Anglo-Irish Relations

1798–1922

Nick Pelling

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134447121
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Providing essays, sources with questions and worked answers, together with background to each topic within Irish history, Nick Pelling provides a good foundational text for the study of Anglo-Irish relations.

For centuries the relationship between Ireland and England has been difficult. Anglo-Irish Relations, 1798–1922 explores the tempestuous events from Wolfe Tone's failed rising to Michael Collins's arguably more successful effort, culminating in the controversial Anglo-Irish treaty of 1921.

Classic struggles between key figures, such as O'Connell and Peel, Parnell and Gladstone, and Lloyd George and Michael Collins, are discussed and analyzed. The deeper issues about the nature of British Imperial rule and the diversity of Irish nationalism are also examined, highlighting the historiographical debate surrounding the so-called 'revisionist' view.

1
REVOLUTIONS AND REACTIONS, 1775–1800

BACKGROUND NARRATIVE

Anglo-Irish relations in the later eighteenth century were transformed by the impact of two great external upheavals: the American War of Independence and the French Revolution.

The outbreak of revolt in the American colonies in 1775 was met with some sympathy in Ireland as both colonies resented the trade restrictions and high taxes imposed upon them from London. Politically the revolt strengthened the hand of a group of ambitious politicians in the Irish Parliament calling themselves ‘the patriots’. This faction was led by Henry Grattan, who sought to use the crisis to extort greater rights for the Irish Parliament. As the crisis deepened and Britain found itself at war with France and Spain, the strategic position of Ireland, as a possible base for an invasion, began to give Irish demands a new urgency. This, coupled with the formation of local militias known as Volunteers, ostensibly designed to repel possible invaders, but potentially a threat to government forces, brought the Prime Minister, Lord North, to the conclusion that the time for concessions had arrived. In 1779 the right of free trade was granted to Irish companies, effectively removing many of the restrictions on Irish trade dating back to the Navigation Acts, and in 1782 the government granted what was called ‘legislative independence’ to the Irish Parliament. It appeared as though the patriots had won a great victory and the word ‘independence’ suggested that Ireland was now free to run its own affairs.

Historians have been at pains to point out that what became known as Grattan's Parliament did not have the power to govern Ireland independently. The royal Privy Council retained the right to overrule any legislation put forward in Dublin, all rights of appointment to senior positions remained in the hands of the government, and the Viceroy, also a royal appointee, was still the single most powerful man in Ireland. In many ways Grattan's Parliament was little different from the highly manipulated and wildly unrepresentative institution that existed before 1782. Nevertheless, in Anglo-Irish relations the important idea had been established, albeit more of a myth than a fact, that in 1782 Ireland had won the right to govern itself. This would be a touchstone for many Irish constitutional nationalists for the next century and more.

Yet Grattan and the gentlemen of the Irish upper classes were soon to be marginalised by the great historical wave emanating from France and rapidly sweeping across Europe. The French Revolution appeared to threaten the entire aristocratic order in Europe and consequently most of the patriots drifted back into a grudging loyalty to the old order. The government, in an attempt to ensure the wider loyalty of the Irish nation, decided to enfranchise the Catholic majority with the Catholic Relief Act of 1793, a doubly useful manoeuvre for the government in that it also threatened to further undermine patriot influence in the Irish Parliament.

The more significant impact of the French Revolution, however, was to be beyond the gilded world of Dublin high politics. French egalitarian ideas spread dangerously among those classes excluded from traditional political influence, namely the middling and lower classes, whether Protestant or Catholic, many of whom agreed that the time had come to check the powers of a corrupt and self-serving aristocracy. Nevertheless, what gave the revolution a particularly explosive impact in an Irish context was the stress on the idea of a people having rights to govern itself. In short, the Revolution preached a heady mix of egalitarianism and nationalism, both of which threatened to detonate the aristocratic framework binding the two nations.

