CHAPTER TWELVE

O’Connell’s Boldest Step

‘The setting-up for Clare was the most daring, and the boldest step which this man ever took, or ever will take. Were he to live a century, he could do nothing which would show so much of daring and intrepid talent.’

Richard Lalor Sheil on Daniel O’Connell, Sketches of the Irish Bar

THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON held a dinner for his new Cabinet at his splendid London residence, Apsley House, on 22 January 1828. Lord Ellenborough, who was present as Lord Privy Seal, described the mood of the evening as guarded at best: ‘the courtesy was that of men who had just fought a duel’. Given the fractured state of the government during the past year, there had been no decisive victors in the various political duels, unless it be the Duke himself, the great general now taking charge of his country – or countries. At least he was flourishing under the strain: his wife Kitty confided to her sister: ‘Thank God the Duke’s strength seems to increase, his powers to rise as they are called for, and his popularity with those who were of the party adverse to him in politics is wonderful.’1

The Duke was now nearly sixty. Physically, his formidable appearance, which the public and the caricaturists loved equally if for different reasons, was undiminished. His public speaking style, which deteriorated further as his deafness increased, remained a weak point: O’Connell would refer with a malign flourish (but no fear of contradiction) to a ‘stuttering, confused, unintelligible speaker’.2 But a perceived lack of formal oratorical skill by his enemies had never held the Great Duke back from giving sharp practical orders which expected and received obedience: and that was surely the point of government, as he saw it.

In the current government the general desire now was for some kind of cohesion, in contrast to the Goderich administration. In spite of this, the Whig Lord Lansdowne was known to be unwilling to serve under an Anti-Catholic Prime Minister, and that set the tone for other Whig lords to refuse. Charles Wetherell, MP for Bristol, was made Attorney-General; he had been an MP for various constituencies (including Oxford City) since 1812, and was previously Solicitor-General. This was a man whose eccentric appearance, like ‘some untidy friar’, belied his keen legal brain and taste for invective enlivened by ‘happy sarcasms’.3 Wetherell might look like a friar but he was in fact a ferocious opponent of friars’ rights in the shape of Emancipation. Robert Peel returned as Home Secretary, as well as Leader of the House of Commons. Lord Lyndhurst remained as Lord Chancellor.

In the end it was reckoned that there were seven Pro-Catholics including William Huskisson, noted for his strong liberal views, and Palmerston. Against this there were six Anti-Catholics, headed by Wellington and Peel, and including Lyndhurst. But there was no declared policy on Emancipation. Wellington’s memorandum on the subject read: ‘Every member of the government is at liberty to take such part as he pleases respecting the Roman Catholic Question, whether in Parliament or elsewhere; but he acts upon this question in his individual capacity.’4

A new government meant that the transfer of the Viceroyalty of Ireland, organized by Canning during the brief summer of his premiership, now took a practical form. Canning had indicated to Wellesley that his time was over, and the Marquess of Anglesey was appointed, although Wellesley did succeed in remaining for the rest of the year. He pointed out that it was ‘of the highest importance both to my interests and honour to remain here till January next... To remove me before that period of time... would bear all the appearance of a recall and would expose me to great inconvenience.’5

Returning to England, Wellesley was disappointed not to be offered a position in the Cabinet by his brother. On this fraternal failure to oblige, his American wife Marianne allowed herself to repeat a sardonic comment once made about the family: ‘God made “Men, Women and Wellesleys.” ’ She also felt that the Irish Catholics had not been sufficiently appreciative of his efforts: they abused him because he had not lent himself blindly to their party views. She had some justice on her side: the Viceroyalty of Wellesley had indeed marked a dilution in the atmosphere of Protestant Ascendancy, with Catholics freely entertained at the Viceregal dwelling (even before the appearance of a Catholic Vicereine in Marianne).

