Lord Edward Fitzgerald had escaped, and a reward of £1000 was put upon his head. On the 19th of May, only four days before the outbreak, he was arrested in an obscure lodging in Dublin, stabbed one of his captors in the struggle, was himself wounded, and died in prison of his wound.
During this most anxious period, the life of every leading member of government was in imminent peril. Plots were notoriously formed for the assassination of the commander-in-chief, and the chancellor; but Lord Castlereagh was obviously the especial mark for the conspirators. In scorn of this danger, he gallantly persevered; and, on the 22d of May, the very night before the commencement of the insurrection, he brought down to the House the following message from the Lord-lieutenant:—
"That his excellency had received information, that the disaffected had been daring enough to form a plan, for the purpose of possessing themselves, in the course of the present week, of the metropolis; of seizing the seat of government, and those in authority within the city. That, in consequence of that information, he had directed every military precaution to be taken which seemed expedient; that he had made full communication to the magistrates, for the direction of their efforts; and that he had not a doubt, by the measures which would be pursued, that the designs of the rebellious would be effectually and entirely crushed."
To this message the House of Commons voted an immediate answer,—"That the intelligence thus communicated filled them with horror and indignation, while it raised in them a spirit of resolution and energy." And, for the purpose of publicly showing their confidence and their determination, the whole of the Commons, preceded by the speaker and the officers of the House, went on foot, two by two, in procession through the streets, to the castle, to carry up their address to the Viceroy.
Lord Castlereagh, during this most anxious period, was in constant activity, keeping up the correspondence of his government with the British Cabinet and the generals commanding in Ireland. But, the correspondence preserved in the Memoirs is limited to directions to the military officers—among whom were the brave and good Abercromby, and Lake, Moore, and others who, like them, were yet to gain their laurels in nobler fields.
The rebellion, after raging for six weeks in the south, and exhibiting the rude daring of the peasantry, in several desperate attacks on the principal towns garrisoned by the army, was at length subdued by Lord Cornwallis; who, at once issuing an amnesty, and acting at the head of a powerful force, restored the public tranquillity. This promptitude was fortunate; for in August a debarkation was made by General Humbert in the west, at the head of eleven hundred French troops, as the advanced guard of an army. This force, though absurdly inferior to its task, yet, by the rapidity of its marches, and the daring of its commander, revived the spirit of insurrection, and was joined by many of the peasantry. But the whole were soon compelled to lay down their arms to the troops of the Viceroy. Scarcely had they been sent to an English prison, when a French squadron, consisting of a ship of the line and eight frigates, with 5000 troops on board, appeared off the northern coast. They were not left long to dream of invasion. On the very next day, the squadron under Sir John Borlase Warren was seen entering the French anchorage. The enemy were instantly attacked. The line-of-battle ship, the Hoche, with six of the frigates, was captured after a sharp cannonade; and among the prisoners was found the original incendiary of the rebellion, Wolfe Tone, bearing the commission of a French adjutant-general. On his trial and sentence by a court-martial in Dublin, he solicited to be shot as a soldier, not hanged as a felon. But there was too much blood on his head to alter the forms of law for a villain who had returned for the express purpose of adding the blood of thousands to the past. To escape being hanged, he died by his own hand, deplorably, but suitably, closing a life which honesty and industry might have made happy and honourable, by the last and only crime which he could have added to the long list of his treasons.
The administration of Lord Castlereagh was now to be distinguished by another national service of the highest order. The British government had been awakened, by the rebellion, to the necessity of a union. The object of the rebels was to separate the two islands by violence: the danger pointed out the remedy, and the object of government was to join them indissolubly by law. The measure had been proposed nearly a century before, by the peerage of Ireland themselves, then shrinking from a repetition of the war of James II., and the sweeping confiscations of the popish parliament. The measure was twice proposed to the British cabinet, in 1703 and 1707. But the restless intrigues of party in the reign of Anne occupied all the anxieties of a tottering government; and the men who found it difficult to float upon the surge, thought themselves fortunate to escape the additional gusts, which might come ruffling the waters from Ireland. The Volunteer armament, with the example of America, if not actually inflaming Ireland to revolution, yet kindling a beacon to every eye which sought the way to republicanism, again awoke the cabinet to the necessity of a union. The regency question, in which the Irish parliament attempted to divide, not only the countries, but the crown—placing one half on the head of the Prince of Wales, and the other half on the head of the King—again startled the cabinet. But, as the peril abated, the means of protection were thrown by. The hurricane of France then came, and dashed against every throne of Europe, sinking some, shattering others, and throwing clouds, still pregnant with storm and flame, over the horizon of the civilised world. But the vices of France suddenly extinguished the European perils of Revolution. The democracy which, proclaiming universal peace and freedom, had summoned all nations to be present at the erection of a government of philosophy, was seen exulting in the naked display of cruelty and crime. In place of a demigod, Europe saw a fiend, and shrank from the altar on which nothing was to be accepted but the spoil and agonies of man.
Those facts are alluded to, simply to extinguish the gross and common charge, that the British cabinet fostered the rebellion, only to compel the country to take refuge in the Union. It is unquestionable, that the wisdom of its policy had been a maxim for a hundred years; that the plan was to be found in the portfolio of every cabinet; that all administrative foresight acknowledged that the time must come when it would be inevitable, yet put off the hour of action; that it haunted successive cabinets like a ghost, in every hour of national darkness, and that they all rejoiced at its disappearance at the return of day. But when rebellion broke out in Ireland itself—when it was no longer the reflection from the glare of American democracy, nor the echo from the howl of France; when the demand of separation was made by the subjects of the British crown, in the sight of England—the necessity was irresistible. There was no longer any alternative between binding in fetters, and binding in law. Then the resolve of Pitt was made, and its performance was committed to the hands of a fearless and faithful man. Ireland was relieved from the burden of a riotous and impoverished independence, and England was relieved from the contemptible policy of acting by party, which she despised, and paying a parliament to protect a constitution.
But we must hasten to other things. There was, of course, an infinite outcry among all the tribes who lived upon popular corruption. In closing the gates of the Irish parliament, they had been shut out from the mart where they had flocked night and day to sell their influence, their artifices, and themselves. The voluntary slave-trade was broken up; and the great dealers in political conscience regarded themselves as robbed of a right of nature. The kings of Benin and Congo could not be more indignant at the sight of a British cruiser blockading one of their rivers. The calamity was universal; the whole body of parliamentary pauperism was compelled to work or starve. The barrister was forced to learn law; the merchant to turn to his ledger; the country gentleman, who had so long consoled himself for his weedy fallows, by the reflection that, if they grew nothing else, they could at least grow forty-shilling voters, found "Othello's occupation gone." The whole flight of carrion-crows, whom the most distant scent of corruption brought upon the wing; all the locust race, which never alighted, but to strip the soil; the whole army of sinecurism, the countless generation of laziness and license, who, as in the monkish days, looked to receiving their daily meal at the doors of the treasury, felt the sudden sentence of starvation.
But this, too, passed away. Jobbery, a more than equivalent for the exemption of the land from the viper, became no longer a trade; faction itself, of all existing things the most tenacious of life, gradually dropped off; the natural vitality of the land, no longer drained away by its blood-suckers, began to show itself in the vigour of the public mind; peace did its office in the renewal of public wealth, and perhaps the happiest years of Ireland were those which immediately followed the Union. If Ireland was afterwards overshadowed, the cause was to be found in that sullen influence which had thrown Europe into darkness for a thousand years.