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CHAPTER XIII.

1760-1762.

all the corruption and cant of Whiggery with whatever is most coarsely tyrannical, dogged, blind, and imperious in Toryism.

When he came to the throne and met George III.-Speech from the Throne.-"Tolera-Parliament for the first time, Mr Pitt was tion."-France and England in India.-Lally's still prime minister; and we accordingly Campaign there.-State of Ireland.-The Revenue. Distress of trade.-Distress in the country.-Op- find the Whiggish element to prevail in pression of the Farmers.-Whiteboys.-Riots. the famous royal speech delivered on that A Popish Conspiracy."-Steel-Boys and Oak- occasion. His first words took the heart Boys.-Emigration from Ulster.-Halifax, Viceroy.—Flood and the Patriots.-Extravagance and of the nation by storm :-"Born and. Corruption.-Agitation for Septennial Parlia- educated in this country, I glory in the name of Briton." But one can well KING GEORGE THE THIRD mounted the through the mind of an educated Irish imagine what bitter reflections passed throne of England in October, 1760, at Catholic, like Charles O'Conor, or Curry, twenty-two years of age. He was grand- as he read the remaining sentences of the son to the late king, being the son of the discourse. "The civil and religious Prince of Wales, Frederick Louis, whom rights" said the king, "of my loving the old king very cordially hated. The subjects are equally dear to me with the mother of George III. was a German prin- most valuable prerogatives of the crown.” cess of the House of Saxe Gotha-a It was his inviolable resolution, he said, family which has since cost dear to the "to adhere to and strengthen this exthree kingdoms; and a year after his ac- cellent Constitution in Church and State." cession, he married another German prin- "It was his fixed purpose" he declared, cess, of the House of Mecklenburg-to countenance and encourage the Strelitz. But the new king himself was practice of true religion and virtue"born in England; a circumstance which which fixed purpose of course bound him greatly rejoiced the English of that day. He had been educated for a time in the choicest Whig principles by his father; and, as an English historian informs us, "great and incessant pains were taken to infuse into the mind of the Second Hope of Britain' just and elevated sentiments of government and of civil and religious liberty." But after the death of Prince Frederick Louis, his mother, the Princess Dowager of Wales, gave quite a new direction to the education of her son; and under the guidance of the afterwards celebrated Lord Bute, brought him up in the highest and choicest doctrines of Toryism and Prerogative. He certainly profited by both those systems of tuition, and united in his conduct upon the throne

In an occasional Address, or Prologue, spoken by Prince George, on acting a part in the tragedy of Cato, performed at Leicester House about the year 1749, he was instructed thus to express himself,

"The poet's labours elevate the mind,
Teach our young hearts with generous fire to burn,

And feel the virtuous sentiments we learn.
T' attain those glorious ends, what play so fit
As that where all the powers of human wit
Combine to dignify great Cato's name,
To deck his tomb and consecrate his fame?
Where LIBERTY-O name for ever dear!
Breathes forth in every line, and bids us fear
Nor pains nor death to guard our sacred laws,
But bravely perish in our country's cause.
Should this superior to my years be thought,
Know 'tis the first great lesson I was taught."

Liberty, in the language of that day, meant the
Protestant interest, and Protestant ascendency in
Church and State.

to discourage and to punish all false re-
ligions. Finally, he exclaimed to his
Parliament: "The eyes of all Europe are
upon you. From you the Protestant In-
terest hopes for protection, as well as all
our friends for the preservation of their
independency. *
* * In this expecta-
tion I am the more encouraged by a
pleasing circumstance which I look upon
as one of the most auspicious omens of my
reign-that happy extinction of divisions,
and that union and good harmony which
continue to prevail amongst my subjects
afford me the most agreeable prospect."
His Majesty also was pleased to say
that he would maintain the toleration in-
violable."

