THE UNION AND THE CATHOLICS

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whose leaders are now the popular heroes of Ireland. Whatever evils the Union may have averted, whatever benefits it may have bestowed, it certainly cannot be said to have made Ireland a loyal country. Among its opponents were many of the most loyal men in Ireland; and Lord Charlemont, who died shortly before the measure was consummated, summed up the feelings of many in the emphatic sentence with which he protested against it. It would more than any other measure,' he said, 'contribute to the separation of two countries, the perpetual connection of which is one of the warmest wishes of my heart.'

There can be little doubt that this was mainly due to the manner in which the Catholic question was treated. The first great question before the English ministers was whether the admission of Catholics to the Imperial Parliament should be made a part of the Act of Union. Cornwallis in Ireland, and Dundas in England, greatly desired it; Cornwallis invariably maintained that the ultimate success of the Union depended mainly upon the speedy concession of Catholic Emancipation, and Canning had advised Pitt to postpone the Union scheme until a period in which he could combine it with that measure. Of the wishes of Pitt there could be little doubt, but the difficulties before him were insuperable. Clare, who was the strongest of the Irish supporters of the Union, was also the bitterest opponent of Catholic Emancipation, and he commanded many votes in both Houses. He was quite aware that the ministers began the Union campaign full of 'Popish projects,' but he believed that he had induced them definitely to abandon them. Though their most powerful supporter, he appears to have been kept altogether in the dark about the negotiations into which they entered with the Catholic prelates,1 and he himself valued the Union

'Lord Holland says: Lord Hobart afterwards assured me that both

largely as a means of defeating altogether the hopes of the Catholics. The King was in a somewhat similar position. He had long since announced his inexorable hostility to the admission of Catholics to Parliament, placing his opposition on the highest moral grounds and declaring that he could not consent to such a measure without breaking his Coronation Oath.

At the same time the ministers, while anxious not to alienate the anti-Catholic followers of Clare, were sincerely desirous of extending constitutional privileges to the Catholics. Cornwallis warned them that in the existing state of Ireland a strenuous Catholic opposition would make it impossible to carry the Union, and they recognised that the success of the Union depended upon its bringing with it some boon that might be sufficiently great to counteract in some measure its extreme unpopularity. The Scotch Union had thrown open to Scotchmen the whole trade of the English Colonies in America from which they had before been excluded; had relieved an intense poverty, and brought with it a great and speedy advance of commercial prosperity. But this colonial trade had been thrown open to Irishmen in 1779, and the last decades of the Irish Parliament had been marked by great and incontestable and rapidly increasing material prosperity. The establishment of free trade between Great Britain and Ireland by the Union was a real boon, but it was not sufficiently great or sufficiently calculated to strike the imagination, nor did it bring any such immediate he and Lord Clare had been deceived by Mr. Pitt, and that he would have voted against the Union had he suspected at the time that it was connected with any project of extending the concessions already made to the Irish Catholics. The present Lord Clare's report of his father's views of the whole matter tallies with this account of the transaction.'-Memoirs of the Whig Party, i. 162. See, too, on the indignation of Lord Clare at what he called the 'deception' that was practised on him, the Castlereagh Correspondence, iv. 47, 50.

NEGOTIATIONS WITH THE BISHOPS

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increase of wealth as to counteract the evil effects of the measure. The great Catholic concessions alone could have done this, and on the conduct of the ministers on this momentous occasion the future loyalty of the Irish Catholics largely depended.

Lord Castlereagh entered into confidential relations with the Catholic bishops at the very beginning of 1799, with the object of securing their support for the Union. The first inducement he put forward was that, whatever postponement there might be of the political claims of the Catholic laity, the Government desired without delay to make an independent provision for the Catholic priesthood under regulations and safeguards such as the bishops would accept as compatible with their doctrines, discipline, and influence.

This step proved perfectly successful, and it at once secured the allegiance of the Catholic episcopacy to the Union. At a meeting which was held at Maynooth in the middle of January, the four archbishops and the six senior Catholic bishops agreed to accept with gratitude the payment of the priests, and at the same time to grant the Government a right of veto over all future episcopal appointments as a guarantee of their loyalty. In the next generation the Catholic episcopacy took a directly opposite course, and the veto controversy greatly retarded Catholic Emancipation, but it should never be forgotten that in January 1799 the bishops by a vote, which was accepted as the unanimous voice of the Irish episcopacy, agreed to the Government terms, and agreed also that the nomination of all parish priests with a certificate that they had taken the oath of allegiance should be regularly certified to the Government. The endowment of the priests was intended to correspond with the increase of the Regium Donum to the Presbyterian ministers, and both measures were

part of the Union campaign. If these measures had been carried out, the attitude of the Catholic clergy towards England would probably have been materially modified.

The negotiations about the political claims of the Catholics were more intricate and more prolonged. The ministers agreed that it was impossible to carry Catholic Emancipation concurrently with the Union, and the bishops, to whom they confided their conclusion, fully acquiesced in the postponement. On two points the Government announced a clear and definite decision. One was that they were resolved inexorably, and for all future time, and by all the means in their power, to oppose the admission of Catholics into a separate Irish Parliament. With the enormous influence over that Parliament which they possessed, this amounted to an absolute proscription, from which the Catholics could only escape by a separation from England or a Legislative Union. The other point was that they would not permit any clause to be inserted in the Act of Union which might be inconsistent with the future admission of Catholics into the Imperial Parliament. The oaths excluding Catholics were maintained, but by the fourth Article of the Union they were retained only until the Parliament of the United Kingdom shall otherwise provide.'

At the same time the more important Government pronouncements, both in England and Ireland, insisted upon the argument that the Union would make an extension of constitutional rights to the Catholics possible without endangering the Irish Protestant Establishment. It was found, however, after the defeat of the Union measure in 1799, that something more than generalities was required. The opposition of Dublin, of the large majority of county members, and of the bulk of the

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Protestants alarmed Lord Castlereagh, and there were clear signs that Foster and some of the other opponents of Catholic Emancipation were now ready to make overtures to the Catholics, offering to support their claims if they would only heartily assist them in defeating the Union. Castlereagh had no doubt that the Catholics would be almost unanimously against the Union if only they believed that it was in the will and power of Foster and the Opposition to admit them into the Irish Parliament. He also stated to the English Cabinet the opinion of the Irish Government that circumstanced as the parliamentary interests and the Protestant feelings then were, the measure could not be carried if the Catholics were embarked in an active opposition to it, and that their opposition would be unanimous and zealous if they had reason to suppose that the sentiments of ministers would remain unchanged in respect to their exclusion, while the measure of Union in itself might give them additional means of disappointing their hopes.' Up to the present, he said, the leading Catholics had failed in spite of many efforts to bring Government to a clear explanation about the future influence of the Union upon their cause, and were in consequence, with some exceptions, either neutral or hostile, the former entertaining hopes, but not inclining to support decidedly without some encouragement from Government; the latter entirely hostile, from a persuasion that it would so strengthen the Protestant interest as to perpetuate their exclusion.' At the same time the friends of the Government by flattering the hopes of the Catholics had produced some favourable impression in Cork, Tipperary, and Galway.1

Under these circumstances, in the autumn of 1799 Lord Cornwallis directed Castlereagh, who was then in

1 Castlereagh Correspondence, iv. 8–12.