The quasi-colonial Irish parliament was consigned to history in 1801 when Ireland became an integral component of the United Kingdom. The Acts of Union of 1800 mimicked the 1707 Anglo-Scottish settlement; if history repeated itself, Ireland would replicate the ‘success story’ of Scotland in embracing its nearest neighbour, creating a mutually prosperous new polity.Footnote ³ But Ireland did not follow the Scottish script. The transition into a unitary constitutional entity from 1801 was blighted by the appearance of stubborn points of national difference that worked against the realisation of a truly ‘United’ Kingdom. The Irish executive in Dublin Castle, headed by the Lord Lieutenant, was retained, separate from and unaccountable to the Irish legislative members of parliament.Footnote ⁴ Article six of the Union legislation facilitated a free trade arrangement between Ireland and Britain, but this took several decades to implement in full. Mirroring the separate political executive housed in Dublin Castle was the maintenance of an Irish exchequer, ensuring that the national debt remained Irish: the two exchequers were only amalgamated in 1817, when Ireland was close to bankruptcy.Footnote ⁵ Union provided legislative fusion between the Irish and British parliaments, but not executive or financial incorporation.

The Union of 1707 was much cleaner in managing the political and economic integration of England and Scotland. Indeed, on a comparative basis, the differences between the 1707 and 1800 Unions disadvantaged the Irish.Footnote ⁶ Scotland retained independence in the spheres of law, education and religion after 1707, whereas Ireland pined for similar institutions of national pride.Footnote ⁷ The Scots were co-opted into British expansionism relatively seamlessly during the nineteenth century, while the Irish found themselves on the receiving end of colonial-esque ‘special’ legislation (to use the contemporary euphemism). This was in keeping with the spirit of what Edward Wakefield, the respected English statistician, described as the ‘separate colonial government’ in Ireland, which contradicted the lofty ideals of the Acts of Union.Footnote ⁸ These were sizeable political and economic issues, but above all else, it was the political exclusion of the majority of the Irish population, on the basis of the remaining penal laws, that defined the antagonism at the heart of the Union during the early decades of the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁹

Withholding full civic rights for Catholics undermined the reconciling potential of the Union from its inception. Reflecting on the passage of the Acts of Union in 1813, John Bernard Trotter, the Ulster-born former private secretary to Charles James Fox, highlighted that the new arrangement had merely perpetuated asymmetries of power in Ireland. ‘The Minister of the day’, Trotter recorded,

The persistence of religious discrimination from 1801 until the belated coming of Catholic Emancipation in 1829 profoundly shaped the Irish political imagination; the expectations for full civil inclusion into the new British-Irish state, an alluring feature of the union debates, morphed into frustration with the new structures and, very quickly, became a powerful grievance.

The penal laws were far from a codified constitutional tradition, and the impact of successive discriminatory legislation was varied.Footnote ¹¹ Parts of the penal laws had been diluted through a suite of relief acts during the second half of the eighteenth century, which, for example, enabled Irish Catholics to purchase land (albeit with the proviso that the property in question should not be connected to parliamentary representation).Footnote ¹² In 1793, Irish Catholics were enfranchised, a significant milestone which underpinned the later campaigns for full Emancipation and the Repeal of the Union from the 1820s through to the 1840s.Footnote ¹³ These concessions did not come willingly from the Irish parliament but were imposed by successive British administrations, often in the context of imperial crisis or military conflict with a foreign power, with a resultant need for (Catholic) recruits.Footnote ¹⁴ These reforms tacitly admitted the failure to ‘Protestantise’ Ireland and the limitations of the British state’s control over Ireland; concessions were made to Catholics in an attempt to bridge the gap between the Protestant ethos of the constitution and the realities of Irish demography. Late eighteenth-century liberal commentators such as Adam Smith and Edmund Burke highlighted the counterproductive nature of the penal laws, which they believed entrenched Catholic alienation from the state apparatus in Britain and Ireland, inadvertently creating the conditions for political unrest to thrive.Footnote ¹⁵ Indeed, given the acceptance of Catholics into property ownership and the electoral franchise, the maintenance of a bar on their right to sit as parliamentarians was condemned by early nineteenth-century observers such as William Parnell as more of an ‘insult’ than an ‘injury’.Footnote ¹⁶ The remnants of the penal laws were, in other words, unjustified and irrational. If Irish Catholics were entrusted to vote for parliamentary representatives, the rationale for withholding the right to serve as representatives appeared illogical.

If the material consequences of the penal laws had diminished by the early nineteenth century, the psychological dimensions remained acute.Footnote ¹⁷ In 1812, Denys Scully, a prominent campaigner for Catholic Emancipation, emphasised the impact of this ongoing exclusion on Irish political mindsets:

The logic of Scully’s argument was that the penal laws produced a constitutional oddity. Unfranchised Protestants enjoyed virtual representation in parliament by virtue of their denomination; Catholics, some of whom possessed the vote, were excluded from virtual representation because of the Anglican ethos of the state. Edmund Burke had warned of the corrosive constitutional damage of this exclusion in 1792; the passage of the Union, with the broken promise of Catholic Emancipation, newly intensified this feeling.Footnote ¹⁹ In essence, the British constitutional decree of an enlightened property order as the basis of representative government did not function in Ireland. The penal laws may have been petty, but this was not how notable Catholic political commentators such as Scully interpreted them. Instead, such Catholic discourse emphasised that exclusion from representation was one of the gravest political conditions that could befall a society.

Character, Representation, and Revolt

The debate over the penal laws during the early nineteenth century intertwined with the wider question of ‘character’. The idea that nations or peoples displayed certain character traits was a commonly articulated Enlightenment concept and was often used to demonstrate a global hierarchy of societies.Footnote ²⁰ The ‘wild’ Irish, in contrast with the ‘civilised’ English, was a trope deployed countless times through the centuries.Footnote ²¹ Writing in 1748, David Hume insisted that the most important aspect in shaping national character was not the environment or climate, but the nature of political institutions. Hume held the English up as a special case: with governmental structures that fused ‘monarchy, aristocracy and democracy’, political power was shared, producing an unwavering commitment to ‘liberty and independency’ among the people.Footnote ²² A union between Britain and Ireland was, therefore, partly envisaged as a method to ‘improve’ the Irish, to export British constitutional liberties into Ireland.

Numerous engagements with Irish ‘character’ appeared in print during the early nineteenth century. These depictions were often reflected through the prism of the perceived rural lawlessness of the Irish countryside, with agrarian violence and secret societies carrying into the era of the Union. The notion that Ireland was different from Britain and required ‘special solutions’ (often based on coercive legislation and draconian policing) was widespread.Footnote ²³ The English statistician Edward Wakefield left a detailed account of aspects of Irish character that he encountered in tours during the first decade of the century. His description of the ‘poorer orders’ stressed their barbarism and contempt for structures of British law and justice. This regrettable trait was, he believed, partly caused by misgovernment. ‘Notwithstanding that the inhabitants of this island have been for centuries under the nominal influence of British laws’, Wakefield noted, ‘yet few traces of happiness, arising from wise political institutions, are to be found in any part of the country’.Footnote ²⁴ Ireland, particularly its recent history under the Union, represented a paradox: a place geographically close to the seat of British power (and thus a prime European ‘civilising’ force), but treated more as a ‘distant province than as a component part of the British empire’.Footnote ²⁵

Similar sentiments on the relationship between Irish national character and the state of government shaped the work of the Scottish philosopher Daniel Dewar. Dewar’s work on the question of character formation was steeped in Hume’s thought. Dewar, an Irish speaker, travelled through Ireland and was appalled at the destitution he saw in the countryside. While the ‘native Irish’ were ‘fond of knowledge’, the majority, according to Dewar, ‘are sunk in the lowest state of ignorance and degradation’.Footnote ²⁶ The destructive vices of ‘ignorance, superstition and barbarism’ were rampant in Ireland.Footnote ²⁷ Like Hume, Dewar emphasised the importance of political institutions in instilling moral virtue and purpose in a people. ‘Character’ flowed first and foremost from a ‘free government’.Footnote ²⁸ It stood to reason, then, that the wretched condition of the majority of the Irish was primarily the product of defective political institutions.Footnote ²⁹ The penal laws were singled out by Dewar as the prime example of a state-sponsored project that retarded moral and civic growth in Ireland. Religious discrimination merely increased poverty in Ireland, strengthened the Catholic Church’s authority over the majority of the people and encouraged a hatred of Protestantism. As a political project, Dewar affirmed, the penal laws had been disastrous.Footnote ³⁰ He believed that Catholic Emancipation would not weaken the framework of the Protestant constitution. A ‘few Catholic noblemen and gentlemen’ in parliament were not a constitutional threat; indeed, Dewar cast the potential of their presence within the national assembly as a moment of reconciliation.Footnote ³¹

