CHAPTER 3

IRELAND UNDER THE UNION, 1801–1922

John Bew

Take then to thy bosom her whom heaven seems to have chosen as the intimate associate of thy soul, and whom national and hereditary prejudice would in vain withhold from thee … lend your own individual efforts towards the consummation of an event so devoutly to be wished by every liberal mind, by every benevolent heart …

—SYDNEY OWENSON, THE WILD IRISH GIRL, 18061

THE ACT OF UNION, WHICH came into being in January 1801, was imposed on Ireland at a time of severe domestic tumult and European warfare. In contrast to many other acts of state building in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, the Union was not the culmination of a social process, related to rapid economic transformation, or a mass cultural or ideological awakening. Indeed, it was a combination of such forces in Ireland that eventually broke the Union in the first quarter of the twentieth century. The Anglo-Irish Union had similarities to the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707 in that its architects were cognizant of (and responsive to) recent changes in the social, economic, and political status quo, rather than simply being intent on suppressing emerging social and political forces.² Although a broad base of popular consent for the measure was preferred, it was not deemed to be essential. From its inception, therefore, the Union failed to pass the test of being seen to be in line with Irish public opinion.³ Unionists were convinced that consent would be forthcoming when the logic of the Union became clear and its positive effects began to be felt. Yet the definitive political fact of Ireland under the Union was that it was never consummated in the way that its exponents intended. Indeed, when one considers the intentions of the unionists, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Union was ultimately a failure. It may have been a “necessary evil,” and it may have been preferable to the alternatives in the wake of the 1798 rebellion. In the end, however, it did not make Ireland easier to govern or “solve” the Irish question. Under the Union, Ireland presented an interminable political problem rather than a project or, consciously at least, a “laboratory” for English social and educational policy.4

The failure to pacify Ireland was not for want of many attempts to “do justice” by the country—a phrase to which English statesmen would often revert when legislating on Irish affairs. Tellingly, though, these efforts were protracted, contentious, and bound within the parameters of what was acceptable in British politics. The inability to ameliorate the conditions of Irish discontent—manifested in persistent anti-Union agitation—became a rebuke to the self-image of the British state and the Westminster parliament. As Richard Cobden observed as early as 1835 in his essay England, Ireland and America, Great Britain had “an insatiable thirst to become the peace-maker abroad, or if that benevolent task fail her, to assume the office of gendarme, and keep in order, gratuitously, all the refractory nations of Europe.” That Ireland, which existed within the purview of the British state, remained a land of “poverty, ignorance and misrule” was, as Cobden noted, “a cancer on the side of England.” Cobden’s view that the Irish question could only be solved “by a change and improvement of the population” rather than “forms of legislation” was not one shared by most British statesmen in 1835, who believed that the British parliament could legislate effectively for Ireland.⁵ Indeed, the publication of Cobden’s essay coincided with the first of a number of concerted efforts by English governments to conciliate Ireland to the Union through legislative programs and local government reform. A strong unionist consensus existed among the English governing elite. By the late nineteenth century, however, it was increasingly difficult to make the case that the answer to the Irish question was to be found at Westminster.

Before the 1880s, “constructive” unionists—both liberal and conservative—often complained that their vision was withheld from Ireland for too long and delivered in much less fortuitous circumstances than they had hoped. They could not claim that it was unrealized, however. More than anything, it was this recognition—of the inadequacy of British liberal solutions to Irish problems—that was fatal to the Union. Nationalist political mobilization—in which Charles Stewart Parnell expertly combined extraparliamentary agitation with parliamentary pressure—gave undoubted urgency to the Irish question. Ultimately, however, the Union was born and died in the minds of the British political elite. British solutions to Irish problems did much to shape Ireland over the course of more than a century—particularly in the sphere of education—and left an indelible mark on post-Union Ireland. In an age of European nationalism, however, the Union failed to douse the strength of national feeling in Ireland or to create a compelling alternative to Irish nationalism. While there was an increasingly ideological and emotional attachment to the Union in parts of Irish society, unionism could not match the breadth and depth of Irish nationalist sentiment. Although it was far from inauthentic, the rationalist logic of unionism lacked the sense of historical grievance and future destiny that nationalists harnessed to their movement.

A nation is a “large-scale solidarity, constituted by the feeling of the sacrifices that one has made in the past and of those that one is prepared to make in the future,” suggested the French liberal theorist Ernest Renan in 1882—a critical year in the Irish national movement when the lines between constitutional agitation and violence became more blurred than ever before. Consent—what Renan called a “daily plebiscite”—was its “sole legitimate criterion.”6 Ironically, it was the expansion of British democracy in last third of the nineteenth century that confirmed the lack of consent for the Union, despite the efforts of successive British statesmen to conciliate Ireland. As William Gladstone observed when introducing the Home Rule bill in 1886—referring back to decades of “constructive” attempts to legislate on aspects of Irish affairs—the experience of Ireland under the Union proved that “there is something more in this world than even the passing of good laws.”⁷

THE ACT OF UNION AS AN UNCONSUMMATED MARRIAGE

The first clue to understanding the Act of Union is to recognize that it was a top-down act of British raison d’état conceived in the wake of the Irish rebellion of 1798. That rebellion, occurring at a critical moment in Britain’s war effort against France, presented a grave crisis of British national security. In these exceptional circumstances, the idea of a legislative union was conceived by a relatively small section of the English political elite—chiefly those around Prime Minister William Pitt—who regarded the old colonial structures of Irish governance as a hindrance to national harmony. In pursuing union, they worked in league with an even smaller—and not necessarily the most powerful—portion of the Irish governing classes, who shared the same analysis. For Pitt, who was the driving force behind the measure, the long-term strength and the security of the British Empire was the foremost consideration.⁸ It does not quite follow that the Union was “the logical conclusion of a process of consolidation of the British state,” however, not least because this assumes some master plan for the construction of the United Kingdom, which never existed.⁹ War made for exceptional circumstances. A nation that was fighting an enemy of unprecedented military potency—in the form of Napoleonic France—needed to find a means to restore calm and some degree of social and political harmony in a tumultuous portion of its own body politic. Existing formulas had failed to ensure this. The main aim of the Union was thus to re-establish the authority of the state, stabilize Ireland, and prevent its further drift away from Britain—and potentially into the hands of France.

Liam O’Dowd has argued that unionism, “in its most abstract form,” is the “ideology of the British state and empire-building in Ireland.”10 This is accurate only to the extent that the Union was intended to serve the interests of the British state. Equally, however, and in no way contradicting this, the architects of the Union were also convinced that Ireland could, should, and would be governed more judiciously than it had been hitherto. To call this an ideology of “empirebuilding” is to fail to consider the extent to which the Union was intended to transform the way Ireland was governed—and to break with the old colonial architecture. As Roy Foster has written, interpretations of the Union have often been “brutally simple: colonization as rape, union as shotgun marriage,” even though it was an attempt—albeit a flawed one—to “amalgamate the nations.”¹¹ J.G.A. Pocock has suggested that Ireland is in danger of “appearing in the narrative only as part of the ‘empire’ which the English and their British state exerted over realms not included in its structure.”¹² Rather than a conscious ideology of imperialism, or a renewed effort to colonize the country, such alternative intellectual trends as utilitarianism, political economy, and Scottish Enlightenment philosophy had a more profound influence on the thinking of the unionists.¹³ The Union may have been a failure when it came to amalgamation and conciliation, but it is more fruitful to evaluate it on those terms than through the prism of twentieth-century constructs of imperialism and colonialism.¹⁴

To the critics of the Union, the self-interest of the British state and the interests of the Irish people were not so easy to reconcile in practice. Coming in the wake of 1798, the measure was widely perceived to have been “wrung from Ireland in her distress”—the latest incarnation of Britain’s “divide-and-rule” approach to the governance of Ireland.¹⁵ That the passage of the act itself was so inglorious—shunted through the Irish parliament by a combination of bribery, intimidation, and skullduggery—was another problem in how it was perceived. Both English and Irish Whigs—particularly those associated with Charles James Fox, the figurehead of the British Whig opposition to William Pitt—objected that unionists had failed to build a sufficiently broad-based consensus in Ireland.¹⁶ It was on similar grounds that as thoughtful and open-minded an Irish member of parliament (MP) as the Whig Richard Lovell Edgeworth opposed the measure, even if he was willing to accept the goodwill of unionists, and accept many of their arguments.¹⁷ This lack of Irish support for the Union was never adequately remedied. This was partly because the logic behind it was never fully understood and partly because the Union failed to deliver on its own terms.

In many ways, the practical experience of early life under the Union seemed to confirm the skepticism of the anti-unionists. The way in which Irish affairs had the capacity to polarize and poison British political debate pointed to a significant miscalculation on the part of the architects of the Union—the assumption that Irish matters would be dealt with more dispassionately and liberally at Westminster once Catholic-majority Ireland was subsumed into a Protestant-majority United Kingdom. The first and most damning example of this mistake was the failure to deal with the question of equal rights for Catholics. It was with bitter disappointment that the most influential pro-unionists—including William Pitt and his Irish chief secretary Viscount Castlereagh—who had steered the Union through the Irish parliament—encountered the fierce opposition of King George III to Catholic emancipation. Pitt’s lord lieutenant for Ireland, Lord Cornwallis, commented in February 1801 that it was “mortifying” that the “fatal blow should be struck from that quarter most interested to avert it, and that Ireland is again to become a millstone about the neck of Britain.”18

Partly because of the failure to complete the Union as intended, the idea of consummation became a motif in post-Union Anglo-Irish literature—a genre that was itself born in this era. In the novels of Richard Lovell Edgeworth’s daughter, Maria Edgeworth, Roy Foster has identified a “speculative unionism” and a “disinterested” attempt to create a genuine Anglo-Irish identity, envisaging a successful Union on the Anglo-Scottish model.¹⁹ It has been suggested by other literary scholars that Edgeworth’s work was more reflective of traditional pre-Union colonial mind-sets than the type of post-Union re-imagining Foster describes.²⁰ The imposition of this colonial prism, although having some analytical use, is an ex post facto mode of analysis. It was Foster’s version of Edgeworth that contemporaries recognized. Notably, her work was praised by Walter Scott in a postscript to his own novel Waverly, as having “done more towards completing the Union than perhaps all but the legislative enactments by which it has been followed up.”²¹ Viscount Castlereagh was also fond of Edgeworth’s 1800 novella, Castle-Rackrent, which coincided with the passing of the Union and predicted Irish advancement under it.²² In the same vein, but less predictable, was Castlereagh’s passion for the novels of Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan. Owenson had been a critic of the Union and was known as an outspoken advocate of Catholic emancipation. In contrast to Edgeworth’s utilitarian view of the potential improvement of Ireland under the Union, she articulated a more sentimental and romantic vision of Ireland in her first novel, The Wild Irish Girl, published in 1806.²³ On the surface, it may seem surprising that Castlereagh was moved by Owenson’s writing, as it articulated feelings of historical grievance and dispossession among Ireland’s native population.²⁴ Yet his fondness for both Castle-Rackrent and The Wild Irish Girl can perhaps be explained by the fact that both novels ended in marriage and invoked a future in which traditional enmities between England and Ireland, and planter and native, would subside. In Owenson’s book, that marriage was perhaps even particularly symbolic, as it took place between a Protestant landowner, Horatia, and a wild Irish Catholic girl, Glorvina, whose family had once been forced off her land by her suitor’s ancestors.²⁵ Even anti-Union novels, such as The Knight of Gwynne by Charles James Lever, displayed some sympathy for the intentions of its architects and allowed for their sincerity.26

