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William Molyneux, The Case of Ireland’s being bound by Acts of Parliament in England, Stated (1698)

‘Spirit of Swift, Spirit of Molyneux,’ Henry Grattan famously declared, ‘Your genius has prevailed! Ireland is now a nation!’ He was referring to the establishment in 1782 of the independent Irish Ascendency Parliament that lasted until the Act of Union in 1801. Jonathan Swift is remembered, as he was in Grattan’s time, as the presiding genius of eighteenth-century Ireland. William Molyneux (1656–1658), no less important in Grattan’s eyes, has since been forgotten. Molyneux was toasted by Grattan for his 1698 pamphlet, The Case of Ireland’s being bound by Acts of Parliament in England, Stated, which made a constitutional case for the re-establishment of an autonomous Irish Parliament, something Ireland did not have since the enactment of Poynings’ Law in 1492.1 The specific case for Irish parliamentary autonomy advanced by Molyneux was built upon ideas that really only entered the domain of mainstream political argument several decades later. During the eighteenth century The Case of Ireland came to be cited by Swift, Charles Lucas, Grattan and even Wolfe Tone. Rising interest in Molyneux over time and the trajectory of Protestant patriotic politics coincided with the rising influence of Locke, particularly in America, whose own case for independence from England came to influence late eighteenth-century politics in Ireland.

In 1682, through Molyneux’s influence, Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding became part of the curriculum at Trinity College Dublin. However, it was not until the late 1770s that it came to be joined by his Two Treatises on Government. During the first half of the eighteenth century Locke could be claimed as the father of Irish philosophy. Locke framed philosophical and theological questions that variously preoccupied Bishop Berkeley and Edmund Burke. In 1724, in his fourth Drapier letter, Swift cited Locke and Molyneux as dangerous authors, ‘who talk of Liberty as a blessing to which the whole race of Mankind hath an Original Title; whereof nothing but unlawful force can divest them.’2 Swift and some other Irish writers presumed a familiarity among their readers with Locke. Perhaps they envisaged them as having come across The Essay on Human Understanding at Trinity. Locke had come to be cited as an authority on education in Ireland. However, it was not until the 1770s that the Two Treatises become his best-known work.

Molyneux was a natural philosopher who engaged in scientific experimentation and contributed to philosophical debates. In 1683, at the age of twenty-five, he became a founding member of the Dublin Philosophical Society, established upon the empirical principles of the Royal Society. His studies of optics were highly regarded by Robert Boyle amongst others. By profession he was a lawyer and a surveyor but he had also inherited estates in Armagh, Limerick and Kildare. He held a number of posts on government commissions. Before the war between William of Orange and King James II he was the surveyor-general of fortifications and buildings and was responsible for the design of Dublin Castle. During the war he fled with his family to Chester in England and returned to Dublin after the Battle of the Boyne. Many other Protestant Irish with the means to do so did likewise.

Molyneux’s aim in charting this constitutional history was to build a case for Irish parliamentary autonomy. He drew upon the Lockean principle of rule by consent as well as upon precedent. That Ireland should be bound by Acts of Parliament made in England, was against reason and the common rights of all mankind:

All Men are by Nature in a State of Equality, in respect of Jurisdiction or Dominion. This I take to be a Principle in itself so evident, that it stands in need of little Proof. It is not to be conceived, that Creatures of the same Species and Rank, promiscuously born to all the same Advantages of Nature, and the Use of the same Faculties, should be subordinate and subject one to another; these to this or that of the same Kind. On this Equality in Nature is founded that Right which all Men claim of being free from all Subjection to positive Laws, until by their own Consent they give up their Freedom, by entering into civil Societies for the common Benefit of all the Members thereof. And on this Consent depends the Obligation of all human Laws; insomuch that without it, by the unanimous Opinion of all Jurists, no Sanctions are of any Force.

Molyneux’s innovation was to extend the principle of rule by consent to nations, a term he used repeatedly in cases where Locke had referred only to individual men. He argued that the principle of consent was breached when laws made in the English Parliament were applied to Ireland. This went against the Common Laws of England that were in force in both England and Ireland. The Irish were not represented in the English parliament but had its laws applied to them.

