CHAPTER SEVEN

Serving Ireland Royally

‘I never felt sensations of more delight than since I came to Ireland... Whenever an opportunity offers, wherein I can serve Ireland, I will seize it with eagerness. God bless you my friends.’

King George IV, Dun Laoghaire, 3 September 1821

WHEN GEORGE IV ARRIVED in Howth on 12 August 1821, he was the first reigning monarch to do so since Richard II in 1399. That visit had led directly to King Richard’s ruin: 400 years later it was to be hoped that there would be better results. What was widely said at the time was that King George was the first English monarch who came in a spirit of conciliation to the country.*1^,1

Certainly King George was greeted immediately with enormous enthusiasm by the Irish. This enthusiasm took many different forms: Mrs Arbuthnot learned that Castlereagh and Lord Sidmouth had been accosted on the day of the landing by a street lady: ‘A glorious day this for our country!’ she cried. ‘This night the King is to have all the fat women in Ireland!’ (Was she perhaps influenced by the impressively ample appearance of Lady Conyngham, who was in attendance?) Lord Cloncurry, an actual witness, wrote later in his memoir that ‘a strange madness seemed at that conjuncture to seize people of all ranks... Men and women of all classes and opinions joined in a shout of gladness.’ There was no thought except of ‘processions and feasting and loyalty – boiling over loyalty’.2

Among those who demonstrated loyalty was Daniel O’Connell, who employed all his fabled oratorical art – to say nothing of his imagination – in his welcome: ‘In sorrow and bitterness, I have for the last fifteen years laboured for my unhappy country. It is said of St Patrick that he banished venomous reptiles from our isle, but his Majesty has performed a greater moral miracle. The announcement of his approach has allayed the dissensions of centuries.’3 With language like this, it is easy to understand the verdict of the lively young Catholic lawyer and political activist from Waterford Richard Lalor Sheil, whose Sketches of the Irish Bar were published in The New Monthly Magazine from 1822 onwards: ‘The Irish appeared drunk with joy, and rattled their chains as if proud of them.’4

King George arrived in the late afternoon of his fifty-ninth birthday. The journey had been delayed by news of the illness and death of Queen Caroline, which had led to a stay en route with the Marquess of Anglesey at Holyhead. During the onward journey, however, the King was in somewhat tasteless good spirits at this unexpected delivery from his enemy (it was with difficulty that he was persuaded to wear mourning for the departed). In fact the Countess of Glengall described him as ‘dead DRUNK’ from wine and whiskey punch when he landed.5 Despite the lack of a formal reception due to the Queen’s demise, the news had spread. People began to amass, as the King greeted the Earl of Kingston in an access of geniality not diminished by the whiskey punch: ‘Kingston, Kingston, you black-whiskered, good-natured fellow! I am happy to see you in this friendly country.’6

He was then driven to the Viceregal Lodge in Phoenix Park, surrounded by an admiring pack of Irishmen, some of them on horseback, 2,000 of them on foot. Once in Phoenix Park, King George kept up the level of geniality, urging the crowds to follow him right up to the house itself, where he made ‘a short but hearty speech’. Throughout the King stressed his long-held desire to visit Ireland, the country which he swore that he had loved since birth. ‘My heart has always been Irish. From the day it beat. I have loved Ireland.’ In a subsequent dismissal which cannot have displeased the huge crowd, he urged them to go and drink his health as he would drink theirs (or perhaps had already done so), ‘in a bumper of Irish whiskey punch’. After which he shook all the hands he could possibly reach, a gesture which went down particularly well.

Of course there were dissentient voices, and being Irish they were eloquent ones. One witness described Ireland as kneeling like a bastinadoed elephant to receive a paltry rider in the course of his visit. Hamilton Rowan, who had been the secretary of the Dublin Society of the United Irishmen and done time in prison, expressed great surprise at the shocking physical appearance of the King: ‘Until I saw George the Fourth, I never met a person who in features, contour and general mien outdid their caricature!’7

The present incumbent of the Viceregal Lodge was Charles Earl Talbot, who had been appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in 1817 at the age of forty. Talbot, a Tory, was a known op-ponent of Catholic Emancipation, but in other respects regarded as a man of integrity in Dublin circles. The Lord Lieutenant had wide-reaching powers; it was a role unique in the British Union in that it had no parallel in Scotland, let alone Wales.8 Thus the post served to emphasize the separateness of Ireland rather than the new Union. Catholics were debarred: since 1690, Viceroys had consisted of a series of English Protestant aristocrats, including two future Prime Ministers in the previous century, Lord Hartington and the Duke of Portland.