Such literary endeavors provided a space in which alternative political possibilities could be explored, in which the notion of a successful Union could be entertained. However, they did not represent—as some may have hoped—harbingers of future events. This literary moment was fleeting, and the prospects of consummation and conciliation faded every year with the failure to pass Catholic emancipation. In 1830, R. J. Bryce, a liberal Presbyterian educationalist, sought patronage from the Duke of Wellington’s government to translate into Gaelic “national” works, such as Edgeworth’s Forgive and Forget, an unpolemical account of the massacres of 1641.²⁷ But the fact that the Catholic Relief Act had not passed until 1829—and was forced on Westminster, rather than passed with good grace—meant that this narrative was increasingly difficult to sustain. Attitudes among English MPs had hardened in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, and it could no longer be claimed that George III was the only obstacle to the completion of the unionist project. Indeed, Catholic relief had been refused even after a majority of Irish MPs at Westminster supported it.²⁸ Instead of generating optimism, the first three decades of the Union came to be regarded as a missed opportunity.²⁹ More fundamentally, what Castlereagh called “the wisdom of the system” did not function as its architects intended.³⁰

IRISH ANOMALIES

The blocking of Catholic emancipation was not the only obstacle to the successful operation of the Union. The governance of Ireland also required the acquiescence of Irish stakeholders, who were not necessarily comfortable with new directives from Westminster—not least the old colonial elites who had been identified as a problem already. In passing the Union through the Irish parliament, for example, Pitt and Castlereagh courted elements of the ultra-Protestant and Orange factions in Ireland. These factions, in turn, were able to exert their influence in their campaign against Catholic emancipation.³¹ Thus the logic of the Union turned in on itself. In some respects, the strained relationship the British state had with its own colonial elites in Ireland was symptomatic of the problems it had faced in America before the War of Independence; unionist thinkers were certainly aware of the parallel. As Kanter has described, union was intended to allow for increased control of the periphery of the state, “while simultaneously reconciling that periphery to the fiscal-military demands of the state by extending political and commercial equality throughout the empire.” The problem with this ambitious scheme, as was discovered with the American Revolution, was that “it seriously underestimated the assertiveness and self-confidence of colonial elites.”³² Irish peers and MPs sent to England to represent their country were often the greatest opponents of legislation created by English statesmen to improve the condition of Ireland.

Recalling a conversation with Castlereagh in 1821—in which the former chief secretary had reiterated his belief in the importance of Catholic emancipation—the Irish peer Lord Rosse outlined a familiar view of Irish governance, which went against the spirit of the Union but which long outlasted 1801. “For, though the maxim, divide and govern has often been reprobated, it is nevertheless true that the division facilitates the governing of the country,” he confessed. Moreover, Rosse also pointed out that the Irish question was much more deep-seated than a simple question of religious liberty and political equality. Referring back to the Plantation, he noted that “notions of aboriginal possession, which are very strong, as well as religion … are always working in the minds of the [C]atholics against the connection.”33 Ireland was not simply divided between Protestant and Catholic but between settler and native, Saxon and Celt, and landowner and peasant.³⁴ Although it would be misleading to see every issue through this prism, this divide did give Irish politics its organizing dynamic. Thus many Irish conservatives remained skeptical about the notions of amalgamation and conciliation envisaged by the architects of the Union. In 1849, the Dublin University Magazine rebuked the pro-unionists for their naivete in assuming that the Catholic question was the key to solving the Irish question; they had approached the question of religious equality “solely with reference to the tranquility [sic] they would produce, and the grounds of discontent they would remove” and could “only see halcyon visions of peace and prosperity.”³⁵

Problems of sectarianism and social disorder were not unique in a European context, of course. But other ingredients in Irish politics made Ireland both anomalous and particularly combustible. In the late eighteenth century, the country had experienced a unique phenomenon—the mobilization and political awakening of Catholic peasantry, ostensibly in support of a Jacobin rebellion. It was to the horror of the Catholic hierarchy that Ireland had caught “the French disease.”³⁶ As Sir Henry Parnell, grandfather of the future Irish nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell, noted early in the life of the Union, anywhere else the French Revolutionary armies marched “armed peasants were their most formidable enemies” and the Catholic religion was traditionally found in support of “arbitrary power.” Ireland presented “the only instance where this religion existing in its full force, has been found leagued in resistance to the civil power, and inculcating, at the same time, the dogmas of religious superstition, and the principles of democratical enthusiasm.”³⁷

The fusion of religious grievance and Jacobinism represented the nightmare scenario of the British governing classes—not only in Ireland but in England too, where the rise of politically conscious Dissenters was of growing concern for those charged with defense of the Anglican constitution.³⁸ For that reason, the restructuring of the state at the time of the Union was seen as an opportunity to decouple confessional interest groups and Jacobin ideology. The leading Irish advocates of the Union saw an opportunity to reset the relationship between the state and the various religious bodies in Ireland through a dual process of emancipation (the lifting of civil and legal disabilities on Catholics) and endowment (of both the Catholic and Irish Presbyterian Churches).

Although an Anglo-Irish discourse of “benevolence” and “consummation” was enticing to unionists, a colder realpolitik rationale was also in operation.39 It is no coincidence then that some of the most prominent proponents of Catholic emancipation—Pitt, Castlereagh, George Canning, Edward Cooke, and Cornwallis—were also some of the most hawkish members of the political establishment when it came to the prosecution of the war with France. The lengthy document that Castlereagh presented to Pitt’s cabinet in favor of Catholic emancipation spoke of “expediency” rather than “justice” and was framed as a measure of security in a time of war. The existence of discontented religious interest groups in the state was a gift to the nation’s external enemies.

Should it be thought that the dissenting interests of the empire at large (the Catholics being so admitted) have not weight, through their lawful operation, to shake the establishment, there can be no question that, in a state of exclusion, they are more naturally open to an alliance with Jacobinism, the enemy of the present day, than in a state of comprehension.

The logic applied not just to Ireland but to all “dissenting” groups (or “sectaries”) in the United Kingdom. Government should “adopt a line of conduct towards the sectaries of less distrust, and thereby to put an end to questions affecting the constitutional rights of large classes of the community,” Castlereagh stated. The most important question was “what system, without hazarding the powers of the State itself, is best calculated, if not warmly to attach at least to disarm the hostility of those classes in the community who cannot be got rid of, and must be governed.”⁴⁰

If emancipation and the removal of disabilities would soothe the relationships, endowment would fasten these groups, Dissenters and Catholics, further to the state and provide the government a channel of communication to the religious hierarchies. A model for this had recently been established by Pitt’s endowment of a Catholic seminary at Maynooth in 1795—something that loomed large in the calculations of the pro-unionists after 1798. Indeed, there were notable similarities between the positions of Castlereagh and Sir Henry Parnell, despite their differences over the Union. In support of endowment, Parnell invoked David Hume’s History of England, which defended the existence of an established church “to bribe the indolence of the clergy, and reduce religious enthusiasms to that degree of temper, which is consistent with the peaceable management of this world.” “[T]o weaken the separatist spirit of a sect (and without a spirit of separation a sect is powerless) nothing is done, unless everything is done,” Parnell posited, in language that could have been borrowed directly from Castlereagh. The Irish were not “naturally rebels.”⁴¹

Despite the recommendations of such men, the notion of endowment was never explicitly stated in the Act of Union or systematically applied by its exponents. Nonetheless, it is possible to argue that it was implicit in the logic of unionism. The idea certainly struck down roots; it was periodically revived by supporters of the Union. In 1845 the knight of Kerry—who had cooperated closely with Cornwallis and Castlereagh at the time of the Union—wrote to Robert Peel, the prime minister, who was attempting to push through an increase in the government grant to Maynooth. In doing so, Kerry unearthed a letter that Castlereagh had sent him in 1801, confirming that Castlereagh had offered extensive financial support for the “advancement” of the Catholic Church in Ireland at the time of the Union, which dwarfed the amount of money granted to Maynooth. Kerry went so far as to claim that the Catholic hierarchy was “taught to expect it as growing out of the union” and argued—accurately—that the idea of state-funded conciliation with the Catholic Church was at the core the original unionist rationale. Thus, “to object now, in principle, to aiding the education of the [C]atholic priesthood, would be to disavow and falsify the union.”42

At the close of the century, the liberal Home Ruler Viscount Morley suggested that this approach—a “policy of levelling [sic] up”—framed the Irish policies of successive Whig and Conservative governments until William Gladstone disestablished the Irish Church in 1869 as part of “a general cessation of endowments for religion in Ireland.” At the time of disestablishment, the Conservative leader Benjamin Disraeli had proposed that the state should fund a Roman Catholic university in Ireland as part of his attempt to present a conciliatory alternative to disestablishment. “Mr Disraeli’s was at bottom the principle of Pitt and Castlereagh and of many great Whigs,” noted Morley, “and doubtless he did not know, how odious it would be to the British householders, who were far more like King George III than they all supposed.”⁴³ Disraeli certainly saw himself as an inheritor of Pitt’s policy, which was to “settle Ireland with honour to ourselves, with kindness to the people, and with safety to the realm.” The duty of an English minister in Ireland was to “effect by his policy all those changes which a revolution would do by force. That is the Irish question in its integrity.”⁴⁴

THE UNION AND IRISH IDEAS

While the Irish question in British politics has been the subject of much scholarship, as K. T. Hoppen has observed, “far less attention has been given to the equally important fact that all aspects of Irish life, not least the political, were constantly obliged to react and reverberate to the imperatives and the dominance of the larger island.”⁴⁵ The subsuming of Irish affairs into Westminster meant a commingling of individuals, ideas, and political methods between the two islands. Daniel O’Connell and Charles Stewart Parnell were both great British parliamentarians and highly innovative political mobilizers “out of doors.” In a similar vein, Gearoid Ó Tuathaigh has called for further exploration of

the intellectual and psychological ramifications of the Union experience for the Irish ideas market after 1800; the horizons of alternative possibilities … the “states of mind” conditioned by the Union experience … the speculative zone—the impact of the Irish Union framework on the imaginative horizons of the nineteenth-century Irish.46

As Peter Jupp also noted, particularly after Catholic emancipation (1829) and the Great Reform Act (1832), “trends encouraging incorporation and assimilation coexisted with those emphasising Ireland’s distinctiveness.”⁴⁷

The Irish parliamentary tradition had its antecedents in College Green, but it was also shaped by the Westminster experience.⁴⁸ Both unionists and anti-unionists worked within this system for more than a century. Indeed, it was sometimes the case that those presumed to be unionists were less comfortable with the prevailing political mood in England than those whose stated aim was a restoration of the Irish parliament; Orangemen were often deeply uncomfortable about aspects of the post-Union dispensation. While they preferred to side with English Conservatives on most issues, they viewed the Conservative leadership with some suspicion.⁴⁹ The strength of unionist or nationalist enthusiasm in Ireland was not a fixed commodity; both unionism and nationalism waxed and waned in response to the prevailing political mood in England and the balance of power at Westminster. Thus changes of government in London shaped both unionist and nationalist strategy and discourse. The first illustration of this came with Pitt’s death in 1806 and the formation of the “Ministry of all the Talents,” in which the Whig leader Charles James Fox was included. William Drennan’s 1806 Letter to Charles James Fox signaled the willingness on the part of former radical opponents of the Union to be reconciled to the measure on the condition that liberal reforms begin.⁵⁰

The reorientation of Presbyterian radicalism—from being in the vanguard of Irish separatism to an essentially pro-unionist position—was a highly significant development in recasting Irish politics in the nineteenth century. On the one hand, it seemed to demonstrate the possibility of reconciliation to the Union. The survival of the Union for so long would not have been possible without the co-option of this group that had been behind much of the radical separatism of the late eighteenth century.⁵¹ On the other hand, the importance of this development was both outweighed and undercut by a new phenomenon: the emergence of an organized campaign for Catholic rights and its fusion with the cause of Irish nationalism. It was this campaign that was to become the dominant political force in Ireland—and the biggest threat to the Union.