The new Viceroy was to be ‘One-Leg’, the Marquess of Anglesey, who had come into Canning’s Cabinet the previous May as an Anti-Catholic. Perhaps George IV should have suspected a potentially dangerous transformation in his emissary when he bade him farewell on 21 February. ‘God bless you, Anglesey,’ said the King. ‘I know you are a true Protestant.’ ‘Sir,’ responded the new Viceroy, ‘I will not be considered Protestant or Catholic; I go to Ireland determined to act impartially between them and without the least bias either one way or the other.’6

In February Lord John Russell, rising star of the Whigs, proposed a measure which directly touched on the principle of Catholic Emancipation: a repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts. Russell, who would be described as ‘Lord John Reformer’ by Sydney Smith, was a younger son of the Duke of Bedford, and a member of a celebrated Whig dynasty. Thanks to this privileged birth, Russell was elected as MP for the family seat of Tavistock in 1813 when he was twenty-one. Almost immediately he showed his own mettle. Physically Lord John was not impressive, very short but with a surprisingly big head, so that his tiny size sometimes caused amazement when he stood up. His voice was equally small, which annoyed the parliamentary reporters, and he frequently paused or stammered. On the other hand, he was intellectually brilliant and his aspirations for social changes such as Parliamentary Reform were immense.

Russell now proposed a new Sacramental Test Bill, as it was termed, of which the objective was to repeal the existing Test and Corporation Acts passed in the reign of Charles II.7 This had required all government officials, including mayors, to take the sacrament of Communion according to the rites of the Church of England. In practice an annual Act of Indemnity had often been passed, so that Dissenters could hold office; but it clearly constituted an inferiority at law. Russell argued that liberty of conscience was the best safeguard for the Church of England rather than exclusion, and that in any case religion should not be dragged into purely secular concerns. ‘I am opposed to religious tests of every kind,’ he declared: the oath he would wish to see applied to persons taking seats in Parliament, and attached to all the offices of government or corporations was ‘a simple provision, that they should be called upon only to swear allegiance to the King’.

The new government supported the bill, once a deal was struck by Peel, that loyal Protestant. A declaration was to be included in the bill in which individuals promised never to use office to ‘injure or weaken the Protestant Church’. Peel successfully introduced this in the House of Commons on 18 March, although the Ultra-Tory Lord Winchilsea did attempt vainly to substitute a belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ (which would have eliminated some Dissenters once again).8 After it passed in the Commons by forty-four votes Peel also persuaded the leading archbishops and bishops in the House of Lords to support the bill.

When the Act was passed, Lord Holland was quick to see the relevance to the cause of Emancipation. On 10 April he wrote that it was ‘the greatest victory over the principle of persecution and exclusion yet obtained... Catholic Emancipation when it comes will be a far more important measure, more immediate and more extensive in its effects – but in principle this is the greatest of them all as it explodes the real Tory doctrine that Church & State are indivisible.’ He repeated his conviction to Anglesey, the new Irish Viceroy, a month later: this was just what George III had imagined he could not repeal because of his Coronation Oath.9

Lord John Russell was certainly much cheered by what he called Peel ‘hauling down his colours’ on the question of Dissent. Russell trusted that they could soon make Peel give up on the next proposition, that ‘none but Protestants’ could serve the State, that is, support Catholic rights, having granted them to Dissenters. Others were more dubious about the connection. There were those, equally sincere in their support of the Catholic cause, like William Huskisson and Palmerston, who drew back from this particular issue which they feared would actually slow down progress towards Emancipation; there would be a compromise, satisfying in practical ways to the Anglican establishment, which could then soldier on ignoring the Catholics, who would remain as before totally inferior at law. Protestant Nonconformists might turn against the Catholics once they had won their own case.

More practically encouraging from the point of view of Emancipation, the Act which had banned the meetings of the Catholic Association was not renewed in May by a decision of the Cabinet. It was decided that the Act had been ‘ineffectual’, and in any case things were quieter in Ireland. Sir Francis Burdett also introduced a new Catholic Bill on 8 May which led to a three-day debate in the House of Commons.10

In his speech Burdett stressed the ‘undeviating loyalty and faithful adherence to their country and sovereign’ of the Catholics of Ireland. He took the opportunity to compare this loyalty to that of Scotland, mentioning the rebellions of 1715 and 1745. And he magnanimously offered Prime Minister Wellington the possibility of yet another triumph: the Great Duke would add to his titles that of ‘the pacificator of Ireland, the consolidator of the power of the English empire, the rewarder of those brave Catholics who fought under his banner’ – that theme of gratitude for Irish military support stressed once again – ‘adding another wreath to the laurel of victory’. The vote was won in the Commons by six, Peel for all his new pragmatism being among those who voted against.

