CHAPTER NINE

A Protestant King

‘Their Lordships must remember, that ours is a Protestant King, who knows no mental reservation, and whose situation is different from that of any person in the country.’

The Duke of York, House of Lords, 25 April 1825

ON 16 DECEMBER 1824 Daniel O’Connell addressed the Catholic Association in a speech which caused an immediate sensation. This was because he invoked the name of Simón Bolívar, the great Venezuelan leader hailed as El Libertador, from which O’Connell would derive his own honorific, the Liberator. Essentially Bolívar had secured liberty for South America from the Spanish by military force, becoming President of Gran Colombia, which included much of modern Colombia, Ecuador, Panama and Venezuela, in February 1819. Recently Bolívar had defeated the Spanish cavalry in Peru at the Battle of Junín.

The recent surge of independence in South America had caught O’Connell’s imagination because of the obvious parallels with Ireland.1 ‘He hoped that Ireland would be restored to her rights,’ said O’Connell, ‘but if that day should arrive – if she were driven mad by persecution, he wished that a new Bolívar may be found – may arise – that the spirit of the Greeks and of the South Americans may animate the people of Ireland.’ One of his nephews had been granted a commission in an Irish legion being raised to fight with Bolívar in Venezuela; this was followed by a commission for O’Connell’s own fourteen-year-old son Morgan. (In the event the whole project of the Irish Legion proved unfortunate, but that lay in the future.) At the time, his adulatory letter for Bolívar, to be conveyed by the boy, spoke of ‘that sacred cause which your talents, valour and virtue have gloriously sustained – I mean the cause of Liberty and national independence’. In response O’Connell was toasted by Bolívar as ‘the most enlightened, the most independent, and the most patriotic man, not only in Great Britain but in all Europe’.

Bolívar represented the zeitgeist and its emphasis on national liberty in the way that O’Connell hoped to do himself: Bolívar was, after all, not only a leader, but a triumphant one. It was through his actions that the former Spanish colonies were recognized as independent, including by Britain; while for the United States the celebrated Monroe Doctrine, as it would come to be known, stated that ‘the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers’.

It was against this background that O’Connell’s speech could be interpreted in two radically different ways. For the Irish who listened to him, it was inspirational in the cause of freedom; for the English government it constituted a deliberate threat of force. O’Connell’s old adversary, Robert Peel, who had been appointed Home Secretary in 1822, three years after he left Ireland, was of the latter view.

Peel took a continuing interest in Ireland, reading the Irish newspapers, and at one point assured Richard Wellesley that he had ‘the strongest attachment to Ireland and the sincerest desire to cooperate with you in the promotion of her welfare’.2 This attachment did not, however, include the belief that Catholic Emancipation would help with that welfare, let alone gain the approval of its prominent advocates. Four days after making the speech, O’Connell was visited at home by an alderman and a police constable, to be told that he must appear at the next sessions in order to answer a charge of speaking seditious words at a meeting of the Catholic Association.

The prosecution of O’Connell failed because the newspaper reporters found themselves unable to substantiate the claims of the prosecution. The only obvious result was a renewed, if unsought, opportunity for O’Connell to demonstrate his huge popularity with the public as he left the courthouse. The question of both South and North America, and O’Connell’s emotional allegiance to them, remained to vex Protestants in England. Three years later, Dean Henry Phillpotts, the strongly Anti-Catholic future Bishop of Exeter, complained to the Duke of Wellington that O’Connell had actually praised America as a country without a Church establishment.3

The next step was a government bill making all societies in Ireland unlawful, which of course included the Catholic Association. This was announced in the King’s speech on 3 February 1825 as follows: in view of the general prosperity in which Ireland was sharing, it was all the more to be regretted that associations should exist in Ireland which had adopted proceedings irreconcilable with the spirit of the constitution, and calculated, ‘by exciting alarm, and by exasperating animosities, to en-danger the peace of Society and to retard the course of national improvement’. The Bill was then introduced into the House of Commons by Henry Goulburn, the Chief Secretary for Ireland. The Association immediately decided to send a deputation to Westminster to plead against it – a deputation which included an initially reluctant O’Connell. The reason for this reluctance was, however, more human than high-minded: O’Connell was unhappy at interrupting his lucrative career at the Irish Bar at the time of the spring circuit.