The extent to which the tone of nineteenth-century Irish nationalism was set by the leader of the Catholic Association, Daniel O’Connell, is hard to overstate. His leadership bestowed a number of identifiable characteristics. First, O’Connell represented a break from the republican traditions of the 1790s; as a young man, he had been an anti-Jacobin, and it was partly because of his predominance that Irish republicanism remained largely dormant until the 1840s. Second, O’Connell’s strategic decision to link the cause of Catholic rights with a campaign to repeal the Act of Union entailed that Catholicism and Irish nationalism became explicitly linked in a way that had been by no means inevitable before 1801. O’Connell’s abrasiveness and dominating presence in Irish politics made him a divisive figure across the political spectrum. Not only was he an obvious bogeyman for unionists, he was also much criticized by later generations of nationalists for a variety of perceived sins—including clericalism and his periodic cooperation with English Whigs. Oliver MacDonagh’s classic two-volume life of O’Connell published in the 1980s rescued him from many of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century nationalist critiques. His version of O’Connell was of a man who combined a strong Catholic faith (after a brief flirtation with Deism) with the characteristics of a clan chief, and who generally adhered to a secular Enlightenment rights-based discourse. Thus O’Connell’s conception of the national struggle was one for equality and liberty.52

It is also true that O’Connell could depart from this script himself on occasion—lashing out at opponents, falling back on his undoubted powers as a demagogue, and “riding the tiger” of mass Catholic peasant mobilization to challenge the authority of the state.⁵³ In this respect it is perhaps worth distinguishing between “O’Connellism” and O’Connell himself; Maume has cautioned against an oversanitized version of “The Liberator” that plays down his “verbal violence.” Combined with O’Connellite tactics—the tithe war and monster meetings, for example—this meant the Repeal movement, just like the Union itself, also failed to broaden its basis of support much beyond the Catholic Association, which O’Connell had established in 1823, and which he essentially reconstituted into the Repeal Association after 1829.⁵⁴ Despite the rights-based framing of the Repeal movement, from the Irish Protestant perspective, it was hard not to view it as a “communal struggle for power.”⁵⁵

O’Connellism was as much a symptom as a cause of the polarization of Irish politics in the first three decades of the century. It was the failure to pass Catholic emancipation in the immediate aftermath of the Union that created the conditions for his rise to prominence. As one Irish Tory MP put it in 1828, the Catholic question “embitters every transaction of life, and it is utterly impossible that the country can regain quiet under such a conflict of opinion—An open rebellion would be far preferable for there would be some prospect of a termination of our miseries in the triumph of one party—but now all is suspicion.”⁵⁶ Coinciding with opposition to emancipation were the political effects of the early nineteenth-century evangelical Protestant revival and renewed efforts at a “Second Reformation” of Ireland.⁵⁷ Indeed, even though ultra-Protestants could point to the support that O’Connell received from the Catholic Church, this alliance was partly of their making. Whelan has shown how the Catholic bishops moved in behind O’Connell’s campaign partly because of their fears of resurgent evangelical proselytism in Ireland.58 A related theme was the increasing inadequacy of Irish liberalism—both as a motor for political change and as a conciliating force in Ireland—an important subtext in this story that has been addressed extensively by J. J. Lee for the period after 1848.⁵⁹ The Irish liberal tradition, once so robust in the late eighteenth century, never fully recovered from the events of 1798 because of the explosion of sectarian violence that had occurred in the “Year of Liberty.” One legacy of the rebellion was that liberals among the Irish gentry were reluctant to embrace “an unrestrained rights-based Enlightenment discourse” predicated on universal suffrage.⁶⁰

Nationalism and liberalism therefore enjoyed a strained relationship in nineteenth-century Ireland.⁶¹ Partly because of their uneasiness about O’Connellism, for example, Ulster liberals in particular sought solace in the broader community of liberal opinion that existed in the United Kingdom. Repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in 1828 and, finally, the Catholic Relief Act in 1829 were optimistically seized on as representing a new dawn in the life of the Union, particularly as they preceded the fall of the Tory government and the long-awaited return to office of the Whigs. “I must acknowledge that it should not be a Union as we have had hitherto; but let the past be forgotten,” declared one prominent liberal at a meeting of the Belfast Reform Society in December 1830, “and let our future Union be one of peace, augmented by the indissoluble ties of equal justice, and reciprocity of interest.” As for O’Connell, it was regretted “that the colossal champion of Irish liberty … should unite his great talents in agitating a question which many patriotic men think calculated to divide our country once more into factions.”⁶²

Speaking in 1834, when the House of Commons debated Repeal of the Union for the first time, O’Connell could complain with justification that too many of his “fellow countrymen are troubled with a fogginess of intellect, which makes them unable to see their own interests, without the use of British spectacles.”⁶³ He did make periodic attempts to broaden his appeal and reach out to Irish Protestants but with scant success. This was partly because of his tendency to oscillate between rapprochement with and denunciation of such groups—and partly because Irish Protestants were unwilling to reconcile themselves to O’Connellism in any form. In 1830 and 1832, he publicly drank Boyne water and took the Orange oath, only to be criticized by liberals for pandering to the ultra-Protestants for short-term gain.⁶⁴ In 1835, conscious that his “tail” of followers in the House of Commons were “almost to a man Catholic,” he reached out to the Protestant landowner and radical Chartist William Sharman Crawford by arranging for the latter’s election to Dundalk.⁶⁵ Yet Crawford spent the rest of the 1830s distancing himself from O’Connell, attempting to outflank him on the left by opposing his alliance with the Whigs, and aligning himself with the radical critics of the government.66

By the early 1830s, then, a number of factors—chief among them the emergence of a Catholic nationalist political consciousness and an aggressive Protestant revanchism—had converged to create a division in Irish political life that was rapidly calcifying: that between unionists and anti-unionists (“Repealers”). The period from 1828 to 1833 also saw several important structural changes to the Westminster system that underlined that distinction, such as the broadening of the franchise and an increasing emphasis on party organization. Not all trends pointed toward polarization, however. The arrival of O’Connell and his supporters in the House of Commons meant that Irish political life became further immersed in the wider pool of British politics. Ideas were exchanged, and unlikely alliances were made. This, as Ó Tuathaigh has noted, should guard us “against the danger of oversimplification, of collapsing all parties into a simple story of polarisation.”⁶⁷

Recent historiography has established a picture of a more plural, fluid, and diverse political scene after 1832. To give an important example, Joseph Spence’s study of the philosophy of Irish Toryism in this period demonstrated both the richness of conservative thought and a degree of unease with the consequences of the Union.⁶⁸ Alongside this, Jennifer Ridden has identified a tradition of Protestant liberalism among the Irish gentry (particularly strong in County Limerick) that pushed back against the proselytism associated with the evangelical revival. As she notes, there was a great variety of Irish mentalities that used religious ideas and languages to debate a much wider range of social and political ideas.⁶⁹ Studies of individual figures—such as Eve Patten’s on Samuel Ferguson—have restored “alternative discourses” and “layered ideology” back into the familiar “nineteenth-century unionist/nationalist dialectic.”⁷⁰ More than any scholar, Patrick Maume has revealed a genuinely diverse panoply of Irish political thought through the auspices of University College Dublin Press’s Classics in Irish History series and the Dictionary of Irish Biography.⁷¹

Ironically, one could argue that it was Daniel O’Connell’s willingness to participate in British political life—and to recognize the possibility of improvement even under the Westminster parliament—that breathed new life into the Union from the mid-1830s. Departing from their predecessors’ overreliance on coercion, the second Melbourne government’s approach to Ireland from 1835 to 1841 was characterized by an ambitious campaign of “conciliation.” Reliant on O’Connell’s parliamentary support for a parliamentary majority, this government developed a “moralistic rhetoric” of doing “justice to Ireland.” In practice, this meant a redirection of patronage to Catholic and liberal professionals, a purge of Orange influence in the magistracy, a reduction in the temporalities of the Irish Church, commutation of tithes, and further reform of municipal government. In the words of the Earl of Musgrave, the Irish lord lieutenant, the aim was “to induce a reciprocal feeling of confidence between the governors and the governed … to treat the English and Irish as ‘one nation.’ ”72

The office of the lord lieutenant—which operated from the old colonial garrison at Dublin Castle—was central to efforts at reform. But it also embodied something of a contradiction at the heart of the Union. On the one hand, it underlined Ireland’s distinctiveness from the rest of the United Kingdom; on the other hand, the relative autonomy of the lord lieutenant meant that it could be a vehicle for radical reform. Another irony was that it was English liberals who were given to celebrate the virtues of authoritarian, central government when it came to national improvement in Ireland; something that James Mill had prescribed for India could also be recommended by Thomas Macaulay for Ireland.⁷³ It was a Whig lord lieutenant who suggested that “Ireland wants a Bonaparte” and asked whether it was “fit for a free government.”⁷⁴ After 1835, under the terms of Melbourne’s alliance with O’Connnell, the country became a “Foxite fiefdom” and a stage on which Whigs could apply their notions of “paternal attention” and gestures of “fellow-feeling.”⁷⁵ The logic of this position was that, in dispensing justice through Dublin Castle, liberals could bypass or undercut local legal and political elites and vested interests that were seen as an obstacle to the successful operation of the Union.

As early as 1803, serious consideration had been given to the reduction of the lord lieutenancy to a ceremonial role—with the English Home Office subsuming the main responsibilities for the governance of Ireland.⁷⁶ This debate was revisited again at various points when the governance of Ireland came under scrutiny.⁷⁷ Although they were generally more suspicious of state centralization, some Irish conservatives also objected that the lord lieutenancy was “an effectual bar to the complete and virtual recognition of Ireland as part and parcel of the United Kingdom, causing her to be looked on rather as a pigmy province, with separate interests, and only fit for the rule of a colonial governor, like that of Trinidad, or Barbados, or Bermuda.” Given how often the political spectrum swung in London, it was also a potential source of instability; by 1850 there had been sixteen lord lieutenants since the Union and on average, a new one every three years.⁷⁸

Another unexpected theme of life under the Union is that conservative unionists could be more ambitious and bold in their schemes for Ireland than were liberal unionists. When O’Connell renewed his campaign for Repeal of the Union after the Whigs left office in 1841, the initial response of Sir Robert Peel’s Conservative government was unimaginative and reactive—a return to the cycle of coercion and repression that had previously played into O’Connell’s hands. However, as Boyd Hilton has described, the reorientation of Peel’s approach from 1843 presents another of the “what if” moments under the Union, in which an ambitious campaign of conciliation was interrupted by the arrival of the potato blight in 1845.⁷⁹ Peel’s three-pronged legislative program consisted of the Charitable Bequests Act (which allowed easier processing of financial gifts and bequests to the Catholic Church), the Maynooth Act (a significant increase in the grant to the Catholic seminary that had been established at Maynooth in the 1790s and support for which had been tied to the original idea of the Union), and the Provincial Colleges Act (which proposed three state-funded nondenominational universities at Cork, Wexford, and Belfast). In the long term it was hoped that this might help foster a new middle-class elite in Ireland that was less welded to sectarian identity politics.80 In the short term—in a development that Peel was keen to exploit—the initiative highlighted important fault lines in nationalist Ireland that took many years to resolve. Thus it was partly the Irish debates over Peel’s program that created the space for a new brand of “Young Ireland” nationalism. This was a cultural and political alternative to O’Connellism that has been seen more in the tradition of the German Romantic movement or as an attempt to revive a civic republican notion of virtue.⁸¹ For the leading Young Ireland intellectual, Thomas Davis, O’Connell’s opposition to “Godless Colleges”—Peel’s proposals for the extension of nondenominational university education—was opportunistic and damaging to the future progression of the nation.⁸²

As Young Ireland never had the democratic weight behind it that O’Connellism did, historians have tended to focus on its cultural and ideological legacy to Irish nationalism. For that reason, sometimes it has been seen as a radicalizing force that fed the political awakening of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Irish republicans. Or at least, subsequent generations of republicans read back into the 1840s lessons that seemed apposite to later campaigns—such as Young Ireland’s criticism of O’Connell’s cooperation with English liberals. Yet the lack of attention paid to the political maneuvering of Young Ireland—behind the pages of the Nation—means that a significant aspect of the Young Ireland story is often obscured. Although Davis is remembered as a purist nationalist, perhaps more significant was his unwillingness to treat Repeal of the Union as a zero-sum cause—something absent from other versions of republicanism. His letters on the issue of mixed education indicate a more expansive notion of patriotism. “We have a battle to fight against dangerous bigots and must all do our best,” Davis wrote to the Belfast Liberal MP Robert James Tennent, another prominent exponent of mixed education: “If we are beaten the country is ruined.”⁸³

