presently assured by one who could read the note that it was perfectly harmless. He nevertheless continued the torture of the lash till the victim nearly expired. Such a case seems to defy apology. Fitzgerald, however, was not only protected from question by an Act of Indemnity, but rewarded with a title. On both sides all hearts were fired with the satanic madness of civil war.

French aid had been promised. To the unspeakable discredit of the British admiralty, it came. An expedition which had long been in preparation under Hoche was allowed to sail from Brest and unopposed to make the coast of Ireland at Bantry Bay. A storm which prevented a landing, the bad seamanship of the French, whose naval service had been shattered by the revolution, and the separation of the frigate which had the general on board from the rest of the fleet, saved Ireland from temporary conquest and Great Britain from the consequences of that disaster. It is remarkable that the peasantry in the neighbourhood of Bantry Bay received the soldiers of the government well and shared their potatoes with them. Was this loyalty or fear? Had the French landed, would the potatoes have been still more hospitably shared? An expedition afterwards fitted out in Holland, now a vassal of France, at the very crisis of the mutiny at the Nore, was weatherbound till the mutiny was over and was then crushed by Duncan at Camperdown. A small French force under Humbert afterwards landed, and at Castlebar put the militia to shameful flight. But it was presently surrounded by superior numbers and forced to surrender. There were still some faint demonstrations, in one of which the arch-enemy of England, Wolfe Tone, met his doom. He imprudently betrayed his identity to his captors. His French commission availed him not. He escaped the gallows by suicide. He was a genuine enthusiast, and he was at all events on one of the only two practicable lines of action. Separation was the sole alternative to union. But had Tone got the upper hand, with his fanaticism and a savage peasantry thirsting for Protestant and English blood at his back, the political millennium in Ireland, as in France, would have opened with a reign of terror.