The probing of the question of character intermingled with the politics of Catholic Emancipation. The notion that Catholics, because of the religious doctrines of their church, were ‘unreliable fellow citizens’ permeated the politics of anti-Emancipation during the period of the passage of the Acts of Union.Footnote ³² This impulse was bolstered considerably with the publication of Sir Richard Musgrave’s history of the 1798 rebellion (1801). Musgrave was a former member of the Irish parliament and was well known for his virulent anti-Catholic views.Footnote ³³ His Memoirs of the Different Rebellions in Ireland did much to propagate the view (which was embraced by nineteenth-century opponents of Emancipation) that the United Irish rebellion had a religiously sectarian motive, driven by Catholic hatred of the Protestant order. It followed that 1798 was not a republican rising, but a Catholic one, akin to the 1641 massacres. Musgrave divorced the rebellion from its French Revolutionary context, overlooking the influence of radical Presbyterian conceptions of republican liberty within the Irish melting pot, in favour of an account that stressed Catholic conspiracy as the motor of political revolution.Footnote ³⁴ The origins of the rebellion, in Musgrave’s reading, lay not in the rights of man or English tyranny in Ireland, but in bigoted Catholic secret societies such as the Whiteboys. The book was an unrepentant diatribe against Catholicism, seeing popish plots constantly lurking in the shadows of Irish society.Footnote ³⁵ Musgrave sponsored the idea of Catholicism as an ‘imperium in imperio’, with two competing sovereigns, one civil, the other ecclesiastical, vying for authority in Ireland. The result was inevitable collision, producing the conditions for atrocity.Footnote ³⁶ Barbarism in Ireland stemmed from popery, and Catholicism had warped the Irish character, affirmed Musgrave: the political exclusion of Catholics was thus not only warranted but necessary for the safety of the realm. In conjuring a history of 1798 which turned the Irish majority into secret agents of Rome, Musgrave foregrounded much of the argument over Catholic Emancipation after 1801. Indeed, Musgrave made his intention clear in dedicating the book to Lord Cornwallis: ‘History, which is a mirror of past times, is the best guide to the statesman’.Footnote ³⁷ The character of the Irish majority, as painted by Musgrave, justified their continuing political exclusion.

Even Cornwallis found Musgrave’s book too relentless and disowned the dedication.Footnote ³⁸ Musgrave’s attempt to discredit liberal interventions in Ireland that might lead to further concessions to Catholics so concerned the Sidmouth administration (which assumed power following Pitt’s resignation in 1801) that a reply was quietly commissioned.Footnote ³⁹ In 1803, Francis Plowden, an English Catholic barrister and polemist, issued the quasi-official rebuttal to Musgrave. Plowden had published a number of weighty tomes on contemporary political questions, many of which stressed his ‘love for the [British] Constitution’.Footnote ⁴⁰ While Plowden celebrated the constitutional monarchy and mixed form of parliamentary authority that distinguished the British political and legal systems, the remnants of the penal laws – the Oath of Supremacy in particular – threatened to poison the Union. Irish Catholics were willing to recognise the monarch as ‘the supreme head of the civil establishment of the Church of England’, Plowden asserted, but their religious doctrine was incompatible with the King’s proclaimed spiritual authority. He concluded with an appeal to parliament to address this ‘cruelty’ which actively discriminated against ‘millions of well disposed, able and loyal subjects of his Majesty’.Footnote ⁴¹

Even though Plowden’s response to Musgrave was a commission, its message was very similar to his earlier history of the British constitution. ‘This work is intended as an act of justice to the Irish nation’, Plowden proudly pronounced. ‘We are now one people’.Footnote ⁴² Pace Musgrave’s depiction of barbarity and atrocity, Plowden’s Ireland was one of a historic nation with a cultured past that stretched back to antiquity. Plowden’s quest for ‘historical justice’ propelled him towards refuting Musgrave’s (and others’) portrait of the Irish as lawless. The contemporary problems that blighted Ireland were the product of gross misgovernment and constitutional neglect, not an inherently deviant national character.Footnote ⁴³ English policy stoked the fires of religious difference in Ireland following the Reformation, instead of encouraging conciliation and fusion. While constitutional liberties spread through England from the revolution of 1688, conquest and coercion were its legacies in Ireland (or the ‘perverted operation of the Revolution of 1688 in Ireland’, as the Foxite John Bernard Trotter put it in 1813).Footnote ⁴⁴ The rebellion of 1798 was not, as Musgrave asserted, a Catholic-inspired conspiracy, but a manifestation of the political and social problems that plagued Ireland through poor governance. Plowden was also at pains to remind readers of the cross-denominational appeal of the United Irish movement in certain parts of Ireland.Footnote ⁴⁵ Regardless of the design of the revolutionaries, rebellion in Ireland was, for Plowden, a tragedy. He depicted union as a natural consequence of the political unrest of the 1790s, but one with the potential to ameliorate Ireland.Footnote ⁴⁶ Plowden hoped that the ‘most beneficial effects’ would flow to Ireland as a result of ‘this national incorporation’, that the Irish would prosper with the eradication of the ‘evil’ that underpinned their former governing structures.Footnote ⁴⁷ While Plowden’s book was criticised by hostile reviewers for its long-windedness, its central thesis – that poor political institutions were the cause of Ireland’s wretched poverty and social unrest – was abundantly clear to readers.Footnote ⁴⁸

The literary spat between Musgrave and Plowden was ostensibly about the rebellion of 1798, but in essence concerned the much larger question of the character of the Irish. For Musgrave, Catholic bigotry was the cause and consequence of Irish discontent; the rebellion of 1798 was a mask for an invidious form of sectarian cleansing. Plowden discounted the sectarian element as a driving force of the rebellion and highlighted the toxic consequences of state-sponsored persecution of Catholics. Disloyalty and the allure of separatism in Ireland sprang not from Catholicism, but from quasi-tyrannical rule. The quarrel continued for some time after 1803, with the arrival of new works by both men which repeated much of their earlier arguments.Footnote ⁴⁹ Despite their profound differences, Musgrave and Plowden shared one key characteristic: both men were enthusiastic unionists, believing that the incorporation of Ireland into the British system was the path to political, social and moral improvement. While the character of the Irish was contested, ‘unionism’ had emerged as a consensus point across the political spectrum. Yet this was never quite unanimous: a few significant voices emerged advocating the resurrection of an Irish parliament, drawing on a particular interpretation of Hume’s theory that a people’s government defined the people themselves.

For Thomas Townshend, a former member of the Irish parliament, the passage of the Union was a double-edged sword. Townshend was an active pamphleteer during the French Revolutionary debate, issuing treatises that stressed the British constitution as the model of government par excellence.Footnote ⁵⁰ In the year when the Union became operational, he published several political works which advocated Catholic Emancipation and British liberties on the one hand, while lamenting the loss of a distinctive Irish polity on the other. Townshend depicted government as a ‘moral seminary’ for a population, with a ‘free government’ heralded as the noblest prize in human history. ‘It was not to the physical influences of sky or atmosphere that the erect Englishman of old times owed his glory’, he observed, ‘it was to his government’.Footnote ⁵¹ Misgovernment in previous ages had left Ireland in a wretched political, economic and social state. English (and later British) policy had crushed Ireland’s commerce, largely to the advantage of the larger island; the feudal nature of Ireland’s agrarian economy created a society with only two social classes, landlord and lowly tenant, without ‘any active, intervening classes’. On top of this, the penal laws had a corrosive effect on the Irish mind. In discriminating against a people based on their denomination, the ‘sacredness of property’, a central motif of the British constitution, was undermined in Ireland.Footnote ⁵² Despite these seemingly grave conditions, Townshend believed that a ‘free parliament’ in Ireland could undo the damage wrought by centuries of misrule. This belief was rooted in his earlier conception of government as a moral force within a society:

Townshend lacked confidence that an incorporating union, which did not provide a distinctive Irish space for national debate, could fill this remit. It was the British, after all, who upheld the poisonous penal laws, demonstrating to the Irish majority that the state was bigoted.Footnote ⁵⁴ The penal laws, Townshend concluded, made ‘the ministry everything, and the people nothing’.Footnote ⁵⁵

The second United Irish rebellion of 1803 appeared to confirm some of the fears of Musgravean interpretation of the lawless Irish. By the turn of the century, the United Irish movement was in a dreadful state, broken by the suppression of the rebellion of 1798 and haemorrhaging northern Presbyterian radicals.Footnote ⁵⁶ Without the promise of French military backing, the insurrection in 1803 was confined to brief skirmishes in Dublin and Kildare. While the United Irish force was led by Robert Emmet, a Dublin-born Protestant, the episode was swiftly viewed as ‘another popish rebellion’ by many critics.Footnote ⁵⁷ Yet, as with 1798, the ideals driving the revolt sprang from democratic radicalism and a desire to create an Irish republic based on principles of popular sovereignty and representative government. The extraordinary revolutionary blueprint published by Emmet – the manifesto of ‘the Provisional Government to the People of Ireland’ – was seized by Crown forces before it could be distributed. The radical document outlined a vision of post-revolution Ireland in which church lands became property of the nation, a parliament based on population representation rather than property, and significant power devolved to each county to preserve law, order and justice.Footnote ⁵⁸

