‘Monday last was a glorious day... The hearts of the Longford Protestants were revived, and a brighter day has risen upon them.’
The Brunswick Club, Longford, Westmeath Journal, 1828
THE CANDIDATE WHO had been so humiliatingly defeated by Daniel O’Connell, William Vesey Fitzgerald, took the advice of his friend Robert Peel. He delivered what has been described as ‘an even tempered but occasionally tearful valedictory speech’ (showing once more that propensity for weeping on which O’Connell had commented so derisively).1 There were tears too for O’Connell. These were tears of delirious, madcap joy – while he remained in Ireland, at least.
When O’Connell questioned Prince Pückler-Muskau on his visit to him at Derrynane whether he had been to the north to admire the Giant’s Causeway, his aristocratic guest replied with a charming smile: ‘Oh no, before I visit Ireland’s Giant’s Causeway, I wish to see Ireland’s Giants.’2 But there was only one giant in Ireland at this moment. Pückler-Muskau went on to comment in his letter to his wife: ‘Daniel O’Connell is indeed no common man, though he is a man of the people.’ With his power in Ireland, O’Connell could singlehandedly raise the banner of revolt, yet by legal, openly publicized means, he had created a power which was like that of a King. Although, added the Prince, with a swipe at the indulgent Hanoverians, it was odd to imagine George IV keeping 40,000 loyal Irish subjects from drinking whiskey for three days, as O’Connell had done in Co. Clare.
O’Connell’s progress to Dublin from Clare, via Limerick, arriving on 10 July, was both ecstatic and triumphant. His escort was 60,000-strong. Where his progress towards Ennis had been illumined by the light of hope, this journey had the added element of joyous surprise at the successful turn of events. In one remarkable encounter, a young sergeant among the soldiers who were keeping a close watch on O’Connell’s progress stepped out of line. He declared that he did so regardless of possible consequences, in order to have the satisfaction of shaking the hand of ‘the father of my country’. Reports of this kind about men who were in fact soldiers in the British Army were, in O’Connell’s opinion, likely to exercise an important influence on their Commander-in-Chief, Wellington.3 The Irishman certainly took care to confide publicly in the Dublin Evening Post – for Wellington’s ear – that 300 soldiers had thrown their caps in the air for him since he left Ennis.
O’Connell’s arrival to address the Catholic Association at the familiar Corn Exchange was greeted with ‘general exultation’; the men were standing and the ladies in the gallery waved their emblematic green silk handkerchiefs. Merrily, O’Connell told them to sit back and enjoy something they had never heard before: a speech by a Roman Catholic Member of Parliament. During the speech he emphasized that he had but one demand, and that was for ‘unconditional, unqualified, free and unshackled Emancipation’.4
On that subject, there was a significant communication from Peel to Wellington on 11 August 1828. While Peel declared once again his uniform opposition to Catholic Emancipation – ‘I wish I could say that my views upon it were materially changed’ – he added that despite these views, ‘I cannot deny that the state of Ireland under existing circumstances is most unsatisfactory.’ Peel was beginning to compare the actual danger from ‘union and organization’ of the Roman Catholic body with the ‘prospective and apprehended dangers’ to its constitution and religion. Put crudely, might there not be ‘less evil’ in settling the Catholic Question than leaving it open, with the country in a state of incessant agitation? Peel added that in the former case he would give any such settlement his full support, although he was careful to point out that, in the light of his known views, it would be better if he resigned and did so out of office.5 The soft rustle of the wings of the angel – or demon – of pragmatism was beginning to be heard.
This was a private communication. One day later, on 12 August, in Londonderry there was a public dinner commemorating the raising of the Siege of Derry of 1689 (the first real victory for the cause of William III in Ireland over the Catholics).*1 Peel’s brother-in-law, George Dawson, made a speech which shocked both the Irish and the English world and appalled many members of the Protestant Ascendancy. Greville wrote that he never remembered any occurrence which excited greater surprise. At the time, the speech, made on such a pre-eminently Protestant occasion, was greeted first with astonishment and then with a rising chorus of angry hisses. Greville also recorded the general impression that the speech was made with the Duke of Wellington’s knowledge and concurrence, although he personally did not believe it.6
‘Derry’ Dawson came of a line of northern Irish MPs, having sat in Parliament for Londonderry himself since 1815. He was financially independent, having inherited £4,500 a year in rents from his father (over £300,000 a year today). Having resigned from his junior position in the government along with Peel the previous year, he had been reinstated when Wellington took office as Financial Secretary to the Treasury. Hitherto Dawson’s ‘violent Orangeist’ credentials had been so marked as to cause one observer to comment that the colour orange was not strong enough to describe him: it should be purple instead. Even a fellow Protestant had found him ‘too acrimonious’ towards the Catholic clergy, before adding snidely: ‘though not beyond the truth’.7 The Catholic Association, for example, was described by Dawson as ‘wild, irresponsible and seditious’. Naturally he had voted regularly down the years against any form of Catholic Relief. Now Dawson argued publicly that the Catholics had a case. He expressed sympathy with their past sufferings, and he, the brother-in-law of Robert Peel, referred to the need for further concessions.
