The Statesmen Seriec 
 
 U 
 
 O'CONNEtL 
 
 J.A.H AMILTQN. 
 
 SMSMMMSIMM 
 
 n 
 
berkTieyX 
 LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF 
 CALIFORNIA/ 
 

STATESMEN SERIES. 
 
 EDITED BY LLOYD C. SANDEKS. 
 
 DANIEL O'CONNELL. 
 
 UK Bighi$ rtturtfd.) 
 
STATESMEN SERIES. 
 LIFE OF 
 
 DANIEL O'COMELL. 
 
 BY 
 
 J. A. HAMILTON. 
 
 LONDON: 
 
 W. H. ALLEN & CO., 13 WATERLOO PLACE, 
 
 PALL MALL. S.W. 
 
 1888. 
 
LONDON : 
 PRINTEB BY W. H. ALLEN AND CO., 13 WATKBLOO PLACE, PALL MALL. S.W. 
 
 LOAN STACK 
 
PREFATORY NOTE. 
 
 
 The only complete Life of O'Connell hitherto published 
 is Miss Cusack's, a bulky and uncritical book, founded, 
 however, upon a considerable quantity of unpublished 
 materials, chiefly correspondence with Archbishop 
 McHale, not all of which was used. John 0*Connell 
 began a life of his father, which he brought in two 
 thick volumes as far as 1824. Of this book it is 
 difficult to speak temperately. A son, writing of his 
 father in the father's lifetime, is not expected to be 
 impartial, but that is no reason why be should be 
 grotesquely eulogistic of his father and his party and 
 indecently abusive of his opponents. Such merit as 
 the book has is due to its being a kind of sorap- 
 book of the speeches and resolutions at the meetings 
 from 1810 to 1824. The same author's edition of his 
 father's speeches is carried only a year or two farther. 
 He also published a volume of Parliamentary Remiois* 
 oences '' from 1883 to 1842, which contains a number 
 
 304 
 
vi PBEFATOEY NOTE. 
 
 of his father's letters of the years 1829 and 1840. 
 William Fagan's Life, which, considering that it ap- 
 peared in a Cork newspaper immediately after O'Con- 
 nell^s death, is a meritorious work, ends at 1838. 
 Huish's Life breaks off in the middle, and is almost 
 valueless ; Graeme's Life is the same. The Centenary 
 Record, published by the O'Connell Centenary Com- 
 mittee of 1875, contains some new information, which 
 the arrangement of the book makes as inaccessible as 
 possible. O'Neill Daunt's Reminiscences deal almost 
 exclusively with the last ten years of O^Connell's life, 
 but are very valuable. Dr. William Forbes Taylor, 
 under the sobriquet of '* A Munster Farmer," published 
 a short and temperate review of O'Connell's career, called 
 A Munster Farmer s Reminiscences of O^GonnelL I 
 have endeavoured to collect what was valuable from all 
 these sources, in order to construct at once a picture 
 of the man and a sketch of his career; and where 
 they disagreed I have presumed that the truth must 
 have been best known to John the son and Daunt 
 the friend. Mr. Shaw Lefevre's Peel and O'Connell 
 has been before me, but its scope is rather foreign to 
 the object of this book. I have not dissented from 
 the general estimate and conclusions of Mr. Lecky's 
 masterly essay in the Leaders of Public Ojnnion in 
 Ireland, which seems to me to possess all the finality 
 that is possible, until O'Connell's epoch has passed into 
 
PREFATORY NOTE. vii 
 
 the cooler temperature of history and ceased to be 
 steeped in the burning atmosphere of Irish controversy. 
 In addition to these works the authorities are Wyse's 
 History of the GatJiolic Association and Charles 
 Butler's Historical Memoirs of the Roman Catholics ; 
 Mr. W. J. Amherst's History of Catholic Emancipa- 
 tion, which is carried only to 1820, is also a useful 
 book. For the Repeal period, DuflFy's Young Ireland 
 and Four Years of Irish History are of the first im- 
 portance. For the legal part of O'ConnelPs life, 
 OTlanagan's Munster Circuit and Irish Bar are useful. 
 I have consulted also D. O. Maddyn's Chiefs of 
 Parties^ Cloncurry^s Personal Reminiscences, the lives 
 severally of Canning, Althorp, Melbourne, Ellen- 
 borough, Shell, Drummond, and Dr. Doyle; Peel's 
 Memoirs, the Greville Memoirs, Lord Hatherton's 
 Memoir, Lord Colchester's Diary, Guizot's Embassy to 
 St, James' in 1840, and Barrington's Personal Skeiche9. 
 For visits to Darrynane Catherine O'Connell's Excur- 
 sions in Ireland and Howitt's Journal, vol. i. p. 828 
 are useful. J. Venedey, a fair-minded German, pub- 
 lished an interesting account of what he saw in Ireland 
 in 1848, and in a small work by M. Gavrois, pub- 
 lished at Arras, called O'Connell €i le Collide At$^la%M 
 a St. Omer, there are several interesting partioulan 
 about O'Couneirs early and his last days. For foreign 
 opinion the following books may be looked at, though 
 
viii PREFATORY NOTE. 
 
 they do not add much to our knowledge of him : an 
 Elogio, recitato nei solenni funerali celebratigli nei 
 giorni 25 e 30 Guigno 1847, by Father Gioacchino 
 Ventura, Napoli 1848 ; Leopold Schipper's Irlanda 
 verhdltniss zu England ; Moriarty's Lehen und Werken 
 O'ConneWsy and two pamphlets by J. M. de Gaulle 
 and by Jules Gondon. Among Magazines, the New 
 Monthly Magazine from 1821 to 1832 contains 
 articles by Sheil and others, and Macmillans Magazine^ 
 vol. xxviii., a valuable article by Mr. Ball. I have also 
 made use of various pamphlets, and for general history 
 have followed Mr. Spencer Walpole's excellent book. 
 
 J. A. H. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER L 
 
 feABLY AND PBOFESSIONAL LI7B. 
 
 ^Btoily, birth, education, and call to the bar— A United Irishman — 
 Professional snccess^^Aniecdotes of profoBsional life p. 1 
 
 CHAPTER n. 
 
 ^tiTt SECUfilTIBS C0NTE0VEB8T, 
 
 1800-1818. 
 
 Position of the Catholic movcmDnt-^Loadonhip of John Kcogh — Tho 
 period of «* dignified silence "—The Veto— The Catholic Board — 
 Grattan's Bill of 1818^Qiiarantotti*8 rescript — CoIIapte of Um 
 Catholic party ........ p. IS 
 
X CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER ni. 
 
 CATHOLIC DESPONDENCY. 
 
 1814-1823. 
 
 State of Affairs after the Dissolution of the Board — O'Connell's Duel 
 with D'Esterre — Affair with Peel — Trial of Magee for libel on the 
 Duke of Richmond — Visit of George IV. to Dublin , p. 48 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE CATHOLIC ASSOCIATION. 
 1823-1828. 
 
 The germ of the Catholic Association — The Catholic Rent — The Act 
 of 1825— The Relief Bill and Wings of 1825— The New Catholic 
 Association — The Waterford and Clare Elections . . p. 61 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 EMANCIPATION. 
 
 1828-1842. 
 
 Result of the Clare Election — Dissolution of the Catholic Association — - 
 Catholic Relief — Refusal of O'Connell's claim to take his seat — 
 Second Clare Election — Repeal Agitation — Conflict with the Mar 
 quis of Anglesey — Reform , p. 79 
 
CONTENTS. xi 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE EEFOEMED PARLIAMENT. 
 
 1833-1835. 
 
 Tithe War — O'Connell renews his agitation against Tithe and for 
 Repeal— The Reform Bill— "Who is the traitor?"— Coercion Bill 
 of 1833 — O'Oonnell's Repeal motion — Intrigne with Littleton — 
 Fall of the Whigs — Peel's Administration ... p. 106 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 WHIG ALLIANCE. 
 1835-1840. 
 
 Disappointed of Office — Tonr in Scotland — The Oarlow Election 
 Scandal — Abandonment of Repeal — The Irish Poor Law Bill — 
 Accession of the Qneen and O'Connell's loss of popularity in 
 Ireland — Reprimanded by the Speaker — The Precursor Society 
 
 p. 126 
 
 CHAPTER Vni. 
 
 THE BEPEAL ASSOCIATION. 
 1840-184d. 
 
 Ropeal Association founded-^Irish Municipal Roform~-O*0oanell Lord 
 Mayor of Dublin — The founding of the Natitm^-Th^ Repeal 
 Dobato^Tho Monster Meetinge^The Mallow Deflanoe^OloaUrf 
 
 p. 147 
 
xii CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 LAST DATS* 
 
 1843-1847. 
 
 The trial — The jtidgment of the House of Lords — The Federal coli* 
 troversy — The conjlict with Yonng Ireland — Alliance With the 
 "Whigs — The Famine — Last days and death ... p. 167 
 
 CEAPTEE X. 
 
 DOMESTIC LIFE AND CHAEACTEH* 
 
 His wife and family-^His domestic life and amusements — His pet* 
 sonal piety — His appearance — His oratory — His political cha- 
 racter and aehieyements <«<*<« p. 195 
 
UjU^^rPj^ 
 
 LIFE OF 
 
 DANIEL O'CONNELL 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 EARLY AND PROFESSIONAL LIFE. 
 
 Family, birth, education, and call to the bar — A United Irishman — 
 Professional success — Anecdotes of professional life. 
 
 In a bouse called Carhen House, long since dis- 
 mantled, which stood in the farthest extremity of Kerry, 
 between the Kenmaro River and Dingle Bay, about a 
 mile to the north of the little town of Cahirciveen, 
 there was born, on the 6th of August 1775, Daniel 
 O'Connell. In the wild districts of south-western Ire- 
 land, the family of O'Connell, or, as they were origi- 
 nally called O'Conal, had long been established, at one 
 time in Limerick, at another in Kerry, and at another in 
 Clare. So remote was this part of Ireland, that through 
 the most rigorous period of the Penal Code, when the 
 law was so strictly administered that Roman Catbolics 
 were constrained to resort, and not in yain, to the good 
 faith of Protestant neighbours, and to avoid confisoa* 
 
 1 
 
 c 
 
2 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL. 
 
 tion by conveying to those good friends, as unavowed 
 trustees, the lands, which the laws forbade persons of 
 their faith to hold themselves, the O'Connells had 
 kept unconfiscated and undisturbed a small moun- 
 tain estate called Glencara, simply because its inacces- 
 sibility and seclusion had saved it from the notice and 
 the grasp of the law. At the end of the eighteenth 
 century they were country gentry of easy circumstances 
 and good standing in their neighbourhood. Darrynane 
 Abbey, the family seat, an old farmhouse increased to a 
 considerable size by picturesque but irregular additions, 
 was in the possession of Maurice, the head of the family. 
 It stands near the shore of Cahirdonnel Bay in a very 
 lovely situation, and has close by the remains of an 
 abbey founded by the monks of St. Finbar in the 
 seventh century. Another brother, Morgan, kept a 
 shop in Cahirciveen and dealt in silks, laces, and wines 
 smuggled over from France. He accumulated money 
 and invested it in land in the names of Protestant 
 trustees. He married Catherine, a sister of John, The 
 O'Mullane, of White Church, county Cork, and lived 
 at Carhen. Of his numerous family, no less than ten 
 survived their childhood. The eldest was Daniel. 
 
 Maurice O'Connell was childless, and soon adopted 
 Daniel, who was his natural heir, and another of Morgan's 
 children, also called Maurice, and a great part of their 
 boyhood was spent at Darrynane. Daniel was a bright, 
 intelligent child. To the end of his life, his tenacious 
 memory retained the recollection of having been car- 
 ried in his nurse's arms to the seashore, to see two of 
 her boats towing Paul Jones's ship out of shallow water 
 to a deeper anchorage. This was in 1778. While still 
 but four years old he received his first teaching from an 
 old hedge schoolmaster, named David Mahoney, one of 
 
EARLY AND PROFESSIONAL LIFE. 8 
 
 that class of poor scholars, particularly numerous in 
 Kerry, and produced by the repressive Penal Laws, who 
 wandered, half-beggar, half-scholar, from house to house, 
 claiming, and never failing to receive, the hospitality of 
 the country-side. The old man took the child upon his 
 knee, and so won his heart and fixed his attention, that 
 the whole alphabet was learnt in an hour and a half, 
 Daniel proved a ready scholar. He would turn over the 
 portraits of the celebrities in the Dublin Magazine, say- 
 ing, ** I wonder will my visage ever appear in the Dublin 
 Magazine'^ ; he composed a drama on the fortunes of 
 the House of Stuart at ten years old ; and so fond was 
 he of reading, that he would desert his play-fellows to 
 sit cross-legged in the window-seat, devouring Coolcs 
 Voyages, and crying over its pages of adventure. 
 
 The policy of the Penal Laws had been to render the 
 education of their children as difficult as might be to 
 the Roman Catholics, if not wholly impossible. At the 
 beginning of the eighteenth century, they were forbidden 
 to establish schools of their own, to be teachers in 
 Protestant schools, to teach in a private house any but 
 the children of their own family, or to send their chil- 
 dren abroad to receive the education, which was denied 
 them at home. The Catholic gentry were obliged to 
 smuggle their sons over seas by stealth, and many a 
 lugger, which had run a contraband cargo successfully 
 on the west coast, took baok to France a few new 
 scholars for St. Omer or Salamanca, Louvain or Li^ge. 
 It was not until 1792 that the restrictions were re- 
 moved which prevented them from setting up sobools 
 of their own. The first school publicly opened by a 
 priest was kept by a Mr. Harrington at Kedington in 
 Long Island, some two miles from the Cove of Cork^ 
 and to tills, when Daniel was thirteen years old, and 
 
 1 • 
 
4 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL. 
 
 had been for some time taught at home by a tutor 
 named John Burke, he and his brother were sent. 
 Without showing particular precocity, he was indus- 
 trious and obedient, and enjoyed the unique distinction 
 of being the only boy in the school who never was 
 flogged. Here he remained for a year, but higher 
 education was still hardly to be attained by a Roman 
 Catholic in Ireland. Trinity College, Dublin, was prac- 
 tically closed to him, as were its endowments by law, 
 and in the usual course of the education of lads of 
 family, the two O'Connells were sent to the Continent. 
 They went first to Liege, only to find that they were too 
 old to be admitted there. They then went to Louvain, 
 among whose fifty colleges several were Irish, and 
 waited there for instructions from home. During the 
 interval Daniel attended some of the University lec- 
 tures. At length, in January 1791, they were placed at 
 the college at St. Omer. It has often been said that 
 Daniel was at this time destined by his uncle for the 
 calling of a priest, but he was himself at the pains to 
 deny the statement in a letter to the Dublin Evening 
 Post, 17th July 1828. He proved himself a ready and 
 quick-witted pupil, and, being placed in the classes of 
 grammar and poetry, was easily first in both of them. 
 Doctor Gregory Stapylton, the fortieth and last Pre- 
 sident of the College, wrote of him in January 1792, 
 ** With respect to the elder, Daniel, I have but one sen- 
 tence to write about him, and that is, that I never was 
 so much mistaken in my life as I shall be, unless he be 
 destined to make a remarkable figure in society." 
 
 On the 20th of August 1792, he went to the College 
 at Douai, where he was placed in the class of rhetoric, 
 and remained there until the 21st January 1793. At 
 the end of 1792, the Douai College was suppressed, and 
 
EARLY AND PROFESSIONAL LIFE. 5 
 
 the boys were obliged to wait some weeks before they 
 could communicate with their uncle in Kerry. They 
 then returned home, but it was not without danger that 
 they reached the coast. The soldiers assaulted their 
 conveyance, and abused them as ** little priests'* and 
 *^ aristocrats.^' For safety's sake they were compelled 
 on the journey to wear the tricolor, which they tore in 
 disgust from their hats when they found themselves 
 securely on board the packet at Calais. His education 
 in France left enduring marks upon O'Connell's cha- 
 racter. What he heard, and to some extent what he 
 himself saw, of the French Kevolution, made upon his 
 susceptible mind an impression which influenced his 
 whole life. He imbibed strong Bourbon opinions and 
 an intense hatred of the Revolution and the Revo- 
 lutionaries, who were the persecutors of his Church, 
 " I was always in terror," he said, " lest the scoundrels 
 should cut our throats ; on one occasion a waggoner of 
 Dumouriez's"^ army scared me and a set of my fellow 
 collegians who had walked out from Douai, crying 
 * Votla les jeunes Jesuites ! les Capucins ! ' So we ran 
 back to our college as fast as we could, and luckily the 
 vagabond did not follow us." He was by nature de- 
 voted to his Church, and his training deepened this 
 disposition of his mind. He was often accused, and 
 not without truth, of Jesuitry in his policy, and the 
 French accent which hung about his English pronun- 
 ciation on his return home never entirely left him. To 
 the end of his days he pronounced " Empire '" 
 " Empeer," and accented the word ** charity " as if it 
 were '* <?fcari/c." 
 
 * Dnmouriez won the battle of Jemappes in the Aaetrian Ne th w> 
 landi, about thirty-six milei from Donai, on NoTember 6, 179i. 
 
6 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL. 
 
 After spending the remainder of the year, 1793, at 
 home in Kerry, moving among the peasantry whom he 
 learnt to know so well, and enjoying with the ardour of 
 a keen sportsman the hare-hunting of the Kerry moun- 
 tains, O'Connell went to London to begin the period of 
 studentship at an English inn of court, which was ne- 
 cessary before he could be called to the Irish bar. He 
 entered himself at Lincoln's Inn"^ in 1794, and took 
 lodgings in a court on the north side of Coventry Street, 
 but in 1795 he removed to a boarding-house at Chis- 
 wick. That his years of studentship were spent in no 
 merely nominal attention to the law, is proved by the 
 fact that his learning in his profession was at all times 
 unquestionable and profound, and that after he had been 
 a few years at the bar, his practice and his political work 
 were so engrossing, that he could have had little time 
 left for further study and research. The first five years 
 of a successful lawyer's life are those during which not 
 the foundations only but much of the superstructure of 
 his learning must be created. O'Connell's mind was 
 ceaselessly active, with a natural bent for law, but he 
 must from the first have vigorously exercised it upon 
 text-books and case-law to have attained the knowledge 
 which he indubitably possessed. The recollections of 
 bis life in France had made him by antipathy a strong 
 Tory, and when Hardy was put upon his trial in Oc- 
 tober 1794, O'Connell attended at the Old Bailey day 
 after day to see the man brought to justice, whom he 
 
 * O'Connell's biographers do not agree as to what inn he studied at ; 
 his son John says Lincoln's Inn, Daunt says Gray's Inn, and Shiel the 
 Middle Temple. All of these may be presumed to have had means of 
 knowing the truth. Fagan follows Daunt and Huish Shiel ; Mr. Shaw- 
 Lefevre puts him at ^the Inner Temple. There are no other Inns of 
 Court. 
 
EAELY AND PBOFESSIONAL LIFE. 7 
 
 regarded as the advocate and accomplice of the French 
 Kevolution. But day by day the bigotry of Scott the 
 Attorney-General, the eloquence of Erskine, Hardy's 
 counsel, the weakness of the case for the Crown, and 
 the justification which appeared for Hardy's speeches, 
 themselves effected a revolution in O'ConnelTs mind, 
 and he left the court at the end of the trial cured for 
 life of his brief fit of Toryism. 
 
 At length his studentship was over, and returning to 
 Ireland, he was called to the Irish Bar on May 19th, 
 1798. Whatever may have been the intentions with which 
 Maurice O'Connell of Darrynane had sent his nephew to 
 St. Omer, it was clear at that time, and to a young man 
 of his temperament, that the bar offered the only 
 career in Ireland that could satisfy his aspirations. 
 As a boy, O'Connell had his ambition. Once, when 
 he was about ten years old, they were discussing 
 Flood, Charlemont, and Grattan, then at the height 
 of their reputation, round the fire at Darrynane. The 
 usually vivacious child was observed to be sitting 
 silent and abstracted. " Daniel," said his aunt, '* what 
 are you thinking of? '^ ** Why, let me tell you," he 
 replied, *' I 'm thinking I '11 make a stir in the world 
 yet." It is said that he had been particularly excited 
 by the career of his uncle Daniel. This oflBcer, the 
 youngest brother of Maurice O'Connell, had entered 
 the French service in 1759, as a sublieutenant in 
 Clare's regiment, when still only a lad of fourteen. 
 By 1787 he had risen to the rank of a major-general, 
 and was colonel in command of the German regi- 
 ment of Salm-Salm in the French army. In 1788, 
 he invented a system of infantry tactics, which was 
 soon adopted by all the armies of Europe. Subse- 
 quently ho was made Count O'Connell, aud when. 
 
8 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL. 
 
 about 1794, several regiments of the Irish Brigade were 
 drafted into the British service, he became a colonel in 
 the British army. But apart from his uncle's brilliant 
 reputation, there was enough in the career of a barrister 
 to tempt O'Connell to climb that way to eminence. He 
 had, as strongly as ever any Irishman has had it, the legal 
 turn of the Irish mind ; he was subtle, ready, disputa- 
 tious, astute. In a country where the aristocracy and the 
 landlord class were always prone to absenteeism, and if 
 resident pinned their hopes on the favour of the Govern- 
 ment ; where the body of merchants, though well-to-do, 
 indeed, and enterprising, was small and almost confined 
 to Dublin and Belfast, the bar became the only body in 
 Ireland capable of taking a prominent position before the 
 public eye. The warfare of the law courts fascinated 
 the Irish as it never has done the English. The English 
 have been content to regard the proceedings of the law 
 as a matter of art and even of mystery, to be respected 
 perhaps, to be tolerated certainly, to be admired never. 
 But to the Irish, and especially to the Irish peasantry, 
 a trial was an arena, in which wit and craft, eloquence 
 and cunning, performed a drama which they fully un- 
 derstood and followed with enthusiasm. A smart and 
 shifty witness, a clever though unscrupulous attorney, a 
 neat quibble, an impassioned appeal to a jury, a bold 
 address to a judge, and a sharp passage of arms be- 
 tween counsel, delighted the spectators, and passed 
 from mouth to mouth in a thousand good stories. Nor 
 did the bar exist for law and lawyers only. Instead of 
 an antagonism between letters and law, such as the 
 English have always known, the best of Irish wit and 
 Irish letters was to be found among the practitioners of 
 the Irish bar. 
 
 The Four Courts, then just completed, have long been 
 
IE ABLY AND PROFESSIONAL LIFE. 9 
 
 a classic ground for Irish stories : every circuit in Ire- 
 land had similar traditions, and its leaders enjoyed a 
 reputation and popularity over the counties whose 
 assizes they attended, which was of itself a kind of 
 fame. But not only was the profession as a profession 
 attractive to a young man ; its connection with Irish 
 pohtics, and especially with Irish popular politics, was 
 of the closest. A great number of the Irish Parlia- 
 mentary leaders were members of the Irish bar, and the 
 public had an access to the courts, which they had not 
 to the House of Commons. Under the strict system of 
 government which had so long prevailed in Ireland, the 
 barrister was almost the only person who had the oppor- 
 tunity of making a figure before the people, while 
 espousing the popular cause. There was no one else 
 whose interest and duty combined to bring him on 
 occasions into conflict with the Government coram 
 j)oj)ulo. The gown which in England clothed some 
 passed-master in the mysteries of replevin or contingent 
 remainders, of ouster or trespass upon the case, was in 
 Ireland the robe of the hero and the patriot. Political 
 and professional success reacted upon one another. 
 Ninety years ago, still more even than to-day, to be a 
 popular champion in politics was no bad way of obtain- 
 ing briefs in court ; and to have the tongue of a ready 
 advocate was an excellent recommendation for a young 
 man ambitious of a public career. 
 
 When 0*Connell joined the Irish bar, a new day had 
 recently dawned for the Roman Catholic lawyer. During 
 the earlier part of the century, Boman Catholics, who, 
 whether in hopes of pension, place, or practice, were 
 minded to come to the bar, had been obliged to take the 
 oaths against Popery, which the Penal Laws imposed, 
 and to conform outwardly to the Established religion. 
 
10 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL. 
 
 Their object once attained, they had often relapsed into 
 a suspected state, half-way between conformity and 
 Catholicism, in which many of them were content, as 
 the price of toleration, to become the disreputable tools 
 of the Government. From this unhappy temptation an 
 Act of the Irish Parliament had recently relieved the 
 Catholics, and, although labouring under great educa- 
 tional and some social disadvantages. Catholic barristers 
 had now a fair field for their talents. Into this field 
 O'Connell was among the first to step. 
 
 For two or three years after his return to Dublin, 
 though he frequented a debating society in Eustace 
 Street, he occupied himself but little with politics. He 
 lodged in Trinity Place, and having no relations 
 and few friends in Dublin, he was thrown very much on 
 his own resources. He became a Freemason, and even 
 master of his lodge, No. 189, and continued to be one 
 till 1801. That he had some connection with the con- 
 spiracy of 1798 is probable. He was sworn in as a 
 United Irishman and attended at least one meeting at 
 which John Shears was present, but he took no part in 
 the proceedings. His most intimate friend in London 
 had been a young Irishman, of good family, Richard 
 Newton Bennett, and Bennett was a member of the 
 Directory of United Irishmen. An accident gave him a 
 hint of the danger of going farther. He was at this time 
 living a convivial and dissolute life. Though no drun- 
 kard, and indeed one of the first to set his face sternly 
 against the extravagance of compulsory wine-bibbing, 
 which then prevailed among the Irish gentry, he occa- 
 sionally got drunk. Coming home emboldened with 
 good liquor, from a party at the house of his friend 
 Murray, a cheesemonger of 3, Great George Street, one 
 evening in the month of March, 1798, he found a knot 
 
EARLY AND PROFESSIONAL LIFE. 11 
 
 of miscreants persecuting a poor street-walker. With 
 generous courage he interfered to protect the girl, and 
 was at once attacked himself. Being a finely-built 
 athletic young fellow, he knocked three of his assailants^ 
 down, but was then pinioned from behind and hit 
 savagely about the face. For some days his bruisea 
 compelled him to keep his room. His landlord, a re- 
 spectable fruiterer named Ryan, took the opportunity of 
 giving him some good advice. He warned his lodger 
 to have nothing to do with the conspirators and their 
 plans, as from what he had heard at the Castle in the 
 course of his business, he knew that the Government wa» 
 quite alive to all the details of the plot. 
 
 Such is the story told by O'Conneirs son ; but a son 
 of Murray's used to declare that his father only pre- 
 vented the arrest of O'Connell, who was desirous of 
 going to swear in members at a neighbouring meeting of 
 United Irishmen, by prevailing on him to go down to 
 the quay and quit Dublin that night in a turf-boat* 
 Scarcely was he gone when Major Sirr reached Murray's 
 house, which he had just left. A few months after- 
 wards his life was very nearly cut short by a violent 
 illness. While staying at Darrynane, and before his 
 first circuit, in August, he got wet through on the 
 hills in following his favourite sport, and heedlessly 
 slept in his wet clothes in a peasant's hut. Next day 
 he was taken ill, and for many days lay at death's 
 door with typhus. His brother John came to see him. 
 The insurrection had then broken out. He recovered 
 consciousness, and cried out, ** What news from the 
 disturbed districts? I am to be a delegate." But 
 his vigorous constitution stood him in good stead, and 
 his life was saved. 
 
 From whatever source his lesson came, O'Coonell 
 
12 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL. 
 
 accepted it, and, from the disastrous results of the rising 
 of 1798, contracted a life-long horror of all armed re- 
 bellion, and of secret societies, whose members are al- 
 ways so much at the mercy of a spy. He never forgave 
 the men of '98, and used to speak of them in terms of 
 harsh and almost unjust censure. " It was they," he 
 said, " who helped Pitt to carry the Union." During 
 Emmett's rising, he served in the Lawyer's Artillery 
 Corps, and was called out on various services, in the 
 course of which, at considerable risk to himself, he 
 restrained his comrades from the commission of gross 
 illegalities. What he then saw strongly impressed him 
 with the inferiority for the maintenance of civil order of 
 a volunteer body to a regular military force. Its want 
 of discipline and professional self-restraint hurry it into 
 the commission of excesses just when forbearance is 
 most needed. He saw the tendency, as he put it, 
 ** when a man has arms in his hands to be a ruffian." 
 
 He made by his profession in his first year £58, 
 In his second he made dG150, in his third i6200, in his 
 fourth ^315, and thereafter his income rose rapidly. 
 He joined the Munster Circuit, which included the 
 counties of Cork, Kerry, Limerick, and Clare, where 
 his family connection was strong. In the autumn 
 of 1813 there were twenty-six cases at the Limerick 
 Assizes, and he was briefed in every one of them. 
 He continued to go circuit for two or three and twenty 
 years, and after that only went for a special fee, when 
 his visits were made the occasion of public rejoicings. 
 In his last year of practice, though he lost a whole 
 term, he made nine thousand pounds. ** The last hour 
 of my practice at the bar," he said of himself, **I kept 
 the court alternately in tears and in roars of laughter." 
 As Shiel says of him, *' from some of the witnesses he 
 
EARLY AND PROFESSIONAL LIFE, 13 
 
 extracted that they were unworthy of all credit, being 
 notorious knaves or process-servers ; others he inveigled 
 into a metaphysical puzzle touching the prisoner's 
 identity ; others he stunned by repeated blows with the 
 butt-end of an Irish joke : for minutes together the 
 court and jury, galleries and dock, were in a roar." For 
 a long time his practice lay very largely in criminal 
 courts, but his opportunities of making speeches were 
 for some time very limited. Counsel for the prisoner 
 in those days was not allowed to address the jury, and 
 O'ConnelFs skill lay in his knack of insinuating half-a- 
 dozen speeches to the jury while pretending to argue a 
 point of law to the judge. The rank of King's Counsel 
 was conferred only on Protestants, and Roman Catholic 
 juniors were obliged to apply themselves to the exa- 
 mination and cross-examination of witnesses. For 
 this, O'Conneirs intimate knowledge of the Irish 
 peasant's mind peculiarly fitted him, and as a cross- 
 examiner he was unrivalled. Once, in 1822, he 
 cross-examined a witness with such severity that the 
 man made a rush at him from the table, but fortunately 
 fell to the ground. Numberless are the stories of his 
 astuteness in dealing with witnesses, whose evasions and 
 shifts, though paltry in their design, were ingenious and 
 clever with a wholly Irish cleverness. In one case the 
 issue was whether a purported will had been duly exe- 
 cuted by the testator or was a forgery. 0*Connell was 
 struck by the fact that one witness reiterated several 
 times in one set phrase, that he saw the testator's hand 
 sign the will " while life was in him." He turned sud- 
 denly on the man. ** By virtue of your oath ! " he 
 cried, " did not someone write with the dead man's hand, 
 while a live fly was placed in his mouth ? " The wit- 
 ness, crestfallen, admitted it, and the case was won. 
 
14 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL, 
 
 To another witness, who denied that he was drunk, 
 because ^* he had only had his share of a quart," 
 O'Connell quietly said, '* Come, wasn't your share all 
 but the pewter ? " and the man owned that it was. A 
 prisoner whom he had successfully defended upon some 
 charge thanked him with topsy-turvey goodwill. ** Och ! 
 Counsellor," he said, *^ I Ve no way here to show your 
 Honour my gratitude, but I wish I saw you knocked 
 down in my own parish, and wouldn't I bring a faction 
 to the rescue ! " 
 
 His indefatigable energy and great physique enabled 
 him to carry on a gigantic practice hand in hand with 
 the labours of agitation and the pleasures of society. 
 The anecdotes of what are really feats of strength are 
 many. On his first circuit he left Darrynane at four in 
 the morning, reluctantly leaving his brother to go 
 coursing, while he rode for the assizes and covered sixty 
 Irish miles that day. He went to a ball and danced, 
 danced with Irish energy, until the small hours, and, 
 rising again at half-past eighty rode on his way all day. 
 In 1829, a Mr. George Bond Low, a Cork gentleman, 
 was fired at, and a conspiracy, called the '^Doneraile 
 conspiracy," to murder him and some other gentlemen 
 of Doneraile, county Cork, was supposed to have been 
 discovered. In October a first batch of prisoners was 
 tried by a special commission at Cork, consisting of 
 Baron Pennefather and Mr. Justice Torrens. Dogherty, 
 the Solicitor- General, was for the prosecution. O'Con- 
 nell, then fifty-four years old, was resting at Darrynane, 
 after the year of incessant conflict which won the Eman- 
 cipation battle, and he had declined to defend the 
 prisoners. The first four were convicted. Their friends 
 were filled with panic : in such a result they had been 
 unable to believe. O'Connell and O'Connell alone 
 
EARLY AND PROFESSIONAL LIFE. 15 
 
 could save the rest. A farmer named William Burke 
 was despatched post-haste to Darrynane, ninety miles 
 away. Travelling in Kerry was still slow and difficult. 
 The first four-horse mail from Cork into Kerry had only 
 been run in August 1810 ; the Limerick mail-coach was 
 a thing of but four years' standing. About thirty years 
 before, O'Connell had been four days in getting from 
 Darrynane to Limerick, and, until 1839, there was a 
 portion of the road to Darrynane, five miles long, so 
 insecure, that the horses had always to be taken out, 
 and the chaises, the rough conveyances of the country, 
 dragged with ropes by men. Burke arrived early on a 
 Sunday morning, and told O'Connell his tale. The 
 counsellor said he would come to the rescue. With 
 only two hours' rest, Burke set out again for Cork, to 
 prepare relays of horses along the road, and raise the 
 spirits of the prisoners and their friends. O'Connell 
 set oflf and drove himself in a chaise all that day and 
 all the night. At Macroom he snatched three or four 
 hours' sleep, and at daybreak he pushed on. The court 
 was to sit at nine ; the judges had refused to delay 
 the trial for O'Connell's arrival. All Cork was quiver- 
 ing with anxiety ; would the counsellor be there in 
 time ? At length the watchers descried him dashing 
 along the Kerry road and lashing his horse as he came. 
 The cheer that went up from thousands of throats broke 
 in upon the Solicitor-General's opening speech/ Pushing 
 through the crowd, O'Connell pulled up at the court ; 
 his horse fell dead in the shafts. As be entered the 
 court Dogherty turned white, and the prisoners dared 
 to hope. Apologising to the bench, O'Connell took 
 his sent, and, snatching a hasty breakfast of milk and 
 bread as he sat in his place, plunged into the case. 
 The Crown witnesses were not prepared to face him. 
 
16 LIFE OF DANIEL O'OONNELL. 
 
 He browbeat the Solicitor-G-eneral, mimicked his pro- 
 nunciation, and sneered at his law. Though the evi- 
 dence was the same as that which had convicted the 
 first batch, the jury, under the influence of O'Connell's 
 ascendancy, disagreed as to the second, and acquitted 
 the third. No wonder that he lived in the hearts of 
 the Munster men, who had so often seen their friends 
 and relatives saved by his skill. The Irish peasantry, 
 who gave to O'Connell through a quarter of a cen- 
 tury an affection and obedience which they have never 
 given to any other leader, always loved better than all 
 his titles the name of ^^ the Counsellor." 
 
 Yet some of O'ConneH's popularity in his profession 
 was won by discreditable arts. Ireland is a country in 
 which it has never been particularly unpopular to attack 
 a judge for his conduct on the bench, either in court or 
 in the press, and there were many occasions upon which 
 O'Connell, without censure or loss of reputation, as- 
 sailed the court or his opponents in language which 
 cannot be justified, and which darkens the splendour of' 
 his great forensic career. It is one of the commonplaces, 
 of Irish history to say that at the beginning of this, 
 century the Irish bench was bigoted, intemperate, and 
 corrupt, the law-officers unscrupulous and ungenerous,, 
 that juries were packed, and the well of justice poi- 
 soned at the spring. It is true that none but Protestants, 
 received Crown appointments, and that promotion from^ 
 Government posts at the bar to a seat on the bench, 
 was the natural ambition of a Crown lawyer. It is. 
 unfortunately true that persons of inferior capacity, 
 defective temper, and insufficient learning were placedi 
 upon the bench. Such judges often delivered them-, 
 selves with harshness and prejudice; but it is to be 
 remembered that in England too at that time public. 
 
EARLY AND PROFESSIONAL LIFE. 17 
 
 opinion was perfectly tolerant of judicial severity and 
 of a strong leaning in favour of Government, when 
 questions of law and order were concerned; and it 
 has chiefly heen in political trials that the conduct of 
 the Irish bench has been impugned. That the lists of 
 jurors were often tampered with is probably but too 
 true, and the two cases of the trial of Magee and of 
 O'Connell himself are, unhappily, notorious examples 
 of it; but this appears to have been done by over- 
 zealous and unscrupulous underlings in the various 
 sheriffs' offices. The Crown, too, made an habitual use 
 of its right to order jurors to stand aside so as to 
 exclude Koman Catholics from juries. Now it is easy 
 to see that the practice is indefensible ; yet there were 
 often grounds then for fearing that in particular cases and 
 seasons of excitement a Roman Catholic might not be 
 an impartial juror ; nor is branding a Dublin Protestant 
 by the term of ** Castle tradesman '* enough of itself 
 to place him beyond the pale of justice and fair dealing, 
 O'Connell himself said, before a Parliamentary Com- 
 mittee in 1825, *' In the Court of King's Bench every- 
 thing is done that one can wish. I cannot say that of 
 the Court of Common Pleas or of the Exchequer, 
 though there are individual judges in both, of whom I 
 think highly. The Court of Chancery is not so well, 
 indeed it gives no satisfaction at all. The apprehension 
 of partiality is more occasioned by the kind of instru- 
 ments that are used to bring questions to trial than in 
 the superior judges themselves." 
 
 His conduct in court was at times deplorably violent; 
 at times improperly crafty. He was accustomed to 
 defend himself by saying that he found extravagant 
 language necessary to awaken the self-respect of the 
 down-trodden Koman Catholics, and to persuade them 
 
 2 
 
18 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL. 
 
 that they too had rights, and a champion who was not 
 afraid to assert them. But the plea is unavailing. 
 Once he was defending a prisoner, who was being 
 tried upon a capital charge. He saw that there was 
 upon the merits no defence at all ; but it happened that, 
 in the absence of the regular judge through illness, 
 Serjeant Lefroy sat as commissioner and tried the case, 
 O'Connell determined to practise upon the fears and 
 conscientiousness of an untried and inexperienced judge. 
 He began to ask the witnesses questions which were 
 wholly irregular and inadmissible. To these Serjeant 
 Gould, who appeared for the Crdwn, made objection, as 
 he was in duty bound to do. Serjeant Lefroy, of 
 course, allowed the objection. It was for this O^Con- 
 nell had been playing. He affected righteous wrath, 
 threw away his brief, and crying, *' If you won't let me 
 defend him, his blood be on your head," flung out of 
 court. Lefroy lost his nerve, began to act as counsel for 
 the prisoner, summed up in his favour, and the man was 
 acquitted. ** I knew," said O'Connell afterwards, '* the 
 only w^y was to throw the responsibility on the judge ! " 
 *' Good God, my Lord ! " he once cried at Cork 
 Assizes to a judge, who had employed his evening after 
 his day's work in refreshing his memory upon some 
 point of law, and on coming into court gave him a 
 favourable decision, ** If your lordship had known as 
 much law yesterday morning as you do this, what an 
 idle sacrifice of time and trouble would you not have 
 saved me, and an injury and injustice to my client ! " 
 
 On another occasion, during a motion for a new trial, 
 counsel called on a young Kerry lawyer, who was attorney 
 on the other side, to produce some document or make 
 some admission. O'Connell, who chanced to be in court, 
 but, for aught that appears, knew nothing whatever of 
 
EABLY AND PROFESSIONAL LIFE. 19 
 
 the rights and wrongs of the case, and had nothing to 
 do with it, stood up in court and told the attorney to 
 refuse. Baron McClellan, one of the judges on the 
 bench, asked him if he had a brief in the case. **No, 
 my Lord," said OTonnell, '* I have not, but I will 
 have when the case goes down to the assizes.'* ** When 
 I was at the bar,'^ said the judge, ** it was not my habit 
 to anticipate briefs.'* ** When you were at the bar," 
 cried O'Connell, " I never chose you for a model, and 
 now that you are on the bench I shall not submit to 
 your dictation." ** Leaving his lordship to digest this 
 retort," says O^Conneirs admiring biographer, **he took 
 the attorney by the arm and walked him out of court. 
 In this way he dealt with hostile judges." It is to be 
 hoped that this vigorous effort was rewarded with the 
 expected brief, but the tone employed to the judge was 
 one which, as the story has it, *' would be offensive 
 from its Maker to a black beetle." 
 
 Saurin, the Attorney-General, one of the most dis- 
 tinguished of lawyers, was the object of O'Conneirs 
 peculiar animosity, and what took place between them 
 upon the trial of Magee in 1813 is remarkable. Some 
 time after the verdict, on November 27th, the Attor- 
 ney-General moved the King's Bench in aggravation 
 of the sentence upon Magee, upon the grounds of 
 the line of defence adopted by O'Connell at the trial, 
 and of the subsequent proceedings of the defendant. 
 O'Connell chose to take umbrage at one of Saurin's 
 expressions, and proceeded thus : — 
 
 Even here do I yield in nothing to the Attorney-General. I deny in 
 the strongest terms his unfounded and absurd claim to saporiority. I 
 am hin oqual at least in birth, his equal in fortune, his equal certainly 
 in oducatioti, and an to talent I should not add that, but thero is littU 
 Yftuity iu claiming equality. ... I do most sincorely rejoice that th« 
 
 2 • 
 
20 LIFE OF DANIEL O'GONNELL. 
 
 Attorney-General has prudently treasured up his resentment since 
 July last, and ventured to address me in this court in the unhandsome 
 language he has used, because my profound respect for this temple of 
 the law enables me here to overcome the infirmity of my nature and 
 to listen with patience to an attack which, had it been made else- 
 where, would have met merited chastisement. 
 
 * * * * * 
 
 Mr. Justice Osborne. — I will take the opinion of the court whether 
 you shall not be committed. 
 
 The Chief Justice. — If you pursue that line of language we must 
 call upon some other counsel upon the same side to proceed. 
 
 Mr. Justice Day. — Now, Mr. O'Connell, do you not perceive that 
 while you talk of suppressing those feelings you are actually indulg- 
 ing them. The Attorney- General could not mean you offence in the 
 line of argument he pursued to enhance the punishment in every way 
 of your client. It is unnecessary for you to throw off or to repel as- 
 persions that are not made on you. 
 
 Mr. O'Connell. — . . . What did he mean when he imputed to the 
 advocate participation in the crime of the client ? This he distinctly 
 charged me with. 
 
 Mr. Justice Day. — You shall have the same liberty that he had, 
 but the Court did not understand him to have made any personal 
 attack upon you. 
 
 Mr. Justice Osborne. — We did not understand that the Attorney- 
 General meant you, when he talked of a participator in the crime of 
 your client. 
 
 The Attorney- General. — I did not, my lords; I certainly did not 
 mean the gentleman. 
 
 Mr. O^Connell. — Well, my lords, be it so. ... I am therefor© 
 enabled at once to go into the merits of my client's case. 
 
 It may be that during the whole course of this case 
 the air was so electric, that O'Connell really had sup- 
 posed that something had passed which he ought to 
 resent, but the affair had very much the air of a piece 
 of factitious indignation. The end of O'Conneirs 
 speech rather confirms this impression. As Curran 
 had once done to Lord Clare, he attacked both the 
 Attorney- General and the Bench by drawing his own 
 portraits of them to their faces in the blackest colours, 
 and speculating what his course would have been, had 
 
FABLY AND PE0FE8SI0NAL LIFE, 21 
 
 those been his opponents and judges, and not the ad- 
 mirable persons he saw before him. Of Saurin he 
 spoke in this hypothetical way as *' some creature, nar- 
 row-minded, mean, calumnious, of inveterate bigotry 
 and dastard disposition . . . whose virulence will ex- 
 plode by the force of the fermentation of its own pu- 
 trefaction, and throw forth its filthy and disgusting 
 stores to blacken those whom he would not venture 
 directly to attack." Having regard to the nature of 
 the motion before the court and to the grounds of it, one 
 does not wonder that at the close of this speech, 
 O'Connell's own junior rose, and on behalf of his client 
 Magee, repudiated his leader's language. 
 
22 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE SECURITIES CONTROVERSY. 
 1800-1813. 
 
 Position of the Catholic movement — Leadership of John Keogh — The 
 period of " dignified silence " — The Veto — The Catholic Board — 
 Grattan's Bill of 1813 — Quarantotti's rescript — Collapse of the 
 Catholic party. 
 
 In 1800, the movement for Catholic Relief, which had 
 begun about 1760 and culminated in 1793, was in a 
 state of profound quiescence, almost of torpor. The 
 Catholic party, thankful for what it had won and fearful 
 of collision with the Government, was without policy or 
 organization and almost without leaders. In that con- 
 dition it remained for several years, and when it again 
 became active it had new leaders, new methods, and a 
 goal so different as to be hardly any longer the same. This 
 comprehensive change was the work of O'Oonnell. From 
 the fall of Limerick to the Declaration of American 
 Independence the Irish Roman Catholics had groaned 
 under a penal code of terrible rigour. Enacted for the 
 most part in the reigns of William III. and of Anne, 
 something had been added to its severity under every 
 succeeding Sovereign. For nearly a hundred years Ire- 
 
THE SECURITIES C0NTB0VEB8Y, 23 
 
 land caused EnglaDd neither anxiety nor solicitude. 
 The Cromwellian policy had been to exterminate the 
 Koman Catholics, and had failed. The Penal Code 
 sought by heaping up disabilities to reduce them to 
 political insignificance and impotence, and to such 
 justification as success can give that policy was en- 
 titled. It was not until England found herself sur- 
 rounded by imminent perils from without, that the 
 first part of the Code was abrogated, nor until the 
 best public opinion of England could no longer tolerate 
 such laws that the second part was swept away. The 
 aim of the penal laws was to make and keep the 
 Koman Catholics weak, disunited, ignorant, and fearful, 
 and so long as those laws were enforced in their entirety 
 they succeeded in that dark endeavour. Long after 
 their worst severities had been relaxed O'Connell was 
 accustomed to say, that you could tell a Roman Catholic 
 in the street by his hesitating gait, his timid carriage, 
 and his demeanour of conscious inferiority. The evil 
 eflfects of the disabilities long survived their repeal. 
 
 Still, during the latter half of the eighteenth century 
 the lot of the Irish Roman Catholic had been greatly 
 improved, until indeed in 1800 it was better than that 
 of his English co-religionist. The movement first 
 began among the Catholic aristocracy and gentry. In 
 1760 the first General Association of Catholics of Ire- 
 land was formed, and in 1776 their position was enor- 
 mously changed for the better by the repeal of several 
 Acts, which disabled Roman Catholics from being 
 owners of land. 
 
