"When late a feminine magician,
Join'd with a brazen politician,
Expos'd, to blind a nation's eyes,
A parchment of prodigious size."
Coxe endeavors to exonerate Walpole from the disgrace attached to this business, by expatiating on Carteret's opposition to Walpole, an opposition which went so far as to attempt to injure the financial minister's reputation by fomenting jealousies and using the Wood patent agitation to arouse against him the popular indignation; but this does not explain away the fact itself. He lays some blame for the agitation on Wood's indiscretion in flaunting his rights and publicly boasting of what the great minister would do for him. At the same time he takes care to censure the government for its misconduct in not consulting with the Lord Lieutenant and his Privy Council before granting the patent. His censure, however, is founded on the consideration that this want of attention was injudicious and was the cause of the spread of exaggerated rumours of the patent's evil tendency. He has nothing to say of the rights and liberties of a people which had thereby been infringed and ignored.
The English parliament had rarely shown much consideration for Irish feelings or Irish rights. Its attitude towards the Irish Houses of Legislation had been high-handed and even dictatorial; so that constitutional struggles were not at all infrequent towards the end of the seventeenth and during the first quarter of the eighteenth century. The efforts of Sir Constantine Phipps towards a non-parliamentary government,[3] and the reversal by the English House of Lords of the decision given by the Irish House of Lords in the famous Annesley case, had prepared the Irish people for a revolt against any further attempts to dictate to its properly elected representatives assembled in parliament. Moreover, the wretched material condition of the people, as it largely had been brought about by a selfish, persecuting legislation that practically isolated Ireland commercially in prohibiting the exportation of its industrial products, was a danger and a menace to the governing country. The two nations were facing each other threateningly. When, therefore, Wood began to import his coin, suspicion was immediately aroused.
[Footnote 3: See Lecky's "History of Ireland," vol. i., p. 446, etc.]
The masses took little notice of it at first; but the commissioners of revenue in Dublin took action in a letter they addressed to the Right Hon. Edward Hopkins, secretary to the Lord Lieutenant. This letter, dated August 7th, 1722, began by expressing surprise at the patent granted to Mr. Wood, and asked the secretary "to lay before the Lord Lieutenant a memorial, presented by their agent to the Lords of the Treasury, concerning this patent, and also a report of some former Commissioners of the revenue on the like occasion, and to acquaint his Grace, that they concurred in all the objections in those papers, and were of opinion, that such a patent would be highly prejudicial to the trade, and welfare of this kingdom, and more particularly to his Majesty's revenue, which they had formerly found to have suffered very much, by too great a quantity of such base coin."[4] No reply was received to this letter.
[Footnote 4: "A Defence of the Conduct of the People of Ireland," etc., p. 6.]
Fears began to be generally felt, and the early murmurs of an agitation to be heard when, on September 19th, 1722, the Commissioners addressed a second letter, this time to the Lords Commissioners of His Majesty's Treasury. The letter assured their Lordships "that they had been applied to by many persons of rank and fortune, and by the merchants and traders in Ireland, to represent the ill effects of Mr. Wood's patent, and that they could from former experience assure their Lordships, it would be particularly detrimental to his Majesty's revenue. They represented that this matter had made a great noise here, and that there did not appear the least want of such small species of coin for change, and hoped that the importance of the occasion would excuse their making this representation of a matter that had not been referred to them."[5]
[Footnote 5: Ibid, pp. 6-7.]
To this letter also no reply was vouchsafed. In the meantime, Wood kept sending in his coins, landing them at most of the ports of the kingdom.
"Then everyone that was not interested in the success of this coinage," writes the author of the pamphlet already quoted, "by having contracted for a great quantity of his halfpence at a large discount, or biassed by the hopes of immoderate gain to be made out of the ruins of their country, expressed their apprehensions of the pernicious consequences of this copper money; and resolved to make use of the right they had by law to refuse the same".[6]