Tellingly, the radical Presbyterian element that animated much of the United Irish activism of the 1790s did not rise with Emmet. Northern Presbyterianism initially opposed the Union in 1800, but swiftly became reconciled to the measure, in the hope that an alliance with British radicalism would lead to a successful campaign for parliamentary reform.Footnote ⁵⁹ The association between violent insurrection and democratic radicalism tarnished the political programme of the United Irish movement; the separatist republicanism of Tone and Emmet was noticeably absent in the public debates after 1803, until the emergence of the radical wing of Young Ireland in the 1840s. William Drennan, the most prominent former member of the United Irishmen in the north, believed that Emmet’s attempted revolt was complete folly. Drennan was a critic of the Union proposals in 1800,Footnote ⁶⁰ but he quickly reconciled himself to Ireland’s place in the United Kingdom. The example of revolutionary France, the great beacon of hope for the United Irish movement during its halcyon early days, was destroyed by the turn to violence and Napoleonic despotism; after the failure of the rebellion of 1798, Drennan looked to the British constitutional tradition instead as a model to balance liberty and order. As Drennan and the strain of northern Presbyterianism that he personified adapted to the new world order after 1800, a tentative unionism was constructed and infused with aspects of the radicalism of the United Irish movement.Footnote ⁶¹ Even within this political constituency, the ‘Catholic question’ was inescapable. In this sense, the rebellion of 1803 did little to alter the trajectory of political thought, which remained fixated on the question of Catholic representative rights and the connection between representation and property status in the British constitution.

Catholic Questions, Uncertain Answers

In 1804, William Parnell published the first of several powerful interventions on the problems confronting Ireland during the early years of the Union. Parnell came from a landed family with connections to the Patriot faction in the Irish parliament during the 1780s and 1790s; he was also the maternal grandfather to the future leader of the Home Rule party, Charles Stewart Parnell. In Roy Foster’s estimation, William Parnell was ‘as radical a theorist as it was possible for an Irish Protestant landlord to be’ in the early nineteenth century.Footnote ⁶² Parnell’s analysis centred on the historical problems that had blighted Ireland – dysfunctional government, state-sanctioned property confiscations and religious discrimination – which had, he believed, continued to plague the country. Written in the aftermath of Emmet’s rising in 1803, Parnell suggested that ‘we hear much of the effects of rebellion in Ireland, but very little of their causes’. He rejected the notion that the rising had a religious motive, chiefly the creation of a Catholic ascendancy, by highlighting the Church’s unbridled support for state power in other European countries. The problems facing Ireland that Parnell identified were multifaceted, ranging from the Irish internalising that they were a ‘conquered people’ to the influence of ‘a republican party’.Footnote ⁶³ Despite the depth of the challenges, Parnell believed that solutions were, tantalisingly, within the reach of the government. The failure to ‘blend all distinctions between the race of conquerors and conquered’ was a disastrous consequence of the incomplete conquest of Ireland, but one that could still be reversed if political equality was the guiding principle of the Union. With the Irish ‘entirely incorporated with the people of England’, with the liberties enshrined in the British constitution spreading throughout Ireland, the ‘conqueror’ and ‘conquered’ distinctions would melt away.Footnote ⁶⁴

At the heart of Parnell’s argument was the belief that the penal laws were a contemporary manifestation of the medieval and early modern English conquest of Ireland, and their continuing existence reinforced the colonial relationship between the two countries. A lack of civic equity reinforced the religiously defined political hierarchy in Ireland, which underpinned the profound sectarian differences and fostered revolutionary fervour.Footnote ⁶⁵ For all the radicalism of Parnell’s message, he could not escape the prejudices of his station, declaring that ‘the Popish religion’ was an engine of ‘slavery and superstition’. But the penal laws were insufficient to destroy Catholicism’s hold over the population; barring Catholics from certain political rights was a half-hearted attempt to maintain the appearance of a Protestant kingdom, while the United Kingdom was a multi-denominational polity. For Parnell, the solution was strikingly clear: either Catholicism was annihilated in Ireland, or (and this was the more attractive and straightforward option) the legislation that prohibited Catholics from taking seats in parliament was repealed.Footnote ⁶⁶ Failure to incorporate Catholic representation into the state would empower future Irish rebellion.

Parnell injected more vigour into his argument several years later with the publication of his An Historical Apology for the Irish Catholics. This offered a striking defence of Catholic Ireland in the face of Musgravean slights on historical character, suggesting that instances of rebellion in the past sprang from political injustices suffered by the Irish majority. ‘The Catholics, by being excluded from all offices of trust and emolument’, Parnell argued, ‘lose all political consequence in the country’.Footnote ⁶⁷ The difficulties in Ireland were created not by Catholicism, but the zeal of Protestant persecution of Catholicism. Discontent within Catholic Ireland, which sporadically spilled over into violence, was the manifestation of exclusion from the political and social spheres. The absence of Catholics from the structures of parliamentary government was the most glaring form of exclusion; but Parnell also emphasised the corrosive effect of informal discrimination in operation within Irish Protestant ‘convivial societies’ and the yeomanry. Such bigoted social choices, which hampered cross-denominational cohesion in Ireland, were legitimised by the penal laws.Footnote ⁶⁸ Parnell believed that it was in Protestant Ireland’s interest for the penal laws to be repealed. Security for the Irish minority had not flowed from an unfair concentration of power and privilege; instead, the powerful grievance of Catholic Ireland created instability.Footnote ⁶⁹

Other advocates of Catholic Emancipation supported Parnell’s assertion that Irish unrest sprang not from ‘Popery’ but from arbitrary laws. John Joseph Dillon, a prominent barrister, forcefully set out the case in 1801 that the penal laws were unconstitutional in British law, as a century of repealed test laws had enshrined the concept that citizenship was defined by property, not denomination.Footnote ⁷⁰ The title page of Dillon’s pamphlet bore a quote by William Blackstone to demonstrate that the ‘laws against Papists’ sprang from ‘the urgency of the times which produced them’, and should not be treated as ‘a standing system of law’.Footnote ⁷¹ The penal laws were, therefore, a political relic from a different era.Footnote ⁷² While Dillon’s primary aim was to promote the plight of English Catholics (who, in contrast to their Irish counterparts, remained wholly unfranchised), the case of Ireland could not be ignored. Denying Irish Catholics the right to sit in parliament represented a breakdown in the social contract, with the state refusing to enshrine political rights for a portion of its citizens. As it was the duty of the sovereign to ‘provide for the remedy of grievances’, the maintenance of civic discrimination based on religion undermined the concept of political obligation and thus the legitimacy of the state.Footnote ⁷³

There was, then, a potent argument that the anti-Catholic legislation in place at the beginning of the nineteenth century was a constitutional aberration that undermined the political principle linking property to citizenship. In bringing a petition for the relief of Catholics to parliament in 1805, Lord Grenville, the Pittite Tory and future Prime Minister, condemned the denial of civic rights to Catholics based on their denomination, and not their property status. He pleaded that Emancipation was not an encroachment on Protestant rights, but rather a means to enable ‘equal participation’ and to spread the ‘full benefits of the British Laws and Constitution’ throughout the polity.Footnote ⁷⁴ Henry Grattan, who made his return to Irish politics by winning a parliamentary seat in Dublin in 1806, instructed the Commons to ‘complete’ the revolution of 1688, the foundational moment for constitutional monarchy in the United Kingdom, by binding Catholics to the state through the granting of the same political rights as their Protestant countrymen. In the absence of equality before the law, that revolution was blighted by its connection to ‘the principles of slavery’.Footnote ⁷⁵ Grattan later expanded on this theme, conceptualising 1688 not as a victory of Protestantism over Catholicism, but ‘civil and religious liberty over oppression’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Reference to a ‘Protestant constitution’, in this reading, was misleading. In a pamphlet dedicated to Grattan, William Russell queried the legitimacy of an exclusive political system, suggesting that a ‘well-ordered State’ was founded on laws that were applicable to all; any deviation from this ideal threatened a descent into political oppression.Footnote ⁷⁷ Like a number of other Protestant writers (such as Parnell), Russell made the case for Catholic Emancipation while condemning the tyranny of ‘Popery’. Indeed, Russell believed the ‘Papal System’ fed on Irish grievances; Emancipation thus had the potential to shatter it from within.Footnote ⁷⁸ With this result in mind, Russell asserted that Protestant Ireland had nothing to fear from political equality. As he put it, ‘are we afraid that immediately after the passing of such a bill in Parliament, the Protestants will generally lose their understandings, and take to sprinkling holy water, and fumbling over beads, and saying Ave-Marias?’Footnote ⁷⁹