 But the Catholic gentry were jealous of the Catholic 
 merchants, and when the outbreak of the French Revo- 
 lution was greeted by the latter with enthusiasm and 
 hope, the leaders of the former seceded in a body from 
 
24 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL. 
 
 the organization. The blow to the Catholic cause 
 seemed paralysing, but it was in fact a fortunate event. 
 It threw the leadership into the hands of a man of talent 
 and force, John Keogh of Mount Jerome. Keogh, without 
 any gifts of oratory or grace of manner, was typical of his 
 class, a merchant of rough force and direct insight, who 
 combined daring with caution, and possessed an instinc- 
 tive comprehension of the means at his disposal, the goal 
 to which they could carry him, and the right tactics for 
 success. For twenty years he remained the leader of 
 the movement. In 1791 he went to London, alone 
 and at his own charges, saw Burke, was by him 
 introduced to Henry Dundas, and by his plain but 
 adroit diplomacy, persuaded the Minister of the wis- 
 dom of listening to the prayer of the Irish Catholics. 
 By direction of the English Ministry a Bill was intro- 
 duced into the Irish Parliament and passed, which 
 opened to the Catholics the bar, removed the remaining 
 restrictions on education, and repealed the Intermarriage 
 Act. Returning to Ireland, Keogh undertook, with the 
 assistance of Wolfe Tone, a personal propaganda 
 throughout the country, and procured the appointment 
 of upwards of two hundred delegates, who assembled in 
 Dublin in a convention, which was nicknamed from its 
 place of meeting the "Back Lane Parliament." The 
 Convention appointed a deputation of five, of whom 
 Keogh was one, to wait upon the King and present 
 their petition. They crossed the Channel, were gra- 
 ciously received by His Majesty, and had an inter- 
 view with Pitt. O'Connell, who had but scant respect 
 for Keogh, long afterwards charged him with having on 
 this occasion, in efi*ect, ruined the Catholic cause, for 
 he was sent to demand equality with Protestants and 
 allowed Pitt to cajole him into accepting the munioi- 
 
THE SECVEITIE8 CONTROVERSY. 2S 
 
 palities and the franchise. But having regard to Keogh*s 
 character, to the circumstances of the tim^, and to the 
 magnitude of his achievement, it may be well doubted if 
 more could have been hoped for than Keogh got. At 
 the instance of the English Ministry, a bill was intro- 
 duced into the Irish House of Commons, and ultimately 
 passed, which in point of legislative change did more 
 for the Roman Catholics than Kenmare did in 1776 or 
 O'Connell in 1829. It opened to them the magis- 
 tracy, the grand juries, the military forces, and the 
 municipalities ; it relieved them from most of the re- 
 maining private disabilities, penalties, and forfeitures, 
 and, much against the wish of the Protestant members 
 and even of the Catholic nobility, it admitted them to the 
 electoral franchise. They remained excluded only from 
 Parliament, and a few of the highest military and civil 
 posts. The qualification for the franchise was fixed at 
 a freehold interest of the nominal value of 40s., and, as 
 a leasehold interest for life was held to confer the fran- 
 chise, vast multitudes of Roman Catholic peasants ob- 
 tained it. But the vote of the tenant was regarded as 
 the landlord's property by unquestioned right. It was 
 a common thing for the tenants to be driven up ia 
 flocks to the poll like sheep, to vote as their landlord 
 directed ; and the gentry and nobility of Ireland, purely 
 to increase their own political importance, set them- 
 selves to manufacture freeholders upon a gigantic scale. 
 Innumerable small holdings were created, no matter at 
 what cost of sub-division of tenancies and increase of a 
 pauper population, and leases for lives were granted of 
 the requisite annual value, but determinable on non- 
 payment of rent, which, to preserve the landlord's control, 
 was deliberately kept in arrear far beyond the peasant's 
 ability to pay on demand. This class of voters had 
 
26 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL. 
 
 neither education nor independence. A tenant who 
 disregarded his landlord's direction at the poll, was 
 promptly called upon to pay his arrears of rent, and on 
 his inevitable failure to perform that impossible task, he 
 forfeited his lease, his holding, and his vote. Both 
 socially and economically the system did irreparable 
 harm to the tenantry, and unhappily it endured long 
 enough to effect the whole of its mischief. It was 
 not for thirty-five years that the revolt of the peasant 
 against his landlord came, and when it came, O'Connell 
 was the author of it. 
 
 From 1793 to 1800, the Catholics attempted little and 
 effected nothing. They saw that from Grattan's Par- 
 liament they had little to hope ; it was to the English 
 Parliament that they had to look. In the negotia- 
 tions for the incorporating union, distinct promises 
 of emancipation were made to the Koman Catholics, 
 and distinct support was given in return. But when 
 the Act of Union passed, and the time came for satis- 
 fying the hopes that had been excited, Pitt, in whose 
 scheme Catholic Emancipation was an integral part, 
 found that he had not sufficiently reckoned with 
 the opposing force of the King's crazy conscien- 
 tiousness, and the intriguing resistance of the high 
 Tory lords. The Eoman Catholics were left with the 
 feeling that they had been baulked of their hopes, and 
 •even defrauded of their rights. For peaceful persuasion 
 and influence the Imperial Parliament seemed both too 
 distant and too ignorant; rebellion after rebellion, 
 begun in folly and quenched in blood, had proved that 
 there was no hope for them in force, and the time was 
 still a generation distant when O'Connell could shew 
 them that it was possible for the English legislature to 
 be terrorised without insurrection, and for the unarmed 
 
THE SECURITIES CONTBOVEBSY. 27 
 
 Irish to extort by threats what persuasion could not 
 obtain. 
 
 For some years their leaders, alike Keogh for the mer- 
 chant middle class, and Lord Fingal for the aristocracy, 
 were content to advise an attitude of " dignified silence." 
 Much had been gained in the previous twenty years. 
 The legal position of the Irish Catholics compared 
 favourably with that of Catholics or of Protestant Dis- 
 senters in England. Among them the franchise was so 
 profusely distributed, that with less than one-fiftieth of 
 the real estate of Ireland they had a clear majority of 
 YOtes in the counties. The magistracy, the grand juries, 
 and the bar, though not the bench, were open to them. 
 With the exception of some thirty of the highest posts, 
 they could enter both the civil and military services of 
 the Crown. They were eligible for university degrees, and 
 for admission to corporations. In England, on the 
 other hand, the Test and Corporation Acts were still 
 unrepealed. A Catholic could neither take a degree 
 nor be an alderman. In the army he could rise no 
 higher than the grade of a lieutenant ; he was ineligible 
 for civil office, and was excluded from the franchise. It 
 is true that these privileges, which were theirs in law, 
 were but little, if at all, open to the Irish Catholics in 
 fact; but their inferiority to the Protestants was 
 nothing in comparison with their superiority to the posi- 
 tion which their own fathers had held, and for a time 
 they were disposed to be passive, and to acquiesce 
 in the policy of Keogh. 0*Connell, occupied in found- 
 ing his practice at the bar, accepted this state of 
 things; but presently the Catholics began to move, and 
 he was among the earliest of the baind of barristers 
 who attended all the meetings, and took a lively 
 interest in the course pursued. In 1805 a meeting 
 
28 LIFE OF DANIEL 0' CON NELL, 
 
 assembled, but timorously rejected a proposal to peti- 
 tion for the admission of Catholics to Parliament by 
 336 to 124, and although Keogh talked of forming- 
 another General Committee, nothing came of it. In 
 February 1806 the Talents Administration came in, and 
 in April the new Lord Lieutenant, the Duke of Bedford^ 
 arrived in Ireland. On the 8th of the month a meeting^ 
 was held, at which a vague association was formed, which^ 
 through fear of the Convention Act of 1793, took no defi- 
 nite shape. The Duke of Bedford promised, on behalf of 
 the Prince of Wales, that he would admit the Roman 
 Catholic claims whenever he should be in a position to 
 do so, and the same promise seems to have been given 
 personally by the Prince to Lords Fingal, Petre, and 
 Clifden at Carlton House. Keogh, however, was not 
 entirely satisfied, and a speech of his at a meeting on 
 24th January 1807 expressed such a determined attitude 
 that it was reported to the King, and was not without its 
 influence in inducing him to refuse his assent to Lord 
 Howick's Relief Bill. The Catholics saw their Whig 
 friends, Grenville and Howick, fall in 1807, as they had 
 seen their Tory allies, Pitt and Canning, fall in 1801, in 
 a vain effort for the Catholic cause. From this time 
 O'Connell became convinced that it was not by soft 
 words, or by deferentially forbearing to advance incon- 
 venient claims, that these claims would meet with a just 
 recognition. 
 
 To the "natural leaders," however, of the Catholics, 
 the nobility and the old-fashioned merchants, O'Connell 
 seemed a turbulent and importunate young man, and 
 their movement continued to follow the same timorous 
 course. Their business was managed by committees 
 appointed by aggregate meetings, cautiously summoned 
 for that purpose and immediately dissolved. A kind of 
 
THE SECURITIES CONTBOVEBSY. 29 
 
 representative organization was attempted in 1807, when 
 delegates were summoned from several Dublin parishes ; 
 but on April 18th of that year a meeting was held at 
 which the Catholic petition was withdrawn, and the 
 association dissolved. Nor did any definite result follow 
 from the meeting held in January 1808. At last, largely 
 at the instance of O^Connell, a numerous meeting was 
 held on the 24th May 1809 at the Exhibition Room in 
 William Street, Dublin, and a permanent organization 
 was adopted. It was formed from the remaining 
 members of the delegation of 1792, and of the '* thirty- 
 six addressers," and was really, if not in form, a repre- 
 sentative body. This Committee met on November the 
 8th, decided to present a petition to Parliament, and 
 appointed a sub-committee to prepare it. The move- 
 ment had now a ttoO o-tw, and proceeded continuously, 
 and meetings of the General Committee were held from 
 time to time during 1809 and 1810. In 1810 its scope 
 was extended by a resolution to form local boards or 
 committees in connection with it, but nothing more 
 was done than to hold occasional local meetings, 
 chiefly in the southern counties, during the Munster 
 Assizes. These meetings mark the growing influence 
 of O'Connell and the other Catholic barristers, men 
 who brought to the cause the prestige of their pro- 
 fession, with easy eloquence, business-like habits of 
 speaking, and the art of presenting a case in a broad 
 and tolling way, but also its disadvantages, a tendency 
 to quibbles and to chicane, and a proneness to debate 
 trifles till the main object was lost sight of. At the 
 various meetings 0*Connell was an indefatigable atten- 
 dant and speaker. Two of the resolutions of the 
 meeting of May 1809 were proposed by him. To bim 
 fell most of the work of drafting resolutions ; and the 
 
30 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL. 
 
 Report on the Penal Code, a work of much elaboration 
 and research, which was principally prepared by Scully 
 for the Catholic Committee, was in part O'Connell's 
 work. Keogh was now living in a retired but respect- 
 able old age at Mount Jerome. The principal peer& 
 who led the Catholics were Lord Fingal, Lord French, 
 Lord Trimleston, and Lord Gormanstown. But the 
 business of the organization was done in committees, 
 and there the leadership naturally fell into the hands of 
 the barristers. For a time the chief of these was James 
 Scully, nicknamed the Abb6 Sieyes, a man of a sardonic 
 and scheming turn, without any gift of oratory, who 
 preferred to gain his ends by Machiavellian diplomacy 
 rather than by open agitation. While keeping himself 
 studiously in the background, he was, in fact, for a time 
 the most influential man in the body. Prominent men 
 also were Hussey and Clinch, members of the bar, and 
 Dr. Dromgoole, *' the Duigenan of the Catholic cause,'* 
 an implacable and impracticable bigot, saturated with 
 mediaeval theology, and unable to perceive that he was 
 living in the nineteenth, and not in the fourteenth 
 century. But gradually the untiring energy, the self- 
 devotion, the legal acumen, and the eloquence of 
 O'Connell, brought him more and more to the front, till 
 by the beginning of 1811 his leadership was virtually 
 established. He would stand on the Carlisle Bridge 
 accosting Roman Catholic passers-by, and pressing 
 them to come into the meeting at the adjacent Exchange 
 Rooms, which were taken for the purpose in his name. 
 
 For more than twenty years before Emancipation [says his Letter to 
 Lord Shrewsbury] the burthen of the cause was thrown on me. I had 
 to arrange the meetings, to prepare the resolutions, to furnish replies to 
 the correspondence, to examine the case of each person complaining of 
 practical grievances. ... At a period when my minutes counted by the 
 
THE SECURITIES CONTROVERSY. 31 
 
 guinea, when my emoluments were limited only by the extent of my phy- 
 sical and waking powers, when mj^ meals were shortened to the narrowest 
 space, and my sleep restricted to the earliest hours before dawn, at that 
 period, and for more than twenty years, there was no day that I did not 
 devote from one to two hours, often much more, to the working out 
 of the Catholic cause, and that without receiving or allowing the offer 
 of any remuneration, even for the personal expenditure incurred in 
 the agitation of the cause itself. For four years I bore the entire 
 expenses of Catholic agitation without receiving the contributions of 
 others to a greater amount than £74 in the whole. 
 
 A man of this calibre could not have been passed 
 over, but O'Connell, who was never tolerant of a rival, 
 forced his way to the front in a way that showed little 
 respect or reverence for the age and services of the 
 leader whom he was ousting. Long afterwards, when 
 he was himself ripe in age and service, and in his turn 
 had young men about him impatient of his cautious 
 policy, he told Daunt — 
 
 Keogh saw that I was calculated to become a leader. . . . The 
 course he then recommended was a sullen quiescence. He urged that 
 the Catholics should abstain altogether from agitation, and he 
 laboured hard to bring me to his views. But I saw that agitation was 
 our only available weapon. ... I saw that by incessantly keeping 
 our demands and our grievances before the public and the Govern- 
 ment, we must sooner or later succeed. Moreover, that period aboye 
 all others was not one at which our legitimate weapon, agitation, could 
 have boon prudently let to rust. It was during the war, and while 
 Napoleon, that splendid madman, made the Catholics of Ireland so 
 essential to the military defence of the Empire, the time seemed 
 peculiarly appropriate to press our claims. About that period a great 
 Catholic meeting was held. . . . Keogh drew np a resolution, which 
 denounced the continued agitation of the Catholic question at that 
 time. This resolution, proceeding as it did from a tried old leader, 
 was carried. I then rose and proposed a counter-resolution, pledging 
 ns all to incessant, onrelaxing agitation ; and such were the wiseacres 
 with whom I had to deal, that they passed my resolution in the 
 midst of enthusiastic acclamations. . . . Thenceforward, I may say, 1 
 was Me loader. 
 
22 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL, 
 
 In O'Connell's hands, and conducted upon these 
 principles, the agitation became so considerable that 
 the Government was no longer able to ignore it. The 
 Catholics were shrewdly advised, but at last they made 
 a false step. Till the summer of 1809 the meetings had 
 cautiously passed formal resolutions disclaiming any 
 representative or delegated character. Then, growing 
 bolder, they dropped them. In the beginning of 1811, 
 upon the advice of O'Connell that such a proceeding 
 was legal, Hay, their secretary, issued a circular calling 
 on every county to elect delegates to the association in 
 Dublin. Clare's Convention Act of 1793 was ready to 
 the Lord Lieutenant's hand. On February 12th the 
 Chief Secretary issued a letter to all magistrates, calling 
 on them to arrest all persons advocating or taking part 
 in any such election. On February 23rd, Darby, a police 
 magistrate, appeared at a meeting of the Committee, 
 and called on those present to disperse, but after a 
 quibbling discussion he withdrew. Another attempt of 
 the same kind was made on July 9th. On August 12th 
 two leading delegates, Taafe, a banker, and Kirwan, a 
 merchant, were arrested, and a warrant was issued against 
 Dr. Sheridan. On October 19th a new Catholic committee 
 met, composed, in defiance of the Government, of elected 
 delegates, ten from every county, and was required to 
 disperse by a police magistrate named Hare. On 
 November 23rd its meeting was actually broken up, and 
 the Catholics thought it wise to dissolve their com- 
 mittee. On December 26th they met and elected a non- 
 represeutative Catholic Board. This was an admission 
 of defeat. The first of the prisoners. Dr. Sheridan, had 
 already been tried and acquitted on November 22nd, but 
 on January 30th 1812, Kirwan was found guilty, 
 though no sentence was passed upon him ; and the 
 
THE SECURITIES CONTBOVEBSY. 33 
 
 action for false imprisonment, which on Sheridan's 
 acquittal had been brought against Chief Justice 
 Downes, who had issued the warrants, resulted in the 
 defendant's favour. The Government was master of the 
 field. The Catholics had to content themselves witli 
 holding occasional meetings in the country to protest 
 against the blow. 
 
 To O'Connell and the Catholics no statesman was so 
 hateful as Mr. Perceval. In October 1810 George III. 
 relapsed into insanity, and in February 1811 the Prince 
 of Wales became Prince Regent, but under considerable 
 restrictions. These expired in February 1812, and it 
 was thought that the Prince would indulge his Whig 
 proclivities by dismissing his Tory Ministers. To the 
 Catholics he had made many promises, and they looked 
 now with painful anxiety for their fulfilment. The 
 Prince made no sign ; Perceval remained in office. On 
 the 11th May, Perceval was shot in the lobby of the 
 House of Commons, by a crazy tradesman named Bel- 
 lingham. Again the Prince forgot his promises. The 
 influence of the Hertford family in the royal closet was 
 a fatal obstacle to the assumption of office by Gren- 
 ville and Grey, and Perceval's colleagues continued 
 to carry out Perceval's policy. The mortified Catho- 
 lics, with O'Connell at their head, fell into a childisli 
 pet of rage. Perceval had hardly been in his grave a 
 month when O'Connell was saying of him : — 
 
 For my ))Hrt, I fool uiialToctod horror at his fate, and i\\\ traoo of 
 rosentmont for his criinoH is obliterated ; but I do not forgot that ho 
 was a narrow-minded bigot, a paltry statesman, and a bad minister ; 
 that every species of public corruption and profligacy had in him a 
 flippant and port ndvooato ; that every advance towards reform or 
 -economy had in him a decided enemy ; and that the liberties of th« 
 ])Ooplo were the object of his derision. 
 
 3 
 
34 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL. 
 
 At this meeting, 18th June 1812, the Catholics passed 
 these impolitic and impotent resolutions : — 
 
 That from authentic documents now before us we learn with deep 
 disappointment and anguish how cruelly the promised boon of Catholic 
 freedom has been intercepted by the fatal witchery of an unworthy 
 secret influence, hostile to our fairest hopes, spurning alike the sanc- 
 tions of public and private virtue, the demands of personal gratitude, 
 and the sacred obligations of plighted honour. 
 
 That to this impure source we trace but too distinctly our afflicted 
 hopes and protracted servitude, the arrogant invasion of the un- 
 doubted right of petitioning, the acrimony of illegal State prosecu- 
 tions, the surrender of Ireland to prolonged oppression and insult, 
 and the many experiments equally pitiful and perilous, recently 
 practised upon the habitual passiveness of an ill-treated but high- 
 spirited people. 
 
 The Catholics must have heen simple indeed, and 
 ignorant of the movements of the parties of their times, 
 if they thought that it needed any ** secret influence " 
 but that of his own convenience to make the Prince 
 break his word, or that nothing prevented instant 
 Emancipation but the religious scruples of a royal 
 favourite. 
 
 But while the Catholics conducted their agitation 
 thus openly in Ireland, they had left the conduct of their 
 interest in Parliament in the hands of Lord Grenville 
 and Mr. Grattan. To Keogh, and afterwards to Lord 
 Fingal, it was left to keep up such communication as 
 they thought fit between the parliamentary advocates 
 of Emancipation and the Irish party ; and this method 
 of procedure by semi-secret diplomacy led to dissen- 
 sion and disaster. Pitt's intention had been to deal 
 with the Irish Catholics in a liberal spirit. His plan 
 seems to have been first generally made known by 
 Castlereagli in a speech in the House of Commons on 
 25th May 1810. *' He had been authorised/* he said, 
 
THE SECURITIES CONTROVERSY, 35 
 
 ** to communicate with the Catholic clergy. It was then 
 distinctly understood that the political claims of the 
 Catholics must remain for the consideration of the Im- 
 perial Parliament, hut the expediency of making with- 
 out delay some provision for their clergy under proper 
 regulations was fully recognised. The result of their 
 deliherations was laid before Government in certain 
 resolutions signed by ten of their bishops, including the 
 four metropolitans, in January 1799." The bishops 
 had met in Dublin on January 17th, 18th, and J9tb, 
 1799, and their resolutions were : — 
 
 That a provision, through Government, for the Roman Catholic clei-gy 
 of this kingdom, competent and secured, ought to be thankfully 
 accepted ; [and that] in the appointment of prelates of the Roman 
 Catholic religion to vacant sees within the kingdom, such interference 
 of the Government as may enable it to be satisfied of the loyalty of the 
 persons appointed, is just and ought to be agreed to. 
 
 They went on to suggest that this interference 
 might be provided for by sending to the Govern- 
 ment the names of those persons whom the Catholic 
 clergy had selected for submission to the Pope, which 
 the Government, if satisfied with them, might there- 
 upon forward to Home, or, if not, return to Ireland. 
 
 For several years this idea had been at rest, but in 1808 
 Grattan and Ponsonby, anxious in bringing on again 
 the question of the Catholic claims to be able to allay if 
 possible the jealousy of English Protestantism, inquired 
 of Fingal, who was spokesman for the Irish Catholic 
 laity, and Dr. Milner, Vicar-Goneral of the Midlands, 
 who acted as agent in London for the Irish prelates, 
 wliether there was no pledge or guarantee which could 
 be offered by the Catholics. Fingal and Milner then 
 mentioned the check on the nomination of bishops 
 to which the Irish prelates had been willing to con- 
 
 3 • 
 
36 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL. 
 
 sent in 1799, and Milner said that the bishops, 
 while immovably opposed to a positive interference of 
 Government in their aflfairs, would accept such nega- 
 tive interference as would give the Government addi- 
 tional means of satisfying themselves of the loyalty of 
 episcopal candidates. 
 
 Accordingly, Grattan in the House of Commons, 
 and Lord Grenville in the House of Lords, announced 
 that they were empowered on the part of the Roman 
 Catholics to offer such an arrangement as part of 
 the general emancipation. Ponsonby said that the 
 Catholic bishops authorised him to say that they 
 would consent to their appointment by the Crown. 
 In fact, however, the Roman Catholics proved to be 
 divided upon the question, and, not without disin- 
 genuousness, Milner hastened next day to withdraw 
 from his pledge. The Irish bishops thought that 
 whatever they might have been willing to agree to nine 
 years before, when endowment was offered to them, 
 to consent to a veto now was to give up their Church's 
 exclusive control over her own discipline. A synod 
 was held of all the bishops of Ireland, which con- 
 demned it with but three dissentients; and on 14th 
 September they formally resolved that it was inexpe- 
 dient to make any alteration in the mode of appointing 
 bishops. An address of thanks to them for this course 
 was signed by forty thousand laymen. Among the 
 Catholic laity, however, there was a party, who on this 
 point were in close agreement with Charles Butler and 
 the English Catholics, with whom the idea of this 
 Crown veto seems to have originated about 1791. 
 Lord Southwell and Sir Edward Bellew requested an 
 explanation of the meaning of this episcopal resolution. 
 Archbishop O'Reilly cautiously replied that, without de- 
 
THE SECURITIES CONTROVERSY. 37 
 
 iinitively pronouncing a Crown veto contrary to the doc- 
 trine and discipline of the Church, the bishops saw 
 danger, for the present at least, in such interference by 
 Ministers in Church affairs. Their opposition, how- 
 ever, became steadily more uncompromising, and the 
 majority of the laity applauded their action. 
 
 In 1810, on February 25th, the bishops voted their 
 unconditional adherence to the resolutions of Sep- 
 tember 1808, and declared ** that it is the undoubted 
 and exclusive right of Roman Catholic bishops to dis- 
 cuss all matters appertaiuing to the doctrines and dis- 
 cipline of the Roman Catholic Church," and that they 
 knew of no stronger pledge of their loyalty than the 
 oath then in force. Grattan, in presenting the Ca- 
 tholic petition in that year, was obliged to announce 
 that he could no longer offer any securities on the part 
 of the Catholics. On the other hand, the nobility, 
 almost without exception, and no inconsiderable part of 
 the middle class members of the committee, were for the 
 veto. Lord Fingal, Sir Edward Bellew, and Woulfe, 
 afterwards Chief Baron, seceded from the Board. 
 Sheil, then a very young but rising man, opposed 
 a motion of Dromgoole's against securities in any 
 form, with a declaration that the agitation about 
 securities had deplorably thrown back the cause of 
 Emancipation, and that if restrictions not more severe 
 than those borne by the Church of England would 
 satisfy the invincible prejudices of the English, the 
 English ought to be humoured. O'Connell took him 
 sliarply to task. He pronounced this view a ** doctrine 
 of slavery," a "base and vile traffic,'* and ** a peddling 
 and huxtering speculation." Tie said that to accept the 
 restrictions was to plead guilty to all the charges that 
 the English made against Papists ; that no Protestant 
 
38 LIFE OF DANIEL O'GONNELL. 
 
 Minister could act honestly in the appointment of 
 Roman Catholic bishops ; that ministerial bishops 
 would be a means of uncatholicising Ireland, and 
 bishoprics the reward of the political services of minis- 
 terial toadies ; and he laid down in the most explicit 
 terms the absolute discretion of the bishops them- 
 selves in the matter. ** If the revered and venerable 
 prelates of our Church, exercising their discretion as to 
 that which belongs to them exclusively, the details of 
 discipline, shall deem it right to establish a domestic 
 nomination purely and exclusively Irish . . . the Board 
 will not interfere with such arrangement." 
 
 Meantime, to the English Emancipationists the course 
 of Irish Catholic opinion was of no moment, except in 
 so far as its violence might endanger the cause, by dis- 
 gusting the English public. It was the episcopate of 
 the English not of the Irish Catholic Church, the House 
 of Commons and not the Catholic Committee, which had 
 to be persuaded. From the time when Castlereagh joined 
 the Government in 1812, Emancipation was an open 
 question. Napoleon's invasion of Eussia, as yet pros- 
 perous, was filling the nation with alarm, and bringing 
 it into a conciliatory frame of mind; and on June 22nd, 
 1812, Canning moved a resolution, which pledged the 
 House of Commons " early in the next session to take 
 into their consideration the laws affecting the Roman 
 Catholics, with a view to their final and conciliatory ad- 
 justment." It was carried by a majority of 129, the 
 largest majority in favour of the Roman Catholics in 
 Canning's lifetime. Charles Butler thereupon began to 
 draft a bill, and, largely upon Canning's advice, in- 
 serted elaborate ** securities " clauses. One provided 
 for an oath to be taken by every Catholic clergyman, 
 that he would not assent to or concur in the appoint- 
 
THE SECURITIES CONTROVERSY, 39 
 
 ment of any Catholic prelate in Ireland, unless he should 
 consider such prelate to he of unimpeachable loyalty 
 and peaceful conduct, and the oath proceeded, " I have 
 not and will not have any communication with the Pope 
 tending directly or indirectly to overthrow or disturb 
 the Protestant Government or the Protestant Church 
 of Great Britain and Ireland, or the Church of 
 Scotland as by law established, or on any matter or 
 thing not purely spiritual or ecclesiastical." To further 
 ensure the safety of Protestantism, a Board of Com- 
 missioners, partly Protestant and partly Roman Catho- 
 lic, was to be appointed to inquire into the character 
 of nominees for vacant sees or deaneries, in order 
 to ascertain whether there was any shadow on their 
 loyalty or conduct. Subject to these restrictions, the 
 House of Commons and all offices except those of Lord 
 Chancellor or Lord Keeper and Lord Lieutenant or 
 Lord Deputy, were to be thrown open to the Roman 
 Catholics. On March 2nd, 1813, Grattan carried a 
 motion in the House of Commons in favour of Eman- 
 cipation by 264 to 224, and in April he introduced this 
 bill. The majority rose to 42 on the second reading, 
 but in committee, on the motion of Abbott, the 
 Speaker, the admission of Catholics to Parliament was 
 thrown out by 251 to 247 on May 24th, and the bill 
 was withdrawn. It never was reintroduced, for on the 
 very verge of victory the friends of tlie Catliolics found 
 their cause compromised by the conduct of the leaders 
 and people in Ireland. When the rumour of the pro- 
 posals got abroad, they provoked not gratitude for tlie 
 boon, but fury at the safeguards. Before the result of the 
 Speaker's motion was known in Ireland the prelates had 
 met on May 27th, and unanimously resolved ** tliat the 
 ecclesiastical securities are absolutely incompatible with 
 
40 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL, 
 
 tlie discipline of the Koman Catholic Church and with 
 tlie free exercise of our religion ; without incurring the 
 guilt of schism we cannot accede to such regulations, 
 neither can we dissemhle our dismay and consternation 
 at the consequences which such regulations, if enforced, 
 must necessarily produce/' The Catholic Board hotly 
 debated whether the laity were to be excluded from a 
 boon because the prelates objected to its attendant 
 securities as uncanonical. O'Connell warmly defended 
 the bishops, and attacked Grattan violently for ever 
 consenting to such clauses. During the autumn, meet- 
 ings in various parts of Ireland denounced Grattan^s 
 ** securities." In November a correspondence took place 
 between the Board and Grattan and Lord Donough- 
 more, in which both the latter refused further communica- 
 lions if the policy was to be that no securities were to be 
 inserted in any Relief Bill, except such as might please 
 the Roman Catholic bishops ; such a demand, said they, 
 was to dictate to Parliament and leave it a bare choice 
 between Aye and No. Personal relations grew strained. 
 Scully declined to meet Plunket ; Plunket talked of not 
 attending Parliament at all ; and Lord Donoughmore was 
 with difficulty restrained from challenging his opponents 
 on the Catholic Board. In the following spring 0*Con- 
 nell moved at the Board to take the petition out of 
 the veteran Grattan's hands, and to send over a deputa- 
 tion to select some English member to whom it might 
 be entrusted. He withdrew his motion, but though 
 Grattan consented to present the petition, neither the 
 demand of the Board nor an aggregate meeting could 
 prevail upon him to move its discussion. 
 
 Meantime, both parties naturally had their eyes 
 turned to Rome. Wyse and others were in Rome on 
 behalf of the Vetoists ; a friar named Richard Hayes, a 
 
THE SECURITIES CONTROVERSY. 41 
 
 nominee of O'Connell's, represented, but without tact 
 or discretion, the Domestic Nomination party. Since 
 the annexation of the States of the Church in 1809, the 
 Pope had been the pensioned prisoner of Napoleon in 
 France. Quarantotti, the Vice-Prefect of the Propa- 
 ganda, was in charge of the Holy See. In the beginning 
 of 1814, it appeared that the Holy See itself had none 
 of those fears of schism which agitated the Irish pre- 
 lates. On February 16th, Quarantotti wrote from Rome 
 to Dr. Poynter, the English Vicar Apostolic : — 
 
 Nos, qui summo absente pastore sacris missionibus praefecti sumns 
 et Pontificiis omnibus facultatibus ad id communiti, muneris nostri 
 partes esse putavimus omnem ambiguitatem atque objectionem remo- 
 vere, quae optatao conciliationi possit obsistere. Habito igitur d<Jc- 
 tissimorum praesulum ac theologorum consilio, perspectis litteria turn 
 ab Amputate tua, tum ab Archiepiscopo Dubliniensi hue missis, ac re 
 in peculiari congregationi mature perpensa, decretum est, ut Catholici 
 legem, quae superiore anno rogata fuit pro illorum emancipatione 
 juxta formam, qu» ab Amplitate tua relata est, aequo gratoque animo 
 excipiant et amplectantur. 
 
 The letter fell on the Irish Catholics like a bomb- 
 shell. From the highest to the lowest they were in 
 dismay. ** What shall we do," said a servant-maid, ** is 
 it, can it be true the Pope has turned Orangeman ? *' 
 But the clergy soon rallied. They pronounced the 
 letter of Quarantotti a nullity and a usurpation. Dr. 
 Coppinger, Bishop of Cloyno, called it " a very mischie- 
 vous document.'* O'Shaughnessy, Bishop of Dromore, 
 pronounced it '* pernicious.*' The priests of the Arch- 
 diocese of Dublin resolved that it was non-obligatory, 
 for want of the signature of the Pope, and expressed an 
 opinion that nothing less august than an (Ecumenical 
 Council was competent to doal witli the relations be- 
 tween an Irish bishop and an English Secretary of 
 State. The bishops assembled at Maynooth and voted 
 
42 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL. 
 
 the letter not to be mandatory. An aggregate meeting 
 of the laity, held at Dublin on May 19th, was even 
 more sturdy. Though throughout the controversy the 
 securities question had been treated as a matter pecu- 
 liarly of a canonical and ecclesiastical nature, the meet- 
 ing resolved *' that we deem it a duty to ourselves and 
 our country solemnly and distinctly to declare that any 
 decree, mandate, rescript, or decision whatsoever of any 
 foreign power or authority, religious or civil, ought not 
 and can not of right assume any dominion or control 
 over the political concerns of the Catholics of Ireland." 
 lo July they even procured of the Pope the dismissal of 
 the luckless Vice-Prefect and a repudiation of his 
 letter. But the Catholics of Ireland had resisted too 
 long. Grattan abandoned the Catholic claims for the 
 session. The Allies entered Paris ; the war was over; 
 the pressure of twenty years of danger was removed. 
 Irish discontent no longer put the English in any jeo- 
 pardy. On the 3rd of June the Catholic Board was 
 proclaimed. 
 
 This stubborn objection to securities in any shape or 
 form cost the Catholics fourteen years of waiting for 
 Emancipation, and cost both England and Ireland no 
 one can say how much strife and ill-feeling, agitation 
 and bigotry. It is difficult to suppose that the large 
 majority in the House of Commons, which voted for 
 Catholic Belief in 1813, was much actuated by fear 
 of Catholic discontent during the continuance of the 
 war or by anything but a sense of the injustice under 
 which the Catholics laboured. The effect of unanimity 
 among the Catholics and of moderation in their lan- 
 guage would, it can hardly be doubted, have turned the 
 scale in their favour within a very short time. In 1812, 
 the Marquis Wellesley, who had every opportunity of 
 
TEE SECVBITIE8 C0NTB0VEB8Y. 43 
 
 forming a just forecast, was standiDg with Charles Butler 
 behind the throne during the Catholic debate in the 
 House of Lords. ** Sir," said he to Butler, ** if the 
 Catholics conduct their cause with propriety, I insure you 
 success in three years, perhaps in one." That the suc- 
 cess which was then so close at hand was not achieved 
 until 1829 was the doing of the priests and O'Connell. 
 
 A change had come over the priesthood since the 
 last generation, which had profoundly altered its cha- 
 racter. The priests then were necessarily educated 
 abroad, and naturally, therefore, were drawn from fami- 
 lies of means and position. Many of them were English- 
 men. Thus they were ready enough to acquiesce in a con- 
 trol which, in its intention at least, was nothing but a 
 legitimate assurance by the State of its own safety. But 
 the alteration in the Catholic laws had given the clergy 
 the means of education at home, and their body had 
 become more insular and isolated, more professional 
 and more Irish. A few prelates breathed secret fears 
 that domestic nomination pure and simple might 
 vulgarise the episcopate, but, practically without excep- 
 tion, the priesthood would accept no State supervision 
 of their conduct in ecclesiastical affairs. In this they 
 were supported by O'Connell with ardour and even in- 
 temperate heat. 
 
 There was something of the ecclesiastic in O'Conneirs 
 temperament ; he had been educated by priests, and his 
 deep personal piety attached him to the priesthood so 
 unhesitatingly, that even in politics, wliere most men, 
 however religious, feel a lurking doubt of eoolesiastics, 
 however disinterested, no mistrust came between him 
 and them. There was, indeed, much to be said against 
 the veto, though perhaps not enough to outweigh the 
 advantage of a settlement of the question forthwith. 
 
U LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL. 
 
 Hitherto the Church of Kome had been subject to no 
 State control in ecclesiastical matters. It was subject 
 to prohibitions, which were disregarded, and to penalties 
 which were not enforced, but in its spiritual affairs as 
 such the State did not interfere. The veto required the 
 priests to make a sacrifice of spiritual freedom ; the 
 freedom which was to be thereby purchased was a tem- 
 poral one, to be enjoyed by the laity. Pitt's veto was 
 to have been in consideration of an endowment to 
 Roman Catholics, but there was now no suggestion of 
 any endowment. The clergy resolved to wait for better 
 terms. With its past and its principles, the Church of 
 Rome has a corporate pride, which it prefers to main- 
 tain at the price of a moderate martyrdom. 
 
 O'Connell, however, had a political object in resisting 
 any such compromise. Though the Imperial Parlia- 
 ment had done nothing for Ireland since the Union but 
 pass Coercion Acts, which, it must be admitted, inter- 
 mittent rebellion and chronic disturbance during a time 
 of national struggle with foreign foes did much to 
 justify, there was no specific reform, except Catholic 
 Relief, which any unanimous or influential party then 
 demanded. Although perhaps no part of the law was 
 beyond need of a radical change, the most imme- 
 diate cause of Irish discontent was the corrupt state 
 and constant maladministration of the unpaid magis- 
 tracy. But behind all questions and grievances there re- 
 mained a deep, though voiceless, yearning for Repeal, and 
 it was his desire for Repeal that determined O'Connell 
 for the present to keep open the grievance of the Catholic 
 Disabilities. Ardent as he was for the relief of his co- 
 religionists, his first aim in politics, as it was his last, 
 was to restore their Parliament to his countrymen. 
 '' It was the Union," he said, *' which first stirred me 
 
THE SECURITIES CONTROVERSY. 45 
 
 up to come forward in politics. I was maddened when 
 I heard the hells of St. Patrick's ringing out a joyful 
 peal for Ireland's degradation, as if it were a glorious 
 national festival. My hlood hoiled, and I vowed on 
 that morning that the dishonour should not last if I 
 could put an end to it." The meeting at which he made 
 his first public appearance had been one held by the Catho- 
 lics in the Iloyal Exchange Hall on 13th January 1800, 
 to protest against the Union. He had risen, an un- 
 known lawyer, to make his speech, when the tramp of 
 yeomanry was heard outside, and the clank of musket- 
 butts grounded on the stones of the portico. Major 
 Sirr appeared in the midst of the affrighted Catholics 
 and demanded to see the resolutions. They had been 
 originally drafted by Curran in very fiery terms, but in 
 deference to the timidity of some of the Catholics, they 
 had been toned down, and were found unexceptionable. 
 Sirr threw them back on the table saying ** There is no 
 harm in these," and retired, and the meeting was 
 allowed to proceed. But as time went on, O'Connell 
 saw that to weld the people of Ireland into a compact 
 united mass, resolutely demanding Repeal, was at once 
 indispensable and almost hopeless. Faction had been 
 the bane of Irish politics. Even on the Eraanoipatiou 
 question he found the clergy timid, the aristocracy 
 jealous of the merchants, the merchants jealous of the 
 aristocracy, the barristers jealous of one another, and 
 the masses ignorant, utterly unused to political delibe- 
 ration or action, willing to throw up their hats and 
 cheer if a favourite of the hour appeared upon the 
 street, but fickle and untrustworthy, and politically 
 powerless, A resort to arms was a madness and a 
 orime. Nothing but a generation of agitation could 
 educate and unite the Irish people into a political force, 
 
46 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL. 
 
 and no question but Catholic Relief could be agitated 
 through a generation. In the thick of the veto conflict he 
 said, at a meeting in Dublin on 29th June 1813 : — 
 
 Your enemies say that I wish for a separation between England 
 and Ireland. The charge is false, to use a modern quotation, " false 
 as hell." Next, your enemies accuse me of a desire for the indepen- 
 dence of Ireland. I admit the charge, and let them make the most 
 of it. I have seen Ireland a kingdom. I reproach myself with 
 having lived to behold her a province. Yes, I confess it — I will ever 
 be candid upon the subject — I have an ulterior object, the Repeal of 
 the Union, and the restoration to Ireland of her old independence. . . . 
 Desiring as I do the Repeal of the Union, I rejoice to see how our 
 enemies promote that great object. Yes, they promote its inevitable 
 success by their very hostility to Ireland ; they delay the liberties of 
 the Catholic, but they compensate us most amply, because they 
 advance the restoration of Ireland. By leaving one cause of agitation 
 they have created, and they will embody and give shape and form to 
 a public mind and a public spirit. I repeat it, the delay of Emancipa- 
 tion I hear Avith pleasure, because in that delay is included the only 
 prospect of obtaining my great, my ultimate object, the legislative 
 independence of my native land. 
 
 Whether O'Oonnell was wise or unwise in his strategy 
 must depend on the view which is taken of the prospect, 
 and the value of Repeal. But of his disinterestedness 
 he gave the best of proofs. As yet, outside of Dublin, 
 agitation had not won him the adoration of the populace. 
 The course that he took did win for him the dislike of the 
 nobility and the gentry of his party. It is true that on 
 December 16th, 1813, the Catholics presented him with a 
 service of plate of the value of a thousand guineas, but 
 year by year agitation cost him much in money and more 
 in time, which was more precious to him than money. He 
 had a large practice, but he had also a large family,* 
 large expenses, and as yet little or no patrimony. The 
 ** good behaviour'' of the Irish Catholics could hardly 
 
 * O'Connell married his cousin, Mary O'Connell, in 1802. 
 
THE SECURITIES CONTROVERSY. 47 
 
 have failed, on the passing of Grattan's Bill, to have 
 been rewarded with professional promotion. O'Connell, 
 not yet obnoxious to any English person or party, 
 would have been one of the first recipients of a silk 
 gown, and must have risen inevitably at a stride to the 
 highest position and emoluments of his profession; and 
 if he wished for more, who so likely to be among the 
 first Koman Catholic members of Parliament as the 
 great King's Counsel, the eloquent orator, the champion 
 of the Catholic cause, in the sense in which the gentry 
 understood the term ? All this was within his grasp, 
 and he threw it all away. He preferred to fight the 
 battle of the priests and of Repeal, at the cost of the 
 disapproval of equals and of professional sacrifices. 
 Of the wisdom of this policy the course of events has 
 raised, and still sustains, a doubt ; but of the courage, 
 foresight, and disinterestedness of O'Connell there can 
 be none. 
 
48 LIFE OF DANIEL 0' CON NELL. 
 
 CHAPTEK III. 
 
 CATHOLIC DESPONDENCY. 
 
 1814-1823. 
 
 State of Affairs after the Dissolution of the Board — O'Conneirs Duel 
 with D'Esterre — Affair with Peel — Trial of Magee for libel on the 
 Duke of Richmond — Visit of George IV. to Dublin. 
 
 The suppression of the Board was a terrible blow to 
 the Catholics. Except his last days, the next seven 
 years were the darkest of O'Connell's life. A meeting 
 was held at his house, which resolved upon sub- 
 mission; indeed, there was nothiug else to be done. 
 For the time being the back of the agitation was 
 broken. In vain he endeavoured to rally his followers. 
 Next year, with characteristic hopefulness he declared 
 that after much deliberation he was sure during that 
 session they would get at least a portion of eman- 
 cipation. He was wrong in his forecast, and his hope- 
 fulness effected nothing. The Vetoists, too, were 
 powerless. Small and timid meetings were held at Lord 
 FingaVs house, which merely resolved to leave the 
 Catholic petition in the hands of Grattan and Lord 
 Donoughmore, and to found an association to take the 
 
CATHOLIC DESPONDENCY. 49 
 
 place of the Board. The split between the two parties, 
 the ** securities " men and the ^^bold measure'' men, 
 was too deep to be remedied. The controversy had de- 
 generated into a personal struggle, in which each party 
 imputed to the other every baseness. It was long before 
 this animosity was appeased, and the misfortune was the 
 greater because English public opinion never was more 
 favourable to Emancipation than then. The two parties 
 endeavoured, but in vain, to support separate organiza- 
 tions. The Vetoists held meetings at Lord TrimIeston*s 
 house ; the Catholic Association, which succeeded the 
 Board in February 1815, met at Fitzpatrick's in 
 Capel Street. The former left their petition in Grat- 
 tan's hands ; the latter entrusted theirs to Sir Henry 
 Parnell. Both were represented by Lord Donough- 
 more in the House of Lords. O'Connell boldly denied 
 that a small body of seceders, meeting in private, had any 
 right to speak for ihe Catholics at large. In February 
 1817 the Vetoists advertised a meeting to be held in 
 Dublin at No. 50 Eccles Street. O'Connell and a few 
 others decided to invade it. They were confronted at 
 the door with an order, signed by Lord Southwell and 
 Sir Edward Bellew, that no one was to bo admitted 
 who was not a party to the Catholic petition com- 
 mitted to Grattan the year before. They put the foot- 
 boy and his orders aside, and, to the oonsternation of 
 the decorous meeting upstairs, appeared in the drawiog- 
 room. They wore requested to withdraw, and declined. 
 The outraged Vetoists took refuge in a motion for 
 an immediate adjournment. O'Connell challenged il 
 and delivered a long and vigorous speech against 
 the ** securities." But nothing practical resulted. 
 Such a course might inspire his own shrinking fol- 
 lowers with temporary courage, but it failed to con- 
 
 4 
 
50 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL, 
 
 ciliate the Veto party. By this time the politics of the 
 see of Rome had changed with the restoration of the 
 Pope to the Vatican. The Association had adopted an 
 address of remonstrance to His Holiness on the 16th 
 September 1815, but the Pope evaded their reproaches 
 by treating it as a lay intervention in matters ecclesias- 
 tical, and declined to receive it officially. The parish 
 priests and a majority of the prelates were in O'Con- 
 nell's favour, but so exclusively moral was their sup- 
 port, that they could not even raise the rent of the 
 rooms in Capel Street which the Association occupied. 
 For a time he paid the rent himself, and then, finding 
 that he had to bear the whole working expenses of the 
 Association, removed it to smaller rooms in Cross 
 Street. In January 1817 he made an attempt to found 
 a society of ''Friends of Reform in Parliament," of 
 which both Catholics and Protestants were to be 
 members, but after a few meetings it collapsed. A 
 lethargy fell on the Catholics ; it was the winter of 
 their discontent, the low-water mark of their activity. 
 A man of only common courage must have given up 
 the fight in despair. 
 
 In such a state of affairs as this, O' Council, who 
 rarely restrained his language, did not mince matters, 
 but spoke of his opponents with asperity. He called 
 the Dublin Corporation, then a stronghold of Protes- 
 tantism, a ** beggarly corporation." One of its mem- 
 bers was a Mr. J. N. D'Esterre, a native of Limerick, 
 who was nominally a merchant, but was said to be in 
 indigent circumstances, though of unimpeachable re- 
 spectability. In his youth he had served in the marines, 
 and, being seized by the mutineers in 1797, during 
 the mutiny at the Nore, was placed with the noose 
 round his neck ready to be swung up to the yard- arm. 
 
CATHOLIC DESPONDENCY. 51 
 
 At the last moment they offered him life if he would 
 join them. "No, never!'* cried the intrepid officer. 
 " Hang away, and be damned to you !" The answer so 
 enchanted the tars that he was immediately set at 
 liberty. He now, egged on perhaps by others, who saw 
 a chance of getting rid of O'Connell, decided to take up 
 the cause of his outraged corporation. The duel was at 
 this time a recognised instrument of party warfare. Even 
 in England statesmen and ministers stood to receive each 
 other's fire. Pitt and Tierney, Canning and Castlereagh, 
 the Duke of Wellington and the Earl of Winchelsea, 
 Fitzgibbon and Curran, had fought, and even Peel was 
 bellicose and a sender of hostile messages. Among Eng- 
 lish statesmen, it is true, these encounters were generally 
 bloodless, but the Irish took the matter more seriously, 
 and the chance that a political opponent might be re- 
 moved in a political duel was considerable. To drink 
 sparingly of your host's best claret, to decide at petty ses- 
 sions for a tenant against his landlord, or to seduce a 
 forty-shilling freeholder's allegiance in a county election, 
 touched the point of honour, and the personal affront 
 could only be atoned for with bloodshed. It was the 
 first time that O'Connell, who was reported a good 
 naarksman, had had a serious affair. In August 1813, 
 during the Limerick Assizes, he went out with Coun* 
 sellor Magrath, with whom he had come to blows in 
 open court, but when the combatants met in the usual 
 battle-place, the old coort-mill field, their friends ad- 
 justed the matter. On the 26th January 1815 
 D'Esterre wrote to O'Connell to demand explanations. 
 Next day O'Connell undauntedly replied, that while 
 individually esteeming many of its members, he de- 
 spised the corporation generally for its bigotry. After 
 this he prepared himself in due course to receive 
 
 4 • 
 
52 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL. 
 
 D'Esterre's friends, but no friends came. D'Esterre 
 wrote again on the 28th, but did not take the final step. 
 At length, on Tuesday, January 31st, a rumour got about 
 that D'Esterre, though but a little man, proposed to 
 cane his burly antagonist in the Hall of the Four 
 Courts, and a crowd gathered to see it done. O'Con- 
 nell, determined not to baulk him, showed himself in 
 the streets all the afternoon, and public attention being 
 excited, a party of five hundred gentlemen followed him 
 about to enjoy the fun or to prevent an assault. O'Con- 
 nell had to take refuge from their importunity in a 
 tavern. This scene of braggadocio was closed in the 
 evening by the arrival of Mr. Justice Day at O'Con- 
 nelFs house to arrest him and prevent a breach of the 
 peace. His lordship went away pacified with O'Connell's 
 pledge not to be the challenger. At length next day 
 Sir Edward Stanley, then barrack-master in Dublin, 
 waited with D'Esterre's challenge on Major Macnamara, 
 a Protestant gentleman, who was acting for O'Connell. 
 A meeting was arranged for half-past three o'clock that 
 afternoon, in a meadow in Lord Ponsonby's demesne, 
 about twelve miles from the city. The days were short, 
 and the snow was lying on the ground. All Dublin 
 knew what was going on, and was in wild anxiety 
 for the fate of O'Connell. A large number of gentle- 
 men rode out to the field to see the fighting. Punc- 
 tually at half-past three O'Connell arrived ; D'Esterre 
 was nearly an hour late. The combatants were placed 
 opposite each other, each with a pistol in either hand, 
 and about twenty minutes to R\e the word was given. 
 They fired almost simultaneously, D'Esterre slightly 
 the first. O'Connell aimed low, and D'Esterre, struck 
 in the hip, fell, bleeding profusely. The party sepa- 
 rated. As O'Connell quitted the field, there dashed 
 
CATHOLIC DESPONDENCY. 63 
 
 up a troop of horse sent by the Executive to protect 
 D'Esterre, in case of his victory, from the fury of 
 the mob. The people lined the roads, and when they 
 saw their favourite returning in safety, raised shouts 
 of joy. Bonfires blazed till midnight in the streets 
 of Dublin. Meantime, poor D'Esterre was carried 
 to his house, but the ball could not be found, 
 and, after much suffering, he expired next day. The 
 dead man's family disclaimed any intention of pro- 
 secuting ; but O'Connell was filled with remorse at 
 this untoward event. He settled a pension on the 
 widow, and never afterwards passed D'Esterre's house 
 without baring his head and breathing a prayer. 
 
