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of Kendal, with 1,500l. Besides these, Lady Stanhope had 2,600l. a year, Lady Darlington 2,000l., and old Baron Bernstorff, who, whatever his claims may have been on George the Second, had certainly none on Ireland, received 2,500l. a year;-almost a sixth of the Irish revenue thus scandalously squandered, and an annual thousand pounds all that could be spared to a fund which was a very fountain of the waters of life! So it was; and, still more strangely complaints from Ireland on the abuse of the Pension fund were received in London with exclamations of indignant astonishment. Among the remarkable qualities of English statesmen during the two last centuries, the most striking, perhaps, has been their inability to recognize a political iniquity till it has become so flagrant as to be intolerable, and an inability equally great, when the iniquity has been redressed, to understand how it could ever have been tolerated.

The Irish gentlemen, meanwhile, were not deterred by the coldness of the English Government. The hereditary revenue continued to be squandered. The Dublin Parliament raised funds out of fresh taxation, and raised their own grants to the society to four, five, and six thousand a year. Peers and gentlemen established schools on their own estates, which were affiliated to the central corporation. Archbishop Boulter came forward in practical liberality, and built and endowed a school in Dublin almost at his own expense. More than 30,000l. was collected in England by private subscription. Other sums were sent from the American colonies. The bishops of the Church began, in a few years, to congratulate themselves that the talisman which was to

CHAP.

I.

1733

BOOK

IV.

dissolve the spell of Papal dominion had been at last discovered.1 So vigorous, so effective, had become the society by the middle of the century, that Parliament appropriated a special branch of the revenue, the annual proceeds of hawkers' and pedlars' licences, to the support of the schools, and grafted on them an effective statute for the repression of Irish beggary.

'In every part of the kingdom,' said the eleventh of the 23rd of George II., ' mendicant children were seen wandering about the country; the Charter Schools had furnished means of educating and providing for them, so that they might become useful members of society.' The ministers and churchwardens had already powers to bind such children as apprentices, with the parents' consent; but this remedy had proved inefficient, and the numbers had still increased. It was enacted, therefore, that, after Michaelmas, 1750, the Charter Society might appoint officers in every province, with powers to take up children between the ages of five and twelve years who might be found begging, and convey them to the nearest Charter School, there to be taken charge of, bred up in industry, and bound out, when at sufficient age, as servants or apprentices to Protestants: and whereas children taken into the schools with their fathers' and mothers' consent had been afterwards demanded back on various pretences, for the defeat of the purposes for which the schools had been erected, the Parlia ment decided also that a child once received into a charter school was thenceforward a child of the

1 See the three volumes of the Charter Society's tracts, with the annual reports and the sermons of the Bishops at the annual meetings.

See also a series of Letters from Henry Maule, Bishop of Dromore, 1741-1744.' MSS. Record Office.

public; and that, unless the parents could prove that it had been admitted against their will, it was not to be given back to them.1

How the very best system of education ever set on foot in Ireland, came at last to nothing, will be told in its place. The fierce and bitter opposition of the priests would have itself been inoperative. Irregularities in the management created occasional scandals; but these were promptly punished. Schoolmasters who allowed girls, under their charge, to be seduced, were three times publicly whipped in the nearest county town. The Charter Society failed partly from the disorganized condition of general Irish society, which spoilt the healthy working of the apprentice system, partly from the spirit of the age, with which, as the century waned, it found itself in too harsh hostility. The catechism and industrial training were too unspiritual to suit the sentiment of revived emotional Christianity; and when the schools, instead of turning out hardworking labourers and artisans, were turned to purposes of soul-saving and propagandist enthusiasm, they came in conflict with modern liberal ideas, and were held to violate the sacred rights of conscience to choose its own religion, and, in its own wisdom, to believe whatever theories about divine things it happens to prefer.

1 23 George II. cap. xi. Irish Statutes.

2 Ibid.

CHAP.

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1733

BOOK.
IV.

1723

SECTION III.

THE Duchess of Kendal was not contented with her pensions, and her name is connected with another Irish scandal which obtained an unenviable notoriety. The rapacity of this lady was on the scale of her person. Wherever the curtain can be lifted which screened the secrets of the Court and Cabinet of the first Georges, the hand of Erengard Schulenberg can be generally detected, raking together ill-gotten plunder. It was alleged with truth-for when the storm was over a real deficiency was left to be supplied that Ireland required an addition to her copper coinage. The Duchess of Kendal, in return for a share of the anticipated spoil, procured a patent for a rich ironmaster named Wood, to coin and circulate in that country 108,000l. worth of halfpennies and farthings. The metal, by the terms of his patent, was to be identical in purity with the metal coined for England The weight of the coins was to be something less. The market price of copper in England was thirteen pence the pound avoirdupois : wrought into bars and prepared for the mint, it was reckoned to be worth eighteen pence the pound. The pound was coined into twenty-three pence, and allowing twopence for waste and for the cost of cutting and stamping, the gain to the mint on each pound of copper coined in England was threepence. By Mr. Wood's patent the pound of copper was confessedly to be made into sixty halfpence or thirty pence, and the gain on his grant, when carried out, if

the letter of it had been strictly adhered to, that remained to be divided between himself and his patroness, would have amounted to something like 40,000l. The copper coin already in use in Ireland was inferior in sterling value to that which was now to be introduced. But the quantity was to be considered as well as the quality. The entire specie currency of Ireland, gold, silver, and copper, in 1724, was estimated only at 400,000l. In England the copper coinage in circulation was but a hundredth part of the whole. In Ireland, when the patent was executed, it would become a fifth of the whole. Copper would enter necessarily into all payments. It would displace and drive out gradually the gold and silver, it would confuse prices, offer an irresistible temptation to coiners, and create all the evils which invariably accrue when an inferior coin, intended only for small purchases, becomes the ordinary standard of exchange.'

The patent was granted in March 1723. The stream of halfpence commenced at once to flow; yet, though to some extent confessedly needed, they were received with dislike and suspicion, and the Duke of Grafton came over as Viceroy in August, furnished by Walpole with arguments which, as he hoped, would remove the objections.

The Duke found Dublin in an unpropitious humour. The city was fermenting under a pamphlet recently issued, entitled Ireland's Consternation.' Every person was open-mouthed about the new halfpence, and the very servants of the Crown were afraid to defend what was so universally and indignantly exe

1 'Archbishop Boulter to the Duke of Newcastle, January 19, 1725.' MSS. Record Office.

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1723

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