In stressing the injustice of excluding a portion of the population from representation based on their denomination, a number of pamphleteers drew on a constitutional idiom. John Ryan, a priest in Cork, published a pro-Emancipation pamphlet in 1809 that queried the logic of withholding British constitutional values from ‘four millions of the population of the empire’, warning that the penal laws fuelled hostility to the present order. Only someone with the ‘heart of a rebel’, or the ‘intellect of one of our modern no-popery bigots’, claimed Ryan, could stand over the ongoing political exclusion of Catholics.Footnote ⁸⁰ Catholics desired ‘free participation of the blessings of the British Constitution’, recorded one reflective (anonymous) writer in 1810.Footnote ⁸¹ In the same year, John Joseph Dillon stated that ‘exclusion from parliament’ was the main grievance of Irish Catholics.Footnote ⁸² In stripping representation from property, Ireland had become, in Dillon’s phrase, an ‘anomaly’ in governing theory.Footnote ⁸³ The continuing exclusion of Irish Catholics from the British political nation bred unrest within the majority population in Ireland, who looked to their ‘fellow [Protestant] citizens … enjoying their full measure of freedom, and basking in the sunshine of the Constitution’.Footnote ⁸⁴ Pro-Emancipation writers strongly pushed for Ireland’s integration into the British constitution through common representative rights; but that same constitution, the creation of a parliamentary union between the two countries, perpetuated Irish distinctiveness by opting for continuing exclusion.

The Demagogue and the Veto

In 1812, the Catholic Committee, the main body that lobbied for Emancipation, was replaced by the more assertive Catholic Board. The increasing belligerence of the Catholic Board was driven by frustration with the lack of success of the Committee and the emergence of the ‘veto’ controversy. The veto was a political initiative by proponents of Emancipation in parliament, which aimed to alleviate Protestant concerns about Catholic relief through a quid pro quo of a royal veto over episcopal appointments. Such thinking was a development of the long-established notion that the state should pay the priesthood to gain a degree of political control over Catholic Ireland. The young Irish Tory, John Wilson Croker, for example, believed that Emancipation was ‘expedient’ if the state’s authority was enhanced over the Catholic Church.Footnote ⁸⁵ Such compromise positions, especially the use of a veto over church appointments, however, inflamed sections of Catholic Ireland. This was a critical moment in the political organisation of the pro-Emancipation cause, as a number of politically active Catholics turned against the well-meaning (but ultimately ineffective) parliamentary lobbying of Henry Grattan and George Ponsonby. William Carey, a Catholic former member of the United Irish movement, rebuked the compromise position pursued by Grattan and Ponsonby in 1813, demanding that they remove themselves from leading the Emancipation cause.Footnote ⁸⁶ While the majority of the Catholic movement acquiesced in the veto as a compromise to secure Emancipation, the anti-vetoists emerged as a vocal and increasingly influential minority.

Chief among the rising generation of restless Catholic leaders was the young lawyer, Daniel O’Connell. O’Connell had built a reputation as a critic of the Union for retarding the political ambitions of Irish Catholics; with his rejection of the veto compromise, he did much to discredit the old Patriot parliamentarians who favoured Emancipation. Increasingly, Catholic politics assumed a more popular form as O’Connell gained a grip over the anti-vetoist wing of the Board, with public mobilisations becoming a weapon to influence parliament. In popularising the Catholic movement and seeking to weaken the influence of its aristocratic leadership, O’Connell was publicly testing the Convention Act of 1793, which prevented Irish Catholics from establishing their own representative organisation.Footnote ⁸⁷ But the veto controversy was more than a clash over tactics and strategy within the pro-Emancipation movement. For O’Connell, the veto represented a microcosm of wider Irish conceptions of political liberty under the Union. Responding publicly to Grattan on the course to be taken regarding the Emancipation question in 1813, O’Connell denounced the veto compromise as an assault on Catholic freedoms. ‘I hope the people of Ireland will show that they deserve to be free’, he proclaimed, ‘by evincing that they are acquainted with, and are resolved to assert the privileges of Freemen!’Footnote ⁸⁸ In O’Connell’s mind, the parliament in Dublin had been lost and the Irish majority were excluded from the legislature in London; the church of the people was all that remained. Suppressing the autonomy of the church thus risked crushing the last national institution in Ireland.

For the anti-vetoists, the ability or otherwise of the Crown to control the appointment of Irish bishops was a question of national independence from the state. When Denys Scully prefaced his forceful A Statement of the Penal Laws, published in 1812, with the declaration that the Catholics ‘are emphatically the PEOPLE OF IRELAND’, he put into words a growing self-reliance among the excluded majority that assumed the language of popular sovereignty.Footnote ⁸⁹ The Foxite writer, John Bernard Trotter, an outspoken opponent of the veto, hypothesised a year later that ‘the true question of Emancipation’ was the ‘distribution of political power in a divided Country’. Emancipation in exchange for the loss of independence in the nomination of Catholic bishops did not equate with civil equality.Footnote ⁹⁰ This emerging consciousness was pushed further with the anti-vetoist rejection of several papal rescripts that (in line with wider European practice) advocated acceptance of a form of state oversight over the appointment of senior clergy. The authority of the Vatican in political matters was rejected by the anti-vetoists, just as the British Crown’s right to make clerical appointments in Ireland was spurned. As the northern radical, John Hancock, quipped in the Belfast Monthly Magazine (BMM), ‘the Irish Catholics will suffer neither the Pope to intermeddle with his politics, nor the King with his religion’.Footnote ⁹¹

The emergence of anti-vetoism within the Catholic Board marked the rise of a style of political activism unlike any seen before in Ireland. The Irish political imagination was widened to include (in the words of Cork writer, William Cooke Taylor) ‘the passions of the priests and the prejudices of the people’.Footnote ⁹² When John Edwards, a Justice of the Peace in Wicklow, wrote a plea for British policymakers in 1814 to reconcile Catholics with the state through the deliverance of Emancipation, he did so with the knowledge that the ‘lower orders’ were increasingly embittered ‘with a strong prejudice’ that risked undermining Irish faith in the Union.Footnote ⁹³ O’Connell, with his virulent language denouncing the veto and its chief advocate, Henry Grattan, personified this hardening of Irish opinion.Footnote ⁹⁴ In a mischievous step, O’Connell equated Grattan’s sponsorship of the veto to Lord Castlereagh’s support for the Union. ‘Does not Grattan know’, O’Connell rhetorically asked, ‘that Lord Castlereagh first dyed his country in blood, and then sold her’.Footnote ⁹⁵ While Grattan later made his peace with Castlereagh, the comparison was jarring for the most prominent parliamentarian associated with anti-unionism and pro-Emancipation.Footnote ⁹⁶

Such an approach alienated as much as it electrified political opinion. One Protestant clergyman believed that unless the Catholics of Ireland ‘disown the men who assume to be their leaders’, the Emancipation question would languish in the depths of unrespectability.Footnote ⁹⁷ ‘Demagoguery’ and ‘zealotry’ became staples of anti-Emancipation commentary on the Catholic movement.Footnote ⁹⁸ Grattan’s son (also called Henry), writing anonymously in 1815, voiced his irritation at the anti-vetoists’ lack of deference for his father. Grattan Jr’s ire was particularly directed at O’Connell, who, in an astonishing passage, he positioned as a dangerous demagogue:

Politically, Grattan Jr believed that the O’Connellites made a huge blunder in rejecting the ‘securities’ offered to the Protestant state of the veto, as it undermined the passage of a potential Catholic relief bill.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ But this is to miss the point of the anti-vetoists’ argument: in their eyes, the coming of Emancipation with a state veto over the selection of senior clergy was akin to snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. The principle behind the Catholic demand was noted by Robert Torrens, a Derry-born Royal Marine officer and future political economist, who asserted in 1813 that the ‘Catholics of Ireland claim the privileges of the English constitution on the grounds of natural right, and on the principles of civil liberty’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Any dilution of Emancipation was, in the eyes of O’Connell and the anti-vetoists, to diminish that ‘natural right’.

Turning the Clock: Backwards or Forwards?

While he reserved a particular disdain for O’Connell, Henry Grattan Jr was seething with anger more generally about the state of Ireland in 1815. ‘It seems as if some evil genius possessed the land’, he wrote,

Poor government and the rise of the new ‘vulgar’ elite in Ireland were, therefore, in Grattan’s eyes, a direct consequence of the loss of the parliament in Dublin. While many anti-unionists reconciled themselves to the Union after 1800, it remained more challenging for some. John Gamble, a Presbyterian writer from Tyrone, personified a form of Dissenting Protestant zugzwang in early nineteenth-century Ireland. He was ambivalent about the positive effects of the Union, while fearful of the direction of an increasingly assertive Catholic mobilisation; he idealised the theoretical virtues of the British constitution while critiquing its practice in Ireland. For Gamble, Ireland was trapped in a constitutional purgatory, an ‘unnatural state’ fostered by ‘the melancholy spectacle of distrustful government and discontented people’.Footnote ¹⁰³ Gamble looked to Emancipation to restore equilibrium in Ireland; but he was aware that others were attracted to more wholesale changes to the polity. By 1810, political dissatisfaction in Ireland began to manifest itself in a resurrected anti-unionism.

