‘...he felt his heart melted with the public sorrow and private regret with which he had followed to his grave that great man’.
William Plunket, MP, on Henry Grattan’s death, 1820
‘THERE NEVER WAS SUCH A BATTLE. Waterloo was nothing to it.’ It was in these exuberant terms that Daniel O’Connell described the prospect of his next dramatic involvement with the law.1 Reality was very different. All this occurred only a few months after the sadly lethal affair involving D’Esterre. O’Connell – in common with his contemporaries, it should be said – still regarded a duel as a possible feature, and what was more, a courageous and honourable feature, of the political scene. D’Esterre’s death had saddened him, but not as yet ruled out duelling from his political options.
One should not forget the extraordinary number of leading politicians who were involved in duels around this time, whether resulting in physical damage or something more ritualized. These included the earlier Prime Minister Lord Shelburne, the younger Pitt, Castlereagh and Canning, and even Grattan, who had fought a duel with his fellow MP Isaac Corry over the passing of the Act of Union, wounding him in the process. And other ‘political’ duels lay ahead; including one particularly dramatic one at a crucial moment in British history, a decade into the future. The Irish Catholic bishops officially condemned duels, but it was said that Archbishop Murray, turning a blind eye to the circumstances, had cried out with joy at O’Connell’s survival over D’Esterre: ‘Heaven be praised! Ireland is safe.’ When Berenice, the heroine of Maria Edgeworth’s novel Harrington, declared that she had resolved never to marry a man who had fought in a duel, she was bravely voicing a surprising independence from current opinion.2 The kind of contemporary anecdote which was found more to the general taste was that concerning Lt Col. Henry Lawes Luttrell, a Cornish MP, who reportedly refused to accept a challenge from his father on the grounds that it had not been given by a gentleman.
In August 1815 Daniel O’Connell certainly did not fall into that category of which a Berenice might approve. He had after all recently killed a man in a duel. In spite of that, it seems that he went out of his way to insult the Chief Secretary, Robert Peel (of whom he had already spoken with contempt at the time of the Magee trial). Peel had indeed criticized O’Connell recently and publicly, but O’Connell’s response was made in ‘such a goading and aggressive manner’ that it was difficult to see it as ‘anything other than a deliberate provocation’, in the words of his biographer.3 O’Connell’s words were certainly ripely insulting. Let the police informers who were present report back this expression: ‘Mr Peel would not DARE, in my presence, or in any place where he was liable to personal account, use a single expression derogatory to my interest, or my honour.’ Here was Peel, the mere ‘champion of Orangeism, I have done with him perhaps for ever’.
If O’Connell had his honour, as the recent disastrous duel with D’Esterre had demonstrated, so did Peel. By the standards of the time he had little choice, but in any case there was nothing timorous about Peel. Sir Charles Saxton, MP for Cashel, was enlisted as his potential second if O’Connell refused to retract. O’Connell’s designated second was George Lidwell, a barrister but a Protestant. Somehow arrangements for the duel went awry: the result, ludicrous if it had not been dangerous, was for a duel between Saxton and Lidwell in which there was a ritual exchange of fire but no damage done. In the meantime, both parties were appealing to the press and issuing statements which did nothing to calm down the bubbling mixture of honour, grievance and insult which ensued.
The next duel – between the true contestants, Peel and O’Connell – was aborted dramatically. O’Connell’s treasured wife Mary had been a young and penniless cousin whom he had married secretly in 1802, after a fairly raffish past of philandering adventure. In his impetuous way, O’Connell simply fell in love with the sweet girl, despite her lack of prospects and the wishes of his uncle ‘Hunting Cap’ that he should marry elsewhere – for money, not love. When Daniel declared himself to Mary he said that he would devote his life to making her happy. If this was not an exact prophecy about the future course of O’Connell’s private life, he did remain loving and caring throughout the course of what proved a long marriage.
