Lord Castlereagh was now advanced an important step in public life. Mr Pelham, who from ill health had long been an absentee, resigned his office. The services of his manly and intelligent substitute had been too prominent to be overlooked. A not less trying scene of ministerial courage and ability was about to open, in the proposal of the Union; and no man could compete with him who had extinguished the rebellion.
A letter from his friend Lord Camden (November 1798) thus announced the appointment:—"Dear Castlereagh,—I am extremely happy to be informed by Mr Pitt that the wish of the Lord-lieutenant that you should succeed Mr Pelham (since he has relinquished the situation of secretary) has been acceded to by the King and his ministers; and that the consent of the English government has been communicated to Lord Cornwallis."
On the 22d of January, a message to the English House of Commons was brought down, recommending the Union, on the ground of "the unremitting industry with which the enemies of the country persevered in their avowed design of separating Ireland from England." On the 31st, Pitt moved eight resolutions as the basis of the measure. Sheridan moved an amendment, which was negatived by one hundred and forty to fifteen votes. In the Lords, the address in answer to the message was carried without a division. It was clear that the question in England was decided.
In Ireland the discussion was more vehement, and more protracted; but the decision was ultimately the same. Parliament went the way of all criminals. It must be allowed, that its scaffold was surrounded with popular clamour, to an extraordinary extent. It faced its fate with national haughtiness, and vigorously proclaimed its own virtues to the last. But, when the confusion of the scene was over, and the scaffold was moved away, none lingered near the spot to wring their hands over the grave.
The unquestionable fact is, that there was a national sense of the unfitness of separate legislatures for two countries, whose closeness of connexion was essential to the existence of both. The Protestant felt that, by the fatal folly of conceding votes to the popish peasantry—votes amounting to universal suffrage—parliament must, in a few years, become popish in all but the name. The landlords felt that, the constant operation of party on the peasantry must rapidly overthrow all property. The still more enlightened portion of society felt that every hour exposed the country more perilously to civil commotion. And even the narrowest capacity of judging must have seen, in the smoking harvest, ruined mansions, and slaughtered population of the revolted counties, the hazard of trusting to a native parliament; which, though it might punish, could not protect; and which, in the hour of danger, could not stir hand or foot but by the help of their mighty neighbour and fast friend.
If, in the rebellion, a wall of iron had been drawn round Ireland, and her constitution had been left to the defence furnished by her parliament alone, that constitution would have been but a cobweb; parliament would have been torn down like a condemned building; and out of the ruins would have been instantly compiled some grim and yet grotesque fabric of popular power—some fearful and uncouth mixture of legislation and vengeance: a republic erected on the principles of a despotism; a temple to anarchy, with the passions of the rabble for its priesthood, and the fallen heads of all the noble, brave, and intellectual in the land, for the decorations of the shrine.
The cry of Repeal has revived the recollection of the parliament; but the country has refused to recognise that cry as national, and even the echo has perished. It was notoriously adopted, not for its chance of success, but for its certainty of failure. It was meant to give faction a perpetual pretext for mendicancy. But the mendicant and the pretext are now gone together. A few childish people, forgetting its uselessness and its errors, alone continue to whine over it—as a weak parent laments the loss of a son whose life was a burden to him, and whose death was a relief. The Union was one of the highest services of Lord Castlereagh.
In corroboration of those sentiments, if they could require any, it is observable how rapidly the loudest opponents of the measure lowered their voices, and adopted the tone of government. Plunket, the ablest rhetorician of the party—who had made his opposition conspicuous by the ultra-poetic extravagance, of pledging himself to swear his sons at the altar, as Hamilcar swore Hannibal to Roman hostility—took the first opportunity of reconciling his wrath to office, and settled down into a chancellor. Foster, the speaker, who had led the opposition, received his salary for life without a pang, and filled the office of chancellor of the Irish exchequer. Bushe, the Cicero of the house, glowing with oratorical indignation, condescended to be chief-justice. All the leaders, when the battle was over, quietly slipped off their armour, hung up sword and shield on their walls, put on the peace costume of handsome salary, and subsided into title and pension.
No one blamed them then, nor need blame them now. They had all been actors—and who shall reproach the actor, when the lamps are put out and the audience gone, for thinking of his domestic meal, and dropping into his bed? Nature, like truth, is powerful, and the instinct of the lawyer must prevail.
One man alone "refused to be comforted." Grattan, the Demosthenes of Ireland, for years kept, without swearing it, the Carthaginian oath, which had slipped out of the mind of Plunket. He talked of the past with the rapt anguish of a visionary, and eschewed human occupation with the rigid inutility of a member of La Trappe. Grattan long continued to linger in Ireland, until he was hissed out of his patriotic romance, and laughed into England. There, he found, that he had lost the better part of his life in dreams, and that the world demanded evidence that he had not lived in vain. Fortunately for his own fame, he listened to the demand; forgot his sorrows over the dead in the claims of the living; threw in his share to the general contribution of the national heart against the tyranny of Napoleon; and by some noble speeches vindicated the character of his national eloquence, and left an honourable recollection of himself in that greatest temple of fame and free minds which the world has ever seen—the parliament of England.