Traversers and Priests — 1844-1845
The summer of 1843 marked the height of Daniel O’Connell’s political power in Ireland. Towards the end he seems to have been engaged in a war of nerves with Peel. Apparently confident that the Prime Minister would not suppress the Repeal movement, O’Connell seemed to think that he could replay his success of 1828 and 1829, when, presented with a fait accompli (the election of Roman Catholics to Parliament) Peel and Wellington had been forced to enact Catholic Emancipation. The situation in 1843 was different, however. In 1828, liberal opinion in Britain supported granting civil rights to Catholics. On the other hand O’Connell’s subsequent demand for the repeal of the Act of Union had little support in Britain. Peel was under no pressure at home to give in to O’Connell.
Peel, too, had to gamble. Could he call O’Connell’s bluff and bring an end to the mass meetings without setting off widespread violence in Ireland? Ironically, success in banning the Repeal meeting at Clontarf without producing a violent reaction depended on the very thing that Conservatives such as Wellington had taken as a sign of danger — the discipline of the Repeal masses and O’Connell’s control over them. Dublin and the country were quiet in the wake of the proscription of the Clontarf meeting. Even when Peel seemed to overplay his hand and had O’Connell and his lieutenants arrested, there was no reaction.
Of course, the Liberator had gone too far and promised what he could not deliver. Having never intended violent revolution, O’Connell, in the face of Peel’s ultimatum, would not send his followers against the British Army. Now, in the wake of the Clontarf ban, however, he had no immediate alternative to his Repeal campaign. There is, therefore, some irony in the fact that his arrest, arriving so quickly on the heels of the banning, almost guaranteed that O’Connell’s followers would shift their attention from his failed campaign to his defense. Peel’s decision to have him arrested and tried enabled O’Connell to save face in Ireland and change his image from that of the vanquished to that of the martyr.
The State Trial of O’Connell and his associates was postponed until January 1844, due in part to elaborate jockeying over jury selection. The defense objected to the sectarian bias of the first jury list, which consisted entirely of Protestants. The judge dismissed this list, but the second panel was again solidly Protestant. Not surprisingly, John Delane supported the final selection in spite of the fact that two pages of the jury list, consisting primarily of Catholic names, had been inexplicably lost (MacDonagh, 1989, 244).
The News of the World was more sympathetic to O’Connell, or at least more aware of his role in keeping the Repeal Movement peaceful. The paper’s leader writer objected to the bias of the jury list, stating that ‘No object of policy can be accomplished by the conviction of Mr. O’Connell by a packed Jury. In a prison his popularity and influence will be immensely increased, and nothing diminished but his means for guiding and restraining his followers’ (28 January 1844).
On the eve of the trial Punch continued to press its accusations that O’Connell’s single object was to live off his followers. O’Connell appeared among January’s Twelfth Night characters as a fat little boy named ‘Daniel O’Diddle.’ The bloated O’Diddle is given these lines to recite:
My countrymen—that they may pay the rent,
To live upon potatoes are content.
And I resort to vegetable means;
For when I feed on them, I live on Greens
(vi., January 1844, New Year’s Issue, 19).
The last word, ‘Greens,’ carried multiple meanings. Green was the colour that symbolized Irish nationalism, while at the same time the word implied that the Irish who supported O’Connell were ‘green’, i.e. inexperienced or gullible and easily duped. In addition, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘green’ also meant ‘desirous’ or ‘yearning.’ Thus, O’Connell himself was feeding on the hopeless dream of Repeal.
A few weeks later, in the cartoon, ‘JACK THE GIANT KILLER,’ Punch celebrated the apparent triumph of Sir Robert Peel in trapping O’Connell in a pit of legality (Figure 3.1). Taking the theme of Jack and the Beanstalk, the cartoonist drew a monstrously outsized O’Connell, as the giant ‘Blunderbore,’ trapped neck-deep in a pit. A minuscule Peel, as Jack, brandishes his sword labeled ‘Justice to Ireland’ (Punch again uses O’Connell’s words against him) and capers about, seemingly ready to decapitate the fearful giant.
Figure 3.1: Punch, vi. (1844), 39.
As the State Trial drew near, a leading article in The Times criticized the Repeal Association’s plans for a procession to accompany O’Connell to court on the first day of the trial: ‘The vanity of the head traverser is, it seems, to be gratified by the injudicious and ill-timed manifestation of “sympathy” hinted at in the Repeal organ.’ The writer then quoted from the pro-O’Connell paper, the Evening Freeman.
It has been decided by the friends of Mr. O’Connell and of Ireland, that he shall be accompanied by as large an assemblage of equipages and vehicles as possible in his progress to the Four Courts on Monday next…indignation at the audacity of the parties who packed the jury lists, will cause hundreds to join the champion of Irish rights in this ovation (The Times, 12 January 1844, 5).
A paragraph later, as a contrapuntal military response to this planned cavalcade, Delane’s paper stated: ‘Preparations are being made for the arrival of additional troops from England. The 32nd Regiment from the northern district is hourly expected in this [Dublin] garrison.’ The implied urgency suggested that a violent reaction to the opening of the trial was expected, building readers’ interest in the trial and possibly producing a jump in circulation.