Executive power nowadays tended to be exercised by the Chief Secretary – the post Robert Peel had recently held. Nevertheless, as time would show, the potential influence of a Viceroy could not be underestimated; nor the potential difficulty when a Viceroy seemed to prefer the interests of the people he governed to those of the King he nominally represented.^*2

The Viceroy – and his wife, the Vicereine – were of course the natural centre of Ireland as focused on Dublin. Although Dublin Castle was the official residence, Phoenix Lodge had come to replace it practically, as being more salubrious. Given that the couple had fourteen children, the last born while Talbot was in office, the choice is understandable. In 1821 Viceregal Society echoed the law and Catholic lack of privilege in that it was by custom predominantly Protestant; many owed their position to land notoriously acquired from previously Irish owners.

King George IV was, nevertheless, greeted by all classes. And the genuine friendliness and charm – seen in the hand-shaking – which were also part of his character, along with the fantasy and self-indulgence, were exercised to good effect. One comment by an old man – ‘he’s a real King, and asks us how we are’ – prefigured the way royalty would go in future, slowly altering from figure of power to benevolent figurehead.9 That last stage, however, lay far in the future. This was a man who still possessed extraordinary hereditary power, even if its exact practical extent might be arguable.

A quick period of seclusion to mark the death of Queen Caroline was followed by a magnificent procession into Dublin itself. One report suggested that there was at least a mile of carriages. The King wore the Order of St Patrick over his regimental dress, and waved a hat decorated with a huge bunch of shamrock. There was no mistaking his message: this was ‘just the day he wished for’. The events which celebrated his stay included a review in the Park, and a Drawing-Room at which the dresses of a thousand ladies were satisfyingly ‘rich and [in] good taste’. (This must have been gratifying to the patriotic, since ‘Irish manufacture to be worn’ had been specified on the invitations.) At a banquet given at Trinity College, the King displayed further public jollity during the singing of ‘Rule Britannia’ by beating time vigorously with his hand on the table.

Only at the Lord Mayor’s feast was a note of chill struck, indicative of the deep divisions which existed within this high-spirited gathering. When a toast was given to William III of ‘glorious, pious and immortal memory’ – the very name ‘a kind of password to insult fellow (Catholic) citizens’, as it was later described – Lord Cloncurry turned down his glass and remained seated, as did Lord Talbot of Malahide. On the other hand, the King did receive among several addresses one from the Catholic bishops, which was felt by the disapproving John Wilson Croker to talk too much of politics ‘in an unseemly tone’.10 The King also witnessed the installation of the Earl of Fingall, appropriately enough, as the first Catholic member of the Order of St Patrick.

News of King George’s ultra-gracious behaviour and the consequent enthusiasm reached England. There were snorts of disapproval: the King ‘seems to have behaved not like a sovereign coming in state and pomp to visit a part of dominions,’ said Lord Dudley, ‘but like a popular candidate come down upon an electioneering trip’. Although such was not Dudley’s intention, he had in fact confirmed the success of the King’s mission to charm and please, even if the expected result would not be his election to Parliament.

George IV also needed to indulge himself: that was part of his character.11 For this he betook himself to the Irish residence of the Marquess and Marchioness Conyngham, Slane Castle overlooking the River Boyne in Co. Meath. There, presumably, he resumed those leisured activities with his mistress commemorated in a ballad of the time:

’Tis pleasant at seasons to see how they sit

First cracking their nuts, then cracking their wit,

Then quaffing their claret – then mingling their lips...

