CHAPTER LXI.
"NINETY-EIGHT."
[Sidenote: 1798—Irish Catholic disabilities]
England was not concerned merely with the successes of France upon the Continent, with the French power of resisting invasion and preserving its capital and its constitution. The time was at hand when England was to take the French Republic into consideration as a more active enemy, whose enmity might take effect and be a very serious menace at her own doors. The breath of the French Revolution was to Great Britain like that of a sudden storm which sweeps round some stately mansion and finds out all its weak places and shatters some of its outlying buildings, although it cannot unroof its firmest towers or disturb its foundations. The weakest spot in Great Britain, and indeed we might almost say in the whole British Empire, was the kingdom of Ireland. Ireland had for long been in a state of what might almost be called chronic rebellion against the rule of England. England's enemies had always been regarded as Ireland's friends by the Irishmen who claimed especially to represent the national aspirations of their country. This is a fact which cannot be made too clear to the minds of Englishmen even at the present day, for the simple reason that no one who is capable of forming a rational idea on the subject can doubt that where a government is persistently hated that government must have done much to deserve the hate.
It is not necessary here to undertake a survey of the many grievances of which Ireland complained under the rule of Great Britain. One grievance which was especially felt during the reign of George the Third came from the persistent refusal of the Hanoverian Sovereign to listen {307} to any proposals for the relief of the Roman Catholics from the civil and religious disabilities under which they suffered. The Catholics constituted five-sixths of the whole population of Ireland, and up to the time of the War of Independence in America no Catholic in Great Britain or Ireland could sit in Parliament, or vote for the election of a member of Parliament, or act as a barrister or solicitor, or sit on a bench of magistrates or on a grand jury, or hold land, or obtain legal security for a loan. No doubt the state of the penal laws as they then existed was mitigated when compared with that which had prevailed but a short time before, when an ordinary Catholic had hardly any right to do more than live in Ireland, and a Catholic priest had not even a legal right to live there. But up to the time when the growing principles of liberty manifested themselves in the overthrow of the feudal system in France the Catholics in Great Britain and Ireland were practically excluded from any approach to civil or religious liberty. Ireland had a Parliament, but it was a Parliament of Protestants, elected by Protestants, and it was in fact a mere department of the King's Administration. The American War of Independence suddenly awakened wild hopes in the breasts of all oppressed nationalities, and the Irish Catholic population was among the first to be quickened by the new life and the new hope. The national idea was not, however, at first for a separation from England. Ireland was then for the most part under the leadership of Henry Grattan, a patriot, statesman, and orator—an orator whom Charles James Fox described as the "Irish Demosthenes," and whom Byron glorified as "with all that Demosthenes wanted endued, and his rival and victor in all he possessed."
Grattan's purpose was not separation from England or the setting up of an independent republic. An Ireland enjoying religious equality for all denominations and possessing a Parliament thoroughly independent of that sitting at Westminster would have satisfied all his patriotic ambition. In fact, what Grattan would have desired for Ireland is exactly such a system as is now possessed by one {308} of the provinces of Canada or Australia. When the alliance between France and independent America began to threaten Great Britain, and the English Government practically acknowledged its inability to provide for the defence of Ireland, Henry Grattan, with other Irish patriots of equal sincerity, and some of them of even higher social rank, started the Irish Volunteer movement, to be a bulwark of the country in case of foreign invasion. When the Irish patriots found themselves at the head of an army of disciplined volunteers they naturally claimed that the country which was able to defend herself should be allowed also an independent Parliament with which to make her domestic laws. They obtained their end, at least for the moment, and at least to all outward appearance, and Grattan was enabled to declare that for the first time he addressed a free Parliament in Ireland and to invoke the spirit of Swift to rejoice over the event. Catholic emancipation, however, had not yet been secured, although Grattan and those who worked with him did their best to carry it through the Parliament in Dublin. The obstinacy of King George still prevailed against every effort made by the more enlightened of his ministers. Pitt was in his brain and heart a friend of Catholic emancipation, but he had at last given way to the King's angry and bitter protests and complaints, and had made up his mind never again to trouble his Sovereign with futile recommendations. It so happened that a new Viceroy sent over to Ireland in 1794, Earl Fitzwilliam, became impressed with a sense of the justice of the claims for Catholic emancipation, and therefore gave spontaneous and honorable encouragement o the hopes of the Irish leaders. The result was that after three months' tenure of office he was suddenly recalled, and the expectations of the Irish leaders and the Irish people were cruelly disappointed.
From that moment it must have been clear to any keen observer in Ireland that the influence of Grattan and his friends could no longer control the action of Irish nationalists in general, and that the policy of Grattan would no longer satisfy the popular demands of Ireland. Short {309} as had been the Irish independent Parliament's term of existence, it had been long enough to satisfy most Irishmen that the control of the King's accepted advisers was almost as absolute in Dublin as in Westminster. To the younger and more ardent spirits among the Irish nationalists the setting up of a nominally independent Irish Parliament had always seemed but a poor achievement when compared with the change which their national ambition longed for and which the conditions of the hour to all appearance conspired to render attainable. These young men were now filled with all the passion of the French Revolution; they had always longed for the creation of an independent Ireland; they insisted that Grattan's compromise had already proved a failure, and in France, the enemy of England, they found their new hopes for the emancipation of Ireland.
[Sidenote: 1791—The United Irishmen]
There were among the Irish rebels, as they were soon to declare themselves, many men of great abilities and of the purest patriotic purpose. Among the very foremost of these were Theobald Wolfe Tone and Lord Edward Fitzgerald. Both these men, like all the other leaders of the movement that followed, were Protestants, as Grattan was. Wolfe Tone was a young man of great capacity and promise, who began his public career as secretary to an association formed for the purpose of effecting the relief of the Roman Catholics from the civil and religious disabilities which oppressed them. This society, after awhile, was named the Association of United Irishmen. The United Irishmen were at that time only united for the purpose of obtaining Catholic Emancipation. The association, as we shall soon see, when it failed of its first object became united for other and sterner purposes. Wolfe Tone was a young man of a brilliant Byronic sort of nature. There was much in his character and temperament which often recalls to the mind of the reader the generous impulse, the chivalric ardor, and the impetuous eccentricity of Byron. Tone, as a youth, was a careless student, or, indeed, to put it more distinctly, he only studied the subjects he cared about and was in the habit of neglecting his {310} collegiate tasks until the hour arrived when it became absolutely necessary that he should master them enough at least to pass muster for each emergency. He was a keen and close student of any subject which had genuine interest for him, but such subjects were seldom those which had anything to do with his academical career. He studied law after a fashion in one of the London Inns of Court, and he was called to the Bar in due course; but he had no inclination whatever for the business of an advocate, and his mind was soon drawn away from the pursuit of a legal career. He had a taste for literature and a longing for travel and military adventure in especial, and for a time he lived a pleasant, free and easy, Bohemian sort of life, if we may use the term Bohemian in describing days that existed long before Henri Murger had given the word its modern application.
[Sidenote: 1763-89—Theobald Wolfe Tone]