Davis was also one of the steering hands behind one of the few attempts by nineteenth-century nationalists to genuinely broaden the scope of Irish patriotism—and to address the specifics of how an independent Irish parliament might function. This attempt manifested itself in the brief but highly significant federalist movement (or “moment”) of 1844, which has been given remarkably little consideration by Irish historians.⁸⁴ Davis repeatedly praised federalists as “men thoroughly national in feeling” and made efforts to help them found their own newspaper.⁸⁵ At a private function in Belfast in October 1844, he met with Sharman Crawford, the young Ulster Catholic liberal Thomas O’Hagan, Belfast’s Liberal MP David Ross, and the Irish Whig Henry Caulfield to discuss how they might expand their ideas. According to Charles Gavan Duffy, another Young Irelander, if the federalists had actually managed to agree on a united program, Davis would have supported it.86 For a fleeting moment, O’Connell also saw in federalism a possible compromise position from which to construct a broader national movement. However, he made the mistake of seeing it as a progression toward the nationalist position to which he himself subscribed—remarking that it “annihilates mere Whiggery.”⁸⁷ What O’Connell failed to realize was that federalism was not the forerunner to but “the shadow of Repeal, he could not get nearer to it or farther from it.”⁸⁸ “All chance of a Federalist move is gone for the present,” complained Davis after O’Connell’s public declaration of support for the federalists, “and mainly because of O’Connell’s public and private letters” in support of it.⁸⁹

Federalism was one of the few suggested solutions to the Irish national question that engaged those who were, broadly speaking, both in the pro- and anti-Union camps. Nonetheless, in keeping with one motif of this chapter, it would be wrong to claim that it was some sort of missed opportunity in the Irish national story. Before his death in 1845, Davis himself also pointed to more serious obstacles to cooperation across the nationalist-unionist divide. The greatest difficulty in unifying the nation around a reconstituted patriotism was not O’Connellism but the increasingly detached perspective of the northeast of Ireland—particularly Belfast, which had experienced a rapid process of industrialization that gave it more in common with many British cities than the rest of Ireland. Davis believed that Ulster had been infected by “Utilitarianism.” This was “the creed of Russell and Peel, as well as of the Radicals” that “measures prosperity by exchangeable values, measures duty by grain and limits desire to clothes, food and respectability.”⁹⁰

THE IRISH SONDERWEG

When O’Connell died in 1847, The Spectator—the embodiment of British compassion fatigue at the time of the Famine—suggested that he had demonstrated the upward limits of Irish nationalism. He

was supreme only in Ireland and not there among several large and important classes of Irish society: the gentry—witness his cool reception and retreat from the Agricultural Society; the Orangemen—he was their personification of evil; the Irish Whigs—he was sweeping in his retaliatory assaults on the “the Black North”; the Young Irelanders—who were always grinding at his “Whig alliance” and Repeal accounts; and the Ribandmen—whom he was powerless to restrain.⁹¹

In fact, to an extent that was not immediately obvious, the years preceding the Irish Famine had seen the upward limits of constructive unionism. On the one hand, when Peel left office in 1846, there were reasons to believe that “Irish nationalism appeared to be moribund” and he had “scotched, though not killed, the repeal agitation.” On the other hand, however, Peel’s government had also carried Irish conciliation as far as it could; at that point he had nearly split his party on the Maynooth grant, and it was only with the support of the Whigs that he had been able to press his Irish measures through parliament.92

The gravity of the Famine began to become clear during Peel’s last few months in office. “You will see,” he wrote to a sympathetic Irish MP in November 1845, “how unfortunately our prospects in Ireland, so far as the present physical comfort of the people is concerned[,] have been clouded by the lamentable disease which has affected the potato crop.”⁹³ As Peter Gray has observed, the lasting impression of 1840s policy toward Ireland was to become one of famine and lost opportunities. Rather than deliberate mendacity or callousness, it was the sheer inadequacy of the Whig government’s response to the crisis after 1846 that was to become the greatest indictment of the Union. A blend of Providential evangelical belief and classical economic orthodoxy restricted the government’s capacity and willingness to respond effectively. It meant that Britain, the richest nation in Europe, handled its peasant dominions less effectively than did any other European state. The ineffectiveness of the initial response was compounded by another conceptual and analytical shortcoming in English governance. This was the failure to recognize the transformative effect that mass mortality and emigration had on the social and economic structure of the country—particularly how it pertained to the land question. Even by 1850, Whig legislation on land was characterized by a “reassertion of orthodoxy.” In addition, Russell’s further aggravation of the sectarian problem in Ireland by clashing with the Catholic hierarchy—leading to the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill of 1852—confirmed his reputation as one of the most hapless of British prime ministers when it came to Irish affairs.⁹⁴

The return of a relative period of prosperity and stability in the 1850s and 1860s initially obscured the long-term significance of these events. But the catastrophe of the Famine was to serve increasingly as a symbol of Irish difference, rather than the dawn of a new Victorian age of integration and prosperity.⁹⁵ After a lag, the psychological effects of the Famine began to assert themselves alongside a series of other developments that made Ireland increasingly difficult to manage under the Union: the growing problem of religious divisiveness and sectarianism; the infusion of economics into political conflict (above all in the linkage of land and the national question); the emergence of new forms of nationalist organization and ideology; and finally, the spread of prosperity and education, which also helped lay the foundation for the march toward national independence.⁹⁶ Above all, as Biagini has put it, “The Irish Sonderweg [special path] was shaped, not by colonialism but by the Famine and mass emigration.”⁹⁷

In Ireland, rather than giving the nation a common cause around which it could coalesce, the post-Famine period confirmed just how entrenched existing divisions had become. The issue of land reform was something that had the potential to unite liberal political forces in the country and bridge the growing gap between north and south. The Tenant League of North and South partly grew out of cooperation between two newspaper editors and inheritors of the Young Ireland and Presbyterian radical traditions, respectively—Charles Gavan Duffy and James McKneight. Yet divisions over the question of attitudes toward the Union remained a serious stumbling block for further cooperation between them. Indeed, Presbyterians framed their land rights distinctly from those of their Catholic counterparts by invoking customary tenant laws, which dated back to the Plantation, and gave them a more legally privileged position.98 In some instances, then, in Ulster “tenant right” and “no surrender” could go literally hand in hand as the banner of a form of radical loyalism.⁹⁹ Augmenting this divide was the increasing sectarianization of Irish politics. Another burst of popular evangelical revivalism from the late 1850s was paralleled by the increasingly assertive Ultramontane movement, which emerged in the Catholic Church during the same period and was chiefly associated with Cardinal Paul Cullen.¹⁰⁰ The English liberal dream of the emergence of a Whiggish Catholic middle class remained unrealized—at least to the extent that had long been hoped for. The English Catholic intellectual Lord Acton (MP for Carlow between 1859 and 1865) and Thomas O’Hagan, perhaps the embodiment of an Irish Catholic Whig, bemoaned the difficulties of establishing a moderate Catholic journal in Ireland, independent of the hierarchy and of liberal outlook.¹⁰¹

It was with good reason that Disraeli saw an opportunity for the Conservatives to cooperate more closely with the Catholic hierarchy in the governance of Ireland. As he told colleagues, he wanted “to break off the connection between Toryism and Orangeism, it was merely accidental, of late growth: the first Orangemen were Whigs.”¹⁰² In October 1870, he claimed that the essence of his approach to the Union was to “govern Ireland according to the policy of Charles the First, and not of Oliver Cromwell, to emancipate the political constituency of 1832 from its sectarian bondage.”¹⁰³ Such a reorientation was much more difficult than Disraeli envisaged, however. In a number of constituencies—particularly in Ulster—traditional Irish Conservative elites were forced to assert their Protestant bona fides in the teeth of a rising populist Orange movement, embodied in the figure of the Orange Order agitator William Johnston (though Johnston himself was later bought off by government patronage).¹⁰⁴ The sectarian dynamic was further entrenched by a series of electoral reforms—above all large extensions of the franchise in 1867 and 1884.¹⁰⁵ Although this presented a problem of management for Irish Conservatives, the Irish Liberal party—notwithstanding a brief renaissance between the Second and Third Reform Acts and some success in its adoption of the cause of land reform—was even more vulnerable to confessional polarization. Its survival had traditionally depended on a large fund of Catholic support and an ability to present themselves as the most effective advocates of land reform.106 As an indication of their vulnerability, the Ulster branch of the Liberal party was severely damaged by William Gladstone’s anti-Vatican pamphlets in 1874.¹⁰⁷ As Conor Cruise O’Brien later wrote, the “arrival of mass democracy, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, made it hard to keep up the pretence that the division had been exaggerated.”¹⁰⁸ The sectarian bondage identified by Disraeli was not simply a residue of the past but an organizing dynamic in mass politics.

The two decades following the Famine were a period of reorientation, renewal, or rebirth for Irish nationalism, meanwhile. As the first indication of this, it was a different type of Young Ireland that emerged from the Famine than the movement Thomas Davis had led before his death in 1845. Something of the Davisian spirit of inclusive patriotism—encapsulated in his encouragement of federalism—was lost. What remained was the purist critique of O’Connell’s alliance with the Whigs and—because of the botched rebellion of 1848—another staging post in the emergence of a tradition of physical force republicanism. The disproportionate influence of another Young Irelander, John Mitchel, was an indication of the hardening of opinions. In The Last Conquest of Ireland—Perhaps, he characterized 1848 as a last act of defiance against British misrule and popularized the view that the Famine had been engineered by the British state as part of a policy of deliberate genocide.¹⁰⁹

Thus 1848 was an important year in Irish history, but not quite in the way that it was in many European states. In 1935 the American historian Robert C. Binkley suggested that throughout Europe in the period between 1848 and 1871, there was an overarching conflict between an ideal of the “federative polity” (essentially variations on the theme of liberal constitutional governance) and new trends of rationalism and realism that was harnessed by nation-builders, such as Cavour and Bismarck.¹¹⁰ Ireland did not quite fit the mold, though it did share certain commonalities. As Joe Lee argues, Ireland underwent a period of rapid political and economic modernization after the Famine, which shaped its political path. High emigration rates left behind a generation of tenant farmers engaged in a market-orientated agricultural economy. Rather than pulling away from the British political system in the first instance, this class initially made use of it to secure and improve their position. It was by linking the national question to the self-interest of such groups that nationalists were able to amplify their campaign in the English parliament.¹¹¹

The effects of the Famine—not least a hardening of political attitudes—were not immediately obvious because of the lack of a parliamentary presence for organized nationalism until the establishment of Isaac Butt’s Home Rule Association in 1870. Butt’s own conversion to Home Rule grew out of the hostility that some Irish Tories had always maintained about the Union. Partly because of this perspective, he might even be regarded as the last genuine federalist in Ireland.¹¹² The extraparliamentary nationalist awakening that occurred simultaneously was of a markedly different character than the movement led by Butt, though its nature and its potency were not immediately obvious. Thus the establishment of the Irish Republican Brotherhood in 1858 and the emergence of the Fenian movement was watched with interest in England but regarded as a poor cousin of previous incarnations of nationalism—not least because of its strength among the “lower orders.” “Once, the only allies to be expected on the side of order were the members of one privileged class; now, we can rely upon every class in Ireland above the lowest,” suggested The Times in 1865. “When Irish disaffection has dwindled to Fenianism, there is good reason for supposing that it is dying out altogether and must be very near its end.”113 Not for the first time, the anomalous nature of Irish nationalism compared to its European counterparts—not least the importance of a large Irish-American diaspora—obscured the emotional reserves on which it could draw. According to the liberal Presbyterian writer Thomas Croskery in The Edinburgh Review, other European patriots were “animated by wider sympathies and antipathies; and however wild their enthusiasm and deplorable their blunders, they set before them a loftier purpose and worship a higher ideal.” Fenians were men “of mean education and a narrow mind, whose ambition is restrained by no principle, whose measures are guided by no reflection.”¹¹⁴

