A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV

by Justin McCarthy; Justin H. McCarthy

When the rebellion was put down the Government of King George the Third abolished the Irish Parliament, and then all loyal and sensible persons in Westminster assumed, of course, that there was an end of the matter. The rebellion had been put down, the principal rebels had been done to death, Grattan's troublesome and tiresome Parliament had been extinguished, Ireland had been merged into complete identification with England, and surely nothing would be heard of the Irish question any more. Yet the Irish question seemed to come up again and again, and to press for answer just as if answer enough had not been given already. There was a clamor about Catholic Emancipation, and at last the Irish Catholics had to be emancipated from complete political disqualification, and their spokesman O'Connell had been allowed to take his place in the House of Commons. Sir Robert Peel had carried Catholic Emancipation, for, although a Tory in many of his ways of thinking, he was a statesman and a man of genius; and now Lord Grey, the head of the Whig Government, had no sooner passed the Reform Bill than he found himself confronted with the Irish question in a new shape. We could hardly wonder that Sir Robert Peel or Lord Grey did not try to inform their minds as to Irish national feeling through a study of "Dark Rosaleen," for the good reason that no such poem had yet been given to the world. But neither Peel nor Grey was a type of the average Englishman of the times, and each had gradually borne in upon him, by a study of realities if not of poetic fancies, that the national sentiment of the Irishman was not to be eradicated by any Act of Parliament for his denationalization. Lord Grey, as the friend and pupil of Fox, who had always been the friend of Ireland, must have acquired, as a part of his early political training, the knowledge that Ireland's grievances were not all {207} sentimental, and that if they were to be dealt with by Acts of Parliament these Acts must take the part of relief and not of repression. It may well be questioned whether any population is disturbed for very long by mere sentimental grievances, and it may be doubted also whether the true instinct of statesmanship does not always regard the existence of what is called a sentimental grievance as the best reason for trying to find out whether there is not some practical evil at the root of the complaint. Certainly, in Lord Grey's time, the grievances were open and palpable enough to have attracted the attention of any man whose mind was not as well contented with the wisdom of his ancestors as that of King William himself.

Just at this time, as we have seen, a school of Englishmen was springing up: Englishmen whose minds were filled with new ideas, and who thoroughly understood the tendencies of the reforming age to which they belonged. The Irish tithe question had come up for settlement. The Irish tithe question was only a part of the Irish State Church question. The Irish State Church was an institution bestowed upon Ireland by her conquerors. Five-sixths, at least, of the population of Ireland belonged to the Church of Rome and were devoted to the religion of that Church. The island was nevertheless compelled to maintain the State Church, which did not even represent the religious belief of the one-sixth of the population that was not Roman Catholic. One of the privileges of the State Church was to exact tithes from all the farmers of the country for the maintenance of its clergymen. Ireland was almost altogether an agricultural country, and had but little to do with manufacturing industry, and in three out of the four provinces of Ireland the farmers, almost to a man, held to the religion of their Catholic forefathers and worshipped only at the altars of their faith. It would be seen, therefore, that the imposition of tithes for the support of the State Church ministers was not merely a sentimental grievance, but a very practical grievance as well. It was practical because it exacted the payment of a tribute which the farmer believed he ought not to be called {208} upon to pay, and it was sentimental because, while it extorted the money from the farmer's pocket, it also insulted his nationality and his faith.

[Sidenote: 1832—Difficulty in collecting the tithes]

The result was that a sort of civil war was perpetually going on in Ireland between those who strove to collect the tithes and those from whom the tithes were to be collected. The resistance was sometimes of the fiercest character; the farmers and their friends resisted the forces sent by the Government to seize the cattle of those who refused to pay, as if they were resisting an army of foreign invaders. Blood was shed freely and lavishly in these struggles, and the shedding of blood became so common that for a while it almost ceased to be a matter of public scandal. Sydney Smith declared that the collection of tithes in Ireland must have cost in all probability about one million of lives. Police, infantry, and dragoons were kept thus in constant occupation, and yet it could not possibly be contended that those who claimed the tithes were very much the better for all the blood that was shed on their behalf. For when a farmer's cattle had been seized by the police after an obstinate fight with the farmers and their friends, and when the cattle had been driven off under the escort of infantry and cavalry soldiers, the clergyman who claimed the tithes was not always any nearer to the getting of that which the law declared to be his own. The familiar proverbial saying about the ease with which a horse may be brought to the water and the difficulty there may be in getting him to drink when he has been brought there was illustrated aptly and oddly enough in the difference between seizure of the farmer's cattle and the means of raising any money on them when they had been seized. The captured cattle could not in themselves be of much use to the clergyman who claimed the tithes, and they would naturally have to be sold in order that he might get his due, and the question arose who was to bid for them. All the farmers and the peasantry of the country were on the one side, and on the other were the incumbent, a few of his friends, and the military and police. It was certain that the soldiers and the policemen would not bid for the cattle, and probably {209} could not pay for them, and the population of the district would have made the place very uncomfortable for any of the clergymen's friends who showed an anxiety to buy up the impounded beasts. In some cases when cattle were sold by public auction no bidder ventured to come forward but the farmer himself who owned the cattle, and they had to be knocked down to him at a purely nominal price because there was no possible competitor. The farmer drove home his beasts amid the exultation of the whole neighborhood, and the clergymen was as far off his tithes as ever. The passive resistance in fact was harder to deal with, as far as practical results went, than even the resistance that was active. Summon together by lawful authority a number of soldiers and police, and it is easy to shoot down a few unarmed peasants, and to dispose for the hour of popular resistance in this prompt and peremptory way. But what is to be done when the resistance takes the form of a resolute organized refusal to pay up the amounts claimed or to offer any price for the cattle seized in default of payment? There were in every district numbers of quiet Catholic parishioners who would much rather have paid their share of the tithes to the Protestant clergymen than become drawn into quarrels and local disturbances and confusion. But such men soon found that if they paid their tithes they put themselves in direct antagonism to the whole mass of their Catholic neighbors. Intimidation of the most serious kind was sometimes brought to bear upon them, and in any case there was that very powerful kind of intimidation which consists in making the offender feel that he has brought on himself the contempt and the hatred of nearly all his fellow-parishioners and his fellow-religionists. In those days it was not lawful to hold a public political meeting in Ireland, but there were anti-tithe demonstrations got up, nevertheless, over three parts of Ireland. These demonstrations took the outward form of what were called hurling matches, great rivalries of combatants, in a peculiar Irish game of ball. Each of these demonstrations was made to be, and was known to be, a practical protest against the collection of the tithes. {210} Whenever it became certain that the recusant farmer's cattle were to be seized, a great hurling match was announced to be held in the immediate vicinity, and the local magistrates, who perhaps had at their disposal only a few handfuls of police or soldiery, were not much inclined to order the seizure in the presence of such a cloud of witnesses. Nor would any Catholic parishioner who had quietly paid up his tithes without resistance have felt very comfortable if he had happened to come near the hurling field that day, and to hear the loudly expressed comments of his neighbors on his line of conduct. To make the troubles still deeper, it often happened that the claimant of the tithes was an absentee—the incumbent of many a parish in Ireland left his curate to look after his flock and his tithes alike—and the absentee was almost as much hated in Ireland as the tithe-collector.

