II. almost on her knees, had petitioned for incorporation CHAP. in the empire. Provoked, perhaps, by a knowledge of Bedford's words to Pitt, that Ireland could only 1759 be controlled by military force, a rumour had gone abroad that the Parliament was about to be suppressed; that the country was to be governed as a province from London, and the taxes to be voted at St. Stephen's. Every day, after the opening of the autumn session of 1759, a disorderly crowd hung about the doors of the Parliament House. Unpopular members were hooted at and hustled, and the city authorities had been required, with very little effect, to keep order. There was an adjournment for a few days in November. On the day of the reassembling,1 a mob of several thousand persons, armed with swords and bludgeons, collected in College Green, broke into the House of Lords, and placed an old woman with a pipe in her mouth on the throne, as an indication of their respect for the Viceroy. They then took possession of the doors and approaches, and every member, Peer or Commoner, as he came up, was made to swear to be true to Ireland before he was allowed to enter. The Chancellor, Lord Bowes, an Englishman, refused the oath, and was turned back. The disturbance lasted through the whole morning. The Mayor came down, but looked on complacently, and refused to interfere. In the afternoon Bedford sent for him and the Sheriffs, bade them swear in special constables instantly, and quell the riot. The Mayor, from ill-judged popularity,' said he did not know on whom he could depend. Bedford offered him the support of the BOOK 1759 troops. The Mayor replied that, as there was no riot act in Ireland, he could not sanction the use of the troops. He had urged the people to disperse, and he hoped they would obey. He would not order them to be shot in an affair about the privileges of Parliament.' The city was thus left at the mercy of armed ruffians. Fifty soldiers were marched into the streets, as a demonstration; but, as no one would give them orders to act, they were only laughed at. At last, the Duke took the responsibility on himself. A party of cavalry were sent out, with directions in writing, to disperse the crowd, using as little violence as possible, but still to disperse them. The rioters retreated into the side streets, and defended themselves with stones; but finding this time that authority meant to assert itself, and that they were ridden down and sabred, they stood their ground till sixteen of them had been killed, and then disappeared into their dens. In the riot itself, though no such scenes had been witnessed in Dublin for forty years, there was nothing calculated to create serious apprehension. It was the conduct of the civil authorities which gave it exceptional importance; which led Pitt, when he heard of what had happened, to reflect seriously, perhaps for the first time, on the Irish problem; and gave occasion for a curious and extremely valuable interchange of letters with the Duke of Bedford. The disturbance originated in a part of Dublin called 'the Earl of Meath's Liberty,' inhabited almost exclusively by Protestant artisans, among whom some excitement had been created two years before by a visit from John Wesley. Methodism, since Wesley's preaching, had more or less agitated the lower classes of the Dublin Protestants; and, as a new form of dissent, had given special annoyance to the official mind of the Viceroy. Interpreting the feelings of the Dublin populace by his own, and especially indignant at the indifference with which the banking transactions of the Irish Chancellor of the Exchequer had been passed over, Mr. Pitt considered the uproar to have been probably a demonstration against Mr. Malone and Mr. Clements. Bedford still persisted in throwing a shield over the delinquents, and, with the contempt of an English aristocrat for the opinions of a mob, set it down to the dissolution of authority and the republican tenets of the new sect, which he stigmatized with the name of Swaddlers. He shrunk from ordering an enquiry into the Mayor's conduct, and was disposed to transfer the entire responsibility to the Parliament. 1 Through the mists and clouds of Irish misgovernment, Pitt's answer shines out like an exceptional flash of sunlight. Though he had no leisure to master the intricacies of the past administrative blundering, his powerful sense grasped instinctively the only principles on which order and good government could be restored. In the persevering efforts to screen a real enormity, he saw how deep was the root of the disease, and in the Duke's poor efforts to throw 1 'The place in which the riot rose, the Earl of Meath's Liberty, is chiefly inhabited by weavers, many of whom are Protestants, and of those called the "New Light Presbyterians, or Swaddlers." Their tenets both here, and I am sorry to say in the North of Ireland, are totally Republican, and averse to СНАР. II. 1760 BOOK 1760 the blame on the Dissenters, an evidence of the miserable infatuation which had so long paralyzed the influence of Protestantism. When Wesley visited Ireland in 1747, the peasantry had flocked about him eagerly, as the miners of Wales and Cornwall, and had been only driven from him by terror of their priests. Of all forms of the Protestant religion, Methodism and Calvinism were best fitted to make converts among the warm impassioned Celts. The Irish Government, with insane ingenuity, at once made itself the protector of moral dishonesty, and selected for special enmity England's most effective allies. 'You remind me, so Pitt replied (and the letter should have been engraved on the walls of the viceregal cabinet, for successive governors of Ireland to read their duty there)- You remind me that you told me last spring, that you considered Ireland, after eight months' experience, as a country where law had lost energy, magistracy all authority, and that nothing but military force could restrain the subject within due obedience. 'I must remind you in turn, that the great danger stated by your Grace, to be apprehended for Ireland, turned principally, if not solely, on the excessive superiority in numbers of Papists over Protestants. 'For the Lord Mayor and magistrates of Dublin, I can only observe that, in the late atrocious riot, those magistrates may more properly be said to have totally lost all sense of fidelity and duty, than that law and magistracy have lost energy and authoritya timely execution whereof so prudently and so expressly recommended by your Grace, duly sup ported in the execution by the military force, could not possibly have failed to prevent the consummation II. of so opprobrious an indignity to Government, as well CHAP. as to have seized and brought to exemplary punishment the ringleaders in such a daring attempt. 'I am hereupon to acquaint your Grace, that this wilful and shameful inexertion of magistracy continues to be considered here as being highly proper to be taken up and enquired into by the executive power, the exoneration whereof from itself by recommending the same to the inquisition of the House of Commons in Ireland, might tend to a further relaxation of the authority of the King's government by due course of law. 'In case, on such enquiry being had, there shall appear full and sufficient grounds in law to prosecute criminally and convict the said magistrates, it is his Majesty's pleasure that your Grace, after taking the advice of his servants learned in the law, should order proper legal proceedings to be commenced against them. 'With regard to the causes of the late outrage, I cannot but remark that, considering the riot to have taken its rise in the Earl of Meath's Liberty, chiefly inhabited by Protestant weavers, there is still more pregnant ground to apprehend that the money transactions of Mr. Malone and Mr. Clements have probably been one fatal ingredient amongst others, observed by your Grace, towards distempering and revolting the minds of a manufacturing multitude, who (though nothing can extenuate the guilt of such an insurrection) may perhaps have felt in their trade the consequences of such a scandalous and iniquitous business, which continues here to be viewed in the same light, and to stand the object of public animadversion. 1760 |