The next line less delightfully suggested that they also tickled the fat ‘about each other’s hips’.12

Slane Castle was, incidentally, not far from the site of the famous – or infamous – Battle of the Boyne, in which William III had put an end to the bid of James II to regain his throne. This was not the occasion to commemorate such battles. The King was now ‘a most determined Irishman’ who ‘raved’ about Ireland, according to Castlereagh. With continuing bonhomie he declared that he would like to stay in Ireland and have Lord Talbot go as his representative to England. In taking up residence there, he presumably had the comforts of Slane Castle in mind.

It was perfectly true that George as Prince of Wales had shown a natural affinity for Irishmen, just as he enjoyed the company of Catholics (including his ‘wife’ Maria Fitzherbert). This affinity included those who might elegantly advocate Irish nationalism along the way. One interesting example was his taste for the novels of the Protestant Irishwoman Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan, who has been described as the first Irish nineteenth-century writer to give expression to the Anglo-Irish movement in favour of nationalism.13 She was included in his favourites, led by Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott. In this he followed his father: George III in his time was said to have praised the novels of another Protestant Irishwoman, Maria Edgeworth; after reading Castle Rackrent, published in 1800, he exclaimed: ‘I know something now of my Irish subjects.’14

The remarkable Lady Morgan was a poet and novelist with a strong romantic feeling for the history of Ireland and its innate independence. She had begun life as Sydney Owenson in comparative poverty; her father being an Irish Catholic actor who had married a Protestant Englishwoman. For Sydney Owenson, existence as a governess to the Featherstones, a Westmeath family living in a castle, only encouraged her natural zeal for writing; later she married Sir Thomas Morgan, surgeon to the household of the Marquess of Abercorn, where she also acted as a governess.

In 1806 The Wild Irish Girl made her name with its wonderful heroine Glorvina in a book which has been described as ‘an appeal to liberal principles combined with aristocratic sentiments’.15 It preached a message whereby ‘the English [sic] landholder’ was openly to appear in the midst of his Irish peasantry, ‘with an eye beaming complacency... show them you do not distrust them, and they will not betray you’. By working for the so-called English Irish, that is the now beaming landholders, the source of Irish poverty would be dried up and ‘the miseries that flowed from it shall be forgotten’.16 The book went through seven editions in two years.

A series of novels followed, as a result of which Lady Morgan found herself involved in a feud with the caustic critic John Wilson Croker in the Quarterly Review (he who had successfully demolished, as he believed, a young poet called John Keats in 1818). When Croker denounced her novel Florence Macarthy, Lady Morgan riposted with an insulting portrait of a certain reviewer she called Con Crawley in her next book. Her own ‘little Red Riding Hood’ figure, as she put it, tiny and dark-haired, pale-skinned, ever animated and witty, became a feature of society. There was no doubt on whose side George IV found himself: he attacked Croker for his insults as a ‘damn blackguard’.17

The Morgans for their part ungratefully withdrew during the royal visit with a kind of social disdain. There were others who profoundly disagreed with it. Thomas Moore, the celebrated Irish nationalist poet now aged forty-two, had been born in Dublin where his father was a grocer. Tom was especially beloved of his mother, who, in his own words, made him at a very early age ‘a sort of show child’ due to his own natural talent for reciting and his mother’s love of poetry; the fact that he was remarkably short as a grown-up meant that Tom retained some of this appearance of an eager child in later life.

Unlike Lady Morgan, Moore was a Catholic, but not a particularly religious one; it was the unfairness of the Catholic lot in Ireland which outraged him. As a Catholic student – one of the earliest intake – at Trinity College, he was insulted by the fact that he could at last study there, but not receive prizes or scholarships. Graduating in 1795, Thomas Moore then moved to London to study law. He made his way into sophisticated Whig Society, being received by the Prince of Wales himself while the latter was still an ostentatious Whig supporter; the Prince allowed Moore to dedicate his translations of Anacreon to him.18 An early clash with Byron led to sincere friendship: it was to Moore that Byron addressed a poem as he left England in 1816:

The libation I would pour

Should be – peace with thine and mine,

And a health to thee, Tom Moore.

It was Moore’s publication of 1808, Irish Melodies, which brought him national fame, with songs like ‘The Last Rose of Summer’ and ‘Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms’. While ‘The Harp That Once Through Tara’s Halls’, the first number in the book, eloquently lamented the lack of liberty in the country compared to days gone by:

No more to chiefs and ladies bright

The harp of Tara swells...

