The Story of Ireland: A History of the Irish People (27 page)

As for the promise of Catholic emancipation: this could not, in the end, be delivered. Pitt’s credibility was now on the line – but he and his allies had failed to take into account the views of one crucial figure. George III – ‘old, mad, blind, despised and dying’
⁷
– had been for over a decade drifting in and out of a state of insanity; at the idea of emancipation, however, he was outraged. For the monarch, emancipation was not simply a question of pragmatics and politics; it was a religious and personal bottom line, in that the admission of Catholics to public office would run counter to his sacred vow to defend and uphold the Anglican faith. So the monarch – ‘considering the oath that the wisdom of our forefathers has enjoined the kings of this realm to take at their coronation’ – refused his consent. In the face of royal displeasure Pitt had no option but to resign, which he did in February 1801.
⁸

This failure to carry the emancipation measure had in a moment thrown away the nascent loyalty of Ireland’s Catholic middle class. Had it come to pass – had tangible benefits begun to flow from the very act of Union – Catholic opinion might have committed decisively to the new status quo. Instead, the great majority of the Irish population was denied access to the benefits of membership of this new United Kingdom – and the promise that Union would bring in its wake full religious liberties and civil rights had proved to be hollow. Figures such as Cornwallis, dedicated to the stability and success of the new polity so recently brought into existence, recognized that the seeds had already been sown for years of future instability and that the course of future events had been altered. The Catholic lobby might have been neutralized and its power dispersed – instead, however, new life had been breathed into the notion that the English, in their dealings with Ireland, simply could not be trusted. ‘What, then, have we done?’ he wrote. ‘We have united ourselves to a people whom we ought in policy to have destroyed.’
⁹

Catholic Ireland, an entity that might have been quietened with kindness, would now have to navigate an alternative route towards a state of political, religious and commercial liberty; it would begin to assume an adversarial attitude that would require only a focus and a leader to spark it to life. The episode provides yet another ‘what if’ moment in Irish history: if Catholic emancipation had been coupled with the Union, it is possible that Irish identity would have evolved on Scottish lines, with a sturdy carapace of nationalist sentiment surviving alongside a unionist reality. The economic development of Scotland in the course of the eighteenth century had, after all, cemented that country into the Union, the failed uprisings of 1715 and 1745 notwithstanding: this expansion would continue in the course of the nineteenth century, in the shape of the booming shipyards and factories of Glasgow that exported to the world.

Indeed, in Ireland itself a similar model was already evolving: and the industrial growth witnessed in Ulster in the course of the eighteenth century continued into the new age. The populations of Belfast, Derry and a host of smaller market towns began to rise steadily; the textiles sector and the linen industry evolved; and as the century went on, Belfast developed a shipbuilding reputation to rival its Scottish counterpart on the Clyde. The province was being increasingly drawn into a larger British and imperial economy – and this was a sign to many that the Union could succeed in tangible and practical ways. Presbyterian culture in Ireland would continue to provide a home to both liberals and conservatives, to both progressive and reactionary wings – but those same middle-class political and cultural figures that had impelled the expansion of the United Irishmen would, in the course of the new century, move to accept the Union. This was in part a pragmatic decision: they could increasingly see no other course of action open to them, and the brutal suppression of the rising of 1798 had taught a lesson not readily forgotten. As the nineteenth century went on, however, it would also become evident that the Union was fulfilling Presbyterian commercial instincts and aspirations – and the consequences of this profound cultural change would in time ripple far beyond the bounds of Ulster itself.

With the Act of Union now a reality, the government’s principal wish was to allow the new constitutional arrangements to settle down and become part of the fabric of life. A mere three years passed, however, before the new order was challenged in what proved to be the last flicker of revolutionary activity from the United Irishmen. Robert Emmet, born in Dublin into a prosperous Protestant family, had been twenty years old in 1798. He had imbibed revolutionary principles of liberty and freedom from his ostensibly respectable father; and his elder brother, Thomas Addis Emmet, had been a friend and ally of Wolfe Tone. Robert himself, though academically brilliant, was expelled from Trinity College as a result of his political sympathies, being condemned by the college as ‘one of the most active and wicked members of the United Irishmen’.
¹⁰
After the failed uprising he had left the country for France, seeking assistance for a further rebellion against British rule. But it was to no avail: the French would fund no more Irish adventures. Nothing daunted, however, Emmet returned home in the autumn of 1802 and set about planning a revolt.

