AN attempt made in 1729 to place an extortionate estimate on the public expenses, and which emanated from “the Castle of Dublin,” had the effect of consolidating the Irish opposition in Parliament. These legislators protested in a dignified manner against extravagance in public expenditure. Under the administration of the Duke of Devonshire, in 1737, they set their faces against his method of corrupting the public conscience by a display of lavish generosity, which is always popular in a capital where trade depends to a great extent on courtly favor. The leaders in the House of Commons were Sir Edward O’Brien, of the House of Inchiquin; his son, Sir Lucius; the Speaker, Henry Boyle, and Mr. Anthony Malone, whose father had been an efficient ally of Sir Toby Butler, in defending Catholic rights under the articles of Limerick.
These gentlemen were ably assisted by Dr. Charles Lucas, who, although not a member of the House, possessed a vast outside influence, because of his great talent and moral worth. The doctor was also a druggist by profession, but could use a virile pen even better than he could a pestle and mortar. In 1741, he began hammering the government in public prints, on the lines of Molyneux and Swift, and with almost as great success. But “the Castle” censor came down upon him, and he was compelled to leave Ireland for a period. Like Swift, he was rather antagonistic to Catholic claims, but, as in the case of the great Dean, the Catholics forgave him because he was true to Ireland. After some years of exile, he returned to Dublin, was elected to Parliament, and became a leader of the Patriots in the House of Commons. In the House of Lords, the Earl of Kildare, afterward first Duke of Leinster, was the Patriot leader.
The famous Earl of Chesterfield became Viceroy of Ireland in 1745, and showed, from the first, a thorough disgust for the penal laws and the oligarchs who supported them. He connived at Catholic toleration to such an extent that he became an object of suspicion, if not of hatred, to the Ascendency faction. The government of England, with habitual cunning, had selected this finished courtier to rule in Ireland, because of disquieting rumors of an invasion of Great Britain contemplated by Charles Edward Stuart, son of “the Pretender,” James III. Also, about the same time, came the stirring news of the victory of the Irish Brigade, in alliance with the French, over the Duke of Cumberland’s column at glorious Fontenoy. “Accursed,” old George II is said to have exclaimed, on being told of the Franco-Irish victory, “accursed be the laws that deprive me of such soldiers!” But Chesterfield was, in reality, friendly to the Irish. He liked their wit and esprit and took no pains to conceal the fact, greatly to the disgust of the Ascendency clique. But Charles Edward’s attempt to recover the British crown utterly failed. Highland Scotland fought for him heroically. The Jacobites of England held, for the most part, aloof, and, beyond the officers of the Irish Brigade, who went with him from France, Ireland hardly furnished a man to aid his hardy and romantic enterprise—thus showing how completely her spirit was subdued during that momentous crisis. Charles Edward was a leader that, in the preceding century, the Irish would have been proud to follow. He was a great improvement on both his sire and grandsire, although he ended miserably, in his old age, a career begun so gloriously in his youth.
Chesterfield remained only eight months in his Irish office. He was recalled within ten days after the battle of Culloden. There was no further need, for the time being, to conciliate the Irish. The heir of the unhappy Stuarts was a houseless wanderer in the land over which his forefathers had reigned for centuries and their cause was hopelessly lost. The Earl and Countess of Chesterfield, on their departure from Dublin, received “a popular ovation.” They walked on foot, arm in arm, from the viceregal residence to the wharf, where lay the vessel that was to bear them back to England, and the warm-hearted, “too easily deluded people” prayed loud and fervently for their speedy return. They came back no more, but Chesterfield was enabled to assure George II, when he reached London, that the only “dangerous Papist” he had seen in Ireland was the lovely Miss Ambrose, afterward Mrs. Palmer, Dublin’s reigning beauty of the period. Chesterfield made much of her at “the Castle,” and laughed politely at the bigots who looked upon her as a species of Delilah. As Miss Ambrose enjoyed, also, the friendship of Lady Chesterfield, her enemies could evoke no scandal from the platonic intimacy. The earl’s mild, insinuating system of government had enabled him to spare four regiments from Ireland for service in Scotland, during the Jacobite insurrection. His “Principles of Politeness,” practically applied, were much more effective in the cause of the House of Hanover than all the repressive enactments of the vicious bigots of the party of Ascendency.