In the House of Lords things went, as usual, much less well from the Catholic point of view. While Lord Wellesley, the former Viceroy, declared his increased conviction of the necessity of the measure, his brother the Prime Minister made his continued disagreement absolutely clear in language so courteous that it verged on sarcasm: ‘My lords, I rise under extreme difficulty to address your lordships on this most important subject. I feel particular concern at being under the necessity of following my noble relative, and stating that I differ from him I so dearly love’. And the Great Duke voted Against.

There was, however, during this debate one speech from a close relative of the King from which hope could be derived. The Duke of Sussex was the sixth out of the nine sons of George III (chances of his succession were therefore remote, with the Dukes of Clarence, Kent and Cumberland above him), but he had been consistent in his Whig sympathies. Now he announced that he saw nothing to dread from ‘the diffusion of light and knowledge’. On the contrary, he saw every reason for hope: for why should there be all this apprehension with regard to Rome? He voted for the bill as did another royal prince, his cousin the Duke of Gloucester. Once again, Lord Holland interpreted this favourably in a communication to Anglesey in Ireland. For the first time, he reported, Sussex had shown himself ‘really good in argument and taste’ as well as learning. ‘We are a people strangely fond of Royalty,’ he mused, like many commentators ever since. On the vexed subject of the Coronation Oath, ‘the opinion of every branch of the Royal family is imagined to be of more consequence than [that of] other men’.11

Unfortunately, the presence at the King’s side of another royal, the Duke of Cumberland, was a much less promising portent. Ernest Augustus Duke of Cumberland had arrived in March. He was now aged fifty-seven, nine years younger than the King. Tall and aggressively self-confident, as a young man he once boasted to George III: ‘I am a man who can never go round about to do or get anything.’ He knew that everyone would tell his father the same: Ernest’s way was ‘straightforward’.12

Certainly Ernest’s Anti-Catholicism was straightforward enough. His declared purpose in coming to England from Germany was, in his own emphatic words, ‘to take my seat [in the House of Lords] and give my vote in the Catholic question, especially as unhappily none of my brothers will do it and it is highly necessary that the nation which is not at all Catholic inclined should know that there is one of the family who is truly and honestly Protestant’. The prospect of the Duke of Cumberland taking his seat was in fact something Wellington had dreaded a year earlier, when he advised Knighton, the royal Private Secretary, against it. ‘It is a great object for the King to keep himself quiet and without discussion on this question’ – of Catholic Relief – he wrote; Cumberland’s presence would make that impossible.13

Educated at the University of Göttingen with two of his brothers, Cumberland had chosen a military career and fought in the Hanoverian army against the French, gaining a reputation for courage and military cool – against which had to be put wounds leaving one eye useless and his once-handsome face badly scarred. He was now an awesome, half-comical, half-frightening figure of military bearing, bald but with a luxuriant white moustache and patriarchal white whiskers surrounding his angry face.

Cumberland’s private life was less straightforward. Although the rumours which made him the incestuous father of his sister Sophia’s child were almost certainly not true, they were plausible to many of his contemporaries.^*1^,14 Other unsavoury scandals, involving his twice-widowed wife (and cousin) Frederica of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, and her earlier marriages, combined to make the Duke and Duchess of Cumberland unwelcome in English Society: Queen Charlotte, for example, had refused to receive the Duchess. They had resided in consequence mainly in Berlin. Life abroad did nothing to dim his Ultra-Tory views: if anything it enhanced them.