Indeed, the State Trial was a news event which Delane and the paper’s new owner, John Walter, III, were prepared to exploit. To cover the trial and any related (and possibly violent) events Delane hired a young Irish reporter, William Howard Russell (later of Crimea fame) as a special correspondent. The paper also chartered the Iron Duke, the fastest ship plying the Irish Sea, to carry his dispatches.1
The British press, while awaiting an Irish riot, was prepared to enjoy an Irish circus. The Times seemed delighted when some Irish reporters, faced with the possibility of being called as witnesses at the State Trial, complained that forcing them to testify would violate their professional principles.
Ireland is unquestionably the land of jokes and the reporters of the Dublin press represent the national temperament most inimitably. Always look out for some fun in an Irish public transaction. They like…introducing some pleasant little farce upon the solemn public stage…These State Trials are heavy affairs…. They do not suit the Irish without some facetious break of this kind (The Times, 17 January 1844, 4).
As if referring to mischievous children, The Times insisted, ‘We are not at all angry with them; no not at all,’ and, then, proceeded to point out how very wrong the Irish lawyers were (17 January 1844, 4).
Covering the first day of the State Trial, the paper described O’Connell’s ‘progress’ through the streets of Dublin as though it were a funeral. At ten o’clock,
[A] solemn procession of 24 carriages, which (with the exception of some corporation vehicles) were hired for the melancholy occasion, moved in all the ‘majesty of woe’ from Mr. O’Connell’s residence in Merrion-square, and passed through the leading streets of the city at a funereal pace into unwilling proximity with the Court of Queen’s Bench (The Times, 17 January 1844, 4).
The correspondent seemed to suggest that, as the carriages were hired ones, O’Connell’s supporters were clearly not among the rich or powerful. Continuing, the report stated that ‘Not many came “to see great Pompey pass the streets of Rome,” but, of course, there were some scores of idle men and boys to run along with the procession….’ (17 January 1844, 5). Through the ironic contrast between the elevated classical reference to a great Roman leader and the ‘idle men and boys,’ of Dublin, The Times asserted the tawdry foolishness of O’Connell and his cause.
London, however, was not the audience to whom O’Connell was playing, and The Times missed the point of the procession. The paper chose to represent its slow pace as a sign of O’Connell’s reluctance to appear in court. It was, in fact, another example of the Liberator’s stage-management. He once stated that the preferred pace for ‘the imperator triumphans of a popular procession’ had to be ‘almost inconceivably slow…. I have known two hours consumed in one mile’ (Owens, 118). O’Connell was insuring the support of his followers by giving them a stately show.
Punch was also incensed at O’Connell’s means of transportation. The illustration accompanying ‘The State Trials’ article reveals a somewhat simian looking O’Connell grinning out of The Lord Mayor’s coach, containing the mayor himself, who is carrying his mace of office. A crowd of men, women and children enthusiastically run after the coach, although one child has prophetically fallen in the street. Punch objected to the scene:
We always thought that the ordinary police van was the proper vehicle for bringing up accused parties to the Court when they are to take their trial. O’Connell, however, was fortunate enough to get the Lord Mayor of Dublin’s state coach …including the mace, which was understood to have been relacquered, lest it should [be] eclipsed by the more abundant brass of the chief traverser.’ (Punch, vi., 1844, 48).2
The OED defines ‘traverse’ in the legal context as ‘to deny or take issue upon an indictment’ and O’Connell certainly denied the charges against him. Throughout the trial, the prosecution referred to O’Connell and company as ‘the traversers.’ Mark Lemon apparently thought that the word carried the sound, if not quite the sense, of guilt. It became Punch’s favorite term for O’Connell during the trial.
In contrast to the critical and often demeaning treatment of O’Connell and the Irish by John Delane of The Times and Mark Lemon in Punch, Frederick Bayley, editor of the Illustrated London News, provided a broader, less hostile point of view. Bayley had been born in Ireland, and had been taken to the West Indies when he was thirteen. After four years, he returned to Ireland at the age of seventeen, just in time to see Daniel O’Connell win a seat in Parliament (Griffiths, 96). The young Bayley may have been impressed by O’Connell’s stunning success. Although his journal did not support Repeal, it did on occasion present the Liberator in a serious, or at least, in an Irish context.
In the wood engraving that accompanied an article on the upcoming trials, the Illustrated London News’ artist shows O’Connell standing before Dublin’s Four Courts (Figure 3.2). His sons support him, one on each arm. (O’Connell was already exhibiting difficulty walking and keeping his balance.) The Liberator’s status in the eyes of his Irish followers is signified by a woman in the crowd, who kneels before him, while her child clasps its hands, as if in prayer. In his enormous broad-brimmed hat, O’Connell appears confident and secure. He seemingly has nothing to fear from the trials. The following week, the ILN published wood engravings of O’Connell in his wig and robes as a Queen’s Counsel, leaving the court to cheers of bystanders (iv., 27 January 1844, 56-57).
Figure 3.2: Illustrated London News, iv. (1844), 41.
The News of the World described the scene inside the courtroom. Ladies in dresses appropriate to their rank occupied the gallery, while reporters had a reserved section of their own. Most of the defendants and their barristers were seated before the judge. Daniel O’Connell asserted his prerogatives and, wearing the red robes of a Queen’s Counsel, sat immediately below the bench with his back to the judge so that every speaker and all the witnesses had to face him as well as the Chief Justice. This placement may have been intended to suggest to his followers that O’Connell was himself holding court, as well as reminding them of the alternative Repeal court system he had created (MacDonagh, 1989, 246).
