Some years before the famine a new form of Irish nationalism, rejecting republican separation altogether, had taken shape under the leadership of the lawyer Daniel O’Connell, one of the great pioneers of popular democracy. It had in fact, until swamped by the famine, acquired the power of the people behind it unlike anything put forward in the name of Irish nationalism before; being the first real effective organization of Irish mass opinion since the days of James II.
The new movement had different names at different times depending on O’Connell’s immediate political objective, but its real objective, under whatever label, was the improvement of the lot of the Irish common people as a national aim in itself. Nationalism, or Irish-consciousness, with its heavy and romantic sense of the past and its love of the beautiful landscape in which this flourished, became primarily a powerful emotive auxiliary in the drive towards political goals which were to mean better times for all.
For the rest of the century and beyond, this was what Irish nationalism was to represent for the majority of the Irish population. Republican separatism, though it could often call on wide passive sympathy, became only a small minority movement, and remained so until almost the final moment of its surprise success in the next century. Only the swelling numbers of separate Irishmen in the great republic across the Atlantic, nursing the bitterest memories of government in Ireland, gave it a significance out of proportion to its Irish presence.
Daniel O’Connell was twenty-five at the time of the Union. He was by then a promising lawyer, born of a prosperous Catholic family from one of the remote promontories of County Kerry in south-west Ireland. As a Catholic, he had been rather untypical of his faith in strongly opposing the Union in 1800, declaring that if offered the alternatives of Union and the re-enactment of the penal laws in their full severity he would choose the latter. Certainly his own family history showed how some well-to-do Catholics could survive through long years of difficulty and darkness.
The O’Connells had been High Sheriffs of Kerry in the sixteenth century, but had suffered setbacks in the seventeenth when the head of the family was transplanted under Cromwell’s anti-Catholic measures to Connaught. However, another O’Connell, by not joining in the rebellion of 1641, had managed to retain his own land. Throughout the eighteenth century the O’Connells had continued to cling to a nucleus of their ancient estates in Kerry and even before the repeal of the penal laws had been adding to them by the fairly common device of buying land in the name of a cooperative and friendly Protestant. One of O’Connell’s uncles had emigrated to reach high rank in the French Army, another to become chamberlain to three Emperors of Austria. But another, after the abolition of the penal land laws, had added further to the family estates in Kerry and become an owner of grazing cattle on a considerable scale. He had also carried on a productive sideline in the smuggling trade with France for which the innumerable wild bays and inlets of Kerry made it so suitable. He virtually took over his nephew’s upbringing.
O’Connell, like better-off Catholics throughout the eighteenth century, was educated in France where he stayed during the early part of the Revolution, leaving on the day of Louis XVI’S execution. After studying law in London he was called to the Irish bar in May 1798, on the day Lord Edward Fitzgerald was arrested. Appalled by the bloodshed of the rebellion of that year, he was, by the time of Emmet’s fiasco, a member of the loyalist Lawyers Artillery Corps.
But although O’Connell rejected the United Irishmen’s ideas of separatist nationalism, he had a very strong emotive Irish-consciousness rooted in his own family history and he was successfully to take over much of the United Irishmen’s rhetorical thunder and convert it to his own uses. A lot of his language was to be often almost indistinguishable from that of separatist nationalists. Thus, although he attached his own constitutional limitation to what he meant by ‘liberate’, he echoed Tone when he declared in 1810: ‘The Protestant alone could not expect to liberate his country – the Roman Catholic alone could not do it – neither could the Presbyterian – but amalgamate the three into the Irishman, and the Union is defeated.’1 Again, later in his career he said: ‘In the struggle for nationality I recognize no distinction of creed or party. Every man who joins with me for Ireland is my sworn brother.’2 And he could talk about ‘the desire for National Independence’ or ‘the want of Nationhood’3 with as much emotive power as anyone.