 At some time after D'Esterre's death, he registered 
 a vow that he would never fight again, and upon 
 this ground refused the many challenges which his 
 vehement invective subsequently brought upon him. 
 The vow, however, was not made in the first keenness of 
 remorse for D'Esterre's loss. Peel, who as Chief Secre- 
 tary was alive to the formidable power of O'Connell, 
 took care to quote to the House of Commons passages 
 from his more violent speeches. At an aggregate meet- 
 ing on August 29th, 1815, O'Connell retaliated by 
 saying ; — 
 
 I am told ho has in my ahsenco, and in a place where he wan 
 privileged from any accomit, grossly traduced mc. I said at the last 
 meeting, in the presence of the note-takers of the police, who are paid 
 by him, that ho was too prudent to attack me in my pretence. I 8«e 
 the same polico informers hore now, and I authorise them oar^foUy to 
 report these my words, that Mr. Peel would not dare, in my p r — en o< 
 and in any place where ho was liable to personal account, use a single . 
 cxpreHHion dorogatury to my interest or my honour. 
 
 Peel had been attacked by O'Connell fiercely enough 
 before. He had been spoken of as " that ludicrous 
 
54 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL. 
 
 enemy of ours, who has got in jest the name he de- 
 serves in good earnest of Orange Peel, a raw youth 
 squeezed out of the workings of I know not what fac- 
 tory in England, who . . . was sent over here before 
 he had got rid of the foppery of perfumed handkerchiefs 
 and thin shoes. '^ But this was too direct an attack to 
 be passed over. On the 31st Sir Charles Saxton waited 
 on O^Connell on Peel's behalf, and offered him the 
 usual satisfaction if he felt aggrieved. O'Connell re- 
 plied that Peers conduct was "handsome and gentle- 
 manlike/' but he must consult his friends, though for 
 his own part he hoped they might advise fighting. 
 The advice of the friends was that, in effect, the speech 
 made O'Connell the aggressor, and the challenge there- 
 fore could not come from him. Saxton, who seems 
 to have thought that O'Connell wished to evade a 
 meeting, published a version of the affair in the 
 papers, which O'Connell answered by regretting that 
 his opponents should have preferred ** a paper war/' 
 and calling the publication *' a dirty trick." On Sep- 
 tember the 4th, Peel replied by sending a challenge 
 to O'Connell by Colonel Browne. The affair was, 
 of course, public property, and in her alarm poor 
 Mrs. O'Connell sent to the Sheriff to prevent a 
 breach of the peace. Late at night that functionary 
 arrived, took O'Connell in bed, and caused him to be 
 bound over in a considerable sum to keep the peace ; 
 but when he went to the Chief Secretary's house to 
 take Peel also, he found that Peel with Browne and 
 Saxton had quitted it for England. Next day O'Con- 
 nell sent Mr. Bennett to Colonel Browne with an offer 
 to meet Peel at any place on the Continent that might 
 suit his convenience. Browne proposed that the parties 
 should proceed, separately and as soon as possible, to 
 
CATHOLIC DESPONDENCY. 55 
 
 Ostend, binding themselves to secrecy, and should leave 
 their addresses at the post office there. To this Peel 
 agreed: he set off and reached Ostend on the 14th. 
 O'Connell was to elude observation by sailing for the 
 Continent from Waterford. But the police were on the 
 alert ; they had received orders to transmit to the Foreign 
 Secretary the names of all passengers by the packets 
 from the southern and western ports of Ireland, and 
 were watching the coast of Essex. O'Connell changed 
 his plans, and contrived to get over to England from 
 the south of Ireland. But the authorities in London, 
 too, were on the watch. Peel's father, not less anxious 
 than O'Connell's wife, is said to have offered a reward 
 of tifty guineas for O'Connell's capture. Being detained 
 by the necessity of getting passports at the Dutch 
 Embassy, he concealed himself as well as he could, 
 changed his lodging from the British Hotel to Holy- 
 land's Coffee House in the Strand, and ordered a post- 
 chaise for Brighton at 4 a.m. one Monday morning. 
 But the police were hanging about at 3 a.m. As he 
 was stepping into his carriage he was arrested by 
 Lavender, a Bow Street runner, armed with the warrant 
 of Lord Chief Justice Ellenborough. He was taken 
 before Mr. Justice Lo Blanc and bound over in his own 
 recognizances of iJl,000 and two others of £500 each, 
 to keep the peace and not to quit London till the 
 first day of the following term. The duel was thus 
 finally prevented : nor did 0*Conneli ever tight again. 
 Some short time afterwards O'Connell was arguing 
 an obscure legal point before Lord Norbury. "My 
 Lord ! '* said lie, ** I fear 1 do not make myself under- 
 stood.'* ** Oh ! Mr. 0*Connell,*' said his lordship, *'I 
 am sure no on(3 is more easily apprehended** 
 
 Later in lite O'Councirs bitter tongue brought on 
 
56 LIFE OF JDANIFL O'CONNELL, 
 
 him other challenges. In 1825, being challenged by 
 Leyne, a Kerry barrister, he lodged an information 
 against him. A year or two later Sheehy, an outraged 
 newspaper proprietor of Cork, cuffed him in the streets 
 of Dublin with the same result. In 1830 the Chief 
 Secretary, Sir Henry Hardinge sent hira a message, 
 Lord Alvanley sent him one in 1835, and in the same 
 year Mr. Disraeli challenged his son. He incurred 
 the severest censure for running riot with his tongue 
 while denying to his wounded opponents the satisfaction 
 of falling by his pistol ; but although it is impossible 
 to approve his conduct in using the strongest lan- 
 guage and declining to take the consequences, his 
 action certainly did a great deal to discredit the 
 practice. 
 
 Meantime he was pursuing his practice at the bar, 
 and his professional fame was at its height. Unlike 
 Curran, whose bitter enemy, Lord Clare, practically ex- 
 pelled him from practice in the Court of Chancery, 
 O'Connell could not be ousted from any court, however 
 grievously he offended the judges. His practice lay 
 equally in equity and at common law. In July 
 1813 the trial of John Magee, the proprietor of the 
 Dublin Evening Post, for a libel on the Duke of 
 Richmond, gave him the opportunity of his greatest 
 forensic effort. The libel in question had been written 
 by James Scully, though some of Magee's friends even 
 suggested that it came from O'ConnelFs hand. As 
 Peel wrote to the Speaker Abbott, the prosecution was 
 intended to wrest from the Catholic Committee its most 
 formidable weapon, the Press. If Magee gave up the 
 writer's name he would become the enemy of the Com- 
 mittee ; if the Committee left him to take the punish- 
 ment himself, it would become the enemy of Magee. 
 
CATHOLIC DESPONDENCY. 57 
 
 The trial took place in the hottest hour of the ** securi- 
 ties " controversy. After innumerable wrangles about 
 challenges, and charges of misconduct in striking the 
 panel, an Orange jury was sworn. There was but too 
 good a reason to fear that the jury panel had been tam- 
 pered with. John Gifford, a bitter and bigoted parti- 
 san, whom Lord Hardwick, when Lord Lieutenant, had 
 dismissed from the Eegistrarship of the Dublin Custom 
 House for his violent attacks on the Catholics, and the 
 Duke of Richmond, during his term of oflBce, had re- 
 instated as Accountant-General of Customs, had said of 
 such a jury, with profane glee, in the previous year, " If 
 Our Saviour himself were in the dock they would find 
 him guilty if it served their party." To such a jury 
 O'Connell thought it useless to appeal, and, abandoning 
 any attempt to secure an acquittal, he devoted himself 
 to a lull and brilliant exposition and defence of the 
 Catholic policy. The Chief Justice checked him and said 
 it was irrelevant. ** You heard the Attorney-General 
 traduce and calumniate us," cried O'Connell, fiercely ; 
 ** you heard him with patience and with temper — 
 listen now to our vindication.'^ Such a course was not 
 likely to help Magee's cause much, whatever it might 
 do for the Catholics. He was convicted, and sentenced 
 to two years* imprisonment and a fine of ;£500. 
 
 But through these years O'Connell was chafing im- 
 patiently at the apathy of his party and the helplessness 
 of his political condition. The rarliamentary position 
 of Emancipation had suffered severely by the loss of 
 the Belief Bill of 1813. It was not mentioned in the 
 sessioD of 1814 ; and Parueirs motion on presenting 
 the Catholic petition was lost in 1815 by 228 to 147, 
 in the very Parliament which had been in its favour two 
 years before. In 181G Grattan's motion on presenting 
 
58 LIFE OF DANIEL 0' CONN ELL, 
 
 the petition of the Vetoists was rejected by 31. In 1817 
 the hostile majority was 24; in 1819 he made his last 
 effort on behalf of the Catholics and was defeated in 
 the House of Commons by 2 only (243 to 241); but the 
 Lords remained staunch and rejected a similar motion by 
 147 to 106. In 1820 Grattan died and Plunket suc- 
 ceeded to the conduct of the question. On the 28th 
 February 1821, in the greatest of all his speeches, he 
 moved that the House should go into Committee on the 
 Catholic claims, and he carried his motion by 6 (227 to 
 221). On March 7th he introduced two Bills, one of 
 which opened to Catholics the House of Commons and 
 all offices except the Lord Chancellorship and the Lord 
 Lieutenancy, and the other gave the Crown a veto on 
 the appointment of bishops and required of Catholic 
 priests an oath similar to that of 1813. The two Bills 
 were consolidated, and carried by 216 to 197 in April. 
 But the Lords were immovable; the Duke of York de- 
 nounced it, and it was lost by 39. 
 
 O'Connell, however, concerned himself more with 
 Irish than with English feeling. Willing to clutch at 
 any straw for help, he proposed, on January 1st, 1821, 
 in one of the public letters that since 1819 he had pe- 
 riodically addressed through the Press to the Irish 
 people, that the Catholics should ally themselves with 
 the English working-class democracy, and postpone 
 Emancipation to Keform. Sheil, who knew better the 
 strength, which their friends proved in Parliament six 
 weeks afterwards, at once issued a strong letter against 
 the proposal, denouncing it as ** pernicious." O'Con- 
 nell replied on January 12th with a caustic epistle, 
 which left the honours of controversy with him, though 
 in judgment and common sense Sheil had the best of 
 of it. 
 
CATHOLIC DESPONDENCY. 59 
 
 In the autumn George IV. paid the first Royal visit 
 to Ireland since the reign of William III. He landed 
 on the 12th August, and was received with accla- 
 mations of applause. The Catholics founded great 
 political hopes on so rare an event. O'Connell and 
 the Ascendency champion, Bradley King, ex-Lord- 
 Mayor, were reconciled. A political banquet was 
 arranged, at which Catholics chose the Protestant 
 stewards and Protestants the Catholics. O'Connell, who 
 less than a year before had solicited and obtained 
 the Queen's Attorney-Generalship in Ireland, in order, 
 as he said, *' to annoy some of the greatest scoundrels 
 in society, and, of course, the bitterest enemies of Ire- 
 land," now declared that ** in sorrow and in bitterness 
 he had for the last fifteen years laboured for his un- 
 happy country. One bright day had realised all his 
 fond expectations. ... It was said of St. Patrick that 
 he had the power to banish venomous reptiles from the 
 isle, but His Majesty had performed a greater moral 
 miracle. The sound of his approach had allayed the 
 dissensions of centuries " ; and the Catholics presented 
 an address, which assured the King that " you are hailed 
 with the benedictions of an enthusiastio and undis- 
 sembling people." When His Majesty departed, 
 O'Connell knelt and presented him with a laurel wreath, 
 which his sovereign was graciously pleased to accept. 
 To tempt His Majesty to return, he started a subscrip- 
 tion to build him a royal palace ; but could only raise 
 funds suflicient to build a bridge. He founded a Boyal 
 Georgean Club to perpetuate the sentiments of amity 
 which the royal visit liad awakened. But the bright 
 hopes of 1821 were doomed to the bitterest disappoint- 
 ment. The winter was disgraced by outrage and dis- 
 order and rendered lamentable by famine. In 1822 
 
60 LIFE OF DANIEL 0' CON NELL. 
 
 Plunket did not venture to raise the Catholic question. 
 In Dublin, Catholic and Protestant fell to their quarrels 
 as before, and dissension broke out among the Catholics 
 themselves. Their temporary unanimity only m^,de 
 their perennial dissension more painful. 
 
 At tlie beginning of 1823 [said Sheil in 1827] an entire cessa- 
 tion of Catholic meetings had taken place. We had virtually aban- 
 doned the question ; not only was it not debated in Parliament, but 
 in Ireland there was neither Committee, Board, nor Association. The 
 result was that a total stagnation of public feeling took place, and 
 I do not exaggerate, when I say that the Catholic question was 
 nearly forgotten ... we sat down like galley-slaves in a calm. A 
 general stagnation diffused itself over the the national feelings. . . . 
 What was the result? It was two-fold. The question receded in 
 England, and fell back from the general notice. There it was utterly 
 forgotten, while in Ireland the spirit and energy of the people un- 
 derwent an utter relaxation, and the most vigorous efforts were 
 necessary to repair all the moral deterioration which the whole 
 body of the Irish Catholics had sustained. 
 
61 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE CATHOLIC ASSOCIATION. 
 
 1823-1828. 
 
 The germ of the Catholic Association— The Catholic Rent— The Act 
 of 1825— The Relief Bill and Wings of 1825— The Now Catholic 
 Association — The Waterford and Clare Elections. 
 
 In April 1823 O'CoiiDell was staying at Glencullen, in 
 the Wicklow Mountains, at the house of his friend 
 Thomas O'Mara. Sheil, with whom he had been in 
 not unfrequent conflict during the previous ten years, 
 and a few other friends were there. To them, one 
 evening after dinner, he broached the scheme out 
 of which grew the Catholic Association and the Catho- 
 lic Relief Act. He had long seen that the disunion 
 of the upper and educated classes was the bane 
 ■of Catholic politics. Two forces there were which had 
 never been awakened and unchained — ^the Priest and the 
 Peasant. The i'ailure of the hopes which the King's 
 visit excited determined him to look to the upper classes 
 no longer : from thenceforth he would go to the people. 
 He conceived the plan of enlisting tlie enthusiasm of 
 the whole agricultural population of Ireland, while 
 keeping the leadership in the hands of the educated 
 
62 LIFE OF DANIEL O'GONNELL, 
 
 classes, by means of a gigantic system of local and 
 central organizations, officered by the priesthood and 
 controlled from Dublin. The funds, which an agita- 
 tion on so great a scale would demand, were more 
 than the donations of the opulent could raise ; he 
 determined that the main source of the riches of 
 his new Association should be the poor. All classes 
 were to be admitted to it. It was to be divided into 
 two kinds of members, those who paid a guinea per 
 annum and those who paid a shilling. It shows how 
 miserably poor the Irish were, that a contribution 
 of a farthing per week should have been enough to 
 make each member feel that he had a share in the great 
 Association. Yet two years later it was proved in 
 evidence that wages in Ireland were but fourpence a 
 day, and that out of a population estimated at seven 
 millions, one million lived by mendicancy or plunder. 
 
 The moment seemed one of the very darkest for the 
 hopes of Ireland that O'Connell, at least, had ever seen. 
 The Irish, whom legislation had deprived of their manu- 
 factures, and want of coal had prevented from regaining 
 them, were a purely agricultural community. The fall 
 of prices upon the termination of the long war had pro- 
 duced grave distress among the farmers. This had 
 been intensified by commercial panics and the deprecia- 
 tion of commercial credit. The winter of 1822 had 
 been marked by famine, which was followed by pesti- 
 lence. One-third of Clare was starving, nor was 
 the rest of the south and west better off. In Cork 
 120,000 persons were living on charity. Crime, too, 
 was rife ; 366 persons were tried by special commission 
 at Cork alone, and thirty-five of them were sentenced 
 to death. The tentative measure of Catholic Relief 
 which, in default of the reintroduction of Plunket's 
 
THE CATHOLIC ASSOCIATION. 63 
 
 Bill of 1821, Canning had brought in and carried 
 through the House of Commons, was ruthlessly rejected 
 by the House of Lords, and the Lord-Lieutenancy of 
 Lord Wellesley, which was to have been a period of 
 reconciliation, was marked by fierce outbreaks of sec- 
 tarian animosity, culminating in the ludicrous but 
 discreditable '* Bottle Riot " of December 1822. 
 
 A preliminary meeting, which a few gentlemen were 
 induced to attend, was held at Dempsey's Tavern, Sack- 
 ville Street, on April 25th, 1823. From May 12th the 
 meetings were held at Coyne's, the bookseller's, at 4, 
 Capel Street, in a mean room on the second floor. Rules 
 were framed for holding public debates upon a Parlia- 
 mentary model, to which reporters and the public were 
 to be admitted. By now the old bitterness of the veto 
 controversy had had nearly ten years in which to die 
 out. Some of those who had shared it were dead, 
 others had forgotten the issue which, though not openly 
 mentioned, had been really in dispute, whether layman 
 or ecclesiastic was to control party politics. The way 
 for united action was open. Slowly peers, prelates, 
 priests, and peasants gathered round the young Asso- 
 ciation. Lord Gormanstown sacrificed his early views 
 to join it. Lord Killeen, Lord Fingal's eldest son, and 
 Lord Kenmare, became members of it. But it was no 
 aristocratic movement; it was in truth a revolt of the 
 democracy against the aristocracy. The peasants found 
 that their complaints and grievances were listened to, and 
 that redress was always promised and sometimes ob- 
 tained. The Association offered them legal assistance 
 against the law. Emancipation was no longer a move- 
 ment which was only to benefit and did only touch the 
 upper classes; it offered to the poorest a bright and 
 indefinite vista of relief and reformation. The priests 
 
64 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL. 
 
 who had hitherto held aloof from politics, began, 
 under the guidance of their bishops, to take part in 
 the work of the Association, of which they were all e.v 
 officio members. By the end of 1823 O'Connell's hopes 
 of a union of Catholic feeling began to be justified. 
 
 But the most successful of all the devices of the new 
 organization was one which at first met with ridicule 
 and almost failure. In the days of the old Catholic 
 Committee, O'Connell had seen the need of a more 
 steady and more abundant revenue, and had endea- 
 voured, without much success, to organize a parochial 
 subscription. He now proposed, by the methodical 
 collection of the smallest subscriptions from the poorest 
 contributors, at the same time to enlist the enthusiasm 
 of multitudes, and to raise an otherwise unapproachably 
 large fund. This was the " Catholic Rent.'^ 
 
 Yet broad as was this scheme, so languid was the in- 
 terest that the new association at first excited, that even 
 at the meeting on February 4th, 1824, at which he was 
 to introduce his proposal for establishing the Rent, no 
 quorum appeared for five-and-twenty minutes, and by 
 the rules the meeting stood adjourned if none ap- 
 peared in half-an-hour. O'Connell rushed out, met 
 an eighth man on the stairs, and, darting into the street, 
 found two young priests from Galway gaping in at 
 Coyne's shop windows. Ex-officio they were members. 
 To seize them by the* arms, to overbear their diffidence 
 partly by force and partly by persuasion, and to pull them 
 into the meeting was the work of a minute ; the quorum 
 was completed, but not one second too soon. The pro- 
 posal was made and duly carried, but outside the 
 association people laughed at it. His schoolfellows 
 taunted O'Conuell's son, John, with liis father's "penny- 
 a-month plan for liberating Ireland." 
 
THE CATHOLIC ASSOCIATION. 65 
 
 By the end of the year, however, matters wore a 
 diflferent aspect. The rent came in at £350 a week in 
 October, at £550 a week in November, and at £700 a 
 week in December. The Association hired the Corn 
 Exchange Rooms at £150 per annum, and appointed 
 iEneas M'Donnell its parliamentary agent in London at 
 a salary of £300 a year. The incessant activity of 
 O'Connell was rapidly making the Catholic agitation, 
 so long dormant, once more troublesome to the Govern- 
 ment. He knew that he was treading on thin ice at 
 every step. To hold language at once passionate 
 enough to inflame a people, who had never known any 
 alternatives but those of torpor or outrage, and also 
 constitutional enough to baulk the Government upon an 
 indictment for sedition, to do this day after day in a 
 multitude of meetings and harangues, for which he had 
 not an instant's leisure to prepare, and to keep in check 
 impulsive and unguarded satellites, and tone down 
 their indiscretions, was no light task. Rare as was 
 O'Conneli's self-mastery even in the wild excitement of 
 triumphant oratory, even he made slips sometimes. 
 At that time the nascent republics of South America 
 were in revolt against Spain, and Bolivar was one of the 
 heroes of that revolution. On December IGth 1824, 
 after a hard day's work in Court, O'Connell went out 
 to address a meeting in the Corn Exohange, and re- 
 ferred to the various wars of liberty then in progress in 
 the world. ** The Greeks," he »aid, ** were engaged in 
 warfare for the defence of their rights. The Roman 
 Catholics trusted that their ends would be procured 
 through more peaceable means. He hoped that Ire- 
 land would be restored to her rights ; but if Ireland 
 wore driven mad by persecution, ho hoped a new 
 Bolivar might arise to defend her." This occurred on 
 
 5 
 
66 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL, 
 
 Friday. Late on Monday afternoon, as he was sitting 
 at home with his family. Alderman Darby entered 
 his house with a constable, and required him to enter 
 into recognizances to appear at the next sessions, 
 and answer a charge of seditious libel. What the words 
 imputed were, or who the informer was, he declined, 
 under superior instructions, to say. The bill wa» 
 duly preferred, but to prove the words used was 
 not so easy. O'Connell was a rapid speaker. The 
 papers complained of the difficulty of reporting a man 
 who could utter two hundred words a minute for three 
 or four hours together. The Government had to appeal 
 to the press-reporters, and the reporters refused assist- 
 ance. On December 21st, Vousden of the Dublin 
 Morning Post, and Leech of the Freeman, were sum- 
 moned by the police, but declined to produce their 
 notes, or to depose to any words without them. Haydn, 
 editor of the ^lar, declared that such an office should 
 not be put upon a journalist. The reporter of Saun- 
 ders^ News Letter was called, and ingeniously swore that 
 just at that part of O'Connell's speech he fell asleep. 
 To this comedy there was but one issue. The Grand 
 Jury threw out the bill. 
 
 On February 3rd 1825 the session of Parliament 
 opened. The King's speech, echoing the fears of many 
 respectable persons, *' regretted that Associations should 
 exist in Ireland which have adopted proceedings irre- 
 concilable with the spirit of the Constitution ''; and 
 this was followed up on the 10th by Goulburn, who intro- 
 duced a bill to suppress both the Catholic Association 
 and the Orange Lodges. In less than a month it was 
 law. By O'Connell's advice the Association at once 
 dissolved. It held its last meeting on March 18th, and 
 the Government breathed again. 
 
THE CATHOLIC ASSOCIATION. 67 
 
 But in the meantime the cause of Emancipation 
 was making progress in England. A deputation 
 consisting of O'Connell, O'Gorman, Sheil, and others, 
 had been appointed on 10th February 1825 to go to 
 London and press the Catholic claims. O'Connell 
 was heard at the Bar of the Commons as counsel for 
 the Catholics, and was examined before a Parlia- 
 mentary Committee on March 9th. *' His whole de- 
 portment," says Lord Colchester, " was affectedly 
 respectful, except in a few answers, when he dis- 
 played a fierceness of tone and aspect." The depu- 
 tation was entertained at dinner by Brougham, and 
 by the Duke of Norfolk, and they addressed a Catholic 
 meeting at the Freemason's Hall. O'Connell, who on 
 this visit first became known to the English public, 
 remained some months in London, and on May 2l8t 
 argued a case before Lord Eldon in the House of 
 Lords, who found him ** not so shining in argument as 
 he expected." Meantime, Parliament had seen that it 
 was impossible to suppress the Catholics' organization 
 and to do nothing for their claims. Burdett carried a 
 motion in tlieir favour in March by 247 to 234. He 
 introduced a Bill, and it was passed on the second read- 
 ing by 268 to 241. A great impression was created 
 when Brownlow, M.P. for Armagh, and afterwards Lord 
 Lurgan, Maxwell, M.P. for Downpatriok, and Forde, 
 M.P. for Downshire, hitherto stout Protestant Ascen- 
 dency men, spoke and voted in its favour. As the 
 liberation of the Catholics seemed now to be close at 
 hand, a demand arose for ** securities/* and two Bills 
 for that purpose, called ** the Wings,'* were introduced, 
 one by Littleton, the other by Lord Francis Levespn 
 Gower. Littleton's Bill, which proposed to raise the 
 qualification for the franchise to £*10, was carried on the 
 
 6 • 
 
68 LIt'E OF DANIEL O'CONNELL. 
 
 second reading by 233 to 185 ; Leveson Gower's, which 
 provided for an endowment of £250,000 per annum for 
 the Catholics, by 205 to 162. Burdett's Bill passed the 
 Commons on May 10th. It was thought the Lords 
 must yield. To facilitate matters Peel offered to resign, 
 but Liverpool refused his resignation. But the Lords 
 proved immovable. The Duke of York, who was next 
 in succession to the Crown, declared, in presenting a 
 petition from the Dean and Canons of Windsor, that 
 '' to the latest moment of his existence, whatever might 
 be his station in life, he would oppose Catholic Emanci- 
 pation, so help him God I" It was known that the King 
 pardoned the anticipation of his demise in consideration 
 of the piety of the sentiment. The Duke instantly 
 became the most popular man in England, and the 
 eponymous founder of countless public-houses ; his 
 words were blazoned by the No Popery party in letters 
 of gold. The Lords rallied to such influences, and threw 
 out the Bill by 178 to 130. 
 
 To the hopes of the Catholics this double disappoint- 
 ment was a terrible blow. Nothing less than O'Con- 
 nell's resourcefulness, energy, and buoyancy, could have 
 restored them to composure. The Suppression Act, 
 which he instantly dubbed the ** Algerine Act,'^ had 
 been the work of a divided Cabinet, and was but 
 loosely drafted. He proceeded to found a New Catholic 
 Association, whose existence was a standing insult to 
 the statute. The Act rendered any society illegal if 
 ** constituted for redress of grievances in Church or 
 State, renewing its meetings for more than fourteen 
 days, or collecting or receiving money.'' In July 
 the New Catholic Association was founded exclusively 
 for purposes of public and private charity and 
 ** for all purposes not forbidden by the Act." It dis- 
 
THE CATHOLIC ASSOCIATION. 69 
 
 claimed any action for the redress of grievances, the 
 alteration of the law, or the prosecution of suits, civil 
 or criminal. It was to have neither separate parts nor 
 separate branches, neither elected delegates nor local 
 secretaries. Christians of all denominations were ad- 
 missible and were to pay an annual subscription of £1. 
 Its objects were to promote public peace and private 
 harmony, to encourage religious education, to provide 
 Catholic churches and graveyards, to promote agricul- 
 ture and manufactures, and to defend the Catholics from 
 untrue aspersions cast on their faith or conduct. For 
 the purposes of agitation, aggregate meetings were held 
 entirely apart from this benevolent association, some for 
 one day only, some for fourteen days, ** pursuant to the 
 Act of Parliament," each of which severally arranged for 
 the preparation of a petition and dispersed. The New As- 
 sociation took over the .£14,000 which the old one had 
 in hand when it was dissolved. The rent was collected 
 as before ; most persons paid in their money '* for the 
 relief of distressed Catholics''; O'Connell his **for all 
 purposes allowable by law." 
 
 The Government allowed itself to be trifled with by 
 this flimsy evasion of the Act. It cannot be that they 
 never desired to put their new powers in force. One 
 thing seems clear : if to pack juries and to dictate sen- 
 tences to a subservient judiciary had really been the cus- 
 tomary procedure of the Irish Government, it is incon- 
 ceivable that they should not have suppressed this 
 agitation and trusted to their partisan judges and 
 packed juries to declare their conduct within the Act. 
 The New Catholic Association was admittedly and noto- 
 riously the Old Catholic Association. The guise of 
 charity was a mere colourable evasion of the Act. That 
 Manners, the Chancellor, and Goulbum, the Chief Secre- 
 
70 LIFE OF DANIEL 0*CONNELL. 
 
 tary, would not gladly have enforced the Act, can hardly 
 be doubted; but it is equally clear that they were pre- 
 vented from doing so and obliged to be content with a 
 posture of ridiculous impotence, by their respect for the 
 letter of the law, and by their inability to secure either 
 such a verdict upon the facts from a jury, or such a 
 construction of the statute from the bench, as would 
 have been necessary to give effect to the indubitable but 
 ill-expressed will of the Legislature. Their conduct at 
 this time acquits both themselves of jury-packing and 
 the judges of servility. 
 
 The Irish had borne the suppression of the Catholic 
 Association with comparative composure ; but the rejec- 
 tion of the Belief Bill and the adjurations of the Duke 
 of York filled them with rage. 0*Connell, while in 
 London, had been in close league with Burdett and his 
 friends, and indeed went so far as to write to the news- 
 papers claiming the authorship of the Relief Bill, a 
 claim which Tierney repudiated with mortifying expli- 
 citness in the House of Commons. Following the 
 unfortunate precedent of 1808 of secretly negotia- 
 ting with the Parliamentary party without any com- 
 munication with the party in Ireland, he had assented 
 to the Wings, both the one which disfranchised 
 the forty-shilling freeholders, and that which pro- 
 vided for the payment of the clergy. For this aban- 
 donment of principle, the Irish priests on his return to 
 Ireland took him severely to task. It was only by 
 prompt and even abject renunciation and contrition, 
 that he recovered his lost ground. He disavowed the 
 Wings and threw himself actively into the agitation. 
 The great thing to be aimed at was to keep alive the 
 interest of the Catholics, to arrest their attention, to 
 keep them in motion ; a precise goal and definite 
 
THE CATHOLIC ASSOCIATION. 71 
 
 achievement was of less iraportance. Even at the risk 
 of provoking hostility, O'Connell was anxious to keep 
 up the heat of his followers* enthusiasm : ** An enemy/* 
 says Wyse, ** is nearer to conversion than a neutral." 
 The Protestants began to appear on Catholic platforms ; 
 there was too much condescending patronage on their 
 side, too much fulsome adulation on O'Conneirs, but 
 the fact was important. More and more strongly the 
 priests became identified with the Association ; they 
 collected the rent ; the meetings were held in their 
 chapels and the platforms set up before their altars. A 
 series of provincial aggregate meetings was held, at 
 Limerick in 1825, at Cork and Waterford in 1826, at 
 Clonmel in 1828. To keep constantly before the public 
 mind the vast disparity in the numbers of Catholics 
 and Protestants, Shiel suggested a religious census, to 
 be taken, parish by parish, by the clergy. An 
 affiliated Catholic Association was formed in New York, 
 and American subscriptions began to come in. Foreign 
 opinion was appealed to and the proceedings of the 
 Association were sent to foreign Governments. The 
 Catholics aspired to have a foreign policy ; and they 
 gratified their taste for splendour by adopting a uni- 
 form or costume, of blue, gold, and white, of velvet 
 and of silk. The English were surprised at this 
 awakening of Irish feeling and universal activity ; but 
 a greater surprise was to come. 
 
 Of tho Protestant territorial magnates, whose wide 
 possessions and family influence seemed to give them a 
 prescriptive and indefeasible title to direct the issue of 
 Irish elections, none were so powerful as the I^eresfords 
 in county Waterford. They had controlled the county 
 time out of mind ; they had held tho seat for the city for 
 seventy years. Upon the register they had an immense 
 
72 LIFE OF DANIEL OrCONMELL, 
 
 majority of votes at their beck and call. The Marquis 
 of Waterford lived on his estates and had done much 
 to earn Catholic good-will. He had introduced the 
 Catholic Belief Bill in the Irish House of Lords in 
 1793, and had been conspicuous for his humanity when 
 in command of the Waterford Regiment of Yeomanry 
 during the rebellion of 1798. A trivial circumstance, 
 arising out of a proposed address to the Lord Lieute- 
 nant after the " Bottle Riot '^ had made him for the time 
 unpopular with some of the Protestant gentry. 
 
 The general election of 1826 was at hand, and it was 
 decided to oppose his candidate, the sitting member, 
 Lord George Beresford. Villiers Stuart, afterwards 
 Lord Stuart of the Decies, a young squire of good 
 family but moderate means, was asked to stand. He 
 posted home from the Tyrol and issued his address. The 
 Beresfords replied with indiscreet and irritating counter- 
 addresses, denouncing clerical influence. The priests 
 in turn became the most active and most successful of 
 canvassers for Stuart. They menaced with the guilt of 
 perjury those who voted against their consciences to 
 please their landlords. Every chapel became a centre of 
 agitation. Four thousand troops were poured into the 
 county and had nothing to do ; in vast orderly proces- 
 sions the forty- shilling freeholders moved about the 
 country or attended Stuart^s meetings, without disorder 
 or crime. Chiefly to give him a locus sta?idi for a 
 speech, O^Connell, who was Stuart's counsel, was put 
 in nomination for the county, and after speaking two 
 hours retired in his client's favour. It was the first 
 nomination of a Catholic ever known, and the precedent 
 was significant. The people of Kilmacthomas had 
 drummed Lord George out of the village ; the people of 
 Portlaw, which lay at the gates of the Marquis' castle, 
 
THE CATHOLIC ASSOCIATION. 73 
 
 claimed the privilege of going first to the poll to vote 
 against their landlord. There was a majority against 
 the Marquis on the first day, mainly composed of his 
 own freeholders; on the fifth Lord George retired. 
 The contest had begun as a forlorn hope ; it had passed 
 into a determined battle ; it ended in a complete vic- 
 tory. The effect was immense. Bat that the Wexford 
 election had been decided before that in Waterford, the 
 Catholics would have carried that county. An obscure bar- 
 rister named Alexander Dawson, without effort and with 
 but three days' notice, carried Louth, and the dismayed 
 Orange candidates were left to struggle for the second 
 place. Westmeath was won ; two Emancipators were 
 returned for Armagh, and Monaghan was wrested from 
 its hereditary representatives, the Leslies, the Blayneys, 
 and the Shirleys. It was the revolt of the forty-shilling 
 freeholders against their masters. The landlords had 
 created them to increase their own importance, and now 
 found the creature rising against the creator. For thirty 
 years Frankenstein's monster had been a submissive 
 slave ; but now he had turned on his master and had 
 rent him. 
 
 The landlords thus defeated began to threaten and in 
 some cases to carry out ejectments for non-payment of 
 the long arrears, which were kept for this purpose hang- 
 ing over the heads of the forty-shilling freeholders. 
 The Catholic Association interfered to protect its clients. 
 It threatened to buy up outstanding judgments and to 
 procure the foreclosure of mortgages against landlords, 
 who acted in this way. It carried on an active regis- 
 tration of votes in the Catholic interest and looked, at 
 another election, to carry three-fourths of the Irish 
 seats. It established Protecting Committees in the 
 counties which had been recently contested, and col- 
 
74 LIFE OF DANIEL 0' CONN ELL, 
 
 lected a ** New Eent '' for the relief of evicted tenants. 
 The old rent reached vast proportions, ^16,000 to 
 March 1825, i96,260 more to December 1826, and 
 d93,000 for 1827. In 1828 it was ^'21,400 ; in two 
 months of 1829, ^65,300. But it was imperfectly 
 collected, and having been left too much to casual and 
 volunteer effort, often to busy priests, had never ap- 
 proached the desired £50,000 per annum. O'Connell 
 proposed a strict parochial organization. Two church- 
 wardens were to be appointed in every parish, one by the 
 priest and the other by the people, to collect the rent. 
 They were to send up to Dublin monthly reports in a 
 prescribed form, giving particulars as to the Catho- 
 lic rent and census, the Church cess and tithes, evictions 
 of tenants and attempts at proselytism. That too much 
 might not bo left to the initiative of the churchwardens, 
 local associations were, on Wyse's proposal, formed in 
 each parish, to look after the wardens ; an association in 
 each county controlled the parish clubs, and all were 
 subject to the central association. The Weekly Kegister 
 of the Association's proceedings circulated to the num- 
 ber of 6,000, and was read aloud by the wardens at 
 chapel after mass. The central association supplied 
 journals to the country branches. In nine years the cir- 
 culation of newspapers in Ireland increased 25 percent. 
 These clubs were founded in every county in Munster, 
 and in most of those in Leinster and Connaught, and 
 enforced a strict maintenance of the peace and obser- 
 vance of the law. By this means, on 21st January 1828, 
 simultaneous meetings were held in no less than fifteen 
 hundred parishes ; and the meetings were held without 
 the slightest disorder. 
 
 When Canning took office in 1827, he sent a private 
 message to the Catholic Association, begging them for the 
 
TBE CATHOLIC ASSOCIATION. 75 
 
 8ake of English opinion to be temperate, and promising in 
 that case to do his best for their claims. The Catho- 
 lic Association refused to moderate its tone. The acces- 
 sion to office of the Duke of Wellington, on Goderich's 
 resignation, was regarded as the accession of a Catholic 
 foe. The Association passed a resolution binding itself to 
 oppose with all its force any Irish member who took office 
 under him. The Catholics, in spite of the stubborn resis- 
 tance to Emancipation of the bulk of the English Dis- 
 senters, had always supported their cause, and 800,000 
 signatures were procured by O'Connell to a petition for 
 the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts. In 1828, 
 when this had been carried. Lord John Kussell wrote 
 to the Association, desiring it, now that the principle of 
 Emancipation had thus triumphed, to withdraw the 
 anti-Wellington pledge. 0*Connell urged, as he had 
 urged the year before, that the advice should be taken. 
 Again he was overruled. For the Association saw now 
 that not to go forward was to go back, and the pledge 
 was insisted on. 
 
 An opportunity for acting on the resolution soon 
 arrived. The East Retford dispute led to the resigna- 
 tion of Huskisson, and among the Ministerial changes 
 which followed was the appointment to the Board of 
 Trade of Vesey Fitzgerald, M.P. for Clare. His re- 
 election seemed certain. He belonged to an old and 
 popular family. His father, Prime Serjeant Fitzgerald, 
 had voted against the Act of Union. He himself had 
 consistently voted in favour of Emancipation. Both 
 father and son were excellent landlords. He had behind 
 him the Ministerial influence and the whole body of the 
 landlords of Clare. The resolution of the Catholic 
 Association bound them to oppose him, but they 
 despaired of success. Steele, however, and The O'Gor 
 
76 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL. 
 
 man Mahon, who were magistrates for the county, 
 posted down to see what could be done. Arriving 
 at Limerick on a Sunday morning, they found that 
 personal obligations to the Fitzgeralds prevented Major 
 Macnamara, who was to have been their candidate, 
 from opposing the new minister. They hurried on 
 into Clare, holding hasty meetings at the chapels, and 
 by night joined Lawless at Ennis. Everywhere they 
 found a general enthusiasm for a contest among the 
 peasantry. To the contemptuous amazement of Fitz- 
 gerald's party, Steele remained to urge that if no 
 gentleman would come forward some grave-digger should 
 be put up. O'Gorman, half-dead with fatigue, posted 
 back to Dublin to beat up a candidate. Lord William 
 Paget was applied to, and refused. On the 21st of 
 June, Shell declared at the meeting of the Association 
 that someone absolutely must stand. O'Oonnell was 
 inclined to dread the effect of a defeat. Next day, in 
 the early morning, Sir David Roose, ex-High Sheriff of 
 Dublin and a Tory, met Fitzpatrick in the street by 
 chance, and suggested that a Catholic, O'Oonnell him- 
 self, should be the candidate. Fitzpatrick remembered 
 that years before he had heard Keogh suggest a similar 
 thing; he caught at the idea, rushed to the Association 
 Rooms and made the proposal. Then followed two 
 hours of hesitation. They saw the advantage of getting 
 on their side the innate English respect for the formal 
 result of an election, even though the elected person 
 be ineligible, and they decided to take the chance. 
 The die was cast. By the end of the week Steele, in 
 Clare, knew that he would have no need to put up any 
 grave-digger; the candidate would be the most popular 
 Catholic in Ireland. O'Connell issued his address on 
 the 24th. It was marked by a pledge ** to bring the 
 
THE CATHOLIC ASSOCIATION. 77 
 
 question of the Repeal of the Union at the earliest 
 possible period before the consideration of the legisla- 
 ture." It was foreseen that the cost of the election 
 would be heavy, but i'2,000 was collected in Dublin in 
 one day, and £14,000 in ten. O'Connell himself could 
 not leave Dublin till the last moment, but Sheil and 
 O'Gorman went down to Clare at once. Then followed 
 one of the most singular scenes in the history of Ire- 
 land. O'Gorman announced his williDgness to fight 
 any squire, who felt aggrieved at seeing his tenants can- 
 vassed, and proceeded to canvass the tenants. Shiel 
 went from chapel to chapel, and '* made every altar a 
 tribune.** The priests exerted themselves for O'Connell 
 almost to a man. One, indeed, sided with Fitzgerald, 
 and the people stopped his stipend. On the other 
 hand, every Whig and Tory landlord supported Fitz- 
 gerald. He was nominated by Sir Edward O'Brien, 
 and O^Connell only by Steele. The candidates ad- 
 dressed the freeholders. Fitzgerald wept before them, 
 and his tears touched their emotional hearts. O'Con- 
 nell replied with a virulent attack, calling him the 
 ** friend of the base and bloody Perceval,'' who, though 
 he had been fourteen years in his grave, and had died 
 by an assassin's hand, was still not safe from abuse. 
 The polling days arrived. Vandeleur of Kilrush drove 
 into Ennis at the head of his three hundred tenants, 
 and under their landlord's eye they cheered O'Connell 
 and broke away to poll for him. Sir Edward O'Brien 
 was bringing up his men, when Father Murphy of 
 Corofin met them, and with a few words gathered the 
 sheep into O'Connell's fold. One look of a priest 
 converted the tenants of Augustine Butler. At the 
 close of one day's voting a vast crowd was waiting 
 anxiously to hear the state of the poll. Up rose a gaunt 
 
78 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL. 
 
 priest, who announced that a Catholic had voted for 
 Fitzgerald. The crowd set up a yell of hatred. 
 ** Silence," cried the priest ; ** the hand of God has 
 struck him ; he has just died of apoplexy. Pray for 
 his soul !" The awe-stricken multitude fell on its 
 knees in silent prayer. During those July nights 
 thirty thousand men bivouacked in the meadows about 
 Ennis, and no case of disorder occurred. The only 
 man who got drunk was O'Connell's English coach- 
 man. Clare had been pre-eminent among Irish coun- 
 ties for faction-fighting ; in that county hereditary foes 
 espied one another only to commence a violent riot. 
 During the whole election not the slightest affray took 
 place. Lord x\nglesey had massed troops upon the 
 place. There were three hundred police in Ennis ; up- 
 wards of two thousand troops were within call, and 
 thirteen hundred more only thirty-six hours distant. 
 Not a corporal's guard was required. From the first 
 the contest was hopeless. As Fitzgerald wrote to Peel, 
 he had polled '* all the gentry and all the ^950 free- 
 holders — the gentry to a man," but out of 8,000 
 electors all but 200 were forty-shilling freeholders. On 
 the first day O'Connell was six votes ahead, on the 
 third almost a thousand. On the fifth Fitzgerald with- 
 drew, and O'Connell was member for Clare. 
 
79 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 EMANCIPATION. 
 
 1828-1842. 
 
 Result of the Clare Election — Dissolution of the Catholic Association — 
 Catholic Relief — Refusal of O'Connell's claim to take his seat — 
 Second Clare Election — Repeal Agitation — Conflict with the Mar- 
 quis of Anglesey — Reform. 
 
 The first question which had presented itself to the 
 Wellington Administration in 1828, had been the re- 
 newal of the Coercion Act of 1825. It expired with 
 the session of 1828, and must either be renewed, or 
 allowed quietly to lapse. It had been a failure. Neither 
 the Catholic agitation nor the Orange processions, at 
 which it was aimed, had been touched by it. The 
 Marquis of Anglesey advised the Ministry not to stir ; 
 there were dissensions, he said, among the Catholics of 
 Ireland, who were not unanimous in supporting the 
 Association, and there were jealousies within its ranks. 
 The prelates looked askance at its influenoe with the 
 parochial clergy, and the landlords at its sway over 
 their tenanls. The country was quiet. A new Act 
 would be difficult to frame, and could only be passed at 
 the cost of now conflicts. Upon this advice they de- 
 cided to take the risk of dropping the Act, and to let 
 sleeping dogs lie. 
 
80 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL, 
 
 But the Clare election changed the whole face of 
 affairs. O'Connell returned to Dublin amid the trium- 
 phant acclamations of the whole country through 
 which he passed. As soon as the Act lapsed, the old 
 Catholic Association was instantly re-established, and 
 at the same time the Orange lodges, which it had sup- 
 pressed, also formed themselves again. The Catholics 
 were active in agitation, but so were the Protestants. 
 They established, up and down the country, Bruns- 
 wick Clubs, which held language as violent as that 
 of the Association, and by their proceedings drove 
 many of the Protestant Liberals, who had hitherto held 
 aloof from politics, into the arms of the Catholics. 
 The Association, in return, decided to extend its opera- 
 tions into Ulster, and despatched ** honest Jack Law- 
 less " as its emissary to the North. Meetings were still 
 an attractive novelty in Ulster, and agitation was still 
 fresh there, and in the neighbourhood of Dundalk he 
 was highly successful ; but when he announced his in- 
 tention of entering the '* black north ^' at Ballybay, co. 
 Monaghan, with 140,000 enthusiasts in his train, some 
 fifteen thousand"^ Orangemen mustered to resist him. 
 This was on the 22nd of September. The magistrates 
 of the locality called on General Thornton, the officer 
 in command of the district, to interpose between the two 
 hosts, and Lawless, finding his senses or losing his 
 nerve, took to his heels. Never was Ireland nearer to 
 a conflagration. The peasantry of Tipperary had aban- 
 doned their faction- fights to prepare for more serious 
 work. In August a great provincial meeting had been 
 held at Clonmel. A disciplined levy of the peasants 
 
 * So Wyse, but the Chief Secretary wi'ote to Peel, on Oct. 6, that 
 the Protestants numbered 1,700. 
 
EMANCIPATION, 81 
 
 en 7nasse marched into the town, 50,000 strong, wearing 
 green cockades and green uniforms, preceded by bands, 
 and commanded by officers. Uniforms were so com- 
 mon, that one Cork firm alone sold ^9600 worth of 
 green calico for the purpose. In addressing this meet- 
 ing, O'Connell had used language of the most unwise 
 violence. The Orangemen had talked of armed suppres- 
 sion of the Catholic movement. ** Would to God,'' cried 
 O'Connell, " our excellent Viceroy, Lord Anglesey, 
 would only give me a commission ; and if those men of 
 blood should attempt to attack the property and per- 
 sons of His Majesty's loyal subjects, with a hundred 
 thousand of my brave Tipperary boys, I would soon 
 drive them into the sea before me." The fierce 
 yell of applause which followed his words showed how 
 his hearers hungered for the fray. It was known that 
 there were stores of arms hidden in the mountains, and 
 all through September the marching and counter-march- 
 ing of these strange armies went on. Had Lawless 
 provoked bloodshed at Ballybay, it is the opinion of 
 Wyse, the historian of the Catholic Association, writing 
 at the time, that there would have followed in the south 
 of Ireland *' another Sicilian Vespers." 
 
 The Lord Lieutenant was neither an alarmist nor a 
 tyrant ; he was a oool soldier, and a friend of Emanci- 
 pation, but he foreboded insurrection. He filled the 
 district with troops, but he knew that his troops were 
 wavering in their loyalty. English regiments bad been 
 largely recruited with Irishmen, and Protestant ones 
 with Catholics. The contagion of popular enthusiasm 
 had seized upon the soldiers. The priests had been at 
 work among tiiom, and they were becoming divided into 
 religious factions. As early as July he had asked for 
 the removal of Irish soldiers and the despatch of Scotch 
 
 6 
 
82 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL, 
 
 regiments to Ireland. Without the concession of 
 Catholic Relief, he said, he could not answer for the 
 peace of the country for longer than until Parliament 
 met. The leaders "could lead on the people to rebel- 
 lion at a moment's notice," and **the probability of 
 present tranquillity rests upon the forbearance oF 
 O'Connell." 
 