By 1815 Mary had already endured the inescapable problems of being married to a popular hero, in this case one devoted to causes such as the abolition of the Union in direct contradiction of the government of the day. O’Connell’s problems, which were Mary’s problems too, also included rising debts; much of his financial future depended on the intentions of ‘Hunting Cap’. Mary was a pious Catholic who took seriously the Church’s prohibition against duelling, quite apart from her fears for her husband’s safety. Despite O’Connell’s elaborate precautions to deceive his wife about his intentions – and his movements – Mary got wind of the truth. She informed the sheriff, causing her husband to be taken briefly into custody.
As many other duellists had done in the past, these determined opponents, animated by a mixture of pride and hatred, now resorted to the expedient of meeting in Ostend. O’Connell remained confident: ‘I cannot bring myself even to doubt success.’ In fact, success in the crude sense of a fight and a victor was never put to the test. Police spies were everywhere. Determined as Peel and O’Connell might be, the government in London was equally sure that the consequences of such a fight would be disastrous from any angle. A series of arrests and threats meant that Lidwell, the second, was held in London. O’Connell was held at Dover. Only Peel managed to get abroad, but in the absence of O’Connell there could be no duel.
At the time O’Connell deplored his treatment: ‘What a glorious opportunity have they deprived me of – of living and dying.’ But he never actually fought another duel. Both Peel and O’Connell therefore lived to fight what was in effect a far bigger fight, in which the principle of religious freedom far outranked personal animosity, and which would come to an unexpected conclusion.
In London, the existence of a Parliament – denied since 1801 to Dublin – meant that words, not pistols, were the weapons of choice. ‘A final and conciliatory judgment’: this was the declared aim of Henry Grattan in May 1817, introducing a motion into the House of Commons. He asked for a committee to consider the laws affecting Roman Catholics in Britain and Ireland; in this way he hoped that they could achieve ‘the peace and strength of the United Kingdom... the stability of the Protestant estate’ and ‘the general satisfaction of all classes of His Majesty’s subjects’.4 It was Grattan’s first such effort since 1813. He was now in his early seventies, but still capable of the oratory with which he had been mastering parliamentary audiences for over forty years.
Grattan showed himself immediately to be a contented supporter of the Veto and all its implications, just as he remained in favour of the Union, for the sake of the ‘stability’ which it brought – so long as it was a Union combined with justice. ‘There may be domestic nominations, there may be a veto – there may be both! Now you may command your own Securities, and therefore not let gentlemen say “we cannot accede to Catholic emancipation, because we have no Securities”.’ Under the circumstances, were they really willing to endanger their own (Protestant) Church in order to exclude the Catholics? They should, on the contrary, give to the Catholics all they required, while taking care that their own Church was properly protected.
A spirited debate followed, including some highly Anti-Catholic speeches from MPs such as John Leslie Foster, a barrister, son of an Irish Protestant bishop and currently representing Yarmouth. Leslie Foster’s attack on Grattan’s previous bill had been published as a pamphlet: now he weighed into the subject of Emancipation with a recitation of Ireland’s long, sad and sadly violent history, suggesting that the Catholic Irish would much rather forgo Emancipation than agree to the Veto. Others quoted from a recent publication by the Catholic Dr Gandolphy entitled A Defence of the Ancient Faith, or a Full Exposition of the Christian Religion. Here Gandolphy had argued that Roman Catholicism was the only real Christian religion: as for the Reformation, that was ‘the sinful deed of lust, avarice and pride’.5 It was an equally intolerant view.
Both Castlereagh and Canning made speeches supporting the motion. Nevertheless, Grattan was defeated by a majority of twenty-four votes. Many felt that the speech which really contributed to Grattan’s defeat – yet again – was that of Robert Peel, the Chief Secretary for Ireland (a post he continued to hold until 1818). Admirers of Peel, and even those who criticized his oratorical style, paid him tributes. Foster, for example, thought it better delivered than anything since Pitt’s time.6 There was a suggestion afterwards that the speech had swayed thirteen votes, which, if true, would have accounted for the majority.