The most famous Irish enthusiast for the French Revolution was one Theobald Wolfe Tone, a Protestant lawyer based in Belfast and a man usually seen as the father of separatist Irish nationalism. In 1791 he co-founded a group which was perhaps the first great republican organisation: the United Irishmen. In the same year he established a similar body in Dublin and gradually extended its network across the nation. Its aims were, to begin with, radical rather than revolution- ary, calling for democracy in Ireland but not necessarily a complete break with the English Crown.

Inspired by the radicalisation of the Revolution in France in 1793, which had led to the execution of Louis XVI, Tone began to move towards more revolutionary ideas, a trend reinforced by Prime Minister Pitt's decision to declare the United Irishmen an illegal organisation.

In 1796 Tone travelled to France to seek its assistance in a proposed revolt against British rule in Ireland. He was successful. In 1796 the French sent a fleet of forty-three vessels with 14,450 soldiers on board, under the command of the renowned General Hoche, to Bantry Bay with the aim of linking up with the United Irishmen but after a disastrous storm only thirty-six vessels arrived, and due to adverse winds it was decided not to attempt a landing. Two years later Tone succeeded in organising a second French expedition which made a landing in County Mayo and achieved some success before government forces prevailed. In truth the rising had probably failed before it began. The army had begun a crackdown on the United Irishmen society after 1796 and once the fighting began it dealt with the rebels, and those wrongly suspected as rebels, with great ferocity. The suspension of Habeas Corpus and the declaration of martial law created a legal smoke-screen behind which numerous massacres took place. The use of torture to extract information was also common, and the use of devices such as the pitch cap, a helmet of boiling tar to be forced upon the victim's head, was frequent enough.

The last battles, as at Vinegar Hill in June 1798, were more anti-climactic than heroic, as the rebel forces dissolved in the face of overwhelming odds. But the relative ease of the government's victory did not stop it from drawing the conclusion that there was something wrong with the way in which Ireland was governed. The need to obtain stronger and more reliable control of Ireland prompted Pitt to pass the Act of Union, as the result of which the Irish Parliament was closed down and Ireland was put under the direct rule of Westminster. The era of revolutions which had seemed to promise greater self-government for Ireland had ended in quite the opposite outcome.

ANALYSIS (1): HOW SIGNIFICANT WAS THE 1798 UPRISING?

It is hard to resist the view that the 1798 uprising must be of major significance if only because of the extraordinary levels of disruption and violence. Approximately 30,000 people were killed, many in cold blood, which makes the uprising the single most violent episode in modern Irish history: more people died in 1798 than in the infamously bloody civil war of 1922–3.

Inevitably the government found it extremely difficult to restore law and order. Local feuding continued and old scores continued to be settled well into the next century. The trials and sentencing dragged on until the end of the eighteenth century and in places like Wexford the sight of wretched men waiting on hulks for transportation to Australia created a mood of sullen resentment, all of which meant that the possibility of disorder hung over Anglo-Irish relations for the next generation or more.

As for the United Irishmen and the would-be revolutionary nationalists, it would be truer to say that rather than being simply defeated they retreated into secretive underground societies and plotted for the future. Perhaps the best example of the continued threat of nationalism came in 1803 with the failed uprising led by Robert Emmet. Although it was rather a doomed affair—Emmet led a poorly armed band of only 300 men against Dublin Castle—it nevertheless seemed to prove that the spirit of ‘98 would not be so easily crushed. Less concerned with ideologies, the British government saw the 1803 rising as just another example of the lack of respect for the law in Ireland, not an unreasonable conclusion given that during Emmet's rebellion the former Attorney General, General Arthur Wolfe, was dragged from his coach and piked to death. Emmet was sentenced to death but, like Tone, he was able to steal a sort of victory from the jaws of death. In his final speech in the courtroom Emmet requested that no man write his epitaph until his country be free, thereby passing on Tone's torch to subsequent generations.

