This series has eight easy 5-minute installments. This first installment: The Importance of O’Connell.
Introduction
Scarcely less important in English history than the passage of the Reform Bill of 1832 was that of the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829. This was an act repealing all laws that disqualified Roman Catholics from the enjoyment of civil rights and free disposal of property — the removal of their civil and political disabilities.
As early as 1793 a Catholic relief bill was passed by Parliament. It partially removed the disabilities under which Catholics had lain, but was far from being satisfactory to them, and did not prevent the Irish Catholics from taking part in the rising of 1798. The legislative union of Ireland with Great Britain (1800) left the demand of Catholics to be admitted to the common rights of citizens still ungranted. Pitt, as prime minister, had promised that Catholic emancipation should follow the union, but was prevented by King George III from redeeming the pledge.
The agitation for Catholic emancipation continued for some years without effectual combination for securing it. In Daniel O’Connell, sometimes called the “Liberator,” born in County Kerry, in 1775, Ireland and the Catholic cause found a new and powerful advocate. While still a young man he appears to have formed the purpose of leading a fresh endeavor for the attainment of his country’s liberties. By 1811 he had established his leadership of the movement for Catholic emancipation. The Relief Bill, as the Catholic Emancipation Act is also called, was introduced in the House of Commons, under sanction of Wellington the prime minister, by Sir Robert Peel, March 5, 1829. It passed both Houses of Parliament and received the royal assent April 13th.
Meanwhile O’Connell had been elected to Parliament for Clare in 1828, but when he appeared, to take his seat, the following year, it was denied him on account of his refusal to subscribe to the Test Act, which, as well as the Corporation Act, required a virtual renunciation of Catholicism. In 1830, after the passage of the Catholic Emancipation Bill, removing the civil disabilities of Roman Catholics, O’Connell, who in 1829 was again returned for Clare, took his seat. The remainder of his life was devoted chiefly to agitation for repeal of the union between Ireland and Great Britain.
Besides the estimates of O’Connell and his work, to which the names of Gladstone and Lecky give the weight of their authority, the reader, it is believed, will welcome, in O’Connell’s letter to Sugrue, the “Liberator’s” own note of jubilation for the victory won.
The selections are from:
- an article in Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 16 by William E. Gladstone published in 1905.
- Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland by William E.H. Lecky published in 1871.
- Correspondence by Daniel O’Connell.
For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.
Summary of daily installments:
William E. Gladstone’s installments: | 1.2 |
William E.H. Lecky’s installments: | 6.5 |
Daniel O’Connell’s installments: | .3 |
Total installments: | 8 |
We begin with William E. Gladstone (1809-1898). He was the great liberal Prime Minister of Great Britain.
Time: 1829
O’Connell was, and was felt to be, not a name only, but a power. He had, in 1828–1829, encountered the victor of the Peninsula and of Waterloo on the battle-ground of the higher politics which lie truly inter a pices and had defeated him, and obtained from his own lips the avowal of his defeat.
Moreover, O’Connell was a champion of whom it might emphatically be said, that alone he did it. True, he had a people behind him; but a people in the narrower, rather than in the wider, sense; the masses only, not the masses with the classes. The Irish aristocracy were not indeed then banded together, as they are now, in the cause that he thought the wrong one. Many of them supported Roman Catholic emancipation, but none of them comprehended that in the long reckoning of international affairs, that support would have to be carried onward and outward to all its consequences. He saw at the epoch of the Clare election, what they did not see; that the time had come when, to save the nation, a victim must be dedicated even from among the nation’s friends, like the great king’s daughter at Aulis to preserve the host commanded by her own father.
O’Connell was the commander-in-chief, although as yet they hardly knew it; and even the most illustrious supporters of Ro man Catholic emancipation, on whichever side the Channel, were but the rank and file behind him. His were the genius and the tact, the energy and the fire, that won the bloodless battle. By the force of his own personality, he led Ireland to St. Stephen’s * almost as much as Moses led the children of Israel to Mount Sinai; he accomplished the promise of Pitt, which Pitt himself had labored, and labored not in vain, to frustrate.