 O'Connell himself saw that an outbreak meant ab- 
 solute ruin to the Catholic cause on the very eve of its 
 final triumph. As yet there had been no disturbance ; 
 but a spark might kindle a civil war, which the Govern- 
 ment might be unable to quell. He recalled Lawless 
 from the North ; he issued a manifesto to the people 
 of Tipperary commanding peace, and directing the for- 
 mation of companies of one hundred and twenty men, 
 each to be under a ** pacificator," who was required to 
 be a communicant, and two *' regulators " appointed by 
 him, all three to be jointly responsible for the conduct 
 of their men. The effect was magical ; almost without 
 a struggle the agitation disappeared. " Divisions of 
 1,000 or 1,500 marching in uniform to the place of ren- 
 dezvous in ignorance of what had happened, were met 
 on their way by a copy of the address, and instantly 
 retraced their steps in peace. Others who had actually 
 assembled, separated, and departed quietly to their 
 homes." 
 
 But in spite of this obedience, Catholic feeling con- 
 tinued to be intensely embittered. In November, one of 
 the directors of the Wexford Provincial Bank, a highly 
 respectable institution managed jointly by Catholics 
 and Protestants, had attended a meeting of a Brunswick 
 Club. In revenge for this the Catholics secretly con- 
 certed a run on the bank. Immense numbers of its 
 notes were simultaneously presented for payment. The 
 
EMANCIPATION. 83 
 
 bank had to obtain in a single week £1,500,000 in 
 gold. The movement threatened to spread to Clonmel 
 and Kilkenny, but fortunately it was stayed. About 
 the same time, Ford, a Catholic solicitor, proposed a 
 resolution in the Catholic Association in favour of 
 exclusive dealing with Catholic tradesmen, and it 
 was with diflBculty that his motion was shelved in De- 
 cember. At such a moment proceedings like these 
 would have been suicidal. As it was, such uneasiness 
 was awakened among commercial men, that in the fol- 
 lowing March, though the banks of issue were highly 
 solvent concerns, they felt obliged to hold very nearly 
 i>5,000,000 in specie to protect a note circulation of 
 but £7,000,000 in all. 
 
 Meantime the Ministry had been undergoing deep 
 searchings of heart. It was supposed to have been 
 constituted upon an anti-Catholic basis. Peel had long 
 been the ablest and best exponent of the argument 
 against Emancipation. To his logical mind it followed 
 that Emancipation must lead to the overthrow of Pro- 
 testant ascendency. To relieve the Catholics from dis- 
 abilities in law, and to enforce them in fact, by refusing 
 to appoint persons of that religion to office under the 
 Crown, was to him irrational. But his experience at 
 the Irish Office had led him to believe that the appoint- 
 ment of Catholics was incompatible with national 
 security. At the same time, his was a highly constitu- 
 tional mind, and the Clare election showed him that his 
 position was fast becoming constitutionally indefensible. 
 The parliament of 1826 had been elected upon an ex- 
 press ** No Popery ** cry ; but when the question came 
 for the first time before it in 1827, they rejected Bur- 
 dett's motion for a committee on the Catholic claims 
 by but four votes in 540, and, after the success of Rus- 
 
 6 • 
 
84 LIFE OF DANIEL O'GONNELL, 
 
 sell's proposals in 1828, Burdett obtained in May a 
 majority of six in its favour. Even its opponents no 
 longer ventured to say that things could remain as they 
 were. Dawson, Peel's brother-in-law, M.P. for Derry, 
 and one of the leaders of the Ulster Protestants, in a 
 Speech afterwards called ^' Peel's pilot balloon," owned, 
 after O'Connell's election, that the time for concession 
 had arrived. Left to itself, the House of Commons 
 would probably have passed a Catholic Belief Act at 
 any time during the last fifteen years, and although the 
 stiff Protestant party was very strong in the country, 
 especially in the Midlands and West, the true centre of 
 resistance was in the House of Lords and the Royal 
 Family. For a generation past all the most distin- 
 guished men in the House of Commons, except Peel 
 himself, had been against the disabilities. A majority of 
 the representatives in each of the great counties of 
 Yorkshire, Lancashire, Middlesex, Kent, Surrey, and 
 Devon, a moiety of those of London, Liverpool, Leices- 
 ter, Coventry, and Norwich, and the whole of those of 
 Westminster, Southwark, Newcastle, Chester, Derby, 
 and Preston, were Emancipationists. But the Clare 
 election produced a still greater effect. With their 
 eyes open the electors had chosen a man whose right to 
 take his seat was highly doubtful, and would certainly 
 be denied. They had known their strength too well to 
 be violent. At a moment of wild excitement, in a 
 county that had never been orderly before, complete 
 order had prevailed. Above all, the election marked a 
 silent but constitutional revolution, a complete trans- 
 ference of power from the class on whom the whole 
 fabric of Protestant exclusiveness had rested, to the 
 class which Protestantism had trampled under foot. The 
 landlord was dethroned, and the priest reigned in his 
 
EMANCIPATION. 85 
 
 stead. Peel had to ask himself what was to be done. 
 Civil government was paralysed and brought into con- 
 tempt by the existing state of things. The authority 
 which kept the peace of Ireland, such as it was, was 
 that of the Catholic Association, and not the king's. 
 During the autumn of 1828 England was at peace with 
 all the world ; her regular infantry force in the United 
 Kingdom was some 30,000 men ; 25,000 of them had to 
 be devoted to the maintenance of tranquillity in Ireland. 
 Civil war seemed so imminent that it appalled even 
 the stout heart of the Duke of Wellington. The exist- 
 ing situation was intolerable. Yet there seemed to be 
 no issue from this impasse. To suppress the agitation 
 by force of arms was hopeless, for neither troops nor 
 police could any longer be trusted. To ask coercive 
 powers of a House of Commons which had declared in 
 favour of Emancipation was idle. To dissolve was to 
 provoke an insurrection, and to bring about another 
 Clare election in every constituency in Ireland. One 
 thing could be done, and one only, and that a thing 
 which none but a Tory anti-Catholic government could 
 have had weight enough to do. It was to yield ; to 
 yield without any conversion of English opinion, to 
 force the stubborn bigotry of the British to submit to 
 the pressure put upon it by a portion of the people of 
 the United Kingdom, their inferior in numbers, wealth, 
 education, and strength. There was something heroic 
 in such a self-efiacement. 
 
 Parliament met on February r)(li IR'29. The speech 
 from theThronesaid that **His Majrstv in nmmends that 
 . . . you should take into your deliberate consideration the 
 whole condition of Ireland ; and that you should review 
 the laws which impose civil disabilities on His Majesty's 
 Ko man Catholic subjects.'' But the same speech contained 
 
86 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL. 
 
 a request for a grant of further powers for maintaining the 
 law, as a preliminary to Catholic Relief, and Peel intro- 
 duced a Bill for the suppression of the Catholic Associa- 
 tion on February 10th. The Whigs, relying on the near 
 prospect of a Relief Bill, offered it little opposition. 
 They thought that with the passing of a Relief Bill the 
 use and occasion of the Suppression Act would disap- 
 pear. It was carried in the Commons by 348 to 160, 
 and finally passed the House of Lords on February 24th, 
 and received the royal assent on March 5th. The more 
 moderate friends of Emancipation urged obedience to 
 the new Act without waiting for it to be put in force. 
 The Marquis of Anglesey wrote to Dublin urging its 
 leaders to dissolve the Association forthwith. O'Con- 
 nell, indeed, who was now on his way to London, and 
 had less faith in the intentions of the Tory Ministry, 
 wrote from Shrewsbury, and wrote again on reaching 
 London, urging them to do nothing of the kind. But 
 by far the most influential of its leaders, after O^Con- 
 nell himself, was Sheil, and Sheil was in Dublin, and 
 was for moderation. He moved and carried a resolu- 
 tion on February 12th, that the Catholic Association, 
 now 14,000 strong, should dissolve. At the same time 
 the collateral ** Association of Friends of Civil and 
 Religious Freedom " was dissolved also. Yet even at 
 this moment, when harmonious action was so neces- 
 sary, and victory was won, dissension broke out. A 
 few weeks afterwards O'Connell was in conflict with 
 MacDonnell, the London agent, about his exorbitant 
 claims to remuneration for services in London, and with 
 the secretary, O'Gorman, about his claim to appropriate, 
 as his private property, the minute books and records 
 of the Association. 
 
 Peel introduced the Relief Bill on the 5th March. 
 
EMANCIPATION. 87 
 
 The King had given to it a rekictant assent. At the 
 last hour, the intrigues of Eldon and the Duke of Cum* 
 berland had so far influenced his weak and disin- 
 genuous mind, that he withdrew his assent to his 
 ministers' policy, on the pretence that he had not ex- 
 pected, and could not sanction, any modification of the 
 Oath of Supremacy. He parted from his ministers with 
 kisses and courtesy, and for a few hours their resigna- 
 tions were in his hands. But with night his discretion 
 waxed as his courage waned ; his ministers were re- 
 called, and their measure proceeded. Tn its main pro- 
 visions it was thorough and far-reaching. It admitted 
 the Roman Catholic to Parliament, and to all lay offices 
 under the Crown, except those of Regent, Lord Chan- 
 cellor, whether of England or of Ireland, and Lord 
 Lieutenant. It repealed the oath of abjuration, it 
 modified the oath of supremacy. It was attended, as all 
 Catholic Relief Bills had been attended, by a ** securi- 
 ties *' Bill. It approximated the Irish to the English 
 county franchise by abolishing the forty-shilling free- 
 holder, and raising the voter's qualification to £10. All 
 monasteries and institutions of Jesuits were suppressed ; 
 and Roman Catholic bishops were forbidden to assume 
 titles of sees already held by Bishops of the Church of 
 Ireland. Municipal and other officials were forbidden 
 to wear the insignia of their office at Roman Catholic 
 ceremonies. Lastly, the new Oath of Supremacy was 
 available only for persons thereafter to be elected to 
 Parliament. Introduced by Peel, almost the only per- 
 son of first-rate capacity in the party which had 
 uniformly opposed all previous measures of Emancipa- 
 tion, the liill met with but little opposition of a formid- 
 able character. After some violent debate it passed 
 the House of Commons by 853 votes to 180, the House 
 
88 LIFE OF DANIEL 0' CONN ELL, 
 
 of Lords by 217 to 112, aud finally on April 13th 
 received the Royal assent. After sixty-nine years of 
 agitation, Catholic disabilities were removed, and the 
 victory was won. 
 
 The true significance of the Relief lay in the disfran- 
 chisement of the forty-shilling freeholder, a unique and 
 sweeping measure of electoral restriction. It was a 
 counter-revolution to that of which the Clare election 
 had been the visible sign. Although to the last moment 
 of the struggle the "No Popery" feeling in England 
 was very strong, although the House of Commons 
 had been elected on a ** No Popery " cry, and was 
 importuned with numberless petitions against Eman- 
 cipation, there can be no doubt that the Opposition 
 to it among thinking men was in the main poli- 
 tical. The Irish members were the choice of the land- 
 lord interest, for in Ireland, as in Great Britain, the re- 
 presentation rested on a territorial basis. The Tories 
 saw that to emancipate the Catholics was to alter this 
 state of things in Ireland ; it was to pass an indirect 
 Reform Bill by anticipation. The question in Ireland 
 was complicated by the state of the franchise, which 
 was in an artificial and unnatural condition. It was 
 vastly more democratic in law than that of England, 
 for the electoral qualification was absurdly low; it was 
 in practice much more aristocratic. In truth, the state 
 of the Irish franchise was very analogous to the repre- 
 sentation of the Slave States in the United States 
 Congress in 1860. For the purpose of enhancing his 
 master's political power, the peasant counted as a 
 freeman ; for the purpose of exercising power of his own 
 he was to be only a slave. 
 
 The Irish landlords of the beginning of this century 
 were a class, which the modern imagination can com- 
 
EMANCIPATION. 89 
 
 prehend only as figures in farces or caricatures in fic- 
 tion. They were violent and dissolute, spendthrift and 
 irresponsible. To vie with one another in tasteless 
 splendour and grotesque profusion, they burdened their 
 estates with mortgages and their tenantry with high rents. 
 They lived in a labyrinth of charges and encumbrances, 
 and protected themselves by doing violence to the offi- 
 cials of the law, who sought to bring them within reach 
 of its process. With them to be sober was to be a nin- 
 compoop, to observe common prudence to be a niggard. 
 The duel was a sacred institution ; smuggling a reput- 
 able calling ; the abduction of heiresses a common 
 mode of repairing broken fortunes ; and the impartial 
 administration of the duties of a county magistrate, an 
 incomprehensible pedantry when it affected others, an 
 unpardonable insult when it affected oneself. Much as 
 the Roman Catholics had suffered from the system of 
 the Penal Code, its worst victims were the landlords 
 themselves. The constitution as it stood made them the 
 guardians of the country, the administrators of its daily 
 concerns and the possessors of its political power. 
 Against their incapacity or their prejudices, a Govern- 
 ment, however well-meaning, struggled in vain. 
 Brought up ns despots and surrounded by an ignorant 
 and degraded population, recruited from the ranks of 
 Roman Catholic renegades, and corrupted by innumer- 
 able exchanges with the Government of votes and seats 
 in return for pensions or plaoes, they had become in 
 three or four generations unfit for power. Yet there 
 was an affection and sympathy between them and their 
 subjects, which mitigated the worst evils of the situa- 
 tion. The Irish peasantry, perhaps more tiian any 
 other agricultural population, looked up to their natural 
 leaders, the possessors of the soil. The landlords were 
 
90 LIFE OF DANIEL 0' CON NELL. 
 
 Irish like themselves, Irish to the core. Their reckless 
 gallantry, their careless profusion, their wit and their 
 weakness, endeared them to peasants whose nature was 
 the same, and whose habits in their sphere were not dis- 
 similar. It was 0*Connell who destroyed this alle- 
 giance. He made the priest and not the landlord the 
 leader of the people. This Peel saw. He knew that 
 the forty-shilling freeholders were a class too igno- 
 rant, too excitable, too little accustomed to political 
 deliberation and action, to be anything but a dangerous 
 force as soon as they got out of passive control. By his 
 very success the forty- shilling freeholder was doomed to 
 extinction. The Act which completed his victory an- 
 nihilated him. It was the first good deed he had ever 
 done, the first free political step he had ever taken, 
 and it was his last. Like Samson, he was greater in 
 his death than in his life. 
 
 But although the main provisions of the Act were excel- 
 lent, it was attended by two of those miserable restrictions 
 which, to the sensitive Irish people, often seem to out- 
 weigh a solid boon. The provision thatKoman Catholic 
 prelates were not to seize upon titles already appropriated 
 to Protestant bishops, would seem a trumpery punctilio 
 without a parallel, were it not for Lord John KusselPa 
 Ecclesiastical Titles Act. It was inserted as a sop to 
 the English bishops. The exclusion of O'Connell from 
 Parliament, unless he either took the oath of abjura- 
 tion or underwent a second election, was a mere fatuity. 
 It was done against the will of the Cabinet to gratify the- 
 spite of the King. 
 
 It must be remembered that, so far as Emancipation 
 was due to Irish effort, it was due to O'Connell. The 
 Irish had had great political combinations before^ 
 though hardly peaceable ones; they had had the Volun- 
 
EMANCIPATION, 91 
 
 teers and the United Irishmen. But the one was a 
 military body officered by the aristocracy and gentry ; 
 the other was a traitorous conspiracy. O'Conneil had 
 had few persons of weight, either intellectual or social, 
 to aid him in his task, and he had been faced by the 
 most powerful opposition. Except Sheil, he had hardly 
 counted a supporter of real strength. And yet he, all 
 but single-handed, had combined the Irish into an agi- 
 tation, which though potent was peaceable, and in crea- 
 ting a revolution he had kept within the Constitution. 
 Single-handed he had vanquished the Duke of Welling- 
 ton and all the forces of Evangelicalism at his back. Yet 
 this was the man who was selected for a flout of the 
 most ungenerous kind. At the time of the Clare elec- 
 tion he had hazarded the opinion, and Charles Butler 
 had taken the same view, that it was possible to sit and 
 vote in Parliament without ever taking the oaths. At 
 any rate, it was possible to elect him, and the question 
 of his taking his seat might be indefinitely postponed. 
 He had at once begun to exercise his privileges as a 
 member of Parliament by franking letters, and the Post 
 Office admitted his right to frank. The moment the 
 Sheriff signed the return, a friend asked him to frank 
 a letter, which was sent to London. It was delivered 
 to the correspondent while he was arguing a case in 
 the House of Lords, and was almost the first an« 
 nouncoment of the news of the election. The frank 
 was handed round and excited curiosity, alarm, and 
 rage. But for eight months 0*ConneIl made no attempt 
 to take his seat. To obviate the necessity of a second 
 election in Clare in case the House should deny his 
 claim to take the new oath, he offered Sir Edward 
 Denny .4'3,000 for one of his pocket boroughs, but the 
 offer was refused. The SherifF of Clare had made a 
 
92 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL, 
 
 special return to the writ. A petition had heen pre- 
 sented against O'Connell's return, and a committee of 
 the House, appointed under Grenville's Act, unanimously 
 reported him duly elected. He arrived in London on 
 February 9th 1829, and put up at Batt's Hotel. Ellice, 
 Burdett, and Hume called upon him to urge the imme- 
 diate dissolution of the Association. The Whigs pro- 
 posed to amend the Relief Bill so as to admit him as soon 
 as it had become law, but he knew the advantage it would 
 give him to be treated unhandsomely by the Government, 
 and begged them not to imperil Catholic Relief for 
 the sake of a personal matter affecting only himself. 
 Rumours of a coming disfranchisement had been rife 
 for months, and on December 16th, 1828, the Catholic 
 Association had resolved that " they would deem any 
 attempt to deprive the forty-shilling freeholders of their 
 franchise a direct violation of the Constitution." In 
 speaking to this resolution, O'Connell said : — 
 
 If any man dare to bring in a Bill for disfranchisement of the forty- 
 shilling freeholders, the people ought to rebel, if they cannot other- 
 wise succeed ; [and having expressed his contrition for giving his 
 consent to the "Wings" in 1825, he proceeded], "sooner than give 
 up the forty- shilling freeholders, I would rather go back to the 
 Penal Code. ... I am loyal to the Throne, and my disposition and 
 my interest combine to produce in my mind an attachment to the 
 ruling powers ; but if an attempt were made to take from the forty- 
 shilling freeholders the privileges vested in them by the Constitution, 
 I would conceive it just to resist that attempt with force, and in such 
 resistance I would be ready to perish in the field or on the 
 scaffold. 
 
 Now, however, possibly lest it might endanger the 
 passing of the Relief Act, possibly because it seemed 
 hopeless, he made no attempt to avert the disfranchise- 
 ment of the forty-shilling freeholders. He comported 
 himself with moderation, and showed himself a well- 
 
EMANCIPATION, 93 
 
 bred man of the world. He dined with Ponsonby to 
 meet Stanley and Greville. Like a loyal subject, he 
 waited upon his Sovereign at the Lev6e. The King's 
 eye fell upon him. ** L'here ^s O'Connell/^ His Ma- 
 jesty was pleased to say, ** God damn the scoundrel.'* 
 
 At length, on the 15th of May, about three in the 
 afternoon, O'Connell presented himself to take his seat. 
 Multitudes stood in the streets about the House and 
 within it the gallery was crowded. He was introduced 
 by Lord Duncaunon, M.P. for Kilkenny, and by Lord 
 Ebrington, M.P. for Tavistock. His demeanour was quiet 
 and courteous, and he advanced to the table with the 
 customary bows. There was a dead silence. The oaths 
 which had been long in use were those of allegiance, of 
 supremacy, and of abjuration. The first two he was 
 willing to take, but not the last. They were printed on 
 cards, and Ley, the Clerk of the House, tendered them 
 to him. He was seen to raise some objection, and Ley 
 went to refer to the Speaker. The Speaker decided that 
 the old oaths, which Ley had tendered, were those 
 which must be taken. O'Connell was directed to with- 
 draw. Brougham moved that he be heard at the Bar 
 forthwith, but Peel desired delay, and an adjournment 
 was agreed to till the 18th. O'Connell was then heard 
 in support of his claim to take the oaths as modified by 
 the new Belief Act. It was a striking occasion, and 
 the keenest attention was paid by the House to one 
 whom some of them had been taught to regard as a kind 
 of grotesque barbarian, and others were accustomed to 
 speak of as an adventurer and a traitor. His speech 
 was calm and temperate ; his manner that of a polished 
 gentleman ; his argument, if not convincing, won the 
 encomiums of some of the ablest lawyers in the House, 
 Tindal and Brougham, Scarlett and Sugden. He had 
 
94 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL, 
 
 twice set out his view in letters to the House, pub- 
 lished on February 2nd and May 9th, in which he 
 urged that the proper course was to allow him to take 
 the oaths as he desired, and leave his right to do so to 
 be tried at law, in an action against him by an informer 
 for the penalties for sitting and voting without taking 
 the oaths. He claimed to be within the letter of the 
 law in taking the new oath, for the Act of Union provided 
 that '' till Parliament shall otherwise provide every 
 member shall take the oaths required by law." For the 
 period between his election and the passing of the Belief 
 Act, no penalty was provided in respect of his non-com- 
 pliance with that requirement. Now, since the Belief 
 Act passed, Parliament had " otherwise provided " ; a 
 new oath was prescribed, and this he claimed to take. 
 In any case he was within the equity of the new Act. 
 Since it had passed, six Catholic peers had taken it 
 in the House of Lords, and one, Lord Surrey, the 
 Duke of Norfolk's eldest son, had been elected to 
 the House of Commons, and had taken the oath 
 under the Act. If he was to take the old oaths, as he 
 was the first, so he would be the last Catholic to do so. 
 The House heard him with attention and respect, and 
 he was directed to withdraw. 
 
 Some Parliamentary pedants, of whom Charles Wynn, 
 a high authority on procedure, was one, seem to have 
 thought that a mere technical difficulty of this kind 
 would prove an insuperable difficulty to O'Connell's 
 admission. Others hoped that a second election might 
 have a different issue, and that the £10 electors might 
 reject the chosen of the forty-shilling freeholders. 
 By 190 to 116 his claim was refused. He was called in, 
 nnd the Speaker asked if he would take the old oath. 
 He asked to see it. " There is one assertion in this 
 
EMANCIPATION. 95 
 
 oath," said he, as he read it, '* which I do not know to 
 be true ; there is another assertion in it which I believe 
 not to be true. I cannot, therefore, take this oath.'' 
 He was dismissed, and a new writ was ordered to issue 
 for Clare. 
 
 He returned to Ireland vowing vengeance. He 
 issued an address to the Clare electors, couched in 
 violent language. It was called sarcastically the 
 ** Address of a hundred promises." Though, on Lord 
 Anglesey's advice, it was silent as to Kepeal, it pledged 
 him to Parliamentary Reform ; to demand the re-enfran- 
 chisement of the forty-shilling freeholders, the repeal 
 of the Subletting Act, and ** an equitable distribu- 
 tion of the revenues of the Established Church between 
 the poor on the one side and the most meritorious of the 
 Protestant clergy on the other," *' to cleanse the Augean 
 stable of the law," and to urge ** the abolition of the 
 accursed monopoly of the East India Company.'* 
 
 The Clare electors cared nothing for the East India 
 Company but a great deal for their champion, O'Con- 
 nell. When he went down to Clare from Dublin, the 
 people received him like a conqueror. He reached Ar- 
 magh late in the evening, but the town was immediately 
 illuminated. He pushed on to Limerick through the 
 night, and was compelled by fatigue to go to bed on bis 
 arrival in the morning. His enthusiastic admirers planted 
 a large tree before his windows and filled its branches 
 with musicians playing Irish airs. A triumphal car 
 awaited him at Ennis. He addressed numberless meet- 
 ings, and excited the new electorate as he bad excited the 
 old. The dissolved Catbolio Association was sum- 
 moned under the form of an aggregate meeting and 
 voted the sum of £6,000, which the Association had in 
 hand when it dissolved, towards the expenses of his eleo- 
 
96 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL. 
 
 tion. There was no opposition and no contest, and, on 
 July 30th, he was returned unopposed. 
 
 As if this slight to the foremost Catholic and fore- 
 most Irishman in Ireland were not deep enough, the 
 Government put upon O'Conuell a hardship in his pro- 
 fession also. He had now been at the bar thirty-one 
 years ; he had been its greatest advocate for almost one 
 half of that time, and because he was a Catholic he still 
 wore a stuff gown. When Canning came in, his hopes 
 of more generous treatment rose. Later on he wrote to 
 Spring-Eice, protesting against the professional injustice 
 which the denial of this merited promotion did him, 
 and he was told that the matter would be made to turn 
 on professional considerations alone. Now, in 1829, 
 the Cabinet considered who should be made the new 
 Catholic King's Counsel. There were six in all, 
 Sheil, Woulfe, Perrin, O'Loghlen^ and two others, but 
 O'Connell was not among them. He had been the 
 advocate and the law officer of Queen Caroline, and 
 the King could neither forgive nor forget that in any 
 man. He had compelled His Majesty, in sanctioning 
 Emancipation, to do violence to his piety. At the cost 
 of keeping open the breach between Great Britain and 
 Ireland, the royal resentment was gratified. 
 
 At the beginning of the Session of 1830 O'Connell 
 came to London and took his seat. He was fifty-five 
 years of age, an age at which few men can adapt them- 
 selves to unfamiliar circumstances or learn new and dif- 
 ficult lessons. He had been rarely in England, and 
 was unfamiliar with the temper of English society. 
 He was intensely Irish, and the Irish were then little 
 known in England and less liked. A large party hated 
 him bitterly. He used to say that for the first two 
 years the Speaker deliberately avoided seeing him 
 
EMANCIPATION, 97 
 
 when he wished to rise. Yet from the first moment 
 he had the ear of the House, and the Doneraile 
 discussion established his position as a formidable 
 gladiator of debate. He was abused and he was hooted, 
 but he was never despised, and he soon made himself 
 feared and admired. Of all the feats of his life, there 
 is none more remarkable than the ease with which, on 
 the verge of old age, he imposed himself upon the 
 attention of an audience so difficult to understand or to 
 please as the House of Commons. In this session he 
 spoke frequently, but without extravagance. His first 
 speech was made on the motion of Knatchbull to amend 
 the Government's Address to the Crown, by calling His 
 Majesty's attention to the state of the landed interest. 
 On May 28th, he moved for leave to bring in a Bill 
 for triennial Parliaments, a practically universal suf- 
 frage, and vote by ballot. It was refused by 819 to 
 13. The King died in June and Parliament was dis- 
 solved. 
 
 The new elections told heavily against the Govern- 
 ment. The counties in England went against them 
 by 3 to 1, the great towns by 9 to 1. O'Connell 
 was elected for Wnterford. The Irish elections turned 
 chiefly upon the questions of Tithe and of the Irish 
 Church, Repeal not being made a test, and the ma- 
 jority against ministers was heavy. Emboldened by 
 the revolutions of July on the Continent, during wbicb, 
 upon the election of a King of the Belgians, some dry 
 Belgian wags nominated and voted for him, O'Connell 
 raised the flag of Repeal and the cry spread fast. He 
 had founded a society called ** The Friends of Ireland of 
 all Religious Persuasions." Its objects were twenty* five 
 in number, but the principal was Repeal. ** The 
 society " was to *' consider with the deepest solicitude 
 
 7 
 
98 LIFE OF DANIEL 0' GO N NELL. 
 
 the means of procuring such a universal combination 
 of Irishmen as may render the Repeal of the Union 
 irresistible, and thus give to Ireland the blessing of a 
 free and domestic legislature, connected with Britain by 
 the golden link of the Crown, but independent of all 
 ministerial or undue control." 
 
 Unlike the Act of 1825, the Act for the suppression 
 of the Catholic Association attempted no nice legal 
 distinctions between lawful and unlawful associations, 
 but empowered the Lord Lieutenant to suppress them all 
 at his discretion. On April 24th, the Duke of Northum- 
 berland had proclaimed the *' Friends of Ireland." O'Con- 
 nell presently summoned a new society, or rather the old 
 one under a new name, to be called the Anti-Union Asso- 
 ciation. At a ball at the Viceregal Lodge in October, 
 Hardinge, the Chief Secretary, accidentally saw its ad- 
 vertisement in a newspaper. The Lord Lieutenant was 
 absent, but Hardinge, like a bold soldier, though run- 
 ning to the very verge of legality, proclaimed it him- 
 self. The guests as they drove home from the ball in 
 the morning, found his proclamation wet upon the walls. 
 Next day O'Connell founded an " Association of Irish 
 Volunteers," which shared the same fate. He denounced 
 Hardinge, and received a challenge, which he declined. 
 This was the first the English heard of his scruple 
 about duelling. They failed to understand it. When 
 he went to London next month for the opening of Par- 
 liament, men turned their backs upon him at Brooks', 
 and no one would speak to him at his clubs. Infu- 
 riated, he took advantage of the Government pro- 
 posal to equalise the Irish and English stamp duties 
 by a letter advocating a run on the banks, and the 
 panic in Ireland which ensued was wild though short 
 lived. 
 
EMANCIPATION. 99 
 
 ' Suddenly the scene changed. Returning with weak- 
 ened forces after the General Election, the Wei* 
 lington Administration fell, and Lord Grey came in. 
 It was the standing maxim of the Whig managers 
 to " buy O'Connell at any price," and his hopes were 
 justly excited. He was a man whose income though 
 large had been swallowed up by still larger expenses ; 
 he was embarrassed by debt ; attendance in Parliament 
 meant the abandonment of his profession. His reputa- 
 tion entitled him to hope for ofiQce, or, at least, for a 
 judgeship. The votes of the Irish members had been 
 enough to turn the scale against Wellington and in 
 favour of Grey. If Catholic Emancipation was not to 
 be an insulting mockery. Catholics must no longer 
 be excluded from professional advancement and from 
 places in the Administration. Now was the time to see 
 if the Whigs were grateful to their Irish supporters, 
 or the English sincere in extending justice to the 
 Catholics. 
 
 The Marquis of Anglesey, whose previous Lord Liea- 
 tenancy had endeared him to the Irish, was to replace 
 the Duke of Northumberland in Ireland. Having 
 known O'Connell personally and even acted with 
 him politically, he sent for him in December, before 
 leaving London for Ireland, and an interview of two 
 hours took place between them at Uxbridgo House. 
 The Marquis announced that he did not intend to 
 disturb the old law-officers, Joy, the Attorney-Gene- 
 ral, and Dogherty, the Solicitor-General. O'Connell 
 replied that if Emancipation was not to be made a 
 practical thing in the administration of Ireland and 
 the distribution of patronage, he must agitate for 
 Repeal. Then, said the ^larquis, he must coerce the 
 agitation. 
 
 7 * 
 
100 LIFE OF DANIEL 0' CONN ELL. 
 
 There was worse to come. Sir Anthony Hart re- 
 tired from the Irish Lord Chancellorship and Plunket 
 succeeded him. This left a vacancy in the Common 
 Pleas, which O'Connell was eager to fill. Dogherty was 
 appointed. This was peculiarly galling to O'Connell, 
 for in the previous session he had denounced Dogherty 
 for his conduct of the Doneraile case, and accused him 
 of having kept hack depositions on the trial of the first 
 batch of prisoners, whose production on the trial of the 
 second and third had shown such discrepancy from the 
 sworn evidence as to lead to an acquittal. It was in this 
 debate that he branded the office of Chief Secretary 
 with the epithet *' the shave-beggar " of the Ministry ; 
 but, on the whole, in the controversy, Dogherty, by 
 his calm and lofty sarcasm, had come off very much 
 the best. Still, the Solicitor-Generalship might pro- 
 perly have been given to O'Connell, and at the 
 same time, by the promotion of Joy, the Attorney- 
 Generalship fell vacant also. Blackburne, a Tory, 
 was appointed to the latter ; Crampton, a Whig, to the 
 former. 
 
 O'Connell declared that there was to be no justice 
 for the Catholics, and hastened to Ireland. He was 
 received in triumph ; he advised that Lord Anglesey's 
 arrival should be contemptuously ignored. Lord An- 
 glesey determined to retaliate. A procession of trades 
 unions was to have been held on December27th. Half- 
 an-hour before the notice convening it was to have been 
 posted on every chapel door in Dublin, a proclamation 
 against it appeared. The workmen asked O'Connell 
 if they should obey, and by way of proving that he and 
 not the Lord Lieutenant ruled Ireland, he advised them 
 to show a colourable deference to the proclamation by 
 holding the meeting on the 28th. He began the Kepeal 
 
EMANCIPATION. 101 
 
 struggle with the new year. He published a letter in 
 which he said : — 
 
 Ireland will achieve one more bloodless and stainless change. Since 
 I was born she has achieved two such glorious political revolutions. 
 The first was in 1782, when she conquered legislative independence ; 
 the second was in 1829, when she won for her victory freedom of 
 conscience. The third and best remains behind, the restoration of a 
 domestic and refoi*med legislature by the repeal of the Union. This 
 we will also achieve, if we persevere in a legal, constitutional, and 
 peaceable course. Let my advice be followed, and I will venture to 
 assert that the Union cannot last two years longer. 
 
 A few days afterwards he founded a ** General Asso- 
 ciation for the Prevention of Unlawful Meetings." It 
 met at the "Parliamentary Intelligence Office," a news- 
 paper-room in Stephen Street, which he had established 
 the year before. It was proclaimed. He proposed 
 that he himself should be constituted the Repeal Asso- 
 ciation, beyond the reach of legal dissolution, and should 
 receive subscriptions and be assisted by a club, which 
 should hold public breakfasts and public debates. Ac- 
 cordingly he constituted " A Body of Persons in the 
 habit of meeting weekly at a place called Home's 
 Hotel." It was dispersed. Then followed '* The Irish 
 Society for Legal and Legislative Relief," and it 
 perished. Another phoenix rose from its ashes, an 
 *' Anti-Union Association." In quick succession this 
 Protean organization became ** An Association of Irish 
 Volunteers for the Repeal of the Union," a society of 
 *' Subscribers to the Parliamentary Intelligence OflBce,'* 
 and, finally, a mere breakfast party at Hayes' Hotel. 
 As fast as 0*Connell created a new society. Lord An- 
 glesey cut it down with a new proclamation. At length 
 this farce, so humiliating to the more serious Irish, so 
 irritating to the Administration, was abruptly closed. 
 
102 LIFE OF DANIEL 0' CON NELL. 
 
 As Anglesey wrote to his wife, "things are now come 
 to that pass that the question is whether he or I shall 
 govern Ireland.'* 
 
 On January 13th, 1831, a proclamation was issued, 
 which forbade an association under any name. O^Con- 
 nell replied with a manifesto, threatening another run 
 on the banks. He assembled a breakfast party of 350, 
 and next day held a meeting of his committee of 
 thirty-one advisers in Dawson Street. It was dispersed 
 by two police magistrates, and on January 19th, at 
 ten in the morning, he was arrested in his own house. 
 An indictment of the usual cumbrous description 
 was preferred on the 24th. In fourteen counts he was 
 charged with offences against the Act of 1829 ; in 
 seventeen more with a conspiracy at Common Law. 
 He had made one slip in holding his breakfast in de- 
 fiance of the proclamation ; he now made another in the 
 conduct of his case. He demurred to the fourteen 
 counts. But a demurrer implied au admission of the 
 facts charged, and an issue only as to their legal effect. 
 He had debarred himself from a trial on the merits. 
 He asked and obtained leave to withdraw his demurrer, 
 and enter a plea of " not guilty." The trial was fixed 
 for the 17th of February, and a defence fund of £7,000 
 was collected. But before the trial came on, seeing that 
 it could have but one ending, he entered into a compro- 
 mise with the Government. To the amazement of the 
 public, the Attorney-General entered a ?folle jwosequi 
 on the conspiracy counts. O'Connell withdrew his plea 
 of " not guilty," and submitted to a verdict on those 
 which alleged an offence against the Statute, and the 
 case stood adjourned for judgment to the first day of 
 Easter term. He then wrote a letter intended to be 
 shown to the Chief Secretary, Stanley, in which he 
 
EMANCIPATION. 103 
 
 offered to abandon Repeal if the Government would 
 abandon tbe prosecution. Stanley sternly refused. 
 Undoubtedly O^Connell was humiliated. He had been 
 defeated by the English Government, which he had so 
 often overcome. His matchless legal dexterity for once 
 had failed him. He denied in the House of Commons 
 that he had offered to withdraw the question of Repeal, 
 and gave out that he feared there would have been a 
 popular outbreak at his trial. But even his friends did 
 not believe it. Sheil said his heart had sunk at the 
 prospect of a gaol ; and " how," he asked, ** could a 
 man face a battle who could not encounter Newgate ?" 
 The supporters of the Government were jubilant, but they 
 had not long much cause for exultation. It was rumoured 
 that O'Connell was to be treated gently, because the 
 Government was bidding for his vote in London. Stanley 
 denied the rumour. " The Crown,'* he said, ** has pro- 
 cured a verdict against Mr. O'Connell, and it will un- 
 doubtedly call him up to receive judgment upon it.*' But 
 the event showed that the world knew better than the 
 Chief Secretary. On March 2nd the Reform Bill was in- 
 troduced ; on the 9th 0*Connell spoke brilliantly in its 
 support. The first day of term approached, but he could 
 not be spared from Westminster. The delivery of 
 judgment in his case was postponed till May. But 
 judgment never was pronounced at all. On April 22nd 
 Parliament was dissolved ; the Act of 1829 thoreupon 
 expired. The Govemraent gladly availed themselves of 
 the plea that, the Act against which he had offended 
 being gone, O'Connell could not now be punished for 
 his offence. He was a free man. 
 
 Until the close of the Reform contest, O'Connell, 
 who had now been returned for Kerry, spoke and voted 
 with the Whigs. But in spite of the most strenuous 
 
104 LIFE OF DANIEL O'GONNELL. 
 
 efiforts in committee on the Irish Bill, he was unable 
 to recover for the Irish peasants any of the ground they 
 had lost in 1829. He pointed out that proportionately 
 to the wealth of each country, a £10 franchise in Ire- 
 land was as high as a £20 franchise would be in England. 
 He complained^that the registration was cumbrous, the 
 number of members inadequate, and that Ireland, which 
 had 8,000,000 inhabitants, and in 1829 had had nearly 
 300,000 voters, had now only 26,000, while the Eng- 
 lish electorate was to be raised from 200,000 to 
 350,000. Stanley sternly refused to enfranchise the 
 forty- shilling freeholders, and the House of Lords in- 
 serted a clause restoring the franchise to freemen in the 
 boroughs, who were invariably Protestants, and often 
 corrupt. The pressure, however, upon the Govern- 
 ment to do something to conciliate so useful an ally 
 and so formidable an opponent grew stronger. In August, 
 1831, Dr. Doyle, a highly esteemed and influential 
 Roman Catholic bishop, urged them to confer office upon 
 him. In Michaelmas term he received his patent of 
 precedence as a King's Counsel, and hoping to fetter 
 him by imposing upon him official responsibility, the 
 Government authorized Sir H. Parnell to sound him, 
 through Dr. Doyle, about taking office. If it were cer- 
 tain that he would accept the offer if made, no insuper- 
 able obstacle existed to their making it. It was a 
 tempting opportunity, but O'Connell felt obliged to 
 refuse. He required a promise of substantial change 
 in the Government's Irish policy. This Grey and 
 Stanley would not give. Their view was one which 
 Stanley afterwards expressed in the phrase ** Ireland 
 must be taught to fear before she could be taught to 
 love," and merely to conciliate a man whom they 
 hated, they would not abandon the principle. But as 
 
EMANCIPATION. 1C6 
 
 yet circumstances had not forced them to avow or to 
 act upon this view. Though O'Connell could not take 
 office with the Whigs, he conceived that he had done 
 them good service, for which he was entitled to their 
 gratitude, and when the last unreformed Parliament was 
 •dissolved in December 1832, he hoped that a new day 
 was dawning for Ireland. He was doomed to a hitter 
 ^disappointment. 
 
106 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE REFORMED PARLIAMENT. 
 
 1833-1835. 
 
 Tithe War — O'Oonnell renews his agitation against Tithe and for 
 Repeal— The Reform Bill— "Who is the traitor ?"— Coercion Bill 
 of 1833 — O'Connell's Repeal motion — Intrigue with Littleton — 
 Fall of the Whigs — Peel's Administration. 
 
 Scarcely had the Irish obtained Emancipation, when 
 they fell upon evil days again. From the year 1830, a 
 cloud of misery and crime gathered over Ireland. 
 Practically valueless, and economically injurious, the 
 forty-shilling freeholders, who had lost their votes, now 
 lost their holdings, and were freely evicted. Prices were 
 low ; employment was ill-paid and difficult to obtain ; in 
 the South wages were 5s. a week, and even less, and 
 even at that rate work was scarce. In the autumn of 
 1830 the potato crop failed ; in the winter famine made 
 its appearance in the South and West, and unfortunately 
 there was no poor law, as there was in England, to 
 relieve the distress. Hundreds and thousands were 
 literally reduced to beggary. The people suffered from 
 two imposts peculiarly offensive to Irish Catholic feel- 
 ing. They were liable to Church tithes for the support 
 of a clergy whose ministrations it was schism to enjoy, 
 
THE REFORMED PARLIAMENT. 107 
 
 and to Church cess for the erection and repair of build- 
 ings, where heretical ceremonies were performed which 
 they believed could lead only to perdition. Gross abuses 
 and gross hardships were but too often connected with 
 these taxes. The burden of the tithes had been thrown 
 deliberately upon the Roman Catholics. The tithe was 
 in many cases let for a fixed sum to tithe farmers, who 
 collected it with little regard to anything but their 
 own profit ; and being often due in almost incredibly 
 minute sums, it was, even when collected from cot- 
 tiers by the ministers of religion themselves, a tax 
 hateful for its past injustice and its present hard- 
 ship. The disproportion between the numbers of 
 the Protestant parishioners and of the Protestant 
 parishes was glaring. There were no less than 151 in- 
 cumbents of parishes who had not a single parishioner. 
 Between the incomes of the bishops and those of the 
 clergy of the Established Church the inequality was 
 no less preposterous. While there were many poor 
 incumbents, the number of bishoprics was indefensibly 
 great, and their incomes exorbitantly high. The 
 Church cess was levied by a Protestant vestry upon a 
 Catholic peasantry for the repair of Protestant churches ; 
 instances were known in which costly churches were 
 erected for non-existent congregations, and others, in 
 which funds raised to build churches had been spent 
 upon dwelling-houses for Protestants. The spirit of 
 the Irish had been awakened during the struggle for 
 Emancipation, and their hopes raised by its issae. 
 Tliey now resolved in their distress to submit to these 
 burdens no longer, and the Tithe War began. 
 
 The agitation, which O'Connell carried on, quick- 
 ened this spirit. The Executive forbade it; but sup- 
 pressed though it was by authority, it did not remain 
 
108 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL. 
 
 barren of results. Repeal was the object at which he 
 ultimately aimed, but he directed his efforts towards 
 ends far more attainable than Repeal. On the 7th 
 January 1830 he had published a manifesto to the 
 people of Ireland, in which he set forth his pro- 
 gramme. This included the repeal of the Sub-letting 
 Act and of the Vestry Act, an elaborate plan for the 
 reform of grand juries, various proposals for the reform 
 of legal procedure, as to which he called himself 
 ** a thorough Benthamite," reform of corporations and 
 radical parliamentary reform, and finally the abolition 
 of Tithes and of Church cess. On July 14th 1832 
 he wrote a letter to the National Political Union, in 
 which he formulated his plan for dealing with tithe. It 
 was to be ultimately extinguished, but compensation 
 was to be given to existing interests in possession; and 
 he followed this proposal with another more sweeping, 
 to disendow the Church of Ireland beyond such sums as 
 were required for its actual ministry and congregations, 
 and to devote the funds so liberated to charity and to 
 the provision of parish houses and glebes for the 
 parochial Catholic clergy and Presbyterian ministers. 
 A few months later, as the conflict became more bitter, 
 he wrote again to the same body a long letter, which he 
 concluded by solemnly declaring, " First, I am deter- 
 mined never again voluntarily to pay tithes ; second, I 
 am determined never again voluntarily to pay vestry 
 cess; third, I am determioed never to buy one single 
 article sold for tithes or vestry cess." 
 
 The Irish profited by his teaching. The refusal to 
 pay tithe or cess was general. As early as the end 
 of 1831 the arrears of tithe were very large, and the 
 clergy found themselves powerless to get them in. But 
 tithes were the chief support of hundreds of the clergy, 
 
THE REFORMED PARLIAMENT, 109 
 
 and by hundreds they were reduced to destitution. 
 Their lamentable condition attracted, as that of the 
 tithe-payers did not, the attention of Parliament. Com- 
 mittees of both Houses sat to examine the question. 
 O'Connell indignantly pointed out that not a single 
 Catholic sat on either. "It seems," said he, *' Roman 
 Catholics have nothing to do with tithe but to pay it." 
 Committees so composed contented themselves with a 
 proposal for collecting the tithes, not for abolishing 
 them, and, in spite of O^Connell's opposition, a measure 
 was carried, by which the Government advanced £60,000 
 fur the immediate relief of the clergy, and itself under- 
 took the collection of the tithe. But the efforts of the 
 Government were as fruitless as those of rectors or 
 tithe- farmers. After many struggles and some blood- 
 shed, they collected £12,000 of tithes in arrear; the 
 effort cost £14,000. When the people refused to pay, 
 the Government proceeded to distrain. The sheriff, 
 assisted by a military force, seized a cottier's cow* 
 Escorted by a troop of horse, the cow was solemnly 
 driven across country to market. Its appearance was 
 the signal for a universal cessation of business. As if 
 it had been plague-smitten, everyone held aloof; not a 
 buyer could be found, and nothing remained to be done 
 but for the sheriff of the county to drive the cow away 
 again, escorted by a troop of His Majesty's dragoons. 
 The vindication of justice was degenerating into a farce. 
 Unhappily it too often terminated in a tragedy. 
 Never had crime and disorder been more rife than in 
 the winter of 1832. Multitudes of secret societies 
 sprang up, cattle were mutilated, tithe-proctors and 
 process-servers were murdered. There were in 1832 
 9,000 crimes connected with political disturbances, and 
 of these 200 were homicides. The record of certain 
 
110 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL. 
 
 counties was peculiarly black. In] Kilkenny, during 
 the twelve months, 34 houses were burnt, 519 bur- 
 glaries were committed, and the murders and attempts 
 to murder were 32. Queen^s County was even worse. 
 The burglaries were 626, the homicides 60. Evidence 
 was not to be obtained, and juries would not con- 
 vict. It became plain that a more stringent law was 
 needed. 
 
 The Government possessed an overwhelming majo- 
 rity in the first reformed Parliament. The necessity of 
 concentrating every effort upon the return of Eeform 
 candidates had induced O'Connell to sink the question 
 of Kepeal at the General Election in the summer of 
 1831. But Keform once carried, he insisted upon the 
 general imposition of a Kepeal pledge at the General 
 Election in the winter of 1832, and published a series 
 of thirty letters, instructing the constituencies in the 
 clearest detail, what persons were entitled to vote, and 
 how votes should be claimed. He had himself been 
 returned for Kerry without a contest, and would have 
 preferred to sit for his native county, but it became 
 clear that no one but he could defeat the Tories in 
 Dublin, and for Dublin he was constrained to stand. He 
 was elected, and his followers won almost all along the 
 line. He nominated about half the candidates who 
 were returned. Three of his sons and two of his sons- 
 in-law formed his *' household brigade." Kepealers 
 oame in for the cities and boroughs of Dublin, Cork, 
 Waterford, Wexford, Clonmel, Ennis, Tralee, Kilkenny, 
 Athlone, Eoscommon, and Galway ; and for the coun- 
 ties of Cork, Dublin, Limerick, Waterford, Mayo, Tip- 
 perary, Kilkenny, Kerry, Wexford, Westmeath, King's 
 County, Galway, Sligo, Wicklow, and Meath. Of 105 
 Irish members, but 23 were Tories; of 82 Liberal 
 
THE REFORMED PARLIAMENT. Ill 
 
 members, 45 were pledged Repealers. The support of 
 52 Irish members had carried the Whig Reform Bill 
 against a majority of the members from England and 
 Scotland ; the Whigs had now a majority which would 
 enable them to pass anything, and the Irish looked for 
 their reward. 
 