The Irish deputation’s journey through England was not without its humorous moments, as recounted by Sheil, the Irish Catholic lawyer who had helped found the Catholic Association with O’Connell.4 At Coventry the mistress of the inn asked who they were. Ironically, on being told her guests were Irish, she replied: ‘Parliamentary folks, I suppose.’ With a slight mental reservation, Sheil nodded assent.

Throughout the journey it was O’Connell as ever who attracted the public eye. He sat on the box of the barouche enveloped in a huge Irish mantle: ‘his tall and ample figure... and his open and manly physiognomy, rendered him a very conspicuous object’. At every stop O’Connell would call for a newspaper ‘with an earnest and sonorous tone’ – every cadence and gesture bearing ‘unequivocal intimations of his country’, in other words an Irish accent.

An attempt to visit Bishop Milner in Wolverhampton en route was not, however, a success. First, in an indication of English provincial attitudes, the young woman who directed them to his house reproached them sharply for using the term ‘the Catholic Bishop’ in their enquiry as to his whereabouts. ‘If you had asked me for the Popish priest instead of the Catholic Bishop,’ she said, ‘I should have told you that he lived yonder.’ Then the Bishop, once the scourge of the Vetoists, hardly seemed to know who they were, only reacting briefly with vigour to the name of his old Vetoist foe Butler. Milner, who died the next year in his mid-seventies, was clearly in decline.

The journey from Holyhead to London averaged about six days at that time. (Jonathan Swift once suggested that the reason the Irish Bishops were so villainous was because highwaymen managed to substitute themselves for bishops en route.)5 Throughout, Sheil felt a sense of Ireland’s material inferiority and the consequent necessity for his country to move from poverty and sorrow towards ‘the splendid spectacle’ of England’s civilization. He was awestruck by the numerous ponderous vehicles on the roads, the rapid and continuous sweep of the carriages, the splendid villas which the poet Cowper had compared to ‘the beads upon the neck of an Asiatic queen’. Sheil was also impressed by the signs of England’s increasing industrialization: ‘a thousand Etnas vomiting their eternal fires’ in this volcanic region of manufacturers; while London itself was sited in an everlasting cloud of ‘bituminous vapours’.

The deputation was in fact travelling through a country where the religious demographic was gradually changing, due to this very industrialization. The need for labour, combined with the sheer poverty of Ireland, inspired that despairing urge for emigration in search of a better life which is universal to history. St Patrick’s Day began to be celebrated in Manchester. By 1821 there was said to be an Irish Catholic population in Liverpool of 12,000, which would rise to 60,000 in the next ten years. In 1825 the Bishop of Chester estimated that there were now about half a million Catholics in England, risen from 67,000 in 1750, while in Glasgow the figure had leaped from 300 to 25,000, almost entirely imported from Ireland.6 None of this predisposed that young woman in Wolverhampton and her kind in favour of the Papists. Such casual but deep-rooted prejudices – seen in the blood and flames of the Gordon Riots – were of course spurred on by the increase in Irish immigrants, and the fact that they undercut English labour.

At the same time there were Catholic advances in society, such as the establishment of the Jesuit College, Stonyhurst.7 Its history illustrated in microcosm the various phases of the English Catholic community. The origins of the College were in St Omer at the end of the sixteenth century, founded by Father Robert Persons SJ, under the patronage of Philip II of Spain, when Catholic education was totally forbidden in England. In the eighteenth century the school had to move first to Bruges, and then Liège, and was finally set up in Lancashire in 1794, part of the exodus caused by the French Revolution.

Ancient Catholic names were involved: the land was first leased then donated by Thomas Weld of Lulworth, who had inherited it from his cousin Mary Duchess of Norfolk and was himself a former pupil from the days when the school was in St Omer and Bruges. Cardinal Consalvi, the fêted star of the 1814 London congress, made helpful interventions in Rome. The position of the Society of Jesus in England was of course complicated (technically there were no English Jesuits in England until the restoration of the Society in 1802). However, by the next century Stonyhurst would be a flourishing Catholic college, with the Boer War Memorial recording the great number of old Stonyhurst boys who in the same campaign ‘left for all time an example of Catholic loyalty and service’. In the 1820s there was prejudice, but there was also progress.

