The Catholic delegates, Lord Killeen, Sir Thomas Esmonde, Lawless, and Shiel, were in London at the time the Duke of York made his memorable declaration. If, on the one hand, they were regarded with dislike amounting to hatred, on the other, they were welcomed with cordiality by all the leaders of the liberal party. The venerable Earl Fitzwilliam emerged from his retirement to do them honour; the gifted and energetic Brougham entertained them with all hospitality; at Norfolk House they were banqueted in the room in which George III. was born: the millionaire-demagogue Burdett, the courtly, liberal Lord Grey, and the flower of the Catholic nobility, were invited to meet them. The delegates were naturally cheered and gratified; they felt, they must have felt, that their cause had a grasp upon Imperial attention, which nothing but concession could ever loosen.
Committees of both Houses, to inquire into the state of Ireland, had sat during a great part of this Session, and among the witnesses were the principal delegates, with Drs. Murray, Curtis, Kelly, and Doyle. The evidence of the latter—the eminent Prelate of Kildare and Leighlin—attracted most attention. His readiness of resource, clearness of statement, and wide range of information, inspired many of his questioners with a feeling of respect, such as they had never before entertained for any of his order. His writings had already made him honourably distinguished among literary men; his examination before the Committees made him equally so among statesmen. From that period he could reckon the Marquises of Anglesea and Wellesley, Lord Lansdowne and Mr. Brougham, among his correspondents and friends, and, what he valued even more, among the friends of his cause. Mr. O'Connell, on the other hand, certainly lost ground in Ireland by his London journey. He had, unquestionably, given his assent to both "wings," in 1825, as he did to the remaining one in 1828, and thereby greatly injured his own popularity. His frank and full recantation of his error, on his return, soon restored him to the favour of the multitude, and enabled him to employ, with the best effect, the enormous influence which he showed he possessed at the general elections of 1826. By him mainly the Beresfords were beaten in Waterford, the Fosters in Louth, and the Leslies in Monaghan. The independence of Limerick city, of Tipperary, Cork, Kilkenny, Longford, and other important constituencies, was secured. The parish machinery of the Association was found invaluable for the purpose of bringing up the electors, and the people's treasury was fortunately able to protect to some extent the fearless voter, who, in despite of his landlord, voted according to the dictates of his own heart.
The effect of these elections on the empire at large was very great. When, early in the following spring, Lord Liverpool, after fifteen years' possession of power, died unexpectedly, George IV. sent for Canning and gave him carte blanche to form a cabinet without excepting the question of Emancipation. That high spirited and really liberal statesman associated with himself a ministry, three-fourths of whom were in favour of granting the Catholic claims. This was in the month of April; but to the consternation of those whose hopes were now so justly raised, the gifted Premier held office only four months; his lamented death causing another "crisis," and one more postponement of "the Catholic question."
CHAPTER VIII.
O'CONNELL'S LEADERSHIP—THE CLARE ELECTION—EMANCIPATION OF THE CATHOLICS.
A very little reflection will enable us to judge, even at this day, the magnitude of the contest in which O'Connell was the great popular leader, during the reign of George IV. In Great Britain, a very considerable section of the ancient peerage and gentry, with the Earl Marshal at their head, were to be restored to political existence, by the act of Emancipation; a missionary, and barely tolerated clergy were to be clothed, in their own country, with the commonest rights of British subjects—protection to life and property. In Ireland, seven-eighths of the people, one-third of the gentry, the whole of the Catholic clergy, the numerous and distinguished array of the Catholic bar, and all the Catholic townsmen, taxed but unrepresented in the corporate bodies, were to enter on a new civil and social condition, on the passage of the act. In the colonies, except Canada, where that church was protected by treaty, the change of Imperial policy towards Catholics was to be felt in every relation of life, civil, military, and ecclesiastical, by all persons professing that religion. Some years ago, a bishop of Southern Africa declared, that, until O'Connell's time, it was impossible for Catholics to obtain any consideration from the officials at the Cape of Good Hope. Could there be a more striking illustration of the magnitude of the movement, which, rising in the latitude of Ireland, flung its outermost wave of influence on the shores of the Indian ocean?
The adverse hosts to be encountered in this great contest, included a large majority of the rank and wealth of both kingdoms. The King, who had been a Whig in his youth, had grown into a Tory in his old age; the House of Lords were strongly hostile to the measure, as were also the universities, both in England and Ireland; the Tory party, in and out of Parliament; the Orange organization in Ireland; the civil and military authorities generally, with the great bulk of the rural magistracy and the municipal authorities. The power to overcome this power should be indeed formidable, well organized and wisely directed.