But for O’Connell the British connection and acceptance of the Crown were never questioned. Late in his life he insisted that he would abandon all his political aims overnight if he thought them in any way ‘dangerous to the connection between the two countries, or dangerous to our allegiance to our sovereign’.4 More than twenty years earlier, when George IV had visited Ireland in 1821 and the port of Dunleary was renamed Kingstown in his honour, O’Connell presented the king with a laurel crown on bended knee on his departure.5 The address from the citizens of Dublin on that occasion referred to the king uniting ‘six millions of a grateful people in a bond of brotherly love to one another, and of affectionate attachment to your Majesty’s person and throne’.6 O’Connell afterwards suggested the formation of a Royal Georgian club to dine six times a year, wearing cloth of Irish manufacture and rosettes of blue. ‘Loyalty,’ he declared, ‘is not the peculiar prerogative of one sect or another, but it is the legitimate and appropriate characteristic of all His Majesty’s subjects of every class, every rank, every denomination.’7
In other words, the sort of Irish nationality and Irish independence in which O’Connell believed was an extension to all the people of Ireland of that very sort of independence within the Empire which Protestant Irishmen had so proudly insisted on for themselves in the eighteenth century. What he meant by liberating the Irish people was liberating them all to this equality of rightful national pride within the connection. Ultimately this would bring about their liberation from the whole tyranny of their everyday conditions. The reason why he stuck so firmly to the British connection was not from any profound mystical convictions about it such as Grattan had had. O’Connell had simply learnt from recent history that any attempt to break the connection not only got the Irish people nowhere, but actually increased their dreadful suffering a thousandfold. On the other hand, anything on the right side of treason might theoretically be obtained. Thus the only insuperable obstacle to his aims became treason itself.
It was in the 1820s that the first stage of O’Connell’s political career opened with his great campaign for Catholic Emancipation. This issue had simmered on for some twenty years after the Union, as a middle- and upper-class affair of polite petitions to Parliament. It was of direct interest only to those Catholics who might aspire to the relatively few high offices and functions, including membership of Parliament, from which they were still debarred. The peasantry concentrated on their own immediate interests through the network of the secret societies. Even as a symbol Emancipation had lost much of its force, for the major concession to Catholics had been made in the 1790s, when they received the vote on the same terms as the Protestants.
Yet it was precisely by managing to organize the masses so effectively in a campaign for the little that remained that O’Connell succeeded in raising a new issue of national political principle altogether. The real issue now, and for the first time in modern Irish politics, was this: were the masses, well-organized, but acting constitutionally, to be allowed to have their way against the government? It was this new subtle threat that accounted for the bitterness with which the government now fought Emancipation thirty years after Pitt had been prepared to concede it.
Although O’Connell had long been in favour of more vigorous action on Emancipation, it was only in 1823 that he began to give his full energies to the cause. Many sophisticated Catholics that year felt that the prospect of Emancipation had never been so dim. One wrote afterwards: ‘I do not exaggerate when I say that the Catholic question was nearly forgotten.’8 But that year O’Connell founded the Catholic Association for the purpose of adopting ‘all such legal and constitutional measures as may be most useful to obtain Catholic Emancipation’.9 The outstanding feature of the new organization was the broad democratic basis O’Connell gave it by introducing an associate membership, for which the subscription was only a shilling a year. The ‘penny a month’ became known as the Catholic Rent and soon vast sums, sometimes of £1,000 a week and more, were pouring in to the organization from all over Ireland, providing it with a regular campaign fund. The only immediate political objective for which the Association could campaign was the return to Parliament of Protestants who favoured Emancipation, but something like an embryonic political party apparatus on a democratic model had come into being.
The old oligarchic political system had survived the Union unreformed. But it did contain one odd democratic feature ready to hand for anyone with the will and determination to use it. When Catholics were enfranchised in 1793, the qualification had been the forty-shilling freehold. Almost any bit of property, sometimes even a bit of furniture, could be and often was spuriously dignified with the title of a forty-shilling freehold, for, with no secret ballot and the tradition still holding good that a tenant voted for his landlord, it was in a landlord’s interest to have as many forty-shilling freeholders as possible. Anyone who voted against that interest could expect immediate eviction. But during the second decade of the nineteenth century evidence began to appear that Catholic forty-shilling freeholders could, if given support and encouragement by their priests, be brought to defy their landlords at the polls. The numerous forty-shilling freeholders were thus potentially a considerable democratic force. Some years even before the appearance of the Catholic Association the forty-shilling freeholders of Leitrim, Wexford and Sligo, mobilized by their priests, had successfully defied their landlords and obtained the election of liberals favourable to Catholic Emancipation. And just before the foundation of the Association the landed proprietors in County Dublin itself had also seen themselves outvoted.
O’Connell seems to have been slow to realize the powerful instrument made available to him by this new trend. A picture had long ago impressed itself on his mind of freeholders being driven by their landlords to the polls, like so many cattle to market. In spite of recent evidence he thought they were more a political liability as automatic landlord votes than an asset, and was even prepared to see their disfranchisement. Thus the initiative to overthrow the entrenched Tory landlord interests in a new election pending in Waterford in 1826 did not actually come from him.