The last Jacobite expedition was organized in France, in 1759, and was under orders of an admiral named Conflans, who, when a short distance out from Brest, was encountered by an English fleet under Admiral Hawke and totally defeated. A wing of this expedition, under Commodore Thurot, whose real name was O’Farrell, did not arrive in time to take part in the battle, but succeeded in entering the British Channel without interruption. A storm arose which drove Thurot’s five frigates to seek shelter in Norway and the Orkney Islands, where they wintered. In the spring, one frigate made its way back to France. Another sailed with a similar object, but was never heard from afterward. The remaining three, under Thurot, made for the Irish coast and entered Lough Foyle, but made no attempt on Londonderry. They soon headed for Belfast Lough, and appeared before Carrickfergus about the end of February, 1760. Thurot demanded the surrender of the place, which was stoutly refused by the military governor, Colonel Jennings. The Franco-Irish sailor immediately landed his fighting men and took the town by a rapid and furious assault. Then he levied on the place for supplies and again put to sea. Off the Isle of Man he fell in with three newly commissioned ships of war under the English Commodore, Elliott. A sanguinary encounter followed. Thurot, alias O’Farrell, and three hundred of his marines and sailors were killed. The French vessels were fearful wrecks, and the victorious English towed them in a sinking condition into Ramsay. Thus terminated one of the most gallant naval episodes of the eighteenth century.
When the Earl of Harrington, afterward Duke of Devonshire, became Lord Lieutenant some time after the recall of Lord Chesterfield, the odious Primate Stone—accused both in England and Ireland of unspeakable immorality—ruled Ireland as completely as had his less filthy predecessor, Primate Boulter. Ireland, at the outset of the new régime, was astonished to find a respectable surplus in her treasury, and Lord Chesterfield, who always, while he lived, took a deep interest in Irish affairs, sent a congratulatory letter on the seeming prosperity of the country to his friend, the Bishop of Waterford. The Patriot party in the Commons, led by the sagacious and eloquent Malone, advocated the expenditure of the surplus on public works and needed public buildings throughout Ireland and in the capital. But Stone and the Castle ring fought the proposition bitterly, contending that the money belonged to the crown and could be drawn by royal order on the vice-treasurer, without regard to Parliament. When the Duke of Dorset succeeded Harrington as viceroy, in 1751, the question had reached an acute stage. Opposition to the royal claim on the Irish surplus had led to the expulsion of Dr. Lucas from Ireland. But Malone and Speaker Boyle kept up the fight in the Commons, and, after having sustained one defeat, on a full vote, finally came out victorious by having the supply bill, which covered all government service in the kingdom, thrown out by a vote of 122 to 117. Government showed its resentment by canceling Malone’s patent of precedence as Prime Sergeant, and striking Speaker Boyle’s name from the list of privy-councilors. This was outrageous enough, but what followed was still more so. The king (George II) by advice of Dorset, Stone, and their clique, overrode the action of the Irish Parliament and despotically, by operation of a king’s letter, withdrew the long-disputed surplus from the Irish national treasury. This crowning infamy was consummated in 1753, and so great became public indignation that Stone and the obnoxious ministers were mobbed, and the Duke of Dorset could not appear on the streets of Dublin without being hooted at and otherwise insulted. Anglo-Ireland seemed on the brink of revolution, but the popular leaders took a conservative attitude and thus avoided a violent crisis. Dorset, alarmed by the tempest he had himself created, virtually fled from Dublin, followed by the execration of the multitude. He left the government in the hands of three Lords Justices, one of whom was Primate Stone, whose very name was hateful to the incensed people.
The viceroy was followed to England by the popular leader of the Irish House of Lords, James Fitz-Gerald, 20th Earl of Kildare, who had married the daughter of the Duke of Richmond, and, consequently, had a powerful English backing. Kildare presented to King George, in person, a memorial in which he strongly denounced the misgovernment of Ireland by Dorset, Stone, and Lord George Sackville, Dorset’s intermeddling son. This memorial has been described as “the boldest ever addressed by a subject to a sovereign.”
Although Lord Holderness, an English courtier, in a letter to Chancellor Jocelyn, says that the bold Geraldine “was but ill-received and very coolly dismissed” by the king, Kildare’s policy soon prevailed in Ireland. Dorset was recalled in the succeeding year, and Primate Stone, with whom Kildare refused to act as Lord Justice, was removed from the ministry of Ireland.
The Duke of Devonshire, formerly Lord Harrington, or Hartington, succeeded Dorset, and immediately began the congenial work, to an English statesman, of breaking up, and rendering harmless, the Irish Patriot party. Boyle was made Chancellor of the Exchequer and was raised to the peerage as the Earl of Shannon, receiving also a pension of £2,000 per annum for thirty-one years. Malone would have accepted the Lord Chancellorship gladly, but was restrained by both private and public opinion from doing so openly. But Mitchel says that while Boyle remained nominal chancellor, Malone quietly pocketed the profits of the position, and his patriotic eloquence declined in proportion to the growth of his profits. Other leaders of the Patriot party were also “taken care of,” and England managed to get rid of one of her most troublesome “Irish difficulties.”
The purchased Patriots, however, may be fairly credited with having forced the beginning of the public works, such as canals and highways, in Ireland, and the construction of some of those splendid official edifices which still, even in their decay, “lend an Italian glory to the Irish metropolis.”