The deputation of the Catholic Association was admitted to watch the proceedings in the House of Commons as permission was sought for it to plead its cause in front of the House. The Irishmen were directed by the Speaker to sit under the Gallery as spectators; whereupon every eye, according to Sheil, was fixed on O’Connell. Beneath the ‘icy surface’ of the House of Commons he saw the ‘constant eddying’ as the drama unfolded. The delegation failed in one sense: in the event it was not allowed to plead its cause, the motion to this effect being voted down. But the enterprise did bring the charismatic O’Connell back to London and enabled him to flourish in an atmosphere of prodigious social success among the grand Whigs. (At least this might atone in some measure for his loss of earnings.) His letters home to his wife Mary poke rueful fun at his own enjoyment at being lionized: ‘You like to be thought the wife of a great man.’8

On one occasion, he told her, there were actually four dukes present, with the Duke of Norfolk as host, and the Dukes of Sussex, Devonshire and Leinster as guests; also four earls and six other peers plus a couple of baronets. As for the magnificent house: ‘I had no notion of such splendour’, it being incidentally the house where George III was born. There was a series of magnificent apartments, rich with crimson and fretted with gold in this seemingly endless mansion. Massive lamps hanging from embossed and gilded ceilings gave only shadowy illumination, although the great chamber was glowing with light.

On 7 March, wrote O’Connell, ‘we had only one duke – of Norfolk – only two earls, Grey and Bessborough, but then we had a Marquess of Lansdowne’, at which O’Connell pulled himself up short: ‘Only think that earls are now become so familiar to me that I left out Earls Fitzwilliam and Sefton... We had members of the Commons like garnish to a dish to complete the table.’9

O’Connell ended one description of a glorious dinner, bedecked, naturally, with dukes: ‘You cannot think how everybody says that it is I who am carrying Emancipation, that it will be carried this session I look on as nearly certain.’ The idea of a huge public dinner for Catholics was abandoned as being unduly provocative; so a general meeting was called instead at the Freemasons’ Hall.10 One of the speakers was Lord Stourton, an embodiment in himself of recent Catholic upper-class history: the boy who had escaped from Douai at the time of the French Revolution had subsequently married Catherine Weld, daughter of Thomas Weld, the benefactor of Stonyhurst. The Protestant Earl Fitzwilliam, a peer with huge Irish estates who had been briefly Viceroy of Ireland before the Union, then declared that he wanted to live long enough to see the Emancipation of the Irish people. Fitzwilliam’s liberal sympathies were indicated by the fact he had recently been dismissed as Lord Lieutenant of the West Riding of Yorkshire for condemning the Peterloo Massacre.

The ‘stout, red-faced’ Duke of Norfolk was in the chair: this was Bernard, the 12th Duke, continuing to assert the discreet mastery over the English Catholic world to which both his inherited position and his personal strong faith entitled him. He chaired, for example, the other Catholic Association in England, untouched by the law. This Association was able to convene with such ease and respectability that a forthcoming meeting at the Crown and Anchor Tavern in the Strand was advertised on the front page of The Times. The notice included the announcement that the ‘Gentlemen of the Irish Association’ would be present.11

Sheil also gave Norfolk much credit for effecting unity between English and Irish Catholics: hitherto the Irish had tried to make up with a certain ‘bombastic’ display of public confidence for the actual insecurity they felt in the face of these entrenched aristocrats. It was in this atmosphere of optimism – despite the fact that the Catholic Association in Ireland had now been suppressed – that the latest Bill for Catholic Relief was introduced into the House of Commons on 23 March 1825.

It was the work of Sir Francis Burdett, Baronet, a long-standing MP and a veteran of protest. Burdett, now in his mid-fifties, had begun early with his expulsion from Westminster School, and as a young man experienced the French Revolution first-hand during his Continental wanderings; thereafter his life was one of continued excitement, as well as engagement in the radical issues of the day. As he said of himself in 1798: ‘The best part of my character is a strong feeling of indignation at injustice and oppression and a lively sympathy with the sufferings of my fellows.’12 A streak of melancholia in his nature did not make his sympathy any less. His distinguished appearance – he had an aquiline nose to rival that of the Duke of Wellington and similarly delight cartoonists – coupled with a fine, clear speaking voice, made him a popular performer in any cause.