Peel’s main message was in direct contrast to that of Grattan. ‘In all this,’ he declared, ‘I see nothing that can lead to harmony – nothing that can constitute a final and satisfactory settlement – nothing but a wild and irreconcilable contradiction of principles.’ And he urged each member of his audience to weigh ‘the substantial blessings which he knows to have been derived from the government that is’, against all the speculative advantages which he is promised from ‘the government that is to be’.
The whole tenor of his speech was indeed unashamedly against any kind of progress or change, and in favour of what was long established – and thus by inference sacrosanct. Where any advance of Catholic power was concerned, he prophesied woe in terms of national danger – to the Protestants, that is. The Roman Catholics would never rest until they had become ‘by far the most powerful body in Ireland’. There was an ‘inviolable compact’ between Great Britain and Ireland. And the essential part of that compact was that the Protestant religion – admittedly the religion of the minority – should be the established and favoured part of the State. In his summing-up, at a late hour, Grattan exclaimed in scorn against these views: how could the Catholic doctrine of Transubstantiation actually endanger the English monarchy, the House of Brunswick?
Peel’s private feelings about Irish politics were less high-flown; they can be judged by his communication to his friend John Wilson Croker on the eve of his departure from the Emerald Isle: ‘A fortnight hence I shall be free as air... free from Orangemen; free from Ribbonmen... free from the Lord Mayor and Sheriffs... free from Catholics who become Protestants to get into Parliament... free from perpetual converse about the Harbour of Howth and Dublin Bay haddock; and, lastly, free of the Company of Carvers and Guilders which I became this day in reward of my public services.’7
The tide of debate in the House of Commons flowed on sluggishly, but for all Grattan’s efforts still it flowed with Peel. The motion was defeated.
Grattan’s next attempt was in May 1819, when he presented several Petitions once again in favour of Emancipation. Grattan made a long speech which aimed at countering in advance all the possible arguments against it.8 Such an Act would, for example, give ‘strength’ to the Protestant Church, the Act of Settlement and the Protestant Succession to the Crown. ‘The Roman Catholic combination of Europe has ceased... the race of the Pretender is extinct [the Cardinal of York had died in 1807]... the dangerous power of the Pope is no more.’ Not only were the supposedly threatening attachments of the Catholics gone, but all the objects to which there could be any such attachments had been annihilated.
Even more powerful was Grattan’s sonorous invocation of the real Ruler of the Universe: ‘The King who would interfere, puts himself in the place of his Maker, and attempts to jostle the Almighty from his throne; he has no credentials from God and can have none from man.’ Naturally Grattan did not end without the obligatory reference to the contribution of Catholic soldiers to the British cause in the recent wars: ‘the battles won with Catholic blood’. Grattan also went into detailed arguments about the legal necessities which were or were not involved.
Once more John Leslie Foster came up with a highly Anti-Catholic speech in which the entire stress was placed upon the rights of the Protestants in England and Ireland: their dislike of the idea of Catholics voting was cited most emphatically as though it was a legal argument. The last speech was made by Lord Lowther, who similarly stressed that further concessions to the Catholics ‘tended to weaken the Protestant establishment’.
Finally, the debate ended in the kind of confusion which seemed emblematic of the misfortune of mixing religion with politics. Cries were heard of ‘Question! Question!’, growing ever louder. The Speaker called on the Ayes and Noes in turn. He decided that the Noes had it. There was then a loud general cry of ‘Divide! Divide!’ According to custom, ‘strangers’, those who were not MPs, now had to leave the chamber. But some ‘strangers’ remained, under the impression that the debate would continue: given that speakers of the importance of Castlereagh, Canning and Peel were waiting to be called, it was a reasonable assumption. Meanwhile there was an argument that the Noes had already been declared the victors.
The Speaker would have none of it. A division took place and this time the Noes were indubitably if narrowly ahead by six votes. Even then, the objections were not over. John Croker, one of the tellers, complained that several MPs had illegally entered the chamber after the question had been put and the Noes pronounced the winners. As a result, Lord Worcester, heir to the Duke of Beaufort, and four others for the Noes were struck off. Lord Forbes was eliminated from the Ayes. The result was even closer, but the Noes still won by two votes: 243 to 241. Grattan was defeated. Catholic Emancipation, in the form of Petitions for Relief, was in effect rejected by the House of Commons once again. Petitions presented in the House of Lords in the following weeks in favour of Emancipation or partial Relief by Lords Donoughmore and Grey were similarly defeated.
