The Story of Ireland: A History of the Irish People (26 page)

The decisive battle for the southeast took place at New Ross on 4 June. The rebels had attacked the town, but they were only lightly armed and were driven back with many killed: within twelve hours, fifteen hundred were dead. Corpses lay in the streets for days; one Protestant shopkeeper spoke of seeing straying pigs feasting on the dead. Later that day, rebels at Scullabogue burned to death a group of one hundred or so civilians – mainly, though not exclusively, Protestant – in a barn; those who tried to escape were hacked and bludgeoned to death. The failed rebel assault proved to be the turning point, ending hopes of breaking out of County Wexford in force. On 21 June, the rebel encampment at Vinegar Hill above Enniscorthy was surrounded and crushed with slaughter; many of the wounded were burned alive in their makeshift hospital.
¹¹
A belated uprising in Ulster in June was quickly mopped up with the assistance of the Orange Order; by the end of the summer, thirty thousand people had died. A second French force landed on the Mayo coast in the autumn and even succeeded in winning an engagement at Castlebar before its inevitable defeat: the French soldiers were handled appropriately as prisoners of war, but some two thousand of their Irish allies were executed.

Tone himself was captured on a French ship on Lough Swilly – close to the harbour at Rathmullan, from which Hugh O’Neill had set sail almost two hundred years before. Tone was sent to prison in Dublin and on 10 November 1798 was brought before a military tribunal, clad in his cherished uniform of an adjutant general of the French Republic: ‘a large and fiercely-cocked hat, with broad gold lace, and the tri-coloured cockade; a blue uniform coat, with gold embroidered collar, and two large gold epaulets; blue pantaloons, with gold-laced garters at the knees; and short boots, bound at the tops with gold lace’.
¹²
The trial was sensational – Tone was remembered affectionately by many Dubliners, regardless of their political views – and the defendant faced the judges as a proud revolutionary: ‘I mean not to give you the trouble of bringing judicial proof to convict me legally of having acted in hostility to the government of his Britannic Majesty in Ireland. I admit the fact. From my earliest youth I have regarded the connection between Great Britain and Ireland as the curse of the Irish nation, and felt convinced that, whilst it lasted, this country could never be free nor happy….’
¹³

That Tone would be sentenced to death was certain. But he wished fervently not to be hanged as a common criminal, rather to face a firing squad as a soldier. After all, he had defended himself as a soldier, citing the example of George Washington; and he had overtly rejected the sectarian lurch that the uprising had taken at Wexford, grieving that ‘any tyranny of circumstances or policy should so pervert the natural dispositions of my countrymen…for a fair and open war I was prepared; if that has degenerated into a system of assassination, massacre and plunder I do most sincerely lament it…’.
¹⁴
Tone’s request was denied, but he cheated the hangman by taking a rusty razor and cutting his own throat. Not very efficiently: ‘My dear Sir –’ wrote Chief Secretary Lord Castlereagh to the British spymaster William Wickham, ‘Tone died this morning of his wound.’
¹⁵
He had lingered for two days.

Wolfe Tone’s belief in the principle of Irish independence and self-determination, his links with revolutionary France and his hatred for the British connection have made him a compelling figure in the story of Irish nationalism and a potent symbol for generations of revolutionaries. Yet the totality of Tone’s vision could not fit smoothly into any of the dominant traditions of later Irish history. Here was an atheist of Protestant birth, deeply influenced by middle-class Ulster Presbyterianism, and cherishing dreams of a united and secular republic. Meanwhile, the country he left behind was more bitterly divided than ever: the dream of a non-sectarian Irish republic was gone; and never again would there exist such an alliance between Presbyterians and Catholics. Instead, the events in Wexford had intervened to reveal the sectarianism that so often underlay Irish life. Events such as Scullabogue would lodge in the collective Protestant memory, with the result that 1798 was now inscribed as 1641 all over again. The secular experiment in political organization had failed and the country had been traumatized by the experience of violent revolution. A new leader would emerge in the century to come – one whose understanding of Ireland’s destiny was quite distinct from that of Tone, and one who would accordingly mould Irish nationalism into an entirely different shape.