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The "toleration" here spoken of, in so far as it included Irish Papists, meant simple connivance at Catholic worship, so long as that was practised very quietly, in obscure places. It did not mean exemption or relief from any one of the disabilities or penalties which had abolished the civil existence of Catholics; it did not mean that they could be educated, either at home or abroad; nor that they could possess arms, or horses, or farms on a longer lease than thirty-one years; nor that they could sit in Parliament, or municipal councils, or parish vestries, or in any way participate in the voting away of their own money. It did not mean Ireland, or go abroad to receive them withthat their clergy could receive orders in out incurring the penalty of transportation,

and, if they returned, death :-nor that Catholics could practise law or medicine, or sit on juries, or be guardians to their own children, or lend money on mortgage (if they earned any money), or go to a foreign country, or have any of the rights of human beings in their own. By the connivance of the government, they were permitted to breathe, and to go to mass, and to do almost nothing else, except live by their labour and pay taxes and penal fines. Such is the precise limitation of that "toleration," which King George said would be inviolably maintained: and it was inviolably maintained during the first thirty-three years of this reign with certain trifling alleviations which are to be mentioned in their proper place.

Nothing can exceed the passionate outbursts of his grief and indignation in some of these letters. "Hell," he says, "has vomited me out upon this land of iniquity; and I am only awaiting, like Jonah, for the whale that is to swallow me." Among his other troubles, the troops mutined, and the revolt was appeased with much trouble. Then continues Voltaire, "the General led them into the province of Arcot, to recover the fortress of Vandavachi, of which the English had possessed themselves after two ineffectual attempts; in one of which they had been completely defeated by the Chevalier Geoghegan. Lally ventured to attack them with inferior forces, and would have conquered them if he had been duly seconded. As it was, he only gained in that expedition the honour of having given a new proof of the determined courage which formed his leading characteristic." This is the battle known to the English by the name of "Wandewash."

At length Lally was obliged to collect all his troops in Pondicherry, resolved to defend it to the last extremity; it was blockaded at once by land and sea. Here, again, everything seemed to irritate his impetuous temper; he insulted the governor and all the council, and threatened to harness them to his provision waggons,

The accession of King George III. took place at an auspicious and properous time, for England, though not for Ireland. The war was proceeding favourably to Great Britain in all parts of the earth and sea; and it was in this year, 1760, and the following year that the great struggle between France and England for the colonial empire of India came to a crisis and was decided against France, and therefore disastrously for Ireland. The war in India would not here much concern us but for its connection with the sad fate of Count Lally. He was now a lieutenant-general in the French armies, and M. de Voltaire informs us that it was his well-known if they did not provide horses. "I had hatred of the English which caused him to be selected for the honour of commanding the force which was to encounter them on coast of the Coromandel. His regiment, that had fought at Fontenoy, was with him; and one of the officers who held high command under him was the Chevalier Geoghegan.* He found everything in disarray at Pondicherry, the capital of the French possessions; very insufficient forces, but little provisions, and no money at all. Voitaire says: "Nothwitstanding the gloomy views he took of everything, he had at first some happy success. He took from the Eng-render. lish the fort St. David, some leagues he was unhapily obliged to yield; and so from Pondicherry and razed its walls n April, 1758." The same year he besieged Madras, took the "black town," but failed before the fortress. His own correspondence, which is in part given to us by Voltaire, attributes this failure to monstrous peculation and waste in the department for supplying the army. Indeed, he seems to have very soon come to the conclusion that nothing effectual could be done; that he was abandoned to his fate, and that the French power in Hindostan was doomed. *Voltaire, Siecle de Louis XV.

rather," he exclaims in one letter, "go and command Caffres, than stay in this Sodom, which it is impossible but the fire of the English must destroy sooner or later, from want of fire from heaven.” The siege was long and the defence desperate. Just at the moment that King George III. ascended the throne, this gallant and impetuous Count Lally was holding his post with obstinate valour against an English fleet and army. But the people in Pondicherry were dying in the streets of hunger, and the council of the city was crying out to Lally to sur On the 16th of January, 1761,

the French lost India in the east almost on the same day that they lost Cana a in the west, by the surrender of Montreal. There was a delerium of joy in England, and the heart of the Irish nation sank low.*

