struggle for Pitt's Government, it is true, was strong as few Governments have been. Pitt himself, as no man not blinded by passion or hatred can doubt, was then and through the remainder of his life the supporter of Catholic Emancipation. But Government then, as Government now, depended on the force of public opinion, and public opinion was at that time becoming uncontrollable. It is with diffidence that one dissents from Mr Lecky on a point involving intimate and wide knowledge of the period he has made his own; but I think he greatly underrates the bitterness that was felt between Protestant and Catholic in Ireland previously to Lord Fitzwilliam's failure, and greatly overrates the extent to which the subsequent hatred that bore fruit in the Rebellion was due to that failure. 1 Froude, English in Ireland, iii. 42. moreland's view. It is to be remembered that we have not yet Mr Lecky's considered judgment on the point. His earlier work, The Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland,' deals with the question; but the world is still waiting for the volumes of his History which shall cover that much-disputed period. Without entering on the discussion of facts which would be necessary for a full treatment of the question, it may be enough at present to quote two or three testimonies from different sides. In the first place, Westmoreland, the Viceroy, the opponent of all emancipation, writes to Dundas in the beginning of 1792: "Instead of the relaxation of the penal laws having tended to unite Protestants and Catholics, it has increased the apprehension and hatred."1 As to the fact of this untoward Mr Froude warmly accepts Lord West result, Henry Grattan, in his Life of his father, seems agreed, and is only concerned to throw the whole blame on Lord Westmoreland and the French Revolution. Mitchell, the Nationalist historian, is of the same mind. Describing the effects of the Act of 1793, he says: "The limited and grudging measure for the relief of the Catholics had by no means had the effect of destroying the odius distinctions that had so long divided Irishmen of different religious persuasions. The law indeed was changed, but the insolent and exclusive spirit that had inspired the penal code, the very marked and offensive disabilities which still left the Catholic people in a condition of legal inferiority, gave the Ascendancy' ample opportunity to make them feel daily and hourly that they were still an oppressed race. In every part of the kingdom continual efforts were made to traduce and vilify the whole Catholic body, in order to defeat and annul the measures which the Legislature had passed in their favour. Never, perhaps, in all the history of the country, had the virulent malignity of the bigots been so busy in charging upon Catholics all manner of evil principles and practices. 1 second or eighth of Queen Anne; after the strange adventure of the grand jury, and after Parliament had listened to the Sovereign pleading for the after all this that such a grudging emancipation of his subjects, it was and discontent was expressed as must justly have alarmed, as it did extremely alarm, the whole Catholic body; and I remember but one period of my life (I mean the savage period between 1761 and 1767) in which they have been more harshly or contumeliously treated than since the last partial enlargement. And thus I am convinced it will be by paroxysms, as long as any stigma remains on them, and whilst they are considered as no better than half citizens." Burke therefore argues in favour of Lord Fitzwilliam's policy, but his statements are directly opposed to Mr Lecky's view that "the rancour which at present (1871) exists between the members of the two creeds seems then (1793) to have been almost unknown, and the real obstacle to emancipation was not the feelings of the people but the policy of the Government. 112 One thing at any rate is certain, that Lord Fitzwilliam (as Lord Brabourne has pointed out) fell undefended; and that of his own Whig friends in the Cabinet, not one was found to justify his course. After Lord Fitzwilliam's return the clouds grew thicker over both countries. The victories of France continued, and the brilliant Italian campaign of Buonaparte of 1796 made him the hero of the army. The United Irishmen, a revolutionary Society founded in 1791 by Wolfe Tone, turned to France for aid, and received full encouragement there. In July 1796 the Directory, under the influence of Wolfe Tone, resolved on an invasion of Ireland. The news quickly reached the Irish 2 Lecky, Leaders of Opinion, p,136 . Government, who were able, by the arrest of Keogh, Neilson, Russell, and others of the leaders on whom Wolfe Tone had relicd, to prevent concert between the invaders and the disaffected. In December a most formidable expedition under Hoche, one of the