Part Four

The Great Change

Chapter Seven

Union

In 1798, they [the Catholics of Ireland] were charged; in 1799, they were caressed; in 1800, they were cajoled; in 1801, they were discarded.
¹

In the momentous year of 1800 the Act of Union was passed by the parliaments at Dublin and London, abolishing the former and in the process ending Ireland’s brief era of ostensible legislative independence that had been inaugurated in 1782. In the aftermath of the tumult of 1798, such a move had become inevitable: a mere two days after Tone’s agonizing death, the chief secretary, Lord Castlereagh (1769–1822) had written to an ally: ‘I take the earliest opportunity of intimating to you in the strictest confidence that the incorporation of the two countries by legislative union is seriously looked to.’
²
The authorities had become convinced now that the Anglo-Irish ruling caste could no longer be trusted to govern the country safely and efficiently.

This view had not simply emerged fully formed. The British prime minister William Pitt (1759–1806) had long been of the opinion that political union between Britain and Ireland was both inevitable and desirable. Since 1782, the nature of the relationship between the two kingdoms had become increasingly blurred: the British government was ever more reliant on an elaborate system of patronage to maintain control of Irish politics – but such methods were both inefficient and unacceptably expensive. Pitt had become convinced that union, combined with a judicious measure of Catholic emancipation, was the only means of bringing clarity to such an unsatisfactory situation. As early as 1792 he had raised the question with the Irish administration, noting that the two issues of union and emancipation went hand-in-hand.

Catholic emancipation was by no means desired as an end or a principle in itself. Pitt reasoned rather that it would be a potent tool if used in combination with political union: taken together, the two measures would solidify British authority and appease Catholic opinion in Ireland once and for all. Union would in fact limit the political impact of emancipation – for Catholic political freedoms would be granted within a political context in which they could pose no threat to the established order. In a note to Lord Westmorland, the anti-Catholic viceroy of the day, the prime minister had made his calculations explicit: ‘The admission of Catholics to a share of the suffrage could not then be dangerous – the protestant interest in point of power, property and church establishment would be secure because the decided majority of the supreme legislature would necessarily be protestant.’
³
Emancipation, then, was an important symbolic and practical step to securing Irish Catholic loyalty to the Crown – while in return forfeiting little of substance.

By 1798, the Catholic sympathizer Lord Cornwallis was viceroy in Dublin; and although Pitt’s fundamental calculations had not changed, the political shifts in the wider world had helped render the prime minister desperate for a measure of peace and stability in Ireland.
^*
The international situation had become grave for Britain: hastily assembled coalitions of European powers – Austria, Britain, Prussia, Russia – were being defeated again and again by a rampant France; Britain itself was living once more in fear of a French invasion; and the European wars in general were proving to be cripplingly expensive. And now Ireland had erupted once more into bloody conflict, adding instability to Britain’s western flank. As a result, it was now viewed as imperative to regularize the relationship between the two countries and, in the process, to end the system of patronage in Ireland. Pitt and Cornwallis were more than ever convinced that emancipation, combined with the removal of the Ascendancy’s political power, would be instrumental in establishing this new
pax britannica
in Ireland. Working on the principle that it was better to keep your friends close and your enemies closer, Pitt planned to gather Britain and Ireland together into a new united state.

But the issue of Catholic emancipation would prove too sensitive to be attached explicitly to the Act of Union bill. Instead, the measure would be introduced quietly once political union itself had been achieved – a course of action much preferred by the Catholic religious hierarchy, with its horror of any whiff of potentially revolutionary public disorder. But lay Catholics were equally pragmatic in accepting the government’s discreet promise: all sides understood clearly that a more public arrangement would be doomed to failure – not least at Westminster itself, where within the establishment a powerful current of anti-Catholic bias remained.

Union itself, of course, was never going to be simply waved through: indeed, in Ireland it spawned improbable coalitions in opposition. Elements within the Ascendancy understood that Union would mean the end of political control and patronage: as a result, they made common cause with Henry Grattan and his fellow proponents of Irish legislative independence, for whom the measure represented an act of absorption, rather than union. Others noted that the colonial framework that had characterized the relationship between Britain and Ireland would stay intact: a British representative would remain at Dublin Castle, answering to a distant parliament and government. A small group of educated Catholics, meanwhile, rejected on principle any diminution of Irish independence, emancipation or no emancipation.

