Disappointed of aid from France, the rebellion took the field by itself. There was a great rising in Wexford, headed by Father Murphy, a fighting priest, a compound of Wat Tyler and John Ball, who gave himself out as a supernatural personage, and persuaded the people that he could catch bullets in his hands. The father showed a natural genius for war. His peasants fought desperately, and the Irish pike proved a formidable weapon in their hands. The rebels gained one or two successes in the field, and took the city of Wexford. They perpetrated fiendish cruelties. At Scullabogue they burned or butchered a barn full of Protestants. At Wexford they dragged their prisoners to the bridge, stripped them naked, hoisted them up on the points of their pikes, and threw them into the river. At Vinegar Hill, a name of ghastly memory, the rebel headquarters, a batch of Protestants was every day brought out after a mock trial to be massacred. The people being here under priestly leadership, the character of a religious crusade was given to their warfare, and every Protestant was a mark for their murderous fury. On the other hand, Protestants in the north who at the outset had been revolutionary, seeing the rebellion assume the character of a Catholic crusade, passed to the side of government and repression. One or two men of property were forced into leadership by the rebels; otherwise property was entirely on the side of the government.
After Scullabogue, Wexford, and Vinegar Hill, there could not fail to be a terrible outpouring of vengeance. It came in full measure, as we learn from the correspondence of Cornwallis, a soldier of high distinction and character, who was sent in place of Camden as viceroy to close the scene. He is much afraid, he says, that any man in a brown coat who is found within several miles of the field of action is butchered without discrimination. The Irish militia, he says, are totally without discipline, contemptible before the enemy when any serious resistance is made to them, but ferocious and cruel in the extreme when any poor wretches either with or without arms come within their power. In short, murder appears their favourite pastime. The conversation of the principal persons of the country all tends to encourage the system of blood, and the conversation even at his own table, where he does all he can to prevent it, always turns on shooting, burning, hanging. If a priest has been put to death, the greatest joy is expressed by the whole company. “Who fears to speak of ’98?” said a patriot bard in other days. The answer is, every one who is not utterly lost to reason and humanity. These militia men, it is to be borne in mind, were Irish, not English, and their murderous enmity was the enmity of one section of Ireland to another.
XII
Pitt now resolved on a legislative union of Ireland with England and Scotland, thus reverting to the policy of the Commonwealth. But union had been the ideal of Molyneux, and since the revolution of 1782 it had found many advocates, among them Adam Smith. An Irish government of sectarian ascendancy and oligarchy combined, controlled, and held in precarious subordination to the government of Great Britain by intrigue and corruption, had ended in murderous and ruinous conflict of political parties, social classes, and religious sects. In its realm people had been refusing to eat pork because the swine might have fed on human flesh. Foreign invasion had been invited. It had come, and only by repeated miracles had Great Britain as well as Ireland been saved in the last extremity of peril. Nor had that peril ceased. It was much to be deplored that Pitt could not, like Cromwell and the Council of State, effect the union by simply calling representatives of Ireland to the Parliament at Westminster. Situated as Pitt was, he had, as Castlereagh laconically put it, “to buy the fee simple of Irish corruption.” The price he paid was compensation in money to the owners of pocket boroughs and profuse grants of peerages. The process was not edifying. Cornwallis, who had come at once to put an end to havoc and to carry the union, having a strict sense of honour, might well recoil from his task. Bribery with money has not been brought home to the government, though in one case at least it has been brought home to the opposition. From that stain the union is free. A pretty large sum was needed to tune the press and for campaign expenses. Pocket boroughs in those days were deemed property, and had been so treated in Pitt’s Reform Bill for England. The compensation paid the owners of boroughs was not above the market price, and it was paid to the opponents as well as to the supporters of the union; Lord Downshire, the most powerful opponent of the union, as it happened, receiving the largest sum of all. Foster, who made the greatest speech in Parliament against the union, received seventy-five hundred pounds for his half share of a pocket borough. In the absence of such compensation the owners of pocket boroughs and the purchasers of seats for them would have been virtually bribed by their private interest apart from any political consideration to oppose the bill. Something was needed to induce a powerful and selfish oligarchy to part with the field of its ascendancy and its ambition. For that purpose the lavish creation of peerages was used. It cost the nation nothing, and titles which had been openly used as bribes were not capable of much degradation. Pitt is upbraided for not having taken the sense of the nation by means of a general election. The sense of a nation of which at least three-quarters were not eligible to Parliament! The sense of the proprietors of nomination boroughs on the question of depriving them of their property and its influence! The sense of a nation, the passions of which had not had time to cool after a furious civil war, a civil war the ashes of which still fiercely glowed and might by the excitement of a general election have been fanned again into a flame! It is ever to be lamented that the thing could not have been done in a simpler and less questionable way. But it had to be done. Venality was venal, and, its consent being necessary to the salvation of the state, had to be bought. The purity of Pitt’s motives or of those of his colleagues cannot be questioned. The idea that he had provoked rebellion to make way for union is a slander which only political frenzy could fabricate or believe.