* Unfortunate Lally had made many enem.es, chiefly by his furious temper. They were powerful though born in the country. They accused him of in France, while he was comparatively a stranger, misconduct, tyranny, exactions, betraying the interests of the king. At length the outery against him became so strong, that he was arrested, confined in the Bastile, kept there for fifteen months without any specific charge, then brought to trial and kept on trial two years; finally, condemned and executed

of time." From all these causes the author states that the payment out of the treasury in little more than one year was £703,957. "The effects," he continues, "of these exactions were immediately and severely felt by the kingdom. These loans could not be supplied by a poor country without draining the bankers of their cash; three of the principal houses (Clements, Dawsons, and Mitchell) among

ing banks in Dublin discounted no paper, and in fact did no business. Public and private credit that had been drooping since the year 1754, had now fallen prostrate. At a general meeting of the merchants of Dublin in April, 1760, with several members of the House of Commons, the inability of the former to carry on business was universally acknowledged," &c.

Even the English colony in Ireland, though it sympathized with British successes, to which, indeed, it contributed more than its share both in men and in money (meaning the earnings of the subject nation as well as its own), yet had no reason, on the accession of this king, to congratulate itself on its happy and prosperous condition. In truth the island had been well drained of its revenues to meet the increased military ex-them, stopped payment; the three remainpenses of Great Britain; and it had become necessary within the past year (1759) to raise a loan of £150,000, on debentures at four per cent. transferable, in order to pay the increasing arrears on the public establishments. Certain duties were granted to provide for the payment of the interest; and this may be considered as the beginning of the funded debt of Ireland. But in the beginning of 1760, The scarcity of money now employed in the king having again considerably aug- trade or improvements, together with the mented his military forces, Ireland was laws which made it impossible for required to raise another loan of £300,000, Catholics to exercise any lucrative inand a vote of credit passed the Commons dustry in corporate towns, caused more for this object, but at five per cent. Then, and more of the people to be dependent as it was found that the first loan of upon agriculture and sheep-farming alone. £150,000 was not coming in at four per But the lot of these poor agriculturists cent., an additional one per cent. was was hard, for the landed proprietors under offered for that. Thus, when George III, whom they had to live, were an alien and came to the throne, the revenues of Ire- hostile race, having no sympathy with the land were considerably embarrassed and humble people around them. This lamenoppressed. Mr. Hely Hutchinson, a good table circumstance is peculiar to Ireland. authority on this point, in his work on Neither in England nor in Scotland was the "commercial restrictions of Ireland," the case of the peasantry ever rendered states, indeed, that "all Irishmen" felt bitterer than poverty makes it at any rate, they ought to sustain the efforts of Great by differences of race and of religion. In Britain in that crisis, but that the states- Ireland they found themselves face to face, men of the latter country always expected not two classes, but two nations; of which too much; and while they looked upon the one had substantially the power of the great prosperity and wealth of their life and death over the other. When we own country, had not sufficient considera- add to this that one of these two nations tion for the poverty of Ireland. Two or had despoiled the other of those very three sentences taken from this book (the lands which the plundered race were now Commercial Restrictions) give a clear idea glad to cultivate as rackrented tenants; of the financial condition of the island. and also that the dominant nation felt The revenue had decreased in 1755, fell bound to hate the other, both as "rebels" lower in 1756, and still lower in 1757. In who needed only the opportunity to rise the last year the vaunted prosperity of and cut their masters' throats, and as Ireland was changed into misery and Papists who clung to the "damnable distress, the lower classes of the people idolatry" of the mass, we can easily wanted food." Again-"The public ex-understand the difficulty of the "landpenses were greatly increased; the lord and tenant question" in Ireland. pensions on the civil-list, at Lady-day, We have now, in fact, arrived at the era 1759, amounted to £55,497; there was at of the "Whiteboy" organization, which the same time a great augmentation of military expense. Six new regiments and a troop were raised in a very short space Voltaire, who has uniformly praised Lally, defends him in his Louis XV.; and afterwards generously vindicated his memory, and aided his son to procare the decree of the parliament rehabilitating the name of this brave and "murdered " man Louis

XV. himself, after the death of Lally, exclaimed:

They have assassinated him."