But a body of opinion also existed in favour of Union: an influential constituency within Irish Catholicism perceived that emancipation was on balance more likely to be granted by a Westminster parliament than by one sitting at College Green; and while many Presbyterians found the idea of Catholic emancipation difficult to countenance, they certainly shed no tears over the prospective passing of an Anglican Ascendancy that had done so much to limit their political and religious freedoms. It was also the case, of course, that the great majority of the population was always more occupied with the matter of earning and growing enough to live on than with the devising of new constitutional arrangements: whether or not the Act of Union was passed, it would do little to help the crops. And the harvest of 1799 was indeed poor, diminishing even further the appetite of the mass of the Irish people for the minutiae of politics.

A first vote on Union failed in a hostile Irish parliament in January 1799. The measure’s opponents argued, convincingly enough, that all dangers were now past: the state had crushed the 1798 rebellion, and nothing of its ilk was likely to occur again. In the light of this reversal Pitt, Cornwallis and Castlereagh understood that the government’s pockets would have to be turned out: the stick that had been used to crush the rebellion must now be replaced by the carrot, and the good will of the Irish parliamentarians acquired – for the last time, perhaps – by the time-honoured methods of bribery, horse-trading and endless application of patronage. As a result, the remainder of the year was devoted to the assiduous buying up of parliamentary seats and promising of pensions to those whose administrative jobs would vanish with Union. The result was that when parliament met on College Green on 15 January 1800 a variety of crucial alliances had been locked into place and victory for Pitt and his ministers was all but assured. In the meantime, the prime minister had opined aloud – and a trifle optimistically – that a time was coming when ‘a man can not speak as a true Englishman, unless he speaks as a true Irishman; nor can he speak as a true Irishman, unless he speaks as a true Englishman.’
⁴

Not that the opponents of Union were prepared to concede without a fight. The debate continued through the night; early the following morning Grattan, who had purchased the Wicklow parliamentary seat the previous evening, arrived on College Green clad dramatically in his old blue Volunteer uniform, in order to lambast the supporters of the Union. Having secured permission to speak from his seat – for he was too ill to stand – Grattan addressed a chamber packed with political allies and foes. Chief among the latter was Castlereagh, who had undertaken a remarkable political journey in his own right, moving from his Ulster Presbyterian roots towards Anglicanism and a place at the heart of the establishment; he would later carve out a substantial political career in Britain and become hated by many in the process.
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For the moment, however, he was the object of Grattan’s specific loathing: on this day in Dublin, the old parliamentarian pointed at his enemy and claimed that he and his cronies were striving ‘to buy what cannot be sold – liberty…. Against such a proposition, were I expiring on the floor, I should beg to utter my last breath and record my dying testimony.’

Grattan’s words, though impassioned, were too late, for the deal had already been done: an amendment designed to reject Union was defeated by a substantial majority and on 7 June – after more months of favours promised, compensation paid, bribes doled out and the government’s own laws broken – the Irish parliament voted itself out of existence. An identical bill asserting that the two islands ‘shall…for ever be united into one kingdom’ passed at Westminster; both bills received royal assent from George III; and the Act of Union came into effect on 1 January 1801. At Belfast, the
News Letter
hailed the Union: ‘Yesterday Morning a union flag was hoisted at the Market House and at one o’clock a Royal salute was fired by the Royal Artillery in garrison…it is now become an
interest
as well as a
duty
…to bury, if possible, all political differences…one people united in interest as in dominion.’
⁶
The first Irish members – there were one hundred of them in the Commons as part of the new deal – and peers took their seats at Westminster on 22 January. The glorious Parliament House on College Green, meanwhile, became an art gallery and then a barracks. In the summer of 1803, however, the building was sold to the Bank of Ireland on condition that it was remodelled internally to remove traces of its original function as a parliament; the Commons chamber was therefore broken up, although the House of Lords remained intact.