The influence of Cumberland on his pliable brother certainly contributed to Lord Chancellor Lyndhurst’s verdict in June: ‘the King is the real difficulty’. At a Cabinet dinner held at Apsley House, the Duke of Wellington confessed that ‘he did not see daylight’ on the Catholic Question, although there was no one who desired the settlement of it more than himself.15

At this point, in the summer of 1828, there occurred one of those incidents, apparently of minor importance at the time – ever fascinating in retrospect to historians – which was to have dramatic consequences in the story of Emancipation. As so often in English history, the drama was rooted not in England itself, but in Ireland. In late May it was proposed that William Vesey Fitzgerald, the MP for Co. Clare, should take on the role of President of the Board of Trade, in the Cabinet, in place of William Huskisson. Fitzgerald, now in his forties, had sat in the House of Commons for various constituencies since 1808. He came from a family with prominent interests in Clare, who were generally speaking held to be benign landlords.

In the House of Commons, Fitzgerald was considered to be clever and capable, without being particularly popular. He had already held several government posts, including that of Irish Chancellor of the Exchequer, benefiting from a friendship with Robert Peel forged when the latter was Irish Secretary. (The two men had both been at Christ Church, Oxford, although not at the same time.) Apart from his parliamentary career, Fitzgerald had also occupied various diplomatic posts. It had been suggested earlier he might go to America as Ambassador, a prospect he dismissed as ‘odious’; although in 1824 Vesey Fitzgerald had contemplated accepting an Irish peerage. This would have reconciled him to the odious New World, and at the same time removed him from Co. Clare where his life as an MP was becoming increasingly difficult due to Catholic agitation. In the event he remained an MP.

During the parliamentary rumpus of the spring of 1825, centred on the suppression of the Catholic Association, Vesey Fitzgerald had voted for the bill on the grounds that the Association had thrown ‘the Protestant mind... into a state of panic which it would be difficult to describe’. Yet broadly speaking he supported Emancipation, voted for Catholic Relief in 1827 and presented Catholic Petitions from Co. Clare. Wellington’s decision to offer him the Board of Trade was put down to Peel’s influence.16

There was one small formality to be undergone before Vesey Fitzgerald could step into place. By the rules of the time, there had to be a by-election if a Member of Parliament was appointed to a new office. Thus Vesey Fitzgerald had to offer himself to Co. Clare for re-election.

Afterwards Peel wrote to Sir Walter Scott that he wished his friend had been present at the Clare by-election which duly followed: ‘for no pen but yours could have done justice to that fearful exhibition of sobered and desperate enthusiasm’.17 The first manifestation of these powerful but contradictory qualities at work was at the meeting of the Catholic Association. It was a question of opposing Vesey Fitzgerald and there was an intense debate on the subject. Then O’Gorman Mahon, a young Catholic landlord, was deputed to approach the wealthy Protestant William Nugent Macnamara, who had acted as second in O’Connell’s lethal duel against D’Esterre and had interests in Co. Clare.

O’Connell was convinced that Macnamara would accept. The Corn Exchange, on Burgh Quay by the River Liffey, was the locality established by O’Connell where as many as a thousand people could meet. Conveniently the coal-porters’ stand nearby provided loyal amateur guards, who boasted of being prepared to throw invading troublemakers into the river. It was here in a speech on 23 June, made in his usual flamboyant style, that O’Connell declared that ‘if his friend had not offered himself, he [himself] would certainly have stood’. Whatever happened, Clare should not be without a candidate backed by the Association.

The next day, 24 June, the news was broken that Macnamara had indeed refused to stand. At a large Catholic meeting held on the same day also at the Corn Exchange, various names were suggested to replace Macnamara. But, in the words of the Dublin Evening Post, they were all drowned out by ‘deafening cries of “Mr O’Connell! Mr O’Connell!”’18

The credit for this outpouring was claimed by David Roose, a stockbroker, and P.V. Fitzpatrick, a friend of O’Connell, who met in a Dublin bookshop and agreed that O’Connell should stand; Fitzpatrick then convinced the Liberator. But it has been pointed out that as early as January O’Connell had in fact indicated that he would stand one day, the obvious step on the road to liberty. Now the moment had indisputably come. And Clare itself was a propitious place since the Clare Liberal Club had been established the year before.19