While the status of Catholics was the dominant issue in Irish political thought during the early years of the Union, discontent with Ireland’s new constitutional status cracked through to the surface occasionally. In pressing the case for Catholic Emancipation, several prominent pamphleteers also voiced concern with the structure of incorporating union, with the fear that centralised power detached Irish opinion from the decision-making process and that the Irish debt was forced to absorb British military spending. William Parnell doubted the ability of the British political classes to formalise a method to consult Irish concerns when addressing government priorities. ‘The English’, he wryly noted in 1804, ‘have the disposition of a nation accustomed to empire; anything that compromises their own dignity appears quite out of the question’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Parnell lamented the lack of imagination in framing the Acts of Union, proposing that a system that maintained the Irish parliament while creating a shared executive with London would have squared the circle of imperial security and Irish sentiment for self-government.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Henry Dillon called explicitly for a ‘federal Union’ in 1805, with separate parliaments in Britain and Ireland tied together through the bonds of the Crown.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ For Dillon, Catholic relief was, in itself, not enough to harmonise the Union: wider constitutional tinkering – with the Irish gaining control over their own government – was also required.

This impulse reinvigorated Irish political thinking in 1810. During that year, a pamphlet appeared in Dublin with the provocative title, Repeal, or Ruin! Addressed to the People of Ireland. ‘Repeal’ referred to the repeal of the Acts of Union, which would have (in theory) returned Ireland to its pre-1801 state. The tract was written by S. D. O’Mara, a minor literary critic; and while it hardly created a sensation at the time of its publication, it is one of the earliest pamphlets to deploy arguments that became mainstream within the O’Connellite campaign for Repeal from the early 1830s.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ O’Mara presented a history of the passage of the Acts of Union which caricatured the personalities in the Irish parliament in 1800 as patriotic heroes (the anti-unionists) and treacherous villains (the unionists). The Union, O’Mara claimed, had crushed Ireland’s national spirit, degrading its status from a self-governing ‘Kingdom’ to a ‘minor province of the empire’. Irish wealth, in the form of increased absenteeism, was siphoned off to Britain. The loss of the parliament in Dublin ensured that ‘everything is becoming foreign’ in the capital city, as the Irish legislators were replaced by British administrators. O’Mara argued that ten years of Union had corroded Irish self-worth. He believed that the cause of Catholic Emancipation would produce positive changes in the Irish body politic, not least in strengthening reformist-minded politics; but national dignity could not be restored until a parliament was resurrected in Dublin.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

The publication of O’Mara’s pamphlet coincided with the Dublin Corporation calling for a resolution for the Repeal of the Union. Against the backdrop of increasing economic hardship during the Napoleonic Wars, a number of Dublin guilds proclaimed their support for a restoration of the Irish parliament as a means to stimulate the city’s mercantile life.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Invited to address the (Protestant) freemen and freeholders of Dublin in September 1810, O’Connell strenuously backed the cause of Repeal. ‘We have been robbed, my countrymen, most foully robbed of our birthright, of our independence’, O’Connell excitedly told the gathering. He concluded with a dramatic proclamation that put Repeal above Catholic Emancipation as a political ambition. ‘Let us rally round the standard of Old Ireland, and we shall easily procure that greatest of political blessings, an Irish King, an Irish House of Lords, and an Irish House of Commons’. He went on to claim that he would accept the reenactment of the entire penal code if it were accompanied by the restoration of the Irish parliament, such was his desire to see Ireland regain the status of a self-governing country.Footnote ¹¹⁰

While such an assertion was most likely posturing for the benefit of his Protestant audience, O’Connell’s support for the Repeal of the Union was genuine. Such a prominent declaration of support from a leading figure in the Catholic movement did much, however, to sustain the notion that Repeal was a ‘Catholic’ cause, as John Gamble ascertained.Footnote ¹¹¹ Other critics went further, accusing the O’Connellites of seeking a separatist Catholic kingdom in Ireland.Footnote ¹¹² O’Connell was notoriously inconsistent in pressing for Repeal, with his campaigning for the restoration of an Irish parliament waxing and waning over the course of his long career. His tactical prowess should not, however, be read as a sign of a skin-deep commitment. O’Connell had been a critic of the Union since its passage, believing that it was disastrous for Ireland.Footnote ¹¹³ The restorative nature of his vision of a self-governing Ireland – the return to ‘Old Ireland’ – was a consistent thread within his anti-unionist argument.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Despite O’Connell’s frustration with Grattan for his handling of the veto controversy, the O’Connellite blueprint for Irish self-government remained resolutely ‘Grattan’s parliament’.

The emergence of an anti-unionist political idea created the conditions for the articulation of its antithesis. One such example was found in the BMM, which was established in 1808 by William Drennan, John Hancock and Robert Tennent.Footnote ¹¹⁵ The BMM served as a vehicle for the evolving post-revolutionary political ideas of a number of individuals with ties to the United Irishmen in Belfast. Drennan’s editorials revealed that his constitutional vision for Ireland had shifted towards a tentative unionism; the independent Irish republic of the 1790s had been left behind.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Responding to the clamour over Repeal in 1810, the BMM retorted that Ireland’s woes were not necessarily a symptom of the Union, but the lack of parliamentary reform to curb the oligarchic nature of power. The restoration of an unreformed parliament in Dublin would do little to address Ireland’s hardships, as power would continue to be monopolised by the aristocratic classes. The problems facing Ireland were not caused by the Union, Drennan argued, but the costly war in Europe and, in political terms, the ‘schism between the Commons and the people’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ He believed that radical reform – creating a more representative political system in terms of an expanded franchise, equal constituency sizes and empowering popular political delegates – was the path to the amelioration of Ireland.Footnote ¹¹⁸ The connection with Britain offered the best opportunity for radical reform, Drennan opined, as the larger political space offered by the United Kingdom had the potential to ‘allay party feuds’ and ‘to relieve us from the rough riding of some of our unprincipled jockies’.Footnote ¹¹⁹ But the ‘spirit’ of union – paternal sovereignty, equality under the law, and reciprocal utility – needed time to permeate the institutions of the state.Footnote ¹²⁰

The BMM demonstrated that unionism could be articulated within the framework of radical political thought. Within the northern Presbyterian community that the BMM largely represented, Wolfe Tone’s mission to sever the connection between Ireland and Britain seemed like a relic from a bygone age.Footnote ¹²¹ Drennan hinted at this break with the past when writing about Catholic Emancipation in 1813:

Despite this optimism, the BMM folded one year later, despairing of the state of an Irish public opinion split by sectarian concerns.Footnote ¹²³ The rhetoric of progressive unionism struggled to overcome the jagged politico-religious dimension within Irish life.

With the abdication of Napoleon in 1814, the BMM asserted that Europe could be remade with the ‘principle of national representation recognised as the grand axiom worthy of universal assent’.Footnote ¹²⁴ But significant aspects of Irish political opinion remained unconvinced that the United Kingdom was the appropriate framework for Ireland to achieve representative government. At the beginning of 1818, a new magazine with a provocative title – the Anti-Unionist – came into circulation. The Anti-Unionist rose from the editorial ashes of the Dublin Examiner, an accomplished but short-lived highbrow monthly that foreshadowed the rise of the better-known mid century Irish periodicals such as the Dublin University Magazine.Footnote ¹²⁵ The Anti-Unionist, like its predecessor, did not last long – seventeen issues over a four-month period – but the magazine was an important vessel for the articulation of radical political ideas from what might be called a liberal Dublin Protestant perspective. While northern Presbyterians were articulating a form of unionism in the BMM, the Anti-Unionist reminded readers that radical Repeal sentiment remained a visible, if dissipating, element of Protestant political thought in the capital. The pages of the Anti-Unionist resolutely advocated a vision for the restoration of Irish self-government that was distinctive from the O’Connellite version.