Grattan died in June the next year, a month before his seventy-fourth birthday; the Protestant champion of the Catholics was buried in Westminster Abbey, close to Pitt and Fox, which, given Grattan’s belief in the permanence of the Union of the two countries, seemed appropriate enough.* Daniel O’Connell, however, claiming him as ‘the greatest man Ireland ever knew’ at the by-election for his parliamentary seat which followed, believed strongly that he should have been buried in Ireland, blaming Grattan’s family for the dereliction.9
William Conyngham Plunket, a determined and highly argumentative Irish lawyer, son of a Presbyterian minister in Enniskillen (a man once described as having an ‘intensity of internal fire’ which glowed like an iron stove), took over the baton of Emancipation in the British Parliament. The intensity was matched by his striking physical appearance: Macaulay called Plunket ‘very ugly, but with a strong expression of intellect in his strong coarse features and massy forehead’. A Whig, just as Grattan had been, and the Member for Dublin University, he had shown his patriotism in 1816 when he had rebuked the Tory Speaker of the House of Commons for leaving out the contribution of Ireland, i.e. her soldiers, in congratulating Wellington on his victory at Waterloo.10
In February 1821 Plunket would move to consider Catholic Relief in a committee of the whole House, after presenting several Irish Catholic Petitions and paying tribute to his predecessor Grattan: ‘he felt his heart melted with the public sorrow and private regret with which he had followed to his grave that great man’, and Plunket unlike O’Connell praised the choice of Westminster Abbey: ‘at his death, as during his life, he had been the bond between the two countries’. Even Peel found Plunket’s speech ‘the most powerful and eloquent... I have ever heard in Parliament’.11
And, just as Peel was believed to have done previously for the opposite result, Plunket evidently swayed the House of Commons in favour of Relief. His basic theme was, crudely put: why pick on the Catholics? ‘He might be an infidel, he might believe in Jupiter, in Osiris, the ape, the crocodile, in all the host of heaven, and all the creeping things of the earth, and [still] be admitted to all the privileges of the state.’ For the first time since 1813 there was a victory for Emancipation in the Commons by six votes – and at the third reading by nineteen – only to be thrown out by the Lords. Plunket, like Grattan before him, was a contented Vetoist: the Pope’s role was to be purely spiritual, and all appointments of bishops and clergy to be given to the Crown. The fact that the leading Catholic Bishop, Milner, continued to oppose any kind of ‘securities’ (controls exercised by the State over the Catholic Church) was consequently described by Plunket as ‘an act of undeviating consistent bigotry’.
While the Parliament in London debated the issue of Emancipation publicly, but without success – from the Catholic point of view, that is, the Anti-Catholics taking a very different line about this heroic stand to hold off Popery – O’Connell in Dublin now began to play with a series of experimental Catholic organizations. He was able to use his immense personal popularity (to which his public acceptance of duelling had only contributed) for essentially peaceful, if contentious, ends. But there were problems. A profound disagreement between those who came to be known as ‘Seceders’ and ‘Anti-Seceders’ echoed the English arguments between Vetoists and Non-Vetoists. It was the basic question yet again of what ‘securities’ would be permitted, that is, non-Catholic interference with the Catholics’ organization of their own Church in the interests of the Protestant State.
An early Catholic Association had been formed in 1815, before the Ostend debacle, which petered out two years later. An earlier Catholic Board had been ended, as contravening government rules of assembly. Now there were small, informal meetings in a drawing room in the house of the Earl of Fingall, which from their elegantly furnished surroundings took the luxurious name of ‘Divan’ meetings.