 The first Irish measure which the Ministry brought 
 forward was a Coercion Act, more severe than any of 
 its predecessors since the Act of Union. The fiery 
 Stanley^s influence with Lord Grey had prevailed over 
 the conciliatory advice of Melbourne, Althorp, and 
 Grant. Seeing what was coming, O'Connell began the 
 battle early, and fought the Government policy with 
 courage, tenacity, brilliance, and vituperation almost 
 unparallelled. He initiated a four nights debate upon 
 the Address on February 5th, in a speech in which he 
 denounced the Government as " bloody and brutal '' with 
 a reiteration that compelled the Speaker to expostulate 
 with him, and, with more damaging effect, declared that 
 the policy of the Executive had made the Catholic Relief 
 Act a dead letter. Since it passed, four years had gone 
 by. There was still not a Catholic judge upon the 
 bench ; there was but one Catholic high sheriff and a 
 handful of Catholic magistrates. Of 84 stipendiary 
 magistrates, all nominated by Lord Anglesey except 8, 
 82 sub-inspectors of police, and 5 inspectors-general of 
 police, for the most part appointed since the Whigs 
 came in, not one was a Catholic, and now, he said, 
 came a Royal Speech which was to Ireland a " de- 
 claration of civil war," The GovemmeDt, however, 
 carried the Address by a huge majority. 
 
 On the 11th of February 0*ConnelI renewed the 
 conflict by a speech on the Report of the Address, 
 in which he pronounced enthusiastically for Repeal, and 
 
112 LIFE OF DANIEL a CORNELL, 
 
 on February 18th, by another on the Estimates, de- 
 nouncing coercion, and declaring that ** this projected 
 measure of His Majesty's Government is more condu- 
 cive to a Kepeal of the Union than all my agitation.** 
 On the 27th, Althorp rose to move the first reading 
 of the Bill for the Suppression of Disturbances in Ire- 
 land. To him it was, indeed, an uncongenial task. 
 He plodded drearily through pages bristling with the 
 statistics of crime and the records of misery and discon- 
 tent, and produced even on his supporters so adverse an 
 impression, that the Coercion Bill was all but still-born. 
 Graham, who saw how ill matters were going, despatched 
 Le Marchant to Earl Grey for reinforcements, xilthorp's 
 box of papers was taken to Stanley, and he shut him- 
 self up in a room upstairs. In two hours he was master 
 of the case; and at midnight he rose to deliver almost 
 the only speech in the annals of the House of Com- 
 mons that has won votes as well as changed opinions. 
 He marshalled the facts of Irish crime with brilliant 
 effect; he directed upon O'Connell an onslaught so 
 fiery and overwhelming that O'Connell '^ looked like a 
 convicted felon." He declared, without mincing matters, 
 that for her crimes, and their inevitable punishment, 
 Ireland had to thank the agitation of O'Oonnell. He 
 charged him with writing, on February lOfch, to the 
 Society of Volunteers, to tell them, contrary to the 
 then usage of secrecy on such matters, that the member 
 for Armagh and the two members for Limerick had 
 voted against Ireland on the Address, and begging their 
 constituents not to forget it. This O^Connell did not 
 seek to deny. He quoted from reports of a speech of 
 O'Connell's delivered at a Trades Union banquet, in 
 which he was said to have called the House of 
 Commons a body of *' six hundred and fifty-eight 
 
THE BEFOBMED PABLIAMENT, 113 
 
 scoundrels "; and although O'Connell followed with 
 a short explanation and denial of the words, his 
 speech at the conclusion of the debate made no im- 
 pression. But O'Connell was not a man to be long 
 or easily put down. It was his policy to make him- 
 self, in the opinion of the whole House, what Cobbett 
 had called him, " the member for Ireland." His 
 imperturbable assurance, not less than his abilities 
 and the air of authority, with which ho expressed his 
 opinion on all Irish matters, gradually gave him an 
 influence on the new members most prejudicial to the 
 Government. He spared no elBfort to improve his posi- 
 tion, being always ready to afford information to other 
 members, and most bland and courteous in his intercourse 
 with them. In committee Stanley found him an assiduous 
 and formidable opponent. But the Irish were too few 
 in number ; only eighty-four members voted against the 
 second reading. The Bill passed by large majorities, 
 and the Government was armed with powers to proclaim 
 districts, to suppress associations, to confine people to 
 their houses after dark, to search for arms, to proclaim 
 martial law, to suspend the Habeas Corpus Act, and 
 to try prisoners by court-martial. O'Connell's Irish 
 Society of Volunteers did not wait to be suppressed ; 
 it transferred its powers to its author and dissolved. 
 
 The Whigs, however, were not insincere in their 
 desire to alleviate the sufferings of the Irish. They 
 introduced a Church Temporalities Bill, to abolish 
 Church cess and substitute for it a tax on the incomes 
 of the clergy, to suppress nearly half of the bishoprics 
 and a crowd of livings, and to devote to non-ecclosias- 
 tical purposes the sum of £3,000,000 so liberated. 
 O'Connell approved the principle of this appropriation ; 
 but the Tories, who could not defend the sinecure bene- 
 
 8 
 
114 LIFJ^ OF DANIEL O'CONNELL. 
 
 fices and profusion of bishoprics, opposed the appropria- 
 tion. To conciliate them it was abandoned, and the 
 Bill passed ; but thus reduced to the abolition of the cess 
 and the internal reform of the Church, it attracted little 
 gratitude from the Eoman Catholics. In the recess 
 ministerial changes took place. Stanley went to the 
 Colonial Office, and was succeeded by Littleton. Lord 
 Anglesey retired, and the Marquis of Wellesley became 
 Lord Lieutenant. Efforts were made to conciliate 
 O'Connell. The Protestant party was appalled to see 
 a Koman Catholic agitator positively dining with the 
 Chief Secretary. They were spared the further pain of 
 seeing him in office. O'Connell writes to a friend : 
 *^ The Ministry have made and are making more direct 
 oifers to me . . . but all this does not make me one 
 whit the less immovable. If I went into office I 
 should be their servant — that is, their slave ; by stay- 
 ing out of office, I am^ to a considerable extent, their 
 master.'* 
 
 For upwards of three years he had now been advo- 
 cating and impressing upon the Irish by speeches, 
 letters, and organization, the necessity of a union of all 
 classes and creeds in Ireland in a determined agitation 
 for Repeal. He had broached the subject in his first 
 Clare election address. He had deeply stirred the South 
 of Ireland by letters and speeches in the autumn of 
 1830, and although his mind was not made up either as 
 to the exact value of Eepeal or the precise form it should 
 take, he was characteristically sanguine of its not dis- 
 tant success. He wrote on December 3rd 1830, to his 
 constant correspondent, Dr. MacHale, Roman Catholic 
 Archbishop of Tuam : 
 
 The moral and political revolution is plainly on its march. ... I 
 am convinced as I am of to-morrow's smi that within the space of 
 
THE REFORMED PARLIAMENT, 115 
 
 probably less than two years the monopolies of corporations and the 
 still more gigantic oppressions of the Established Church will have 
 passed away for ever. . . There must be a law to take off the 
 Church burden. An Irish Parliament alone can do that. There 
 must be an end to absenteeism. An Irish Parliament alone can do 
 that. 
 
 When he endeavoured during his prosecution in 1831 
 to induce Stanley to forego a trial by the offer of an 
 abandonment of Eepeal, he seems to have thought that 
 an Irish Parliament was only machinery, a means to an 
 end, and that if an English Parliament would endeavour to 
 remedy Irish grievances equally^effectually, Repeal became 
 needless. In 1833, too, he said in the House of Com- 
 mons: ^* The only reason I have for being a Repealer is 
 the injustice of the present Government towards my 
 country. ... If I thought the machinery of the present 
 Government would work well, there never lived a man 
 more ready to facilitate its movements than I am.** 
 During the election of 1831 he allowed the question to 
 rest, but as soon as it was over he began his agitation 
 afresh. In October he founded his National Political 
 Union, which met twice a week to discuss Repeal, and in 
 1832 he endeavoured to effect the union of it with a rival 
 body, the Trades Political Union, ** to procure that mea- 
 sure without which, it is my solemn, conscientious, and 
 unalterable opinion, Ireland cannot prosper, the Repeal of 
 the Union." He formulated a plan for an independent 
 legislature in opposition to the subordinate assembly of 
 Sharman Crawford's Federal scheme. At Bath the 
 newspapers reported him, to the dismay of the Irish, to 
 have declared himself favourable to the '* union " with 
 Great Britain. This he denied, and said that he had 
 only declared in favour of the ** connection," and had 
 demanded *' a Parliament to do our private business, leav- 
 
 8 ♦ 
 
116 LIFE OF DANIEL O'GONNELL. 
 
 ing the national business to a national assembly." He 
 further elaborated his plan, proposing, first, repeal of the 
 Act of Union, and, next, the creation of two legislatures, 
 each consisting of a House of Lords and a House of 
 Commons, each legislature to meet in October, and to 
 discuss private Bills, and the aflPairs of commerce, agri- 
 culture, and manufactures of Great Britain and of Ire- 
 land respectively, while in February a National Parlia- 
 ment was to meet for affairs of peace or war and foreign 
 policy. By the following spring the Coercion Bill had 
 further developed his views. He was anxious to have 
 Moore come forward for an Irish constituency. Moore 
 would neither stand as a Kepealer, nor accept the position 
 of a '* joint " in O'Connell's tail. He told O'Connell that 
 Separation must follow Repeal, as certainly as night 
 day, and therefore he could not advocate Repeal. 
 O'Connell said to him, **I am now convinced that 
 Repeal won't do, and that it must be Separation." He 
 was not far from the position of the peasants, who, 
 during the agitation of 1830, were constantly asking 
 O'Neill Daunt, " When do you think. Sir, the Coun- 
 sellor will call us out ?" 
 
 One thing, however, O'Connell saw quite clearly, that 
 it was useless, with the Irish agitation still only in em- 
 bryo, to ask the House of Commons to entertain any 
 proposal for Repeal, and yet in 1834 he brought the 
 question forward in Parliament. From the Union until 
 1838 the Irish members had been Whigs or Tories as 
 the case might be, but there had been no separate Irish 
 party. But with the return of a large Repeal contingent to 
 the first reformed parliament, there came into existence 
 under O^Connell's leadership that third party which 
 has held the balance in so many parliaments, and upset 
 so many ministries since then. In the brief interval 
 
THE REFORMED PARLIAMENT. 117 
 
 between the last election and the opening of Parliament 
 in 1833, O'Connell had not time, although he held a 
 meeting of his party in Dublin, to bring them into 
 thorough discipline. But he was disposed to make an 
 unsparing use of his strength to keep his followers in 
 subjection. Fergus O'Connor, member for Cork, a 
 scatter-brained squireen, was unwilling to submit. 
 During 1833 he pressed vehemently for the immediate 
 discussion of Repeal. O'Connell resisted while he could, 
 and twice at the beginning of 1834 obtained majorities 
 in the meetings of the Repeal party in favour of its 
 postponement. But O'Connor vowed that if their leader 
 would not bring the question forward, he would do so 
 himself ; and to avoid worse consequences O'Connell, 
 sorely against his will, decided to introduce the ques- 
 tion. ** I felt,'' said he to Daunt, with a metaphor pro- 
 bably more forcible in those days than in these, ** like 
 a man who was going to plunge into a cold bath ; but I 
 was obliged to take the plunge." 
 
 One matter of discipline there was, in which he could 
 interfere. Hill, M.P. for Hull, had, in a speech to 
 his constituents during the previous autumn, said that 
 some of the Irish members, who violently denounced 
 the Coercion Bill iu public, had in private implored 
 Ministers not to drop it. If this were so, OConneH's 
 authority with his party was gone. He must either 
 vindicate it by disproving the charge or purge his forces 
 by unmasking the traitor. On February 6th 1834, the 
 second night of the Session, he questioned Lord 
 Althorp in the House as to the statement. Althorp 
 said no such communication had been made to 
 Ministers, but he believed that in private conversation 
 Irish members had approved the Bill, who in debate had 
 assailed it. Amid violent confusion, O'Connell rose. 
 
118 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL, 
 
 followed by the other Irish members, one by one, each 
 asking "Is it I?" Althorp said **no^' to each. The 
 Speaker tried to pour oil on the waters, but O'Connell 
 would not have peace, and still further troubled them. 
 At last Sheil rose to ask if he was one of those referred 
 to. Althorp said that he was one. Sheil, ^* speaking 
 in the presence of God," passionately denied it. O'Con- 
 nell thereupon ostentatiously withdrew and apologised 
 for every harsh expression he had applied to Hill. 
 There followed a long discussion upon the nice point 
 of honour, which of the two, Althorp or Sheil, was to 
 be considered the aggrieved party, who could send a 
 challenge, and which of the two should accordingly be 
 first required to promise to send none. The Speaker 
 called on Sheil to undertake that the matter should go 
 no farther. Sheil sate dumb. The Speaker turned to 
 Althorp. Althorp said he would not follow it up out- 
 side. The Speaker was disposed to be content witb 
 this ; but O'Connell was more astute, and pointed out 
 that Althorp had said he would not send a challenge, 
 but had not said he would not accept on^. To the 
 Speaker's demand for a full undertaking Althorp gave a 
 refusal, and, on Burdett's motion, Sheil and Althorp 
 were marched out of the House in the custody of the 
 Serjeant-at-Arms. 
 
 This was a disagreeable incident for the Ministry ; 
 another was to come. On February 13th, O'Connell 
 rose to call attention to the extraordinary nocturnal 
 habits of Baron Smith of the Irish Court of Exchequer, 
 who loved to come to Court at the hour when most 
 Courts rise, and to try prisoners till the small hours of 
 the morning. He had given notice of a motion in 
 favour of the judge's removal. The Ministry had 
 decided to oppose it. Suddenly he changed his 
 
THE BEFOEMED PARLIAMENT, 119 
 
 motion to one only for a select committee. Althorp 
 and Littleton^ taken by surprise, assented. It was 
 carried by 167 to 74. But on reflection they saw 
 the ineptitude of the proceeding. A committee was 
 useless. The House must impeach the Baron or 
 address the Crown for his removal, or let him alone. 
 The last was the onlv feasible course. A week later, 
 on the 21st, Knatchbull, a Tory member, relieved them 
 from their difficulty by carrying a motion to rescind 
 the motion to which Althorp had assented. 
 
 After these two blows O'Connell tried the strength of 
 the Repeal party. The King^s Speech had taken notice 
 of the Repeal agitation. It said of the Act of Union, 
 ** this bond of our national strength and safety I have 
 already declared ray fixed and unalterable resolution, 
 under the blessing of Divine Providence, to maintain 
 inviolate by all the means in my power.'^ The Address 
 contained words which re-echoed this resolution; 
 O'Connell had moved their omission, and was defeated 
 by 189 to 23. The prospect was dark indeed. He 
 gave notice of a motion for a committee to inquire into 
 the working of the Act of Union. ** He was one of the 
 most sensitive and nervous men that ever lived,** says 
 his son. ** Previous to his motion he was very unhappy 
 and spent several sleepless nights, whioh was by no 
 means unusual with him when any matter of importance 
 impended.'* His motion came on about 5 p.m. on 
 Tuesday, April 22nd. He spoke for nearly seven hours. 
 Beginning with a long historical retrospect, during 
 which he read copious extracts from Morrisson's History 
 of Ireland, ho proceeded to argue that the Irish Parlia- 
 ment had no power to extinguish itself or to sell its 
 birthright, and therefore that the Act of Union was not 
 binding in law. It was not binding in morality, having 
 
120 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL. 
 
 been procured by corrupt means. He even declared 
 that for the purpose of making up a case for union the 
 English Government had connived at the plots of the 
 United Irishmen and deliberately fostered the rebellion 
 of 1798. He argued that the terms of the bargain were 
 unfair to Ireland. The English House of Lords had 
 usurped an appellate jurisdiction so inconvenient, that 
 this grievance of itself was sufficient to justify the 
 demand for Repeal. Ireland had been loaded with an 
 unfair proportion of the Imperial indebtedness. The 
 taxation for interest on the debt and annual expenditure, 
 to which her resources made her justly liable, was l-17th 
 of the whole. She had been charged with 2-17ths ; 
 and, as it was impossible for her to pay so much, it had 
 been found necessary to amalgamate the Irish with the 
 English exchequer. Proportionately to her population 
 she ought to have 202 members, and on any calculation 
 110; she had 105. Since the Union, Ireland had de- 
 cayed. From 1782 to 1800 her consumption of tea and 
 tobacco had increased twice as fast as that of England, 
 of coflPee and wine four times as fast. But since 1800 
 absenteeism had become almost universal, and Ireland 
 had fallen into poverty. In Great Britain ^£47,000,000 
 of taxation had been repealed ; in Ireland £1,500,000. 
 Taxes in England had risen 20 per cent. ; in Ireland 80 
 per cent. The population of England had increased 
 prodigiously in thirty-four years; in Ireland it had 
 diminished. In that period there had been sixty select 
 committees and one hundred and fourteen commissions 
 on Irish aflPairs, and yet for all this inquiry the English 
 had been so little able to govern Ireland that in twenty of 
 the thirty-four years the Constitution was suspended. 
 His case was backed up with a huge parade of quota- 
 tions from various politicians by way of testimony, like 
 
THE REFORMED PARLIAMENT, 121 
 
 proofs in a lawyer's brief, and at the end of his speech 
 the exhausted House adjourned. 
 
 Spring-Rice was deputed to answer him, and was no 
 less prolix and even more statistical. The Government 
 met the motion with a proposal for an address to the 
 'Crown, pledging the House to maintain the Union and 
 to remove all just causes of complaint in the future. 
 The question was debated for nine nights, and O'Connell 
 was beaten on a division by 523 to 38. In the minority 
 •but one English member voted ; in the majority 57, 
 more than half, of the Irish members were counted. 
 The question of Repeal was at rest in Parliament for 
 •upwards of a generation. 
 
 The Whigs, however, were not unmindful of their 
 ipromises to the Irish. Littleton brought in, much to 
 the disgust of Stanley, a Tithe Bill, which commuted 
 the tithe for a land tax. It was introduced on the 
 20th February, and on the 2nd May the Bill came 
 on for second reading. But the Ministry was in a 
 moribund state. Althorp and Littleton were for mode- 
 rate reform, Grey and Stanley for ruling with a high 
 hand ; Brougham was meddlesome and treacherous, 
 Graham vacillating and uncertain. In May came a 
 crisis. Ward brought on his resolution in favour 
 •of the appropriation of surplus Irish Church revenues 
 to secular objects. The feeling of a majority of the 
 •Cabinet was in its favour, and the (Jovernment proposed 
 to meet it with a pledge for an inquiry into the Irish 
 Church. Upon this Stanley resigned, and Graham, the 
 Duke of Richmond, and the Earl of Ripon followed 
 him. Thus weakened, the Government was anxious to 
 secure the support of the Irish members for their Tithe 
 Bill, which was obnoxious to the Tories. But the 
 •Coercion Act of the previous year had rendered the 
 
122 LIFE OF DANIEL 0' CONN ELL. 
 
 Eepealers implacable, and to add to their difficulties 
 the Government were now met by the necessity of 
 renewing some part of it, if not the whole. To the 
 curfew clauses and the power of proclaiming districts, 
 O'Connell was more or less reconciled, for the state 
 of Ireland was still indisputably disturbed ; but to the 
 suppression of meetings he was inexorably opposed^ 
 Littleton knew that that provision and his Tithe Bill 
 could not both pass. Hitherto Lord Wellesley had 
 written officially to the Government pressing for a 
 renewal of the whole Act except the court-martial 
 clause. On June 19th Brougham sent for Littleton, 
 and proposed to him to ask Lord Wellesley to write to- 
 Earl Grey advising that the public meetings clause 
 should be dropped. Littleton did so, pointing out how 
 essential to the Ministry it was to have O'Connell's 
 support, and that if the Tithe Bill passed the clauses 
 against mere agitation would not be required. Lord 
 Wellesley wrote on June 23rd to Lord Grey a private 
 letter in the sense Littleton desired. Littleton also saw 
 Melbourne and Althorp. They were both of his opinion ;. 
 the first characteristicallysaiditwouldnot do to exasperate 
 Grey ; the second said that sooner than assent to the 
 clause he would resign. Convinced now that the clause 
 would not be introduced, Littleton proposed to Althorp 
 to send for O'Connell, hint that this was so, and beg 
 him not to embarrass the Government. O'Connell was 
 at that time beginning a new Irish agitation against 
 the Coercion Bill. There was a vacancy at Wex- 
 ford, and against the Whig candidate he had sent a 
 Eepealer. Althorp approved of the project, but urged 
 reticence and caution. Littleton accordingly sent for 
 O'Connell, who came to the Irish Office, and was told 
 under the seal of secrecy that the Coercion Bill would 
 
THE EEFOBMED FAELIAMENT, 123 
 
 be a short and limited one, aimed only at agrarian 
 crime, and that he would do well not to agitate for the 
 present. O^Connell accordingly withdrew his Repealer 
 at Wexford, and declined to support a local Repeal 
 candidate. On June 29th there was a Cabinet meeting, 
 and Grey, though he read Lord Wellesley's letter of the 
 23rd to his colleagues, carried his point that the whole 
 Act should be renewed ; but, in introducing the Bill in 
 the House of Lords on July 1st, he suppressed the fact 
 that Wellesley had written to advise the abandonment 
 of the public meetings clause. Rumours had got aboat^ 
 no doubt due to hints dropped by O'Connell, that the 
 Government was carrying on some negotiations with 
 the Irish members. These were referred to during the 
 debate, and Grey denied them. O'Connell now deter- 
 mined upon revenge. He thought that he had been 
 deceived and trifled with, and he saw how Littleton 
 had laid himself open defenceless to attack. He 
 argued that the deceit practised upon him absolved 
 him from his promise to hold the communication a 
 secret, and on the 3rd he rose and in terms charged 
 the Chief Secretary with ** tricking ** him in order to 
 obtain the withdrawal of the Repeal candidate at Wex- 
 ford. Littleton could not deny the substance of the 
 conversation, which O'Connell revealed to the asto- 
 nished House, though he denied the charge as regards 
 the Wexford election. The angry combatants bandied 
 across the table point-blank contradictious on their 
 honour as gentlemen. Littleton was reduced to com- 
 phiining that O'Connell had violated a sacred confidence. 
 This complaint was not ill-founded, and many of 
 O'Conneirs friends and colleagues, including Hume, 
 Warburton, OTerrall, 0*Dwyer, and Orattan, re- 
 proached him with breach of faith. But the mischief 
 
124 LIFE OF DANIEL O'COJffNELL. 
 
 was done. Littleton tendered his resignation, which 
 was refused. Grey saw that it was useless to ask the 
 House of Commons to give power to prohibit meetings, 
 when once it knew that the Lord Lieutenant himself did 
 not desire to possess it, and, finding the dissensions of 
 his Cabinet now public property, himself resigned. 
 O'Connell and Ireland had brought to the ground the 
 great Keform Minister less than two years after the 
 passing of his great Keform Act. 
 
 Melbourne succeeded Grey, and Littleton proceeded 
 with his Tithe Bill. Upon the motion to go into 
 Committee on July 20th, O'Connell pressed for delay 
 until the Church Commission, the Commission which 
 he had called a *' wet blanket" on the tithe agitation^ had 
 reported. The motion to go into Committee was carried 
 by 154 to 14. Next night, undeterred, he brought in 
 an amendment to abandon the arrears of tithe and to 
 bring the scheme, which Littleton had eventually pro- 
 vided for, into immediate operation. The relief to the 
 payers of tithe was very great, and the amendment 
 passed by a large majority. But no Bill would satisfy 
 the Lords ; they threw it out by 189 to 122, and de- 
 ferred the settlement of the question for several years. 
 
 The Melbourne Ministry did not last long. The 
 King dismissed his Ministers, and Hudson was sent 
 post-haste to Peel at Rome. O'Connell, who, upon the 
 rejection of the Tithe Bill, had begun a fresh agitation 
 with a series of letters to Lord Duncannon from Darry- 
 nane, savagely exulting over Grey's fall, struck the first 
 note of opposition to the new Government by post- 
 poning the question of Repeal and founding the Anti- 
 Tory Association. Peel dissolved Parliament, and 
 O'Connell exerted every nerve to defeat the Tories in 
 Ireland. The Tories almost defeated him. He himself 
 
THE REFORMED PARLIAMENT, 125 
 
 barely saved his seat at Dublin. His majority of 1,549 
 dropped to 217, and his return was immediately peti- 
 tioned against. However, his three sons and a nephew 
 obtained seats, and, although the Repeal party was less 
 strong than in 1882, Peel, who on the English elections 
 had a substantial majority, was in a minority of twenty 
 upon the Irish elections. The Whigs began the Session 
 by carrying Abercromby, their candidate for the 
 Speakership. Meetings were held on March 12th and 
 23rd at Lord Lichfield's house in St. James's Square, 
 the result of which was to secure them the co-operation 
 of O'Connell in turning out Peel. Lord Morpeth 
 moved an amendment to the Address condemning the 
 dissolution, and O'Connell took the opportunity of 
 indicating the measures in favour of which he was con- 
 tent to postpone Repeal, namely, the amendment of the 
 Irish Reform Act, the appropriation of the Irish Church 
 surplus, and the reform of the Irish Corporations. Peel 
 introduced a Tithe Bill but little different from that 
 which the Whigs had introduced the year before. Rus- 
 sell moved an amendment in favour of devoting the 
 Irish Church surplus to education, and carried it, with 
 O'Connell's assistance, by a majority of thirty-three. 
 Peel resigned on April 5th, and Lord Melbourne wah 
 called upon to form an administration. 
 
126 LIFE OF DANIEL O'GONNELL. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 WHIG ALLIANCE. 
 
 1835-1840. 
 
 Disappointed of OflBce — Tour in Scotland — The Carlow Election 
 Scandal — Abandonment of Repeal — The Irish Poor Law Bill — 
 Accession of the Queen and O'Connell's loss of popularity in 
 Ireland — Reprimanded by the Speaker — The Precursor Society. 
 
 O'Connell's fond hopes from his alliance with the 
 Whigs were doomed to disappointment. He had 
 grounds for believing that he was entitled to office in 
 the Whig Administration, and, Kepeal being now laid 
 on one side, office would have been peculiarly grateful to 
 him. Eumours were afloat that he was to be Attorney- 
 General for Ireland, which the new Lord-Lieutenant, Lord 
 Mulgrave, afterwards Lord Normanby, encouraged him 
 to believe. He gave them credit, and, thinking that a 
 new era was coming for Irish officialism, was on the 
 look-out for a large house in Dublin in which to exer- 
 cise a lavish official hospitality. The rumours reached 
 the King, who had little more love for O'Connell 
 than his brother and predecessor had had. His Majesty 
 so far departed from constitutional usage as to write to 
 Lord Melbourne that such an appointment must not be 
 
WHIG ALLIANCE. 127 
 
 made. Melbourne replied with spirit that it was not 
 for the King to dictate in the matter, but that in fact he 
 did not propose to include O'Connell in his Administra- 
 tion. The Whigs, indeed, saw the dangers of the posi- 
 tion. Some alliance with O'Connell was indispensable 
 to their existence : too close a partnership might be 
 fatal to it. Below the gangway he could, though not 
 without hazard, render them important service ; on the 
 Treasury bench he could only scare away their sup- 
 porters. It became necessary to communicate to 
 O'Connell that nothing could be done for him, and 
 Ellice, the dexterous manager of the party, with whom 
 O'Connell had been intimately associated in found- 
 ing the Keform Club the year before, was chosen for 
 the purpose. The announcement was a blow to him, 
 perhaps less personally than patriotically. For himself 
 office might have been perilous : his tribute for 1833 
 had amounted to £13,900 ; for 1834 to not much less. 
 Office would have risked this. As their Attorney- 
 General he would have been the servant of the Govern- 
 ment. Popularity was dear to him, and the Irish were 
 little used to make an idol of an attorney-general. But 
 he thought this, nevertheless, a serious blow to Ireland, 
 for his appointment would have been a singular mark of 
 conciliation, and conciliation was sorely needed. 
 
 He bore his rejection magnanimously, and took his 
 seat below the gangway. During the next five years 
 he rendered the Whigs a steady and invaluable support. 
 His action and advocacy in the House of Commons 
 during this period belongs, indeed, rather to the 
 history of Lord Melbourne's administration than to 
 his own personal career. Upon Irish questions he was 
 practically a consultative member of the Cabinet, and 
 Irish patronage was almost at his disposal ; but he was 
 
128 LIFE OF DANIEL O'GONNELL. 
 
 without responsibility, and was not called upon to 
 originate a policy. 
 
 It was not, however, long before he found himself 
 engaged in the most active hostilities. In his exaspe- 
 ration with the House of Lords he applied the expres- 
 sion " bloated buffoon " to Lord Alvanley. Alvanley 
 sent Dawson Damer with a challenge, which was refused, 
 and Damer published the correspondence. It was also 
 laid by Alvanley before the managers of Brooks' on May 2, 
 with a requisition signed by twenty-three members calling 
 for a general meeting of the Club to consider 'Connellys 
 conduct in the matter, but the managers decided that 
 they could not ** take cognizance of differences of a 
 private nature between members of the Club." Morgan 
 O'Connell thereupon offered a vicarious satisfaction, and 
 after two shots had been fired, Alvanley was appeased. 
 Disraeli now thought that he too might burn some 
 powder. He had sought O'Connell's recommendation 
 at the High Wycombe election in 1832, and had now 
 attacked him fiercely at the Taunton election in 1835. 
 O'Connell replied with still greater ferocity, in a speech 
 before the Dublin Franchise Association, and called him 
 ^* a miscreant,'' "a liar," "a disgrace to his species," 
 and "heir-at-law of the blasphemous thief who died 
 upon the cross." Disraeli wrote to Morgan O'Connell 
 on May 5th, and challenged him to fight for his father, 
 but the challenge was declined. 
 
 The recess was a period of greater excitement for 
 O'Connell than the Session had been. The Govern- 
 ment was testifying its loyal intentions to Ireland. 
 Morpeth and Drummond, as Chief Secretary and 
 Under-Secretary, were carrying on the administration 
 with an impartiality and diligence hitherto unknown. 
 A Tithe Bill had been introduced, but the House of 
 
WHIG ALLIANCE. 129 
 
 Lords, resisted it, and the Bill was dropped. The 
 Municipal Corporation Bill shared the same fate. 
 O'Connell announced himself as the indulgent patron 
 of the Ministry. In a manifesto to the Irish people 
 he said : — 
 
 I now come before the people of Ireland to avow myself the devoted 
 supporter of the administration. If I see the Ministry persevere for 
 one year in their determination to do justice to Ireland I shall give 
 them another trial. If the Ministry deceive us it will demonstrate 
 that Repeal is our only resource. 
 
 As their powerful ally he undertook a crusade 
 against the Tory majority in the House of Lords. On 
 the rising of Parliament he went down to the North. 
 He visited Manchester, passed through the streets in 
 procession, and spoke in Stevenson Square. He went 
 to Newcastle, and proceeded into Scotland. Every- 
 where he was received with curiosity, admiration, and 
 enthusiasm. He addressed crowded meetings at Edin- 
 burgh. On September 21st he proceeded by Falkirk to 
 Glasgow, and spoke six times in a single day. *' The 
 papers," writes Greville, ** are full of nothing but 
 O'Conneirs progress in Scotland, where he is received 
 with unbounded enthusiasm by enormous crowds. He 
 is exalted to the bad eminence at which he has arrived 
 more by the assaults of his enemies than by the efiforts 
 of his friends. It is the Tories who are ever insisting 
 upon the immensity of his power, and whose excess of 
 hatred and fear make him of such vast aocount.'' 
 
 My duty [ho told one of his audioncos] is to propose to you as a 
 toast ** a speedy ofToctual reform of the House of Lords,"* and that, I 
 confess, is tho prime objoot of my mission through England and the 
 country. It is now tho leading object of my political life. ... I 
 disclaim occupying the principal portion of my mind with any other 
 topic, till I see tho oligarchy mitigated and an effectual reform intro- 
 duced into that House. 
 
 9 
 
130 LIFE OF DANIEL 0' CONN ELL. 
 
 He returned to Ireland by Belfast, was received with 
 a demonstration of trades in Dublin, and proceeded to 
 recruit himself at Darrynane. In his retreat he formu- 
 lated a plan for the reform of the House of Lords, 
 which he published in two letters to the editor of the 
 Leeds Times. His plan was, that out of the peerage, 
 whose numbers were not to be allowed to fall below 500, 
 150 were to be elected by popular vote to form a second 
 chamber. The plan was moderate and simple, but it is 
 not easy to see how a second chamber so elected could 
 form a very useful check upon the House of Commons. 
 
 In October he became involved in a scandal which 
 caused him no little disquietude and some discredit. 
 At the General Election in the spring Bruen and 
 Kavanagh had been returned for Carlo w. The return 
 had been petitioned against, and it became plain that 
 the seats would be vacated. O'Connell, anxious to wrest 
 the seats from the Tories, looked round for a candidate 
 of means to stand with the other Bepealer, Mr. Vigors, who 
 had none. A Mr. Alexander Raphael, a London trades- 
 man, who had been Sheriff of London, had for some time 
 solicited O'Connell's support in procuring his election 
 to Parliament. He professed the Roman Catholic faith, 
 and, although there was some doubt of his political sin- 
 cerity, his principles appeared satisfactory to O'Connell. 
 He had contested Pontefract and Evesham, and had 
 thought of coming forward for Westminster. In view 
 of a vacancy at Carlow, Raphael renewed his solicita- 
 tions. On May 27th the Committee declared the seats 
 vacant, and next day O'Connell called upon Raphael and 
 proposed that he should contest one of them. He wrote 
 on the 29th, " You will never again meet with so safe a 
 speculation. I am quite sure I shall never hear of 
 one." The parties had an interview on June 1st, and 
 
WHIG ALLIANCE. 181 
 
 O'Connell gave a written agreement in the following 
 terms ; — 
 
 You having acceded to the terms proposed to you for the election 
 of the County of Carlo w, viz., you are to pay before nomination 
 £1,000 and a like sum after being returned, the first to be paid 
 absolutely and entirely for being nominated, the second to be paid 
 only in the event of your being returned, I hereby undertake to 
 guarantee and save you harmless from any and every other expense 
 whatever, whether of agents, carriages, counsel, petition against the 
 return, or of any other description, and to make this guarantee in the 
 fullest sense of the honourable engagement, that you should not 
 possibly be required to pay one shilling more in any event or upon 
 any contingency whatever. 
 
 The bargain thus closed, Kaphael handed to O'Con- 
 nell an old address of his to the electors of Westminster, 
 which was to be altered to suit the taste of the electors 
 of Carlow, and he was put in nomination on the 8th. 
 He never went near Carlow at all. O'Connell pressed 
 to have the i91,000 paid to his credit with Wright & 
 Co., his bankers. Kaphael would only lodge it with 
 Hamilton, his own solicitor, from whom John O'Con- 
 nell at length obtained it on June 10th. 0*Connell 
 being then in perhaps more than his normal pecuniary 
 embarrassments, paid it into his own account at his 
 bankers, and remitted it to Ireland by an acceptance 
 drawn on'^ some Irish brewers at several months' date. 
 As, however, he offered Vigors cash if he desired it, and 
 took no benefit to himself from the discount in settling 
 the accounts, this course would appear to have been 
 taken for some not very obvious but innocent reason. 
 On the- 13th O'Connell wrote to Raphael, ** Our pros- 
 pects of success are quite conclusive ; if only one 
 Liberal is to be returned, you are to be the man "; and 
 on the 17th, ** I send you Vigors' letter to me, just 
 received ; you see how secure wo are. Return me this 
 
 9 • 
 
132 LIFE OF DANIEL 0' CONN ELL. 
 
 letter, as it vouches ^9800 for me. With that you have 
 nothing to do, as, of course, I stand between you and 
 everybody." Kaphael was accordingly elected with 
 Vigors by a majority of fifty-six, and he at once took 
 his seat. The return was promptly petitioned against, 
 and it became evident that the result would turn upon a 
 scrutiny of the register. It had been agreed that, in the 
 event of no petition being presented, Kaphael's second 
 £1,000 should be devoted to a fund for indemnifying 
 his voters from any loss or persecution by their land- 
 lords. Now, however, it was required to defend the 
 seat. 0*Connell wrote on July 17th — 
 
 Send Mr. Baker (the parliamentary agent) the particulars he wants 
 of your qualification. I will stand between you and him for all the 
 expenses. I promised you, and repeat distinctly my promise, that 
 upon payment of the second £1,000, to which you are at all events 
 engaged, no demand shall be made on you for one additional sixpence. 
 Do then at once pay the other £1,000 into Messrs. Wright's to my 
 credit. 
 
 On the 26th Hamilton met John O'Oonnell, and put 
 before him, on EaphaePs behalf, the extraordinary view 
 that the second d91,000 was not to be paid until the 
 seat was safe. O'Connell wrote hotly next day : " Kely 
 on it, you are mistaken if you suppose that I will 
 submit to any deviation from our engagement." Kaphael 
 at first thought of resigning the first sGl^OOO and the 
 seat, but having consulted his friends, decided to yield. 
 The ^61,000 was paid to John O'Oonnell on July 28th, 
 who within an hour allowed himself to become a 
 member of the very committee which was to try the 
 question that the d61,000 was to be spent in arguing. 
 O'Oonnell wrote to Kaphael asking if he would care to be 
 a baronet, adding that he did not ask without a reason ; 
 but Kaphael was not ambitious of the title. By the 4th 
 
WHIG ALLIANCE. 188 
 
 of August he found that he would have to fight the 
 petition, if at all, at his own cost. Unwilling to sacri- 
 fice his j92,000, he kept up the contest for a few days ; 
 hut by the 17th, 105 of his votes had been struck off, 
 and being thus hopelessly behind, he withdrew, and the 
 seat was vacated. 
 
 He took his revenge by publishing a letter to the 
 Carlow electors, setting out the whole story. O'Connell 
 replied on November 6th in a letter, in which he de- 
 nounced Kaphael as " that most incomprehensible of all 
 imaginable vagabonds.*' But strong language did not 
 mend matters. He was accused of trafficking in seats, 
 AS he might have trafficked in bacon. He was sus- 
 pected of having pocketed part of the JG2,000. This, 
 added to his frequent abuse of persons whom he would 
 not fight, induced Burdett in November to call upon 
 the managers of Brooks' to expel him. On December 
 3rd O'Connell wrote to them justifying his conduct, 
 and they affirmed the decision given to Lord Alvanley 
 in May. Burdett, Brougham, Stanley, and Graham 
 resigned their membership. Next session a petition 
 from Carlow was presented by Bruen on February 11th, 
 setting out the facts of the election. The matter looked 
 grave. On the 16th a committee of inquiry was ap- 
 pointed; it met on February 19th and 29th, heard 
 O'Connell's explanation, which was corroborated by 
 Vigors, and eventually on March 11th reported that 
 although " no charge of a pecuniary character can be 
 attached to Mr. O'Connell," and ** he was only the 
 medium between Raphael and Vigors and the political 
 club at Carlow "; still, the letter of June Ist was ** cal- 
 culated to excite much suspicion and grave animadver- 
 sion." It was a lenient conclusion. The whole affair 
 shows not only how indifferent O'Connell was to the 
 
134 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL. 
 
 nicer particulars of public conduct, but how difficult a 
 task it was to find Repeal candidates among Irishmen of 
 moderate means and tolerable reputation. Till 1829 
 the Irish members had been even more aristocratic than 
 the English, and in the counties good birth and good 
 family had^ been indispensable in a candidate. O'Con- 
 nell had changed all this ; but a supporter, even 
 nominally respectable, must have been hard to obtain^ 
 when Raphael could be accepted so easily. Men of high 
 abilities or standing were little likely to brook the 
 complete obedience and subordination to himself which 
 O'Connell expected of the *' joints of his tail," and 
 among those who formed his party were some who^ 
 though no doubt unsuspected by him, were generally 
 and reasonably believed to sell to candidates for money 
 down their promises of support in the solicitation of 
 petty offices in the Civil Service. The followers of 
 O'Connell were not, indeed, inferior to the Irish Tory 
 members, but the conduct of both classes amazed the 
 more reserved English members of the House. John 
 O'Connell, not a willing witness against his country- 
 men, says : " Not an assertion dropped by an Irish 
 member on one side, but it was immediately contra- 
 dieted upon the other ; not a violent expression or ges- 
 ture but had its counterpart with interest. And while 
 the Irishmen fought and blackened each other, and rose 
 higher and higher towards boiling point, the English 
 members looked on, as the Spartans of old at the 
 riotings of their Helots, and asked each other with 
 looks of pitying contempt: *Is it not well for such men 
 as these to have us to take care of them ?' " 
 
 The administration of Ireland, in the hands of Mul- 
 grave and Drummond, had now been shown to be so 
 impartial and liberal, that O'Connell felt bound to 
 
WHIG ALLIANCE. 135 
 
 redeem his promise of abandoning the Kepeal agita- 
 tion. Old as he was, before Parliament met in 1836 he 
 was incessantly active. On January 14th he was 
 speaking at Tralee, on the 16th at Cork, on the 18th at 
 Galway, on the 20th at Shadbally, on the 25th at 
 Dublin. He then came to a meeting at Liverpool, spoke 
 at Birmingham on the 28th, and appeared in Parlia- 
 ment when it opened on February 4th. He asked of 
 his audiences their authority to drop the question 
 of Kepeal if he thought England was giving justice 
 to Ireland. In Dublin, at St. Bridget's charity dinner, 
 he said : — 
 
 When Emancipation was obtained I sought for Repeal, because 1 
 saw that the Imperial Parliament paid little attention to the affairs 
 and condition of Ireland. Even Sir Robert Peel himself confessed 
 that he could not get forty members together when an Irish question 
 was to bo brought forward. I, however, took up Repeal, and like the 
 flappers we read of in Gullivers Travels, I rattled it about their ears, 
 the result of which is that the attention of the Government is almost 
 entirely engrossed with the affairs of Ireland. ... In looking for 
 Repeal, both Houses of Parliament promised that if that question 
 were given up, they would grant every other, which could be proved 
 to be advantageous to Ireland. ... I am now for making the experi- 
 inent, whether that is a real and bona Jide reason on their part, or a 
 more pretence. . . . Place us on an equality with yourselves, and 
 then talk to mo of an Union ; for then will I offer you, in the name of 
 the Irish people, not to talk of Repeal ; but imless you do that, thank 
 Heaven, wo have seven millions of people to fall back upon the qnes- 
 tion of Repeal again. The people of Ireland are ready to beoome a 
 portion of the Empire, provided they be made so in reality, and not in 
 name alone. They are ready to become a kind of West Britons if 
 made so in benefits and in jnatioe; but if not, we are Irishmen 
 again. 
 
 A petition against his return for Dublin had been 
 presented in the previous session. A committee had 
 been appointed, and liad delegated three barristers to 
 conduct a local inquiry into the facts in Dublin* 
 
136 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL, 
 
 O'Connell was charged with gross intimidation, with 
 advocating exclusive dealing, and urging that every 
 adverse voter should find a death's head and cross-bones 
 chalked by his enemies upon his door. The register 
 was elaborately investigated. He spent iG20,000 in 
 defending the petition, and the costs of the petitioners 
 were ^640,000, which the Carlton Club was reported to 
 have largely taken upon itself. The commissioners 
 sate some six months in Dublin, and after the presenta- 
 tion of their report the committee conducted a further 
 inquiry for six weeks. On May 16th O'Connell was 
 unseated, but his measures had been taken. His voice 
 was needed in the discussion upon the Municipal 
 Reform Bill. In anticipation of this result, Richard 
 Sullivan, M.P. for Kilkenny, had accepted the Chil- 
 tern Hundreds, and on the 17th O'Connell was elected 
 in his place. Meetings were held in England to 
 raise a subscription in aid of his expenses; ;£3,000 
 was subscribed at the first, and the nett proceeds 
 amounted to :£8,489. The Duke of Bedford sub- 
 scribed one hundred guineas. The King said he might 
 subscribe if he chose, but no supporter of O'Connell 
 could be allowed to appear among the sculptures of 
 Windsor, and ordered his bust to be removed from the 
 royal gallery. 
 
 The agitation for the abolition of tithe was still 
 going on. Sheil and O'Connell had both refused to 
 pay it, and O'Connell had all but been outlawed in con- 
 sequence by the Dublin Court of Exchequer. The 
 Ministry reintroduced a Tithe Bill on the same lines as 
 that of the previous year. The Municipal Corporation 
 Bill proposed to deal with the Irish corporations, some 
 fifty in number, in a drastic fashion. Their privileges 
 and monopolies were numerous. They were now all to 
 
WHIG ALLIANCE. 137 
 
 •be swept away, and an occupation franchise of £10 in 
 large towns and £5 in small ones, was to be fixed as the 
 feasis of corporators' rights. Peel opposed it in the 
 House of Commons with a proposal for the total 
 abolition of these corporations. He was defeated, but 
 in the House of Lords he triumphed. The Bill was 
 thrown out by 203 to 119, and the Tithes Bill was also 
 lost. O'Connell resolved to ** revive the Catholic Asso- 
 ciation on a broader basis " for the purpose of obtain- 
 ing a full corporate reform and tithe reform. He called 
 his new association the General Association. It met 
 twice a week, and speedily became formidable enough to 
 excite no little outcry in England. It collected a 
 "justice rent,'^ which reached 4^690 per week by 
 November. Ireland seemed again on the verge of 
 fresh agitation. In England the rancour of his enemies 
 redoubled. He had hitherto given a general support to 
 factory legislation, and had spoken in favour of restrict- 
 ing the hours of labour of children employed in factories. 
 In May, two Bills came before the House of Commons, 
 which dealt with the subject, Fielden's providing 
 for a working day of ten hours, and Poulett Thom- 
 son's, which regulated the conditions of factory work, 
 but did not adopt the ten hours day. O'Connell 
 was satisfied from the debate, that, in the then state of 
 things, to impose a limitation on the hours of work would 
 cause considerable loss of trade, and consequent suffering 
 and loss of employment to the very class it was proposed 
 to protect. He voted for Poulett Thomson's Bill. The 
 operatives, who supported the ten hours* bill, were much 
 •disappointed, and the Tories took advantage of the 
 ■opportunity to attack him. Wilson, in an article on 
 ^* Cotton Manufacturers and the Factory System," in 
 the July number of Blackwood's Magazine, alleged that 
 
138 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL. 
 
 three days before the debate O'Connell had promised 
 Lord Ashley the support of his party for Fielden's Bill^ 
 and that three days after the debate he was rewarded 
 for his breach of faith by the admiring manufacturers 
 with a purse of seven hundred guineas. Bell, for- 
 merly editor of the True Sun, and newly appointed 
 editor of the Mercury, published in it a statement that 
 Mr. Potter of Manchester had promised O'Connell, who 
 was then much in debt, ^91,000 for his support on the 
 question. This Potter promptly came forward to deny.. 
 The story probably originated in the subscription to 
 lighten the cost of O'Connell's defence to the petition 
 against his return for Dublin ; but it shows with great 
 force how bitter and unscrupulous was the animosity 
 which he excited among his opponents. 
 
 For the Session of 1837 the Government measures 
 were the reintroduetion of the Irish Municipal Reform 
 Bill and a Poor Law Bill. Of any application to Ire- 
 land of the English poor-law system O'Connell had 
 long been a steadfast opponent. He had carried on at 
 sharp controversy upon the subject with Dr. Doyle 
 in 1832, in which undoubtedly the victory rested with 
 the Bishop. He was now less violently hostile to- 
 the principle, but still deeply impressed with the 
 difficulty of applying it. On February 13th Lord 
 John Russell called the attention of the House of Com- 
 mons to the necessity of passing an Irish poor-law. 
 O'Connell expressed himself incredulous of its success,, 
 and advised emigration as a remedy, but said that he 
 regarded the proposal as an experiment and would not 
 resist it. Upon the second reading, at the end of April, 
 he took a decided stand and attacked it directly. He 
 pointed out that there was to be no provision for out- 
 door relief, and the cheap workhouses which it was pro- 
 
WHIG ALLIANCE, 13^ 
 
 posed to erect for the accommodation of 80,000 poor, 
 were wholly inadequate to the indoor relief of the two 
 millions who were destitute. Wages, which in England 
 were 8s. to 10s. per week, in Ireland were 2s. 6d., and 
 even 2s. Ireland, with its smaller area and smaller 
 population, had hut 75,000 fewer agricultural labourer* 
 than England. There were no means of permanently 
 supporting them, and it was then computed that in 
 Ireland 585,000 heads of families were out of work 
 for seven months in every year. Hitherto this gigan- 
 tic evil had been dealt with by the spontaneous and 
 abundant charity of the poor. Given in kind and 
 not in coin this was felt by the giver as but a slight 
 burden, but it sufiBced to support, though on the 
 verge of misery, many thousands of mendicants. 
 A poor-law must abolish this. To provide a legal 
 relief, to which every beggar was entitled, was to deprive 
 him of that voluntary relief from his neighbours, which 
 in default of a poor-law was never refused. The use 
 and wont of generations had made mendicancy an 
 honourable calling and had attracted to its wandering 
 and unrestrained life vast crowds of beggars. The 
 Government proposal implied as a consequence the ex- 
 tinction of this calling : it supplied in its stead a relief 
 which one-tenth of the applicants would exhaust* 
 Work for the remainder was not to bo had : there re- 
 mained only the sad alternative of starvation. 
 
