Part 3 (2/2)

The proposal to abolish the religious test in the case of Members of Parliament was, however, defeated.

Looking back, with the light of later history to aid us, it is interesting to see how much more correct were Lord Clare's predictions of the future than Grattan's. Grattan (as I have already explained), taking his ideas from his lay friends among the cultured cla.s.ses, and seeing the decline of the Papal influence on the continent, considered that anyone who regarded Popery as a political influence of the future totally misunderstood the principles which then governed human action; for controverted points of religion (such as belief in the Real Presence) had ceased to be a principle of human action. He maintained that the cause of the Pope, as a political force, was as dead as that of the Stuarts; that priestcraft was a superannuated folly; and that in Ireland a new political religion had arisen, superseding all influence of priest and parson, and burying for ever theological discord in the love of civil and religious liberty. Clare, who was not only a shrewder observer but a much more deeply read man, realized that in order to find out what would guide the Roman Catholic Church in the future one must look not at the pa.s.sing opinions of laymen but at the const.i.tution of the Church; he foresaw that if the artificial supports which maintained the Protestant ascendancy were removed, the mere force of numbers would bring about a Roman Catholic ascendancy; and in enumerating the results of that he even said that the time would come when the Church would decide on all questions as to marriage.

In order to show how far Lord Clare's expectations have been verified, I will quote, not the words of an Orange speaker or writer, but of an eminent Roman Catholic, the Rev. J.T. McNicholas, O.P., in his recently published book on ”The New Marriage Legislation” which, being issued with an _Imprimatur_, will be received by all parties as a work of authority. He says:--

”Many Protestants may think the Church presumptuous in decreeing their marriages valid or invalid according as they have or have not complied with certain conditions. As the Church cannot err, neither can she be presumptuous. She alone is judge of the extent of her power. Anyone validly baptised, either in the Church or among heretics, becomes thereby a subject of the Roman Catholic Church.”

But whilst politicians were amusing themselves with fervid but useless oratory in Parliament, stirring events were taking place elsewhere.

To trace in these pages even a bare outline of the main incidents of those terrible years is impossible; and yet without doing so it is not easy to obtain a correct view of the tangled skein of Irish politics at the time. In studying any history of the period, we cannot but be struck by observing on the one hand how completely in some respects circ.u.mstances and ideas have changed since then; it is hard to realize that Ulster was for a time the scene of wild disorder--a.s.sa.s.sination, arson, burglary and every form of outrage--brought about mainly by a society which claimed to be, and to a certain extent was, formed by a union of the Presbyterian and Roman Catholic parties--whilst the south and west remained fairly orderly and loyal. And yet on the other hand we find many of the phenomena which have been characteristic of later periods of Irish political agitation, already flouris.h.i.+ng. Boycotting existed in fact, though the name was not yet invented; also nocturnal raids for arms, the sacking of lonely farmhouses, the intimidation of witnesses and the mutilation of cattle. Again, we see all through the history of Irish secret societies that their organization has been so splendid that the ordinary law has been powerless against them; for witnesses will not give evidence and juries will not convict if they know that to do so will mean certain ruin and probable death; and yet those same societies have always possessed one element of weakness: however terrible their oaths of secrecy have been, the Government have never had the slightest difficulty in finding out, through their confidential agents, everything that has taken place at their meetings, and what their projects are.

As early as 1785 there had been two societies carrying on something like civil war on a small scale in the north. How they originated, is a matter of dispute; but at any rate before they had long been in existence, the religious element became supreme--as it does sooner or later in every Irish movement; whatever temporary alliances may be formed for other reasons, religion always ultimately becomes the line of cleavage. In this case, the ”Peep of Day Boys” were Protestants, the ”Defenders” Roman Catholic. Some of the outrages committed by the Defenders were too horrible to put in print; many Roman Catholic families fled the country on account of the treatment which they received from the Peep of Day Boys, and took refuge among their co-religionists in the south.