Waterford was the property of the Beresford family, the most powerful in Ireland for influence and patronage. Only ten days before the actual election, for which preparations had been going on for months, O’Connell and the Catholic Association finally decided to throw themselves into the fight against the Beresfords’ nominee. But they did so with a masterly organization which immediately struck fear into the government. The frightening thing was not the expected disorder, but the reverse. The police major in charge in Waterford reported to Dublin Castle that, quite unlike normal Irish elections, there was very little drunkenness and no rioting.10 The Catholic Association itself patrolled the town to keep order. Green handkerchiefs, sashes, cockades and ribbons were being worn everywhere and green flags flew in all parts of the city.
The Emancipation candidate at Waterford was elected. It was a staggering blow to the landed proprietors, one of whom emphasized what to him was the really ominous feature, namely that all those very Catholics who had most loyally helped him put down rebellion in 1798 had now voted contrary to his wishes. The prospect of an organized mass political opinion which could no longer be dealt with as treason was thoroughly alarming. An equally sensational result took place soon afterwards at Louth, where a man whose family had controlled the county for half a century was defeated by an Emancipation candidate.
One of the ways in which Association funds were used was to give help to tenants evicted in reprisal for voting against their landlord’s wishes. Publicity given by the Association to such acts of vindictiveness also discouraged the use of this ultimate landlord’s sanction against the rebellious Catholic freeholder. Further elections followed, in which the Association continued to be successful.
The government, alarmed by this new democratic phenomenon, had already passed one act which made the Catholic Association illegal. But O’Connell always boasted that with his lawyer’s skill he could drive a coach and six through any act of Parliament. He soon founded a New Catholic Association, ‘merely for the purposes of public and private charity … promoting public peace and tranquillity as well as private harmony among all classes of His Majesty’s subjects throughout Ireland’.11 Peel, the Home Secretary, and Wellington, the Prime Minister, strongly pressed the law officers of the Crown to prosecute the new organization. They were advised that, although the Association had technically broken the Convention Act of 1793 which had been specifically designed to prevent Catholics organizing extra-parliamentary power, it would be ‘hazardous’ in the present climate of Ireland to risk a prosecution by bringing the case before a jury. The climax of the Association’s campaign came when O’Connell himself decided to stand for County Clare in 1828.
There was nothing illegal about a Catholic actually standing at an election, though none had done so for nearly 150 years. It was only after election that the test of his suitability to sit in Parliament was made. On presenting himself at the House of Commons he had not only to take the oaths of allegiance and supremacy, but also to testify that ‘the invocation or adoration of the Virgin Mary or any other saint and the sacrifice of the Mass, as they are now used in the Church of Rome, are superstitious and idolatrous’.12 If, in full knowledge of this, an electorate voted for a Catholic it was clearly as arrogant a defiance of the political establishment as could constitutionally be made. The Clare election presented the government with the most serious challenge it had had to face since the passing of the Act of Union.
There was a threat, too, behind the challenge, which, though largely unspoken, was a real consideration to the government and an essential, if risky, aspect of the tactics of O’Connell and the Catholic Association. The bloody horrors of 1798, though now some thirty years old, were very much a part of living memory. Any organization of the Irish masses in their incredible poverty and misery and their fierce resentment of their conditions could not help conjuring up the old spectre of violent and terrible insurrection. Though all leadership for political insurrection had disappeared, the masses’ instinct for violence as a last resort had continued to manifest itself in the activities of the agrarian secret societies, particularly in the period between 1815 and 1824, which had seen two serious potato famines. In the circumstances, the government and the established order made no nice distinction between agrarian and political activity, between the masses collected in night bands of Rockites and Ribbonmen and the masses collected in their constitutional organization under O’Connell. One Orangeman, the Earl of Clancarty, thought that in 1824 Ireland was in a more dangerous state than on the eve of the rebellion of 1798, and in letters to the government there was exaggerated talk similar to that of the 1790s, of nightly meetings and arming with pikes and firearms.13
O’Connell’s own horror of bloodshed was founded in recent Irish history. He had made technical legality and a constitutional attitude the cornerstone of his political faith. But he was not beyond implying that but for him and the Catholic Association violence would gain the upper hand. And in thus drawing attention to the threat he was averting, he uttered a sort of threat himself. The vivid and emotive metaphorical language of his speeches heightened the effect. His technique was to use those very dark forces of violence, which he was holding back, as a force obscurely at the back of him. This was to become even more blatantly his tactic in his later campaign for Repeal of the Union.
