BRITISH PREMIERS IN RELATION TO BRITISH CATHOLICS.
CONCLUDED.
Every step toward emancipation, however halting and feeble, was of great consequence, since it established a precedent—and precedents in England have often the force of law. Thus, the act fifth, George IV., chapter seventy-nine, permitted persons to hold office in the receipt of customs, without taking any oath but that of allegiance. This was a gain, trivial in itself, yet, under the circumstances, not to be despised. The same thing was true of Mr. George Bankes's bill, relieving English Catholics from penalty of double assessment of land-tax. It was introduced and passed in 1828. While recording Canning's services to the cause which Catholics had at heart, we must not forget to show how ready he was, on the other hand, to combine with his colleagues when Ireland had to be oppressed and persecuted. In 1825, they agreed, with one mind, to put down the Irish Catholic Association, because they saw how powerful an instrument it would become, in O'Connell's hands, for the attainment of freedom. The bill by which they suppressed it was called, by the Liberator, "the Algerine Bill." But in the same year an attempt was made, with very doubtful sincerity, to modify the maddening effect of this suppression by conferences with O'Connell, Sheil, and other lay Catholics of influence, by inducing them to assent to a proposal, made by way of compensation, for the pensioning of the Catholic clergy, and the disfranchisement of the forty-shilling freeholders.[187] These were to be "the two wings" of a Catholic relief bill, and to this offer O'Connell was induced to adhere. The measure was introduced by Sir Francis Burdett, in April, 1825. It passed the Commons by a considerable majority; and was then, as might have been expected, thrown out by the Lords, who were fortified in their opposition by the Duke of York. Thus the great work of emancipation was again postponed. Though there had been points in Canning's conduct which were displeasing to Catholics; though, with strange inconsistency, he resisted the repeal of the test and corporation acts, which by relieving dissenters would have relieved Catholics also; though he was sharply attacked by Brougham, and charged with pleading their cause without the smallest idea of success, and with betraying those whom he appeared to befriend, yet they listened with delight to his speech in behalf of their claims a few months before his death. They placed their confidence in him, and looked forward to his premiership as the season of their deliverance. But as Pitt had resigned office in consequence of his attachment to the Catholic cause, so it was Canning's fate also to taste the bitter fruits of befriending an oppressed and hated communion. The frowns of royalty, the fury of Tories, and the perfidy of Whigs, combined with the insidious growth of disease to bring him down to the grave harassed and worn.
A recess government followed. Lord Goderich had been a supporter of the Catholic claims; but mediocrity such as his could not be expected to hold its place long at the head of affairs, and still less to conduct a momentous and vital question to a happy issue. That question, like all others of equal magnitude, had to be settled out of parliament before it could be carried within its walls. The monster meetings assembled in Ireland at the call of O'Connell brought the matter to a crisis, and convinced all reasonable men that concession could not long be delayed. Yet the Duke of Wellington, who succeeded Lord Goderich in 1828, and Sir Robert Peel still ranged themselves on the side of the opponents of emancipation. The Lords, in the month of June, rejected a motion pledging them to a favorable consideration of the measure. Vesey Fitzgerald, however, an Irish liberal, was made president of the Board of Trade, and required, according to English law, to be reelected as member of parliament before he could hold his office in the government. It was a glorious opportunity for the Irish, and they embraced it manfully. At the suggestion of Sir David Roos, an Orangeman,[188] and of an intimate friend named Fitzpatrick, O'Connell proposed himself as a candidate for Clare, in opposition to the protégé of the government, Mr. Vesey Fitzgerald. In such a conflict the odds were all but desperate; yet O'Connell was victorious, although legally ineligible. He was declared duly returned; and he was the first Catholic elected by an Irish constituency since the reign of James II.
That election was, in effect, the triumph of emancipation. It sunk deep into the minds of the chiefs of the opposition. The greatest statesmen had long been wavering in secret. Lord Liverpool had been convinced some time before his death that the time for yielding the point was drawing nigh, and that he would soon have to support the Catholic claims, if not as a premier, at least as a peer. Sir Robert Peel had, in 1825, requested Lord Liverpool to relieve him of office on the ground that emancipation could no longer be deferred. Three years later, he announced to the Duke of Wellington his resolution to support the claims he had so long resisted, and declared that, in pursuit of that "great object," he was ready to sacrifice "consistency and friendship." Little did the majority, either of his friends or foes, imagine how deep a change his mind had really undergone.