The Anti-Unionist’s first editorial portrayed the Union as a moment of national disaster for Ireland, both politically and economically. The absence of the structures of self-government had undermined the dignity of the Irish since 1801, a debasing feature that perpetuated sectarian grievances. ‘We are a nation of wretched traders, famishing peasants, and loathsome beggars’, lamented the Anti-Unionist. The transformation of Irish political economy had not followed the Acts of 1800: the promised injection of English capital into Ireland had failed to materialise, as productive duties were retained in many cases. Indeed, it was English debt, from the imposition of high taxes in Ireland and the near bankruptcy of the Irish exchequer, that dominated fiscal thinking in the pages of the Anti-Unionist.Footnote ¹²⁶ Indeed, it was likely no coincidence that the Anti-Unionist appeared during a period of intense economic hardship for Ireland (and Britain more generally) in the years following the end of the Napoleonic Wars. The postwar fiscal crisis brought to the fore the structural economic problems that blighted Ireland, many of which stemmed from the implausibility of amalgamating two very different economic units at radically different stages of development.Footnote ¹²⁷ One such issue raised by the Anti-Unionist was continuing gentry absenteeism, a practice that was long established in Ireland but unusual in England.Footnote ¹²⁸ The magazine asserted that moving the Irish parliament to London had amplified the absentee problem, with money raised from rents in Ireland spent mostly in England and the solidifying of the image of the remote and disinterested landlord.Footnote ¹²⁹ That the rot had set in only eighteen years after the Union disturbed the magazine. ‘If half a generation has reduced us to this state, what must be our condition before the lapse of half a century?’ Redemption, the Anti-Unionist believed, could only be achieved through the restoration of a parliament in Dublin. The Anti-Unionist conceded that this goal was not likely achievable in the short term, but the first step had been taken with the appearance of the magazine. ‘One stage in the progress will be gained by making the Union and its effects the subject of every man’s thoughts and the burden of his daily speech’.Footnote ¹³⁰

While the Anti-Unionist took its cue from the Grattanite Patriot faction’s stance in 1799–1800 against the British connection, what is striking is the anchoring of Repeal as a measure of radical political reform. The desire for widening the franchise and removing the aristocratic grip over parliament was shared between the BMM and Anti-Unionist, but while the BMM argued that radical reform was achievable through the framework of the Union, the Anti-Unionist rejected this model. Under the Union, Ireland suffered a state of constitutional subjugation, which left ‘the great body of the people’ disenfranchised and poorly served by self-interested and remote representatives. ‘Let us now look at the state of Ireland with respect to Representation’, declared the Anti-Unionist:

These factors, according to the magazine, ensured that Ireland occupied a passive constitutional space, deprived of the means of representation to effectively shape its own future.Footnote ¹³² With this analysis of the present state of Ireland, the Anti-Unionist posited that a Repeal of the Union did not imply a turning of the clock backwards to 1800: any parliament in Dublin must be ‘reformed so as to give the great body of the people their real value’.Footnote ¹³³ An expansive franchise was championed in the pages of the Anti-Unionist, as was the secret ballot.Footnote ¹³⁴ While Repeal was the most eye-catching component of the Anti-Unionist, the magazine placed as high a value on radical reform as a means to representative government.Footnote ¹³⁵

The core message of the Anti-Unionist was thus grounded not on national sentiment or nostalgia, but a belief that the Union gravely weakened the link between the Irish people, political power and economic well-being. The magazine connected fiscal exploitation to a lack of effective political representation: Ireland ‘must consequently expect to be imposed on’, given its representatives had little influence on policy matters.Footnote ¹³⁶ Such a spiteful constitutional set-up enabled sectarian differences to flourish unchecked in Ireland, as discriminatory laws were maintained by London. The message was stark: the new polity created in 1801, which promised so much from an Irish perspective – access to British capital, the lessening of religious divisions, the much-vaunted virtues of the British constitution – was, in fact, a tomb for political liberty in Ireland. Without a Repeal of the Union, ‘the people of Ireland can never enjoy the advantages of representative government’.Footnote ¹³⁷

‘A Sort of Political Pastorini’

The 1820s was the decade of mass Catholic mobilisation and the eventual – and begrudging – concession of Emancipation. After making a name for himself in the veto controversy, O’Connell’s star began to wane in the post-1815 period. The formation of the new Catholic Association in 1823, with its innovative ‘Rent’-based funding model and visibility via the medium of mass meetings, returned O’Connell to the forefront of Irish political consciousness, and on a scale never seen before. Foregrounding the establishment of the Catholic Association was a continuing defence of the ‘Protestant constitution’ by its defenders and assault on the ‘Orange system’ by its detractors. Henry Grattan Jr’s attempt to retain the Dublin City seat of his recently deceased father in 1820 failed in the face of a concerted effort by Irish Protestant Toryism. Thomas Ellis, a prominent Orangeman, won Grattan’s old seat and announced a drastic change of direction for the constituency. ‘I shall oppose the unqualified demands of the Roman Catholics’, he asserted, ‘conceiving them to mediate the overthrow of the Constitution and the Protestant Religion’.Footnote ¹³⁸ Sir Harcourt Lees, an Anglican clergyman and staunch opponent of Catholic Emancipation, issued two pamphlets in 1820 that asserted the primacy of what he called the ‘Protestant constitution’. In Lees’s argument, the Anglican Church and state were one; Protestantism and the idea of civil liberties in the United Kingdom were intimately bound together. Catholic relief was, therefore, unconstitutional. Lees also stressed that the ‘bigots’ who would inevitably represent Catholic Ireland in the event of Emancipation would destroy the state from within. Emancipation was thus, from Lees’s vantage point, a revolutionary threat to the United Kingdom.Footnote ¹³⁹

Increasingly, however, such a perspective was difficult to maintain. The near-annual motions in the House of Commons on the question of Catholic relief were becoming extremely close, which gravely concerned Tories and other anti-Emancipationists.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ There was also growing criticism of the structures of power in the Irish government and the judiciary, with the old wine of the Protestant Ascendancy appearing in the new bottles of nineteenth-century political and legal life. There was a flurry of pamphlets in the early 1820s critiquing the ‘Orange System’, a clandestine faction associated with the Orange Order who enjoyed the tacit support of the state and continued to uphold the attitudes of the Protestant Ascendancy. A supporter of Grattan contrasted the harsh treatment of Ribbonmen, the oath-bound Catholic society, with the leniency that Orangemen received in the law courts in front of all-Protestant juries.Footnote ¹⁴¹ It was this explicit difference in how the law interpreted different Irish political and religious organisations that prompted several liberal Protestants, such as Thomas Wallace and the ubiquitous William Cusack Smith, to condemn the ‘Orange System’ in print.Footnote ¹⁴² Wallace believed that the power wielded by the Orange Order created a form of political apartheid that encouraged the anti-Protestant excesses of Ribbonism. ‘What could be more natural for the Irish peasant’, Wallace asked, ‘when he saw or felt that a sworn confederacy was formed and in full operation against him, then he also should resort to a sworn confederacy for defence and protection?’Footnote ¹⁴³ Smith believed that the perceived differences in how Protestants and Catholics were regarded by the judicial system, with Orangemen finding favourable treatment, was a festering sore within the Union. He warned that an increasing ‘hatred of Orangemen’ would ultimately result in ‘their destruction’.Footnote ¹⁴⁴

There was a certain timeliness in Smith’s words, given the popularity of the so-called Pastorini prophecies in Ireland during the early nineteenth century. ‘Pastorini’ was the pseudonym of Charles Walmesley, an English Benedictine who died in 1797. In 1771, he published a history of the Catholic Church which contained a commentary on the Book of Revelation, with a prediction about the destruction of Protestantism in the year 1825.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ The book was hugely successful, running through numerous editions throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Numerous editions were published in Ireland, encouraged by the British government during the French Revolutionary Wars, to persuade Irish Catholics that France was the primary enemy of Catholicism.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ The irony was that the state sponsored a text dealing with religious apocalypse and the ultimate triumph of Catholicism, which circulated widely throughout Ireland.

At the end of the Napoleonic War, the sections from Walmesley’s History dealing with the fall of Protestantism were reprinted as standalone small pamphlets and broadsheets.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ The Pastorini prophecies formed part of the vocabulary of Catholic agrarian secret societies, such as the Ribbonmen and the Rockites, in parts of Munster during the early 1820s.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Given the fevered background, millennialism was projected by some onto the new Catholic Association. William Phelan, an Anglican clergyman, lamented the coming of ‘a sort of political Pastorini’, in which the state, through the maintenance of political exclusion, had abandoned the Catholics of Ireland to ‘papal tyranny’ and radical politics. Ireland was ‘legally a member of the great British family’ but was not ‘morally’ accepted as such. Opponents of the Anglican Church and state had flourished in Ireland, with fearful consequences inevitably to follow.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ For unionist writers such as Phelan, the apparent widespread embrace of the Pastorini prophecies by sections of the Irish peasantry was a manifestation of the failure to meaningfully import the virtues of the British constitution into Ireland; moral authority in Ireland lay elsewhere, gravely weakening the institutions of the state and the Protestant Church.

