CHAPTER THREE

The Royal Conscience

‘The agitation of it had been the cause of a most serious and alarming illness to an illustrious personage’

The Duke of York on George III and Catholic Emancipation

IRELAND NOW HAD its Parliament formally swallowed up in that of the United Kingdom by an Act which came into force on 1 January 1801. This was a country with a huge Catholic population. It has been variously estimated as three-quarters or even five-sixths of the total, with the remainder divided between the Established (Protestant) Church and Dissenters.1 But Catholicism, although without question the dominant religion, was not spread evenly across the various classes. On the contrary, the ruling classes, as the phrase Protestant Ascendancy indicates, tended one way, while their social inferiors, whether servants, farmers or soldiers, were almost universally Catholic.

These peasants, as they were seen from across the English Channel, were routinely derided with the word ‘barbarous’, or barbarian, deriving from the Latin barbarus for stranger. However, they were of course the natives of the island, and it was the Protestant Ascendancy whose history stretched back to invasion, notoriously that of Cromwell in 1649, and subsequent settlement in the great estates of the land. Nevertheless there was an endemic attitude of scorn – often affectionate scorn – towards the Catholic peasantry on the part of those who were their social superiors.

Not only were these peasants but they were lawless peasants, as Robert Peel pointed out early in his political career, when he was sent to Ireland as Chief Secretary in 1812: ‘You can have no idea of the moral depravation of the lower orders in that country.’ This was accompanied by a ‘fidelity towards each other’ which was ‘unexampled, as they are in their sanguinary [bloodthirsty] disposition and fearlessness of the consequences’. Only the occasional compassionate voice would be raised, as when Maria Edgeworth, a Protestant, exclaimed to her sister about a noble chimney sweeper’s boy spending hours climbing: ‘I only wish the Anti-Catholics could have seen how poor Catholics were labouring here... They are a most generous people... wretched boys in rags refused shillings from me,’ reminding her she had paid before although she would otherwise have blithely done so twice.2

Like all forms of racial or religious prejudice, this attitude could produce ludicrous incidents or amusing comments which provided at the same time a guide to contemporary values. Edward Bulwer entertained the Irish hero Daniel O’Connell in his London house at the height of the latter’s early triumph. The story was that Mrs Bulwer directed the cleaning arrangements in the dining room the next day: she explained that she was ‘fumigating in order to get rid of the brogue’.3 Most of the Catholic peasantry would never see the inside of a gracious London household, but the treatment they received from birth, which was linked demographically to their religion, was inspired by the same fundamental contempt for ‘the brogue’ and what it stood for.

When Alexis de Tocqueville cast his cool eye on Irish society, he described the typical Protestant lord: ‘His dogs are large and fat and fellow beings are dying at his door. Not only does he never help the poor in their need, he profits by their necessities to extract enormous rents and goes to France and Italy to spend the money he has gained.’ In the meantime it was the poorest who had the most children, out of despair. It was small wonder that the Irish people believed firmly in another world, wrote de Tocqueville, ‘because they are unhappy in this one’.4 In its own way, this was a similarly prejudiced view, ignoring the numerous benevolent landlords, but it did express the vast difference in the two ways of life, so clearly visible to an outsider.

There could be a variety of attitudes within this contempt. The historian David Hume, pronouncing in 1767 that the Irish, ‘from the beginning of time, had been buried in the most profound barbarism and ignorance’, put it down to the fact that they had never been conquered by the Romans. Later the poet Robert Southey, inveterately hostile to the idea of Catholic Emancipation, asked himself the same question: why were the Irish people so barbarous? He blamed the Catholic aristocracy, their surviving landowners and their priests: it was their own leadership which deserved to be reproached. For all that, he was convinced that letting Catholics near political power would be ‘the most perilous experiment that could by possibility be tried in a Protestant country’.5

There were those, the decent Protestant people of good intentions, who took comfort in the fact that the Catholics were actually the intolerant ones. This was an attitude summed up later by the nineteenth-century historian J. A. Froude: Ireland’s ‘Romanism’ in the eighteenth century had aimed at domination, whereas the English attitude, infinitely less repressive, was one of laissez-faire. In short, the Catholics had no right to complain: ‘They who had never professed toleration, had no right to demand it.’6