 But the question remained undecided for the momenU 
 In June the King died. O'Connell was full of enthu- 
 siastic loyalty to the young Queen, and at the General 
 Election gave her Ministers nil the support in his power* 
 He put out a manifesto, in which he said : ** Ireland is 
 prepared to amalgamate with the entire Empire. We 
 are prepared for full and perpetual conciliation. Let 
 
140 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL. 
 
 Ireland and England be identified." As soon as the 
 election was over he dissolved the General Association, 
 saying that ** he was still in favour of giving a fair trial 
 to the Union ; he would confidently entrust the fortunes 
 of the Irish people to the British Parliament. If the 
 results demonstrated the incapacity of Parliament and 
 Government to do full and complete justice to Ireland, 
 then he would unfurl the flag of Repeal and call upon 
 Ireland to rally round it." Upon the general result 
 of the elections the Ministry had a majority of twenty- 
 five ; without O'Connell's assistance they would have 
 been in a minority. 
 
 But in proportion as Lord Melbourne had sought to 
 govern Ireland according to Irish ideas, and O^Connell 
 to conduct himself according to the ideas of the Eng- 
 lish, each had lost ground with his own countrymen. 
 It became plain that the Whigs were kept in oflice 
 only by the Repeal vote. It was alleged that they had 
 sold the Irish Church for the thirty pieces of silver of 
 O'Connell's support. Lord John Russell was |likened 
 to Judas Iscariot, and the Whig Government was called 
 the O'Connell Cabinet. Exposed to the assaults of Peel 
 in front, and attacked in flank by "the Derby dilly carry- 
 ing six insides," with a hostile House of Lords, a King 
 of erratic will and feeble health, and an heir to the throne 
 who was a girl in her teens, caught between the active 
 agitation of Exeter Hall, which opposed all countenance 
 to Roman Catholics, and the growing High Church cry 
 that the appropriation clause was a robbery of the 
 Church of Christ, the Ministry had found themselves 
 in a position in which nothing but the firmest and most 
 united front could bring them out of the conflict with 
 success or even without dishonour. But their followers 
 were not a united party. Some were Whigs, impracti-^ 
 
WHIG ALLIANCE. 141 
 
 cable with the pride of family, the Brahmins of politics; 
 some were Radicals, impracticable with the pride of rea- 
 son, political Pharisees; while O'Connell, in proportion as 
 he stood loyally by the Ministry, found the Irish for- 
 getting his fame and his services. Nor were the Ministry 
 able to effect much for Ireland. Their administration^ 
 indeed, was admirable, but year after year, a Tithe Bill^ 
 such as Peel himself had introduced, was wrecked by 
 the House of Lords, and the Irish were denied the- 
 Corporation Reform which their own representatives 
 had been largely instrumental in passing for England. 
 In the hopes of obtaining *' justice for Ireland " O'Con- 
 nell had supported the Whigs at the cost of his popu- 
 larity, and year by year as his popularity waned, he saw 
 the prospect of ** justice for Ireland,'* as he conceived 
 the term, vanishing into a more and more distant 
 future. 
 
 In the autumn of 1836 a commercial panic occurred 
 through the failure of the Agricultural Bank, and in 
 the run upon the banks which followed, the National 
 Bank, which he had founded, and to the support of 
 which his whole fortune was pledged, was in great 
 danger. He experienced the pressure which he had 
 exhorted the Irish to apply to the Government five 
 years before, and he saw that the holders of notes 
 had no more compassion for the Liberator's bank . 
 than for the Bank of Ireland. In the beginning of 
 1837 he was in open conflict with Sbarman Crawford 
 upon the renewal of coercion, which he had thought 
 justifiable, and upon the Government plan for dealing 
 with the Tithe question, and with Smith O'Brien for 
 his advocacy of a State endowment for the Roman 
 Catholic clergy and his opposition to the ballot. In the 
 autumn severe disputes occurred, especially in the ship- 
 
142 LIFE OF DANIEL O'OONNELL. 
 
 building trade, between the Dublin trades unions and the 
 employers of labour. In a speech on November 7th 
 at the Dublin Trades Political Union, O'Connell 
 espoused the side of the masters, and, with great 
 -courage and devotion to his principles, denounced 
 strikes and condemned the men. He was instantly the 
 mark for their most violent abuse. He was hooted by 
 his own constituents in the streets of Dublin. He had 
 interviews for hours together with the trades union 
 leaders, and took nothing by his arguments. He boldly 
 challenged discussion, and held meetings in January 1838 
 to debate the question. The workmen forced their way 
 in and denied him a hearing. At one meeting he was 
 compelled to stand for nearly two hours the centre of 
 indescribable confusion, never able to utter more than 
 two or three sentences, and for the most part wholly 
 inaudible. His popularity in Ireland seemed almost 
 gone. 
 
 Scarcely had Parliament reassembled in 1838 than 
 he found himself again in conflict with the House of 
 Commons. It was a matter of notoriety that commit- 
 tees upon election petitions, though they sat as judges 
 and were sworn to decide conscientiously, voted simply 
 as loyal partisans. In November 1837, Buller had 
 obtained leave to bring in a Bill to amend the practice 
 of trying these petitions, and O'Connell, who had suf- 
 fered at the hands of election committees himself, had 
 then proposed to transfer them to the Queen's Bench. 
 On the 21st February 1838, in a speech at the '* Crown 
 and Anchor" tavern, he reverted to the subject. 
 
 Corruption of the worst kind [he said] existed, and, above all, 
 there was the perjury of the Tory politicians. Ireland was not safe 
 from the English and Scotch gentry. It was horrible to think that a 
 body of gentlemen, who ranked high in society, who were themselves 
 
WHIG ALLIANCE, 143 
 
 administrators of the law, and who ought, therefore, to be above all 
 suspicion, and who ought to set an example to others — was ft not 
 horrible that they should be perjuring themselves in the Committees 
 of the House of Commons ? The time was come when this should be 
 proclaimed boldly. He was ready to be a martyr to justice and 
 truth, but not to false swearing, and he repeated that there was foul 
 perjury in the Toi*y Committees of the House of Commons. 
 
 The truth of the charge was hardly deniable, but it 
 excited the wrath of those who suffered from the impu- 
 tation. On the 23rd Lord Maidstone read the report in 
 the House of Commons, and asked O'Connell if it was 
 correct. " I did say every word of that," replied 
 O'Connell, ** and I believe it to be perfectly true. Is 
 there a man who will put his hand on his heart and say 
 upon his honour as a gentleman that he does not 
 believe it to be substantially true ? *' Lord Maidstone, 
 without going through this or any milder form of denial, 
 gave notice that he would call the attention of the 
 House to the speech on the 26th. The day came, and the 
 obnoxious passage was read by the Clerk of the House. 
 O'Connell, in a long speech, admitted and justified his 
 words. Lord Maidstone moved ** that the words were 
 a false and scandalous imputation upon the honour of 
 the House." A long debate followed. Ministers voted 
 against the motion, but it was carried by 268 to 254. 
 A motion that O'Connell should be reprimanded was 
 carried, and on the 28th he was ordered to stand up in 
 bis place, and received from the Speaker a severe and 
 lengthy censure. He was perfectly unabashed. With- 
 out a moment's loss of time, or so much as resuming 
 bis seat, he gave notice of a motion for a committee to 
 investigate the whole matter, concluding with the words 
 *^ I have repented of nothing ; I mean not to use harsh 
 or offensive language. I repeat what I have said^ but I 
 
144 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL. 
 
 wish I could find terms less offensive in themselves- 
 and equally significant/' 
 
 The Ministry had made more than one attempt to- 
 reward O'Conneirs staunch support. He was very 
 near being made Irish Attorney-General in 1837. 
 Meeting Mr. John Ball and one of the Irish members 
 one day in that year at the corner of Downing Street, 
 he cried, ** Congratulate me ; I am Attorney- General 
 for Ireland. I have just been with Lord Melbourne, 
 and have determined to accept the office. But nothing 
 must be said for the present." The King, however, 
 heard of the appointment, and put pressure upon Mel- 
 bourne to revoke it."^ In 1838, Joy, Chief Baron of 
 the Irish Exchequer, died. Melbourne was anxious to 
 promote O'Connell, but it was thought that to set 
 him to preside over the Court, which had exclusive 
 cognizance of those writs of rebellion, which he had so 
 often denounced and contested, would be unwise. The 
 post was therefore offered to O'Loghlen, who was 
 Master of the Rolls. O'Loghlen was willing to consent 
 to the change, but the vacancy in the Rolls thereby created 
 was, when offered to O'Connell, refused. O'Loghlen was 
 not transferred, and Woulfe became Chief Baron. It was 
 not without a struggle that O'Connell refused this promo- 
 tion. He told the House of Commons in 1840 that one 
 reason for his refusal was that he feared he might not deal 
 impartially with litigants, and that in dread of favouring^ 
 Roman Catholics he might find himself unfairly hostile 
 to them. But the principal reason was that he felt 
 Ireland would soon have need of him again. 
 
 In 1838 Russell introduced the sixth Tithe BilL 
 The appropriation clause, upon which the Whigs had 
 
 * " O'Connell," by John Ball, MacmiUari's Magazine, xxiii., 222. 
 
WHIG ALLIANCE. 145 
 
 come into power, had been abandoned the year before. 
 Its place was taken by a tax of ten per cent, upon 
 the incomes of the clergy for educational purposes. 
 This, too, was given up. It was proposed that the 
 tithe rent-charge should ultimately cease as an eccle- 
 siastical revenue and be diverted to education. The 
 opposition of the House of Lords was fatal to this, and 
 the Bill ultimately passed much in the form in which 
 Peel had introduced it three years before. O'Connell 
 passively acquiesced, but the Bill was disappointing. 
 By removing various glaring abuses in the Church of 
 Ireland it strengthened her general position. Whether 
 or not the rent-charge was generally added to the old 
 rents by the landlords, so as to be ultimately as much a 
 burden on the tenants as the old tithe, is much dis- 
 puted, but the whole measure seemed to be of a hesi- 
 tating character, and convinced O'Connell that the great 
 Whig experiment was a failure. He betook himself 
 to a last agitation for ** justice to Ireland ** as distinct 
 from Bepeal. 
 
 In August of 1838 he founded his ** Precursor 
 Society." Its name was supposed to mean, though few 
 Irishmen divined it, that it was to be the forerunner of 
 Repeal, but his choice of names for his societies 
 was almost uniformly infelicitous. It was to agitate for 
 complete corporate Reform, extension of the suffrage, 
 total abolition of compulsory Church support, and ade- 
 qaate representation in Parliament. But the Irish were 
 not united in the agitation. Many disapproved of any- 
 thing less than a cry for Repeal. Connaught, which 
 had given the last and least assistance to Emancipation, 
 stood aloof from the Precursors altogether. ** Ireland," 
 O'Connell wrote to Dr. MacHale in January 1839, 
 ** has never acted together since the close of the Eman- 
 
 10 
 
146 LIFE OF BANIEL 0' CONN ELL, 
 
 cipation fight/' The society was, however, sufficiently 
 strong to alarm the Ministry. They wrote to O'Oon- 
 nell '' menacingly '* about it, and used every means in 
 their power to impede its organization ; but the society 
 was not checked. Agitation was as yet the work only of 
 his immediate circle of associates, nor was it directed 
 very openly to its object, but it deserved its name. 
 Unknown, perhaps, even to O'Connell himself, Ireland 
 was on the very eve of the struggle for Repeal. 
 
147 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 THE REPEAL ASSOCIATION. 
 
 1840-1843. 
 
 Repeal Association founded — Irish Municipal Reform — O'Connell Lord 
 Mayor of Dublin — The founding of the Nation — The Repeal 
 Debate — The Monster Meetings — The Mallow Defiance — 
 Clontarf. 
 
 On April 15th 1840 the Repeal Association was founded. 
 The meeting was held in the Great Room of the Corn 
 Exchange; only a sprinkling of persons were seen in 
 the room ; not a hundred in all were there. They 
 waited till it became impossible to wait longer, and to 
 that handful of people 0*Connell unfolded his plan. 
 The Association was formed at first under the title of 
 the National Society and rules were adopted. 
 
 He was not disheartened ; he remembered the first 
 meeting of the Catholic Association. He had himself 
 been discouraging agitation for Repeal ; he knew that it 
 would bo a work of time to convince people of his 
 change of policy. *' As soon/* he said, ** as they begin 
 to find out I am thoroughly in earnest, they will come 
 flocking in to the Association." In truth, however, 
 for some time Dublin was singularly indifferent to the 
 birth of his now society. He had founded nearly a dozen 
 in the previous ten years, beside some which were still- 
 
 10 • 
 
148 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL, 
 
 born, and associations had lost their novelty. Eepeal 
 was popular, and he had set Eepeal aside ; the Whigs 
 were unpopular, and he had supported them. He had 
 offended the landlords by ousting them from their 
 dominion in the counties ; the priests by acquiescing in 
 a Tithes Act, which only strengthened the Church of 
 Ireland ; the artisans by denouncing trades unions ; the 
 peasants by obtaining for them so little but coercion acts 
 after six years^ alliance with the Whigs. He was sur- 
 rounded by henchmen of dubious respectability and defi- 
 cient talent. His enemies had brought to light numbers 
 of scandals, which, however exaggerated, were distressing 
 to men of probity. He insisted on paying the funds of 
 the ** Precursor Society " into his own bank account 
 instead of the Treasurer's'; he had traded on the strength 
 of his name; he had founded a bank himself; his son had 
 founded a brewery. Another son and a son-in-law were 
 placemen under the alien Saxon Government. Eman- 
 cipation was now an old tale. Those who had fought in 
 that agitation w6re aged or dead. A younger genera- 
 tion had grown up, to whom O^Conneirs services were 
 matter of report ; who saw in him a hero indeed, but 
 one sinking into old age after years of failure. Many 
 of the Catholics had been educated on the English 
 model, and prided themselves on their English ideas; 
 many of them were suppliants for Government patron- 
 age. The merchants, the backbone of the first Catholic 
 agitation, were impoverished, and stood aloof from 
 politics ; the priests, the backbone of the second, were 
 satisfied with Emancipation, and had no great ardour 
 for Repeal. To this indifierent people O'Connell ap- 
 pealed at the age of sixty-five with the calm confidence 
 of middle life, and the hopeful energy of youth. 
 
 His letters to Dr. MacHale at this time set out his 
 
THE REPEAL ASSOCIATION. 149 
 
 reasons and the plan which he had in his mind. He 
 was convinced that the Tories would soon be in power ; 
 the Whigs were tottering to their fall. What the Whigs 
 had not been able to do, the Tories would not attempt 
 to do for Ireland ; much of what the Whigs had done 
 would be undone by the Tories. Four grievances were to 
 be remedied, first (and writing to a Roman Catholic Arch- 
 bishop, he adroitly called it the greatest), was the State 
 Church of the minority — nothing but Repeal could 
 abolish national payments for this alien Church ; second, 
 full reform of corporations was still withheld ; third, 
 equality of political franchise was denied ; fourth, the 
 Irish parliamentary representation was insufficient. The 
 method was to be the old one of the Catholic Associa- 
 tion, a host of small subscriptions from a multitude of 
 humble subscribers. 
 
 I can give Your Grace the result of thirty years and more of expe- 
 rience, and it is this : that once got a parish into a mood of contribu- 
 ting to public purposes, the more such purposes are brought before 
 them, the more liberal will bo each aggregate contribution. So many 
 persons will not give five pounds or live shillings, but many more will 
 give one shilling; the contributors should be individually solicited to 
 give sums smaller than each can reasonably afford. 
 
 During the summer and autumn he addressed inces- 
 sant meetings. He flew from Mullingar to Cork, from 
 Cork to Dublin, from Dublin to Belfast, from Belfast to 
 Leeds, from Leeds to Leicester. Towards the end of 
 1840 he advocated the exclusive consuraption of Irish 
 manufactures, but the expedient soon proved itself use- 
 less. The rich would not, and the poor could not buy, 
 and to delude those whose patriotism got the better of 
 their taste, English goods wore imported into Ireland, 
 and were marked and sold as of Irisii manufacture. He 
 carefully modelled the Repeal Association upon the Catho- 
 lic Association. The Act of 1793 was still unrepealed. 
 
150 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL. 
 
 and therefore a representative character was carefully 
 disclaimed. There were three classes, associates pay- 
 ing Is. a year, members paying £1, volunteers paying 
 d610. All the proceedings were completely open. There 
 were special committees, which, during the existence of 
 the Association, prepared as many as sixty-five reports, 
 and a general committee of about eighty persons, which 
 conducted general business, and considered the ac- 
 counts, reports, resolutions, and circulars of the Asso- 
 ciation, and there were weekly meetings of the Associa- 
 tion itself. There were Eepeal wardens, who collected 
 the rent, answerable to Eepeal inspectors, who were 
 in turn controlled by provincial inspectors. The old 
 machinery of the Catholic Association was ready to 
 hand, it only needed to be furbished up again ; but 
 many of its old officers were dead or incapacitated, and 
 it was not for some time that O'Connell could find 
 among the younger generation men fit to take their 
 place and bring the whole scheme into operation. 
 
 The proximate cause of the founding of the Eepeal 
 Association was Stanley's Irish Eegistration Bill of 
 1840. By its restrictions upon registration it practi- 
 cally limited the franchise. O'Connell attacked the 
 Bill warmly, and was warmly attacked in return. On 
 June 11th he was heard with so much impatience and 
 interruption that, losing his temper, he cried : " This is 
 a Bill to trample on the rights of the people of Ireland. 
 If you were ten times as beastly in your uproar and 
 bellowing I should still feel it my duty to interpose to 
 prevent this injustice"; and in spite of the angry 
 scene which followed, he would not withdraw the 
 phrase. The Bill, however, dropped for the session of 
 1840. A similar fate had befallen the Irish Municipal 
 Eeform Bill in the previous year. Now it passed, but, 
 
THE REPEAL ASSOCIATION. 151 
 
 owing to the amendments of the Lords, in a form so 
 restricted, as to make it highly unsatisfactory to O^Con- 
 nell. 
 
 In 1841 the Whig Ministry was defeated ; it dissolved 
 Parliament on June 23rd, and was utterly routed at 
 the elections. O'Connell and his party suffered too. 
 He lost his own seat for Dublin, and was obliged to 
 take refuge at Cork, and many elections went against 
 his party. He returned with a ^* tail '' reduced to less 
 than a dozen, of whom four were members of his own 
 family, and two others, Dillon Browne and Somers, were 
 his unscrupulous partisans. Nor was the Kepeal move- 
 ment making much headway. He prepared several 
 reports for the Association, in the first of which, issued 
 on May 4th 1840, he had elaborated a scheme for an 
 Irish Parliament of 300 members, 127 borough and 173 
 county members, but it had not struck the popular 
 imagination. A vast meeting had been held at Croker*s 
 Hill, Kilkenny, in October, with 20,000 mounted men, 
 and ten times as many on foot, but nothing came 
 of it. He journeyed to and fro all over Ireland, and 
 late in 1841 visited Ulster. The Orangemen of Belfast 
 menaced him with condign punishment if he ventured 
 to appear there. Violence was intended to be offered 
 him on the way. His carriage was to have been 
 waylaid between two high banks which oommanded the 
 road, and stones hailed upon it till carriage and occu- 
 pant were crushed. He escaped only by changing the 
 time of his journey, and to secure changes of horses 
 at the posting-houses was obliged to travel under the 
 name of a popular ventriloquist. His meeting had 
 to be protected with five companies of foot, two troops 
 of horse, and 2,000 police. The windows of his 
 room were broken, and Dawson, Peel's brother-in-law. 
 
152 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL, 
 
 vapoured about *^ every river in Ireland being another 
 Boyne if necessary." In the autumn of 1842 he 
 endeavoured to stimulate the movement by appointing 
 Kay, the secretary of the Association, Steele, the Head 
 Pacificator, Daunt, and his son, John O'Connell, Re- 
 peal Inspectors, to visit the provinces and enrol mem- 
 bers. But the missionaries were not more powerful than 
 their master, and through 1842 the agitation lagged. 
 Their efforts did, indeed, raise the rent from i645 
 for the week before they set out to d6235 for the week 
 after their return, but the great stride that was taken 
 at the end of 1842 and the beginning of 1843 was not 
 theirs. It was due to two events : the founding of 
 the Nation on October 15th 1842, and the Repeal de- 
 bate in the Dublin Corporation on February 25th 
 1843. 
 
 The founding of the Nation as the newspaper of the 
 new Repeal movement meant that the younger generation 
 of Irishmen was willing to cast in its lot with the old. 
 Davis, poet and patriot, John Blake Dillon, C. Gavan 
 Duffy, John Cornelius O'Callaghan, ClarenceMangan, and 
 J. O'Neill Daunt were the leaders in the enterprise. The 
 newspaper was instantly successful ; the first issue could 
 have been sold twice over. The newsvendors clamoured 
 round the office, breaking in the windows in their 
 eagerness to procure copies. O'ConnelPs practical mind 
 was apt to make the Repeal argument too purely an 
 appeal to Irish pockets. The motto of the Nation was 
 a saying of Stephen Woulfe, *' to create and foster 
 public opinion in Ireland, and to make it racy of the 
 soil.'' O'Connell told the Irish that the Union loaded 
 thenJ with debts they had not contracted, and deprived 
 them of the manufactures they had created ; that the 
 artisans of Dublin had dropped in forty years from 
 
THE REPEAL ASSOCIATION. 153 
 
 5,000 to 700 ; the workmen in the woollen trade from 
 150,000 to 6,000 ; that Repeal would raise their wages 
 and lower their taxes. Davis and Duffy sought to make 
 them feel themselves a nation, talked to them of Brian 
 Boru, and spelt his name Borhoime ; of O'SuUivan, 
 whom they wrote O'Suillebhain ; of 011am Fodlah, and 
 Eoghan Euadh O'Neill. They told them that ''Ire- 
 land ought to have a foreign policy, but not necessarily 
 the foreign policy of England." O'Connell had put it 
 more forcibly, but with the same meaning, ** If France 
 puts England into a difficulty, the first hostile shot that 's 
 fired in the Channel I ^11 have the Government in my 
 hand.'^ ** England's adversity is Ireland's opportunity,^' 
 was the doctrine of them both. 
 
 The Irish Municipal Reform Act had been welcomed 
 in Dublin by the election of O'Connell on November 
 Ist 1841 to the Lord Mayoralty for 1842. He was 
 the first Roman Catholic who had filled that office, 
 and with great tact he negotiated an arrangement by 
 which it should thereafter be held by Protestants and 
 Roman Catholics alternately. The sight of their old 
 leader in that position and the pomp with which he 
 was surrounded pleased and inspirited the people of 
 Dublin. In 1843 O'Connell, now an alderman, de- 
 cided to attract attention to the question of Repeal by 
 a debate in the Corporation, and on February 25th he 
 brought on a motion in its favour. A great crowd 
 gathered in the Assembly House in William Street, and 
 a still greater in the street outside. O'Connell spoke 
 for upwards of four hoursy and delivered a speech, 
 which, even among his, had no superior. He arranged 
 it, as was his favourite manner, under heads, and 
 covered the whole ground with a masterly command 
 of figures and arguments. He declared the Irish fit 
 
154 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNFLL. 
 
 for an independent parliament, entitled to it by im- 
 memorial constitutional right, and robbed of it by- 
 bribery, menaces, and force, by the craft of Pitt, and the 
 cruelty of Castlereagh. He affirmed that the Irish Par- 
 liament could not by any contract bargain away its own 
 existence, and that in any case the Union was morally 
 void, being procured by fraud and duress. He went 
 through a vast parade of statistics to show the in- 
 crease of absenteeism which the Union had caused, 
 and the consequent decay of trade, and painted a glow- 
 ing picture of the wealth, peace, and dignity which 
 would accrue to Ireland from the presence of a Parlia- 
 ment in College Green. Isaac Butt, then a rising 
 junior barrister, a professor in Dublin University, and 
 formerly editor of the Dublin U?iiversity Magazine, 
 replied in a speech of almost equal merit. The debate 
 lasted for three days. In an assembly of Irishmen glad 
 to be convinced, O'Connell's argument carried all before 
 it. He made a triumphant reply, and carried his 
 motion by 41 to 15. 
 
 From that day the Kepeal Association and its work 
 grew apace. The average rent in January 1843 had 
 been about ^150 per week ; for the last week in Feb- 
 ruary it was J6342, for the second in March £366, for 
 the first in April £478, for the last £683, for the last 
 week in May £2,205, for the third in June £3,103, for 
 the entire year £48,400. The priests, headed by the 
 Bishops of Meath and Dromore, and finally by Arch- 
 bishop MacHale, joined the Association. O'Connell's' 
 rash prediction that *' 1843 was to be the Repeal year,'^ 
 seemed in a fair way to be realised. Meetings were 
 arranged for every county ; the Association met in 
 Dublin twice a week ; the old room on the second floor 
 of the Corn Exchange, which had served the Catholic 
 
THE REPEAL ASSOCIATION. 155 
 
 Association, was but eight yards by sixteen in size, 
 and rudely furnished ; 400 persons overcrowded it. A 
 large hall was projected to hold first twice as many, 
 then 1,200, finally 5,000. With grim humour they 
 obtained a site from an an ti -Repealer, concealing the 
 object of the bargain till the contract was signed. The 
 hall was completed and opened in October, and un- 
 couthly called Conciliation Hall. The business of the 
 Association became enormous. In 1841 its staff of 
 clerks had been 9 ; in 1842, 7 ; by the end of 1843 they 
 numbered 48. Everything was conducted with the 
 regularity and routine of a great counting-house. There 
 were 58 folio volumes of documents containing 44,000 
 separate papers, 40 quarto volumes of letters, and 22 
 folio volumes of vouchers for subscriptions, containing 
 33,000 vouchers. There were cash books, day books, 
 minute books, and scrap books fully indexed ; lists of 
 the three classes of members ; lists of American contri- 
 butors. A Repeal police was instituted, over which a 
 " Head Pacificator," Tom Steele, presided. If tumult 
 broke out in any district in Ireland, any rising of 
 "Terry Alts," or conflict of **Gows" and of " Po- 
 leens," it was the business of the local Repeal police, 
 or, if necessary, of the august Head Pacificator himself, 
 to repair to the spot and compose the quarrel. Arbitra- 
 tion Courts were established, which soon threatened to 
 leave the courts of the Queen nothing to do. The card 
 of membership, which had hitherto been plain and busi- 
 ness-like, expanded, in deference to the national aspira- 
 tions, into a document highly emblematic of Ireland's 
 history and Ireland's wrongs, the design of Mr. John 
 Cornelius O'Callaghan. Seventy thousand of them were 
 issued during the year. A host of little books upon 
 Irish history, Irish poetry, and Irish art, poured from 
 
156 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL. 
 
 the press of James Duflfy. O'Connell's activity was in- 
 cessant and marvellous in a man of his years. From 
 meeting to meeting he travelled in the year some five 
 thousand miles. Beside presiding at the public and 
 committee meetings of the Association, and directing, 
 if not executing, the greater part of its business with 
 vast forethought and attention to detail, he attended in 
 March three, in May six, in June nine, in July three, 
 in August five, in September three huge meetings, and 
 his admirers were never content with a short speech from 
 him. A series of meetings, which the Times dubbed 
 *^ Monster Meetings,'"* was projected and carried out. 
 The number of persons attending them could only be 
 guessed, and must have been grossly exaggerated, but 
 it is certain that enormous crowds gathered almost day 
 after day in different parts of Ireland to agitate for 
 Repeal. In April nine meetings were held, at which it 
 was estimated 620,000 persons attended ; one meeting 
 of 110,000 was held at Limerick; and two of 150,000 
 at Kells and Carrickmacross respectively. At eleven 
 meetings in May two millions and a quarter persons 
 were present ; they included one of 170,000 at Sligo, 
 one of 150,000 at Mullingar, one of 260,000 at Long- 
 ford, one of 300,000 at Charleville, two of 400,000 at 
 Armagh and Cashel respectively, and one of 500,000 at 
 Cork. Two millions and three-quarter persons attended 
 nine meetings in June, at the least of which 100,000 
 were present, at two 300,000, at two 400,000 and up- 
 wards, and at one in Clare 700,000. There were 
 three meetings of 300,000 in July, and one of 500,000. 
 On August 15th, 750,000* persons assembled at Tara, 
 
 * Daunt, in his Recollections, puts the number at 1,200,000. If 
 that were so, three-fourths of the adult males of Ireland must have 
 been present. 
 
THE REPEAL ASSOCIATION'. 157 
 
 in Meath, and on the same day 300,000 more at Clon- 
 tibret in Monaghan, and the series was closed by two of 
 400,000 each at an interval of a week at Lismore and 
 the Eath of Mullaghmast. 
 
 These numbers were probably no more than the 
 sanguine guesses of triumphant enthusiasts. What was 
 more extraordinary, and to the Government more 
 ominous than even these numbers, was the complete 
 Orderliness of the meetings. They were held in the 
 open air, and even under cover not a tenth of those 
 huge multitudes could have heard the speaker's voice. 
 They were held in the heat of summer, and the dust 
 and pressure of so many persons must have aggravated 
 the thirst natural to the season of the year. Yet the 
 tedium of standing and hearing nothing did not pro- 
 duce disorder, nor did fatigue and exhaustion lead to 
 drunkenness. The meeting at the Hill of Tara was a 
 sight peculiarly solemn and afifecting. Tara was the 
 coronation place of Irish kings ; the day, a feast of the 
 Virgin Mary of peculiar sanctity. All night long the 
 people gathered by thousands at the hill, and bivouacked 
 under the open sky. In the morning so vast a crowd 
 covered the place of meeting, that there was no one 
 place from which the whole of it could be surveyed. 
 Dublin was denuded of public conveyances. It seemed 
 deserted by its inhabitants. For miles along the roads 
 leading to the hill carriages were drawn up and horses 
 picketed by the wayside. No one was left to watoh 
 them ; yet they suffered neither theft nor injury. If the 
 gathering was a triumph for O'Connell, it was a still 
 greater triumph for Father Matbew. Three-fourths of 
 the crowd were pledged teetotallers. From dawn till 
 noon at forty altars priests were celebrating mass under 
 the summer sun, and over the heads of kneeling thoa- 
 
158 LIFT] OF DANIEL O'CONNELL, 
 
 sands the bell tinkled, the smoke of incense quivered, 
 and the Host was held on high. Towards noon O'Con- 
 nell came, attended by a procession of ten thousand 
 horsemen, mustered by marshals in orderly battalions. 
 Forty- two bands raised a discordant note of triumph. 
 The crowds made way for the Liberator, but so great 
 was the press, that he was two hours in passing the last 
 mile. When the platform was reached he delivered a 
 speech, but it was not his speaking that produced the 
 effect of the day. That silent orderly crowd was ten times 
 more eloquent than he, a disciplined army obedient to 
 his beck and nod. At Tara the uncrowned king assem- 
 bled his subjects; on October 1st at the Rath of Mul- 
 laghmast his subjects offered their king a crown. Duffy 
 suggested that a quaint and uncomely cap, which was 
 part of the traditional garb of an independent Irish king, 
 should be again brought into use. At the conclusion 
 of the meeting a deputation consisting of John Hogan, 
 an Irish national sculptor, Henry MacManus, an Irish 
 national painter, John Cornelius O'Callaghan, the de- 
 signer of the national symbolism of the members^ card, 
 and his brother Mark, solemnly advanced through the 
 €rowd, and gravely crowned O'Connell with the Irish 
 national cap. The proceeding, in itself so ridiculous 
 and theatrical, appeared in the tense state of public 
 feeling, to be nothing short of sublime. 
 
 For fifteen months the agitation had been proceeding 
 unchecked ; for seven it had been of the most formid- 
 able proportions. The apprehensions, which the sight of 
 these unarmed armies of disciplined men excited in the 
 minds of ministers, were justified by the language which 
 O^Connell and his followers publicly employed. Davis, 
 the poet of the Nation, in lines which, though often un- 
 polished, were singularly terse and fiery, was rousing a 
 
THE REPEAL ASSOCIATION. 159 
 
 spirit of antagonism to England, and inculcating the 
 duty of the struggle to be free, in language which was 
 meaningless if it did not advocate an ultimate appeal to 
 force. The whole teaching of his colleagues of the 
 " Young Ireland '^ party was instinct with the feeling 
 that, although the gift of freedom might perhaps be 
 accepted if extorted by mere menaces, it was hardly 
 worth having unless won by force of arms. From the 
 point of view of Her Majesty's Government, responsible 
 for peace and order and for the dominions of the 
 Crown, this was sedition, a veiled incitement to rebel- 
 lion ; and yet O'Connell, who viewed the growing power 
 and unfamiliar tone of the Natiofi with jealousy, and en- 
 deavoured to check it by private remonstrance, in public 
 thought it necessary to echo its language. On May 
 9th, questions were put in the House of Lords by Lord 
 Roden, Grand Master of the Orangemen, and by Lord 
 Jocelyn, his son, in the House of Commons, as to the 
 intentions of the Ministry. Peel seized the opportu- 
 nity of delivering an ultimatum in reply. 
 
 There is no influence [said he], no power, no authority, which the 
 prerogatives of the Crown and the existing law give the Government, 
 which shall not be exercised for the purpose of maintaining the Union, 
 the dissolution of which would involve not merely the repeal of the 
 Act of Parliament, but the dismemberment of this great Empire. . . . 
 I am prepared to make the declaration which was m»de, and nobly 
 made, by my predecessor. Lord Althorp, that deprecating as I do all 
 war, and especially civil war, there is no alternative which I do not 
 think preferable to the dismemberment of this Empire. 
 
 The words were weighty ; their meaning was not to be 
 mistaken. To some of the Irish they sounded the knell 
 of their hopes, to others the tocsin of a welcome war* 
 O'Connell interpreted them to moan that agitation for a 
 political object, however unanimous, and however consti- 
 tutional, was to be met with a cold and resolute denial. 
 
160 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL, 
 
 I belong [he cried] to a nation of eight millions, and there is besides 
 a million of Irishmen in England. If Sir Robert Peel has the audacity 
 to cause a contest to take place between the two countries, we will put 
 him in the wrong, for we will begin no rebellion ; but I tell him from 
 this place that he dare not begin that strife against Ireland. 
 
 The meaning of the words was ohvious. They 
 meant that, however peacefully disposed, events might 
 come in which he would be prepared to declare war. The 
 people so understood him ; already the Nation was 
 writing about ^* being ready for death, for liberty.'^ 
 
 They talk of civil war [he said on another occasion], but while Hive 
 there shall be no civil war. But if others invade us, that is not civil 
 war, and I promise them that there is not a Wellingtonian of them all 
 who would less shrink from that contest than I, if they will enforce 
 it upon us. We are ready to keep the ground of the constitution as 
 long as they will allow us to do so, but should they throw us from 
 that ground, then vae victis ! between the contending parties. 
 
 At the meeting at Cashel on May 23rd, after his 
 accustomed panegyric upon the beauties of Ireland, he 
 went on, ** Where was the coward who would not die 
 for such a land ? . . . He did not like fighting, but let 
 their enemies attack them if they dare." Nor was this 
 the mere ebullition of impassioned oratory. John 
 O'Connell, his most trusted son and henchman, wrote to 
 the Morni?ig Chronicle : " We will not attack ; I do not 
 say we will not defend/' 
 
 The Government began to act. On May 23rd Sir 
 Edward Sugden, Lord Chancellor of Ireland, a pro- 
 foundly learned lawyer, but an indiscreet statesman, 
 dismissed from the magistracy Lord Ffrench, O'Con- 
 nell, his son John, and thirty-one others. The Irish 
 promptly took up the challenge. ' The "rent" trebled 
 in a week; it leapt from £700 to £2,200; Smith 
 O'Brien and many other Irish Whigs resigned their 
 commissions of the peace. A crowd of new members 
 
THE REPEAL ASSOCIATION. 161 
 
 joined the Association. It was then that O'Connell 
 established the Arbitration Courts, which quickly 
 spread throughout the country. The English Whigs 
 censured the Chancellor's act; Russell declared that 
 Repeal was as fit to be discussed in a constitutional 
 manner as any other topic; and the Whig lawyers 
 condemned the legality of the proceeding. The Govern- 
 ment, however, kept to its course. The Irish Arms Act 
 was expiring ; they had proposed to renew it with in- 
 creased severity, and they pressed it steadily upon the 
 House of Commons. Whigs, Radicals, and Irish com- 
 bined to resist it; they fought it line by line; it re- 
 mained three months in committee. Nor was it by the 
 Ministry alone, or in Ireland alone, that civil war was 
 expected and designed. From America came the news 
 that Tyler, the President of the United States, while 
 declining to attend a Repeal meeting, had declared 
 himself the strong friend of Repeal. Sir Charles Met- 
 calfe, Governor of Canada, reported to his superiors 
 that if any aggression took place upon Ireland he could 
 not answer for the peace, perhaps not even for the 
 security of the Dominion. In France the Radicals, with 
 Ledru Rollin at their head, were openly projecting 
 armed assistance for the Irish. Military plans began to 
 be openly discussed. It was pointed out how defensible 
 a country Ireland was ; cavalry would be powerless ; for 
 in Ireland rough stone walls took the place of hedges 
 and made each field a redoubt. The art of manufactur- 
 ing pikes was explained. O'Connell told his hearers 
 at Kilkenny on June 8th : — 
 
 They Btood that day at tho head of a group of men eufflciont, if 
 they undorwoiit military diHcipline, to conquer Europe. WoUington 
 noTcr had such an army. There were not at Waterloo, on both sides, 
 as many brave and energetic men. Howerer, they were not diaoi- 
 
 11 
 
162 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL. 
 
 plined, but tell them what to do, and you would have them disciplined 
 in an hour. They were as well able to walk in order after a band 
 as if they wore red coats. They were as able to be submissive to the 
 Repeal wardens, or anybody else told to take care of them, as if they 
 were called sergeants or captains. 
 
 Three days later, at the meeting at Mallow, he 
 crowned all his utterances with his celebrated ** Mallow 
 defiance ": — 
 
 Do you know [he exclaimed], I never felt such a loathing for 
 speechifying as I do at present. The time is coming when we must be 
 doing. Gentlemen, you may learn the alternative to live as slaves or 
 die as freemen. ... In the midst of peace and tranquillity they are 
 covering our land with troops. Yes, I speak with the awful determi- 
 nation with which I commenced my address, in consequence of news 
 received this day. . . What are Irishmen that they should be denied 
 an equal privilege ? Have we not the ordinary courage of English- 
 men ? Are we to be called slaves ? Are we to be trampled under 
 foot ? Oh I they shall never trample on me, at least I I say they may 
 trample on me, but it will be my dead body they will trample on, not 
 the living man ! 
 
 Never was man more skilful than 0*Connell in so 
 measuring his language as to convey the most inflam- 
 matory impression in still peaceable words. Never did 
 any man so hold a whole country in check upon the 
 very verge of civil war without suffering it to break the 
 peace. But, elated with the delirious enthusiasm of 
 1843, he had been carried too far. It was the theory 
 of Davis and his followers, that, if necessary, the Irish 
 ought to fight for their freedom. The Irish accepted 
 the theory; they were eager to fight; and they understood 
 O'Connell's words, as Peel understood them to mean, 
 that he would, when the time came, lead them to battle, 
 and they rejoiced at the prospect and had no fear of its 
 issue. ** At any moment that Mr. O'Connell had chosen 
 
THE REPEAL ASSOCIATION. 163 
 
 during that year," writes John O'Connell, ** and indeed 
 for long afterwards, he could have raised them in insur- 
 rection as one man throughout the entire country, and 
 however bloody, wasting and desolating might have 
 been the struggle, it is utterly impossible but that the 
 result would have been a violent separation from Eng- 
 land. There was a spirit abroad among the people 
 which would have made millions among them prefer 
 death to submission again to England.'* They imagined 
 they could drive the English into the sea. 
 
 It is hardly conceivable that 0*Connell could have 
 hoped for any such issue ; it is difficult to see how he 
 allowed himself to encourage such a temper in the 
 people of Ireland. If he meant what he said he was 
 preparing for rebellion ; if he did not, he was playing 
 with fire, and risking the lives and liberties of his 
 fellow-countrymen for a little idle rhetoric. The truth 
 probably lies between the two suppositions. It acquits 
 him of folly if not of guilt. He recollected 1828 and 
 how his present opponents, Wellington and Peel, had 
 succumbed, sorely against their will, to the peaceful 
 menace of unanimous agitation. He thought the same 
 tactics would succeed now. He could not believe that 
 Peel meant to go to any lengths in defence of the 
 Union. He was counting on the surrender of the 
 Government. 
 
 But he had sadly mistaken his men. Peel had 
 yielded in 1829 because the House of Commons was 
 divided and because the best of the English were in 
 agreement with the Irish. With a united House of 
 Commons he was not the man to flinch. Wellington 
 had yielded because in face of imminent civil war he 
 was told the troops were no longer to be trusted. There 
 were no Repeal regiments now, and if the Irish must 
 
 11 • 
 
164 LIFE OF DANIEL O'GONNELL. 
 
 come to blows with the Empire the lesson would be 
 short, certain, and lasting. 
 
 The Government quietly took their measures. They 
 masked each meeting with dragoons, but did not inter- 
 fere with it. The Duke had poured 35,000 troops into 
 Ireland. Barracks had been fortified, martello towers 
 put in repair, forts loopholed, stores accumulated. 
 Ships of war lay in the rivers ; more troops were in 
 readiness in the west and north of England. If there 
 was to be a conflict he was ready. The Kepealers felt 
 that the series of monster meetings must be brought to 
 an end ; their novelty was wearing off; autumn was fast 
 vanishing. It was decided to conclude them with one 
 beside which the others, gigantic as they were, should 
 sink into insignificance. It was to be held at another 
 of the historic spots of Ireland, at Clontarf, a few miles 
 from Dublin. To it the people were to be gathered from 
 every part of Ireland and from England and Scotland 
 across the sea. Nine-tenths of the grown men of Ireland 
 were Repealers ; it was to be an awe-inspiring proof of 
 the unanimity of the Irish race. A platform was set up 
 and minute directions given for the gathering of the 
 host. One slip they made, but only for a moment. One 
 of the secretaries, Frank Morgan, a solicitor, issued a 
 placard summoning and directing what he called the 
 ** Repeal Cavalry." The expression was not very 
 obnoxious, but it was indiscreet, and the placard 
 was at once called in. The Government made no 
 sign, and it was thought they would allow this last 
 meeting to pass as they had tolerated so many of its 
 predecessors. 
 
 The meeting was to be held on Sunday, October 5th. 
 Already steamers were arriving laden with the Repealers 
 of Glasgow and Liverpool, when the Duhlitr Mail 
 
THE REPEAL ASSOCIATION, 166 
 
 announced on the Friday that the meeting would be 
 forbidden. It was known that the Irish Privy Council 
 was assembled to receive a despatch from England. 
 Still the Government uttered not a word. But soon 
 troops began to be moved down upon Clontarf. On the 
 following day the guards at the barracks and at Dublin 
 Castle were doubled. The guns at the Pigeon House Fort 
 and the batteries of the ships in the river were trained 
 upon the place of meeting. The Rhadamanthus and 
 the Dee arrived from England with the 34th Regiment 
 of Foot and the 87th Royal Irish Fusiliers. The 5th 
 Dragoons, each man equipped for active service, with food 
 for twenty-four hours, moved towards evening to Clon- 
 tarf. Close by, at Conquest Hill, were the 11th Hussars 
 and the 54th Foot, and a brigade of the Royal Horse 
 Artillery, with four six-pounders. The 60th Rifles 
 commanded the ground, and each man had sixty rounds 
 of ball cartridge. 
 
 From an early hour on that Saturday the Committee 
 of the Association had been in session, fitfully transact- 
 ing its business, and expectant, amid the news of these 
 preparations, of some word from the Castle. The room 
 grew crowded. At last, at half-past three a messenger 
 burst in with a copy of the proclamation in his hand 
 wet from the press. The meeting was forbidden. There 
 was no time for deliberation. Less than two hours of 
 daylight remained. Already the people were beginning 
 to approach Clontarf. It had to be decided on the 
 instant whether the proclamation should be obeyed or 
 defied. The habit of a lifetime determined 0*Connell 
 to obey. But it was not enough passively to yield ; 
 the people must bo warned in time and time was scant. 
 O'Connell did not talk ; he acted. Peter Martin was 
 sent to pull down the platform^ which had been erected 
 
166 LIFE OF DANIEL O'GONNELL. 
 
 at Clontarf. Twenty or thirty gentleiiien wete de- 
 spatched through the surrounding country in pairs to 
 warn the gathering crowds. By dawn O'ConneH's pro- 
 clamation, commanding obedience to the proclamation, 
 was posted in every village within twenty miles of 
 Clontarf. The meeting was abandoned ; the Government 
 was victorious. If the meeting was legal, as 0*Connell 
 said it was, the Government had ** invaded '* the Irish 
 and O'Connell had ** shrunk from the contest.*' In the 
 sight of the whole people of Ireland, he had flinched 
 from his word. 
 
167 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 LAST DAYS. 
 1848-1847. 
 
 The trial - -The judgment of the House of Lords — The Federal contro- 
 versy — The conflict with Young Ireland — Alliance with the 
 Whigs — The Famine — Last days and death. 
 
 Unconditional submission to the proclamation of the 
 Government was undoubtedly the only course open to 
 O'Connell, whether as a man of sense, a humane Irish- 
 man, or a loyal subject of the Queen, but for the time 
 being it was a severe blow to his hopes, his self-esteem, 
 and his prestige. Nothing less than the devotion of the 
 Irish to their trusted leader could have kept them 
 faithful to him, so bitter was their disappointment. He 
 had conducted agitations for a generation past against 
 governments of every temper and description. He had 
 baffled the law officers of the Crown, laughed at statute 
 after statute, defied the Executive again and ngain, with 
 consummate dexterity. He had said, and ho still main- 
 tained, that the Clontarf meeting was perfectly legal ; 
 he had announced that he would resist by force any in- 
 vasion by the Government of the people's legal rights, 
 and after all his defiances, he had turned his cheek to 
 the sraiter. Between the leaders of the Young Ireland 
 
168 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL, 
 
 party and O'Connell's henchmen for long no love had 
 been lost. The young men now began to think that 
 their chief was superannuated, and that his hand had 
 lost its cunning. 
 
 Still the matter was far from being hopeless. In the 
 summer O'Connell had formulated a plan for an as- 
 sembly, which was to be the germ of an Irish House of 
 Commons. He argued, somewhat pedantically it is 
 true, that, as Parliaments were originally summoned by 
 the writ of the Sovereign, it needed now no statute to 
 create an Irish Parliament. A little wax and parch- 
 ment, a royal summons to counties and boroughs to 
 send persons to advise the Crown, would suffice. He 
 proposed to collect such a body of advisers before- 
 hand ; to bring together in Dublin an amateur House of 
 Commons, as he had established throughout the country 
 a volunteer judiciary. The Kepealers of each locality 
 were to subscribe £100, and to select someone in whom 
 they had confidence, not to represent them, since that 
 would have infringed Lord Clare's Convention Act, but 
 to be the bearer of the £100 to Dublin. These agents 
 for the transmission of money, finding themselves for- 
 tuitously in Dublin, were to meet, to debate, to resolve, 
 to comport themselves like the delegates that they were 
 and the members of a House of Commons that they 
 hoped to be. Their number was to be 300; it was a 
 number instinct with the recollections of independent 
 Ireland, the number of Charlemont's assembly, the 
 number of Grattan's Parliament, the number of the 
 Dungannon Convention. Here was a plan still remain- 
 ing to be tried. 
 