When the great man himself was called upon to speak, he declared in that rich prose to which much of Ireland bowed in emotional obedience that he in his turn was ready to obey ‘the voice of the nation’. In the assessment of O’Connell’s colleague Sheil two years later, ‘the setting-up for Clare was the most daring, and the boldest step which this man ever took, or ever will take. Were he to live a century, he could do nothing which would show so much of daring and intrepid talent.’ Sheil went on to quote Voltaire: it was one of those steps that ‘vulgar men would term rash, but great men would call bold’.20

The keynote of the campaign, which was to be of vital importance in the future, was struck by O’Connell when he announced that ‘ours is a moral not a physical force’. This was a further development of the surprising tranquillity with which the fight against Lord George Beresford had been conducted in Waterford at the General Election of 1826. Thus the people of Clare were adjured to abstain from any kind of violence, which in view of the traditional rough handlings at any election – and not only Irish – remained an astonishing pronouncement for its time.

That was one challenge to unspoken traditional procedures. But the mighty gauntlet which O’Connell now flung in the face of the government concerned his religion, not the behaviour of his putative constituents. O’Connell was a Catholic and as such frequently held to be ineligible for the British Parliament. There was, however, no such specific law enacted. Nor was it true, as O’Connell had at first mistakenly believed, that, if elected, he would be fined £500 a day for non-attendance due to refusal of the Anti-Catholic oath.

O’Connell was quite clear on the subject in his electoral address, disseminated by the newspapers well in advance of his arrival in Clare: ‘You will be told I am not qualified to be elected. The assertion, my friends, is untrue. I am qualified to be elected, and to be your representative. It is true that as a Catholic I cannot, and of course never will, take the oaths at present prescribed to members of Parliament.’21

O’Connell then proceeded to give details of the oath. He would be required to say ‘That the sacrifice of the Mass and the invocation of the Blessed Virgin Mary and other saints, as now practised in the Church of Rome, are impious and idolatrous.’ He commented: ‘Of course, I will never stain my soul with such an oath. I leave that to my honourable opponent, Mr Vesey Fitzgerald. He has often taken that horrible oath. He is ready to take it again, and asks your votes to enable him so to swear. I would be rather torn limb from limb than take it.’ This was the key point. Parliament, the authority which created these oaths, could also reject them. ‘Return me to Parliament,’ commanded O’Connell, ‘and it is probable that such a blasphemous Oath will be abolished for ever.’

O’Connell went further. He suggested that the eyes of all Europe would be on the events in Clare, and if, having been duly elected, he was excluded (due to his unwillingness to take the oath), it would produce ‘such a burst of contemptuous indignation against British bigotry’ in every enlightened country in the world that the voice of all the great and good in England, Scotland and Ireland would join to the universal shout of the nations of the earth and overpower every opposition. No longer would Peel and Wellington be able to close the doors of the constitution against the Catholics of Ireland.

This was stirring stuff. These were also fighting words. In complete contrast was the exemplary behaviour of the Catholic forces in Co. Clare. According to Wellington’s report to the King, no violence, disorder or even insult was committed. Supporting O’Connell were what Peel would later describe to Scott as ‘tens of thousands of disciplined fanatics, abstaining from every excess and every indulgence, and concentrating every passion and feeling on one single object’.22 This was symbolized by the pledge taken by the local Catholic Association to abstain from whiskey for the campaign, just as the butchers had volunteered to deny themselves in Waterford. (Modest wine, porter and cider were provided but these did not count; O’Connell himself stuck to water.) This was not seen as an empty pledge for display only. Those who were unwise enough to flourish the bottle notwithstanding got plunged in the river, and then kept there in the water for hours, with periodically renewed dunkings.

The local Catholic clergy were also now poised to take on a vital role. In Wellington’s words, those of an experienced military campaigner, it was under the direction of their parish priest that the whole of ‘the lower orders of the population’, with the exception of a few Protestants, ‘moved in regular military order... to the election town’. There they remained till it was their turn to vote. At night they ‘bivouacked’ in an open space near the town or ‘cantoned’ in neighbourhood houses on rainy nights and paid for their lodgings.23

The appearance of O’Connell himself with his entourage at 11 a.m. on Monday, 30 June created a sensation. This was in Ennis (the name comes from the Irish inis for island), a busy market town through which flows the River Fergus near the Shannon Estuary in western Ireland. As the county town of Co. Clare, this was the designated voting place. The crowds, who had been waiting for him all night, surged impatiently in the streets until the hour of the nomination. The Times reporter wrote that it was impossible to describe ‘the shouts, the tumultuous and deafening cheers’ with which they were received as they came into the town.