The indictment, according to News of the World, included eleven counts. The first stated that the accused
did unlawfully and maliciously conspire to excite discontent amongst Her Majesty’s subjects, hatred and jealousy amongst different classes, and discontent and disaffection in the army, also contempt of the established tribunals for the administration of justice; also to create changes in the Government and constitution of the country, and to bring them into contempt (News of the World, 18 February 1844, 2c).
Additional charges included ‘attempting to procure a dissolution of the legislative union’ and ‘by means of intimidation causing large numbers of persons to assemble, and having addressed them in seditious and inflammatory speeches’ (News of the World, 18 February 1844, 2c).
None of these accusations actually constituted treason. However, as Attorney General Thomas Barry Cusack Smith made clear on the third day of the proceedings: ‘If the traversers contemplated an outbreak [of violence], that, in point of law, would be a higher offense than that for which they were indicted. The present was only a misdemeanor case, subject to fine and imprisonment’ (The Times, 19 January 1844, 6). Smith’s implication was that, if he could have proved that O’Connell had actually called for a rising, the Irish leader might have been hanged.
The question of the packed jury would not go away, but The Times, rather than continue to defend the selection of the jury, went on the attack. The paper’s leading article for 22 January 1844 complained:
The meetings of Roman Catholic bodies in Dublin and elsewhere, avowing with signal hardihood that they regarded a special jury expressly sanctioned at every stage of its composition by the law, as an insult to ‘all the Roman Catholics’ of Ireland, was a pregnant index of the extravagance of their pretension, or of the depth of their hypocrisy.
Delane refused to see any injustice in trying O’Connell with a certified set of Protestants in the jury box.
The witnesses, many of them constables and policemen who had attended the mass meetings, were agreed that the events at which O’Connell and his fellows spoke were orderly and peaceful, though the meetings had attracted very large numbers. However, the prosecution emphasized the quasi-military nature of the meetings, with hundreds of horsemen drawn up in ranks. Questions were raised as to the threatening nature of the mass meetings. When a cheer went up for O’Connell at the Baltinglass meeting, one onlooker was heard by an informant to remark, ‘That is a shout that will frighten not only the pigeons, but the Protestants’ (News of the World, 28 January 1844, 3f).
Richard Lalor Sheil, MP, counsel for John O’Connell, sought to place the issues within the contexts of sectarianism and colonialism.
[In earlier times] the Protestants of Ireland had been contented to kneel to England upon a Catholic’s neck…. The question now was not one between Catholic and Protestant, but between the greater country and the smaller, which the greater country endeavoured to keep under ignominious control…. [Ireland] might, perhaps, be reconciled to the terms of the Union, bad as they were, had the results been beneficial to the country; but travellers stood appalled at the misery she represented (News of the World, 4 February 1844, 3b).
The sense that the trial was unfair and that its outcome was a foregone conclusion produced little excitement in Dublin. O’Connell’s longstanding belief in moral rather than physical force seriously reduced the chances of mob protest. Moreover, the presence of hundreds of armed British troops garrisoned in and around Dublin may have had a tempering effect on O’Connell’s supporters. A week into the trial, The Times correspondent in Dublin, apparently hoping for livelier responses from the locals, complained that ‘The same absence of excitement we have already noticed in and about the Four Courts continues to be manifest’ (The Times, 22 January 1844, 5).
When at last O’Connell arose to defend himself, he put off his Queen’s Counsel robes and appeared before the court dressed in what The Times disdainfully described as a drab suit. O’Connell’s speech was given more in defense of Repeal than of his own actions. The Times carried the speech in its entirety in very fine, almost illegible print. Having declared his belief that ‘the motive for carrying the union was an intolerance of Irish prosperity,’ O’Connell detailed what he took to be the disastrous results of the loss of the independent Irish Parliament.
Toward the end of his peroration, O’Connell directly addressed the jury: ‘You differ from me,’ he said, ‘in religious belief; and if you did not you would not be in that box’ (The Times, 4 February 1844, 5). At the conclusion of the trial, a News of the World leader again objected to the exclusion of Catholics from the jury:
The Crown charging him [O’Connell] with the crime of conspiracy, state they will not allow him to be tried by a Repealer or a Roman Catholic; but they think it fair, just, and calculated to satisfy the public mind, when they record a verdict against him, which is found by his political opponents (News of the World, 18 February 1844, 1c).
The paper also objected strongly to the instructions from Justice Pennefeather to the jury in which he stated that ‘in order to render a meeting unlawful, it is not necessary to show the peace had been broken.’ A meeting could be unlawful
when by the demonstration of great physical force it may be reasonably supposed that fear, terror or alarm, would be created in the minds of any of her Majesty’s subjects, by reason of the assemblages of enormous masses and multitudes’ (News of the World, 18 February 1844, 1c; italics original).
This meant that if the monster meetings had alarmed one Protestant, O’Connell and his companions were guilty as charged.
Some of the defense’s arguments may have been persuasive, for the jury returned at first with a verdict limited to less than half of the charges. The Chief Justice instructed them to complete their task. The Times later complained that the jury took thirty hours to reach a final verdict, suggesting that the Irish, whether Protestant or Catholic, jury or defendants, were basically incompetent.