Lord Fingall, a man in his sixties, was far from being any kind of revolutionary figure. He was a man of great sweetness of character who found it easy to woo with courtesy, believing strongly in the kind of compromises which would bring about effective relief from disabilities for his fellow Catholics. He had, for example, headed a body of yeomen who had helped suppress the rebellion of 1798. A few years earlier he had secured the lifting of the ban on his Jacobite father: the previous Lord Fingall had been outlawed for adherence to James II, but since he had actually died before 1689, he could no longer be plausibly accused of the crime of supporting the Stuarts at that point. O’Connell and Fingall represented two opposing forces in the fight for Emancipation; not only that, but socially the hereditary aristocrat and the ambitious lawyer represented two sides of politically active Irish society at the time.
The Catholic Association had proved a disappointment. A new and, it was hoped, improved Catholic Board took its place in July 1817 with the hope of unity and action. But in the words of John O’Connell, Daniel’s son, who edited his correspondence in 1846 after his death, this period was felt by O’Connell to be the nadir of his eventful campaigning life: ‘a moral lethargy, a faint-hearted apathy hung over the country, and with the exception of himself, scarce anyone was in the field for Ireland’.12 O’Connell himself remained a dedicated opponent of any kind of ‘ecclesiastical’ Veto, in direct opposition to the Irish Seceders. In the meantime, the English Parliament, in the shape of Robert Peel, had declared the issue of Emancipation ‘irreconcilable’.
In one of his earlier, more violent perorations, O’Connell chose to quote from Byron’s poem of 1812, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage:
Hereditary bondsmen! Know ye not
Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?
When the old King of England died on 29 January 1820, to be succeeded at last by his eldest son the Prince Regent, it would have been a bold prophet who foresaw the eventual fate of Catholic Emancipation. Was it to be achieved by violence, as Byron’s poem seemed to indicate? (Although O’Connell had arguably so far believed more in violent oratory than the violence of rebellion.) In both the English Parliament and the Irish governing class, there was a kind of stalemate.
Henry Grattan’s reference to ‘the Protestant Succession to the Crown’ in his speech to Parliament nine months earlier was not without significance. The coming of a new King meant in turn the prospect of a new heir to the throne – or heirs. The Hanoverian Succession, which had enjoyed a period of orderly tranquillity, thanks to the high fertility of Queen Charlotte with her fifteen children, nine of them male, had become once more potentially complicated, if not in this generation, then the next one. Princess Charlotte, the only child of the Prince of Wales’s ill-fated marriage to Caroline of Brunswick, had recently died in childbirth. The next male heirs in order of age were Frederick Duke of York and William Duke of Clarence.
Both the Duke of York and the Duke of Clarence had led rich private lives, with children galore, but all illegitimate and in consequence not in line for the throne. Then the Duke of Clarence was one of the two royal Dukes to be galvanized into making late (legal) marriages after the death of Princess Charlotte. His choice, Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen, a widowed German princess with one child, had failed so far to produce a baby that survived. (Princess Elizabeth of Clarence was born and soon died at the beginning of the next reign.) In January 1820, therefore, the nearest existing legitimate grandchild of George III and Queen Charlotte to the throne was an eighteen-month-old princess called Victoria, the daughter of their fourth son, the Duke of Kent, who had died six days before his father. There were two other legitimate grandchildren at this time, both born in 1819 and both called George, one living in Hanover, sons of the fifth and seventh sons respectively; but little Victoria took precedence.
More to the immediate point was the fact that the Duke of York was now the heir presumptive to the throne occupied by George IV, now a corpulent and self-indulgent man approaching sixty. And York was a dedicated opponent of any reduction of the Penal Laws against the Catholics. His influence – and he was an eager, prolix speaker in the House of Lords – was a matter of reckoning. Ernest Duke of Cumberland was an equally malevolent opponent, but liberals, and even pragmatists, hoped that he would remain in Hanover. As against that another Royal Duke, the sixth son, Augustus, Duke of Sussex – although his lowly position in the vast family made his succession unlikely compared to that of the Duke of York – had presented Petitions on behalf of Catholics.