The irony of this was that the very features of Fenianism for which it was mocked were also the characteristics that made it an enduring political force in Ireland. These included its ability to appeal beyond the elite audience reached by Young Ireland, its skill in harnessing nationalist sentiment in the working classes, and its foundation on a loosely defined but strongly felt sentiment of hostility toward England. Taking a more cautious editorial line than The Times, in 1868 The Spectator recognized that these traits presented “the gravest danger ahead for Liberal statesmanship, a large revolutionary party, with vague and restless cravings for national independence, and without faith in constitutional reforms or Parliamentary agitation.”¹¹⁵ The challenge presented by the Fenians became more complicated because of their willingness to play the parliamentary game after the “New Departure” announced by John Devoy in 1878.¹¹⁶

That the government had responded to the Fenian rising of 1867 by resorting to coercion undermined the self-image of liberal English government. It was a theme that Viscount John Morley evoked memorably in his 1868 pamphlet Ireland’s Rights and England’s Duties. “How much longer shall we have the hangman for our ally and the gallows for the symbol of our Government?”¹¹⁷ It was no coincidence that such liberal angst signaled the beginning of an unprecedented level of English political investment in the Irish question, surpassing the previous legislative programs of the late 1830s and early 1840s. In October 1868, William Gladstone had announced at an election speech in Wigan his intention to take the ax to the tree of the Irish problem in its three branches—church, land, and education.¹¹⁸ These efforts began with the totemic decision to disestablish the Irish church in 1869. As with Catholic emancipation in 1829, liberal unionists spoke in terms of a new watershed in the life of the Union; it was not only “a measure of justice” but the dismantling of the last pillar of “garrison” rule in Ireland.119 In Ireland, however, even those who were sympathetic to the measure were not so sanguine that it would make much long-term difference. Although it was a “just and desirable measure,” wrote the land reformer Hugh de Fellenberg Montgomery, “those who expect any immediate effect from it on the temper of Ireland will be deceived…. The matter of the Church … will I imagine soon blow over and make little difference; the land question is much more serious.”¹²⁰ Yet land reform was more of a domino than a silver bullet. The Liberal Land Act of 1870 did not solve the land question; as the first of five major land reform measures between 1870 and 1909, one might even say that it was the prelude to it.

Having made such concerted efforts to conciliate Ireland, the apparently irreducible nature of Irish nationalism was hard to digest. The bemusement of English liberals when faced with the resilience and the bitterness of these sentiments became a recurrent motif of the 1870s and 1880s. “The majority 4/5^th of them are no more H[ome] Rulers than you or I, but they adopted the shibboleth to get into Parliament,” boasted the Liberal lord lieutenant Spencer at the end of his tenure in 1874. “I have left your dear country very quiet. I am not depressed about it. I think that we are overcoming the anti-English prejudices gradually.”¹²¹ Predictably, this attitude left him rather perplexed at the ferocity of anti-English sentiment articulated by nationalists such as the Young Irelander John Martin:

I cannot hear how John Martin impressed the House…. It makes my heart sick to think that a man like him sh[oul]d really believe that England looks upon Irishmen as her foes…. If only he knew how devoted and earnest many Englishmen are in the cause of Ireland, and how ready they were to make almost any sacrifices for her good, he would not insult them as he does.¹²²

Such willful blindness was in deep reserve. In 1878, reflecting on the decade that had passed since the Fenian Rising of 1867, The Times retrospectively celebrated the “sweeping but beneficent legislation of 1869 and 1870” in pacifying Ireland. Although it had taken a number of years, The Times haughtily criticized the impatience of those who had complained that its “effects were not visible all at once, just as they are now impatient because Europe is not immediately pacified by the Treaty of Berlin. The mills of politics grind slowly, like those of higher Powers, but in the end they return meal for grain.” Both comparisons were as unfortunate as they were Panglossian. The Treaty of Berlin did not solve the Eastern Question, and within months, Ireland was suffering from an acute agricultural depression that led to the formation of the Land League and the Land War from 1879 to 1882. This made a mockery of the 1878 claim that “Fenianism is dead, and nothing has taken its place, though Irish restlessness may still find an occasional outlet in wayward and almost fantastic expressions of imaginary discontent.”123 As if to underline the irony, it was one of the clauses of 1870 Land Act—a provision to protect small farmers from eviction in instances where their rent had been increased significantly—that became the pretext for much of the Land League mobilization. The flood of money from Irish America meant that an increasing number of these cases could be brought to court. This entailed a further politicization of land and law, and was a challenge to the English defense of property rights as sacrosanct. In subsequent land reforms, Ireland’s distinctiveness would be increasingly recognized in legislation.¹²⁴

By August 1880, the extent of the agitation—and the “creep of agrarian crime”—had led to a complete change of tone among the English liberal elite. Coercion was countenanced again.¹²⁵ Tellingly, it was The Times, in its opposition to Home Rule, that led the most visceral and personalized attacks against Charles Stewart Parnell. Disappointment at the failure to pacify Ireland exposed the first cracks in the previously confident unionism of the English governing classes. Parnell’s ability to make the Land War tell in terms of parliamentary pressure was particularly disconcerting. Parnellism, according to the liberal constitutional lawyer and opponent of Home Rule, A. V. Dicey, was “organised hypocrisy. It is violence masked under the form of constitutional agitation.”¹²⁶ Notwithstanding such hyperbole, a substantive change in the nature and strategy of nationalism under Parnell’s leadership made the era of Isaac Butt seem very distant. As Maume notes, “the machine politics, opportunistic vaguenesss, and authoritarian leadership which contributed to the growth of Parnell’s party,” combined with the agrarian violence of the Land War, demonstrated the growing contrast between “Davisian idealism and the seedier aspects of constitutional nationalism.”¹²⁷

THE END OF ASSIMILATION

The reversion to coercion in the 1880s weighed heavily on Gladstone’s mind—not least the imprisonment of Parnell in Kilmainham Gaol in 1882, reminiscent of Peel’s imprisonment of O’Connell almost forty years before. This, as much as anything else, contributed to the gangrene that began to infect the Union in this period. In 1897, Gladstone claimed not to have given much thought to Parnell until relatively late in his career. But the key moment in his reassessment had come with the renewal of agitation. “I do not think that Mr. Parnell or Irish matters much engaged my attention until we came back to Government in 1880,” he told Parnell’s biographer Barry O’Brien, “You see we thought that the Irish question was settled. There was the Church Act and the Land Act, and there was a time of peace and prosperity, and I frankly confess that we did not give as much attention to Ireland as we ought to have done.”¹²⁸

Gladstone’s conversion to Home Rule represented the decisive end of the consensus in the British governing classes that the Union, if imperfect, was the least bad option for Ireland. As Hoppen has described, an essentially assimilationist approach had been pursued by successive mid-century administrations. It had been characterized by tithe, poor law and municipal reform, the regularization of the Irish franchise, and the alignment of criminal and civil law with English practice. While assimilation efforts had peaked in the ten years before the Famine, this approach—of equalization—had essentially continued into the 1850s and 1860s. However, Hoppen also argues that a creeping recognition of Ireland’s difference began in the late 1860s—manifested in reforms that went against the grain of British political culture and were not replicated in England (disestablishment, land reform, and the acceptance of Catholic control over education). Long before his “Hawarden Kite” (of December 1885, when it was revealed to the press that he had “converted” to Home Rule), Gladstone was bombarding his party with talk of Irish special circumstances. His conversion began, therefore, with an acceptance of the limits of assimilation.

This was a watershed in English attitudes to Ireland from which even anti–Home Rulers recognized it was almost impossible to recover. Both before and after the Home Rule bill, Hoppen suggests, there was a “coherent unity that lay beneath” both Tory and Whig prescriptions for Ireland; before the 1870s, it was assimilationist; after the 1870s, it was increasingly predicated on Irish differentiation. The most significant thing about Gladstone’s conversion to Home Rule was not its sincerity or high-mindedness, but the fact that his party’s “mode of discourse about Ireland changed to one based upon a general acceptance of Irish difference.” And although Lord Salisbury’s Conservative-Unionist coalition rejected Home Rule, they too increasingly accepted the logic of Irish difference. Indeed, the result was that policies associated with “constructive unionism”—such as those associated with land reform—were arguably more radical than Gladstone was willing to countenance from an English parliament.129 Such a conclusion tallies with Andrew Gailey’s argument that progressive reform measures under the chief secretaryships of Gerald Balfour and George Wyndham into the early 1900s were sticking-plaster solutions rather than part of a coherent strategy of killing Home Rule by kindness.¹³⁰

The failure of the first and second Home Rule bills in 1886 and 1893, respectively, might be approached as the last “what if” moment in Anglo-Irish relations between 1801 and 1922. Both English liberal historians and sympathizer of the moderate constitutional nationalist John Redmond—who assumed leadership of the Home Rule movement after Parnell—later propounded the view that Home Rule would have prevented the separatism, radicalization, and militarization of Irish politics that occurred in the first two decades of the twentieth century and led to the Easter Rising of 1916 and the War of Independence.¹³¹ Much of this interpretation depends on an assessment of the relationship between Gladstone and Parnell and their leadership of their respective parties. Arguably, Gladstone’s approach to the Irish question in the early 1880s was to assess it through the prism of Parnellism, and Parnell himself—the “English face” of Irish nationalism.132 As an Irish Protestant landowner and the honorary chieftain of a mass movement of Catholic tenants, the paradox of Parnell also provided Gladstone with a potential solution to the problem of Irish discontent and radicalism. Despite his leadership of the Land League, Parnell’s discomfort with violence—above all, the Phoenix Park murders of 1882—also suggested a desire to moderate the nationalist movement over which he presided. Gladstone’s own conservatism on the question of property rights (his desire to protect the rights of private property ownership) may also have encouraged him to devolve the question to a Home Rule parliament in which the voice of Irish landowners, such as Parnell, would be preserved. This seems to be confirmed in the diaries of Sir Edward Hamilton, who recalls how Gladstone—his close friend—believed that Parnell “appeared to be an altered man” after his release from Kilmainham in 1882 and had demonstrated “evident conservative proclivities which he (Mr. Gladstone) intended to do his utmost to encourage.” On another occasion Gladstone also commented to Hamilton that it was a “mistake to suppose that Irishmen were imbued with real democratic tendencies” and that he would not be surprised if, when they had their own legislature, “they might cut a somewhat Tory figure” in the Imperial parliament.¹³³

The potential problem with this logic, of course, was that the Home Rule settlement envisaged in 1886 was partly dependent on the preeminence of Parnell, but this ended in 1890 following the acrimony of the O’Shea divorce case (when Parnell was named in divorce proceedings, causing the majority of his party to desert him). Even a unionist writer, such as St. John Ervine, could see the importance of Parnell to the balancing act that was Home Rule: “Parnell was the cornerstone of the Irish arch. When he fell, it fell.”¹³⁴ The populist Catholic invective against Parnell following his citation in the O’Shea divorce case and the anti-Parnell narrative of the followers of Timothy Healy and the Irish National Foundation under John Dillon internally poisoned nationalist politics in Ireland.¹³⁵

Thus, the missed-opportunity narrative presupposes a number of secondary contingencies that were by no means inevitable. In addition, it would be a mistake to underestimate the extent of British opposition to Home Rule and the absolute rejection of Gladstone’s logic on the Irish question. Indeed, as O’Callaghan has observed, British unionists presented the Gladstone-Parnell alliance and land agitation as essentially criminal rather than political.¹³⁶ What is more, it was far from inevitable that a federalist solution to the Irish question would have extinguished the growing separatist movement in Ireland. Parnell himself said in a speech in Cork in January 1885 that “no man has the right to fix the boundary to the march of a nation.”¹³⁷ Kelly’s work on the Fenian movement has pointed both to the widespread popularity of separatism and the pragmatism of Fenians in supporting Parnellism as a first step to a fuller political revolution.¹³⁸ Perhaps more importantly, neither Parnell nor Gladstone had anything approaching a viable answer to the Ulster question; both the nature and extent of opposition to Home Rule in the northeast of Ireland made any peaceable settlement to the Irish question very unlikely in 1886.139