Burdett, who as a young man had had a notorious love affair with Lady Oxford, married the heiress Sophia Coutts in 1793.^*1 In the House of Commons in 1796 he opposed the war with France. Later he had a spell of confinement in the Tower of London over a breach of Parliamentary Privilege, and another in the Marshalsea Prison, together with a heavy fine, following his own condemnation of the Peterloo Massacre. His appearance was that of a country gentleman fond of field sports, summer and winter in a broad-brimmed hat, blue brass-buttoned coat and breeches with top boots; the expression on his delicately chiselled face – the eyes with ‘no flash or splendour’ – was unchanging.13 Burdett’s language on the other hand was always colourful as well as strong: on the Peterloo occasion not only had he chosen to remind the King of the revolution of 1688, but made a lethal comparison to the vicious Roman emperors of history with the phrase ‘bloody Neroes’.

Parliamentary Reform was for Burdett the key to the regeneration of society: he had in mind honest country gentlemen who would displace the corrupt borough-mongers and restore ancient liberties. Thomas Moore would later refer to Burdett’s approach as an ‘antiquarian justification for reform’.14 Obviously Catholic Emancipation, being about the liberty of the individual, and a theoretically persecuted individual at that, constituted a natural cause for such a campaigner. Burdett’s interest was deepened by touring Ireland itself, and a friendship with the Irish revolutionary poet Arthur O’Connor.

The new Bill was framed by the co-operation of O’Connell and William Plunket, as well as Burdett. It was buttressed by two ‘wings’ in the form of sets of ‘securities’ which were intended specifically to calm the fears of Protestants. One of these was the elimination of the Forty-shilling Freeholders. Curiously enough, the so-called Forty-shilling Freeholders would have constituted a real danger to Protestant interests. This was because the franchise had become widely spread among the Irish Catholic peasantry, granted by Acts of the Irish Parliament before the Union, while the coming of the Union itself had not altered it. The Irish system of tenure, different from that of England, meant that around 200,000 poor Catholic voters were involved; the Ascendancy was intended to be placated by their elimination. The second ‘wing’ consisted of provision for the payment of the Roman Catholic clergy from public funds, with the obvious opportunity for the government to influence appointments and conduct.

The involvement of O’Connell in the process of devising the Bill was a fact that Peel would mention with contempt and anger in the House of Commons as he denounced it.15 He had read about O’Connell’s contribution in the press, where it had not been denied, and yet here was a man who had been the leader of an association now suppressed. O’Connell came back to England for the second reading, attending the debates in the Commons. On this occasion the Bill passed in the Commons by 268 votes to 241, with George Canning, unlike Peel, speaking in favour of it. Leaning on a crutch to ameliorate the fearful pain of the gout which was increasingly debilitating him, Canning spoke shortly but powerfully – ‘as becomes an elderly gentleman with a stick’, as he put it – and in his own estimation, swung many loose votes in favour of the Bill.

O’Connell decided to swallow his pride. He had already accepted the ‘wings’ of the Bill. He now intended to make a more personal type of compromise. O’Connell apologized to Robert Peel for the events of the duel ten years earlier.16 Peel did not respond, but news of the apology was made gradually public. O’Connell got a message to Peel’s second that he blamed himself for the whole incident. While O’Connell’s enemies accused him of ‘crouching’ before Peel, out of self-interest, the correct interpretation was rather more favourable to O’Connell the politician: this ability to adapt in a minor way for the prospect of major good was an aspect of his character which the flamboyance of his public image sometimes concealed.

On 18 April Brougham had presented a Petition in Parliament from Great and Little Bolton in Lancaster, in favour of the Bill.17 ‘He spoke not of the Roman Catholics merely. He was of the opinion that the pure doctrine of religious toleration ought to be extended to all sects, as well as to Roman Catholics. Why did he wish this? Because he felt that a man was no more answerable to the tenets which he espoused in religion, than he was for any peculiarity in his physical or mental constitution over which he had no control.’ Additionally Brougham pointed out that tests were useless and simply encouraged people to become hypocrites by masking their true feelings in order to pass them.