The speech which followed has been estimated by his biographer as ‘without doubt one of the greatest of his life’.24 His adversary’s previous support of Emancipation did not hold him back. Sheil recorded that Fitzgerald frequently muttered an interrogatory ‘Is this fair?’ when O’Connell used what he called ‘some legitimate sophistication’ against him. This included mocking Fitzgerald’s tears at the mention of his dying father’s name: ‘I never shed tears in public,’ said O’Connell. Defensively, Sheil admitted that sensitive persons might find this unduly harsh; but Fitzgerald had made a very powerful speech and the effect had to be got rid of. ‘In such a warfare a man must not pause in his selection of weapons, and Mr O’Connell is not the man to hesitate in the use of the rhetorical sabre.’

Lord Holland put it in another, less flattering way in his correspondence with the Viceroy Anglesey: O’Connell’s ‘first and main object is naturally to maintain the ascendancy he has got – if he can – in good fellowship with the Government and in real promotion of the Cause, but if not, in the teeth of the Govt. and at the risk of the cause’. Campaigning verses were equally simple – they might be political:

Ask your Hearts if Vesey can be true

At the same time to Wellington and you?

Or, more emphatic about O’Connell’s perceived contest with Wellington, the man who had defeated Napoleon:

Who will beat Wellington, thro’ his own merits,

And by the justice of his cause:

O’CONNELL,

Irishmen,

If we beat the MINION of Wellington, in Clare,

the Great Captain is himself defeated, and by whom?

By the

Great Catholic Leader

DANIEL O’CONNELL

The latter was posted as a placard all over Clare. It went on:

We tread the Land that bore us,

Our Green Flag flutters o’er us;

The FRIEND we’ve tried is by our side,

And the FOE we hate before us.

Anglesey’s ADC reported to him that people were saying locally: ‘O’Connell be with you,’ the name of the Liberator replacing that of God. Most eloquent of all was the banner which read quite shortly: ‘Vote for your Religion.’25

Various slashes of O’Connell’s rhetorical sabre included a stab at Fitzgerald’s friendship with Peel, which led to Fitzgerald smiling when O’Connell denounced him. O’Connell then began to quote Hamlet on his uncle: ‘A man may smile...’ before letting his voice trail away. ‘I will not use the word,’ said O’Connell, implying but not pronouncing the rest of the quotation, which ended ‘be a villain’. But he did manage to describe Fitzgerald as a smiling, gay deceiver. The finale of his speech, adapting Shakespeare again, was on a higher level: ‘Romans, countrymen and lovers, I come here not on my own account but yours – I am not fighting my own but the Catholic cause. Let them make this their cry: “O’Connell, the Catholic cause and Old Ireland.” ’26

At the voting itself, the priests had a significant role to play, given that there was no such thing as a secret ballot at an election at this period: all preferences were made public in a way which could be threatening for the person concerned if he went against powerful local interests.^*2 Tenants were naturally wary of offending their landlords. In this case there were scenes where priests ostentatiously embraced those who had voted the right way, and made a penitential – and possibly ominous – sign of the cross over those who had voted for ‘the wrong side’. An empty coffin was carried through the streets, purporting to contain the body of a man who had died suddenly in consequence of having voted against Daniel O’Connell.27