was itself the legitimate offspring of the Rapparees, and which in its turn has given birth to "Ribbonism," to the "Terry Alts," and finally to the "Fenians." The principle and meaning of all these various forms of secret Irish organization has been the same at all times, namely, the instinct of resistance to legal oppression by illegal combinations among the

oppressed. And this has been inevitable, The riots of these few forlorn men, were and far from blamable, under the circumstances of the country. All the laws were made not for, but against the great mass of the people; the courts of justice were entirely in the possession of the oppressors; the proscribed race saw only mortal enemies on the bench, enemies in the jury-box, enemies everywhere all around, and were continually made to feel that law and justice were not for them. This of course, in times of distress, threw them back upon the only resource of desperate men, conspiracy, intimidation, and vengeance.

soon construed into a general Popish conspiracy against the Government; because, indeed, the greatest part of them were Papists, at least in name; although it was well known that several Protestant gentlemen and magistrates of considerable influence in that province, did all along, for their own private ends, connive at, if not foment, these tumults, and although we assured by authority, "that the authors of these riots consisted indiscriminately of persons of different persuasions, and that no marks of disaffection to his majesty's person or government appeared in any of these people." This was officially published in the London Gazette.

were

present at the burning down of a cabin, upon the information of one of their associates, who was the very person that with his own hand set fire to it. These men immediately before their execution, publicly declared and took God to witness, that in all these tumults it never did enter into their thoughts to do any thing against the Government."

We have seen by the statements of Mr J. Hely Hutchinson, that in the last year of King George II. "the lower classes of This authentic declaration was groundthe people wanted food." The financial ed on the report which had been made to distress soon made matters still worse, Government by persons of admitted and almost immediately after the ac- loyalty and eminence in the law, sent cession of the new king, the whole island down and commissioned some time before began to be startled by formidable to inquire upon the spot into the real rumours of disturbances and tumults in causes and circumstances of these riots; the south. The immediate cause of the which report was afterwards confirmed by first breaking out of these disorders was the going judges of assize, and by the that many landlords in Munster began to dying protestations of the first five of inclose commons, on which their rack- these unhappy men, who were executed rented tenants had, up to that time, en-in 1762 at Waterford, for having been joyed the right of commonage as some compensation for the extreme severity of the terms on which they held their farms. The inclosure of these commons took away from them the only means they had of lightening their burden and making their hard tenure supportable. In Waterford," in Cork, and in Tipperary, angry crowds assembled, tore down the inclosures, and sometimes maltreated the workmen employed in putting them up. The aggrieved peasantry soon combined their operations, associated together by secret oaths, and these confederates began to be known as Whiteboys. A second cause for the discontents, which soon swelled the society of Whiteboys, was the cruel exactions of the tithe proctors-persons who farmed the tithes of a parish rector, and then screwed the utmost farthing cut of the parishoners, often selling out their crops, their stock, even their beds, to make up the subsidy for clergymen whose ministrations they never attended. Resistance, therefore, to tithes, and the occasional amputation of a tithe proctor's ears, formed a large part of the ings of the Whiteboys.*

A considerable force of regular troops was sent to the south; some savage military execution done; which was again followed by fresh outrages; and the disorder continued unabated for several years.

About the same time when Whiteboys first began to be heard of, various other secret societies sprang up in Ulster. These associations called themselves variclass in the kingdom. If a poor man lodges a complaint against a gentleman, or any animal that chooses to call itself a gentleman, and the justice issues out a summons for his appearance, it is a fixed afront, are in conspiracy against law, to whom are the opand he will infallibly be called out. pressed people to have recourse? They know their situation too well to think of it; they can have no proceed-defence but the means of protection from one gentle

*See Dr. Curry's Review. He was a contemporary. See also Arthur Young's "Tour in Ireland." Young was one of the most observant of travellers, and has examined this whole subject in a very fair spirit. He thus speaks of the state of the people under their landlords:- The execution of the law lies very much in the hands of justices of the peace many of whom are drawn from the most illiberal

Where manners

man against another, who probably protects his vassal as he would the sheep he intends to eat.