The Tory press howled with rage. O’Connell said publicly that nothing had ever pleased him more than the conduct of Mr Dawson, whose speech had done a great deal of good.8 The volte-face was so striking that there was even a complicated theory that Peel and Wellington had deliberately put Dawson up to it in order to provoke Protestant fury, and thus justify once again defeating the cause of Emancipation. The reverse was the case. As Peel’s private letter to Wellington of 11 August demonstrates, the Abominable (Catholic) Question was now being asked once again in certain important circles, but in a very different tone of voice. The discussions were also confidential. Under the circumstances, it was thought prudent to leave Dawson in his lesser government position so as not to call further attention to the episode.
Inevitably, the news of Dawson’s untoward speech and the Protestant explosion which followed it reached the royal ears. The result was predictable. King George IV was furious, or, as Wellington put it, ‘What was passing did not fail to have its effect upon the King’s mind.’ In any case, George IV’s health was causing increasing concern, as the dropsy progressed and his painful gouty right hand was now ‘as large as two hands’; Wellington thought he couldn’t hold a pen if his kingdom depended on it.9 As with his father, the two issues of health and Emancipation were beginning to mingle with George IV in a lethal combination.
Wellington, angry with Dawson but from the different angle of his delicate negotiations, reacted with his own explosion: ‘Surely a man who does such things ought to be put in a straight waistcoat.’ O’Connell would later refer to Dawson as the ‘pilot balloon’. This was probably an accurate description if the word ‘pilot’ is omitted; in the sense that Dawson, as an Ultra-Tory but an Irishman, was expressing the growing feeling that there could be worse things than highly limited, security-bound Emancipation. But in August 1828 Wellington was not yet ready for anything as visible as a balloon (or Dawson). The Duke of Cumberland, from Hanover, was clear on the subject: ‘that madman Dawson has done the government and the Duke in particular the greatest mischief, for it has shaken very much the opinion of the Protestants, as to the purity of his intentions’.10
It was not as if organized Protestant Anti-Catholic opinion was in any way quietening down in either England or Ireland. While Dawson’s speech was laughed at by the Catholics, it was reviled in the bitterest terms by the new group, the so-called Brunswickers. In late June there had been meetings about a new Protestant Club to convene monthly during the parliamentary session. The name was changed to the loftier Brunswick Constitutional Club by Lord Eldon in July; it was an allusion to the origins of the dynasty currently on the British throne, synonymous with Protestant Ascendancy.
Naturally the Duke of Cumberland was an active patron, just as he was Grand Master of the Orange Lodges; he boasted to the Russian ambassadress Princess Lieven that he had started up the whole affair, and now had an organization ready to defeat the Catholic Association. (Wicked Ernest did not exclude other, less peaceful methods: he suggested to the King that he should put down O’Connell by force.) Although Cumberland now returned to Germany, he assured supporters and menaced opponents with a promise: ‘the moment anything should occur in Parliament that interests Our Great Cause I shall not fail to be back on my post’.11
On 4 July the Marquess of Chandos was in the chair; the Dukes of Gordon and Newcastle, the Earl of Longford, Lords Farnham and Hotham and several commoners were present. Brunswick Clubs began to be founded in the country, all with the declared intention, as the name indicated, of protecting the constitution, which included of course the King’s Coronation Oath and precluded Catholic Emancipation.
It was, however, in Ireland that the Brunswick Club found its truly fertile ground. The Irish Brunswick Club was founded by Wellington’s brother-in-law, Thomas 2nd Earl of Longford, he who had withdrawn support from his own brother Hercules Pakenham at the 1826 General Election because the latter had conceded the need for Emancipation. It was as an Irish member of the British House of Lords that he had been present at the original July meeting in London: now he was on home ground.