Surely all men of goodwill would be convinced by such good sense? It was not to be. In contrast to this rational disquisition on the practical need for toleration in the Commons, an astonishing outburst of bigotry followed a week later in the House of Lords. And it was the voice not of a government minister, among whom there were varying opinions – notably Canning Pro and Peel Anti – but the voice of the heir to the throne.

On 25 April the Duke of York presented a Petition of the Dean and Canons of Windsor praying that no further concessions be made to the Roman Catholics. Even the nature of the Petitioners, representing senior clergymen of the Protestant Church, indicated the heartland of opposition to Emancipation, which existed in what would now be called the Establishment. The Anglican bishops in the House of Lords had regularly voted against Emancipation, with very rare exceptions.

The Duke of York rose to his feet. His audience saw a portly but well set up and dignified man of sixty-two (he was almost exactly a year younger than the King), with the characteristic slightly bulging blue eyes of his family. Here was a Royal Duke, known to be generous and good-hearted towards others, Catholics not excluded: he had in fact shown kindness to Franciscan nuns from Bruges in the past when they settled at Taunton.18 For two-thirds of his life he had been the next heir to the throne after his brother, the exception being the brief lifetime of his niece Princess Charlotte. Since George III’s death the Duke of York was the actual heir to the throne.^*2

The life of the Duke of York up to this point had included its fair share of tumultuous episodes. His own marriage to a German princess had failed, and without leaving any children. Destined from early boyhood for a life in the army, he had been awarded a rising series of military appointments culminating in Commander-in-Chief; although the nature of his military competence in the Dutch War is commemorated, fairly or unfairly, in the famous nursery rhyme about the Grand Old Duke of York who had 10,000 men but did nothing much but march them up and down the hill. More creditably, he had been involved with the vital reorganization of the British Army during the Napoleonic Wars and the foundation of Sandhurst Military College. Less salubrious was a charge of corruption as a result of his mistress, Mary Anne Clarke, selling army commissions, which resulted in the Duke resigning his position as Commander-in-Chief in 1809, although he was later exonerated and reappointed.

Good-natured he might be, and a loyal friend, the Duke’s importance at this point was as ‘the bulwark of the Protestant cause’, in the words of Mrs Arbuthnot. As the government began to show fissures in its attitude to Emancipation, the Duke of York presented himself as a rallying point for those who saw themselves as the true Tories. The Duke announced that he must be permitted to say ‘a few words’ before he moved that the Petition should be read. What followed was a long Anti-Catholic rant, verging at times on the hysterical, which was subsequently printed and circulated with a cover ornamented with gold.19

The Duke began with a clear declaration of his intentions. There were occasions when every man owed it to his country and to his station to declare his sentiments, and there could be no opportunity which required ‘more imperiously’ the frank avowal of these sentiments than the present one. In His Royal Highness’s opinion, their lordships were being called upon ‘to make a total change in the fundamental principle of the Constitution... to strike at the very root of its existence’.

The Duke then made a reference to his father’s madness, to which he ascribed the earlier Emancipation crisis, before returning to the appalling proposal placed before the members of the House of Lords. They were ‘required to surrender every principle of the constitution, and to deliver us up, bound hand and foot, to the mercy and generosity of the Roman Catholics’. What was more, there was no guarantee that the Catholics would actually be satisfied with such fearful concessions. From here he passed to the fate of the Church of England, if Emancipation came about, and horror of horrors! Roman Catholics were admitted to Parliament. They might then legislate for the Church of England, while allowing no input into the legislation for their own Popish Church.

From the Protestant Church, the Duke of York moved, in a passage which would prove extremely significant, to its official head, King George IV. ‘Their lordships must remember that ours is a Protestant King, who knows no mental reservation, and whose situation is different from that of any other person in this country.’ Everyone else, including himself, could be released from their oath by an Act of Parliament, ‘but the King could not’. The King was a third part of the State, without whose voluntary consent no act of the legislature could be valid, and he could not relieve himself of the obligation of his oath.