Although he was essentially an idealist, he did make considerable efforts at military preparedness: he organized, for example, the stockpiling of thousands of pikes (collapsible, the better to be safely stored), rockets and explosives in depots in central Dublin; and he planned an assault on Dublin Castle, with its store of arms and supplies and potent symbolic associations. His blueprint for rebellion, however, came to naught, for ultimately it pivoted on factors that were incalculable: in capturing the castle complex, Emmet believed that he would tap into a vein of latent anger across Ireland and ignite a spontaneous uprising that could simply not be controlled. On the morning of 23 July 1803, the fragile foundations of his plan crumbled: the thousands of men whom Emmet had hoped to summon had dwindled to a mere eighty, some of whom were drunk; Emmet was jeered for his youth and idealistic rhetoric; and the fuses for the stockpiled rockets were mislaid. The castle was not stormed and the revolt degenerated into scenes of violence in central Dublin, in the course of which the lord chief justice, Lord Kilwarden, was pulled from a passing carriage and piked to death. It was all over in a matter of hours; Emmet himself became a fugitive, hunted through Dublin and the Wicklow mountains before being captured in September.

Before his execution, Emmet delivered the famous oration that, more than his deeds and or the events of the rebellion itself, earned him a place in Irish history: ‘When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then, and not until then, let my epitaph be written. I have done.’ His fame, built on idealism, enthusiasm, oratory and youthful energy, was thus secured; and it spread in the years to come. Set against this was the fact of his slender achievements: later, such figures as James Joyce mocked his developing cult; in
The Old Lady Says No!
Denis Johnston portrayed Emmet unflatteringly as deluded and violent, and the Dublin that had so conspicuously failed to succour him in his time of need as a ‘wilful, wicked old city…. Strumpet city in the sunset.’
¹¹

The authorities, however, were alarmed by the fact that Emmet’s abortive rising had – after a fashion – been carried through. Allegations soon circulated that the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, John Thomas Troy, had known of Emmet’s plans in advance but had neither alerted the authorities nor used his own influence to end the uprising. Given the social and political conservatism of the Catholic hierarchy, these claims were almost certainly incorrect: Troy was anxious above all to maintain the strength and position of the Church in the aftermath of the period of the penal laws; neither he nor his colleagues could be accused of being secret revolutionaries. In the matter of public loyalty, indeed, Troy had considerable form: in 1789, on the (temporary) recovery of George III from ill health, he had brought together at Dublin the highest ranks in society, both Protestant and Catholic, in a
Te Deum
to give thanks for the monarch’s deliverance; another service had been held following the failed French landings at Bantry Bay at Christmas 1796. Throughout his career, he had been consistent and loud in his abuse of events in France and of any form of civil unrest in Ireland itself. He and his colleagues in the Irish hierarchy were not about to jeopardize their institution’s hard-won place in society for the sake of a doubtfully planned and poorly executed revolutionary plot. Granted, some Irish priests were certainly Jacobin sympathizers and a handful of them were indeed active in, for example, the events of 1798; to Troy, this minority was ‘scum’, but he could not alter what was a bald and uncomfortable truth.

In the years immediately following Union, the anti-papist sentiment at the centre of the British establishment was fully exposed by further attempts to return emancipation to the political agenda. Following the return of Pitt to power in 1804, meetings were held at Dublin to sound out the state of Catholic opinion; the result was a petition – an unwise petition, in the view of both Catholic pragmatists and the Pitt administration – for emancipation that was carried to Westminster in the spring of the following year. Pitt duly rejected the petition; the Whig opposition showed itself favourably inclined, but to no avail; and the measure was debated in the House of Commons and rejected, by a huge majority, in May 1805.