ablest French generals, set sail from Brest. It carried 15,000 troops, and artillery and arms for 45,000. By a wonderful succession of happy chances, the invasion miscarried completely. Through bad seamanship the fleet parted company the first night. Hoche and his staff were separated from the rest and never reached Ireland at all. The main part of the fleet reached Bantry Bay in safety; but fortunately for England, they were under Grouchy, the second in command to Hoche, who then, as twenty years after at Waterloo, ruined French hopes by his blunder. He hesitated and delayed. Not a man was landed. The weather became more and more tempestuous, till at length the fleet was fairly blown out to sea. They returned to France defeated by the weather, without having seen a single English ship of war either going or returning. his own flag-ship the Venerable, and the Adamant, a fifty-gun ship. With glorious audacity he anchored his two ships in the channel, which was so narrow that only a single vessel could pass out at a time. By numerous signals to seaward, he deluded De Winter into the belief that a large squadron was lying off shore, and thus for several weeks maintained with two ships a blockade of the whole Dutch fleet. By July a force of sixteen sail of the line, with ten frigates, and 15,000 troops with eighty guns, was lying ready at the Texel, but by this time the British fleet was also ready for service. Again the weather stood our friend. For two months the fleet was delayed by foul winds, until their supplies were exhausted. When at last, in October, the Dutch fleet put to sea, it was met by Duncan at Camperdown with a nearly equal force. After a desperate and bloody fight, ten Dutch ships of the line and two frigates were captured, and there was an end of all danger from Holland. Meanwhile, however, the victories and the bribes of Buonaparte had reduced Austria to peace, and within a week after In the following year the country Camperdown the Treaty of Campo was in even greater danger. The Formio left us without a single British cause was at its nadir. ally. On the very day on which The fleet our only efficient de- the treaty was signed, a decree fence was for three months in- was issued by the Directory for capacitated by successive mutin- the formation of an "army of ies, the outcome of mismanage- England" at Boulogne, under ment and neglect, whose fatuity General Buonaparte. The hopes almost amounted to treason. of the United Irishmen reached Meanwhile the Dutch, who were their highest pitch. It is now in alliance with the French, were known that this army was, probthrowing their whole national ably from the first, intended for strength into the preparations for other purposes, but both Irish and an invasion of Ireland on an English were completely hoodequally large scale. Duncan, who winked by Buonaparte. The most was blockading the Dutch fleet in desperate efforts were made on the Texel, was deserted by succes- the one hand to welcome, on the sive ships, till he was left with only other to repel, the expected in vasion. In this way passed the winter of 1797 and spring of 1798; but all this time matters in Ireland had been going from bad to worse. Catholic emancipation roused Protestant bitterness and Protestant oppression. Protestant cruelty roused Catholic retaliation, In the north, the strife between Orange boys or Peep-of-day boys (so called from their visiting Catholic houses at peep of day to search for arms) and the Catholic defenders almost reached the magnitude of a war. Throughout Ireland the Protestants felt their weakness; and, as has happened since in India and Jamaica, as they became terrified they became cruel. The Irish Parliament entirely shared this feeling, and passed act after act of ever-increasing severity against the protest of ever-diminishing minorities, till Grattan and the constitutional opposition seceded in despair. The United Irishmen, whose leaders had long been Republican and Separatist, took full advantage of the opportunity to foment disaffection and prepare for invasion. Then (as always in Irish history), traitors were not wanting to betray the schemes of their friends to the Government, who were aware of the magnitude of the danger they had to meet from sedition at home and invasion from abroad, though not in a position to prove in the law courts what they knew from informers. Militia had been raised in the prospect of invasion, yeomanry had been embodied in the course of a few weeks to the number of nearly 30,000 men (Froude, iii. 178). These were necessarily Protestant, and for the most part Orangemen of the most bigoted and ferocious description. The Irish Government was unable to maintain discipline Officers were over these forces. as bad as men. They became, as Abercromby, the Commander-in chief, publicly declared in a