The Duke concluded by apologizing for the length and at times warmth of his speech, but he felt the whole subject ‘most forcibly’; at which point he made a second and even more pointed reference to his father’s ‘severe illness and ten years of misery’ which had been caused by a previous campaign. Thus the special personal position of the sovereign was heavily underlined by the heir to the throne, in a way that could not be missed – either by the Lords or the sovereign himself, the Protestant King. Certainly that heir left no possible doubt about his own reaction in the event of his succession.

Yet O’Connell, not fully understanding perhaps the kind of calculations that were being made about the future, remained optimistic. The day after this climactic royal intervention, he made a mighty speech to the Midland Catholic Association (the English associations were still legal) and a few days later was ushered to the front of an anti-slavery meeting in London, when he was recognized.20 O’Connell proceeded to give of his best: the newly independent blacks would soon rise to the top of society. And he praised the Liberator of South America yet again in lavish terms – ‘glorious Bolívar’ – for bringing them freedom, while remarking that such statements would have been dangerous in his native Ireland where he himself was ‘a slave’.

It was however about the same time that, according to the Duke of York, his brother declared that he would never give his assent to a Relief Bill. In the event George IV was not asked to do so. The Bill won on its third reading in the Commons, a vote taken at five o’clock in the morning only to be defeated once again in the House of Lords. It is easy to understand why Charles Throckmorton, of the prominent Catholic family, younger brother of Sir George Throckmorton, had a wager on the subject in May: ‘Betted yesterday with Dr. Fletcher one guinea that the [sic] Catholic Emancipation would not take place in my lifetime.’21

Lord Liverpool now announced a very different kind of measure: a general inquiry into the state of Ireland, which was not however to concern itself with what was generally called ‘the Catholic Question’. The Whig reaction to this prohibition was one of indignation mixed with derision. As Lord Holland put it, this was like Shakespeare’s Mark Antony, who gave licence to men’s tongues to discuss his faults but not Cleopatra. In short, how could they discuss the disease but not the remedy? Yet the disagreements within the Tory government on the very subject of Catholic Emancipation meant that there was a real danger in the summer of 1825 of this long-lasting regime coming to an end; in which case it was difficult to see how the Whigs would be kept out of office. So the Catholic Question remained to bedevil English politics – as it had been doing so vigorously since 1801, when at the time of the Union the promise of Emancipation, if it was made, was never kept.

As for Ireland, the question of peaceful religious toleration for the majority of the population could never be far away. On 1 June O’Connell took part in a triumphal procession home in Dublin from Kingstown, named at the time for George IV with what must now have seemed a certain irony.^*3^,22 The Irish activists needed to pick themselves up after the recent banning of the Catholic Association, and look for a new, and of course legal, way of combining to campaign.

On the surface of Dublin society, Wellesley as Viceroy continued his public policy of conciliation by receiving both Orangemen and Catholics, including bishops. O’Connell enjoyed being ‘a Castle man’ because it annoyed the Orangeists. The novelist Lady Morgan commented wryly of one private party at the Castle: thirty years ago, the roof would not have been safe which afforded shelter to both O’Connell and that ‘roaring lion’ Colonel Blacker, Grand Master of the Orange Lodge.23

In the autumn of 1825 the Viceroy gave a very public demonstration of Pro-Catholicism by marrying an actual Catholic, whom he described to Lord Liverpool as ‘worthy of my heart and hand’. (Liverpool commented that he believed the bride had enough sense to govern Wellesley better than he governed himself.) What was more, Wellesley celebrated the union with a Mass held on the following Sunday within the Viceregal Lodge – a symbol of British dominion – performed by a Catholic archbishop.24