The colours of this picture are not charged. To assert that all these cases are common, would be an exaggeration; but to say that an unfeeling landlord will do all this with impunity, is to keep strictly to truth; and what is liberty but a farce and a jest, if its blessings are received as the favour of kindness and humanity, instead of being the inheritance of RIGHT?"-Young's Tour, Dub. Edit. vol. ii., pp. 40, 41

ously Hearts-of-Steel, Oak-Boys, and radical cure, from overlooking the real Peep-of-Day Boys; but their members cause of disease, which in fact lay in were all Protestants; and their grievances themselves, and not in the wretches they and objects were in part connected with doomed to the gallows. Let them change landlord oppression and clerical exaction, their own conduct entirely, and the poor partly with the alleged injustice of the will not long riot. Treat them like employers of manufacturing labour. men who onght to be as free as yourThese latter disturbances were soon over, selves: put an end to that system of because first the grievances were not so religious persecution which for seventy deep-seated, and next because the parties years has divided the kingdom against on the two sides being mainly of the same itself; in these two circumstances lies the race and religion, the enmity and exas- cure of insurrection, perform them comperation were never so fierce, and were pletely, and you will have an affectionate far more easily appeased. While all these poor, instead of oppressed and discontented last-named conspiracies speedily dis- vassals." appeared, Whiteboyism remained, and under one form or another must remain till English domination in Ireland shall be abolished. The honest English tourist, Mr Young, makes some reflections on these societies which show a most remarkable spirit of fairness, for an Englishman-and though a Catholic would no more writing about Ireland:

It will be seen in the sequel how little chance these indignant and well-meant remonstrances had of meeting with attention.

The troubles in Ulster, though they were quite unconnected with Whiteboyism

have been admitted into a Heart-of-Steel "Consequences have flowed from these lodge than into a vestry meeting- were yet oppressions which ought long ago to have produced by hardship and oppression. put a stop to them. In England we have The Presbyterians of the north were now, heard much of Whiteboys, Steel-Boys, as well as the Catholics, suffering not only Oak-Boys, Peep-of-Day-Boys, etc. But by the Test Act and the tithes, but also by these various insurgents are not to be con- the difficulty of earning an honest livelifounded, for they are very different. hood, owing to the scarcity of money and The proper distinction in the discontents the heavy taxation to meet the demands of the people is into Protestant and Cath- of Government. Emigration to America, olic. All but the Whiteboys are among therefore, continued from the northern the manufacturing Protestants in the seaports; and many active and energetic north: the Whiteboys, Catholic labourers families were every season seeking a new in the south. From the best intelligence home beyond the Atlantic. It was now I could gain, the riots of the manufac- that the fathers of Andrew Jackson, of turers had no other foundation, but such John C. Calhoun, of James Buchanan, variations in the manufacture as all and other eminent American statesmen, fabrics experience, and which they had established themselves in various parts of themselves known and submitted to before. the colonies. These exiles were the men The case, however, was different with the who formed the " Pennyslvania Line" in Whiteboys, who being labouring Catholics the revolutionary war, and had the satismet with all those oppressions I have de- faction of contributing powerfully to scribed, and would probably have con- destroy in America that relentless British tinued in full submission had not very domination which had made their Irish severe treatment in respect of tithes, homes untenable. While the exiled united with a great speculative rise of Catholics on the European continent rents about the same time, blown up the were eager to encounter the English flame of resistance; the atrocious acts power upon any field, those other Protesthey were guilty of made them the object tant exiles in America were ardently enof general indignation; acts were passed gaged in the task of uprooting it in that for their punishment, which seemed cal- hemisphere. Yet it is a strange and sad culated for the meridian of Barbary; this reflection, that although their cause and arose to such a height, that by one they their grievances, while at home, where were to be hanged under circumstances very similar, if not identical, they never without the common formalities of a could bring themselves to combine totrial, which though repealed by the follow-gether there against their common enemy ing session marks the spirit of punishment; while others remain yet the law of the land, that would, if executed, tend more to raise than quell an insurrection. From all which it is manifest that the gentlemen of Ireland never thought of a

and oppressor. It must be stated, however, without hesitation, that this was exclusively the fault of the Protestant dissenters. They hated Popery and Papists even more intensely than did the English colonists of the Anglican church: they had

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