Tone and Emmet were both engaged in rebellions that had little or no chance of success, although one cannot help wondering how the United Irishmen might have fared if the wind had changed when the French fleet stood off Bantry Bay in 1796. Nevertheless, through the peculiar lens of Anglo-Irish relations, defeat can also be victory. Tone had created an inspirational romantic role which generations of nationalists proved extremely keen to play. Indeed, the entire insurrection created a kind of theme which would be played out again and again over the next century, namely the power of the grand gesture to overcome mere death.

In an ideological sense, although Tone by no means founded the idea that Ireland was one nation, he fused this idea with the notion of an independent republic in which Catholics and Protestants would stand side by side. It is no accident, for example, that modern nationalists venerate his name as the founder of republican nationalism. Tone and the United Irishmen were perhaps the first to fight for a modern concept of national independence. That said, the fact remains that the rising failed. In order to grasp the deeper significance of 1798 we must explore the reasons for its failure.

The most obvious reason is perhaps that, despite the name of the United Irishmen, the Irish people were in fact deeply divided among themselves. Tone had dreamt of a nationalism that would transcend sectarian divisions: instead, the rising served to exacerbate those very divisions. At Vinegar Hill, for example, the successful rebel forces rounded up the Protestants of Enniscorthy and brutally slaughtered them, often using pikes or scythes. In parts of Ulster in 1797 the Orange Order enrolled in the loyalist yeomanry and militia and set about terrorising entire Catholic communities and anyone caught wearing green. In many cases the religious antagonisms were interwoven with older family feuds which had little to do with either politics or religion. Arguably, the long-established traditions of banditry in Ireland, in which rival agrarian gangs waged incessant turf wars, merely received legitimacy as old grievances were pursued behind the cloak of a great rebellion.

Another related reason for the failure of the rebellion surely lies in the fact that Toneite republicanism was, indirectly, the product of the European Enlightenment, with its confident belief in reason and contempt for ritualised, unthinking religious practices. As such it was an urbane, intellectual outlook, unlikely to make much impact upon the ordinary peasantry and rural workers. The works of Paine, Rousseau or Voltaire made little headway in Ireland outside Belfast and Dublin. Inevitably, perhaps, many of the peasantry remained attached to their traditionally sectarian modes of thought.

In addition to the forces of religious tribalism, the rising was also deeply fractured by class divisions and tensions. Some in the Defender movement saw the war as a part of what might become a more social revolution, perhaps even leading to a more equal share of wealth. The Presbyterian Defender movement in Ulster began to call for wholesale land confiscation and redistribution, a radical slogan which served to alarm many of the more bourgeois members of the same movement. The leadership of the United Irishmen was largely middle class with a vested interest in maintaining the existing property arrangements. The sight of Irish workers urging Ireland to emulate some of the more extreme social policies of the Revolution in France only served to split the rebel movement.

On top of the religious and social divisions within the rebel movement there was also a generalised lack of organisation and little sense of national coordination. The whole insurrection was in truth a patchwork of disconnected actions which the authorities were able to deal with as such, rather than as one national rebellion. Ulster, for example, was perhaps the most radical province of all in 1796 and yet had all but been repressed before 1798 by the ferocious activities of Lieutenant-General Lake. In 1797 Lake proclaimed martial law and let loose a wave of house-burning, flogging and killing which smothered the Ulster movement a year before the south was ready to rise. As a result, when the peasantry of Kildare, Carlow and Wexford rose in the following year, the expected response from Ulster never came. Part of the reason for this lack of national coordination obviously lay in the crude nature of communications at the time but it is also true that for many of those involved in the fighting the grievances were of a local or provincial nature. Issues such as local rents or tithes could animate groups far more than the nationalist abstractions.

Against the argument that the rebel movement was fatally weakened by internal divisions it can argued that the British forces simply had superior weaponry and that the final outcome is merely a reflection of that underlying military reality. It is certainly true that many of the rebel units were armed only with home-made pikes, pitchforks, peat spades and all manner of working tools. The authorities, by contrast, could usually rely upon mobile artillery, rifles and pistols and a healthy line of supplies. All this is true but it must also be remembered that most of the governmental forces, and in particular the volunteer yeomanry, were themselves Irish. On 8 December 1797 Sir John Moore calculated that of the 76,791 fighting men available to the government in Ireland at that time, only 11,193 were English or Scottish, a calculation which, if correct, makes a mockery of Tone's belief in a United Ireland.