After all the Irish omissions and Irish commissions, the insults and apologies, the squabbling of attorneys and the indecision of judges, the challengings of jurors and the challengings of counsel, with which this most original of trials has teemed, the jury seemed determined not to be wanting to the honour of their country, and have accordingly contributed their share of blunder and misapprehension (The Times, 13 February 1844, 6).
The final verdict was, of course, ‘guilty.’ O’Connell was sentenced to two years’ confinement. The Times special correspondent, William Russell, scooped the other London dailies with the announcement on Monday, 12 February.3
For the Tory metropolitan press, justice had been done. However, other voices were raised in Parliament. Lord John Russell, aware that O’Connell could still swing his support behind the Whigs and return them to power, rose in the House of Commons and strongly criticized the increased military presence in Ireland. The Whig leader objected, as reported, that
The present Government…rather occupied Ireland by military force than governed her. A Government ought to rest upon opinion; but this Government stood only upon force…. He could see in the now probable punishment of the man whom the Irish people affectionately regarded as their liberator, no hope of improved tranquility (The Times, 14 February 1844, 4).
Punch, whose focus was constantly centered on London and its metropolitan audience, commented on the trial in terms of its possible effect on British politics. The trial was represented as a comic opera. The big cut, titled ‘THE IRISH TOM THUMB,’ includes in the dramatis personae Sir Robert Peel as King Arthur and Lord Brougham as the Lady Dollalolla, both in elaborate eighteenth-century costumes (Figure 3.3). Behind them stands a sketchy figure representing Sir James Graham, Home Secretary and chief minister for Irish Affairs, as ‘Noodle (his original Character).’ To the right, Thomas Berry Cusack Smith, the Irish attorney general, is Tom Thumb, and Daniel O’Connell, once again feminized, is the Amazon Glumdalca. The contrast between the small figure of Smith and the huge O’Connell in chains adds to a sense of the latter’s powerlessness. Both figures are costumed in classical garb and wear plumed helmets.4
In the accompanying text Glumdalca/O’Connell sings ‘Who fears to speak of Ninety-eight,’ the opening line of a poem that featured in the State Trial. The Attorney General had read the entire text of ‘The Memory of the Dead’ which contained the lines Punch assigned to the O’Connell character:
Who fears to speak of ‘Ninety-eight?
Who blushes at the name?
Who hangs his head for shame?
He’s all a knave or half a slave
Who slights his country thus;
But a true man, like you, man,
Will fill your glass with us.5
The words referred to the ill-fated Rising of 1798 by the United Irishmen. Smith had maintained that the poem was a seditious call for a new rebellion. In the context of O’Connell’s defeat, Punch used the poem as satire.
Figure 3.3: Punch, vi. (1844), 112.
Punch then had King Arthur/Peel address Tom Thumb/Smith:
Thy valour thou hast shown, beyond a doubt;
Not by mere words, although by calling out.
(vi., 110, italics original)
This sly couplet may once again recall the incident in 1815 when Peel ‘called out’ O’Connell, that is, challenged him to a duel, for which O’Connell failed to appear.
As the satire continues, it becomes clear that London rather than Ireland was the ultimate referential center of Punch’s humor. The king offers Tom Thumb a reward, and the Tom Thumb/Smith answers:
I ask not office, that I’ve got already
But if the ministry continues steady,
I only ask—think not I take it cool—
The first reversion of the sack of wool.
Dollalolla/Brougham, in an aside, protests:
Be still my soul — my itching palm keep back;
’Tis I that long have languished for that sack (vi., 111).
Since the ‘wool sack’ is kept under the chair of the Lord Chancellor or chief legal officer of Britain, Punch managed to ridicule the ambitions of both Lord Brougham and the Irish Attorney General. In this satire O’Connell appears merely as a passive foil amid the struggle for dominant political position in Westminster.
The Illustrated London News continued to present O’Connell within his own political and cultural context, which included references to his religion. In the interval between his sentencing and the date for his imprisonment, O’Connell went over to London and took a triumphal tour of his supporters there. The ILN covered his enthusiastic reception by Irish residents in England and by some British radicals. The journal also published an article on O’Connell’s investiture, while in London, with the Holy Order of the Guild of Saint Joseph and Mary. Bayley seems to have gone out of his way to emphasize this event. The accompanying wood engraving shows only the anonymous back of a figure kneeling before a priest and six altar boys, suggesting a stock sketch rather than something produced on the spot. The article, however, described the solemnity of the occasion and the 5000-6000 people in the congregation. Interestingly, Bayley placed on the same page a brief piece about the Rev. Edward Nangle’s Protestant evangelical ‘colony’ on Achill Island in County Mayo. The brief report dealt with a trial of some Catholics accused of plotting to burn the ‘colony’ (3 March 1844, 181). Bayley may have felt it necessary to balance a positive piece on a Catholic ceremony with a report more in keeping with Protestant expectations.
For a time support for O’Connell and Repeal remained high, bringing in £625, 712 during the leader’s fourteen weeks in jail (Broderick, 159). With support for O’Connell and his cause undiminished, Punch summed up Peel’s seemingly endless problems with Ireland and O’Connell in Richard Doyle’s cartoon of ‘THE MODERN SISYPHUS’ (vi., 1844, 121). In the piece, Peel strains to roll up the mountain a huge, round stone that bears O’Connell’s features. Queen Victoria, above the clouds and reminiscent of John Flaxman’s Zeus, looks on while the Whig Furies, including Lord Russell, fly by.