 There was this, too, to encourage the Repealers. The 
 Irish Whigs had hitherto stood aloof from their move- 
 ment. They were fully alive to the grievances, which 
 
LAST DAYS. 169 
 
 Temained unredressed ; they were no longer sanguine 
 that they ever would be remedied under existing consti- 
 tutional arrangements. But their leaders were men of 
 high rank and ancient family, such as the Duke of 
 Leinster and the Earl of Meath. They could not consent 
 iio throw in their lot with O'Connell and Barrett and 
 Steele, or to support Repeal pure and simple. But the 
 Federal idea was gaining ground among them and 
 Federalists were always possible Repeal recruits. Shar- 
 man Crawford had put forward a scheme for a subor- 
 dinate Irish assembly to manage Irish affairs, and an 
 Imperial legislature for Imperial affairs. Ross, member 
 for Belfast, and Oaulfield, a son of the Lord Charle- 
 mont who was a leader of the Volunteers in 1782, were 
 of the same opinion. Smith O'Brien, than whom no Irish 
 member was more esteemed for his family or for his 
 integrity, had moved in July that the House of Com- 
 mons should go into committee to consider the state of 
 Ireland. An excellent case had been made out for Irish 
 reforms. The Whigs had supported him ; the debate 
 had been carried on for five nights ; and the rejection 
 •of the motion brought the Whigs so much the nearer to 
 Repeal. 
 
 Everyone was anxious to hear what O'ConneH's next 
 step would be. The next Association meeting was at- 
 tended by a dense crowd. He spoke long, but to little 
 purpose. Nothing was made of the Convention scheme ; 
 nothing of the Whig accession. He proposed to hold 
 simultaneous meetings in every parish, as had been done 
 in 1828 ; the Government could not break up a thou- 
 sand meetings in a day. He had also a vague scheme 
 for a joint stock compiiny, which was to benefit Ireland 
 in some unexplained way by jobbing in Irish mortgages. 
 The disappointment of the Repealers was intense ; their 
 
170 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL. 
 
 leader had lost his nerve. Their enemies were openly 
 exultant, and the Government struck another blow. 
 
 On October the 14th O'Connell, his son John, Ray^ 
 Secretary of the Association, Steele, its Head Paci- 
 ficator, Barrett, editor of the Pilot, Gray, editor of the 
 Freeman s Journal, and Gavan DuflPy, editor of the- 
 Nation, were called upon to give bail to answer infor- 
 mations, which had been sworn against them, for a con- 
 spiracy to raise sedition and to excite disaffection in 
 the army. The indictment was sent up before the 
 Grand Jury on November 2nd ; they deliberated for 
 six days and found true bills on the 8th. The indict- 
 ment was an instrument of portentous size and impene- 
 trable obscurity. It set out at full length resolutions, 
 speeches, and newspaper articles. It was one hundred 
 yards in length ; it occupies fifty-five close-printed folio 
 pages in the Appendix to the Traversers^ case in the 
 House of Lords. There were eleven separate counts;; 
 forty-three overt acts were alleged ; and all the tra- 
 versers were charged with conspiring together to com- 
 mit each act, and with a general conspiracy to commit 
 general seditious acts. It was a masterpiece of intricate- 
 alternative pleading. It is too much to say that it waa 
 intelligible. 
 
 A vast array of counsel was retained on either side. 
 The Crown had a dozen barristers to represent it — 
 the Attorney-General, T. B. 0. Smith, afterwards 
 Master of the Bolls, the Solicitor-General, R. Wil- 
 son Greene, afterwards a Baron of the Exchequer,. 
 Brewster and Napier, both subsequently Lord Chan- 
 cellors and others. The traversers had an equally bril- 
 liant array — Sheil, Pigot, afterwards Chief Baron, 
 Monahan, afterwards Chief Justice of the Common^ 
 Pleas, Whiteside, afterwards Chief Justice of the Queen's. 
 
LAST BAYS. 171 
 
 Bench, O'Hagan, subsequently Lor(f Chancellor, 
 O'Loghlen, subsequently Judge - Advocate - General. 
 From the first the Irish Repealers made up their minds 
 that the accused would not have a fair trial, and their 
 newspapers encouraged the belief. Unfortunately the 
 unscrupulous zeal of the minor officials of the Crown 
 converted their prejudiced apprehension into a lament- 
 able truth, and it must be owned that the counsel for 
 the Crown availed themselves of every technical objec- 
 tion with illiberal pedantry. 
 
 The trial was to take place at bar, but it could not 
 well be held until the jury panel had been revised. 
 Shaw, the Recorder of Dublin, member for Dublin 
 University and a Privy-Councillor, was the officer before 
 whom the list was revised. He had made frequent and 
 strong complaints of the incompleteness and inadequacy 
 of the list of persons qualified to serve as jurors. The 
 revision was now at hand. The special jury panel ought 
 to have contained all peers and eldest sons of peers, all 
 esquires and all merchants, whose property was worth 
 £5fiOO. The existing panel showed but 388 special 
 jurors' names, an obviously insufficient number, and of 
 these, 70 were dead or disqualified. At least 300 Catho- 
 lics must have been entitled to have their names on 
 the list ; there were but 23. The returns of the col- 
 lectors of Grand Jury cess showed over 11,000 housen 
 in Dublin rated at the amount which qualified for the 
 common jury list. Presumably there ought to have 
 been a common jury list of at least 9,000 names. The 
 existing list contained but 5,000, and was besides 
 scandalously incoinplctr in other respects. These facts 
 were notorious. From suoli a jurors* book in such a case 
 a panel could not bo struck. The trial was postponed 
 till January 15th, 1844. 
 
172 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL. 
 
 The revision took place. The Recorder enlarged the 
 list of special jurors from 388 to 717. On January 4th 
 the parties attended before the Clerk of the Crown to 
 strike a jury. It was pointed out on behalf of the tra- 
 versers that the names of 60 persons, wealthy and re- 
 spectable men, which had been entered by the Recorder 
 in the list of special jurors, had been somehow omitted 
 from the list, from which it was now proposed to strike 
 the panel. The Clerk of the Crown decided that he had 
 come there not to argue but to strike a panel and a panel 
 should be struck. The ballot produced the names of 
 forty persons ; eleven were Roman Catholics. One by 
 one Kemmis, the solicitor for the Crown, struck them 
 off. The jury finally consisted of twelve Protestant 
 tradesmen, of whom one was an Englishman. The Court 
 consisted of Chief Justice Pennefather and three puisne 
 judges. Burton, Crampton and Perrin. All were Pro- 
 testants, two were Tories, one was an Englishman. 
 
 The 15th came. Business in Dublin was suspended. 
 Huge crowds thronged the Four Courts. O'Connell 
 arrived at the Court in semi-royal state, riding in the 
 Lord Mayor^s coach and attended by the Dublin alder- 
 men in their robes. He took his seat in Court in wig 
 and gown. The judges entered, the jurors were called. 
 When the first person called came to the book to be 
 sworn, counsel for the traversers interposed with a chal- 
 lenge to the array and pointed to the omission of the 
 sixty names. The Attorney-General put in a demurrer; 
 he admitted the fact, and argued that it was immaterial 
 in law. The Court sustained the demurrer. On the 
 17th the jury were sworn, and the case proceeded at a 
 length worthy of the indictment. The Attorney-General 
 occupied two days in opening his case ; the evidence 
 for the Crown occupied seven days ; the speeches for 
 
LAST DAYS. 17a 
 
 the traversers ten ; the reply of the Solicitor-General 
 three. O'Connell was the last of the traversers to speak 
 and his speech was a failure; it was feeble and ineffec- 
 tive. Late on the afternoon of the twenty-third day the 
 jury retired. It was a Saturday, and the hours wore on 
 into the night ; but no one left the Court while the- 
 jury were out. Shortly before twelve they returned. 
 They were agreed as to the substance of their verdict,, 
 but had a natural difficulty in adjusting it to the case 
 of nine traversers, eleven counts, and forty-three overt 
 acts. Before this nice matter could be set right mid- 
 night arrived. All was in doubt. The Attorney- 
 General was of opinion the jury must undergo further 
 incarceration and give their verdict on Monday; he 
 doubted if the verdict could be taken in the small hours 
 of Sunday morning. The judge directed that the jury 
 should remain together till Monday and proposed to 
 adjourn. Another learned gentleman doubted if the 
 Court could now adjourn ; it would be the performance 
 of a judicial act on Sunday, a dies non. The judge had 
 had doubts of his power to take the verdict and let the 
 wretched jurymen go to their homes; he had none of 
 his power to adjourn and go to his own. The Court 
 rose. 
 
 But practically the verdict was known. The Govern- 
 ment had a steamer in readiness at Kingstown ; it sped 
 away with the news at once, and the Times had the ver- 
 diot printed in London at the time it was being formally 
 delivered in Dublin. O'Connell, Barrett, and Duffy were 
 found guilty on the whole of the first three counts, except 
 as to the charge of acting ** maliciously and seditiously "; 
 on the other counts there was a general verdict of guilty 
 ugaiust all. Sentence was deferred until the following 
 term. Parliament was then in session. O'Connell onlr 
 
174 LIFE OF. DANIEL O'GONNELL. 
 
 waited for a meeting of the General Committee before 
 setting out for London. But at that meeting he startled 
 his followers by the tone which he adopted ; in truth, the 
 verdict and the certain prospect of imprisonment might 
 well quench the spirit of a man on the verge of his 
 seventieth year. He urged a complete submission ; he 
 proposed to abandon the Arbitration Courts, and he 
 recommended the dissolution of the Association and its 
 reconstitution in some other and less obnoxious form. 
 The young and fighting wing were up in arms. They 
 had with difficulty acquiesced in the policy of abandoning 
 the Clontarf meeting; now they threatened, rather 
 than acquiesce in the dissolution of the Association, to 
 split the party. Smith O'Brien, who had now become an 
 avowed Repealer and a member of the Association, was 
 of the same opinion. At last a compromise was arrived 
 at. In the late trial the articles in newspapers, though 
 unauthorised by and unconnected with many of the 
 traversers, had formed the most serious evidence against 
 them. For the security of the Association all the edi- 
 tors of newspapers resigned their membership. Notice 
 was sent to the Arbitration Courts that they must no 
 longer have any connection with the Association. 
 Severed from the parent stem they speedily perished. 
 
 O'Connell crossed to England, and was enthusiasti- 
 cally received by the Liberals. He addressed largo 
 meetings at Liverpool, at Manchester, at Coventry, at 
 Birmingham. A great banquet was given in his honour 
 at Coven t Garden theatre. He entered the House of 
 Commons during an Irish debate, and was hailed with 
 enthusiastic cheers. In Parliament strong opinions 
 were expressed against the course of the trial by Sir 
 Thomas Wilde and other eminent lawyers. But in spite 
 of it all two adverse and significant facts appeared. 
 
LAST DAYS, 175 
 
 The Radicals were eager for Reform ; they were hostile 
 to Repeal. The official Whigs held themselves aloof 
 altogether. 
 
 The day of sentence at length arrived. Efforts had 
 been made to disturb the verdict. A motion was made 
 at the beginning of term for a new trial on the ground 
 of misdirection, but it was refused. On May 30th 
 the traversers were called up. As he entered the 
 Court, O'Connell was received with vociferous ap- 
 plause. The traversers were called upon, and 
 Mr. Justice Burton pronounced the sentence of the 
 Court. He and O'Connell had been old friends and 
 companions on the Munster circuit and old rivals at 
 the bar. As his judgment proceeded, he was painfully 
 affected and even wept. The sentence upon O'Connell 
 was imprisonment for twelve months, a fine of £2,000, 
 and security in dS5,000, his own and another's, for his 
 good behaviour during seven years. The other traver- 
 sers were sentenced to nine months' imprisonment and 
 £50 fines. When sentence had been delivered, O'Con- 
 nell rose, and briefly said that justice had not been 
 done him. His words were caught up with cheers for 
 Repeal by the audience in Court, which were repeated by 
 the crowd outside. The prisoners were then removed, 
 escorted by a silent multitude, to Richmond Gaol. 
 
 In the matter of their imprisonment they were treated 
 with the utmost leniency. It had been privately com- 
 municated to them, that they would be permitted to 
 choose the place of their confinement. Fitzpatrick had 
 occupied himself with inquiries about the gaols of Ire- 
 land, and had ascertained that Richmond Prison was a 
 commodious and convenient gaol. It had the great 
 recommendation of being under the control of the Cor- 
 poration of Dublin, who oould be oouoted on even to 
 
176 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL. 
 
 strain the law in order to treat them as honoured 
 guests, not as condemned criminals. 
 
 The prisoners were delivered into the custody of the 
 governor of the gaol, and their names and descriptions 
 entered in the usual way in the prison register, where 
 they may still be seen. The Board of Superintendence 
 was holding a meeting in the prison, and sent for 
 0*Connell. As he entered all rose to receive him. 
 He was informed that every possible concession would 
 be made to the comfort of the prisoners, if they would 
 give their parole not to misuse the indulgence by turn- 
 ing it into a means of escape. The pledge was given ; the 
 officials were permitted to let their private houses to the 
 prisoners ; the garden of the gaol was placed at their 
 disposal. They were catered for from outside, they re- 
 ceived their letters and visitors, and entertained guests 
 as if they were in their own homes. The only persons 
 who were refused admittance were the mayors of Cork, 
 Waterford, Limerick, Kilkenny, and CJonmel, who came 
 in state with their aldermen and town councillors to 
 present addresses to O'Connell. The Roman Catholic 
 bishops undertook in terms the duty of saying a daily 
 mass for O'ConnelFs benefit, and eagerly competed with 
 one another for the honour. Visitors to the gaol found 
 him walking placidly in the garden with his grandchil- 
 dren about him playing among the flowers, and his 
 fellow-prisoners engaged in various pastimes, in con- 
 ducting a gaol journal, the Prison Gazette, which 
 chronicled meetings held at the hillocks in the garden, 
 which they nicknamed the Hill of Tara, and the Rath of 
 Mullaghmasts, or in the more serious business of advis- 
 ing those who remained at liberty and were carrying 
 on the work of the Association. 
 
 Meantime, proceedings had been taken for bringing 
 
LAST DATS, 177 
 
 the trial on appeal to the House of Lords by writ of 
 error. O'Connell to the very last had little expectation 
 that this forlorn hope could succeed. His attention was 
 concentrated on the proceedings of the Association, 
 which were being carried on under the leadership of 
 Smith O'Brien, and upon the conduct of the people at 
 large. 
 
 The people [he said] are behaving nobly. I was at first a little 
 afraid, despite all my teaching, that at such a crisis they would have 
 done either too much or too little ; either have been stung into an 
 outbreak, or else awed into apathy. Neither has happened. Blessed 
 be God I the people are acting nobly. What it is to have such a 
 people to lead ! In the days of the Catholic Association I used to 
 have more trouble than I can express in keeping down mutiny. I 
 always arrived in town about October 26th, and on my arrival I in- 
 variably found some jealousies, some squabbles, some fellow trying to 
 be leader, which gave me infinite annoyance. But now all goes right ; 
 no man is jealous of any other man ; each does his best for the gene- 
 ral cause. 
 
 The English lawyers, however, who had now been en- 
 gaged for the prisoners, knew better than O'Connell 
 that any points of law that could be raised would be 
 fairly heard by the House of Lords. They assigned 
 error on no less than thirty-four grounds. There was 
 error in the composition of the jury, error in the inex- 
 tricable intricacies of the indictment, error in the ver- 
 dict, and error in the judgment. The jury was unlaw- 
 fully chosen ; the indictment in some oases said too little, 
 for it did not name the persons whom it was alleged the 
 prisoners had conspired to intimidate ; and in others it 
 said too much, for it charged the same and only con- 
 spiracy over and over again ; the verdict, which found 
 them guilty of conspiracy, was so framed as to acquit 
 them on its face of having conspired in common, which 
 was essential to the existence of the offence; the judg- 
 
 12 
 
178 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL, 
 
 ment ingeniously sentenced each to imprisonment until 
 all had paid up the amount of their fines. 
 
 If the original indictment was formidable, the indict- 
 ment against it on appeal was no less so. According 
 to custom, the House of Lords stated questions for the 
 opinion of the judges, and Tindal, Chief Justice of the 
 Common Pleas, attended to read their opinion to the 
 House. The judges differed in opinion, but a majority 
 were against the appeal, and in particular, with little 
 hesitation, they held that the defect in the jury panel, 
 since partiality was not alleged against the sheriff, did 
 not invalidate the subsequent proceedings. The House 
 gave judgment upon September 4th. Five law lords 
 had heard the case, Lyndhurst, the Chancellor, 
 Brougham and Cottenham, ex-Chancellors, Campbell, 
 ex-Chancellor of Ireland, and Denman, Lord Chief 
 Justice. The judgments of the first four had been accu- 
 rately forecast; they were evenly divided. Denman, 
 indignant at the incompleteness of the jury panel, 
 turned the scale in favour of quashing the whole pro- 
 ceedings. If the omission of sixty names was imma- 
 terial, he said, why should not the sheriff have been at 
 liberty to add sixty names ? The persons who had 
 tried O'Connell were not truly jurors at all. If sheriffs 
 were to do their duty thus, then trial by jury was '^ a 
 mockery, a delusion, and a snare." Upon the judg- 
 ments of the law lords the proceedings were to be 
 quashed. In strict law any member of the House of 
 Lords was entitled to vote upon the question, for for- 
 mally the judgments in the House of Lords are speeches 
 in support of or against a motion. Some lay peers, 
 alarmed at the prospect of O'Connell's release, proposed 
 to vote and carry Lyndhurst's motion against their 
 enemy. Then Lord Wharncliffe rose, deputed by the 
 
LAST DAYS. 179 
 
 Government, and with grave dignity appealed to them 
 not to violate the now well-established custom of the 
 House, which was to leave the decision upon questions 
 •of legal process to the peers who were learned in the 
 law. The peers bowed to his appeal to their sense of 
 fairness; they overcame their prejudices and withdrew, 
 and their enemy went free. 
 
 Away posted Ford, O'Conneirs solicitor, to Holy^ 
 head with the news in his pocket. A steamer, the 
 Medusa^ was in waiting to carry him to Dublin. Eagerly 
 expecting the issue, were it good or evil, thousands 
 <5rowded the Kingstown pier on her arrival. In 
 an instant all was rejoicing. The engine that brought 
 the messenger up to Dublin was decorated with a flag, 
 ■*' O'Connell is free,'* to spread the news by the way- 
 side. Away rushed Ford to Richmond and dashed 
 into O'ConnelFs dining-room with tears and ejacula- 
 tions. **Fitzpatrick," said O'Connell, reverently, "the 
 hand of man is not in this. It is the response given by 
 Providence to the prayers of the faithful, steadfast people 
 of Ireland." That night he left the prison and walked 
 home to Merrion Square ; as they met him in the streets 
 the people stared at him as if he had risen from the dead. 
 But no quiet home-coming could satisfy his admirers. 
 From end to end of Ireland the news had been expected, 
 and bonfires telegraphed from hill to hill, that the news 
 was good. Next day the prisoners returned to gaol to 
 be formally escorted home by a vast processioQ. O'Con* 
 nell, mounted upon a grotesque triumphal chariot, with 
 a harper in ancient Irish garb harping patriotic tunes 
 before him, and all the trades of Dublin marching before 
 and behind, was drawn amid thunders of applause 
 through the streets to his home. 
 
 But although few at first believed it, in those few 
 
 12 ♦ 
 
180 LIFE OF DANIEL O'GONNELL, 
 
 months of his imprisonment the whole scene changed. 
 The eyes of all Europe had heen fixed upon the trial,, 
 and the trial had heen represented as the struggle of in- 
 nocence against a legal system and a hench of judges, 
 which were nothing hut tools in the firm grip of the 
 English Government, and now in the sight of all the 
 world the highest English tribunal had shown its inde- 
 pendence of the Government, by giving a just judgment 
 upon a passionless point of law. It was a signal proof 
 to the Irish people that English justice was justice in* 
 deed. The sympathy of the spectators was changed ; 
 but the actors were changing too. While O'Connell 
 was in prison the forward party had obtained a greater 
 control over the machinery of the Association, and had 
 become more confirmed in the belief that the struggle 
 must, if necessary, be decided by an appeal to the sword ; 
 and unhappily, while these ardent spirits were becom- 
 ing more and more fiery, O'Conneirs power of con- 
 trolling them was fast diminishing. • While he lay in 
 gaol, he was attacked, secretly but certainly, by that 
 disease of which less than three years later he died. 
 
 The Federal idea had been steadily gaining force 
 among the Protestant gentry of Ireland and the English 
 Whigs, until it became elevated almost into an avowed 
 object of their policy. Nassau Senior had propounded 
 in the Edinburgh Review a scheme for an "itinerant 
 Parliament." Occasional sessions of the Imperial Le» 
 gislature were to be held in Dublin. Lord John Hussell 
 corrected the proof sheets of the article. The project met 
 with some favour. Many years afterwards it was al- 
 leged, on the authority of one who afterwards became a 
 Whig Cabinet Minister, and was not denied by Russell, 
 that the Whig leaders actually resolved to offer O^Con- 
 nell " an alliance, on the basis of conceding to Ireland 
 
LAST DAYS. 181 
 
 a Parliament administeriDg Irish affairs under a system 
 of federal union with Great Britain." Mr. Hatohell 
 was sent to Dublin to sound the Irish Repealers upon 
 the subject. Even if this rumour were, as it probably 
 was, an exaggeration, it was clear that as a via media 
 [Federation would command no little support. O'Connell 
 ^as disposed to forego Repeal, of which he now knew 
 the hope to be so shadowy, for the solid benefits, which 
 the English were willing to bestow as soon as the 
 .inertia of their unfamiliarity with Ireland was over- 
 come. Upon his release from prison he wrote on 
 October 14th to the Repeal Association a letter, in 
 which, after disclaiming any more monster meetings, 
 and keeping silence about his plan for a Convention in 
 Dublin, he said : — 
 
 For my own part I will own that since I have come to contemplate 
 the specific differences, such as they are, between simple Repeal and 
 Federation, I do at present feel a preference for the Federation plan, 
 us tending more to the utility of Ireland and the maintenance of the 
 connection with England than the proposal of simple Repeal. But I 
 must either deliberately propose or deliberately adopt from soma 
 other person a plan of Federative Union, before I bind myself to the 
 opinion which I now entertain. . . . The Federalists cannot but per- 
 ceive that there has been on my part a pause in the agitation for 
 Repeal since our liberation from unjust captivity. 
 
 The letter fell like a bomb upon the party which 
 found voice in the Nation ; to them it seemed, that to 
 abandon Repeal, after all the great things that had been 
 said of it for years past, was pusillanimous. It made 
 Ireland contemptible. Duffy issued a temperately worded 
 manifesto, in which he declared that a voice in the 
 Imperial destiny of England was a poor compensation 
 for a little limitation upon the Irish claim to have the 
 sole control of the individual destinies of Ireland ; 
 nothing could satisfy him but tlio restoration of Ireland's 
 ancient and historic constitution. Smith O'Brien was 
 
182 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL. 
 
 as yet mute. O'Connell wrote to him on the 21st a 
 letter, in which he dwelt on the importance of their 
 common agreement and propounded a Federal plan, of 
 which he said : — 
 
 While all matters of taxation, commercial and ecclesiastical policy, 
 as well as the general taxation and expenditure of the United King- 
 dom, would by such an arrangement remain, as now, within the 
 exclusive control of the Imperial Legislature, such matters as the 
 regulation and disposition of local taxation, the relief of the poor and 
 the development of the natural resources of the country would be 
 provided for by the local assembly, which must necessarily be better 
 qualified to discharge such functions. 
 
 We utterly disclaim any intention of rendering the proposed mea- 
 sures in any degree subservient to the severance of the legislative 
 connection between Great Britain and Ireland, which, thus reformed, 
 we shall deem it our duty, as we believe it will be our interest, by 
 every means in our power to maintain. 
 
 But it speedily became apparent that except among 
 his own sycophants, who would have accepted any 
 policy from his hands, O'ConnelFs suggestion of adopt- 
 ing Federation found no favour. The Protestants, who 
 followed Sharman Crawford, personally distrusted him. 
 The English Whigs, unaware, perhaps, of any change 
 of opinion among their leaders, adhered to the Whig cry 
 of Keform but no Repeal ; the Irish Repealers, one 
 and all, denounced any concession. O'Connellfelt that 
 the reins were slipping from his grasp. It was not thus 
 that in the heyday of his powers his suggestions were 
 disputed ; unfortunately, too, it was not thus that he 
 had been accustomed to crush a mutineer. He recanted. 
 He returned to Dublin from Darrynane amid the 
 usual signs of enthusiasm and popularity, banquets,, 
 addresses, and torchlight processions. He attended the 
 Association meeting on November 25th, and practically 
 announced that his Federalism had been a temporary 
 ruse adopted to attract the Federalists, a tub to catch/ 
 
LAST DAYS, 183 
 
 a whale. If they assented they would have been drawn 
 into the Repeal circle ; if they refused they would have 
 been made to appear opinionated and in the wrong. 
 
 After the liberation of the state prisoners [he said] advances had 
 been made to him by men of large influence and large property, who 
 talked of seeking Repeal on what they called the Federal Plan. He 
 inquired what the Federal Plan was, but nobody could tell him. He 
 called upon them to propose their plan, the view in his own mind 
 being that Federalism could not commence till Ireland had a parlia- 
 ment of her own, because she would not be on a footing with England 
 till possessed of a parliament to arrange her own terms. The Fede- 
 ralists were bound to declare their plan, and he had conjectured that 
 there was something advantageous in it, but he did not go any further; 
 he expressly said he would not bind himself to any plan. . . . He had 
 expected the assistance of the Federalists, and opened the door as 
 wide as he could without letting out Irish liberty. But [said he, 
 snapping his fingers], let me tell you a secret ; Federalism is not 
 worth that. Federalists, I am told, are still talking and meeting. . . . 
 I wish them well. Let them work as well as they can, but they are 
 none of my children — I have nothing to do with them. 
 
 In truth, O'Connell's position in relation to Repeal 
 never had been the same as that of the more advanced 
 and fanatical of his party. His rooted belief was that 
 no political advantage was worth having at the cost of 
 shedding one drop of blood. They were not far from 
 thinking that Irish liberties were not worth having 
 until they had been baptized with English blood shed 
 by Irish hands. There could be no lasting union be- 
 tween two such views. O'Conneirs practical mind 
 shrank from rejecting present boons when nothing 
 better could be got ; he knew tlint when a peaceful 
 agitation had missed fire, as the Repeal agitation had, to 
 prolong it was to be ridiculous ; for criminal he would 
 not be, and prolonged agitation of the pattern of 1843 
 would either lead him to the crime of rebellion, or 
 would fritter itself away. He was looking anxiously 
 round for a practicable policy and a practicable goal. 
 
184 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL, 
 
 He knew his countrymen better than the Young Ire- 
 land party did, and saw that they did not walk in 
 processions and pay Kepeal rents — the rent, which had 
 averaged £500 a week during the trial, had risen to 
 £2,500 and £3,000 a week during the imprisonment — for 
 nothing. They looked for legislative advantages, and 
 expected to feel the advantage in their pockets. A boon 
 such as that must be obtained peacefully and from Eng- 
 land. But to the Young Ireland party a boon from 
 England seemed no better than a penny tossed to a 
 beggar, and they detested the policy which accepted it,» 
 When the Repeal party was thus on the verge of break- 
 ing up, Peel accelerated the process by offering 
 remedial legislation to Ireland. His mind had been 
 much impressed with the debate on Smith O'Brien's 
 motion in 1843. There had been another long debate 
 on the causes of Irish discontent on Russeirs motion in 
 the spring of 1844. The Devon Commission, appointed 
 in 1843, conducted an exhaustive inquiry into the Irish 
 land question in 1844, and reported early in 1845. 
 Peel, now informed upon the question, braved the 
 fanaticism of some of his party, and proposed 
 substantial reform. The Irish were to be educated. 
 For the benefit of the priests the Maynooth grant was 
 almost trebled, and was made permanent and placed 
 beyond the reach of controversy ; for the laity it was 
 proposed to establish three Queen's Colleges at a cost 
 of £100,000, and to endow them with £7,000 a year, 
 and the education given in them was to be secular. 
 
 O'Connell was in some difficulty in the matter. 
 Through Mr. Petre, an unaccredited agent, backed by 
 the powerful influence of the agent of the Austrian 
 Monarchy, the Government had succeeded in obtaining 
 from the See of Rome a letter from Cardinal Fransoni, 
 
LAST DAYS. 185 
 
 Prefect of the Propaganda, to Archbishop Crolly, depre- 
 cating the lively part which Irish priests were taking in 
 political agitation. Most of the Irish bishops evaded 
 the monition by interpreting it as a warning against 
 excessive zeal on the part of their clergy, but a minority 
 deferred to it by withdrawing all ecclesiastical support 
 from the agitation. Now the Maynooth grant was 
 likely still further to alienate the priests. And yet it 
 was difficult to oppose it. 
 
 As time progressed, however, he became decidedly 
 hostile to the Government plan of provincial colleges. 
 The Bill was introduced on May 9th, and was well re- 
 ceived by the House of Commons. In Ireland some of 
 the bishops, the Young Ireland party, and the Protes- 
 tants, also welcomed it. In the General Committee, in 
 spite of O'Connell's opposition, a majority was favour- 
 able to it. He was impatient of such a result. Davis 
 suggested that to avoid the spectacle of open divisions 
 the question should not be dealt with by the Asso- 
 ciation at all. O'Connell would have none of the 
 -suggestion. He brought it before a full meeting in 
 Conciliation Hall. Sir Robert Inglis, member for the 
 University of Oxford, had stigmatized the projected col- 
 leges as *' godless colleges." This was said from the 
 extreme Protestant point of view. O'Connell thanked 
 him for teaching him that word, and, as a Gatholicy 
 denounced them too as ** godless.*' His son John, 
 ■a poor-spirited bigot, who aspired to be his sue* 
 cessor, and already possessed a great influence over 
 his father's mind and the proceedings of the Asso- 
 ciation, followed in the same tone. O'Connell proposed 
 -Catholic colleges in Cork and Galway. and a Presbyterian 
 college in Belfast. To the Young Ireland men, who 
 <oared for nothing except as a means to Repeal, and for 
 
186 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNFLL. 
 
 that end were ardently working for a union of Catholics- 
 and Protestants in one party, this seemed madness. It 
 had been bad enough when O'Connell treated the Fede- 
 ralists with discourtesy, not to say contempt. To see 
 all their efforts at union destroyed by this rekindling of 
 religious strife was more than they could bear. They 
 openly dissented from their leader in the Association 
 Hall. At a subsequent meeting, what had been merely 
 the cut and thrust of debate, became the blows and 
 wounds of personality. O'Connell denounced the Bill 
 as ** execrable," and prejudicial to ** faith and morals.'^ 
 A clever bat dissolute free-lance named Conway rose 
 and attacked Davis and his party, declaring that their 
 indifference to the perilous character of the Bill was 
 only part of their general indifference to religion. Some 
 of them were Protestants; in an assembly consisting 
 principally of ardent Catholics the hit told. O^Connell 
 so far forgot himself as to wave his cap round his head 
 in unrestrained applause. Davis denied the charge- 
 O'Connell came into collision with him, and used words 
 which, whatever Davis might do, his followers could not 
 forgive : — 
 
 The principle of the Bill [said he] has been lauded bj" Mr. Davis, 
 and was advocated in a newspaper professing to be the organi 
 of the Roman Catholic people of this country, but which I emphati- 
 cally pronounce to be no such thing. The section of politicians styling 
 themselves the Young Ireland party, anxious to rule the destinies of 
 this country, start up and support this measure. There is no such 
 party as that styled Young Ireland. There may be a few individuals 
 who take that denomination on themselves. I am for Old Ireland. 
 *Tis time that this delusion should be put an end to. Young Ireland 
 may play what pranks they please. I do not envy them the namd- 
 they rejoice in. I shall stand by Old Ireland, and I have some slight 
 notion that Old Ireland will stand by me. 
 
 The deed was done. Though Davis and O'Connell 
 became reconciled before the meeting separated, thera 
 
LAST DAYS. 187 
 
 could after this be no peace between the Young Ireland 
 and the Old. 
 
 O'Connell had always been intolerant of any opposi* 
 tion to his will among his followers, though with com- 
 bined good nature and good sense he had never been 
 jealous of expressions of mere verbal dissent. The feud 
 between him and TheO'Gorman Mahon arising out of the 
 Clare election of 1830 remained open for several years> 
 and about 1833 O'Connell refused him admission to hia 
 National Trades Union. Galway, one of the Repeal 
 members, had voted with the Government in one of the 
 divisions upon the Coercion Bill of 1833. At the earliest 
 opportunity he was drummed -out of the party. But 
 now O'Connell had far more cause than pique or 
 jealousy to turn him against the party of the 
 Nation, Davis died, and they began to get somewhat 
 out of hand. Some newspaper had pointed out the 
 military advantage, in case of a rebellion, of the pro-^ 
 jected system of Irish railways ; it brought all Ireland 
 within a few hours of the garrison of Dublin. Mitchell 
 replied with an article in the NalioHy explaining to hypo- 
 thetical iusurgcnts the best modes of disabling the rail- 
 ways. O'Connell opeuly disapproved of the article. 
 The Government prosecuted Duffy, the editor of the 
 Nation. O'Connell declined to say anything in his 
 defence. 
 
 Soon it became clear that the old agitation for Repeal 
 was abandoned and that O'Connell was returning to the 
 policy of supporting the Whigs, whioh he had pursued 
 from 1835 to 1840. During the autumn of 1845 he 
 had, at various provincial meetings, pressed for the for- 
 mation of a Parliamentary party. He called for the 
 return of sixty-five Repealers at the next General Elec- 
 tion. In particular he warned Sheil that he must 
 
188 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL. 
 
 accept the Kepeal pledge or lose his seat. In December, 
 during the crisis when Russell attempted and failed to 
 form a Ministry and Peel was compelled to resume the 
 Government, he made a long speech in the Repeal Asso- 
 ciation, unmistakeably offering the Whigs the support of 
 the Repeal party in return for a very moderate programme 
 of Irish reform. In May 1846 he attended a meeting of 
 Lord John Russell's followers at his house in Chesham 
 Place. At the end of June Peel fell and O'Connell entered 
 into an alliance with the new Whig Ministry. Ministers 
 with Irish seats were not to be opposed ; one of them 
 was Sheil, who sat for Dungarvan. He was the new 
 Master of the Mint. The patronage of Ireland was in 
 return to be at O'Connell's disposal as it had been under 
 Lord Melbourne's Administration. This brought the 
 conflict with the Young Ireland party to a head at once. 
 O'Connell had ceased to be willing to tolerate them ; 
 they would follow the banner of no captain of Whig 
 mercenaries. By tactics, adroit but disingenuous, 
 O'Connell contrived to let Shell's election pass without 
 opposition. The Young Ireland party considered this 
 a disgrace to the cause of Repeal. But they were most 
 anxious not to abandon the Association. John O'Con- 
 nell was scheming for the succession to his father: 
 Elijah's mantle was to fall upon him. He wished to be 
 not less an autocrat than his father was, and therefore 
 he was anxious to expel the Young Ireland members, 
 to crush the Nation, and leave himself without check 
 or rival. They were equally anxious to thwart this 
 plan. O'Connell, himself sincerely alarmed at the tone, 
 or what he believed to be the tone, of the Nation, was 
 now worked upon by his son to take steps to assert his 
 own authority and to drive the party of the Nation into 
 secession. He proposed the adoption by the Associa- 
 
LAST DAYS. 18^ 
 
 tion of a report, pledging its members to a renunciation 
 of the use of physical force in the agitation under any 
 circumstances whatever. The pledge was a purely gra- 
 tuitous one. As an abstract theorem of politics, it was 
 maintained by none but Quakers, and hardly acted on 
 by them. O'Connell himself had a thousand times 
 over used language in flat contradiction of it. As a 
 motion of immediate expediency, it was unnecessary, 
 because, in spite of Mitcheirs article, nobody was at 
 present advocating the employment of physical force. 
 But it was a stroke of very great ingenuity. To oppose 
 it for its own sake looked seditious, and, coupled with 
 the existing charge of infidelity, was certain to alienate 
 the Roman Catholic clergy. To oppose it on the 
 ground that it was needless and irrelevant was to expose 
 its opponents to the charge of a pedantic or vexatious 
 hindrance of the policy of the Liberator. Meagher, a 
 lad of fiery eloquence, whose subsequent speech 
 upon this pledge earned him the title of Meagher 
 ** of the sword/* made matters worse by charging one 
 of O'ConnelFs henchmen with having sought and obtained 
 a Government place, a charge all the more unpalatable 
 for being true. The adoption of the pledge was cnrricd 
 all but unanimously. The Young Ireland pnrty did not 
 instantly retire, but it only needed a little discourteous 
 interruption and hectoring from John O'Connell to 
 drive them out. The Association was purged of its for- 
 ward party, and O'Connell was free to act up to his 
 parliamentary alliance with the Whigs. But the seces- 
 sion reduced the Association to impotence and O'Con- 
 nell did not live to serve his allies. 
 
 While these dissensions and intrigues were proceeding 
 in Dublin and London, Ireland was passing through the 
 very darkest of her many hours of suffering. The Irish 
 
190 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL. 
 
 people, which had multiplied beyond the normal capa- 
 city of the soil to support it, had come to depend for its 
 existence upon a single root. The potato was a crop 
 more abundant, more easily cultivated, and more nutri- 
 tious than any other. But it is unfortunately liable 
 to the attacks of a disease, which, unforeseen and 
 beyond the reach of any remedy, destroys the entire 
 <}rop with unexampled rapidity. In October 1845 this 
 disease made its appearance and spread slowly. Soon 
 the people of Ireland were starving by thousands. But 
 Ireland's adversity was England's opportunity, and the 
 helping hand of public and private charity was nobly 
 held out for her succour. It was hoped that the crop 
 of 1846 would be a full one ; instead of being a full one 
 it perished with an almost instantaneous blight. In 
 July the traveller from Cork to Dublin found the crop 
 all around him luxuriant, plenteous, and sound. A 
 week later he returned through a country covered with 
 jTotting vegetation and sickly with the smell of decay. 
 Where thousands had wanted the autumn before, scores 
 of thousands died of hunger in 1846, and scores of 
 thousands more of the fever and pestilence which fol- 
 lowed in the track of famine. It was a misery that 
 mocked the powerlessness of agitation. O'Connell's 
 tmind was distressed by the dissensions in the Associa- 
 tion, by the rash and daring projects which he believed 
 the Young Ireland party entertained, by the disappoint- 
 ment which had fallen upon the rosy hopes of 1843. 
 But beside the famine these were light matters. When 
 he went in the autumn to Darrynane, he passed through 
 a country that seemed accursed; where he had been 
 accustomed to see crowds of rejoicing and triumphant 
 supporters, he met troops of haggard and wasted 
 wretches, whose sufferings were beyond human help. 
 
LAST DAYS. 191 
 
 It was to this all his agitation had brought him. After 
 fifty years of effort and thirty years of triumph, he felt 
 that he was passing from the scene with nothing but 
 -distress to cloud his present, and no cheering hopes of 
 the future to console him. He was going down to his 
 grave, and there 
 
 Vestibultun ante ipsum primisque in faucibus Orci 
 Luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae : 
 Pallentesque habitant Morbi tristisque Senectus 
 Et Metus et malesuada Fames ac turpis Egestas 
 Terribiles visu formae. 
 
 His end, indeed, was now near at hand. In addition 
 to the woes of his country which he saw around him, 
 his faculties had long been decaying under the strain of 
 private anxieties. He was now visibly a broken man. 
 -Shortly before his imprisonment, though all but seventy 
 years of age, he had fallen deeply in love with a girl 
 . hardly out of her teens, an Englishwoman and a Pro- 
 testant. Her persistent refusals to marry him allayed 
 neither his passion nor his disturbance of mind. His 
 •religious austerities increased ; his family began to fear 
 that he might take the Trappist vows. Fierce attacks 
 were made on him for his inveterate habit of controlling 
 the expenditure of the Repeal Association, without 
 {)ermitting the accounts to be published. He dis- 
 dained the imputations upon his honesty, but he 
 •could not forget that the best friends of the cause 
 condemned his refusal to publish the accounts. 
 During the misery of the famine the Tufu*8 sent a 
 special correspondent to investigate the condition 
 of his estates about Darrynane, and pubhshed a 
 very dark account of his conduct as a landlord. 
 The warfare of oontradictions, which this entailed, 
 was very harassing to his health. His physical 
 
192 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL. 
 
 powers now gave way. He paid his last visit to Darry- 
 nane in September 1846 ; his once upright figure wa» 
 bent ; the vivacity of manner and the elasticity of foot- 
 step, which had long been remarkable in him, were 
 gone ; he shuffled rather than walked into his house. 
 On the 26th of January 1847 he left Ireland for the 
 last time and the darkness of the hour was accentuated 
 by the fact that on the steamer, among his fellow-pas- 
 sengers, there chanced to be a Protestant clergyman and 
 a Catholic priest, both visiting England to beg alms 
 for their starving parishioners. He appeared in Parlia- 
 ment on February 8th, and solemnly warned the Go-^ 
 vernment that they little realised how great was the 
 misery and disaster impending over Ireland. A quarter 
 of the people must die if the House would not save 
 them, and that could be done only by some great 
 act of national charity. It was a solemn appeal and 
 the House listened to it with respect, but the change . 
 in O'Connell himself was distressing. His eloquence 
 was gone. He appeared to be '* a feeble old man mut- 
 tering at a table " ; his figure was shrunk ; his once 
 splendid voice was so feeble that it could scarcely be 
 heard. He was but the wreck of himself. 
 
 He went to Hastings to recover a little strength and 
 then to Folkestone. But he knew ho was a dying man,, 
 and he was eager at all hazards, before he died, to .reach 
 Kome, the sacred seat of his Church. He embarked 
 amid a great crowd, and on March 22nd reached Bou- 
 logne. He was visited at his hotel, the Hotel des 
 Bains, by the Abbe van Drival, a canon of Arras. He 
 was wearing his green and gold Liberator's cap, but he 
 .was feeble, full of the preoccupation of death, full of the 
 fear that he had not strength to reach Rome. The 
 Abbe wished him better health. *' God's will be 
 
LAST DAYS. 198 
 
 done/* said O'Connell in an inexpressibly solemn 
 tone. 
 
 Sa tete [says the Abb^] etait enorme, sa face carree comme la fac« 
 d*uii lion ; ses traits etaient fortement marques ; le feu jaillissaii 
 de ses yeux pourtant. ... II etait e'rident qu' O'Connell e'tait alors 
 preoccupe sans ccsse d'une seule idee, qui ne le quittait plus, et dont 
 on m*avait recommande de ne lui point parler, les malheurs d'Irlande, 
 les folies d* O'Brien.* 
 
 Travelling by slow stages he reached Paris on the 
 26th. At the Hotel Windsor great numbers of per- 
 sons came to visit him, among them Montalembert and 
 De Berryer. He consulted Doctors Chomel and Oliffe 
 and was told that he was dying of a lingering congestion 
 of the brain of two or three years standing. By slow 
 degrees he was brought by Nevers, Moulines, and Lapa- 
 lisse to Lyons, which he reached on April 11th. There 
 he was detained for several days by frost and snow. 
 The people took the liveliest interest in his welfare ; 
 prayers were said for his recovery in all the churches. 
 If he walked abroad, crowds gathered round him, but, 
 oppressed by melancholy, his head hung down, moving 
 by slow and painful steps, he did not notice tbem. He 
 left Lyons on the 22nd, and passing through Avignon^ 
 reached Marseilles on May 3rd. The day but one after 
 he sailed for Genoa, and on arriving went to the Hotel 
 Fader. He never left it alive. He was attended by 
 Dr. Miley of Dublin as his chaplain, and his faithful 
 valet Duggan. He was soon very ill ; leeches were 
 applied but gave him no relief. Presently he became 
 delirious, and was oppressed with a haunting fear that 
 lie might be buried before life had really left his body. 
 For some days, with occasional intervals of conscious- 
 ness, he remained in this condition. At dawn on the 
 * (/Connell et /« ColUge Anglai$ Sl OmtTi par Louis Ommk, 
 ArrM, 1867. 
 
 18 
 
J 94 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL. 
 
 morning of the 15th, the Cardinal Archbishop of Genoa, 
 though in extreme old age, came at a hasty summons 
 and administered the last sacraments of the Koman 
 Church. ** All Genoa was praying for him.'' His last 
 hour had indeed come ; at half-past nine that night he 
 died. 
 
 His will directed that his heart should be removed 
 and buried in Rome. His body was taken to the 
 hospital on the day after his death and embalmed. His 
 heart was placed in an urn and taken to Eome, and 
 there, with many pompous obsequies, placed in the 
 Church of St. Agatha, where there is a monument to 
 him representing him at the bar of the House of 
 Commons refusing the old Parliamentary oath. His 
 body was brought to Ireland and reached Dublin in 
 August. It was received with almost royal honours 
 and was buried on the 5th in Glasnevin cemetery. 
 In 1869 an Irish round tower, 165 feet high, was erected 
 to his memory and his body was then removed to a 
 crypt at its base. 
 
195 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 DOMESTIC LIFE AND CHABACTBB. 
 
 Hie wife and family — His domestic life and amasements — ffis per- 
 sonal piety — His appearance — His oratory — His political cha- 
 racter and achievements. 
 
 O'OoNNELL lived from his thirtieth to his Latest year 
 full in face of the public. The law courts, the platform, 
 or the House of Commons, claimed all his energies and 
 most of his time. Though devotedly attached to his 
 family and his domestic life, they formed but a small 
 part of his existence. He married on June 23rd 1802 a 
 distant relative, Mary, daughter of Dr. Edward O'Con- 
 nell of Tralee ; the marriage, which was contrary to the 
 wishes of his uncle Maurice, was celebrated privately in 
 Dame Street, Dublin, in the lodgings of James Connor, 
 the bride's brother-in-law. Maurice O'Connell was at 
 first deeply offended at the mntch^ but presently became 
 reconciled to it. Of this marriage a numerous family 
 was born : four sons, Maurice, Morgan, and John, all 
 at different times members of ParliamtMit, and f)anicl ; 
 and three daughters, £llen, who married Christopher 
 Fitzsimon, Catharine, who married Charles O'Connell, 
 
 18 • 
 
196 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL. 
 
 and Elizabeth, who married Nicholas French of Fort 
 William, Roscommon. Surrounded by his family, he 
 took the little distraction that he allowed himself from 
 his profession and his agitation. His life was sternly 
 laborious and punctiliously methodical. 
 
 He told me [says Mrs. Nicol]that for twenty-five years of his life he 
 rose soon after four, lighted his own fire, and was always seated at 
 business at five ; at half -past eight one of his little girls came by turns 
 to announce breakfast ; gave an hour to that. At half-past ten he set 
 oflF to the Court-house, walked two miles therein twenty-five minutes, 
 always reached the Court five minutes before the judges arrived. 
 From eleven to half-past three was not a minute unoccupied ; at half- 
 past three he returned, taking the office of the Catholic Association 
 on his way. He always went in (the regular meetings were only 
 once a week), read the letters, wrote a sentence or two in reply, out of 
 which his secretary wrote a full letter. Returned home, dined at 
 four ; with his family till half -past six, then went to his study - 
 went to bed at a quarter before ten, his head on his pillow always 
 at ten. 
 
 After he gave up practice at the bar, about the time 
 when he entered Parliament, he was less stern with 
 himself^ and the family breakfast hour became ten. 
 But it was at Darrynane that his real moments of hap- 
 piness were passed. It had been the home of his boy- 
 hood, and it was the solace of his old age. He found 
 in wandering upon the Atlantic shores, or among the 
 mountains of Kerry, food at once for his imagination 
 and for the vein of melancholy that ran through his as 
 it runs through all Irish natures. His enjoyment of 
 nature in contrast to the sordid business, in which he 
 was obliged to spend so much of his time, was keen. In 
 1829 he wrote regretfully to a friend of his night jour- 
 ney through the Kerry Hills from Darrynane to Cork to 
 defend the Doneraile prisoners : " At ten that morning, 
 after that glorious feast of soul, I found myself settled 
 down amid all the rascalities of an Irish Court of Jus- 
 
DOMESTIC LIFE AND CHARACTER, 197 
 
 tice." To the Kerry sport of hare-hunting with beagles 
 among the hills, he was passionately attached. His 
 pack was famous all over Ireland. At night he would 
 go round his drawing-room and ask his guests, ** Are 
 you for the mountain in the morning ? ^' and gave 
 orders for the huntsman to call the sportsmen at 4 a.m. 
 Equipped with a long wooden staff, he followed hifT 
 dogs on foot, even in his old age, with extraordinary 
 vigour and fleetness. While his companions beat for 
 game, he would hold a hasty court to arbitrate upon the 
 quarrels of his tenants, and would break away from them 
 to cheer on his beagles, and pursue the chase from one 
 hill-top to another. Breakfast was brought out to the 
 hillside, but the party,' however fasting, was not allowed 
 to sit down till two hares at least had been killed. At 
 breakfast he eagerly devoured the contents of his post- 
 bag ; but when the time came for starting the hunt 
 again, he impetuously strewed the grass with the letters 
 and newspapers that he threw away. In such hard sport 
 his day was spent, and at dark he would return home 
 the freshest of the whole party. When he refused to be 
 <Jhief Baron, ** I don't at all deny," said he, ** that the 
 office would have had great attractions for me. There 
 would not be more than eighty days duty in the year. 
 I would take a country house near Dublin and walk 
 into town, and during the intervals of judicial labour 
 1 'd go to Darrynane. I should bo idle in the early 
 part of April, just when the jack hares leave the most 
 splendid trails on the mountains.'' In 1840, when ho 
 was sixty-five, he wrote to bis son John that he had 
 killed five hares in one day, and it was always to Dar- 
 rynane that ho turned whenever he could snatch a brief 
 respite from the toils of agitation. 
 