It would hardly be too much to say the same of the duke. He was the only man in England who could carry emancipation, and the only man who did do it. He was that power in the state which the circumstance required. He accomplished in England, though with far different aims and feelings, what the lyre of Thomas Moore effected in Irish homes, and the eloquence of O'Connell on the fields of Tara and Clontarf. The test and corporation act being repealed, his way was cleared. Persons holding office under the crown were no longer obliged to qualify themselves by receiving the Lord's Supper in the Established Church. He began, therefore, by speaking on the Catholic claims with studied ambiguity. Though he declared that his opinions on this subject were as decided as those of any one in the house, he added that he should oppose emancipation until he should see a great change in the question. That change was fast coming over it. He knew that the Commons would then pass no very arbitrary laws; that they would not require candidates for a seat in parliament to take the oaths of allegiance and supremacy on the hustings; that without emancipation it would be impossible to disfranchise the forty-shilling freeholders; that others would be elected besides O'Connell; and that they could not be prevented from taking their seats and representing their constituents without a civil war. The duke, though a great general, was not a man of blood. He was not an impracticable man, though a Tory. He knew how to "take occasion by the hand," and to do that of which St. Philip Neri says there is not a finer thing on earth—make a virtue of necessity. He was influenced in the matter by no abstract principle of justice, no enthusiasm in favor of the oppressed, no sympathy with a proscribed faith; but he sincerely loved his country, and he came by degrees to feel convinced that her interests were consulted best by altering the basis of her constitution in church and state. He sought, indeed, securities from those whom he proposed to relieve, and he purchased at their hands the disfranchisement of the forty-shilling freeholders in Ireland; but, on the other hand, he was willing to endow the Catholic Church in the sister isle, and to apply three hundred thousand pounds per annum toward the payment of the priests. To this part of his plan Peel could not be induced to consent, and it was subsequently abandoned. Great as Wellington was in war, he was greater in peace—greater in his victory over Protestant prejudices, and as the champion of the rights of an injured people and a persecuted creed.
On the 5th of March, 1829, Sir Robert Peel (then Mr. Peel) brought forward a bill for the relief of Catholics. It was the bill long desired, clamored for, dreaded; which was to alter fundamentally the character of English law, and change the destinies both of England and Ireland. It was preceded by a bill finally suppressing the Catholic Association, at the very time when that association was being dissolved of its own accord. The mind of Peel had been long and anxiously engaged in the study of the question as regarded Ireland. Night and day he had been examining evidence, pondering the difficulties to be overcome, and the chances of success. It was the nature of his mind to work in secret, and to manifest the result only when it became absolutely necessary. During the period of transition he voted against Catholic emancipation, but did so with manifest repugnance. Whatever decision the house might come to, he said, he should give it his best acquiescence; and if the measure should be carried, he should use his earnest endeavors to reconcile Protestants to it. When it was proposed to admit Catholic lords into the upper house, he offered but slight opposition to the bill, nor did he object to granting English Catholics the same electoral rights as were enjoyed by their brethren in Ireland. His Tory friends were offended by his moderation; for they loved "the falsehood of extremes," and they could not comprehend his anxiety to promote education among the Catholic as well as among the Protestant part of the population. They would not recollect how many indications he had given of a possible change in his future conduct in reference to emancipation. They knew not, or they affected to forget, that two years before Canning died, he had expressed to Lord Liverpool his conviction that emancipation must pass, and had offered to resign. So long ago as 1821, he had declared, in reply to Plunket, that even if his own views prevailed, "their prevalence must be mingled with regret at the disappointment which he knew the success of such opinions must entail upon a great portion of his fellow-subjects." He should, he said, "cordially rejoice if his predictions proved unfounded, and his arguments groundless."
There were those who perceived the current his thoughts were taking, and among them was the Duke of Clarence, afterward William IV. One of the duke's sons told Cardinal Acton that, when he returned home one night from a very late division in the House of Commons, of which he was a member, he went to his father's dressing-room, and was asked by the duke how the division on emancipation had gone; and when he was told that the bill had been lost, the duke said,
"That rascal, Peel, will adopt emancipation, will carry it, and take the glory from us who have fought for it all our lives."[189]
No less remarkable were the words used by the Duke of Clarence when, at last, Wellington and Peel introduced, with all the weight of government recommendation, the great bill for Catholic relief. He wished, he said, that the ministers had been as united in 1825 as they proved in 1829. "It will be forty-six years next month," he added, "since I first sat in this house; and I have never given a vote of which, thank God! I have been ashamed; and never one with so much pleasure as the vote I shall give in favor of Catholic emancipation."