The Pastorini revelations provided an unsettling backdrop for the inauguration of the Catholic Association. Such was the persistence of the prophecies that O’Connell felt obliged to appear in front of a House of Lords committee on the subject, where he claimed that they had ‘no effect … upon the lower orders of the Irish Catholics’.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ O’Connell’s utterance revealed his eagerness to downplay the lure of the ‘prophecies’ as he sought to build political respectability. On most metrics, he was successful. Through innovations such as the Catholic Rent, local organising agents and grassroots meetings, the Catholic Association became a mass movement from 1824, drawing people away from the violent Rockites; apocalyptic ambitions were tempered by a renewed and invigorating political agitation. Somewhat ironically, O’Connell was cast as the predestined deliverer of millennialism in Ireland, albeit a new age ushered in through the constitutional destruction of Catholic disabilities, not the fall of Protestantism.Footnote ¹⁵¹

The connections between radical politics that challenged exclusion from representation and Catholicism unquestionably became more pronounced with the inauguration of the Catholic Association. This was personified by James Warren Doyle, who was one of the most prominent clerical figures in Ireland with an affiliation to the Association. Doyle became the Bishop of Kildare and Leighlin in 1819 and rose as one of the most significant political thinkers in Ireland during the 1820s. Through his pastoral addresses, appearances in front of parliamentary select committees and, most significantly, his political writings published under the pen name ‘J. K. L.’ (James of Kildare and Leighlin), Doyle’s contributions to public debate embodied a form of Catholicism that cast off obeisance in religious and political matters, and demanded spiritual and civic equality within the Union.Footnote ¹⁵² At the heart of Doyle’s thought was the dignity of Irish Catholics as a religious and political community.Footnote ¹⁵³ The politicisation of Catholicism was, in his reading, a by-product of religious-based discrimination in secular matters:

The remaining cinders of the penal laws, therefore, created the conditions for the flourishing of a cohesive and confident Catholicism, with Doyle emerging as one of its indispensable mouthpieces.

Doyle came to prominence as a political commentator with the publication in 1823 of his pamphlet, A Vindication of the Religious and Civil Principles of the Irish Catholics. In addressing the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Richard, Marquis Wellesley, directly, ‘J. K. L.’ symbolically wrote as a critical citizen rather than a subordinate subject. The aim of the pamphlet was to refute four misconceptions of Irish Catholicism, which Doyle believed were promoted to copper-fasten the status quo: that the religion was slavish superstition; that the Catholic hierarchy desired to overthrow the Anglican Church; that the clergy stirred the minds of their flock to stoke rebellion; and that the Catholic Church was intolerant of other denominations.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ While social injustices such as the continuing tithe system were condemned by Doyle, he powerfully stressed that such complaints should not distract policymakers from the real source of discontent in Ireland:

The classical references suggested that Doyle framed Ireland in terms of a timeless political struggle between nascent ideas of popular liberty and the corrupt tyranny of a powerful state; the ‘laws of Draco’, referring to the vindictive Athenian lawgiver, was an evocative analogy. O’Connell, the new Demosthenes, was gratified by the Vindication, moving a vote of thanks to ‘J. K. L.’ on behalf of the nascent Catholic Association.Footnote ¹⁵⁷

Despite the sustained critique of the penal laws, Doyle (like O’Connell) was an enthusiastic advocate of the theory of the British constitution. His thinking was shaped by a conspicuous unionism, which imagined the United Kingdom as a political space that enshrined equality before the law for all citizens while incorporating Irish ideas into Irish policy. Once Britain and Ireland were bonded by the ties of equality, ‘one solid empire’ spanning the islands would be created.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Indeed, Doyle’s understanding of the constitution was deeply influenced by English Whig political thought, such as the supremacy of parliament and the idea that ‘corporate property’ (such as land owned by the Church of Ireland) was held by the Crown as a trustee of the people.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ He rejected the widely received notion held by such champions of the political status quo that the constitutional tradition established in 1688 was intrinsically ‘Protestant’, arguing that ‘no civil constitution can be essentially either Catholic or Protestant’. Laws are made and unmade and constitutions continually evolve ‘in Catholic and Protestant times’. The penal laws, in other words, were not a timeless component of the British constitution, but a legislative priority of a previous age that had lost its relevance in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The state had the right to suspend the political rights of a portion of its citizens ‘in times of danger’, but, as Doyle asserted, ‘when the danger has ceased … the suspension of rights should cease also’. It was ‘tyrannical’ to maintain the penal laws when clearly there was no ‘Catholic’ plot against the state.Footnote ¹⁶⁰

Doyle rapidly became a popular and influential writer. His pamphlets were circulated widely throughout Ireland, and his writings were incorporated into Sunday Mass services.Footnote ¹⁶¹ In 1825, his standing as the political voice of Catholic Ireland was enhanced with the publication of his most engaging work and noted appearance as a witness to a parliamentary select committee. His Letters on the State of Ireland assumed the form of collected letters on a wide range of political and social matters, written from ‘J. K. L.’ to an unnamed friend in England. It was a tour de force of powerful polemic writing, offering a sweeping survey of the Irish political landscape. Opening the book with a letter on the character of the Irish government, Doyle deployed the analogy of Rome (one of many classical references that pepper the work) as a warning of the lurch into an unresponsive and unrepresentative state with highly centralised power, which would inevitably implode.Footnote ¹⁶² Doyle believed that Irish governance was not guided by a vindictive impulse, but ‘bad laws’, even if administered justly, were as damaging to Irish faith in the political structures of the United Kingdom as a despotic regime. Coercive legislation, such as the Insurrection Act of 1822, had legitimate intentions – the aim of quelling rural unrest – but achieved this at the behest of Irish liberties. ‘The spirit and the letter of almost all our laws’, argued Doyle, ‘are hostile to the people’.Footnote ¹⁶³ While this state of affairs continued – while laws were passed without consideration of the needs of the Irish people – the Union was merely the modern manifestation of the ‘spirit of conquest’.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ At the heart of Doyle’s commentary on the operation of governance in Ireland was a critique of its (from an Irish perspective) unrepresentative nature. Citing Montesquieu (from The Spirit of the Laws (1750)), Doyle queried whether the laws of one country could be ‘transferred to another without regard to the temper, habits, trade, resources, modes of industry, or religion, of its inhabitants’.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ His summary of British law in Ireland under the Union was that it retained a toxic colonialism from a previous age; the governing structures had not evolved to adequately incorporate Irish sentiment.

Doyle emphasised that the penal laws represented the most obvious weakness of the British constitution in Ireland. Deploying a somewhat tongue-in-cheek reference to the father of Scottish Presbyterianism to make his point, he recorded that John Knox ‘would have it that Government should exist for the sake of the people, and not for the people for those who govern them’. As the Catholics were, as Doyle put it, ‘morally speaking, the people of this country’, the Irish majority ‘should engross the principal attention of our rulers’.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ He stressed that it was patently unjust in a modern state that a citizen’s interaction with the law was dictated by their religious denomination.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ In his evidence to the parliamentary committee on the state of Ireland in 1825, Doyle stated that if Emancipation was carried, ‘the whole of the Catholic population would consider their grievances, as it were, at an end’.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ Political equality for Catholics was the path to fully reconciling Ireland to the Union, argued Doyle; any other alternative options were disastrous. The political exclusion of Catholics underpinned, in Doyle’s reading, ‘an unnatural conflict between the people and the laws’, with Irish society as a whole made to suffer through a lack of industry, agrarian tension and widespread poverty.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ He voiced a desire to join Rousseau in a ‘return to a state of nature’, rather than accept the injustices inherent in ‘the system in Ireland’.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Doyle posited an apocalyptic consequence if the penal laws were retained indefinitely, cautioning that ‘we need no Pastorini to foretell the result’.Footnote ¹⁷¹ Continuing political exclusion was, he warned, turning the Irish into ‘Reformers of the very worst description’, driven in political matters not by hope but by ‘revenge’. The logical outcome, Doyle believed, was the Repeal of the Union, achieved not through reasoned debate but politicised hatred.Footnote ¹⁷² Given Doyle’s professed unionism, he believed that such a scenario was extremely dangerous. His gravest fear was rooted in a lesson from antiquity: ‘My chief anxiety for Emancipation, after a sense of duty to my king, and attachment to my country, arises from my aversion – from my horror of civil war’.Footnote ¹⁷³

One of the major themes emphasised by Doyle was that there was no tension between the spiritual and temporal allegiances of Catholics. The charge of divided allegiance was part of the argument forwarded by champions of the ideal of an exclusively Protestant constitution. In such interpretations, Catholicism could be tolerated by the state, but could not gain a share in political power.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ During a parliamentary debate on Emancipation in 1825, the Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool, asserted that ‘Catholics were not entitled to equal rights in a Protestant country’. He believed that it was unconstitutional to concede ‘the enjoyment of the same civil rights and privileges as the Protestant’ to Catholic subjects, when their ‘allegiance was divided between a spiritual and a temporal master’. The allegiance of the Protestant subject, in contrast, was undivided and ‘acknowledged but one ruler’, in line with the normative political theory of the state.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ For Liverpool, this concept of divided allegiance emboldened the Catholic clergy, who eagerly spread their ‘practical power’ beyond the spiritual realm.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ Doyle addressed Liverpool in his book, An Essay on the Catholic Claims (1826), stressing that the question of allegiance was not controversial. Doyle styled himself as ‘Your Lordship’s most obedient and most humble Servant’ in the dedication to make his point.Footnote ¹⁷⁷