Another foreigner, the infinitely grand Prince Pückler-Muskau, took a more romantic view (despite being announced as Prince Pickling Mustard by the footman of the Irish novelist Lady Morgan): ‘For all their crudity, these people combine probity with the poetic homeliness of the German, the quickness of the French and powers to best all the naturalness and submissiveness of the Italians.’ He was therefore able to reflect with genuine pleasure, unconscious of complacency: ‘I know no country in which I would rather be a great landowner.’7

It is true that changes were on the way. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the Catholic middle class was beginning to germinate and grow as the career of Daniel O’Connell himself would demonstrate. But of course the middle class felt particularly hard done by according to the exclusive religious laws: as Sydney Smith wrote, there was not a parent who didn’t feel ‘his own dear preeminent Paddy would otherwise rise to the highest honour of state’.8 It was to the advantage therefore of this class that in 1793 there was a Catholic Relief Act for Ireland. The prohibition against Catholics voting there was relaxed and the so-called Forty-shilling Freeholders – named after the value and status of their property – were emancipated (but they still could not stand for state office, of course). The Irish Catholics could also now inherit by the same rules as Protestants, and take 999-year leases, another overdue amelioration of their condition.

There was a rise in Catholic church-building after this date, including cathedrals in Waterford and Cork before the end of the century, and Dublin fifteen years later. The Royal College of St Patrick at Maynooth in Co. Kildare, ‘for the better education of persons professing the popish or Roman church’, to train priests, was voted public money by the Irish Parliament in June 1795 and after the Union its annual grants were fixed at nearly £10,000 a year (roughly £750,000 today).9 The circumstances created by the French Revolution were once again part of the equation. The origin of the grant was a wish to prevent seminarists from crossing over to wartime France, whence they might return full of inappropriate revolutionary sentiments; but the effect was to bring Catholics generally closer into the Establishment.

At quite a different level, there was an increase in Catholic pilgrimages to places of ancient devotion at various points in the island. Croagh Patrick, nicknamed the Reek, in County Mayo near Westport, was one example, with its tradition of being climbed by pilgrims on Reek Sunday, the last Sunday in July, in honour of St Patrick’s fast there. The name of the national saint was attached also to St Patrick’s Purgatory, another ancient pilgrimage site on an island in Lough Derg, in Co. Donegal, mentioned in documents as early as the twelfth century.^*1

When the Act of Union came to be considered in detail, it made perfect sense for the subject of general Catholic Emancipation to be discreetly raised. Such a possibility – more than that, such a prospect – was delicately held out to the Catholic peers, and the liberal Protestants who advocated it for the sake of Ireland’s future. Naturally the assent of the sovereign had to be secured, as with any proposed Act of Parliament: that was part of the British constitution.

The unexpectedly tumultuous episode which followed was centred on this Royal Assent. A shrewd comment about it was made in a letter soon afterwards: ‘Time will explain this mass of falsehood and intrigue – but when religion is mixed with politics, only misfortune can be expected.’10 The writer was Hyacinthe Roland, or Wellesley, as she would become: the French Catholic mistress and future first wife of Wellington’s elder brother Richard, Marquess Wellesley. Certainly from the point of view of the ‘Catholic Question’, as the cause of Emancipation was generally known, 1801 represented an enormous setback which differed from that earlier setback the Gordon Riots in one major respect – the King was on the other side.

At some point the conscience of King George III, a decent, amiable, certainly not intolerant man, with good Catholic friends and compassionate towards unfortunate Catholic refugees, found itself stirred into a frenzy by the prospect of allowing these same Catholic friends and their children to participate in any way in the government of the country. There had been warnings over the years.11 In 1795 he had declared that the subject was ‘beyond the decision of any Cabinet of Ministers’ and over the next years he issued further warnings such as this: ‘I should become an enemy to it’ – the Union – ‘if I thought a change of situation of the Roman Catholics would attend the matter.’

It was a question of the oath which as sovereign he had sworn at his Coronation forty years earlier on 22 September 1761. This was originally devised in 1689 after the Protestant couple William and Mary had replaced the Catholic James II. It naturally owed much to the seemingly perilous situation of the new English regime, threatened not so much by the exiled James as by his powerful backer Louis XIV.

In 1761 the key question was put to the young George III in Westminster Abbey by the Archbishop of Canterbury. It began as follows: ‘Will you to the utmost of your power maintain the laws of God, the true profession of the Gospel, and the Protestant reformed religion established by law?’ The Archbishop elaborated: ‘And will you maintain and preserve inviolably the settlement of the united Church of England and Ireland, and the doctrine, worship, discipline and government thereof, as by law established, within England and Ireland, and the countries thereunto belonging?’ He further named the rights and privileges of the bishops and clergy.