Thus Freedom now so seldom wakes,

The only throb she gives

Is when some heart indignant breaks

To show that she still lives.

From the first, Thomas Moore was certainly an ardent patriot who was friendly with Robert Emmet when he was young (although never an advocate of violence himself). On grounds of patriotism, Moore was therefore a sympathizer with the movement for Catholic Emancipation as a cure for Ireland’s woes, while being inclined to dismiss O’Connell as a rough type of demagogue. He certainly poured scorn on the latter’s tactics of conciliation towards George IV. O’Connell himself showed more generosity in hailing the effect of Irish Melodies at a meeting of the Dublin Political Union: ‘I attribute much of the present state of feeling, and the desire for liberty in Ireland to that immortal man – he has brought patriotism into the private circles of domestic life.’19

None of this affected the enthusiasm of the public for George IV and the hopes of their masters. The King departed from Dun Laoghaire on 3 September, which was renamed Kingstown. A ‘most determined Irishman’, in the King’s own phrase, Daniel O’Connell, presented him with a laurel wreath. George IV replied with yet another handshake and an address to the crowds on the shore in the usual grandiloquent language: ‘My friends! When I arrived in this beautiful country my heart overflowed with joy – it is now depressed with sincere sorrow. I never felt sensations of more delight than since I came to Ireland – I cannot expect to feel any superior nor many equal till I have the happiness of seeing you again. Whenever an opportunity offers wherein I can serve Ireland, I shall seize on it with eagerness.’20

There would of course be an obvious opportunity for the King of Ireland to serve Ireland in his encouragement, or at any rate lack of discouragement, for the campaign for Catholic Emancipation. At the time Daniel O’Connell, in keeping with his general belief in peaceful methods (duels were a matter of personal honour and different), believed that the olive branch in the shape of the laurel wreath was the best way of serving Ireland himself.

Once the King was back in England, the question was: what was to come of all this? In his diary on 5 December 1821 John Lewis Mallet, a civil servant, Secretary of the Audit Board, wrote that the visit left ‘the Catholics elated with extravagant hopes – the Protestant party, or rather Orange faction, reproved and humbled without being weakened or made wiser... such a country as Ireland cannot be pacified by fair words’.21 Lord Redesdale, former Speaker of the House of Commons and Lord Chancellor of Ireland, described it in similar terms to another former Speaker, Lord Colchester, as ‘that unfortunate journey’.22

It was Richard Marquess Wellesley, elder brother of the Duke of Wellington, and shortly to become a major player in this politico-religious drama, who made the important point. The King’s behaviour in 1821 at the Irish visit was ‘most injudicious’ if he meant to oppose Catholic claims afterwards. The Catholics now believed that he was ‘secretly friendly to their admission [to political power]’.23 Yet the Whig grandee Lord Holland knew differently, from the private testimony of Louis-Philippe, Duc d’Orléans. The latter heard directly from the then Prince Regent of his secretly Anti-Catholic views: if the Catholics were admitted to political power, how could they be excluded from the Crown? Then his own family would no longer be legitimate. There was obviously considerable room for misapprehension here on the subject of Emancipation.

The situation in the government in London still concentrated power in the hands of the Tories under Lord Liverpool, who had now been Prime Minister for nearly ten years. A formidable ally had joined the government in late 1818, also in the House of Lords: this was Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, whose post was that of Secretary of the Ordinance. This was not his first political appearance: as Arthur Wellesley he had been in the House of Commons at an earlier date, quite apart from his long and varied military career involving, among other things, prolonged service in India. But now, inevitably and gloriously, he brought with him all the réclame of the victor of Waterloo.