[* The British Houses of Parliament: a historic name figuratively applied especially to the House of Commons, sometimes also to the House of Lords. Both Houses are entered through St. Stephen’s porch and St. Stephen’s Hall. -ED.]
There cannot be many in whose eyes O’Connell stands as clearly the greatest Irishman that ever lived. Neither Swift nor Grattan (each how great in their several capacities!) can be placed in the scale against him. If there were to be a competition among the dead heroes of Irish history, I suppose that Burke and the Duke of Wellington would be the two most formidable competitors. But the great Duke is truly, in mathematical phrase, in commensurable with O’Connell. There are no known terms which will enable us fairly to pit the military faculty against the genius of civil affairs. It can hardly be doubted that if we take that genius alone into view, O’Connell is the greater man, and I will not so much as broach the question, in itself insoluble, whether and up to what point of superiority the exploits of the great Duke in the field establish an excess in his favor. With respect to Burke as against O’Connell, it seems safe to say that he was far greater in the world of thought, but also far inferior in the world of action.
There is another kind of comparison which this powerful figure obviously challenges, a comparison with the great demagogues or popular leaders of history. It is, however, a misnomer to call him a demagogue. If I may coin a word for the occasion, he was an “ethnagogue.” He was not the leader either of plebs or populus against optimates: he was the leader of a nation; and this nation, weak, outnumbered, and despised, he led, not always unsuccessfully, in its controversy with another nation, the strongest perhaps and the proudest in Europe. If we pass down the line of history (but upward on the moral scale) from Cleon to Gracchus, to Rienzi, and even to Savonarola, none of these, I believe, displayed equal powers; but they all differed in this vital point, that they led one part of the community against another, while he led a nation, though a nation minus its dissentients, against conquerors, who were never expelled, but never domesticated.
For a parallel we cannot take Kossuth or Mazzini, who are small beside him; we must ascend more nearly to the level of the great Cavour, and there still remains this wide difference between them, that the work of Cavour was work in the Cabinet and Parliament alone, while O’Connell not only devised and regulated all interior counsels, but had also the actual handling, all along, of his own raw material — that is to say, of the people — and so handled them by direct personal agency that he brought them to a state of discipline unequalled in the history of the world.
His first, I believe, and not his last, memorable public utterance had been made in January, 1800, when he was twenty-four years old. In writing to Lord Shrewsbury, he says:
For more than twenty years before emancipation the burden of the cause was thrown upon me. I had to arrange the meetings, prepare the resolutions, furnish replies to the correspondence, examine the case of each person complaining of practical grievances, rouse the torpid, animate the lukewarm, control the violent and the inflammatory, avoid the shoals and breakers of the law, guard against multiplied treachery, and at all times to op pose, at every peril, the powerful and multitudinous enemies of the cause.”
This was without doubt what may be called the opulent period of his life: but hear him as to even this period:
For four years I bore the entire expenses of Catholic agitation without receiving the contributions of others to a greater amount than seventy-four pounds in the whole. Who shall repay me for the years of my buoyant youth and cheerful man hood? Who shall repay me for the lost opportunities of acquiring professional celebrity, or for the wealth which such distinction would insure?”
From, or shortly before, the epoch of the Clare election in 1828 dates the commencement of his absorption in public affairs. He was now totus in illis. He remained at his zenith until 1843, when the Peel Administration instituted the great prosecution against him. * It can hardly be said that this prosecution was directly the cause of a decline in his power over the people. But this much appears to be certain. If his imprisonment in Richmond Bridewell did not break his spirit, it added heavily to that drain upon his nerve power which had for so many years been excessive and almost unparalleled.
[* In 1844 O’Connell was convicted of conspiracy to raise sedition and was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment and a fine of two thousand pounds. The verdict was set aside by the House of Lords, but O’Connell lay in prison for fourteen weeks. – ED.]
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William E.H. Lecky begins here. Daniel O’Connell begins here.
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