Even though Locke eventually came to be canonised as the great Whig theorist of the 1688 Glorious Revolution, only a handful of English acquaintances or correspondents are known to have mentioned the Two Treatises with Locke’s approval. Thanks to Molyneux he gained public identification as a major political authority in Ireland before he did so in England even though he was intellectually influential amongst the emerging Whigs during his own lifetime. By the mid-eighteenth century The Two Treatises loomed large in Whig histories of the Glorious Revolution; notably in the writings of David Hume. By the end of the eighteenth century Locke emerged as the most frequently cited authority in Irish pamphlet literature generated by the debate preceding the Act of Union. These took from Locke what Molyneux did, refutations of the notion that claims based on conquest conveyed power over the descendants of the conquered and assertions of the principle of rule by consent.

Following the original 1698 edition The Case of Ireland was reprinted in 1706, 1719, 1720 and 1725. After a twenty-four year gap it was again republished in 1749. A further four editions were published between 1770 and 1782. The foreword to the 1770 edition explained that The Case of Ireland was first published at a time when William of Orange had rescued Irish Protestants from the ‘bigotry of the deluded followers’ of James II. It restated Molyneux’s sense of grievance at having been driven temporarily abroad as part of a history of Protestant anxiety and grievance:

… the Protestant Families had been stripped of their Properties, and forced to seek Refuge in this Country; they were received with Humanity, by many particular Persons, and Money was raised by private Subscription for their Relief; their Lands had been wasted, their Houses burned, and the whole Island thrown back, as to matter of Improvement, at least a Century; all this did the Irish suffer in the Cause of Liberty …

The oppressed Irish so described were Protestant Irish descended ‘from Ancestors, who brought with them the Manners, Customs, Laws, and Constitution of England’. They ‘saw their Independence as a Kingdom, unjustly violated, their Trade wantonly restrained, and Mr Molyneux’s modest dispassionate irrefragable Proof of the Rights and Liberties of his native Country, profanely burned by the Hands of the common Hangman’. The 1770 foreword argued that inadequate parliamentary autonomy had brought to pass constitutional dangers foreseen by Molyneux. A weakened monarchy and the absence of Irish parliamentary autonomy had rendered the interests of Ireland a pawn on the chessboard of English parliamentary politics:

An English Minister would move Heaven and Earth to corrupt a Majority in the House of Commons, and contrary to that Golden Rule of Politicks, which prefers the greater Part to the smaller, he would, in order to secure a single Member, the Circumstances of whose Estate may render it convenient to destroy the entire Trade of Ireland, readily Sacrifice so respectable a Part of the British Empire: To cut off the left Arm, in order to save a little Finger of the Right Hand from Amputation, would be strange in Surgery. Ireland has many unhappy Peculiarities in her political Situation, the chief of which seems to be, that she is a Kingdom without a King, for the Minister with an obsequious British Privy Council, has assumed the Power of putting a Negative upon the most salutary Laws; the Man who is not well acquainted with the Interest of Ireland, must surely be incapable of advising his Majesty concerning such Interest.

The 1770 foreword distinguished the Irish, meaning the Protestant patriot Irish, from ‘the wild ferocious Natives of Ireland’. This was not a phrase ever used by Molyneux himself though it was congruent with his obvious indifference to their existence and to his Lockean rationale for not considering their entitlement to rule by consent. However, the late eighteenth century witnessed new readings of Locke that did. At a 1791 celebration of Bastille Day in Belfast, Molyneux was the sole Irishman other than Grattan to be toasted.

In April 1782 Grattan secured the Irish Parliament that Molyneux wished for. In May that year the London Parliament rescinded Poynings’ Law and passed various other Acts that gave independence to Irish judges subject to the Irish House of Lords. In his April 1782 speech that divined the Spirit of Molyneux at work, Grattan optimistically summarised the new political settlement:

I rejoice that the people are a party to this treaty, because they are bound to preserve it. There is not a man of forty shillings freehold that is not associated in this our claim of right, and bound to die in its defence; cities, counties, associations, Protestants and Catholics; it seems as if the people had joined in one great national sacrament; a flame has descended from heaven on the intellect of Ireland, plays round her head, and encompasses her understanding with a consecrated glory.3

While Catholics did secure some important freedoms within the 1782 settlement, the revitalised Parliament came to be defined by the Penal Laws and a Protestant patriot mindset proposed by Molyneux at the end of the previous century. It took a mere eighteen years for Grattan’s Parliament to fall asunder.

BF

Notes

1William Molyneux, The Case of Ireland’s being bound by Acts of Parliament in England, Stated (facsimile, Online Library of Liberty, 1698).

2Jonathan Swift, The Drapier’s Letters and Other Works, 1714–1725, in H. Davis (ed.), The Works of Jonathan Swift, vol. X (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966), p.88.

3Henry Grattan, 16 April 1782, Irish House of Commons.