Wellington was now in his fifties, seven years younger than the Prince he served. At a superficial level, it mattered in practical terms that he was deaf – and became deafer. He also had difficulty with his elocution, having lost his back teeth during his military service. As his elder brother Richard bluntly put it: ‘Arthur can’t speak the English language intelligibly.’ None of this could dim the brilliance of the natural authority he exerted against the sombre background of recent events, in a country distressed with post-war unrest, quite apart from the Catholic Question. At a deeper level, he had a dislike of what he called ‘factiousness’, believing that ‘a factious opposition to the government is highly injurious to the interests of the country’.24 Such an instinctive reaction to unproductive argument – as he saw it – was perfectly comprehensible in a great general. This was, however, no longer the all-encompassing military sphere of the recent decade. It remained to be seen how such a dislike of the essence of a democratic constitution – opposition – would play out in the rough parliamentary world.

Richard Wellesley was appointed Viceroy of Ireland in place of Lord Talbot in December 1821. Richard Wellesley had progressed through various titles: Viscount Wellesley, then Earl of Mornington, inherited from his father, before reaching that of an Irish Marquess in 1799. Physically the two brothers were not unalike, in that Richard shared the fine head and long nose, if the latter’s was not quite so formidable as Arthur’s much-caricatured prow; Richard was also shorter.

As characters, the brothers were very different. Richard Wellesley was the elder by nine years and had had a long diplomatic and political career after a shaky start when he was expelled from Harrow School and found a welcome in the rival Eton College.^*3 He had been an Irish MP, then Ambassador to Spain; but the formative experience was surely his seven years as Governor-General of India at the turn of the century, where, in the words of Lord Cloncurry, he acquired ‘habits of dominion’. It certainly led to arrogance and has inspired one historian to compare him to the similarly vain twentieth-century Indian Viceroy, the Marquess of Curzon, who, after he returned home, always walked ‘as if accompanied by elephants’.25 Wellesley liked to present himself with a flourish, his painted lips and rouged cheeks visible in his portrait by Thomas Lawrence.

Macaulay pronounced his verdict on Richard Wellesley later: ‘a great and splendid figure in history and his weaknesses, though they make his character less worthy of respect, make it more interesting as a study’. Certainly Wellesley’s private life was complicated. His brother Wellington brusquely referred to him as ‘whoring’, more tactfully described as indiscreet sex.26 Wellesley had a long affair, producing five children, with the French actress of Irish descent Hyacinthe Roland, one who described herself as having ‘quicksilver’ in her veins, before marrying her in 1794. She died in 1816, leaving him, however, without a legitimate heir.

In short, Wellesley after India was a man of imperious be-haviour, with liberal views; or, as the Prince Regent put it less kindly, here was a Spanish grandee grafted on an Irish potato.27 He became Foreign Secretary in Perceval’s government, resigning however in 1812 over the issue of Catholic Emancipation. Here his Irish background led him to identify himself with the claims of the Irish Catholics, not so much in the idealistic cause of religious freedom, but believing that the political results of persecution would be eventually disastrous in his native land.

His appointment as Viceroy in late 1821 was consequently seen as Pro-Catholic and attacked as a result. The Tory MP George Bankes wrote in disgust to Lord Colchester: ‘I can augur nothing good [from it]... Vanity, dissipation, want of private and unsteadiness of public character... and a strong predilection for the Roman Catholic cause, are not the component parts which ought to constitute the Chief Governor for such a country in such times as these.’ For Bankes believed that many parts of Ireland were in ‘as disturbed a condition as they have ever been’, except during the rebellion of 1798.28

Wellesley’s early actions as Viceroy confirmed this prejudice. As before, it concerned the historical figure of William III, who, whatever he might have done for the Whig aristocracy in 1688, survived to act as a symbolic troublemaker, whether as hero or villain, in Ireland. As Lord Redesdale put it: ‘Every Protestant who enjoys property feels that if James II had won the Battle of the Boyne, his ancestor would have been executed as a traitor.’29

In July 1822 the Viceroy forbade the Protestants to take part in their traditional celebration of the battle, by which the statue of William III was garlanded and saluted in a special ceremony. A proclamation by the Lord Mayor of Dublin in October prohibited decoration of the statue in the future. The Protestants showed their disgust publicly. At a performance at the theatre in December 1822, a quart bottle was thrown at the Viceroy in his box by a person in the upper gallery. Magnificently, the Viceroy simply stepped to the front of the box, hand to heart, and gazed upward in the direction of the would-be ‘assassin’ (as the Dublin Evening Post termed him).