The inaugural meeting was in Dublin on 14 August, two days after Dawson’s speech in the north. O’Connell, with his usual touch for a lacerating phrase, referred to ‘their ostentatious display of peerage strength’. It was perfectly true that the Irish Brunswick Club, apart from the Earl of Longford as President, had thirty-odd noblemen as Vice-Presidents. There was another acid comment on the new club, but from precisely the opposite point of view, by one who declined to join. These Irish Brunswickers were much too ‘milk and water’: they seemed to plan to put down the Catholic Association by ‘Eating and Drinking’.12
Certainly, some of the letters in reply to the invitation sent by ‘Brunswick Tom’*2 had a jovial touch, conveying the familiar close-knit network of the Anglo-Irish upper class – not so different perhaps from the close-knit network of the similar English Catholic group, except for the vital difference that the Brunswickers were determinedly preserving power, and English Catholics modestly hoping for a share in it. There was another basic difference: it is only fair to say that many of the Anglo-Irish Protestant grandees, including Brunswick Tom, had lived through the rebellion of 1798 and for this reason were inclined to see Catholic conspiracies everywhere. The safety of the English aristocrats was hopefully no longer an issue, unlike their legal status.
There was in fact nothing milk-and-water about the prospectus of the Irish Brunswick Club, printed in Dublin by J. Lennox Livingstone. Brunswick Tom believed it to be, incidentally, a suitable gift from landlord to tenants, in their respective roles of ‘Father and Children’; for it would teach them ‘to Love and Venerate our [Protestant] Religion and Laws as Gloriously Constituted by the Wisdom, and Established by the Blood of our Forefathers in 1688’. The declared object of the club was the preservation of ‘the integrity of our Protestant constitution’, and the presentation address declared it to be in ‘glorious and immortal memory of 1690’.
On the title page the words ‘For King and Constitution’ surmounted the Union Jack (and the Longford arms), with PROTESTANT ASCENDANCY unmissable in capitals. The text had a portrait of Brunswick Tom as its frontispiece, and was headed No Surrender, that watchword of the Siege of Derry standing for the Williamite defiance. It included outright abuse of those ‘Noble Lords and Gentlemen’ who had advocated the cause of Catholic Emancipation, and in so doing had encouraged the disaffected and seditious in ‘this unhappy land’.
All of this was immensely appealing – to a small, but in their own estimation at least, powerful section of the population. The Westmeath Journal reported a subsequent meeting held in the actual town of Longford: ‘Monday last was a glorious day... The hearts of the Longford Protestants were revived, and a brighter day has risen upon them.’ Speeches, either replete with historical allusions or full of comic turns about O’Connell, were made respectively by the Rev. William Digby (nearly two hours of it) and the Rev. Richard St George (‘called forth bursts of laughter’).13
For his part, Wellington’s reaction to the clubs in both countries was to shrug his shoulders. He told Peel that the Brunswick Clubs had a right to meet ‘if they think it proper’. But it was a little too much to expect that the troops would be turned out beforehand to protect their meetings. The Irish Home Secretary, Lord Francis Leveson Gower, was instructed to ignore them in language rather less high-flown than that of the clubs themselves: ‘They can do no harm except in the way of irritation and God knows there is no want of that ingredient in Ireland, whether Brunswick Clubs exist or not.’ Privately Wellington was more brutal: to Mrs Arbuthnot he expressed the view that the lords, including his brother-in-law Longford, would not remain long in Ireland if there was ‘a cutting of [Protestant] throats’, thanks to the appearance of their clubs.14
O’Connell for his part interpreted the Brunswick Clubs firstly as part of the mission to terrify the Viceroy, Lord Anglesey, and his administration into Anti-Catholic action. O’Connell’s second charge against the Brunswickers was that they encouraged ‘the friends of bigotry in England’. As for the latter, O’Connell was quite clear in his own mind: ‘It would be, indeed, quite idle to conceal from ourselves that the great enemy of the people of Ireland is his most sacred Majesty!!’ Here was a King surrounded by ‘pimps and parasites’ who believed their power was connected to the continuation of abuses in Ireland.15
But O’Connell missed out one enormously important point about George IV’s entourage. However bigoted, the King had, in addition to those around him, a Prime Minister in Wellington who was most emphatically neither a pimp nor a parasite. How far in fact was the attitude of the Great Duke softening towards Emancipation as a practical measure towards solving the crisis that was Ireland? This became the crucial internal query within the Catholic Question.
There are indications that by the autumn of 1828 Wellington’s mind was far from being firmly set against any form of Catholic Relief, even if his recent public utterances might indicate that was so. Peel had put the choice succinctly in his letter of 11 August: was the government to continue to endure the practical consequences of its obstinacy in Ireland or attempt to solve the perpetual problem of the rebellious Emerald Isle by some form of concession?