Sheil gave a rich description of the Catholic priesthood in action – so very different, beginning with their appearance, from the Protestant parsons. Typically, the parson was marked by ‘the mannerism of Ascendancy’, wearing a broad-rimmed fire-shovel hat of smoothest and blackest material, stockings of glossy silk on ‘finely swelling’ leg, with his ruddy cheek and bright, authoritative eye above his well-fitted jerkin. Where Catholic priests were concerned, Sheil focused on Father Murphy of Corofin, tall, slender and emaciated in his long robes, with ‘a peculiarly sacerdotal aspect’. He had long, skinny white hands, very thin, a long, sunken, cadaverous face but one that was illuminated by eyes blazing with all the fire of genius. Father Murphy first told his congregation that there would be no politics at Mass; then when Mass was over, he threw off his robes and called on the people in Irish to vote for O’Connell ‘in the name of their country and their religion’. Inflamed by his emotion, he actually shook his fist as he grasped the altar with the other hand. After which Father Murphy marched them into Ennis, and to a man the tenantry of the Protestant Sir Edward O’Brien, who officially proposed Fitzgerald, voted for O’Connell.

The ‘priesthood’ was indeed widely seen by those who shuddered away from Catholic direct action as responsible for running – or ruining – the election; the fact that this was basically an Ascendancy point of view did not necessarily mean that it was wrong. All the Catholic priests, except two with specific Ascendancy connections, pledged their vote for ‘the man of the people’.

Inevitably social distinctions played their part in this stratified society. The Irish novelist John Banim featured a scene in The Anglo-Irish of the Nineteenth Century, published in 1828, in which one character, Tom Steele, challenged another, William Smith O’Brien, to a duel, after the latter said that not a single gentleman supported O’Connell: this implied that he, Steele, was not a gentleman. The Catholic Forty-shilling Freeholders, granted the vote in 1793, who were suspected for good reason of being heavily in favour of O’Connell, were the targets of this kind of sneer. Sir Edward O’Brien pulled no punches when instructing his tenants to back his candidate: Ireland, he told them, would not be a fit place for a gentleman to live in if the results of the election demonstrated that property had lost its influence.28

As against this automatic display of Ascendancy condescension, the Catholic Association, in the provision of large sums of money through the Catholic Rent, which was collected monthly, demonstrated very different values. Catholic priests, too, were collecting money for the campaign at their churches, with a ready-made flock of potential donors in the members of their parish. The lesson here was that organization, including financial organization, provided a much surer path to victory than rowdiness shading on rebellion.

Voting, according to custom, took five days, beginning on Tuesday, 1 July. Over this period, the votes cast gradually tilted towards a clear winner, having favoured one man from the first (as with the ballot, there was no secrecy about the process). Many of the tenants of the Ascendancy were to be seen marching to vote, as though to battle, with a piper at their head. It was in this way that, at 11 a.m. on Saturday, 5 July 1828 in the courthouse of the town of Ennis, the sheriff made the dramatic announcement. The winner of the Co. Clare by-election by 22,027 to 982 votes was: Daniel O’Connell, a Roman Catholic.

It was a development that the Anglo-Irish Palmerston described in his journal as ‘somewhat sublime’.^*3^,29 The banquet which followed at nine o’clock that night with the new MP in the place of honour certainly justified the description.30 There was beef, pork, mutton, turkey, tongues and fowl, and 100 tumblers of punch and sliced lemon. For a while there was no sound but that of ‘hungry masticators’. Then the toasts began. Sheil’s own speech was unashamedly belligerent: ‘Protestants, awake to a sense of your condition. Look around you... 7 million of Irish people are completely arrayed and organised.’ And he ended with a clear threat: ‘Annihilate us by concession; extinguish us with peace; disarray us by equality; instead of angry slaves make us contented citizens: if you do not, tremble for the result.’

O’Connell would be fifty-three in August. Physically he remained impressive. Prince Pückler-Muskau, who visited him at the end of September in Derrynane, found ‘a tall, handsome man of cheerful and agreeable aspect’ and, he added, with a touch of European prejudice, looking more like one of Napoleon’s generals than a Dublin lawyer. John Banim gave a similar portrait of O’Connell in his novel which emphasized his good cheer: a ‘tall, lusty gentleman, with the healthy, good-humoured face, he that walks so firm and stout’.31

In Ireland O’Connell’s most daring and boldest step had resulted in triumph. The crucial question was now raised as to whether this firm and stout progress would take him into the British House of Commons, with the prospect of taking the Anti-Catholic Oath of Allegiance hovering over the entrance like a huge black cloud.