The measure had always been doomed to failure, and not merely by the opposition of the government. George III was still on the throne and would be until his death in 1820; and antipathy towards Catholicism and mistrust of its allegiance to Rome had by no means vanished from the British body politic. In purely political terms, meanwhile, it was understood in London as well as in Ireland that the desire for emancipation was merely one thread in a rather larger political tapestry involving Irish Catholic society, its Church and the eventual destiny of Ireland itself: tug just one of these threads, it was feared, and the picture in its entirety might begin to alter. The Catholic deputation, then, returned home empty-handed: the following years would see renewed petitions, occasional concessions from Westminster and a good deal of querulous debate on the status of Irish Catholicism – but little of substance; the question of emancipation became a running sore.

The wider issue of the relationship between Westminster and Ireland was also moulded by such events as the Napoleonic Wars that lay beyond the control of any of the interested parties. When the pendulum swung away from Britain and its continental allies (as it so frequently did during these tumultuous years), the government became anxious to allay Catholic fears, the better both to quieten Ireland and to enlist once again valuable Irish manpower in the British armed forces. As events began moving away from French control, however, the need to appease was much less pressing – and this became increasingly so following Napoleon’s disastrous invasion of Russia in the winter of 1812–13 and the subsequent collapse of French military dominance in Europe.

Yet there was more to this period than a mere fractious relationship between the British State and its new subjects in Ireland; and the Napoleonic Wars – or, rather, their culmination on the battlefield at Waterloo in June 1815 – provide an excellent illustration of a more complex Irish stake in British affairs. For, as Irish troops had served in North America in the course of the Seven Years War in the previous century, so now did they, in ever-increasing numbers, serve a British State that in this new century was intent on rebuilding and expanding its empire. Military service had always held the prospect of adventure and a possible route out of poverty, isolation and economic stagnation, and in the early nineteenth century it was no different: in the first half of the century, Irish-born soldiers provided over 40 per cent of the manpower of the British army.

At Waterloo the 27th Inniskilling Regiment, having been instructed to hold its vital position on the field in the face of an enemy surge, was cut to ribbons by French cannon fire. By the end of the battle, some five hundred of the seven hundred Inniskillings had been killed. The regiment earned a glowing mention from the British commander, Arthur Wellesley, first Duke of Wellington, one of the foremost military figures of the day and a man normally sparing in his praises. By 1815 Wellington already had a glittering career behind him, with successful campaigns in India and against Napoleonic France in the Peninsular War, as a result of which he had been ennobled; he would later carve out a political career too, becoming prime minister in 1828. And, like his faithful Inniskillings, he was Irish, born into an Ascendancy family with estates in counties Kildare and Meath. Famously, he did not like to be reminded of the fact – though his insights into Irish culture and politics would prove useful later. The vital roles of such Irish figures as Wellington and the Inniskillings in what was an iconic
British
victory indicate the extent to which the destiny of the two countries was now intertwined. As a later rhyme had it:

There was a man named Wellington,

Who fought at Waterloo.

So never let yourself forget,

That you are Irish too.
¹²

Nor was it only on the battlefield that an Irish presence could be found: while Wellington was performing on the European military stage, an Irish poet and singer named Thomas Moore was making himself at home in the most elegant salons of London society. Moore’s Irish airs and ballads – his so-called
Melodies
, ten collections of songs that were published between 1808 and 1834 – charmed the city’s aristocratic circles; and Moore himself became one of the most popular poets of the era. His success was all the more remarkable given that he held mildly nationalist views – although this did not stop him receiving the patronage of the Prince Regent – and that he was a Catholic, born over his father’s grocery shop in the centre of Dublin. Moore attended Trinity College – one of the first Catholics to do so – as a contemporary of Robert Emmet; and although his travels took him to North America and Bermuda, he returned to Ireland frequently throughout his life. Yet much of that life was spent at the heart of the British establishment: Moore’s portrait was painted for the Royal Institution by Sir Thomas Lawrence, and Moore himself died at his cottage in the depths of the Wiltshire countryside.