Later that year Punch lampooned O’Connell, who was now nearly seventy, for his alleged romantic attachment to one Rose McDowell, a young woman in her twenties, who was part of the elaborate entourage that waited on the Irish leader during his sojourn in prison (MacDonagh, 1989, 248-49).
It seems that O’Connell has been the victim not only of the blind goddess [Justice], but also of the blind god [Cupid]; for it is said that he has let his own judgment go by default, having fallen in love with a young lady…. Some of O’Connell’s political allies are under the apprehension that his politics will change in consequence of his being bent on effecting a union on his own account, instead of repealing one (Punch, vi., 237).
The Liberator’s three-months’ imprisonment was comfortable enough. The prisoners were installed in the warden’s private residence at Richmond Prison on the Circular Road in Dublin. With limited opportunities for exercise and with an unlimited supply of food sent in by his devoted supporters, O’Connell gained more weight, possibly to the detriment of his health. Ironically, Punch’s John Leech uses his signature of a leech in an apothecary’s bottle to sign his cartoon on ‘THE PROBABLE EFFECTS OF GOOD LIVING AND NO EXERCISE.’6 The artist portrays O’Connell sitting in a chair with one gouty leg on a stool, his figure bloated to the point of bursting, with every button strained (vii., 39). At his feet is a book, ‘Domestic Cookery,’ and off to the side a bottle of champagne stands in a cooler. Next to the cartoon was a statement that Daniel O’Connell, Jr. had sent to the Irish newspapers to reassure them that ‘the prisoners were looking right well and getting fat.’ The prisoners had just received, Punch reported, a forty-five pound cake and a sturgeon weighing 200 pounds (vii., 38, 39). In a poem (contributed anonymously by Thackeray) that accompanied the cartoon, Mr. Punch imagined himself as O’Connell’s jailor.
No chains shall in his prison clink,
No ruthless jailor urge him,
With lashings of the best of drink
I’d pitilessly scourge him.
Tis thus that noble Justice Punch
Would treat his Celtic neighbor,
And thus at dinner, supper, lunch,
Condemn him to hard labour.7
Ever conscious of his public image, O’Connell had long fretted about the fact that, as he reached middle age, he began to put on weight. As early as 1824, he lamented to his wife that in spite of having cut back on wine and increased his walking, ‘Yet I get fat.’ In a phrase that could earn him sympathy in the twenty-first century, he concluded, ‘I ought not, I believe, to eat so much’ (Owens, 106). Beginning with John Doyle’s drawings in the 1830s, O’Connell’s figure had loomed large in political cartoons. His bulk was a consistent feature in Punch’s caricatures of him.
O’Connell’s comical appearance in many of Punch’s cartoons was enhanced by the crown-like Repeal cap its cartoonists frequently placed upon his head. This headgear had become the primary signifier of O’Connell in Punch’s cartoons. The ‘Milesian’ or Repeal cap had been designed by Irish artists John Hogan and Henry MacManus for O’Connell’s public appearances during the Repeal Year. The green velvet hat was presented to him with great ceremony at the monster meeting at the rath of Mullaghmast in 1843. The Irish leader seldom appeared at Repeal events without it, and British cartoonists can hardly be blamed for making the cap a permanent part of their images of him (Owens, 122).
The Repeal cap had no brim, but the gold thread sewn on the lower portion suggested the saw-tooth outline of a crown. The cap puffed to a soft dome, from the center of which hung a gold tassel. The crown motif, allegedly copied from an ancient crown found in a Tipperary bog in the seventeenth century, was intended to remind O’Connell’s followers of lost Irish royalty. As Gary Owens explains,
These associations [of royalty] naturally linked the cap with the heroic and the tragic elements of Ireland’s past and were a tangible reminder of her legendary kings who ruled their country as independent sovereigns. By extension, the cap symbolized the nationalist demand for the restoration of self-government (114).
Of Irish make and design, the cap also represented the economic prosperity that O’Connell promised would accompany Repeal.
In England, of course, the cap was seen as an absurd but also a dangerous pretension, a symbol of O’Connell’s threat to the Union. Punch’s cartoonists invariably exaggerated the crown-like nature of the cap for comic effect, while suggesting to British readers that O’Connell was pretending to be the ‘uncrowned king of Ireland.’ Nothing better illustrates the dramatic difference in political and cultural symbols between England and Ireland than the conflicting interpretations of O’Connell’s headgear.8
O’Connell and his fellow prisoners appealed the verdict against them to the House of Lords. Punch ran a cartoon by Leech depicting O’Connell as a pepper pot (topped by his Repeal cap), with his dukes up ready to fight a judge, probably Brougham, a Tory Law Lord, embodied as a vinegar cruet (vii., 133). A trio of Whig judges overturned the conviction with Lord Brougham dissenting. Imprisoned on 30 May 1844, O’Connell was freed on 7 September of that year. Intent upon keeping his public image intact, the Liberator returned to Richmond prison the following day to participate in a carefully stage-managed triumphal procession that wound its way from the prison to his home in Merrion Square. The Illustrated London News for 14 September ran a series of wood engravings depicting the event. One showed large crowds outside of the prison, awaiting news of his release. Several depicted O’Connell standing before his throne on top of his triumphal car receiving the adoration of the crowds.9 The ILN’s artist captured the most dramatic moment of the day. When the procession reached the Bank of Ireland, originally built to house the old Irish Parliament, O’Connell called for a halt and stood silently pointing to ‘Our Old House at Home,’ as Repealers called the building (Figure 3.4). The text emphasized the enthusiasm of the crowds and the pageantry of the procession. Somewhat more ominously, however, the last illustration in the series depicts a night scene. A rough crowd, its celebrations led by a ragged man with a torch and a huge upraised fist, bear placards emblazoned with ‘Dan is Free’ (v., 165).
Figure 3.4: Illustrated London News, v. (1844), 164.
O’Connell’s supposed desire to woo the Whigs and to bring down Sir Robert Peel’s administration was the subject of an illustrated poem in Punch entitled ‘Dan Serenading Lord Johnny.’ The illustration shows O’Connell as an improbable bumpkin in his tasseled Repeal cap, under a full moon, blowing an ophicleide (an absurd-looking member of the cornet family) beneath a cottage window where Lord John Russell in a white bonnet listens to the music. The poem may also hint at O’Connell’s pursuit of young Rose McDowell, as Punch uses the language of illicit lovers in the opening lines:
Wake, Johnny! wake, and again combining,
Soon into power we’ll steal;
Where we hatch’d our plots designing,
Our compact we’ll reseal (Punch, vii., 218; Altick, 1997, 349).
Once considered the tail that wagged the Whigs, the O’Connellite contingent was now seen as wooing a reluctant Russell into a renewed alliance. But O’Connell’s own feelings toward Russell had been expressed earlier in the year in a letter to Charles Buller, a radical leader:
Lord John Russell … will never permit anything like justice to be done to the Catholic people of this country. I know him well. He has a thorough, contemptuous, Whig hatred of the Irish. He has a strong and I believe a conscientious abhorrence of Popery everywhere but I believe particularly of Irish Popery.10
Meanwhile, Peel had initiated a policy to detach the Roman Catholic clergy in Ireland from O’Connell’s influence. He intended to grant them concessions that O’Connell had been unable to produce. Priests were to be allowed to sit on boards determining the inheritance of property by religious orders. Moreover, the grant to sustain Maynooth College as a seminary for priests was to be increased to fund new building projects. Peel did not intend the grant to placate O’Connell and the Repealers, but rather to show the Catholic clergy in Ireland that the British Parliament under Tory leadership understood their needs and that they could be accommodated within the Union.
Significantly, the Papacy supported the British civil authority rather than Repeal. When in November of 1844 Cardinal Fransoni rebuked the Irish clergy’s political involvement in Repeal, the British press praised the papal rescript as an attempt to control O’Connell’s agitation (Kerr, 1982, 173-75; 199-200). O’Connell, however, had long maintained that, while he was a Catholic, he was not a Papist. He had, of course, taken the Oath of Allegiance, which was required of all Catholics in the United Kingdom who exercised their franchise. Upon voting, they swore: ‘I do declare that I do not believe that the Pope of Rome, or any other foreign Prince, Prelate, person, state or potentate, hath or ought to have any temporal or civil jurisdiction, power, superiority or preeminence, directly or indirectly, within this realm’ (Broderick, 197). In opposing the papal rescript, Repealers referred to this pledge as a defense against what they saw as Vatican interference in Irish politics. While Peel and his Ministers were delighted with the Holy See’s attempt to discourage the Irish clergy’s involvement in Repeal, The Times, in J. F. Broderick’s words, ‘observed from London that the Popish faction [Repealers] had taken up the cry “No Popery.”’ At the same time, O’Connell, with all the zeal of an Orangeman, was lecturing a Protestant Ministry on the obligations of their oaths of supremacy and of allegiance (Broderick, 209).
Consistent with his principles, O’Connell, along with Archbishop MacHale of Tuam, also opposed the increase in the Maynooth College subsidy. So did The Times, the Standard and the Scotsman of Edinburgh, all of which were furious at Peel’s support for Ireland’s largest Roman Catholic seminary. The Times worked hard to make its readers see the college as a symbol of Romanism within the United Kingdom. ‘It is not Liberalism but Romanism which Peel is forcing on the nation …. It is not merely Popery; that is unpopular enough in England, especially Irish Popery; but it is Maynooth. It is a name and a thing above all others odious and suspicious to England’ (Kerr 1982, 277). Mark Lemon of Punch, unwilling to distinguish as subtly as Peel the difference between the Catholic clergy and O’Connell on this issue, published a pair of cartoons by John Leech suggesting that O’Connell would not be placated by the Maynooth grant. In ‘A DISTURBER OF THE PUBLIC PEACE,’ Sir Robert Peel is seen as a footman handing a purse labeled ‘Maynooth Grant 30,000 pounds’ to O’Connell, who, dressed as a street musician, wears his usual Repeal cap (Figure 3.5). The caption reads:
PEEL.—‘There’s a Maynooth Grant for you! So you now be quiet, and move on.!’
O’CONNELL.—‘Grant, indeed! I never moves on under Repale! D’ye think I don’t know the value of peace and quietness!’ (viii., 185).11
Figure 3.5: Punch, viii. (1845), 185.
In a later cartoon on the Maynooth issue, Leech showed Peel, this time as a mother or nanny, reading a bedtime story entitled ‘Maynooth Grant 30,000’ to a baby O’Connell, who, wearing his usual cap, points to the moon and weeps. In the cartoon, ‘THE GREEDY BOY WHO CRIED FOR THE MOON,’ little Dan demands, in a stage-Irish accent: ‘I will have Repale—hoo! hoo! hoo! — I won’t be aisy—I will have Repale’ (viii., 229). Peel, of course, was not trying to placate O’Connell. It seems unlikely that Lemon and company missed the point of Peel’s attempt to separate O’Connell and Repeal from Ireland’s Roman Catholic hierarchy. Punch’s staff may simply have chosen to distort the issue so as to make O’Connell the villain of the piece.
Punch also continued to print images that depicted O’Connell preying on Ireland’s poor. In its ‘Almanack’ page for January of 1845, ‘BUBBLES OF THE YEAR – THE O’CONNELL RENT,’ John Leech depicts Daniel O’Connell enthroned on a chair with a cross behind it (Figure 3.6). He is the king of Ireland in his crown-brimmed Repeal cap, collecting his rent from ragged, impoverished peasants.12 The Almanack was issued nine months before the first failure of the potato crop, and is a prime example of Leech’s stereotyping of the Irish poor. Despite their poverty and rags, the young women are beautiful, while the men are simian-faced creatures with clay pipes stuck in their hat bands.
When the Maynooth grant passed in June of 1845, Punch’s William Newman featured O’Connell in a new cartoon pantomime captioned ‘THE DEMON OF DISCORD’ (Figure 3.7). The Liberator is cast as a demon, complete with the bat wings of an unbeliever or a devil. The artist borrowed the motif of a long reptilian tail from John Doyle’s earlier cartoons of O’Connell as the very large tail prepared to wag the Whig dog. In Punch’s cartoon stage show, O’Connell descends into a hell hole in the stage floor, vanquished by the appearance of Queen Victoria as the Good Genius. The Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel dance with joy at his disappearance. On the other side of the stage lovely Irish colleens (identified by their shawls and bare feet) clasp their hands in happiness. Their glee signifies that the loyalty of the Queen’s Irish subjects lay with the Union, not with O’Connell and Repeal. The figure of Mr. Punch himself takes the place of the unicorn as a supporter of the heraldic buckle framing the queen.
Figure 3.6: Punch, viii. (1845), 1.
Cartoon triumphs are often short-lived, and the defeat of the ‘Demon of Discord’ may have been intended to suggest Peel’s hopes, rather than Punch’s optimism, that O’Connell’s power actually had been trimmed. At any rate, Mark Lemon and his colleagues were soon busy depicting O’Connell’s continued threat. The ‘UNCROWNED MONARCH AT HIS NEXT LEVEE’ appeared in July 1845 (xi, 6). The cartoon presents a highly imaginary court scene in which Peel recognizes O’Connell as King of Ireland. Peel in court dress kneels before a corpulent, upright O’Connell wearing his Repeal cap like a crown. In the background the cartoonist suggests a crowd bearing the Repeal banners.
Although there are no religious symbols in the cartoon, an anti-Catholic tirade later in the issue revealed Punch’s deeper distress. When Peel brought in a bill to establish non-sectarian colleges in Ireland, the Roman Catholic hierarchy opposed it, declaring such secular institutions ‘godless colleges.’ During the debate, John O’Connell, the Liberator’s son, attacked the member from Waterford, Sir Thomas Wyse (an anti-Repeal Liberal). In supporting Peel’s Irish Colleges Bill, Wyse had shown himself to be, in the younger O’Connell’s words, a ‘schismatic Catholic.’ John O’Connell then went on to insist upon the authority of Ireland’s Catholic hierarchy in educational matters. Punch quoted from the Morning Chronicle, attributing the following speech to ‘Mr. O’Connell,’who insisted that Mr. Wyse,
ought to look to Rome, and not to the House of Commons for advice on this subject…. Here was the declaration of the Catholic Bishops — the authority which he [John O’Connell] believed to be the supreme authority in Ireland, controllable only by the Sovereign Pontiff, declaring this bill was dangerous to the faith and morals of the Catholic people.
This was too much for Mr. Punch, or at least Thackeray, who anonymously stormed:
Figure 3.7: Punch, viii. (1845), 217.
So Rome is to be the mistress when the empire is disunited; and Repeal means the supremacy of the Pope in Rome! One can hardly believe the words, though they stare you in the face…. Here is the O’Connell creed in the nineteenth century: — ‘Down with the British, and on your knees to the Pope. Away with the Saxon, and put your trust in the Roman.’ As we write this, we begin to boil and foam over like the Standard [an ultra-Tory newspaper].
In spite of this aside, reminding readers that satire was supposed to render it immune from such passions, Mr. Punch did ‘boil and foam.’ Rhetorically calling on Thomas Davis and the other Protestant Young Irelanders to square their desire for freedom from England with this apparent promise of Roman tyranny that would accompany Irish independence, Thackeray fumed that if ‘O’Connell were to set up the Inquisition they [Young Ireland] daren’t protest….’13
Although Punch was criticizing a speech by John O’Connell, in this case the son’s sentiments accurately reflected those of his father on this subject. Whatever else it may have accomplished, Thackeray’s anonymous outburst did manage to present in one piece Punch’s anti-O’Connell, anti-Repeal and anti-Catholic biases, leaving very slender ground for whatever sympathy its staff might otherwise have held for Ireland.