It was helpful that the Whig high command for their part were not countering the Brunswick Clubs with new associations of their own. Richard Grosvenor, Viscount Belgrave, heir to the Marquess of Westminster and MP for Chester, did propose matching the Brunswickers, meeting for meeting, in a speech to the Cheshire Whig Club. Lord John Russell also suggested that the Pro-Catholics should form large petitioning meetings on the Brunswick model. Lord Grey, on the other hand, opposed such moves when they were put forward, on the grounds that this would only stir up Anti-Catholic feeling. He had in fact just the same objection to Catholic clubs as he did to the Brunswick Clubs: they would embarrass the government. Lord Althorp agreed, believing that such schemes would arouse jealousy. Progress – unseen progress – was more likely to be effective.
Mrs Arbuthnot was becoming dubious about her hero’s mindset. Her own attitude to recent events in Ireland had been mainstream Tory: ‘the Catholics and their priesthood have driven Mr Vesey Fitzgerald out of the county of Clare’. As for O’Connell: ‘he talks very big and very treasonably of coming over and storming the House of Commons and of putting an end to Tithes and the corrupt government of Wellington and Peel.’ On 29 July she reported Wellington as racking his brains as to how to satisfy friends of Catholic Emancipation in England and check ‘the Agitators’ in Ireland.16
The government was paralysed by the fact that an Irish MP could not now be created a peer, because that would inevitably leave an empty seat in the House of Commons up for contest; then the hideous fiasco of the Clare by-election would happen all over again. Further aggressive Catholics would put their names forward and be elected. Wellington wrote a memo to that effect in early August. ‘The influence of these demagogues is paralysing the royal authority itself.’17 Ironically enough, the unabated vigorous protests by ‘Irish landed Gentlemen’ such as his brother-in-law Longford also helped convince the Duke that conciliation of the Catholics was the proper route to follow.
Mrs Arbuthnot’s key assessment was, however, her description of Wellington as ‘the only man who has considered the subject practically’.18 It was that side of the Great Duke’s character which did not flinch from taking unpopular action on the grounds that, in modern slang, somebody’s got to do it. It is sometimes plausibly suggested, including by contemporaries, that the Clare election result was the decisive element which convinced Wellington (although O’Connell himself, as has been seen, ascribed the conversion to the behaviour of the Irish troops saluting him on his Ennis journey). Given his military genius, the ability to assess rapidly a change in the horizon of battle and act upon it, this makes perfect sense; from the Catholic point of view, it certainly justifies O’Connell’s ‘most daring and boldest step’ in standing for Parliament in July 1828.
In contrast to this, Peel, who also saw the Clare election as a crossroads, was at this moment concerned with the effect it had on his own career: he was increasingly determined to resign, in order to go out amicably now, with his reputation for opposing Emancipation intact, and return as soon as a bill proposing Emancipation was passed. This of course would have left Wellington with the task of piloting the bill with all the implications of royal displeasure, while the integrity of Peel was carefully preserved.
Mrs Arbuthnot continued to chart the path of Wellington’s progress – downward, as she saw it. By 9 October the Duke was no longer managing Ireland and the Catholic Question in a satisfactory fashion. ‘I am afraid he has seemed not to take a sufficiently Protestant view of it.’ In her opinion, he should have solved it by bolstering Protestant confidence. He should, for example, have recalled Lord Anglesey when he let his son and members of the Viceregal household go to Catholic Association meetings. Above all, Anglesey was guilty of the crime of being civil to Daniel O’Connell at the Viceregal court when the latter dared to wear – oh horrors! – his Liberator’s medal, ‘a harp without a crown’.
Wellington’s practical plan of conciliation paid serious attention to the question of ‘securities’. Effective administration rather than political clubs was the way to go. The Forty-shilling Freeholders would be raised to £5, thus eliminating a whole category of dissidents. There would be a grant from Parliament for the Catholic clergy, who were in turn to be licensed by the government. This would create a culture of dependency – on British, not foreign Papal authority. (There would be penalties for priests without licences.) Negotiations would be carried out for suspension of the oath which denounced Transubstantiation, and a possible substitute Oath of Allegiance. All of this was in essence practical, aimed at securing peace in Ireland, rather than taking into account religious feelings.