In another uneven pattern, toward the end of the life of the Union, one could argue that English sympathy for Ireland—expressed both in English support for Home Rule and constructive unionism—increased in parallel with the growth of Irish separatist sentiment in Ireland. Indeed, to a certain extent, the growing dislocation between the English desire for conciliation and the Irish willingness to be conciliated was typical of the story of the Union itself. In British Democracy and Irish Nationalism, Biagini has demonstrated how common feeling with the cause of Irish nationalism helped remake English radicalism before 1906. Not only was there a genuine belief in the morality of doing “justice to Ireland,” but Home Rule was also identified with broader liberal goods, such as democracy, constitutional freedoms, and humanitarianism.¹⁴⁰ John Redmond’s moderate constitutional leadership of the Home Rule movement made such solidarity easier, of course. However, the undercurrents in Ireland suggested that the momentary re-convergence of English liberalism and Irish nationalism was ultimately based on flimsy foundations. In his essays in the New Ireland Review between 1898 and 1900, the Gaelic revivalist and essayist D. P. Moran mocked both British self-conscious moralism and Irish eagerness to win British good opinions.¹⁴¹ Moreover, despite the apparent robustness of Redmond’s Irish Parliamentary Party before 1914, the sands of nationalist Ireland were shifting beneath it toward a more radical and separatist stance. From local studies of Leitrum, Longford, Roscommon, Sligo, and Westmeath, Michael Wheatley’s Nationalism and the Irish Party suggests that the Irish Parliamentary Party was in a stronger position before 1914 than is often assumed. However, he also demonstrates that Irish nationalism was increasingly characterized between 1910 and 1916 by an intensity of grievance and Anglophobia at the micro level. This was reflected in the paramilitarization of the Home Rule campaign and compounded, above all, by the impact of the Great War. The Gaelic revival movement offered further cultural exposition of ethno-religious difference.¹⁴² Meanwhile, of course, the logic of polarization was asserting itself in Irish unionism at the same time: it was slipping out of the realms of British political acceptability in a way that was to have long-term connotations in the bastardized Northern Ireland state. Not only did the unionist campaign become increasingly militarized and extreme; it also began to adopt a tone and a discourse that was increasingly distinct from its sponsors and supporters in the English political mainstream.¹⁴³

OUT OF THE SERBONIAN BOG

Even before the Union was officially ended in 1922, Ireland had defied and defeated the ingenuity of English governance. By 1894, the London correspondent of the New York Times claimed that Ireland was regarded by most English MPs at Westminster as “a sort of Serbonian bog, whence proceeded from time to time unintelligible squeaks and groans, and through the obscurity of which vague shadows now and again may be seen flitting about, but no one seriously tried to follow what is going on or to understand what it is all about.”144 That said, this fatalistic attitude to Irish affairs only emerged relatively late in the life of the Union. Indeed, the etymology of the phrase “Serbonian bog,” pre- and post-Union, tells a story about how much intellectual effort English statesmen expended on Ireland. First used by Milton in Paradise Lost, the phrase had re-entered the English political lexicon in the late eighteenth century through an Irishman, Edmund Burke—whose specter haunted the Union throughout the nineteenth century. Under the Union, English politicians frequently adopted Burke’s phrase as shorthand for the complex job of legislating on Irish matters in parliament—on church, education, and land reform. Lord John Russell was the first to do so in a parliamentary debate over Repeal of the Union in 1834, in which he attempted to answer the Irish nationalist case against the Union. In 1835 Peel picked it up and applied it to the vexed question of how to spend the surplus revenues of the established church in Ireland—“a Serbonian bog, in which whole armies of unfortunate logicians had sunk.”¹⁴⁵

Over the course of the century, the phrase increasingly came to denote the fatigue that was beginning to set in when it came to Irish affairs. At the time of the Famine, The Spectator objected to Russell’s measures of relief on the grounds that “We need not fill up ‘the Serbonian bog of Irish destitution’ with our hard-earned store of sovereigns, nor make roads to nowhere, nor build work-houses for people to lie down and die in; and it is that conviction which makes the Englishman suddenly tighten his flowing purse-strings.”¹⁴⁶ Irishmen from across the political spectrum—including the Orange Order and ultra-Protestant populist William Johnston—were conscious of (and sensitive to) the fact that their concerns were regarded as too provincial for arrogant imperial “senators” at Westminster who wanted to stay clear of “the Serbonian Bog of Irish Polemics.”¹⁴⁷ The phrase even found its way into the lexicon of the English supporters of Home Rule for Ireland. In 1891, Viscount John Morley warned William Gladstone that there was a “frightful danger” of the Liberal party finding itself “struggling once more in the Serbonian bog of the land question.”¹⁴⁸

The legacy of the Union is a complex one. Kissane has argued that the Irish experience of the Westminster system—“regular local and national elections, administrative structures increasingly subject to popular control, and a parliament at times responsive to Irish public opinion”—contributed to the political maturation of Irish society and provided the foundations for post-Union Irish democracy.¹⁴⁹ Despite the radicalization of Irish politics after 1914, Townshend has also argued that the influence of the constitutional tradition of O’Connell, Parnell, and Redmond outlasted the hothouse atmosphere of the period from 1916 to 1922.¹⁵⁰ Even though Ireland did succumb to many of the supremacist and violent tendencies common to other forms of European nationalism, Biagini has made the valid point that—both under the Union and after it—the Irish experience also contains remarkable illustrations of the extent to which liberal elites could control and contain such tendencies.151

Ultimately, though, the moral of the Union is that the Irish question proved beyond the abilities of a succession of highly imaginative and gifted statesmen. Although “constructive” unionists—a remarkably broad group that encompassed figures as diverse as Castlereagh and Gladstone—complained that their vision was withheld from Ireland for too long and was delivered in much less fortuitous circumstances than they had hoped, they could not claim that it was unrealized. That the high point of the liberal unionist governing vision in the early 1870s formed the prelude to the greatest nationalist campaign of the nineteenth century tells a story in itself. It spoke to the growing—and potentially unbridgeable—gap between legislative ingenuity at Westminster and social and political undercurrents in Ireland itself. That is not to say that the end of the Union was only a matter of time after 1870. As Comerford has suggested, the events of 1870—such as land reform and the disestablishment of the Irish church—could even be interpreted as a new beginning for the Union.¹⁵² It is, however, to posit that the premises of British elite support for the Union had been seriously undermined by the 1890s. Although Irish nationalist mobilization was more formidable than ever before under Charles Stewart Parnell, the real game-changer was the fraying of the pro-Union consensus in the British governing classes.

FURTHER READING

The best starting points for the passage of the Act of Union are Patrick M. Geoghegan, The Irish Act of Union: A Study in High Politics, 1798–1801 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1999) and D. Keogh and K. Whelan (eds.), Acts of Union: The Causes, Contexts and Consequences of the Act of Union (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001). For the role of the Union in the eyes of the British governing class, see D. A. Kanter, The Making of British Unionism, 1740–1848: Politics, Government and the Anglo-Irish Constitutional Relationship (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2009). For an excellent article on the death of unionism in the British political elite, see K. Theodore Hoppen, “Gladstone, Salisbury and the End of Irish Assimilation,” in Mary E. Daly and K. Theodore Hoppen (eds.), Gladstone: Ireland and Beyond (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2010).

The best general surveys of the nineteenth century are Roy Foster, Modern Ireland 1600–1972 (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1990); Paul Bew, Ireland: The Politics of Enmity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); and Alvin Jackson, Ireland, 1798–1998: Politics and War (London: Wiley Blackwell, 1999). For good guides to political history under the Union, see Ó Tuathaigh, “Political History,” in L. M. Geary and M. Kelleher (eds.), Nineteenth-Century Irish History: A Guide to Recent Research (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2005); and Patrick Maume, “Irish Political History: Guidelines and Reflections,” in M. McAuliffe, K. O’Donnell, and L. Lane (eds.), Irish History (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009). Also useful is P. Gray (ed.), Victoria’s Ireland? Irishness and Britishness, 1837–1901 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004).

For the movement to repeal the Union, the dominant interpretation has been provided by Oliver MacDonagh, O’Connell: The Life of Daniel O’Connell 1775–1847 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990). For a superb and more recent account, see Patrick Geoghegan, King Dan: The Rise of Daniel O’Connell 1775–1829 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2010); and Patrick Geoghegan, Liberator: The Life and Death of Daniel O’Connell, 1830–1847 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2013). For Young Ireland, see R. Davis, The Young Ireland Movement (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1987).

For the post-Famine period, the primer remains F.S.L. Lyons, Ireland since the Famine (London: Collins/Fontana, 1973). Also seminal are Joseph J. Lee, The Modernisation of Irish Society, 1848–1918 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1973); and V. E. Vaughan (ed.), A New History of Ireland, V: Ireland under the Union, 1870–1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). For federalism and the Irish question, the best book is Alvin Jackson, Home Rule in Irish History, 1800–2000 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2003).

A wealth of excellent and relatively new scholarship addresses important questions of sectarianism and the politicization of religion. Among the best studies are: Nigel Yates, The Religious Condition of Ireland, 1770–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); James H. Murphy (ed.), Evangelicals and Catholics in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005); David Hempton and Myrtle Hill, Evangelical Protestantism in Ulster Society, 1740–1890 (London and New York: Routledge, 1992); K. Collins, Catholic Churchmen and the Celtic Revival in Ireland, 1848–1916 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002); Desmond Bowen, The Protestant Crusade in Ireland, 1800–1870 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1978); and Colin Barr, Paul Cullen, John Henry Newman and the Catholic University of Ireland, 1845–1865 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003).

The best insight into the emergence of Ulster (as opposed to Irish) unionism remains Thomas MacKnight’s Ulster as It Is or Twenty-Eight Years’ Experience as an Irish Editor (2 vols., London: Macmillan and Co., 1896). Also important are: Brian M. Walker, Ulster Politics: The Formative Years, 1868–1886 (Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation, 1989); and James Loughlin, Gladstone, Home Rule and the Ulster Question, 1882–93 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1986).

On Irish nationalism after the Home Rule crisis, there are numerous biographies of Parnell and other key protagonists. The most recent one is by P. Bew, Enigma: A New Life of Charles Stewart Parnell (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2012). For Fenianism, the major study remains R. V. Comerford’s The Fenians in Context: Irish Politics and Society, 1848–82 (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1985). Matthew Kelly picks up the baton to the Easter Rising in The Fenian Ideal and Irish Nationalism, 1882–1916 (Woodbridge, England: Boydell Press, 2006). For early twentieth-century Irish nationalism, see Michael Wheatley, Nationalism and the Irish Party: Provincial Ireland, 1910–1916 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). See also David Fitzpatrick, Politics and Irish Life 1913–1921: Provincial Experiences of War and Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

NOTES

1. Sydney Owenson, The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 250–252.

2. James Kelly, “The Origins of the Act of Union: An Examination of Unionist Opinion in Britain and Ireland, 1650–1800,” Irish Historical Studies 25: 99 (1987), pp. 236–263.

3. Daniel Mansergh, “The Union and the Importance of Public Opinion,” in D. Keogh and K. Whelan (eds.), Acts of Union: The Causes, Contexts and Consequences of the Act of Union (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001), pp. 126–139.

4. F.S.L. Lyons, Ireland since the Famine (London: Collins/Fontana, 1973), pp. 98–99.

5. Richard Cobden, England, Ireland and America (1835), edited by Richard Ned Lebow (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1980), pp. xii, 74.

6. Ernest Renan, “What Is a Nation,” in Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, Becoming National: A Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 42–55, 43.

7. 14 April 1886, Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, third series, vol. CCIV, p. 1079.