Evidently it is possible to see the 1798 rising as a confused, episodic fiasco hardly deserving of its mythic status. But this may be to miss the point. The divisions within Ireland were very real but this was still a seminal event. And for all the divisions and confusions the fact remains that large numbers of Irish men and women had begun to talk in republican terms and indeed taken up arms for their country. Although the movement was not centrally organised and lacked any sense of an overall strategy, it is nevertheless true that the United Irishmen had laid the basis of a national network. Right across Ireland, with the possible exception of the far west, the United Irishmen had made connections. In some respects it may be possible to see the rising as the beginning of a process of politicisation: a slow awakening of national consciousness. The numbers of people tortured or murdered created a rich legacy of tales of martyrdom which in themselves further developed a sense of national consciousness. Ordinary men and women, such as the farmer William Orr, made passionate gallows speeches invoking the love of their country. The numerous injustices involved in the governmental crackdown only served to amplify the emotional volume of such oratory; the balladeers and bards did the rest. Revisionist historians will always stress that the rising reveals just how exceptionally weak non-sectarian nationalism was and how divided along class lines Georgian Ireland was, and further argue that the entire event was a retrogressive development, leading as it did to the closure of the Irish Parliament. But on the other hand, there can be no doubt that the failed insurrection stamped an idea of an independent republic into the minds of Irishmen for generations to come. In that sense, as so often in Anglo-Irish relations, it was not what happened that mattered but what people thought had happened.

Questions

1. Discuss the view that Irish society was divided in too many ways to support an effective uprising in 1798.
2. What, if anything, did Wolfe Tone achieve?
3. How true is it to say that in 1798 England suppressed an Irish nationalist uprising?

ANALYSIS (2): WHY WAS THE ACT OF UNION PASSED AND WHAT WERE THE CONSEQUENCES?

The Act of Union of 1800 created a United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland: a kingdom legislated for by one Parliament in London. The Irish Parliament which had met, in one form or another, intermittently during the previous five hundred years was abolished.

The main reason for this development was clear: the 1798 rebellion had so shocked the British government that it was felt that a more reliable and effective system of control was necessary. The fact that Britain remained at war with revolutionary France in 1799 only served to increase the sense that Ireland was a political and strategic weak point. In fact this line of thinking had been almost a consistent theme in the discussions of the Cabinet ever since the American War had first raised the spectre of revolution. By 1799 there was a clear majority at Westminster in favour of removing the assembly that had all too clearly failed to keep order; it was judged on its past record to be not only weak but also politically fickle. In that sense Pitt and his government were passing judgement upon the Irish Parliament for its opportunism in 1782 as well as its failures in 1798.

In addition to political and strategic considerations there was, as ever, an undertow of racial feeling: the Act emerged from the kind of thinking which argued that the lawless Irish people were not fit to have a Parliament of their own. Such prejudices were not always aimed at the poor Catholic peasantry; the Act was in a real sense a reflection of the English aristocracy's exasperation with their Irish counterparts. The Ascendancy had been judged an inferior elite.

However, the Irish Parliament was not simply closed down against the wishes of the Irish MPs. Rather, the government had ...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• QUESTIONS AND ANALYSIS IN HISTORY
• SERIES PREFACE
• INTRODUCTION
• 1: REVOLUTIONS AND REACTIONS, 1775–1800
• 2: THE AGE OF THE LIBERATOR, 1800–45
• 3: THE GREAT FAMINE AND ITS LEGACY, 1845–70
• 4: THE AGE OF PARNELL, 1870–90
• 5: CULTURAL NATIONALISM AND UNIONISM, 1890–1914
• 6: THE MAKING OF A DIVIDED IRELAND, 1914–22
• NOTES
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY