timony of Lord Castlereagh himself, shrink to three, or even, to speak more correctly, to one,-Mr. Richard Bagwell, of Tipperary. And Mr. Richard Bagwell's account of his secession, and that of the two other Bagwells whom he controlled, is not to be set down as false because Dr. Ingram chooses to think it so. Lord Cornwallis mentions the desertion of 'twelve' of the Government supporters in a letter written after the great division of February 5, 1800. That he was misinformed should have been obvious to Dr. Ingram.2 In a letter to the Duke of Portland, written on February 7 and printed immediately before that of Lord Cornwallis in the Cornwallis Correspondence, Lord Castlereagh, whose means of knowing the exact truth were, of course, far superior to those of the Viceroy, states the number of seceders as seven.3 Three of these were the Bagwells, one of the remainder was Mr. Whaley. The latter, Lord Castlereagh states, with what accuracy we can judge, to have been absolutely bought by the Opposition stock purse.' Against the three remaining seceders Lord Castlereagh makes no such charge-he believes that they were 'taken off by county cabals' (i.e. influenced by public opinion in their constituencies) 'during the recess.' The action of Mr. Bagwell, he attributes, 'partly to fear, partly to expectations given him by the leaders of the Opposition in the event of their influence being established.' Lord Cornwallis writes that this gentleman 'endeavoured to excuse his desertion by stating that the principal part of the respectable freeholders of the county of Tipperary have signed resolutions against the Union, many of whom had before instructed him to support that measure.' 4 It certainly was not for want of bribery on the part of the Government that Mr. Bagwell left its ranks, since Lord Castlereagh states, as part of the general unaccountability of his conduct, that 'the objects he solicited were promised.' What could the Opposition have done more for him? That the Opposition collected a fund for the purchase of seats is undenied. That they may have been induced by the example of the Ministry to misuse it in one or two instances is 1 Corn. Corr. iii. p. 183. 2 And, indeed, it was so, for in a subsequent passage (p. 167), where he was not dealing with the charge of bribery on the part of the Opposition, Dr. Ingram states the number of the seceders correctly. 3 Corn. Corr. iii. p. 182. Lord Castlereagh gives the names of all these seceders, and in a subsequent letter reiterates the statement of their number. Castlereagh Corr. iii. 328. 4 Corn. Corr. p. 180. 5 Ibid. p. 182. not in itself unlikely. But the strongest proof of the fact remains its likelihood. Nor could there ever have been the least question of serious competition with the resources of the Government. We now come to Dr. Ingram's second thesis. How he can believe, or even 'affect to believe,' that the Union was passed with the hearty consent and concurrence of the vast majority of the two peoples that dwelt in Ireland' it is difficult to understand. When the measure was first brought before Parliament on January 22, 1799, in a debate on the Address, the division showed a majority of two for the Government, 107 to 105. In 1785, it will be remembered, a majority of nineteen on the Commercial Treaty had been reckoned a decisive defeat, and that at a time when the corrupt influence of the Government was not so strong as now. On January 24, when the address was reported, the Opposition had increased its strength and showed a majority of five, 109 to 104. Under ordinary circumstances the measure would have been abandoned. But it was His Majesty's fixed and unalterable determination to direct, session after session, the proposition of the Union, to be renewed to Parliament until it is adopted by the good sense of the nation.' Parliament was reconstituted in the manner described, and when it met again, on January 15, 1800, the Government had a majority, which, when the House was tolerably full, it henceforth maintained, of over 40. The Opposition, on the decisive debate of February 5, 1800, reckoned 115, so that it showed an absolute, though not a relative, increase in strength since the introduction of the measure. 1 Again and again the Opposition demanded a dissolution, arguing that the Legislature was not competent, without a special mandate from the constituencies, to vote away the independence of the nation. Can it be doubted that the Government would have accepted the challenge if it saw a prospect of success at the polls? Forty-six petitions at the lowest estimate (Dr. Ingram's) were presented to the Commons against a Union, and only two in its favour.2 In 1799 Lord Cornwallis, however, made tours through the north and south of Ireland, expressly, as he states, to procure declarations in favour of the Union,3 and received a number of addresses (thirty-six), nearly half of them being from small and exclusive bodies. Lord Castlereagh stated that seventy-four declara1 Portland to Cornwallis, February 12, 1800.-Corn. Corr. iii. p. 191. 2 Ingram, p. 123. 4 Ingram, p. 121. 3 Corn. Corr. iii. p. 118. tions entirely had been made by public bodies in favour of a Union. But such declarations, most of them mere personal addresses to Lord Cornwallis, cannot of course compare in weight with formal and open petitions to Parliament, and there were many extra-parliamentary declarations against the Union too. No doubt illegitimate means to procure signatures were employed on both sides.' But the Government had immense advantage in a competition of this kind. In a debate already alluded to, on February 5, 1800, Mr. Tighe said :— 'If it were not notorious and not worth proving he would prove that to one set of resolutions in favour of the Union sixty names had been forged, that to another which he would name, Waterford, numberless respectable names had been forged. Several persons had protested, in the public papers, against impudent forgery of their names--inter alios, Mr. Savage, an official of the corporation of Waterford. . . The names signed to a single petition against the Union would outnumber the whole obtained in its favour by nine months' labour and expense. He could prove that in that part of the country where he had lately been, the county of Wicklow, emissaries had come, not he believed with the knowledge or under direction of the noble lord, but persons had come from Dublin who spread reports among the farmeis and Roman Catholics that their signing such a petition would be looked on by the Government as rebellious; nay, he had even been informed that handbills were shown to the people stating that such signatures would be considered by the Government in the same light as signatures of United Irishmen. Nay more, that loyal persons in that county who had suffered from the Rebellion were afraid to sign such a petition lest they should be deprived of the compensation granted for their losses by the Legislature, and he called upon the noble lord to declare why those compensations had been so long delayed.' That intimidation of the kind complained of by Mr. Tighe was really used is, a priori, highly probable, and it is highly probable, too, that the noble lord knew all about it, for after the defeat in 1799 the Duke of Portland had directed the lordlieutenant to take care it should be understood that it [the Union] neither is nor ever will be abandoned, and that the support of it will be considered as a necessary and indispensable test of the attachment on the part of the Irish to their connexion with this country. 2 In spite of all the efforts of the Government Mr. (afterwards Lord) Grey was able to assert, without challenge or contradiction, in the British House of Commons, that, 'though there were 707,000 who had signed petitions against the measure, the total number of those who declared themselves Ingram, p. 133 note. 2 Corn. Corr. iii. 47. 1 1 in favour of it did not exceed 3,000, and many of these only prayed that the measure might be discussed.' The younger Grattan including, we suppose, extra-parliamentary declarations—places the number of signatures to the Unionist addresses and petitions at 7,000; but this is probably too low.2 Dr. Ingram takes much pains in his sixth chapter to prove, what no one ever doubted, that the Catholic hierarchy and aristocracy supported the Union. When he looks for evidence that the ordinary lafty followed them he has to be thankful for very small mercies. The Catholic hierarchy and aristocracy, down, one may say, to the last decade, have been traditionally subservient to the English Government in all political matters. The laity swept them aside when the Catholic committee was re-organized in 1791; and some seventy prelates and peers seceded from it. At the very time we are considering, four archbishops and six bishops endorsed with their names a proposal to the effect that the British Government should have a right of veto in the election of Catholic bishops in Ireland.3 It was understood that emancipation would be granted, with a State provision for the clergy, subject to this condition. When in 1808 the emancipation question came before the British Parliament, and the existence of this agreement became known, a storm of indignation broke out among the Catholic laity at the proposal to place their Church under the control of the English Government. The very bishops who had signed the agreement were compelled to denounce it, and because the aristocracy, as a body, persisted in supporting emancipation coupled with the veto, the conduct of the Catholic movement was once more, and for ever, taken out of their hands. Why there could be no such expression of public feeling at the part the bishops took on the Union question is clear enough to anyone who realizes the condition of Ireland at that time. The country, in Bismarck's terrible phrase, was saignée à blanc after the Rebellion of '98. It was actually under martial law while the Union was being discussed, and that law was administered 1 Cobbett's Parl. Hist. xxxv. 60; and compare Lords Cornwallis and Castlereagh :-'I have most earnestly recommended it to the friends of Government to exert themselves during the summer in their respective counties, and have urged them, without risking popular meetings, to obtain declarations similar to those of Cork and Galway favourable to the measure.'-Cornwallis to Portland, Corn. Corr. iii. 105. The [antiUnionist] petitions presented to Parliament have been more numerously signed than the addresses and declarations in favour of the measure, which in general were studiously confined to a superior description of persons. Castlereagh to King, April 12, 1800, Corn. Corr. iii. 224. 2 Grattan's Life, v. 51. 3 Butler's Historical Memoirs of the Catholics, iv. 479, &c. 1 with a frantic ferocity which Lord Cornwallis strove in vain to check. The vilest informers,' he wrote, 'are hunted out from the prisons to attack, by the most barefaced perjury, the lives of all who are suspected of being, or of having been, disaffected, and, indeed, every Roman Catholic of influence is in great danger.' How any Catholics at all could venture to raise their voices against a Government measure, their attitude on which was to be taken as a test of loyalty, is astonishing ; but they did so. Thus, on January 13, 1800, a large Catholic meeting was held in Dublin, Mr. Ambrose Moore in the chair, and a resolution was passed affirming the Irish legislature to be the only true and permanent foundation of Irish prosperity and of British connexion. An explanation was added: 'That, having heretofore determined not to come forward any more in the distinct character of Catholics, but to consider our claims and cause not those of a sect, but as involved in the general fate of our country, that we now think it right, notwithstanding such determination, to publish the present resolutions in order to undeceive our fellow-subjects who may have been led to believe, by a false representation, that we are capable of giving any concurrence whatever to so foul and foolish a project.' 2 Charles Coote, an enthusiastic Unionist, whose History of the Union was published in 1802, writes that 'the Ministers and their friends [in the interval between the session of 1799 and that of 1800] exerted all the arts of persuasion in favour of the scheme, and endeavoured to promote it by intrigue or enforce it by intimidation.'3 In another place he speaks of the measure as having been imposed on a reluctant people.' 4 Mr. Edgeworth, father of the famous novelist, and himself a man of high ability, delivered on Feb. 5, 1800, a speech which Dr. Ingram justly styles 'remarkable.' In his hands it becomes most truly so; for the series of inconsequences in which he professes to give its purport would lead a confiding reader to suspect that Mr. Edgeworth was qualifying for Swift's Hospital. The speaker's drift was that he was ardently desirous of a union, yet could not bring himself to vote for the present measure in consequence of the iniquitous means by which it was being forced upon the country. Lord Cornwallis seems at times to have persuaded himself, or to have been persuaded by those who manipulated public opinion for him, that the country could not 'in general be said to be adverse to the 5 1 To Gen. Ross, November 16, 1799.—Corn. Corr. iii. p. 145. 3 History of the Union, p. 289. 4 Ibid. p. 508. 5 Ingram, p. 168. |