8. Patrick M. Geoghegan, The Irish Act of Union: A Study in High Politics, 1798–1801 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1999); D. Keogh and K. Whelan (eds.), Acts of Union: The Causes, Contexts and Consequences of the Act of Union (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001).

9. Kevin Whelan, “The Other Within: Ireland, Britain and the Act of Union,” in Keogh and Whelan, Acts of Union, pp. 13–33, 13.

10. Liam O’Dowd, “Republicanism, Nationalism, and Unionism: Changing Contexts, Cultures and Ideologies,” in J. Cleary and C. Connolly (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 78–95, 79.

11. Roy F. Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch: Connections in Irish and English History (London: Penguin, 1993), pp. 81–82.

12. J.G.A. Pocock, The Discovery of Islands: Essays in British History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 164.

13. D. A. Kanter, The Making of British Unionism, 1740–1848: Politics, Government and the Anglo-Irish Constitutional Relationship (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2009), pp. 319–320.

14. Stephen Howe, Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Terrence McDonough (ed.), Was Ireland A Colony? Economics, Politics and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2005); A. Jackson, “Ireland, the Union and the Empire, 1800–1960,” in K. Kenny (ed.), Ireland and the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 123–153. For a discussion of Irish involvement in the British Empire, see K. Jeffrey (ed.), An Irish Empire? Aspects of Ireland and the British Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996).

15. This was the verdict of former radicals, such as Charles Hamilton Teeling in his Personal Narrative of the Irish Rebellion (London: Henry Colburn, 1828), p. 263.

16. Kanter, The Making of British Unionism, p. 110.

17. “Maria Edgeworth, Edgeworthstown, to Miss Ruxton, Arundel in Sussex, 29 January 1800,” in Maria Edgeworth, The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, edited by Augustus J. C. Hare (London: E. D. Arnold, 1893), vol. 1, pp. 67–69.

18. “Marquis Cornwallis to Major-General Ross, 26 February 1801,” in Charles Ross (ed.), Correspondence of Charles, First Marquis Cornwallis (London: John Murray, 1859), vol. 3, pp. 340–341.

19. Roy Foster, “The Politicisation of Irish Literature,” first Clark Lecture, delivered at Cambridge University, February 17, 2009. See also Roy Foster’s Words Alone: Yeats and His Inheritance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

20. Terry Eagleton has pointed out that much of Edgeworth’s novel Castle-Rackrent was written before the Union, during 1798, when the Edgeworths found themselves threatened by the local peasantry, despite their record as liberal landlords. See Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture (London: Verson, 1995), pp. 161–166. See also Seamus Deane, Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790 (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1997).

21. Quoted in M. Butler, “Introduction,” in Maria Edgeworth, Castle-Rackrent and Ennui (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), p. 3.

22. Edgeworth’s account of meeting Castlereagh is in her diary entries for March 9 and April 3, 1822, in Edgeworth, The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, vol. 1, pp. 65–67, 71–74.

23. Foster, Words Alone, pp. 10–44. Foster sees Owenson and Edgeworth as part of a triumvirate of writers whose works shared loosely connected themes.

24. Mary Campbell, Lady Morgan: The Life and Times of Sydney Owenson (Sydney: Pandora Press, 1988), pp. 106–107, 165.

25. Owenson, The Wild Irish Girl, pp. xviii, 250–252.

26. Charles Lever, The Knight of Gwynne (London, 1872, first published in 1847).

27. “R. J. Bryce (Belfast Academy) to Duke of Wellington, 24 June 1830,” Add. Ms. 70992, f. 86, British Library, London, f. 86; “R. J. Bryce to Robert James Tennent, 7 January 1828,” Tennent Papers D1748/G/76/15, Public Record Office Northern Ireland, Belfast.

28. Kanter, The Making of British Unionism, p. 161.

29. J. C. Beckett, The Making of Modern Ireland (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), p. 285.

30. Quoted in Paul Bew, Ireland: The Politics of Enmity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 63.

31. For Duigenan, see Bew, Ireland, pp. 30–31, 49–51, 59–60.

32. Kanter, The Making of British Unionism, p. 320.

33. “Earl of Rosse to Lord Redesdale, 3 May 1822,” Redesdale Papers, T3030/13/3, Eighteenth Century Irish Official Papers in Great Britain, vol. 2, edited by A.P.W. Malcolmson (Belfast: Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, 1990), pp. 462–464.

34. Frank Wright, Two Lands on One Soil: Ulster Politics before Home Rule (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1996).

35. “Lord Castlereagh,” Dublin University Magazine 249: 39 (October 1849), pp. 433–447.

36. Daire Keogh, ‘The French Disease’: The Catholic Church and Radicalism in Ireland, 1790–1800 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1993).

37. Sir Henry Parnell, An Enquiry into the Causes of Popular Discontent in Ireland (London: J. Milliken, [reprint] 1805, second ed.), pp. 2–4.

38. J.C.D. Clark, English Society 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancien Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

39. See J. Bew, “The High Politics of Post-War Reconstruction in Britain after 1815,” in Michael Rowe, Karen Hagemann, Alan Forrest, and Stefan Dudink (eds.), War, Demobilisation and Memory: The Legacy of War in the Era of Atlantic Revolutions (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

40. “ ‘On the Expediency of Making Further Concessions to the Catholics,’ by Lord Castlereagh, 1801,” in Charles Vane-Tempest Stewart (ed.), Memoirs and Correspondence of Viscount Castlereagh (London: John Murray, 1848–1853), 12 vols., IV, pp. 392–400, 396.

41. Parnell, An Enquiry into the Causes of Popular Discontent in Ireland, pp. 3–4, 7, 14–20, 21–22, 71.

42. “The Knight of Kerry, Valentina, to Lord Sandon, 24 March 1845,” Harrowby Papers, T3228/7/1, Eighteenth Century Irish Official Papers in Great Britain, vol. 2, edited by A.P.W. Malcolmson (Belfast: Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, 1990), p. 147.

43. John Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone (London, 1903), II, p. 242.

44. John Pope Hennessy, Lord Beaconsfield’s Irish Policy: Two Essays on Ireland (London, 1885), pp. 24–25.

45. K. T. Hoppen, The Mid-Victorian Generation, 1846–1886 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 559.

46. G. Ó Tuathaigh, “Ireland under the Union: Historiographical Reflections,” Australian Journal of Irish Studies 2 (2002), pp. 1–21.

47. See Peter Jupp, “Government, Parliament and Politics in Ireland, 1801–41,” in J. Hoppit (ed.), Parliaments, Nations and Identities in Britain and Ireland, 1600–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 146–168, 147.

48. B. Farrell (ed.), The Irish Parliamentary Tradition (Dublin: Gill and MacMillan, 1973); Alan O’Day, The English Face of Irish Nationalism: Parnellite Involvement in British Politics, 1880–6 (Dublin: Gill and MacMillan, 1977).

49. H. Senior, Orangeism in Ireland and Britain, 1795–1836 (London and Toronto: Routledge, 1966); Allan Blackstock, Loyalism in Ireland, 1789–1829 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2007).

50. William Drennan, A Letter to the Right Honourable Charles James Fox (London, 1806), pp. 30, 34–35.

51. For the classic account, see A.T.Q. Stewart, “The Transformation of Presbyterian Radicalism in the North of Ireland, 1798–1825” (unpublished MA thesis, Queens’ University Belfast, 1956). For more recent accounts, see R. F. Holmes, “From Rebels to Unionists: The Political Transformation of Ulster’s Presbyterians,” in R. Hanna (ed.), The Union: Essays on Ireland and the British Connection (Newtownards, Northern Ireland: N.P., 2001), pp. 34–47; and John Bew, The Glory of Being Britons: Civic Unionism in Nineteenth-Century Belfast (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007).

52. Oliver MacDonagh, O’Connell: The Life of Daniel O’Connell 1775–1847 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990). For a more recent account, see Patrick Geoghegan, King Dan: The Rise of Daniel O’Connell 1775–1829 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2010) and Liberator: The Life and Death of Daniel O’Connell, 1830–1847 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2013).

53. K. T. Hoppen, “Riding a Tiger: Daniel O’Connell, Reform and Popular Politics in Ireland, 1800–1847,” Proceedings of the British Academy 100 (1999), pp. 121–143.

54. P. Maume, “Irish Political History: Guidelines and Reflections,” in M. McAuliffe, K. O’Donnell, and L. Lane (eds.), Irish History (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), pp. 1–48.

55. Richard English, Irish Freedom: The History of Nationalism in Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 131.

56. “George Dawson to Sir Robert Peel, Coleraine, 17 August 1828,” Peel Papers, Add. Ms. 40, 397, f. 244, British Library, London.

57. Nigel Yates, The Religious Condition of Ireland, 1770–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2006). See also James H. Murphy (ed.), Evangelicals and Catholics in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005).

58. Irene Whelan, The Bible War in Ireland: The ‘Second Reformation’ and the Polarisation of Protestant-Catholic Relations, 1800–1840 (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2005).

59. Joseph J. Lee, The Modernisation of Irish Society, 1848–1918 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1973).

60. Jennifer Ridden, “The Forgotten History of the Protestant Crusade: Religious Liberalism in Ireland,” Journal of Religious Liberty 31: 1 (March 2007), pp. 78–102, 84.

61. Eugenio F. Biagini, “Liberty and Nationalism in Ireland, 1798–1922,” Historical Journal 51: 3 (2008), pp. 793–809.

62. Northern Whig, December 6, 1830.

63. “17 February 1834,” Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, third series, vol. XXI, p. 417.

64. Northern Whig, July 2, 1832.

65. “Lord Rossmore to O’Connell, 13 December 1834,” The Correspondence of Daniel O’Connell, vol. V, 1833–1836, edited by M. R. O’Connell (Dublin: The Irish Manuscripts Division, 1977), p. 230.

66. See Bew, The Glory of Being Britons, chapter 3.

67. G. Ó Tuathaigh, “Political History,” in L. M. Geary and M. Kelleher (eds.), Nineteenth-Century Irish History: A Guide to Recent Research (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2005), pp. 1–26.

68. Joseph Spence, “The Philosophy of Irish Toryism, 1833–52” (unpublished PhD dissertation, University of London, 1991).

69. Jennifer Ridden, “ ‘Making Good Citizens’: National Identity, Religion, and Liberalism among the Irish Elite, c. 1800–1850” (unpublished PhD thesis, London University, 1998). See also Jennifer Ridden’s “ ‘Making Good Citizens’: Britishness as an Imperial and Diasporic Identity: Irish Elite Perspectives, c. 1820–70s,” in P. Gray (ed.), Victoria’s Ireland? Irishness and Britishness, 1837–1901 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004), pp. 88–105

70. Eve Patten, Samuel Ferguson and the Culture of Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004), p. 13.

71. See, for example, William Cooke Taylor, Reminiscences of Daniel O’Connell, P. Maume (ed.) (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2005); and the Dictionary of Irish Biography online (http://dib.cambridge.org).

72. Speech of the Earl of Mulgrave to the House of Lords, on Monday 27 November, 1837, on the Motion of the Earl of Roden (London: Ridgway, 1837), p. 324. See also M.A.G. Ó Tuathaigh, Thomas Drummond and the Government of Ireland, 1835–41 (Dublin: National University of Ireland, 1977).

73. Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 25, 73–76, 173, 256; R. Pearson and G. Williams, Political Thought and Public Policy in the Nineteenth Century, An Introduction (London and New York: Prentice Hall Press, 1984), pp. 9–38.

74. Cited in Adam D. Kriegel, “Liberty and Whiggery in Early Nineteenth-Century England,” Journal of Modern History 52: 2 (June 1980), p. 272.

75. Peter Mandler, Aristocratic Government in the Age of Reform, Whigs and Liberals, 1830–1852 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 159–162.

76. Michael Durey, “When Great Men Fall Out: William Wickham’s Resignation as Chief Secretary for Ireland in January 1804,” Parliamentary History 25: 3 (2006), p. 334–335.