But now a greater crisis was at hand. The terrible upheaval of the French Revolution was shaking European society to its foundation. The teaching of Paine and Voltaire had borne fruit; the wildest socialism was being preached in every land. Ulster had shown sympathy with Republican ideas at the time of the American War of Independence; and now a large number of the Presbyterians of Belfast eagerly accepted the doctrines of Jacobinism. Nothing can sound more charmingly innocent than the objects of the United Irish Society as put forward publicly in 1791; the members solemnly and religiously pledged themselves to use all their influence to obtain an impartial and adequate representation of the Irish nation in Parliament; and as a means to this end to endeavour to secure the co-operation of Irishmen of all religious persuasions. Some writers have tried to make out that if the Relief Act of 1793 had been extended in 1795 by another Act enabling Roman Catholics to become Members of Parliament; and if a Reform Bill had been pa.s.sed making the House of Commons really representative, the society would never have been anything but a perfectly legal and harmless a.s.sociation. Of course it is always possible to suggest what might have been; but in this case it is far more probable that if Parliament had been so reformed as to be a fair reflex of the opinion of the country, it would immediately have pa.s.sed a resolution declaring Ireland a Republic and forming an alliance with France; for whatever objects were stated in public, the real guiding spirits of the United Irish Society from the beginning (as of other societies of a later date with equally innocent names) were ardent republicans, who joined the society in order to further those views; it is absurd to suggest that men who were actually in correspondence with the leaders of the Directory and were trying to bring about an invasion from France in order to aid them in establis.h.i.+ng a Republic on Jacobin lines would have been deterred by the pa.s.sing of a Bill making it lawful for Roman Catholics to sit in Parliament. Nor again is it reasonable to contend that earnest-minded Roman Catholics would, in consequence of the failure of such a Bill to become law, have rebelled against a Government under which they were able to exercise their religion in peace and which was at that moment founding and endowing a College for the training of candidates for the priesthood, in favour of one which had confiscated the seminaries and was sending the priests to the guillotine. The fact seems to have been that the society was formed by Presbyterians, for political reasons; they tried to get the Roman Catholics to join them, but the lower cla.s.s Roman Catholics cared very little about seats in Parliament; so the founders of the society cleverly added abolition of t.i.thes and taxes, and reduction of rents, to their original programme; this drew in numbers of Roman Catholics, whose principles were really the very ant.i.thesis of Jacobinism.

It is a fair instance of the confusion which has always reigned throughout Irish politics, that after the Relief Act of 1793 had been pa.s.sed, the Catholic Committee expressed their jubilation by voting 2,000 for a statue to the King, and presenting a gold medal to their Secretary, Wolfe Tone, who was at that moment scheming to set up a Jacobin Republic.

This celebrated man, Wolfe Tone, was not unlike many others who have posed as Irish patriots. Hating the very name of England, he schemed to get one appointment after another from the English Government--at one time seeking to be put in command of a filibustering expedition to raid the towns of South America, at another time trying for a post in India; hating the Pope and the priests, he acted as Secretary to the Catholic Committee; then hating Grattan and the Irish Parliament and everything to say to it, he showed his patriotism by devoting his energies to trying to persuade the French Republican Government to invade Ireland.

On the 21st of September, 1795, an incident occurred which, though apparently trivial at the time, was destined to be of great historical importance. Ulster had now for some time been in a state bordering on anarchy; not only were the secret societies constantly at war, but marauding bands, pretending to belong to one or other of the societies, were ravis.h.i.+ng the country. Something like a pitched battle was fought between the Protestants and the Defenders, in which the Defenders, although they were the stronger party and made the attack, were utterly routed. In the evening, the victors agreed to form themselves into a society which should bear the name of William of Orange. There had previously been some societies called by that name; but this was the foundation of the Orange Society of the present day.

The oath which at first was taken by every member of the society was to defend the king and his heirs so long as he or they support the Protestant ascendancy. (This conditional form of oath of allegiance has long since been abolished.) It was industriously circulated by the United Irishmen that the actual words of the oath were: ”I will be true to the King and Government and I will exterminate as far as I am able the Catholics of Ireland.” There is no evidence, however, that any words of the kind ever formed part of an oath prescribed by the Orange Society; and those who make the statement now must be aware that they are repeating a calumny.

After this time, the quarrel gradually tended more and more to become a religious one; the Peep of Day Boys becoming merged in the Orange Society, and the Protestants slowly withdrawing from the United Irish Society; on the other hand, the Defenders ultimately coalesced with the United Irishmen and thus, by an illogical combination of inconsistent forces, formed the party which brought about the terrible rebellion.

The close of the year 1796 was one of the most critical moments in the history of England. On the continent the power of republican France under the genius of Napoleon and his generals was sweeping all before it. England was in a state of bankruptcy, and almost as completely isolated as she had been in the time of Elizabeth. Wolfe Tone and his Irish plotters saw their opportunity as clearly as their predecessors had in the times of Edward Bruce and Philip II. They laid a statement of the condition of Ireland before the French Government which, though as full of exaggerations as most things in Irish history, was sufficiently based on fact to lead the French Government to believe that if a French force were landed in Ireland, the Irishmen in the British Army and Navy would mutiny, the Yeomen would join the French, and the whole of the North of Ireland would rise in rebellion.