At the end King George rose up out of his chair in Westminster Abbey, and was assisted by the Lord Great Chamberlain, with the Sword of State carried before them, to the altar. Here he laid his right hand on the Holy Gospel contained in a great Bible. It had previously been carried in the procession and was now offered to him by the Archbishop kneeling before him. He made a solemn declaration.12

‘The things which I have here before promised, I will perform and keep. So help me God.’ After that the King kissed the Book. And then he was anointed. It was by the special request of the King that the anthem which followed was Handel’s Zadok the Priest. It had been composed for the previous Coronation of his grandfather in 1727 with its awesome invocation: ‘May the King live for ever. Amen, Allelujah.’

The King had made a clear public promise in 1761 – one whose meaning became clearer to him as time went on, with a little help from interested parties. On the other hand, it can never be known exactly what private promises were made in Dublin concerning future Catholic Emancipation in the run-up to the Act of Union. But promises there were.

One politician of rising importance was Viscount Castlereagh, heir to the Marquess of Londonderry but not yet a peer in his own right and thus able to sit in the House of Commons. Castlereagh was thirty-two in 1801. He had first taken office in 1797 and as Chief Secretary at the time of the Rebellion of 1798 had incurred some odium with the Irish. Yet he had his own clear philosophy regarding the two countries: in his role of Chief Secretary for Ireland beneath the Viceroy, ‘I trust I shall never be an Irishman in contradiction to the Justice due to Britain, nor an Englishman opposing and betraying the interests of this country [Ireland].’13 It was a noble sentiment, if more difficult to put into practice than to enunciate, given the sharp observation of Hyacinthe Wellesley on the subject of religion and politics.

Part of Castlereagh’s personality was his undeniable charm. In the words of one interested observer of the political scene, Mrs Harriet Arbuthnot, confidante of the Duke of Wellington, he would come to present a fine commanding figure, with compelling dark deep-set eyes, rather a high nose and ‘a mouth whose smile was sweeter than it is possible to describe’; he also had the perfect gallant manners of the aristocrat. A comparison was made to the young Augustus; alternatively Castlereagh had ‘all the grace of the French and the manliness of the English and Irish...’.14

Time would show that one gift, that of oratory, had been denied this ladies’ delight; but then the House of Commons was not the salon of Mrs Arbuthnot. He was a soporific orator, literally so: his compatriot Thomas Moore merrily versified on the subject twenty years later:

Last night I tossed and turned in bed

But could not sleep – at length I said

‘I’ll think of Viscount Castlereagh

And of his speeches – that’s the way.’15

In the late 1790s oratory was less important than the machinations which led to the successful presentation of the Act of Union. Castlereagh’s Irish connection – like that of the Wellesley brothers – implied knowledge, but not necessarily sympathy for independence. For example, Castlereagh had come to believe strongly in the Union as a method of keeping the native Irish down; at the same time he had the patrician attitude of approval for the Irish in the army. ‘Linked with England,’ wrote Castlereagh, ‘the Protestant Irish would feel less exposed, and become more confident and liberal, and the Catholics would have less inducement to look beyond that indulgence which is consistent with the security of our establishment.’

Emancipation, on the other hand, was a subject where his Irish connection acted the other way: it was possible for him to see how it might lead to a peaceful settlement of the country without incurring any proportionate danger. Castlereagh was therefore in a position to hold out hopes to the Catholic clergy and the Catholic members of the Irish establishment that Emancipation might follow Union.

In London, the chain of events was distressingly clear, at least on the surface. On 25 January 1801 a Cabinet meeting was held at 10 Downing Street, residence of the Tory Prime Minister, William Pitt the Younger, who had succeeded to office eighteen years earlier when he was only twenty-four.^*2 As a result, the principle of Catholic Emancipation was approved. During the next two days the King was informed of what had happened. The results were disastrous.

The crucial event was the Royal levée of 28 January at St James’s Palace, where official royal events took place, although Buckingham House at the head of the Mall had become the residence of the Royal Family in 1761.^*3 At this familiar event, imported originally by Charles II from France, it was the custom for politicians, soldiers and diplomats to be presented to the sovereign. It thus provided an opportunity for personal conversations at the monarch’s choosing. Where George III was concerned, some of these could be uncomfortably frank. There was a further opportunity for impromptu declarations, of which the government would have no warning.