77. See Peter Gray, “ ‘Ireland’s Last Fetter Struck Off’ ”: The Lord Lieutenancy Debate, 1800–67,” in Terrence McDonough (ed.), Was Ireland a Colony? Economics, Politics and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 87–102.

78. Belfast Newsletter, March 12, 1850.

79. Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England, 1783–1846 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 542–543.

80. See, for example, L. J. McCaffrey, Daniel O’Connell and the Repeal Year (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1996), pp. 214–239.

81. For Young Ireland, see R. Davis, The Young Ireland Movement (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1987). See also David Dwan, “Civic Virtue in the Modern World: The Politics of Young Ireland,” Irish Political Studies 22: 1 (2007), pp. 35–60.

82. See Donal A. Kerr, Peel, Priests and Politics: Sir Robert Peel’s Administration and the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, 1841–1846 (Oxford: Oxford Historical Monographs, 1984), p. 15; D. Gwynn, O’Connell, Davis and the Colleges Bill (Cork: University College Cork Press, 1948).

83. “Thomas Davis to Robert James Tennent, 9 June 1845,” Tennent Papers, D1748/G/141/5A-B, Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, Belfast.

84. The only study to deal with 1840s federalism in detail is B. A. Kennedy, “Sharman Crawford’s Federal Scheme for Ireland,” in H. A. Cronne, T. W. Moody, and D. B. Quinn (eds.), Essays in British and Irish History Presented to J. E. Todd (London: Frederick Muller, 1949), pp. 235–254. It is only briefly discussed in existing studies of Irish federalism: George Boyce, “Federalism and the Irish Question,” in Adrea Bosco (ed.), The Federal Idea: The History of Federalism from Enlightenment to 1945, vol. 1 (London and New York: Lothian Foundation Press, 1991), pp. 119–138; J. Kendle, Ireland and the Federal Solution: The Debate over the United Kingdom Constitution, 1870–1921 (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989), pp. 9–11; and Alvin Jackson, Home Rule in Irish History, 1800–2000 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2003), p. 16.

85. Charles Gavan Duffy, Young Ireland, Part I, 1840–1845 (Dublin, 1892), pp. 213–214.

86. Charles Gavan Duffy, Thomas Davis, edited by B. Clifford (Cork: Anchor Books, 1999), p. 168.

87. “Daniel O’Connell to William Smith O’Brien, 21 October 1844,” Correspondence of Daniel O’Connell, The Liberator, edited by W. J. FitzPatrick, (London: John Murray, 1888), II, pp. 335–336.

88. Charles Gavan Duffy, My Life in Two Hemispheres, 2 vols. (New York: Unwin, 1896), I, pp. 101–103.

89. “Thomas Davis to William Smith O’Brien, undated,” William Smith O’Brien Papers, Ms. 432/895, National Library of Ireland, Dublin.

90. Duffy, Thomas Davis, p. 69.

91. Spectator, May 29, 1847.

92. Kanter, The Making of British Unionism, pp. 281–282.

93. “Peel to Emerson Tennent MP, 2 November 1845,” Peel Papers, Add Ms. 40,575, f. 92, British Library London.

94. Peter Gray, Famine, Land and Politics: British Government and Irish Society, 1843–50 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1999), pp. 139–141, 224–226, 328–338.

95. Peter Gray, “The Making of Mid-Victorian Ireland? Political Economy and the Memory of the Great Famine,” in Peter Gray (ed.), Victorian’s Ireland? Irishness and Britishness, 1837–1901 (Four Courts Press: Dublin, 2004), pp. 151–166.

96. Lyons, Ireland since the Famine, pp. 16–17.

97. Eugenio F. Biagini, British Democracy and Irish Nationalism, 1876–1906 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 24.

98. “Seamus Macneactam [James McKneight] to Charles Gavan Duffy MP, 14 October 1847,” Duffy-McKneight Papers, T1143/1 Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, Belfast.

99. Alexander Dinnen, Ulster Tenant Right: Mr Jas. Sharman Crawford’s Amendment Bill and “No Surrender” (Belfast: Northern Whig, 1876).

100. David Hempton and Myrtle Hill, Evangelical Protestantism in Ulster Society, 1740–1890 (London and New York: Routledge, 1992); K. Collins, Catholic Churchmen and the Celtic Revival in Ireland, 1848–1916 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002), pp. 98–104; Desmond Bowen, The Protestant Crusade in Ireland, 1800–1870 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1978); Desmond Bowen, Paul Cullen and the Shaping of Modern Irish Catholicism (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1983); Colin Barr, Paul Cullen, John Henry Newman and the Catholic University of Ireland, 1845–1865 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003).

101. “John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, first Baron Acton to Lord O’Hagan, undated,” O’Hagan Papers, D/2777/9/76/3, Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, Belfast.

102. See entry for February 16, 1851, in Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party: The Political Journals of Lord Stanley, 1849–1869, edited by J. R. Vincent (Hassocks, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1978), pp. 40–41.

103. John Pope Hennessy, Lord Beaconsfield’s Irish Policy: Two Essays on Ireland [1885] (London: Kessinger reprint 2010), p. 26.

104. For Johnston, see J. Aiken McClelland, William Johnston of Ballykilbeg (Lurgan: Ulster Society, 1990). See also Bew, Glory of Being Britons, chapter 6; A. Shields, The Irish Conservative Party, 1852–1868: Land, Politics and Religion (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007), pp. 207–213.

105. See K. T. Hoppen, “Tories, Catholics and the General Election of 1859,” Historical Journal 13: 1 (March 1970), pp. 48–67; and K. T. Hoppen, Elections, Politics and Society in Ireland, 1832–1885 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).

106. Brian M. Walker, Ulster Politics: The Formative Years, 1868–1886 (Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation, 1989); Frank Thompson, The End of Liberal Ulster: Land Agitation and Land Reform, 1868–1886 (Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation, 2001).

107. Thomas MacKnight, Ulster As It Is or Twenty-Eight Years’ Experience as an Irish Editor (London, 1896), 2 vols., I, pp. 303–308.

108. Conor Cruise O’Brien, States of Mind: States of Ireland (St. Albans, England: Granada Publishing, 1974), p. 29.

109. Bew, Ireland: The Politics of Enmity, pp. 212–213.

110. Robert C. Binkley, Realism and Nationalism, 1852–1871 (New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1935).

111. Lee, Modernisation of Irish Society.

112. Speech of Isaac Butt, Esq., MP, at Glasgow November 14^th, 1871, on Home Rule for Ireland (Dublin: Irish Home Rule Association, 1871), pp. 9–11. In one of his earliest speeches on Home Rule, Butt referred back to two previous federalists—Sharman Crawford MP and Thaddeus O’Malley, a Catholic priest and Chartist.

113. The Times, May 1, 1865.

114. Thomas Croskery, “The Irish Abroad,” Edinburgh Review 260: 127 (April 1868), pp. 257–275, 266.

115. Spectator, September 26, 1868.

116. Cited in Niall Whelehan, The Dynamiters: Irish Nationalism and Political Violence in the Wider World, 1867–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 16, 26.

117. John Morley, Ireland’s Rights and England’s Duties (Blackburn: The Times Office, 1868), p. 18.

118. Kevin McKenna, “From Private Visit to Public Opportunity: Gladstone’s 1877 Trip to Ireland,” in Mary E. Daly and K. Theodore Hoppen (eds.), Gladstone: Ireland and Beyond (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2010), pp. 77–89.

119. Sir George Young, The Dis-Establishment of the Irish Church a Measure of Justice; A Letter to the Rev. A. Headley, Rector of Hardenhuish (Chippenham: S. Spinke, 1868), p. 4. See also J. P. Parry, “Religion and the Collapse of Gladstone’s First Government, 1870–1874,” Historical Journal 25: 1 (March 1982), pp. 71–101.

120. “Hugh de Fellenberg to his cousin, 27 November 1868,” Hugh De Fellenberg Montgomery Papers, D1121/3, Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, Belfast.

121. “Lord Spencer to Dufferin, 19 March 1874,” Dufferin and Ava Correspondence, D1071/H/B/S/476/33. Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, Belfast.

122. “Lord Spencer to O’Hagan, undated [circa 1868–1874]” O’Hagan Papers, D/2777/8/258B, Public Record Office of Northern Ireland.

123. The Times, August 31, 1878.

124. E. D. Steele, Irish Land and British Politics: Tenant Right and Nationality, 1865–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974).

125. The Times, August 24, 1880.

126. The Times, December 23, 1890.

127. D. P. Moran, The Philosophy of Irish Ireland, edited by P. Maume (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2006), pp. xx–xxi.

128. “Gladstone, Hawarden Castle, Chester, to Barry R. O’Brien, 11 December 1895,” in R. Barry O’Brien, The Life of Charles Stewart Parnell, 1846–1891 (London, 1897), 2 vols., I, pp. 355–358, 356.

129. K. Theodore Hoppen, “Gladstone, Salisbury and the End of Irish Assimilation,” in Mary E. Daly and K. Theodore Hoppen (eds.), Gladstone: Ireland and Beyond (Four Courts Press: Dublin, 2010), pp. 45–63, 62.

130. Andrew Gailey, The Death of Kindness: The Experience of Constructive Unionism, 1890–1905 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1987).

131. For the classic statement of this view, see J. L. Hammond, Gladstone and the Irish Nation (London: Cass, 1938).

132. O’Day, The English Face of Irish Nationalism.

133. Entries for February 3 and February 11, 1891, in The Diary of Sir Edward Hamilton, W. R. Bahlman (ed.) (Hull, England: University of Hull Press, 1993), pp. 110, 138.

134. St. John Ervine, Parnell (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1944), p. 244.

135. Frank Callanan, The Parnell Split (Cork: Cork University Press, 1993).

136. Margaret O’Callaghan, British High Politics and a Nationalist Ireland: Criminality, Land and the Law under Forster and Balfour (Cork: Cork University Press, 1994).

137. Quoted in Albert W. Quill, The Arguments against Home Rule Unanswered by Mr Morley: A Critical Study (Dublin: Hodges, Figgis and Company, 1888), p. 20.

138. M. J. Kelly, The Fenian Ideal and Irish Nationalism, 1882–1916 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006). For the classic account of Fenianism, see R. V. Comerford, The Fenians in Context: Irish Politics and Society, 1848–82 (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1985).

139. James Loughlin, Gladstone, Home Rule and the Ulster Question, 1882–93 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1986).

140. Biagini, British Democracy and Irish Nationalism, 1876–1906.

141. D. P. Moran, The Philosophy of Irish Ireland, pp. 10–11.

142. Michael Wheatley, Nationalism and the Irish Party: Provincial Ireland, 1910–1916 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). See also David Fitzpatrick, Politics and Irish Life 1913–1921: Provincial Experiences of War and Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

143. George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England (Serif: London, 1997, first published 1935), pp. 88–90. See also J. Smith, The Tories in Ireland: Conservative Party Politics and the Home Rule Crisis, 1910–1914 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2000).

144. New York Times, September 8, 1894.

145. Speech of the Right Hon. Sir Robert Peel, Bart., in the House of Commons, on Thursday 2^nd April, 1835 (London: John Murray, 1835), p. 14.

146. Spectator, May 19, 1849.

147. In this case, William Johnston was referring to his objections to the government’s endowment for the Catholic seminary at Maynooth. See Downshire Protestant, July 6, 1855.

148. Patrick Jackson, Morley of Blackburn: A Literary and Political Biography of John Morley (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2012), p. 198.

149. Bill Kissane, Explaining Irish Democracy (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2002), p. 79.

150. Charles Townshend, “The Meaning of Irish Freedom: Constitutionalism in the Free State,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, sixth series (1998), pp. 45–70.

151. Biagini, “Liberty and Nationalism in Ireland, 1798–1922.”

152. Vincent Comerford, “Gladstone’s First Irish Enterprise,” in V. E. Vaughan (ed.), A New History of Ireland, V: Ireland under the Union, 1870–1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 431–449. For a critical view of this volume, see the review by Mary E. Daly in Irish Historical Studies 27: 106 (November 1990), pp. 171–174.