The dismissal of William Saurin in January 1822 was similarly interpreted as Pro-Catholic. Saurin, who had been Attorney-General for the last fourteen years, was that extreme Protestant Ascendancy man who had been disgusted by O’Connell’s defence of John Magee at his trial. For Saurin the Catholics were the main source of Ireland’s evils; there could be no two ways about it, regardless of the fact that they constituted the majority of the population. Supporters of Emancipation in Ireland – not necessarily all Catholics themselves – had therefore reasons for hope.

In England, to the optimistic there appeared to be the same kind of movement. The Tory Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool, supported Catholics in the higher ranks of the army and the magistracies, even if he remained opposed to them actually being in Parliament. But the number of friends of Emancipation within the Commons was swelling. George Canning, for example, made Foreign Secretary in September 1822 after the death of Castlereagh, had long followed his mentor Pitt in supporting Emancipation, for the crucial reason of Irish security. Earlier in 1822, when he believed he was on his way to being appointed Governor of India, he had made an attempt to argue that historically Catholics could be members of the House of Lords.

It was an able, well-researched speech, belying Canning’s own claim to speak ‘with much trepidation and anxiety’. Although it began with the now habitual mockery of those on the other side – longing for more disabilities not fewer, how upset they must be by the Acts of 1778 and 1791, and so on! – he passed on to history. This was definitely not ‘an insidious attempt’ to get a partial solution to ‘what is called the Catholic Question’. On the contrary, Canning concentrated on events in 1678 under Charles II, when the real intention had been to exclude the future James II, then Duke of York and the Catholic heir presumptive to the throne – not Catholic peers. He also cited the Popish Plot and the false testimony of Titus Oates which had led to the execution of the Catholic Lord Stafford, subsequently declared innocent.30

Nearer home, he referred to the events of the recent Coronation in which Catholic peers, notably the Duke of Norfolk, the Premier Peer, and Lord Clifford, with his long-reaching ancestry, had featured conspicuously as part of the magnificent pageantry. Were they now to be dismissed, ‘as if called forth and furnished for the occasion... their importance faded with the importance of the hour?’

Canning’s speech was met by a forceful one from the opposing point of view delivered by Robert Peel. For Peel in private, this was support for Catholic Emancipation in ‘a new and, I think, extraordinary and objectionable shape’, as he described it to Saurin. In the House of Commons, however, he came forward with what he chose to call ‘cold reasoning and sober views of the question’. He stressed the impossibility of separating the two Houses plausibly – admission of Catholics to the Commons having been firmly denied by Parliament at the time of William Plunket’s Bill the previous year. ‘Upon no constitutional ground, upon no ground of policy, could he see the propriety of such a measure.’ And he dealt with the whole awkward subject of the Popish Plot by quoting Dryden in his political satire of 1681, Absalom and Achitophel:

Some truth there was, but dashed and brewed with lies,

To please the fools and puzzle all the wise;

Succeeding times will equal folly call,

Believing nothing or believing all.

Peel’s conclusion was that ‘the measure before them would not be final; and he doubted very much whether it would be conciliatory’. In short, the whole issue of ‘securities’ (State controls) should be reconsidered first.

Canning’s attempt passed the Commons on the third reading by five votes, only to be flung out by the Lords once more. It represented the growing emphasis on the safety or otherwise of Ireland itself as a leading element in the fight for Emancipation. It was similar to the attitude of the new Viceroy, Richard Wellesley, with nothing innately idealistic about it, but a great deal to do with the best interests of England.

The issue of security in Ireland was after all something which could never be ignored by a Protestant administration, likened in some respects to a garrison. There was, as there had always been, another side to Catholic Ireland, that side characterized by travellers (and many English) as barbarous, but in fact owing a great deal to the appalling social conditions of the peasantry. This genuine potential for some kind of rebellion – it was only twenty-odd years since the desperate dash for freedom of Robert Emmet – coexisted with the romantic nationalist literature of Thomas Moore and Sydney Morgan. King George had declared himself on arrival to be eager to serve Ireland. That left open the question of how England itself would feel best served in this situation.