The royal levée of 28 January proved a catastrophe from the point of view of the government – and a nasty surprise to many of those present. George III publicly declared in a loud, ‘agitated’ voice that anyone who even proposed Catholic Emancipation forfeited his friendship. The terms in which he spoke were unequivocal. He used the term ‘personal enemy’. When Henry Dundas, a minister and currently MP for Edinburgh, proposed a distinction between the King in private as an individual, and in his constitutional capacity, George III replied sharply: ‘None of your Scotch metaphysics!’ The King continued melodramatically: he would rather beg his bread ‘from door to door through Europe’ than consent to any measure that would betray his Coronation Oath.16

A meeting of the Cabinet was hastily called. Pitt remained in favour of Emancipation. Loughborough, Westmorland and Liverpool were against. On 1 February 1801 Pitt wrote to the King in the most reasonable terms he could design, pointing out that Catholic Emancipation would not harm the interests of the Established Church or Protestant interest in England or Ireland. The dangers from the Catholic people were gradually declining, and among the higher orders especially ‘have ceased to exist’. The special new oath, for those taking office within the State, would take care of the situation, with its disclaimer of ‘politically obnoxious’ tenets and explicit refusal to be overridden by a priest’s absolution. But, said Pitt, if the King disagrees, as he believes he does, Pitt will only remain in office long enough for him to find a successor.17

The King’s response was unequivocal: any proposition which tended to destroy the maxim that employees of the State must be members of the Established Church could not be discussed. Anything else would result in ‘the complete overthrow of the whole fabric’. On 2 February George III duly read his speech to the House of Lords at the Opening of Parliament with only one reference to the Union – not the one which so many of the leading Catholics and Pro-Catholics in Ireland were expecting.

Pitt resigned on 3 February as he had offered to do, and Henry Addington became Prime Minister in his place. It has been suggested that Pitt’s own physical state was shaken by these events, leaving him as agitated as the King at the end of an audience.18 Gout was an increasing problem. There were thus two healths involved, that of the King and that of the Prime Minister, not one. But from the point of view of Catholic Emancipation, it was Pitt’s resignation which was the important, inexorable fact.

This was the monarch who had agreed to the rights of the French Canadians to their own religion, and was the genuine personal friend of Lord Petre and Thomas Weld. What had happened? The answer was in two parts. Partly he had been preyed on for political reasons by members of his court opposed to Pitt. One demonic force – from the Catholic point of view – was John FitzGibbon, created Earl of Clare in 1795 in the Irish peerage and later a Baron in the United Kingdom, enabling him to sit in the House of Lords. The former John FitzGibbon was now about fifty. The son of a successful lawyer, he was a man who had grown rich through the law in his own right, with an income estimated at nearly £7,000 in 1782. His sister had married into the prominent Beresford family, headed by the Marquess of Tyrone, which brought him noble connections added to those he himself had acquired.

Clare was a handsome, powerfully built man, and powerful in personality to match. He was also a heavy drinker: he would die, probably of cirrhosis, the year after the Act of Union and it was said that such was his unpopularity with the ordinary (Catholic) people that dead cats were thrown at his Dublin funeral. Certainly Clare was always profoundly Anti-Catholic, despite or perhaps because of his Catholic ancestors; these had been doctors and extremely minor gentry (although his enemies scoffed inaccurately at his peasant descent). As FitzGibbon he had for example savagely opposed the Catholic Relief Bill of 1778, a few months after his election to the Irish Parliament as Member for Trinity College, Dublin. He rose to become Attorney-General of Ireland in 1783 and Lord Chancellor in 1789.

This was a type very different from the Irish aristocrats of the Protestant Ascendancy to which he never quite belonged. A crucial speech stressed the active tyranny of Catholicism: if the new Bill was passed, the result would be the creation of a Catholic state in Ireland hostile to Protestantism. This speech was regularly reprinted as a body blow to the hopes of Catholic Emancipation. He was certainly a hardliner over the rebellion of 1798, and actually suggested that Wolfe Tone should not have been granted a trial, but hanged the moment he arrived in Ireland.

It was an obvious progression, as well as a cunning move, for the newly ennobled (FitzGibbon) Clare to stir up George III into believing that Catholic Emancipation would betray his Coronation Oath. He was naturally a strong proponent of the Union by which the Protestants would set about ‘taming and civilizing’ the barbarous Catholics, as was their duty. It seems very likely that he was the first to make the lethal suggestion of ‘personal betrayal’ to George III.