The bride was an American: Marianne Patterson. In descriptions of her, contemporary prejudices of all sorts jostled with each other for pride of place. To one she was ‘a Yankee and a Papist, turned into a Vice-Queen’, and to another she was very handsome, with a noble air and ‘not a shade of her mother country’. In fact Marianne, now aged about thirty-five, was the daughter of a Baltimore merchant; her two sisters had already married into the British aristocracy, being respectively Duchess of Leeds and Baroness Stafford; her former sister-in-law Betsy was married to Jerome Bonaparte, brother of the late Emperor. Sheil’s estimate was as good as any, if not untouched by prejudice of sorts: Marianne was extremely dignified, nothing of the bourgeoise parvenue about her, even if, as an American, she did not have quite such a pure complexion as an Irish lady. Her composure in difficult circumstances certainly deserved respect. When adjured by her husband not to read the gutter press, she replied with a nice mixture of humility and reproof: ‘My dearest Lord, I will obey you, dearest, and never look at a scandalous newspaper, and if possible never be annoyed by their attacks; but it is easier for one like you, of unquestionable superiority, to despise them, than for me, a woman and a stranger.’25

The Duke of Wellington, the younger but more famous brother in the government in London, was appalled by the outrageous news of the ceremony. Mrs Arbuthnot had never seen him more annoyed; there was perhaps some personal element here, as the Duke had also been linked to the seductive Mrs Patterson. He wrote to Peel: ‘You see that the marriage in Dublin has been celebrated. Allow me to ask you, Is not the appearance of the Roman Catholic Archbishop in pontificalibus [in his formal religious robes] contrary to the law? It is at all events very improper.’ Mrs Arbuthnot was even more explicit: ‘He had the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin to perform the ceremony which I think is a scandal, as his assuming that title [Dublin] is contrary to law.’ She proceeded to list, disdainfully, the old men who had recently got married (Wellesley was sixty-five), including Sir Harry Featherstonhaugh, who at seventy-six had married a kitchen maid of eighteen. Most explicit of all in his disgust was the King. On 11 November he fulminated to Peel: ‘That house is as much my palace as the one I am in and in my palace Mass is not said.’26

There was, however, no doubting the Viceroy’s sincere passion: the following spring the Earl of Mount Charles told the King’s Private Secretary, Sir William Knighton, that he had never seen a man so in love. More soberly the Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool, commented that ‘it was a very strange and awkward event’.27

O’Connell’s future meetings involving the Viceroy, on the other hand, in contrast to this allegedly strange and awkward event, were all carefully arranged ‘for all purposes allowable by law’. They also involved the great majority of the Irish people – but in a deliberately peaceable way that was a political novelty. The New Catholic Association, for example, was specifically founded for purposes of public or private charity.^*4^,28

At the same time, there was a gratifying rise in support for Catholic Associations generally in other parts of the world, notably the new United States. American newspapers with Irish readerships were beginning to reprint material such as parliamentary debates and O’Connell’s speeches on the subject of Emancipation. The United Catholic Miscellany demanded in strong terms for financial aid to be supplied: ‘You will soon be called, fellow countrymen, for your assistance – you cannot – you must not refuse... no Irish man except a grovelling wretch, will refuse his contribution.’29 The Friends of Ireland were constituted at a meeting in New York in July 1825 to support O’Connell’s New Catholic Association, and chapters became widespread, often including as members United Irishmen, those who had taken part in the 1798 rebellion, or at any rate sympathized with it; the New York chapter would rise to 1,000 members.

John England, born in Ireland, was the Bishop of Charleston in the American South and strongly supported Emancipation. In 1823 he wrote to O’Connell as an ‘expatriated bishop’ who was once ‘your fellow-agitator and your ghostly father’. He organized sympathizers in Augusta, Georgia, who sent an address back to Ireland.30 Later George Washington Parke Custis, stepson of the late President, would remind the Friends of Ireland and Religious Liberty in Washington of the aid that Irish-born colonists had given in the Revolutionary War: ‘it was Ireland who cheered you in the dark hour of your trial, Irish hearts, and Irish sinews were with you in your arduous struggle for independence’. Now was the time to come to the aid of ‘poor Erin’. In February 1826 Irishmen in Baltimore issued a high-flown address, extolling their own freedom and suggesting that the voice of free America was already being heard on the dark Atlantic wave: ‘every hedge in Ireland should be vocal’ with the proud example of the land that had achieved independence.

In 1826, the hedges of Ireland would in fact be vocal with rather different sounds than the extolling of America. For this would be the year of a General Election throughout the United Kingdom.