The hostile attitudes of Punch, The Times, the Standard, and many other newspapers toward Catholicism were, in fact, an integral part of British culture, a part of the sense of Britishness itself. The last supporters of a Catholic pretender to the throne had been defeated a century earlier with the scattering of the Stuart rebellion of 1745. Much of the eighteenth century had been taken with wars against Catholic France. As Linda Colley suggests, ‘The invention of Britishness was so closely bound up with Protestantism, with war with France and with the acquisition of empire, that Ireland was never able or willing to play a satisfactory part in it’ (8). Even the conflict between the Established Church and Nonconformists did not dilute this ‘powerful cement between the English, the Welsh and the Scots, particularly lower down the social scale’ (23). This deep cultural sense of British Protestantism extended well beyond confessional principles. According to Colley, ‘To be Catholic, according to this view, was to be economically inept: wasteful, indolent and oppressive if powerful, poor and exploited if not’ (35).
Periodicals like Punch and The Times were very much about Britishness. Rather than just ‘boil and foam,’ however, John Delane of The Times chose to clothe his paper’s anti-Catholic, anti-O’Connell and anti-Irish biases in a more effective fashion. In the late summer of 1845, Delane sent a young reporter to Ireland to travel through the country and to send back a ‘true’ description of ‘The Condition of the People of Ireland.’ It was a master stroke of anti-Irish propaganda unwittingly unleashed at the same time the potato blight struck Ireland.
Notes
1. William Howard Russell was a Protestant and anti-Repealer, but, like O’Connell himself, was capable of maintaining personal relations with adversaries, including the Liberator. See The Times, History, 8.
2. Punch also ran a comic piece, ‘The Monster Trial or the Juror’s Oath,’ vi, 1844, 48-52.
3. Although the jury had finally reached its verdict on Saturday afternoon, 10 February, there was no time to reconvene the court, and the court would not sit on Sunday. The verdict could not be officially announced until Monday, 12 February. However, Russell had apparently gleaned the jury’s intentions from some proceedings late on Saturday. He caught the Iron Duke around two o’clock on Sunday morning and reached Printing House Square in time to squeeze two columns into the Monday Morning edition. Russell apparently repeated the feat again, for The Times managed to carry an account of the court’s Monday morning proceedings in a special afternoon edition on the next day, Tuesday. See The Times, History, 8-9.
4. Altick identifies the characters and discusses how the Tom Thumb theme, originally drawn from Henry Fielding’s literary burlesque, moved from print to popular theatre and then into political cartoons; 1997, 347.
5. The Times indignantly referred to the piece as seditious poetry and quoted it in its issue of 18 January 1844, 6. The poem was written by John Kells Ingram and published in 1843 in the Nation, the weekly organ of the Young Irelanders, owned by Charles Gavin Duffy and edited by him, Thomas Davis and John Blake Dillon. Reprinted in the collection entitled The Spirit of the Nation (1843), the poem eventually became a ‘rebel’ perennial, and, as a song, is usually referred to by its opening lines, rather than by its formal title. See Moylan, 102-103.
6. Leeches were a treatment for apoplexy; see Spielmann, 173.
7. Punch, vii. (1844), 38. Spielmann identifies the poem as Thackeray’s; 82.
8. Patrick Byrne’s Head of O’Connell carved for St. James Church in Dublin actually turns the cap into a crown; see Owens, 112. Owens describes the popularity of the Repeal cap in Ireland where thousands of cheap copies were sold to the Liberator’s admirers; 112-13. Strangely, Mary O’Connell, the Liberator’s wife, is posed wearing a remarkably similar hat in the John Gubbins portrait of her with her youngest son, painted between 1817 and 1818. Although her hat does not seem to have a dome, it bears a design similar to the Repeal Cap’s crown motif; see MacDonagh, 1987, illustration number 4.
9. The ILN stated that the ‘triumphal car’ had first been used in the ‘chairing’ of O’Connell in 1832. ‘It is apparently constituted of a large platform, bearing three stories, arranged like steps of stairs, and profusely decorated with purple velvet, gold fringes, gilt-headed rails, bosses, and paintings. On the top were two large arm-chairs, covered with purple velvet and gilding….’ A harper in bardic costume usually occupied one of the lower tiers. The Liberator of course rode on top. See Illustrated London News, v., 14 September 1844, 165.
10. MacDonagh, 1989, 258-59. See also O’Connell, 9 January 1844, Correspondence, vii., 235.
11. This image of O’Connell as a street musician held special venom coming from the pen of John Leech. Street musicians, especially organ grinders, were a particular personal irritant to Leech, whose nervous disposition could not abide having extraneous street sounds interrupt his work; Prager, 92.
12. The cross on the back of O’Connell’s chair suggested, wrongly, to Arthur Prager that the seated figure was a member of ‘the Roman Catholic hierarchy’ and that the ragged figure approaching him was O’Connell; Prager, 43. However, the features of the figure in the chair are those of O’Connell, who is wearing Punch’s unmistakable version of the Repeal cap.
Punch’s ‘Almanack’ came out every year as an extra issue and was very popular. It was in a calendar format and most of the illustrations were by Leech; Houfe 24.
13. Punch, ix., 1845, 15. Spielmann identifies Thackeray as the author; 134-35.