All the time, concealed in an apparently minor dispute on a matter of religious tolerance, was a constitutional point of enormous significance now and for the future.19 The Revolutionary Settlement of 1689 had expressly excluded absolute monarchy: the King (or Queen) could not rule without Parliament. Finance and the army depended on laws passed annually. If that was what he could not do, what he could do was altogether more murky. The general feeling was that the sovereign had the right to try to find other ministers, if he disagreed with those to whom he had entrusted power.

In all this, of course, human nature played its part. George III was over sixty at the time of this crisis, his health, whether mental or physical, was demonstrably not good; the average male life expectancy in 1800 was about forty. (In fact the father of George III died at forty-four, even if his grandfather George II, who outlived his son, made seventy-six.) Surely the supposedly Pro-Emancipation views of his heir were an encouraging omen for a future without George III.

The unexpected factor was this: the granting of Catholic Emancipation in the United Kingdom touched on a vein of developing paranoia in the King’s nature. He had come to believe, as he told Pitt, that this was a decision beyond the sphere of any Cabinet minister.20 It was this tragic paranoid condition which would rapidly turn to apparent madness, and bring about a seemingly permanent Regency for his son George Prince of Wales.

There had already been a bout of this madness in 1788 and 1789, with the younger George as temporary Regent.^*4 Whatever the actual illness from which he periodically suffered, it included among the symptoms an obsessional quality which certain topics unquestionably aroused. Catholic Emancipation, that appalling prospect which would cause him to be damned for breaking his sacred vow, was prominent among them. This malevolent obsession itself was at the time more relevant to the Catholic Question than what the nature of the King’s madness actually was.

The first witness to the connection was the King himself. On 21 February 1801 George III professed himself as feeling very ill. He was convinced that this nervous collapse was to do with the Catholic Question. By the night of 22 February he was delirious, and only recovered after a crisis on 2 March. When he learned that the Prime Minister had called, the King sent Pitt a message which was scarcely reassuring. ‘Tell him that I am quite well – quite recovered from illness; but what has he not to answer for, who is the cause of my being ill at all?’21

The King instructed Addington to tell Pitt of the great danger of ever speaking to him on a subject ‘on which I can scarcely keep my temper’. When conveyed this message, Pitt ‘hastily’ replied to the effect that he would not ‘bring forward the Catholic Question’ in future, whether in or out of office, and that he would try to defer it, should it be ‘agitated’. A message came back from the King on 6 March: ‘Now will my mind be at ease.’

The connection was now firmly made between the royal mental state – already the subject of anxious discussion following the previous collapses – and agitation over the Catholic Question. Twenty-four years later, the King’s second son, the Duke of York, recalling the horror of that time from the point of view of the Royal Family, employed the same word when he pronounced in the House of Lords that ‘the agitation of it had been the cause of a most serious and alarming illness to an illustrious personage’.22

In the same year as the Union, 1801, another event took place which would inevitably affect the issue of Catholic Emancipation, although it happened far from the shores of Britain. On 15 July a Concordat was signed between Napoleon and Pope Pius VII which reconciled the Revolutionaries and the Catholic Church in France. As part of this process of reconciliation, Napoleon was to select the bishops. This offered an even stronger possibility of interference than the more limited power of the so-called Veto, by which the King would merely have the right to block bishops from among those whose names were submitted to him.

As England and France veered for a short while uncertainly between peace and war with the temporary Peace of Amiens in 1802, the issue of Catholic Emancipation, forbidden in the Cabinet because of the explicit desire of the King, sank from notice in England. The Catholic aristocracy continued to bicker with the clergy over the issue of pragmatism. Was a royal Veto on Catholic clerical appointments to be allowed in return for toleration towards the religion generally? In fact, throughout Catholic Europe local princes were accustomed to having a say in episcopal appointments; England’s status since the Reformation as a mission territory had meant that the bishops had enjoyed a particular independence. Or was there now to be a rigorous adherence to full Papal authority? This was a fundamental issue which needed to be settled. In the meantime, the question could not even be discussed in the Cabinet, by agreement of the Prime Minister with the King.

Under the circumstances, the point of view of Richard Wellesley is understandable: ‘The obstacle of the coronation oath may be respectable but it is a gross error.’23 It was however an error in which King George III remained resolutely, even stubbornly, uncorrected, describing anyone who gainsaid him as a personal enemy.