general order, and as Cornwallis, after the experience of the Rebellion and of Castlebar confirmed, "a terror to every one except their enemies "; and by their ravages, rapes, and murders, drove the peasantry wholesale into the arms of the United Irishmen. Providentially the threatened invasions of 1796 and 1797 miscarried by the weather without the Irish army being called on to strike a blow, and that of 1798 turned out to be a mere feint. During this period Camden had not, independently of the yeomanry, 10,000 men on whom he could rely. If any of the three expeditions had succeeded in landing in one of the more disaffected parts of the island, there can be no reasonable doubt but that the forces of the Crown would have proved insufficient to repel the attack. Neither would it have been an invasion by a common foe. Abhorrence of French principles was only equalled by fear of the outrages of French revolutionary armies. Under these circumstances the sense of insecurity and terror which filled the minds of all friends of the connection, explains-little as it justifies—the Protestant outrages of these years. As the same time, the Catholic revulsion against the dragoonings, the free quarterings, the plunderings, the murders of undisciplined troops, goes far to account for the ferocity of the rebellion of 1798. In the spring of 1798 matters came to a climax. The leaders of the United Irishmen understood the necessity of foreign aid, and desired to defer a rising until the French were in the country. They were, however, betrayed by one of their own number, and arrested at a meeting on the 12th March, when papers containing full evidence of their plans were seized. The most violent measures of repression, almost inevitable by a terrified minority-free quarterings, house-burnings, torturings even-were adopted to discover arms and plots. Floggings, half-hangings, picketings pitch-cappings, made the name of loyalist odious in all generous minds. In the end of May overt rebellion broke out. Arrangements had been made for a simultaneous rising through Leinster and Ulster, where the Presbyterians were almost as disaffected as the Catholics of Leinster. It broke out in various parts of Leinster, but was suppressed with ease, except in Wexford, where one or two successes at the beginning made the insurrection swell to enormous dimensions. Bloody revenge was speedily taken for Protestant oppression, and a war of extermination and massacre commenced, in which the two sides rivalled one another in deeds of horror. In the judgment of Mr Plunket, the impartial biographer of his grandfather, the first Lord Plunket, the only difference between the parties was that while the loyalists were more brutal in their outrages on women, the rebels were more wholesale in their massacres of men.1 The rising in Ulster was delayed for a fortnight by the arrest of some of their leaders. By that time the anti-Protestant character of the insurrection in the south had declared itself. The Presbyterians of the north, who were republican in feeling, but who hated Popery even more strongly than the British connection, could not fight heartily in such an alliance, and the rising was easily suppressed. soldier that Immediately on the outbreak of the insurrection, the Government appointed as Lord Lieutenant Lord Cornwallis, the most distinguished general and most large-minded and statesman-like Britain possessed. He reached Ireland on the 20th June, one day before the Wexford insurrection was finished by the battle of Vinegar Hill. He found the insurrection crushed, and that his whole work was to extinguish the smouldering embers, to bring in an amnesty, and to repress the savage spirit of vengeance roused by the desperate struggle for life through which the ruling party had just passed. His language on the subject has often been quoted; but the best idea of his position is perhaps given by the following letter, written a month after he reached Ireland, to a private and intimate friend: "DUBLIN CASTLE, July 24, 1798. declining, and the principal leaders stipulation for their lives only; but the whole country is in such a state, that I feel frightened and ashamed whenever I consider that I am looked upon as being at the head of it. Except in the instances of the six state trials that are going on here, there is no law either in town or in Kildare have surrendered with a country but martial law, and you know enough of that to see all the horrors of it, even in the best administration of it; judge then how it must be, conducted by Irishmen heated by passion and revenge. But all this is trifling compared to the numberless murders that are hourly committed by our people without any process or examination whatever. The yeomanry are in the style of the Loyalists in America, only much more 1 Life of Lord Plunket, i. p. 72. |