What was the feeling in Ireland at large it is very hard to determine. There were addresses and declarations on both sides, but we cannot tell how they were got up. Cornwallis made a canvassing tour. His opinion at first was that Dublin was furiously opposed but the rest of the country was favourable. This estimate changed as the struggle went on. Dublin, of course, was the centre of excitement. At the outset it was the scene of a riot. The capital could not like to lose the seat of government and the social centre; nor could the Irish bar like the transfer of the supreme jurisdiction to Westminster, or the severance of the Parliamentary from the forensic career; the two, while Parliament sat in Dublin, having been habitually, and often brilliantly, combined. Cork, on the other hand, was flattered with the prospect of becoming a second Glasgow. It seems strange that the Orangemen should then have been against the union, of which they have since been the staunchest supporters. But they no doubt scented the approach, with the union, of Catholic emancipation. The Catholic hierarchy, headed by Archbishop Troy, was strongly for the union, and unquestionably drew with it a large following both of clergy and laity. The hope was undoubtedly held out of Catholic emancipation, possibly accompanied by a provision for the Catholic priesthood, as a sequel to the union; though no positive pledge was or could be given. At the same time it is to be borne in mind that the general sympathy of a Catholic priesthood would be with the British government as the chief antagonist of an atheist France. The terrible tension of ’98 had probably been followed in many quarters by collapse and readiness to acquiesce in anything that could hold out to life and property the protection of a strong government. The “Annual Register” for 1802 says that at the first election of Irish members to the United Parliament no supporter of the union lost his election or was even upbraided on that account; that in the county of Dublin alone did a candidate think his opposition to the union such a claim to popular favour as to make it worth his while to allude to it; and that some of the largest and most independent counties returned strong supporters of the union. Cornwallis reports that in Dublin, the chief centre of opposition, when at last the royal assent was given to the bill, not a murmur was heard nor, as he believed, was there any expression of ill-humour throughout the whole city.
The Established Church of Ireland would be willing to support a measure which, by identifying it with the English establishment, converted it from the Church of a small minority into a limb of the Church of a great majority, thus giving it a tenable ground of existence and a pledge of support which it fondly hoped would never fail.
The campaign of opinion, at all events, was conducted on both sides with perfect freedom. There is no pretence for alleging that the union was carried by military force. The affair at Dublin was a street riot, for the repression of which it was necessary to call in the troops. Nothing like military terrorism in fact is alleged. Twelve months before the passing of the union, and in the middle of the struggle, Cornwallis said that “the force remaining in Ireland was sufficient to maintain peace, totally inadequate to repel foreign invasion.”
There were historic debates in the Irish Parliament. Grand speeches were made in the nationalist and patriotic vein by opponents of the union. Grattan, the author of the constitution of 1782, came in his volunteer uniform to bedew its hearse with his oratoric tears. The dramatic effect was enhanced by the bodily infirmity of the great patriot and orator, which obliged him to speak sitting. Plunket put forth to the utmost those powers of debate which led Lord Russell to pronounce him of all the many speakers whom he had heard the most convincing. Foster produced a profound effect by his mastery of commercial and financial detail, though in this part of the field he had to contend with the supreme and unclouded judgment of Adam Smith left on record in favour of union. As strong an argument as any was that Ireland would be in danger of losing her leading men, who would be drawn away to England. But absenteeism was already rife, and was likely to be in the main diminished rather than increased by any measure which made Ireland a happier abode. To the spirit of nationality telling appeals could not fail to be made; but to what the nationality amounted, whether it was nominal or real, of the heart or merely of local boundary, had with terrible clearness appeared. In the speeches of the opposition there seems to have been much more of political argument of a general kind and of patriotic sentiment than of reference to the actual working of the Constitution of 1782 and the consequences to which it had led.