The Lord Lieutenant selected by Mr. Canning, was the Marquis of Anglesea, a frank soldier, as little accustomed to play the politician as any man of his order and distinction could be. He came to Ireland, in many respects the very opposite of Lord Wellesley; no orator certainly, and so far as he had spoken formerly, an enemy rather than a friend to the Catholics. But he had not been three months in office when he began to modify his views; he was the first to prohibit, in Dublin, the annual Orange outrage on the 12th of July, and by subsequent, though slow degrees, he became fully convinced that the Catholic claims could be settled only by Concession. Lord Francis Leveson Gower, afterwards Earl of Ellesmere, accompanied the Marquis as Chief Secretary.
The accession to office of a prime minister friendly to the Catholics, was the signal for a new attempt to raise that "No-Popery" cry which had already given twenty years of political supremacy to Mr. Perceval and Lord Liverpool. In Ireland, this feeling appeared under the guise of what was called "the New Reformation," which, during the summer of 1827, raged with all the proverbial violence of the odium theologicum from Cork to Derry. Priests and parsons, laymen and lawyers, took part in this general politico-religious controversy, in which every possible subject of difference between Catholic and Protestant was publicly discussed. Archbishop Magee of Dublin, the Rev. Sir Harcourt Lees, son of a former English placeman at the Castle, and the Rev. Mr. Pope, were the clerical leaders in this crusade; Exeter-Hall sent over to assist them the Honourable and Reverend Baptist Noel, Mr. Wolff, and Captain Gordon, a descendant of the hero of the London riot of 1798. At Derry, Dublin, Carlow, and Cork, the challenged agreed to defend their doctrines. Father Maginn, Maguire, Maher, McSweeney, and some others accepted these challenges; Messrs. O'Connell, Shiel, and other laymen, assisted, and the oral discussion of theological and historical questions became as common as town talk in every Irish community. Whether, in any case, these debates conduced to conversion is doubtful; but they certainly supplied the Catholic laity with a body of facts and arguments very necessary at that time, and which hardly any other occasion could have presented. The Right Rev. Dr. Doyle, however, considered them far from beneficial to the cause of true religion; and though he tolerated a first discussion in his diocese, he positively forbade a second. The Archbishop of Armagh and other prelates issued their mandates to the clergy to refrain from these oral disputes, and the practice fell into disuse.
The notoriety of "the Second Reformation" was chiefly due to the ostentatious patronage of it by the lay chiefs of the Irish oligarchy. Mr. Synge, in Clare, Lord Lorton, and Mr. McClintock at Dundalk, were indefatigable in their evangelizing exertions. The Earl of Roden—to show his entire dependence on the translated Bible—threw all his other books into a fish pond on his estate. Lord Farnham was even more conspicuous in the revival; he spared neither patronage nor writs of ejectment to convert his tenantry. The reports of conversions upon his lordship's estates, and throughout his county, attracted so much notice, that Drs. Curtis, Crolly, Magauran, O'Reilly, and McHale, met on the 9th of December, 1826, at Cavan, to inquire into the facts. They found, while there had been much exaggeration on the part of the reformers, that some hundreds of the peasantry had, by various powerful temptations, been led to change their former religion. The bishops received back some of the converts, and a jubilee established among them completed their reconversion. The Hon. Mr. Noel and Captain Gordon posted to Cavan, with a challenge to discussion for their lordships; of course, their challenge was not accepted. Thomas Moore's inimitable satire was the most effective weapon against such fanatics.
The energetic literature of the Catholic agitation attracted much more attention than its oral polemics. Joined to a bright army of Catholic writers, including Dr. Doyle, Thomas Moore, Thomas Furlong, and Charles Butler, there was the powerful phalanx of the Edinburgh Review led by Jeffrey and Sidney Smith, and the English liberal press, headed by William Cobbett. Thomas Campbell, the Poet of Hope, always and everywhere the friend of freedom, threw open his New Monthly, to Shiel, and William Henry Curran, whose sketches of the Irish Bar and Bench, of Dublin politics, and the county elections of 1826, will live as long as any periodical papers of the day. The indefatigable Shiel, writing French as fluently as English, contributed besides to the Gazette de France a series of papers, which were read with great interest on the Continent. These articles were the precursors of many others, which made the Catholic question at length an European question. An incident quite unimportant in itself, gave additional zest to these French articles. The Duke de Montebello, with two of his friends, Messrs. Duvergier and Thayer, visited Ireland in 1826. Duvergier wrote a series of very interesting letters on the "State of Ireland," which, at the time, went through several editions. At a Catholic meeting at Ballinasloe, the Duke had some compliments paid him, which he gracefully acknowledged, expressing his wishes for the success of their cause. This simple act excited a great deal of criticism in England. The Paris press was roused in consequence, and the French Catholics, becoming more and more interested, voted an address and subscription to the Catholic Association. The Bavarian Catholics followed their example, and similar communications were received from Spain and Italy.