In the meantime the reigning mistress of George IV, Isabella Marchioness of Hertford, had been succeeded by Elizabeth Marchioness Conyngham; or, as the private despatch of a foreign minister seen by the Duke of Wellington had it: ‘The Prince Regent aged 70 [actually fifty-eight] has left the Marchioness of Hertford aged 70 [actually sixty], to become wildly in love with the Marchioness Conyngham, aged 50.’13 It was true that, like her predecessors, Elizabeth Conyngham was not young – she was indeed fifty in 1819 when she probably became the mistress of the then Prince Regent. A portrait by Thomas Lawrence of Elizabeth in her early thirties shows a voluptuous beauty of the type that appealed to the Prince. His devotion was generally remarked; her own devotion was generally felt to be to the financial advancement of her family.
On the other hand, she was by nature more of a Whig than a Tory, and as time would show shared the Whiggish predilection for Emancipation on practical, if not religious grounds. Her husband (raised from Earl to Marquess in 1816) came from the Anglo-Irish Conyngham family who therefore had that practical knowledge of the circumstances of Irish life, which, while it did not always persuade its possessors to support Emancipation – Protestant Ascendancy remained Ascendancy – was at least more realistic than condemning three-quarters of a nation as hopelessly barbarian.
Lady Conyngham was certainly installed by the time of the King’s Coronation on 19 July 1821 when he was seen nodding and winking in her direction, sighing and making eyes at her, at one point taking off a diamond brooch from his breast and kissing it with his besotted gaze fixed upon her, whereupon she did the same to a diamond ring. Mrs Arbuthnot gave it as her opinion that the King had never known what it was to be in love before: strong words given the many attempts he had evidently made to find out.14
The Coronation of George IV when it came – complicated by his attempt to divorce the woman now officially Queen Caroline – has been described by Roy Strong in his study of the subject as ‘the most extravagant in history’.15 That was the impression which lingered with varying effect: short-term admiration from those who liked such wonders and revulsion from those contrasting such extravagance with the social needs of the less fortunate. The pathetic or grotesque attempt – once again, according to individual sympathies – of Queen Caroline to gain access to the Abbey was another feature of the event; especially since it would be followed shortly afterwards by her death.
Several Catholic peers were present, although unable to take their seats in the House of Lords; the hereditary Earl Marshal, the Catholic Duke of Norfolk, who should have organized the whole magnificent event, was obliged to depute his office. The banquet alone cost over £25,000 (nearly £2 million in today’s money) and roughly £150,000 (over £11 million) went on jewels, plate and the various uniforms and costumes deemed essential to the national celebration. The nation, far from being grateful, was outraged by the expense; but curtailment thereof would be a decision for the next sovereign to make, whoever he or she was. George IV had waited for his moment and was determined to suffuse it with splendour.
However, he himself cut a figure ‘more like the Victim than the Hero of the fête’ owing to his now vast physical proportions, including his fifty-inch waist and wobbling fleshy face, all this enhanced rather than disguised by the lavish velvet and jewels with which he was optimistically adorned. The judgement was that of Lady Palmerston, who added that several times the new King was ‘at the last gasp’, but a cheering look from Lady Conyngham ‘revived him like Magic or Ether’.16 Naturally a Coronation entailed a Coronation Oath: in Westminster Abbey King George IV swore in front of the Archbishop of Canterbury almost exactly the same oath as his father had taken sixty years earlier. The difference was not religious: it lay quite simply in the inclusion of the words ‘and Ireland’, inserted twice in recognition of the Union in 1800; after ‘this United Kingdom of Britain’ and ‘the Church of England’.
This oath was that ‘binding religious obligation’ developed by ‘the wisdom of our forefathers’ which had caused the senior King such agony of conscience in 180l that he convinced his Prime Minister Pitt that it had led to his madness.17 In the future it would be a question of the significance attached to this oath by the son of George III – was it mere flummery or a profound personal and spiritual engagement? If there was any alteration in the state of religion in the United Kingdom, would the King, in the combative words of Henry Grattan, really interfere, putting himself in the place of his Maker and attempting to jostle the Almighty from his throne?
* There is a statue of Grattan in the Outer Lobby of the Palace of Westminster.