Unfortunately, King George IV showed no signs of relenting on the subject of Emancipation in the autumn, unlike his Prime Minister and – to a certain extent – his Home Secretary, Peel. It will be remembered that Catholic Emancipation was a subject which had been banned from being raised in Cabinet; that ban remained in force. The King’s hyperactive mind was moving in quite a different direction. In a meeting with Wellington on 14 October, he wanted Lord Anglesey sacked for detailed offences including issuing proclamations without Privy Council authorization; he wanted the Ultra-Tory Lord Eldon made Lord President; above all he wanted to dissolve Parliament in order get in more Pro-Protestants – thus Anti-Catholics – at a new General Election.19
Wellington argued back against each one of these royal proposals as giving absolutely the wrong message at this particular time. He especially stressed ‘the inconvenience and the evils’ of an election. While Parliament continued to be so divided on the Catholic Question, it could not ‘force Ireland to be tranquil’; an election would make things infinitely worse. The Duke issued the ominous words: ‘There is no remedy for this state of things excepting by means of a consideration of the whole state of Ireland.’ Sooner or later it would come to the same result, with or without a contest, ‘after suffering the misery and distress and incurring great expense and running great risks’. Wellington ended by coolly apologizing: ‘I am aware of the pain which I give your Majesty by stating these facts.’
A week later Charles Arbuthnot, who as Keeper of the Royal Parks and Gardens had court connections, told his wife that the King had been ill again and was ‘frantic’ about the Catholics. From his own point of view, George IV had a genuine grievance concerning Anglesey in Ireland; although the latter might argue that he was merely demonstrating that impartiality which he had promised in advance at his personal interview with the King. By November, Anglesey was being angrily described by the Ascendancy as ‘a Papist’ because of his perceived favour to the Catholics.20
The fact was that Anglesey, as an old soldier, was in a good position to assess the potential danger of Irish rebellion. He told the Cabinet shortly after the Clare election that neither the police nor the army in Ireland were truly dependable. There were even rumours of hostile intervention from the other side of the Atlantic. In August Maurice Fitzgerald, the Knight of Kerry, thought there might be an attempt to land arms. The Irish-American Bishop of Charleston, John England, was said to have organized a force of 40,000 men, headed by a general of Irish refugee descent, who would invade Ireland if Emancipation was not granted.21 Orange and Catholic factions were apparently beginning to be formed within the ranks of the British Army. That old paradox was apparent again by which the so-called seditious Irish Catholic manhood formed a vital part of a Protestant regime’s defence system.
In a letter to Peel of 23 September, copied by him to Wellington, Anglesey described the state of Ireland as ‘alarming’, with the continued assemblage of ‘many thousands of persons, bearing flags, and moving by word of command’ chiefly in Tipperary, Clare and Limerick. Peel agreed with Anglesey that a large disposable force – not less than three battalions and a regiment of cavalry or four battalions – should be kept within reach of Ireland ‘on a very sudden call’, with transport arrangements already in place.22
There had been an historic English disposition to believe in the hideous prospect of rebellion in Ireland. A few years earlier the poet Southey had been warned off visiting Limerick and its bishop by a friend, ‘well informed of the state of things’, who had told him: ‘Pray do not think of going to Ireland. I would not insure any man’s life for three months in that unhappy country. The populace are ready for rebellion and if their leaders should for their own purpose choose to have one, they have tomorrow a second edition of the Irish massacre.’ As a true liberal, the Rev. Sydney Smith expressed his take on the situation in the Edinburgh Review in 1827: ‘The moment the very name of Ireland is mentioned, the English seem to bid adieu to common feeling, common prudence and common sense’. In the House of Lords, as he denounced Canning’s Bill for Catholic Relief, Lord Mansfield had voiced the perennial nightmare by which even seeming tranquillity was not to be trusted: the priests might advise their flocks to present for the time being a morbid and lethargic stillness, but always beware ‘the serpent underneath’.23
This new official apprehension was quite different from that generic dread. Thirty years after the rising of the United Irishmen, wise observers like Anglesey were beginning to suggest that rebellion was an actual possibility. How close was Anglesey (and for that matter Southey’s correspondent) to the truth? For the time being what mattered was not the truth, but what was believed to be true. The menacing last words of Richard Lalor Sheil at the triumphant banquet following O’Connell’s victory at Ennis expressed the stuff of many Protestants’ nightmares: instead of ‘angry slaves’, make of us Irish ‘contented citizens’ (by granting Emancipation); ‘if you do not, tremble for the result.’
Was it actually possible that the angry slaves would turn on their masters, and if so, would it not now be better to take that action which would transform them into contented citizens? O’Connell himself in April had written to the Knight of Kerry about the results of the Burdett Catholic Relief Bill, not yet known: ‘Believe me, there is an underswell in the Irish people which is more formidable than any sudden or showy exhibition of irritation. I have no doubt that if this present system is persevered in for 20 years, it will end in a separation brought about in blood and confiscation.’24 Was O’Connell right? Were blood and confiscation – and separation – really moving nearer?
Meanwhile the jovial, confident Brunswickers in both countries stood for the enduring might of Anti-Catholicism in the higher echelons of society, thoroughly determined that the present system should prevail – not for twenty years but for ever.