[Sidenote: 1832—The tithe question in Parliament]

Now it must not be supposed that there were not many of the Protestant clergy in Ireland who utterly disapproved of the tithe system. One Protestant clergyman in England, from whom we have just quoted, the Rev. Sydney Smith, had denounced the system over and over again in language the most indignant and the most scornful that even his scathing humor could command. But there were numbers of Protestant clergymen in Ireland who saw and proclaimed its injustice and its futility. The Archbishop of Dublin declared that no Government could ever accomplish the collection of tithes in Ireland otherwise than at the point of the bayonet. Protestant country clergy often found that the very attempts to collect the tithes only brought increased distress and hardship upon themselves.

Many a poor Protestant clergyman saw the utter injustice of the system, and disliked and detested it almost as much as the Roman Catholics themselves could have done. There were many such men, too, who put up with miserable poverty rather than make any attempt to recover such an income by force. Great English speakers and writers were beginning to denounce the whole system. Macaulay stigmatized it as severely as Sydney Smith had done. George {211} Grote, the historian of Greece, who had then a seat in the House of Commons, had not only condemned it, but had condemned the whole State Church system of which it was only a part. In our own days the ordinary English reader finds it hard to understand how any such system could have been carried on under a civilized European Government. Such a reader will readily admit that Sydney Smith had not gone beyond the limits of sober assertion when he declared that "there is no abuse like it in all Europe, in all Asia, in all the discovered parts of Africa, and in all we have ever heard of Timbuctoo." The subject had been brought up in Parliament by some of the advanced reformers of the day, and, indeed, it was bringing itself before the notice of Parliament every week through the official reports of the disturbances which were taking place in various parts of Ireland.

The House of Lords had appointed a committee to inquire into the whole subject. The committee reported that a complete extinction of the tithe system was demanded, not only in the interests of Ireland but in the interests of the State Church itself, and suggested, as a means of getting out of the difficulty, that the tithes might be commuted for a charge upon land or by an exchange for an investment in land. This meant, in other words, that the collection of tithes should be devolved upon the landlord, leaving him to repay himself by a corresponding addition to the rent which he asked from his tenants. The House of Commons also appointed a committee to inquire into the subject, and the recommendation of that committee was in substance very much the same as the recommendation made by the committee appointed by the House of Lords.

The Government then took up the question, and in 1832 Lord Althorp announced that it was the intention of ministers to submit to the House of Commons a scheme of their own as a temporary settlement of the Irish tithe question, and out of which was to be developed, in time, a measure for the complete removal of the difficulty. A very brief description will serve to explain the nature of {212} this measure. The Government proposed to advance a certain sum of money for the relief of the tithe-owners who had not been able to recover what the law held to be their due, and in the meantime to apply themselves to the preparation of some scheme which might transfer the tithe burden from the occupiers to the owners of the land. The Government thus admitted that at the moment they did not see their way altogether out of the tithe difficulty, but promised to apply their minds to the discovery of some final and satisfactory settlement, and undertook until then to pay to incumbents the arrears of tithes, and to collect the money as well as they could from the indebted occupiers. In point of fact, Lord Althorp and his colleagues proposed to become the tithe-collectors themselves and to let any loss that might be incurred fall, for the time, upon the State and the national taxpayers. The plan was tried for a while, and we need hardly say that it proved altogether unsatisfactory. The Government had no better means of compelling the farmers to pay the tithes than those means which they had already vainly put at the disposal of the tithe-owners. The farmer who could not be coerced by the police and the military into settling his accounts with the incumbent was not likely to be any the more ready to pay up because the demand for payment was made by the Lord-Lieutenant.

[Sidenote: 1834—Henry Ward and the Irish Church]