There was a good deal of substance in O’Connell’s and the Catholic Association’s claim that by the broad democratic nature of their own appeal they kept the violence of the agrarian secret societies harnessed and under control. O’Connell boasted that they and they alone prevented ‘civil war’, at the same time warning Wellington: ‘Why, even in London if Pat took it into his head, he would go near to beat the guards; but for efficient strength at home it is but folly not to appreciate us justly.’14 Sheil, another prominent member of the Association, sailed even closer to the wind by drawing attention in public to the ‘vast body of fierce, fearless and desperate peasantry, who would be easily allured into a junction with an invader’.15
Certainly agrarian violence diminished after 1824 and the government reluctantly had to admit that this was due to the Association and its ability to assert discipline. ‘We are in that happy state in Ireland,’ wrote Peel to Wellington, bitterly, ‘that it depends upon the prudence and discretion of the leader of the Roman Catholic Association whether we shall have a rebellion there or not in the next few months.’16 And O’Connell continuously reminded the British Government of their predicament, playing sometimes too on their fear of French and even American17 intervention. In his address to the people of England early in 1825, he stressed that ‘Those who are labouring under oppression … will be exposed to the strong temptation of receiving (if they can obtain it) assistance from any part of the world’, and he talked of ‘the possibility of seeing foreign fleets or bands the deliverers of Ireland’.18 Moreover, by 1828, the year of O’Connell’s own candidacy in the Clare election, the government were beginning to have serious doubts about the reliability in any emergency of the Irish troops.
Thus in the Clare election of 1828 the Irish bogey loomed almost as large as if rebellion had broken out, with the additional disadvantage that it could not be dealt with as if it had.
O’Connell stood in Clare as ‘Man of the People’. The discipline of the crowds was again uncanny for an Irish election. Drunkenness was actually made a subject for mob punishment, offenders being thrown into the river, where they were kept for two hours and subjected to repeated duckings.19 The commander of the troops described how the people marched in regular columns under officers who gave orders like ‘keep in step’ and ‘right shoulders forward’ which were immediately obeyed.20 Peel himself wrote of the ‘fearful exhibition of sobered and desperate enthusiasm’.21
O’Connell won the election by an overwhelming majority.
‘Such a scene we have had!’ wrote Peel. ‘Such a tremendous prospect it opens to us! … no man can contemplate without alarm what is to follow in this wretched country.’
With reports coming in that columns of men wearing green sashes and carrying green flags were parading in the West of Ireland,22 Wellington and Peel, who even before the election had been facing up to the need to accept the inevitable, were in no doubt about one thing that had to follow. ‘No one can answer for the consequences of delay,’ wrote Wellington to the king in November.
A Catholic Emancipation Bill was introduced early in 1829 and received a pained and angry royal assent on 13 April of that year. It was immediately followed by an act which did something to reduce O’Connell’s political power in Ireland for the immediate future by raising the franchise qualification from a forty-shilling to a ten-pound freehold. But, dazzled by his victory, O’Connell does not seem to have thought this important.
His victory meant much more than that Catholics could now sit in Parliament and become judges. The real victory consisted in the fact that for the first time ever the down-trodden Catholic masses had taken on the government and won. They had won by organization and discipline, by courage and leadership, by keeping just on the right side of the law and a long way on the right side of loyalty. There was a lesson to be learnt from this victory in contrast with the disastrous defeat into which the far cruder methods of the Defenders and the United Irishmen had led them. And in the first flush of this first victory, it either escaped them or seemed unimportant that the victory brought no real change to their everyday lives. In any case, the new strength by which they had won Emancipation could presumably be brought to bear on other issues too.
O’Connell, whose election had taken place before the passing of the Emancipation Act, now tried to take his seat in the Commons. But by a piece of government spite the act had not been made retrospective. Though O’Connell knew what the outcome of an attempt to take his seat must be in the circumstances, he made the most of the occasion for political ends. He went down to the House and, putting on his spectacles, laboriously read through to himself the wording with which he must have been perfectly familiar, of the oath of royal ecclesiastical supremacy together with the passage about the superstitious and idolatrous nature of the adoration of the Virgin and of the Mass.
‘I see,’ he declared aloud, ‘in this oath, an assertion as a matter of opinion which I know to be false. I see in it another assertion as a matter of fact which I believe to be false. I therefore refuse to take this oath.’23
O’Connell had to travel all the way back to Clare to re-submit himself to the electorate. But again he made the most of the occasion, travelling much of the road in triumph and entering Ennis, the county town, escorted by a procession of forty thousand people with bands and banners.24 This time he was elected unopposed, and under the Emancipation Act could now take his seat. The government’s spite had deprived him of a personal ambition to be the first Catholic to enter Parliament, for the Duke of Norfolk and other peers had already been able to take their seats in the House of Lords.
A great triumph was behind O’Connell. He immediately set out in pursuit of a greater one. His next campaign would be Repeal of the Union itself.