 There he kept almost open house. His relatives 
 
19H . LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL, 
 
 alone were very numerous, for he had twenty-one 
 uncles and aunts, and seven married sisters, and wa» 
 kind to all his kinsfolk ; but visitors from abroad, and 
 even the casual tourist who passed his door, were hos- 
 pitably received. His table was generally laid for thirty 
 at Darrynane. In Dublin he lived for nearly forty 
 years at 30 Merrion Square south, and there he loved 
 to make a handsome figure. He set up his carriage when 
 he had been a few years at the bar, and his green coach 
 and his footmen in green liveries were a striking sight 
 in the streets of Dublin. He was burthened, too, with 
 the expense of a house in London during the session of 
 Parliament. Generally he lived in Langham Place, but 
 in 1832 he had a house in Albemarle Street, and in 
 1835 at 9 Clarges Street. All these expenses, together 
 with agitation, elections, and the maintenance of his 
 sons in Parliament, caused him an enormous annual 
 outlay, and he was a man habitually careless of money^ 
 He lived in a world where debt was no discredit, and 
 had little time to spare for the regulation of his private 
 affairs. Shortly after he was called to the bar he ac^ 
 cepted bills to accommodate a friend, which hampered 
 him for twenty years, nor was he ever free from embar- 
 rassments. And yet his means were large. In addition 
 to his professional income, his patrimony was handsome. 
 His uncle Maurice died, a childless widower, in 1825,. 
 and left his estates at Darrynane to his nephew. They 
 were estimated to be worth 5^4,000 a year, though as to 
 one-half O'Connell is said to have had only a life^ 
 interest. By the death of his uncle, Count Daniel, in 
 1834 he also inherited a considerable fortune. Fifty 
 thousand pounds was subscribed for him in 1829 after 
 the passing of the Relief Act, and the O'Connell Tri- 
 bute or National Annuity subsequently became an 
 
DOMESTIC LIFE AND CHABAGTEB. 199 
 
 annual offering. It was managed for him with great 
 skill by Patrick Vincent Fitzpatrick, a wit and bon 
 vivant who did not concern himself with politics, and 
 was collected in sums of 10s. and 5s., chiefly from the 
 clergy and middle classes. A day was fixed for its 
 simultaneous collection in chapels and other places, and 
 a writer of repute was employed to compose a eulogy 
 upon its object. Its gross amount averaged £15,000, 
 but the expenses of collection were so heavy as to reduce 
 its proceeds to O'Connell to £10,000. 
 
 He was virulently attacked for receiving this tribute, 
 and was called " the big beggarman," and a ** paid 
 patriot." But, since the controversies of his lifetime 
 have been calmed, no fair man has condemned him for 
 taking the free offerings of a people, for whose service 
 he had resigned his profession and spent all his ener- 
 gies. Yet he died poor, and left his family little more 
 than a competence. His conduct in money matters was 
 fiercely assailed, and be was charged with mismanage- 
 ment of the large sums of the Catholic and Repeal Rent 
 which passed through his hands, but not one of these 
 charges could be sustained. It should be remembered 
 that for years he had only to ask, and he might have 
 procured for every one of his male relatives lucrative 
 and easy Government posts. Yet the only offices his 
 relatives held were a stipendiary magistracy hold by his 
 son-in-law, and a registrarship by his son Maurice, 
 which was not given at his desire. 
 
 Altliough when first he returned from France he was 
 affected by some sceptical doubts, through all the years 
 of his latter life ho was devoutly and sincerely pious. 
 He employed the leisure hours of his first years at the 
 bar in translating Arnaud's Proofs of the Infallibility 
 of the Church. In 1824 and 1826 he engaged in public 
 
200 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL. 
 
 controversies with Mr. Noel and with Daly, afterwards 
 Bishop of Cashel. His theological learning, however, 
 was small. It was his habit, however busy he was, how- 
 ever late he had gone to rest, in Dublin and in London 
 constantly to attend early mass at some neighbouring 
 chapel, and at Darrynane, his domestic chaplain. Father 
 O'Sullivan, celebrated mass daily at 9 a.m. In August 
 1838 he performed a retreat of great austerity at the Cis- 
 tercian Convent of Mount Melleraye in Waterford. To be- 
 guile the tedium of his long and wearisome journeys from 
 meeting to meeting, he was accustomed to repeat to 
 himself Latin hymns. That he was unconscious of the 
 edifying effect upon both priests and people of such dis- 
 tinguished piety is not likely ; but ifwould be equally 
 unreasonable to suppose, that he was prompted to it 
 by anything but the natural impulse of a religious mind. 
 In all his correspondence with bishops and clergy and 
 constantly in speaking of them he used language of 
 deference, not to say subjection, which now has a very 
 singular appearance and in his later days gave some 
 offence to the younger generation by whom he was sur- 
 rounded. Nature had given him, and his foreign edu- 
 cation had increased, a hierocratic turn of mind, which 
 made him rest gladly upon the authority of the priest- 
 hood, and act with them without misgiving or misun- 
 derstanding. 
 
 His personal appearance was impressive. He was 
 but half-an-inch under six feet in height, but a round- 
 ness about the shoulders, which increased his naturally 
 burly and ecclesiastical appearance, rather diminished 
 his apparent stature. His figure was broad and thick, his 
 step energetic and swift, and in his customary green coat 
 and broad-brimmed hat, striding swiftly along, he was a 
 well-known and remarkable figure about the streets of 
 
DOMESTIC LIFE AND CHARACTER. 201 
 
 Dublin. His mouth and the lower part of his face were 
 'beautifully shaped, but his nose was short, and gave to 
 its upper part a rather vulgar appearance. As a young 
 man his complexion was very ruddy ; his eyes were keen 
 blue, and from middle-life he habitually wore a black 
 wig. Such was his face in repose, but when excited or 
 animated, it was extraordinarily mobile, and flashed 
 with every phase of emotion. Humour, pathos, scorn, 
 iindignation, hopefulness, or gloom, all seemed equally 
 the natural expression of a face, which instantly reflected 
 •every mood of the feeling within. Though he greatly 
 •disliked sitting for portraits, many exist. The earliest 
 is a pencil sketch, dated 1810, and engraved in Miss 
 •Cusack's life of him. There is also a portrait by Ha- 
 verty in the National Bank and another by Catterson 
 Smith in the Municipal Chamber at the City Hall, 
 Dublin, and he also sat to Duval and to Wilkie. There 
 are statues of him by Hogan in the Dublin City Hall 
 and at Limerick, by Foley in Dublin, and by Cahill in 
 Ennis. 
 
 No doubt there was in his composition a oertain rude 
 
 animalism^ almost inseparable from a nature so 
 
 buoyant, so energetic, so indefatigable. He appears 
 
 after his marriage to have been engaged in at least 
 
 one intrigue, the fruit of which was a natural 
 
 son, who was born about 1820, and to whom and 
 
 his mother he behaved with considerable neglect. 
 
 In manner ho was obliging, suave, kindly, especially 
 
 to children, of whom he was very fond. In spite of 
 
 the violence which he displayed towards his public 
 
 •opponents he was singularly forbearing to private 
 
 ^enemies; he never made use of his powers to their 
 
 injury, and often employed it for their promotion or 
 
 advantage. 
 
202 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL. 
 
 One so busy as he was from manhood to old age, had 
 naturally scant time for study. He appears to have 
 had little scholarship, and beyond his profession little 
 learning, though his great talent enabled him to put 
 all he knew to the best use. He was an admirer of 
 Dickens, and read novels eagerly but few other books. . 
 His speeches owe singularly little to quotation or 
 allusion. For his jest upon Stanley and his seceding 
 companions, 
 
 See down thy vale, romantic Ashbourne, glides 
 The Derby dilly carrying six insides, 
 
 he is said to have been indebted to Romayne, member- 
 for Clonmel ; and almost his only other witticism that 
 owes anything to literature is the well-known parody 
 upon Colonels Sibthorp, Percival, and Verny : — 
 
 Three colonels in three distant counties born, 
 Lincoln, Armagh, and Sligo did adorn : 
 The first in matchless impudence surpassed, 
 The next in bigotry, in both the last. 
 The force of nature could no further go, 
 To beard the third she shaved the other two. 
 
 His publications were almost confined to his nume- 
 rous letters upon public questions, of which perhaps the 
 best is his Letter to the Earl of Shrewshury, in 1842.. 
 He also began a work called a Memoir on Ireland, 
 'Native and Saxon, published in 1843, an extremely 
 amorphous and ill-digested book, which has not even* 
 the merit of being thoroughly accurate. It never got 
 beyond one volume. In 1836 he became, with Dr. 
 Wiseman, part-editor and proprietor of the Dublin 
 RevieiVy but whether he took any part in writing for it 
 does not appear. A long article upon his uncle, Count 
 Daniel O'Connell, which appeared in the journals of 
 1834, is also attributed to him. His knowledge of 
 
DOMESTIC LIFE AND GHAUACTEB. 205 
 
 French literature was small ; but he spoke French fairly 
 well, though not with perfect ease. In December 1835 
 he was approached on behalf of the "Lyons conspira- 
 tors," who were to be tried on a charge of high treason 
 before the French chamber of peers, and was asked to 
 go to France as their advocate. His answer — a refusal 
 — is interesting. He says : — 
 
 I am restraiued from attempting it by one only motive, the convic- 
 tion of sheer incapacity to perform that duty eflBciently in the French 
 language. It is true that I understand the language well, but I can- 
 not speak it with that abundant fluency, which so imj)oii;ant an argu- 
 ment would require. I never write out any discourse beforehand, nor 
 could I do it without utterly cramping the force and nerve of the 
 very limited talent I possess, and my command of the French lan- 
 guage is not sufficient to enable me to translate my ideas as I went 
 along in speaking without embarrassing my powers of thought. 
 
 But as an orator O'Connell had very great genius ; 
 in oratory he found his natural and constant ex- 
 pression. Yet he had the strength of mind never to 
 give the reins to his tongue for the mere purpose of 
 personal display. In the conduct of a cause he was in 
 every moment an actor ; he affected extreme careless- 
 ness to cover his anxiety, indignation to hide a bad case, 
 bonhomie to put a witness off his guard, woe to touch 
 the feelings of a jury, and he never allowed himself to 
 make a fine speech at the cost of his client. ** Ah ! " he 
 said, '' a speech is a fine thing, but the verdict is the 
 great thing." Thus playing a part at will, and never, 
 in his most impassioned moments, losing his self- 
 oontrol, ho adapted himself with marvellous versa- 
 tility to every audience and every style of address. In 
 the Crown Court, at nuti prius, or in banco ; before 
 a mob. a committee, or the House of Commons, he 
 played the tolc suited to the place. Where too many 
 of the great Irish barristers had been helpless unless 
 
204 LIFE OF DANIEL O'GONNELL. 
 
 they were appealing to all the noblest passions of hu* 
 inanity, he could argue a right of way case or a nice 
 point upon a criminal indictment, without rhetoric and 
 as a lawyer should argue it. Before a mass meeting he 
 was a demagogue, bold, rollicking, emotional ; in the 
 House of Commons he put off the demagogue and spoke 
 clearly and calmly, except when he dealt about swash- 
 ing blows with calculated ferocity. In the conduct of 
 the multifarious business of the Catholic or the Repeal 
 Association, he was rapid, matter-of-fact, and business- 
 like; and in an after-dinner speech he could draw upon 
 an unfailing fund of wit or pathos to adorn an oration 
 about nothing at all. Never preparing his speeches, 
 he showed a roughness in his mode of expression, 
 which, though often more trenchant and telling than the 
 most carefully prepared rhetoric, was still oftener in- 
 elegant and cumbrous. In Sheil's often quoted phrase, 
 ** He brings forth a brood of lusty thoughts without a 
 rag to cover them." M. Duvergier speaks of him as 
 " throwing out his opinions in a negligent manner," 
 and N. P. Rogers describes his speaking as '^ public 
 talk." He never scrupled to repeat himself; indeed, it 
 was one of his devices to hit upon some telling phrase, 
 which an ignorant audience could carry away, to repeat it 
 over and over again in every form, and to do this at meet- 
 ing after meeting, untilby constant reiteration the public 
 had thoroughly learnt its lesson. This habit of repetition 
 occasionally took odd forms. He was fond of making 
 gushing allusions in his speeches to his mother, his 
 wife, his children, and his grandchildren. After his wife's 
 death in 1826, he said in one of his speeches : ** But that 
 subject brings me back to a being of whom I dare not 
 speak in the profanation of words. No ! I will not 
 mention that name," and so forth. For once this was 
 
DOMESTIC LIFE AND CHARACTER. 205 
 
 all very well ; having accidentally reminded himself of 
 his lost wife, the bereaved widower might well check 
 himself thus. But Daunt heard him repeat this im- 
 promptu in public speeches several times, and always in 
 identically the same words. To wear one*s heart on 
 one's sleeve in this way, and affect to find it painful, 
 strikes the spectator as being curiously inconsistent ; 
 yet no doubt each time that he said it, O'Connell, accus-. 
 tomed for thirty years to feel in public, was perfectly 
 sincere, and saw no reason why he should not use over 
 again a passage which had so often proved efficacious 
 before. His readiness and self-possession in controlling 
 an audience were marvellous. During the Repeal year- 
 he was anxious to restrain his followers from violent 
 expressions of hatred towards the Government without 
 at the same time giving them offence. ** I wish a crow 
 picked Peel's eyes out," bawled an angry auditor parenthe- 
 tically at one of the great meetings. ** I wish a crow," 
 retorted O'Connell instantly, " came and stuffed your 
 mouth with potatoes." On another occasion, when the 
 people were densely packed together, a horse, picketed 
 on the fringe of the crowd, broke loose and caused a 
 panic. There was an alarm that the meeting was 
 charged by dragoons. In a mom(»nt a dangerous stam- 
 pede would have begun. ** Stop," thundered O'Connell 
 at the top of his voice, and the crowd stopped instantly 
 and order was restored. At another meeting, which 
 was held in a loft, it had been thought necessary to< 
 underpin the floor, to provide for the weight of the 
 crowd. O'Counell was speaking, when word was passed 
 to him that the floor was unsafe, and that the stays wen^ 
 giving way. 1 lo calmly finished his sentence, and then 
 said that circumstances rendered it necessary to adjourn 
 the meeting to a plot of vacant land hard by, and4 
 
206 LIFE OF DANIEL 0' CON NELL. 
 
 asked the people to file out and go there. In a few 
 moments it became plain that this would not be done 
 without a dangerous amount of jostling. Then he 
 quietly told them the state of the case, ordered them to 
 file out right and left, two and two, at the door, and said 
 he would leave the room last himself. The people 
 became perfectly quiet and obeyed his instructions, and 
 though they were three-quarters of an hour in getting 
 out no accident occurred. 
 
 But however open to criticism his speeches may be 
 from the point of view of the student of rhetoric, how- 
 ever unfinished or redundant they may seem when read, 
 they produced as they fell from his lips an effect almost 
 unexampled. He was gifted with a superb voice, full as 
 a bell, of wide compass and of great power. He had 
 carefully studied Pitt's speaking, and had attained a per- 
 fectly natural and unstudied action. His was the 
 instinct of an orator, never so much at home as when 
 talking with the people at his feet. He had a fine 
 presence, a complete command of telling, nervous lan- 
 guage, a rich Irish accent which went to his hearers' 
 hearts, and a finished delivery, and thus equipped, he 
 threw himself into his work and dilated upon the sub- 
 ject which engrossed him with superb and exhaustless 
 eloquence. The peroration of his speech on the first 
 reading of the Coercion Bill of 1833 is a good example 
 of his unprepared and inornate but flowing and affecting 
 eloquence : — 
 
 I have now wearied the House. I have not exhansted the subject, 
 nor have I exhausted the deep interest I feel in it. I say, that as far 
 as political agitation is concerned, there is no such case made out, 
 that any dispassionate man, putting his hand to his heart, can say 
 there is evidence to connect it with predial insurrection. Upon in- 
 quiring into the subject, facts to the contrary stare you in the face. 
 Is not Ireland in distress? Is she not in want, and suffering 
 
DOMESTIC LIFE AND CHARACTER, 207 
 
 grievances ? The noble Lord, the Member for Armagh, exclaims 
 that relief must be given, and you promise relief. Oh yes ! if we 
 pass this Bill you will give us a measure of Church Relief ! But are 
 you sure of passing that measure of relief in another House ? It has 
 little immediate practical benefit besides the abolition of Church-cess. 
 But to secure it, why not adopt the wise motion of my honourable 
 friend and keep your hands off this measure until you have steered 
 the other over the rocks and quicksands in another place ? I am not 
 entering into any compromise. I say that Ireland requires relief, and 
 I ask how do you propose to afford it her ? You will not apply any 
 part of the rich revenues of the Church to the relief of the poor. 
 What is to become of them ? You can give them nothing ; and the 
 •only thing I can offer them is hope — the hope of a domestic Legisla- 
 ture. You may think that a delusive hope. How are j'ou to show it 
 to be such ? By anticipating me, by evincing that you are a protect- 
 ing Legislature — that you are a kind and paternal Legislature. Oh ! 
 instead of that you turn away the look of kindliness, you turn away 
 all benetits and leave the grinding evils. You leave the rack-renting 
 absentees, you leave every misery and grievance untouched; for 
 bread you give them a stone ; you raise the scorpion rod of despotic 
 authority over them, and say that ** you must be feared before yon 
 «can be loved." I deny it, Sir. I deny that you have made out a case ; 
 I deny that you have shown that predial insurrection has anything to 
 •do with political agitation ; I deny the right upon which you foand 
 this coercion ; I deny that witnesses have been injured, lately at least, 
 to any public knowledge. If they have, I utterly deny that any juror 
 has been injured during the whole period of this political agitation. 
 Predial agitation subsisted for forty years before political agitation 
 -oommonced. 1 laving thus demonstrated that this measure is by no moans 
 neooHsary, shall I trust the despotic power it confers to hands which I 
 think ought to have no power at all — to statosmon who mingle miser- 
 able personal feelings with their political conduct ? I call upon you, 
 if you would oonciliato Ireland — if you would preserve that oonnezion 
 which I desire you to recollect has never yet conferred a single blessing 
 u])on that country — that she knows nothing of you but by distress, for- 
 feitures, and confiscations ; that you have never visited her but in 
 anger ; that the sword of desolation has often swept over her, as 
 when Cromwell sent his eighty thousand to perish ; that you have 
 burdened her with grinding penal laws, despite of the faith of treaties 
 And in Tiolation of every oompaot, and that you have neglected to 
 fulfil the promises you dealt out to her. You have, it is true, granted 
 Oatholic Emancipation ; but nine and twenty years after it was pro- 
 mised, and five and twenty years after the Parliament uf Ireland must of 
 
208 LIFE OF DANIEL O'GONNELL. 
 
 necessity have done so. We know you as yet but in our sufferings and 
 in our wrongs ; and you are now kind enough to give us as a boon this 
 Act, which deprives us of the Trial by Jury and substitutes Courts 
 Martial — which deprives us of the Habeas Corpus Act, and, in a word,, 
 imposes on a person the necessity of proving himself innocent. That 
 Act you give us, and you tell us it will put down the agitation of the- 
 Repeal of the Union. I tell you that until you do us justice you can 
 never expect to attain your object. The present generation may 
 perish. Your Robespierrian measures may destroy the existing popu- 
 lation ; but the indignant soul of Ireland you can never annihilate- 
 There was a time when a ray of hope dawned upon that country. It 
 was when the present Parliament first assembled. We saw this re- 
 formed House of Commons congregated. We knew that every man. 
 here had a constituency ; we knew that the people of England were 
 represented here ; we knew that the public voice not only would influ- 
 ence your decisions but command your votes; we hoped that jom 
 would afford us a redress of our grievances — and you give us an Act 
 of despotism. 
 
 In his situation he fell inevitably into exag- 
 geration, both of praise and of abuse. His eulogies 
 sometimes were so profusely distributed as to lose 
 all meaning ; but to the leader of a motley com- 
 bination of highly susceptible followers flattery was a 
 necessary instrument of command. A passage from a 
 speech of his in 1813 is characteristic of this mood. 
 He was praising the newspapers of his party : — 
 
 In Ulster we had the Belfast Magazine, a work in which all the 
 elegance of classic taste was combined with all the good feeling of 
 virtuous sentiment and all the purity of genuine Irish patriotism. . . . 
 In Limerick there is one of the best conducted and most patriotic 
 papers in the land, the Limerick Evening Post. In Cork the Mercan- 
 tile Chronicle, an admirable paper, most patriotically conducted by 
 my esteemed friend, Councillor O'Donnell, a member of your board 
 and a first-rate Irishman. In the Evening Post we have a brilliant 
 advocate, that never ceases powerfully to serve and severely to suffer 
 for us. In the Freeman^ s Journal and the Evening Herald we have 
 friends who cannot be bought nor intimidated, and whose talents adorn 
 the cause of their country, which they never cease to promote. But 
 I muat point your vote particularly to the proprietor of the Evening 
 
DOMESTIC LIFE AND CHAEACTEB. 209 
 
 Post, Unseduced by the pleasures and enjoyments of youth, uncon- 
 taminated by the selfishness of wealth, unintimidated by the perse- 
 cutions of power, he seeks to serve you as disinterestedly as he opposes 
 your enemies. ... I cannot conclude without proclaiming my con- 
 viction that Ireland would be free if she possessed a second John 
 Magee. 
 
 He was even more extravagant in his abuse of his 
 enemies, and in this matter it is hard to excuse him. 
 Yet he adopted the language of vituperation deliberately, 
 and with a certain relish. It is interesting to know that 
 his paternal grandmother, an O'Donoghue, and locally 
 nicknamed " Black Mary," was pre-eminent, even in 
 Kerry, for her powers of abuse. O'Connell inherited her 
 talent, and employed it, and defended its employment. 
 He thought it gave spirit to a down-trodden class, who 
 under persecution had forgotten that they had rights. 
 ** When 1 was working out Catholic Emancipation," said 
 he, ** members of Parliament and private friends used to 
 come to me and say, * O'Gonnell, you will never get 
 anything so long as you are so violent/ What did I 
 do ? Why, I became more violent, and I succeeded." 
 His language, however, was more than violent ; it was 
 irreclaimably coarse. To call the Duke of Wellington 
 ** a stunted corporal," Sir Charles Napier ** a doldrum 
 general," Lord Hardinge a ** one-armed miscreant,'* 
 had neither wit nor truth to recommend it, nor could 
 such expressions be needed to inspire courage in a 
 people who had proved their valour under those very 
 commanders. It must, however, be remembered how 
 bitterly and remorselessly he was all his life attacked, 
 and what examples of abusiveness he bad before him in 
 the most distinguished of his countrymen. His reputa- 
 tion and his life were in almost hourly danger. What- 
 ever may be thought of his conduct in declining chal- 
 lenges, it is certain that, if he had been willing to 
 
 14 
 
210 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL. 
 
 accept them, duels would have heen deliberately forced 
 upon him, and he would have lost his life before he was 
 fifty. More cowardly attempts were made upon him : 
 his carriage axles were tampered with and filed half 
 through ; and in 1825 he was waylaid in county Down, 
 and only escaped the assassins by the accidental break- 
 down of his carriage and the cunning of a servant. 
 Grattan gave him at onee a provocation and an example 
 of abuse in language which even O'Connell could not 
 match. He had described him to Moore as ** a bad 
 subject and a worse rebel," but in his irritation at the 
 event of the " securities " controversy, he wrote of him 
 deliberately in an address to the Catholics of Ireland : 
 
 His speaking is extravagant diction. . . . his liberty is not liberal, 
 his politics are not reason, his reason is not learning, his learning is 
 not knowledge ; his rhetoric is a gaudy hyperbole, garnished with 
 faded flowers, such as a drabbled girl would pick up* in Covent Gar- 
 den, stuck in with the taste of a kitchen-maid. He makes politics a 
 trade. . . . He barks and barks, and even when the filthy slaverer 
 has exhausted its poison and returns to its kennel, it there still howls 
 and barks within unseen. 
 
 His English enemies were better able to preserve 
 their self-respect, but their enmity was no less bitter, 
 and their opposition in its way no less galling. The 
 reporters in the House of Commons misreported his 
 speeches, and when he complained in a speech at the 
 Globe Hotel, they met and resolved not to report him at 
 all. He took his revenge upon them by spying stran- 
 gers and clearing them out of the gallery. But society 
 placed its ban upon him. Theodore Grenville ceased to 
 visit the house of a friend because he dreaded meeting 
 O'Connell there. Even when he was the trusty ally of 
 the Whigs he was not a guest at Holland House or at 
 Lansdowne House; and in 1840 Guizot, who was 
 anxious to meet him, found it necessary to get Mrs. 
 
DOMESTIC LIFE AND CHARACTER, 211 
 
 Stanley to arrange a dinner for the purpose. After 
 dinner 0*Connell, finding other guests were expected, 
 humbly rose to go before they arrived, but was at length 
 prevailed upon to stay. 
 
 This merciless warfare, in which he passed his life, 
 this cold and almost contemptuous aversion, which was 
 displayed towards him by those who ought to have been 
 his friends, explain and excuse, though they cannot 
 justify, the extraordinary violence of language, which 
 O'Connell permitted himself to employ. But it was in 
 truth a misfortune to his country, as well as a discredit 
 to himself. In any case, the English must have found 
 him hard to understand, for when first he became a 
 figure in English politics, a Roman Catholic of any 
 kind was unfamiliar to the English, and of the Irish as 
 a people their notions were ill-informed and deeply preju- 
 diced. O'Connell was a fervent Catholic and an Irish- 
 man of the Irish. He was Celtic to the very core, 
 though he possessed qualities rare among the Celts, 
 those of patience and self-control. It was vitally im- 
 portant to himself and to Ireland that be should make 
 himself understood by the English, and it ought to 
 have been his study so to comport himself before the 
 English people as to enlist upon the side of Ireland 
 their sympathies, which are deep, and their sense of 
 justice, which is invariable ; to disarm their preju- 
 dices and compel their respect. Unfortunately, at a 
 hundred points he jarred upon them, offended tbem, 
 alarmed them. His almost ecclesiastical suavity oon- 
 irasted with their surly integrity ; his peculiar want of 
 sensitiveness and punctilio in the conduct of money 
 matter's offended a people peculiarly susceptible upon 
 such points, and obscured his real honesty; his extraor- 
 dinary vivacity and seeming irresponsibility passed their 
 
 14 ♦ 
 
212 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL. 
 
 comprehension. A statesman and an orator, a king's 
 counsel learned in the law, and the leader of his people, 
 who could publicly, and without any sense of reserve, 
 engage in a duel of abuse with a fishfag in the streets of 
 Dublin, and enjoy his own and his friends' congratula- 
 tions upon the happy epithets ** whisky-drinking paral- 
 lelogram " and *' porter-swiping similitude of the bisec- 
 tion of a vortex," was to them an unintelligible paradox. 
 Whether he was a blackguard or a buifoon they could 
 not tell, and did not care to ask ; but, in their eyes, 
 such a man could not be a trusted statesman. But when, 
 in addition to all this, they found him habitually indulg- 
 ing in language so violent as to be almost impotent, and 
 in menaces of resistance that none but a casuist could 
 distinguish from invitations to rebellion, what had been 
 a prejudice resting upon ignorance deepened into a con- 
 demnation prompted by disgust. This was a misfortune 
 for the Irish as well as for O^Connell. He came into 
 English politics late in life, and in spite of the versa- 
 tility which enabled him to make his power felt in the 
 House of Commons, he was not able to change his 
 modes of action or expression, perhaps not even to see 
 the need of any change. Yet in many respects he was 
 well qualified to have won the sympathy of the English. 
 His opinions in general were just and liberal. His 
 Radicalism, indeed, probably was rather a matter of ex- 
 pediency. It is difficult to suppose that he had any 
 deep zeal for triennial Parliaments or the Ballot, and 
 the Chartists at least, incited by Fergus O'Connor, be- 
 lieved he had none, and mistrusted him accordingly. 
 But he was the advocate of Negro Emancipation, though 
 he knew it was costing his cause much valuable aid in 
 America. He was the proclaimed enemy of despots ; he 
 refused the Emperor Nicholas his autograph on that 
 
DOMESTIC LIFE AND CHARACTER, 213 
 
 ground, and characteristically let his refusal be known. 
 His opposition to the Poor Law, if mistaken, was 
 generous ; he was an early Free-Trader and opponent 
 of the Corn Laws. He attacked flogging in the army ; 
 he advocated temperance. Had he only possessed the 
 tact and moderation, which would have won the esteem 
 and respect of the English, the latter part of his life 
 might have been far less barren of results than it was. 
 For barren of results to Ireland his last twenty years in 
 a great measure were. The benefits which the Whigs 
 secured to Ireland no doubt in part were due to him, 
 for although they fell far short of what he desired, it 
 was thanks to his persistent thrusting of Irish questions 
 upon the House of Commons and the people of Eng- 
 land that Ireland received so much attention as she did. 
 By incessant reiteration he brought home to the Eng- 
 lish mind facts which to us are commonplaces but fifty 
 years ago were discoveries. Yet it can hardly be 
 doubted that even without him, and without the neces- 
 sity of paying in Irish reforms the stipulated price 
 for his support, Liberal ministries could not long have 
 ignored the obvious justice of the cry for reform in 
 nearly every department of Irish life and administration. 
 Melbourne's Irish policy was no triumph of O'Conneirs. 
 O'Connell himself did not look upon what his son 
 describes as the ** ten years* war *' as a period of success. 
 To him the experiment, which ho was driven to make, 
 was a failure, and Whig Reform an illusion. Perhaps 
 it was a failure, but to a large extent that was beoause 
 O'Connell himself was unfortunate, in the impression 
 which he, as representing Ireland, produced upon the 
 English mind. Ho would not have carried the English 
 with him for Repeal by being more bluif in his de- 
 meanour or more courteous in his speech, but it was his 
 
214 LIFE OF DANIEL 0*CONNELL. 
 
 misfortune that he did not perceive how essential it was 
 to content himself with a policy which a large minority 
 at least of the English could approve. Had it not been 
 for the mistrust which his tendency to cunning excited^ 
 and the repulsion produced by his scurrility, he might 
 have won for himself and for Ireland an amount of sym- 
 pathy and support that would have overawed the House 
 of Lords, and have converted the Whig experiment, 
 which was far from being the complete failure he 
 thought it, into an indubitable success. It is almost 
 as hard for the Irish to understand the English as 
 for the English to understand the Irish. O'ConnelFs 
 epoch was a time when the English middle class repre- 
 sented the most liberal instincts of the people, and its 
 support was all-important to the advocate of a popular 
 cause. He unfortunately failed to see that the English 
 middle class was not to be identified with the Irish 
 oligarchy. Led astray by the knowledge of their preju- 
 dices, he fell into the error of including them in the 
 attacks which he made upon the party of Protestant 
 ascendency. In this way he ranged against himself and 
 his country much of the class which formed the best 
 strength both of Peel and of Melbourne. It was a 
 misfortune for both countries. The Irish were disap- 
 pointed of their hopes, and they fell into deep discontent. 
 Personal antipathy to O'Connell alienated numbers of 
 the middle class from the Whigs. His support, which 
 kept Melbourne in power in the House of Commons, 
 helped to ruin him in the country, and in consequence 
 an opportunity, perhaps the most favourable that Eng- 
 land has had, for satisfying the legitimate desires of the 
 Irish passed but half employed. 
 
 Thus the good and the evil of the career of O'Connell 
 are so inextricably intermixed, that it is hard to say 
 
DOMESTIC LIFE AND CHARACTER. 215 
 
 whether on the whole it was a benefit to Ireland or 
 not. It falls with a completeness, rare in the lives of 
 men so eminent, into two parts, and the dividing year is 
 1829. Catholic Emancipation was a victory, which he 
 won in a sense single-handed against the most formid- 
 able odds. It was a battle for an entirely just object, 
 and the man who led the Irish to victory in that fight 
 has an everlasting claim upon their gratitude. It is 
 true that Emancipation must have come with the first 
 reformed Parliament, and it ought never to be forgotten 
 that even O'Connell could not have carried Emancipa- 
 tion without the support of the large and powerful 
 body, which advocated it in England and in the House 
 of Commons. None the less it is a boon, nay rather a 
 right, which was secured for the people of Ireland by 
 him. Had his life terminated there, possibly that 
 might have been the better for his fame. In October 
 1829 he was driving on the mail cart with his brother 
 into Cahirciveen. At a point where the road skirted a 
 precipice, hundreds of feet high and unguarded by any 
 adequate wall, the horses ran away, and O'Connell and 
 his brother jumped out and saved themselves at the 
 cost of some injuries. Had this accident ended fatally, 
 the judgment of posterity upon him must have been 
 one of almost unmixed praise. To have ousted the 
 landlords in 1829 from the leadership of the people 
 was a revolution of the greatest magnitude. It is 
 difficult to regret their fall. It is impossible to be 
 satisfied with their successors. It is a misfortune due to 
 the economic circumstances of Ireland, that she is so 
 deficient in the possession of a middle class. The land- 
 lords once ousted, the political leadership fell either 
 into the hands of the priests or, in large degree, into 
 the hands of adventurers. O'Conneirs own guiding 
 
216 LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL. 
 
 hand once removed and the influence of both was 
 felt and felt for the worse. Though tolerant himself, 
 he had kindled and fanned the flames of sectarian 
 intolerance, and, although a man of genius, had sur- 
 rounded himself with partisans of little character and 
 less talent. With many excellent qualities, the priests 
 had not the training which their new position required. 
 As ecclesiastics they would have been better out of 
 politics; as politicians, they had all the instincts of the 
 peasantry, and hardly more breadth of view or know- 
 ledge. And the alternative leaders have been even less 
 beneficial to Ireland. But from 1829 he entered 
 upon a course, in which he failed precisely because 
 he did not perceive that the Irish people alone, how- 
 ever unanimous, could not win the contest in which 
 he engaged them. Upon the question of Eepeal, he 
 had no supporters in England; for a time the Whigs 
 may have favoured some scheme of extensive local self- 
 government, but all parties in England were united 
 against Kepeal, and that one fact placed success be- 
 yond his reach. That O'Connell was perfectly sincere 
 in his desire for Kepeal cannot be doubted; yet he 
 was always keenly alive to the possibilities of the situa- 
 tion, and personally would have been content with 
 less. But, although he swayed the Irish with an abso- 
 lute control never possessed by any other leader, whom 
 they have ever had, he was to some extent obliged to 
 float upon their tide. Left to his own judgment he would 
 probably have realised that Beform alone was possible, 
 and would not have jeopardised it by demanding Repeal. 
 Probably, but for the personal slight offered to himself 
 in 1829, he would never have entered upon the agita- 
 tion for Repeal, which, however much he desired it, he 
 knew to be so diflficult of attainment. Even George 
 
DOMESTIC LIFE AND CHARACTER. 217 
 
 the Third's opposition to Emancipation, though it did 
 almost more harm than the act of any single man has 
 «ver done in England, was less a misfortune to Ireland 
 than George the Fourth's petty spite against O'Connell. 
 The insolent injustice done to him personally he took to 
 be a declaratioD that Emancipation was as far as pos- 
 sible to be made a nullity. It was a wrong he never 
 forgave. It forced him into a policy of Repeal, which 
 perhaps, except in the intoxication of contact with an 
 enthusiastic multitude, he hardly expected to conduct to 
 a successful issue ; and years of agitation in a hopeless 
 cause could not but be prejudicial to Ireland. 
 
 O'Connell was the inventor of the whole modem 
 machinery of peaceful agitation, of associations, sub- 
 scriptions, processions, demonstrations, and organiza- 
 tions, and in his hands it attained a pitch of perfection, 
 which others have only endeavoured to imitate. Of the 
 merit of a system which elicits the expression of the 
 popular will by means of bands and banners, marchings 
 and counter-marchings, teaching the ^go^Xq pedibus in 
 sententiam ire^ it would be premature to speak. But 
 the invention of these methods and the use O'Connell 
 made of them prove at once his sincerity and the bene- 
 ficence of his control over his countrymen. The almost 
 pathetic fiasco of Smith O'firien's rising in 1848, shows, 
 as Mitchell himself admitted, how deeply O'Connell's les- 
 sons had entered into the mind of the people of Ireland. 
 That control was won and maintained only at the cost of 
 an endless and wearisome round of speech-making and 
 banqueting, ovations, processions, and demonstrations, 
 of endless and irksome petitions from all sorts of persons 
 for all sorts of services and patronage. At such a 
 price it is inconceivable that O'Connell, " agiutor " 
 though he avowed himself to be, oould have sought 
 
218 LIFE OF DANIEL O'GONNELL. 
 
 power for the sake of mere popularity or for anything 
 less than that which he conceived to be the good of his 
 country. 
 
 No man has ever retained so commanding a position 
 in Ireland for nearly so long a period. For five and 
 thirty years he was so much the first man in his country, 
 that in the eyes of the world he stood for Ireland. He 
 won the admiration and esteem of all sorts and kinds of 
 men, Quakers, Presbyterians, Catholics. Pease was his 
 friend and admirer. Chalmers said of him, " He is a 
 noble fellow, with the gallant and kindly as well as the 
 wily genius of Ireland "; and the dignitaries of his 
 Church entertained for him feelings as warm as were his 
 for them. And his virtues were not confined to the showy 
 arts of the platform. Nothing about him strikes one 
 with more wonder than his vast powers of work and at- 
 tention to detail. He could carry on the work he had 
 in hand, while attending to the conversation that was 
 going on around him. His patience and his complete 
 mastery of all the details of a question were prodigious. 
 His memory was exceedingly retentive and his capacity 
 for taking pains truly amounted to genius. He spared no 
 efiPort to conciliate every kind of influence for his agita- 
 tion and carefully collected and focussed the support of 
 the most dissimilar persons, and by these means gave 
 to his movement a unity and a force which in Ireland 
 were irresistible. In this light even his powers as an 
 orator sink to the second place. If Peel was pre-eminent 
 as a member of Parliament, O'Connell was one of the 
 greatest of men of business. He was indeed a man with 
 the defects of his qualities, impulsive, pugnacious, mas- 
 terful. But he was, too, a man, of whom Ireland and 
 the United Kingdom have cause to be proud ; great as 
 an orator, great as a politician, and, as a man, amiable 
 
DOMESTIC LIFE AND CHARACTER. 219 
 
 and upright. It was his fate to have little scope for 
 the statesmanship of constructive policy ; to find his 
 great success balanced by great failure ; to die with so 
 dark a cloud hanging over the country he loved so well. 
 But he served her well and he still lives in her affections, 
 and that is his best reward. 
 
 
 SA*Y ^f 
 
INDEX. 
 
 A. 
 
 " Algerine Act," the, 68. 
 
 Althorp. Lord, 112, 117. 118, 
 122. 
 
 Alvanley, Lord, 56, 128. 
 
 Anglesey, Lord, 79, 81, 95, 99, 
 101, 114. 
 
 Arbitration Courts, the, 161, 
 174. 
 
 Association, the first Catholic, 
 49, 60. 
 
 Association, the Catholic, 61-64 ; 
 collects the rent, 64 ; sup- 
 pressed by law, 66 ; refounded, 
 68 ; organized parochially, 74 ; 
 old Association re-established, 
 80; finally dissolved, 86. 
 
 AsBociation, the General, 187, 
 140. 
 
 Association, the Repeal. See 
 Repeal. 
 
 B. 
 
 Barrett, 169, 170, 178. 
 Belle w, Sir £,, 86,87,49, 
 Blaok Lane Parliament, 24. 
 
 Board; the Catholic, 32, 40 
 Butler, Charles, 36, 38, 43. 
 Butt, Isaac, 164. 
 
 c. 
 
 Canning, George, :J8, 63, 74. 
 Church Temporalities Bill, 113. 
 Clare Election, the, 75-78. 
 Clonmel, meeting at, 80. 
 Clontarf, proposed meeting at,. 
 
 164-166. 
 Coercion Bill (188,'l), 112-113; 
 
 attempt to renew, 122. 
 Committee, the Catholic, 29, 32. 
 Conciliation Hall, 156. 
 Oonyention, scheme for a, 168, 
 Crawford, Sharman. 141, IWK 
 
 182. 
 Onrran, 45. 
 
 Darnrnane Abbev. 2, 191, 192,. 
 
 196-198, 
 DaviH. ir)2. im), 162, 186, 187. 
 
222 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 D'Esterre. Mr., 50-53. 
 Disraeli, Mr., 56, 128. 
 Dogherty, 100. 
 Doneraile Conspiracy, 14:-16, 
 
 196. 
 Donoughmore, Lord, 48, 49. 
 Donai, O'Connell at, 4. 
 Dromgoole, Dr., 30, 37. 
 Drummond, Mr., 128. 
 Duffy, C. G., 162, 170, 173, 181, 
 
 187. 
 
 E. 
 
 Emmet's rising, 12. 
 
 Famine, the Irish, 189-191. 
 
 Federation, schemes for, 169; 
 adopted by O'Connell, 181 ; re- 
 pudiated, 183. 
 
 Fingal, Lord, 27, 28, 34, 35, 36, 
 37, 48. 
 
 Fitzgerald, Vesey, 75-78. 
 
 Forty- shilling freeholders, 25 ; 
 their revolt, 71-78 ; their abo- 
 lition, 87-89. 
 
 *' Friends of Ireland," the, 97- 
 
 G. 
 
 •George IV., 59, 87, 97, 215. 
 Grattan, Henry, 34, 35, 36, 37, 
 
 39, 42, 48, 57 ; death of, 58 ; 
 
 abuses O'Connell, 208. 
 Grenville, Lord, 34, 36. 
 Grey, Earl, 99-121, 122, 123; 
 
 resigns, 124. 
 
 H. 
 
 Hardinge, Sir H., 56, 98, 209. 
 
 K. 
 
 Keogh, John, 24, 28, 30, 34; 
 ousted from leadership of the 
 Catholics, 31. 
 
 L. 
 
 Lawless, 76, 80. 
 Lefroy, Serjeant, 18. 
 Littleton, 67, 114, 118, 124; 
 quarrel with O'Connell, 122. 
 
 M. 
 
 MacClellan, Baron, 19. 
 
 MacHale, 114, 145, 149. 
 
 Magee, trial of, 56-57. 
 
 Meagher, 189. 
 
 Melbourne, Lord, Premier, 124; 
 again, 125. 
 
 Memoir on Ireland, 202. 
 
 Milner, Dr., 35, 36. 
 
 Mitchell, 187, 189. 
 
 Monster meetings, 156. 
 
 Municipal Corporation Bills (Ire- 
 land), 129-137. 
 
 Mulgrave, Lord, 126, 128. 
 
INDEX, 
 
 223 
 
 N. 
 
 Nation, the, 162. 
 Northumberland, Duke of, 98, 
 99. 
 
 O. 
 
 O'Brien, Smith, 142, 160, 169, 
 174, 181, 215. 
 
 O'Connell, Count Daniel, 7-8, 198, 
 202. 
 
 O'Connell, Daniel : birth, 1 ; edu- 
 cation, 3-5 ; called to the Irish 
 bar, 7 ; joins the Munster Cir- 
 cuit, 12; joins the Catholic 
 movement, 27; becomes its 
 leader, 30 ; fights D'Esterre, 
 60-53 ; afiFair with Peel, 53-55, 
 and George IV., 59 ; founds the 
 Association, 63 ; tried for sedi- 
 tious libel, 66 ; visits England, 
 67 ; elected for Clare, 78 ; at- 
 tempts to take his seat, 93; 
 re-elected, 96 ; maiden speech, 
 97 ; elected for Waterford, 97 ; 
 tried for conspiracy, 102 ; re- 
 turned for Kerry, 103 ; refuses 
 office, 104, 114; speech against 
 the Union, 119; quarrels with 
 Littleton, 122 ; elected for 
 Dublin, 125 ; disappointed of 
 office, 127; tour in Scotland, 
 129 ; elected for Kilkenny, 136 ; 
 ** Crown and Anchor" speech, 
 148; offered promotion, 144; 
 founds Repeal Assooiation, 
 147 ; returned for Cork, 151 ; 
 Lord Mayor of Dublin, 168; 
 tried for conspiracy, 170-178 ; 
 sontenood, 176; sentence re- 
 ▼ersed by the Lords, 178; new 
 alliance with Whigs, 188 ; ill- 
 ness and death, 191-194; 
 domestic life and oharactor, 
 195-219. 
 
 O'Connell, John, 131, 132, 134, 
 152, 160, 162, 170, 185. 188, 
 189. 
 
 O'Connell, Mary, 54, 195. 
 
 O'Connell, Morgan, 56, 128. 
 
 O'Connells, the, 2-3. 
 
 O'Gorman Mahon, The, 67, 75. 
 77, 187. 
 
 P. 
 
 Pamell, Sir H., 49, 57. 
 
 Peel, Sir R. and O'Connell, 5i^ 
 55 ; offers to resign, 68 ; 
 changes his views, 83 ; intro- 
 duces ReUef Bill, 86 ; Premier, 
 125 ; again, 151 ; speech 
 against O'Connell, 159; sup- 
 presses the Repeal Association, 
 164. 
 
 Penal Code, the, 22, 23. 
 
 Perceval, O'Connell on, 88. 
 
 Plunket, 40, 58, 100. 
 
 Ponsonbv, 35. 
 
 Poor Law Bill (Ireland), 138. 
 
 Q. 
 
 Quarantotti, 41, 42. 
 
 R. 
 
 Raphael, Mr., 
 180-184. 
 
 and O'Connell, 
 
 Raffistration Aei (Ireland), 150. 
 
 Relief BUI (1885), 67. 
 
 ReUef BUI (1829), 87-90. 
 
 Repeal, COonnell and, 44-47 ; a 
 •ooieiy founded for, 97 ; ttm^le 
 begins, 101 ; Repealers in Kr- 
 110; renewed agita- 
 
224 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 tion, 115. 116 ; abandoned, 
 
 135. 
 Repeal Association, the, 147, 
 
 149 ; its growth, 154-158, 160- 
 
 161 ; and Young Ireland, 174, 
 
 188 
 Russell, Lord John, 85, 140, 144, 
 
 188. 
 
 St. Omer, O'Connell at, 4. 
 
 Saurin, and O'Oonnell, 19-21. 
 
 Scully, James, 30, 40, 56. 
 
 "Securities," the, 38-40, 43; 
 split about, 49. 
 
 Shell, 37, 58, 61, 67, 77 ; dis- 
 solves the Association, 86 ; and 
 Althorp, 117-118; elected for 
 Dungarvan, 188. 
 
 Shrewsbury, Earl of, O'Connell's 
 letter to, 30, 202. 
 
 Smith, Baron, 118. 
 
 Southwell, Lord, 36, 49. 
 
 Spring-Rice, 121. 
 
 Stanley, Mr., 103, 104; speech 
 on the Coercion Bill, 112 ; re- 
 signs, 121. 
 
 Steele, 76, 77, 152, 155, 169, 
 170. 
 
 T. 
 
 Tara, meeting at, 157. 
 
 Tithe Bills, 121, 124, 128, 137, 
 
 138, 145. 
 Tithe Wars, the, 106-109. 
 Tribute, the, 198. 
 
 XT. 
 
 United Irishmen, the, and O'Oon- 
 nell, 10, 11. 
 
 V. 
 
 "Vetoists," the. See "Securi- 
 ties." 
 
 w. 
 
 Ward, Mr., resolution of, 121. 
 Waterf ord election, the, 71-73. 
 Wellington, Duke of, 75, 85 ; fall 
 
 of his administration, 99. 
 Wellesley, the Marquis, 43, 62, 
 
 114, 121, 122. 
 William IV., 127, 140. 
 "Wings," the, 6. 
 Wyse, 40, 74. 
 
 York, the Duke of, 58-68. 
 Young Ireland, 159, 181, 183- 
 187, 188. 
 
 London: Printed by W. H. Allen & Co., 13 Waterloo Place. S.W. 
 
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