Accordingly a French fleet of forty-three sail, carrying about 15,000 troops, sailed from Brest for Bantry Bay. No human power could have prevented their landing; and had they done so, they could have marched to Cork and seized the town without any difficulty; the United Irishmen would have risen, and the whole country might have been theirs. But the same power which saved England from the Armada of Catholic Spain 200 years before now s.h.i.+elded her from the invasion of republican France. Storms and fogs wrought havoc throughout the French fleet. In less than a month from the time of their starting, Wolfe Tone and the shattered remains of the invading force were back at Brest, without having succeeded in landing a single man on the Irish sh.o.r.e.

Had this projected invasion taken place fifty years before, amongst the French troops would have been the Irish brigade, who were always yearning for the opportunity of making an attack on their native land.

But half a century had caused strange changes; the Irish brigade had fallen with the collapse of the French monarchy; and some of the few survivors were now actually serving under King George III.

It was a remarkable fact that no one in the neighbourhood of Bantry showed the slightest sympathy with the Frenchmen. The few resident gentry, the moment the danger was evident, called together the yeomanry and organized their tenantry to oppose the foe--though the utmost they could have done would have been to delay the progress of the invaders for a little at the cost of their own lives; and the peasantry did all in their power to support their efforts.

If it is possible to a.n.a.lyse the state of political feeling at this time, we may say that first there was a very limited number of thoughtful men who saw that after the Acts of 1782 and 1793 either separation or union was inevitable, and who consequently opposed all idea of parliamentary reform, because they thought it would tend to separation and make union more difficult. A second party (a leading member of which was Charlemont) approved of the existing state of things, and believed that it could be continued; a third (of which Grattan was one) fondly imagined that all would go smoothly if only a Catholic Relief Bill and a Reform Bill were carried, and so directed all their efforts towards those objects; and a fourth believed that no reform would be granted without pressure, and so were ready even to work up a rebellion in order to obtain it; but that was a very small party at best, and was soon carried away by the whirlwind of those revolutionists who cared nothing about the Parliament then sitting in Dublin, or about any other possible Parliament which might own allegiance to the King of England, for their real aim was to sever Ireland from England altogether and establish a separate republic. As Wolfe Tone wrote: ”To break the connection with England and to a.s.sert the independence of my country were my objects.”

It is this party that is represented by the Nationalists of to-day, except that when they look for foreign aid, their hopes lie in the direction of Germany rather than France. I know that this remark may call forth a storm of denials from those who judge by the speeches which Nationalist leaders have made in England when trying to win the Radical vote, or in the Colonies when aiming at getting money from people who had not studied the question. But I judge not by speeches such as those, but by statements continually put forward by political writers and orators when they have cast off the mask and are addressing their sympathizers in Ireland and America:--

”The Nationalists of Ireland stand for the complete independence of Ireland, and they stand for nothing else. In the English Empire they have no part or lot, and they wish to have no part or lot. We stand for the Irish nation, free and independent and outside the English Empire.”--(_Irish Freedom_.)

”Our aim is the establishment of an Irish Republic, for the simple and sole reason that no other ending of our quarrel with England could be either adequate or final. This is the one central and vital point of agreement among all who are worthy of the name of Irish Nationalists--that Ireland is a separate nation--separate in thought, mind, in ideals and outlooks. Come what may, we work for Ireland as separate from England as Germany is separate.”--(Ib.)

”Year by year the pilgrimage to the grave of Theobald Wolfe Tone grows more significant of the rising tide of militant and uncompromising Nationalism, more significant of the fact that Young Ireland has turned away from the false thing that has pa.s.sed for patriotism, and has begun to reverence only the men and the things and the memories that stand for Ireland an independent nation. Paying tribute to the memory of men like Tone, lifting up the language of Ireland from the mire, linking up the present with the old days of true patriotic endeavour--these are the doings that will eventually bring our land from the mazes of humbug into the clear dawn that heralds Nationhood.”--(_The Leinster Leader_.)

”The object aimed at by the advanced National party is the recovery of Ireland's national independence and the severance of all political connection with England.”--(_J. Devoy_.)

”In the better days that are approaching, the soil of Ireland will be populated by a race of Irishmen free and happy and thriving, owning no master under the Almighty, and owning no flag but the green flag of an independent Irish nation.”--(_W.

O'Brien, M.P._)

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