An Essay on the Catholic Claims presented a history of the papacy’s secular authority from the Roman Empire to the medieval period, highlighting its waning influence as political power. Doyle’s key argument was that the Pope’s supremacy in spiritual matters was undisputed, but the Catholic Church did not sponsor papal dominion over the temporal claims of monarchs and emperors.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ While the bull Unam Sanctam, issued by Boniface VIII in 1302, was cited by opponents of Catholic Emancipation as evidence of papal aspirations for a universal monarchy,Footnote ¹⁷⁹ Doyle offered a more temperate interpretation. Deploying an Irish form of Gallicanism, he suggested that ‘no Bull of any pope can decide our judgement’. The imperial pretensions of Unam Sanctam were, in Doyle’s view, ‘odious’, and could not be upheld in any legal (or even rhetorical) sense.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ Claims that the papacy insisted on sovereignty over temporal matters were bogus, Doyle affirmed; such a doctrine was, in his view, never a pillar of Church teaching.Footnote ¹⁸¹ There was, thus, no barrier to Catholics pledging allegiance to a secular ruler, even a Protestant one. Catholics might not recognise a spiritual supremacy of the Crown in the United Kingdom, but as Doyle pointed out, neither did Protestant Dissenters.Footnote ¹⁸² The state was, in Doyle’s reading, ‘derived from God, and totally independent of the pope, or of any other authority whatsoever’.Footnote ¹⁸³ The King was obeyed without question in temporal matters; his status as head of the Anglican Church was incidental to the practice of sovereignty. The Pope, on the other hand, ‘has no arbitrary power over us’ in worldly matters.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ Doyle’s powerful conclusion was, therefore, that the charge of divided allegiance made by opponents of Emancipation was unjust.

While Doyle was an important clerical advocate of Emancipation, he was prepared to deviate from the script set by the leaders of the Catholic Association. The year 1825 was a dramatic one for the Association, with its suppression in March, coupled with O’Connell actively working with English radical parliamentarians in drafting Emancipation legislation. Included in the text were several ‘securities’ to soothe Protestant fears – which became known as the ‘wings’ attached to the measure – including state payment of the Irish Catholic clergy and the disfranchisement of the forty-shilling freehold voters.Footnote ¹⁸⁵

O’Connell believed that there was a compelling case to abandon the forty-shilling freeholders as the price of Catholic Emancipation, as their poor economic status rendered them electoral tools of the landlord interest.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ Doyle, however, was at odds with this part of the O’Connellite compromise package. In the Letters, he mounted a robust defence of the small freeholder voters in Ireland. ‘It is the natural right of man’, Doyle pronounced,

Disenfranchising the forty-shilling freeholders was tantamount to falling from ‘the image of a freeman’ to the ‘very essence of a slave’. Doyle utilised a classical analogy to depict the Irish peasant who had lost their voting rights: ‘Like the Helot at Athens he may go to the forum and gaze at the election, and then return to hew his wood or fetch his water to the freeman’. The dignity of electoral rights was a central component of Doyle’s political imagination; it was the ability to cast a vote that separated a ‘citizen’ from merely an ‘inhabitant’.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ Emancipation to him meant equality under the British constitution; disenfranchising a portion of the Irish population to achieve the rights of a citizen was an incongruous concept. The question of Emancipation was not solely about Catholic representative rights but about the definition of the ‘people’.

Despite Doyle’s defence of the forty-shilling freeholder, he was careful to avoid public criticism of O’Connell on the matter.Footnote ¹⁸⁸ While O’Connell was increasingly confident of carrying Emancipation with the ‘wing’ of disenfranchisement, there was much discontent (and open hostility) within the re-established Catholic Association regarding the compromise.Footnote ¹⁸⁹ Doyle’s perspective certainly carried weight within Catholic Ireland; and in the election of 1826, it was the forty-shilling freeholder who delivered the incredible victory that the Catholic Association enjoyed in Waterford. Through a concerted campaign overseen by senior Catholic Association lieutenants, particularly Thomas Wyse, the small freeholders of the constituency abandoned the landed ‘establishment’ candidate, Lord Beresford, in favour of the liberal, pro-Emancipationist, Henry Villiers Stuart. Underpinning the dramatic success was a disciplined organisation that mobilised the Catholic electorate, paid for by the renewed Catholic Rent. The clergy were central, as organisers and fundraisers, to these initiatives, although Doyle was hesitant in permitting priests in his diocese to become Catholic Rent collectors.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ While Doyle believed that Emancipation would defuse religious antagonisms in Ireland and ultimately row back clerical involvement in politics, the figure of the priest was well entrenched in Catholic politics.Footnote ¹⁹¹ The triumph in Waterford demonstrated the potential of a mass democratic movement led by clerics, which ultimately created the conditions (via O’Connell’s dramatic electoral victory in Co. Clare in 1828) to secure Catholic Emancipation. Despite Doyle’s hopes for the post-Emancipation age, his politicised pulpit became normalised during the 1820s and continued long afterwards. While ‘popery’ signified backwardness to a British audience, Catholicism was cast by its adherents as the vehicle for liberty, justice and (ironically, perhaps, given its Protestant ethos) a share in the British constitution. As one pamphleteer, praising the role of the clergy in the Catholic Association, asked rhetorically in 1826, ‘was it not to assert his right of citizenship that St Paul appealed to Caesar?’Footnote ¹⁹²

‘The First Day of Freedom’

The pressure created by the spirited campaign of the Catholic Association soon paid dividends in the aftermath of Lord Liverpool’s death in 1827. The crisis provoked by Daniel O’Connell’s sensational victory at the Clare by-election in 1828, which prompted a panicked government led by Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, to pass the Catholic Relief Act, is well known.Footnote ¹⁹³ Writing to the secretary of the Catholic Association, Edward Dwyer, shortly after Emancipation received royal assent, a jubilant O’Connell saluted the dawning of ‘the first day of freedom’. He praised the Association for instigating ‘a bloodless revolution more extensive in its operation than any other political change that could take place’, and expectantly believed that the transformation would put an end to ‘misgovernment’ in Ireland. But he warned against Irish complacency and advocated the creation of a body – he used the phrase ‘Society for the Improvement of Ireland’ – to ‘watch over the rising liberties of Ireland’.Footnote ¹⁹⁴

Several months later, a more despondent O’Connell bemoaned that the ‘old system of government is in full force here’.Footnote ¹⁹⁵ The unbridled optimism of the immediate aftermath of the passage of Emancipation had quickly evaporated, underpinned by O’Connell’s guilt at paying the ‘pound of flesh’ in the form of the disfranchisement of the forty-shilling freeholder.Footnote ¹⁹⁶ This ‘wing’ of the Catholic Relief legislation reduced the Irish electorate from 300,000 to 37,000, and damaged O’Connell’s reputation as a political radical.Footnote ¹⁹⁷ Still, O’Connell was emboldened by the concession of Catholic Emancipation and left disappointed by the resistance of the British state to reform itself. O’Connell now concluded that Ireland would be better served within alternative representative structures. The Repeal of the Act of Union became the next goal of his extraordinary political career.

Such a swift change in O’Connell’s political mood spoke volumes for the confidence instilled within Catholic Ireland through decades of agitation in pursuit of Emancipation. The perception among Catholic political thinkers was that Emancipation would reorder the structure of politics based on the concepts of inclusion, equality and justice. Pro-Emancipation political literature often framed the eradication of the final penal laws as the path to Catholic empowerment. Once the full liberties promised by the theory of the British constitution became a reality in Ireland, Catholics would be on a par with the ‘Established’ denomination. With the majority population formally recognised as part of the political nation, improvement would inevitably follow. The Irish Catholic political mind connected the hardships that blighted Ireland not as symptomatic of unjust economic structures, but as the formal exclusion from political power. This was a common interpretative framework in the first half of the nineteenth century. The Anti-Unionist, for example, stressed that the ‘happiness’ of populations rested on the ‘introduction of representative governments’. The same issue explicitly explained the ‘wretched condition of the poor’ in Ireland as a ‘consequence of their political degradation’.Footnote ¹⁹⁸

Emancipation was formally about the ability of Catholics to act as political representatives in the national parliament; but it also symbolised resentment at a post-1800 polity seemingly based, in terms of its Irish policy, on the principles of conquest and petty bigotry. O’Connell’s frustration in 1829 at the lack of profound political change symbolised the advances of an organised Catholic politics that sought amelioration through the languages of political inclusion, equal rights and constitutionalism. These themes permeated Thomas Wyse’s Political Catechism on Emancipation, published in 1829:

[…]

While the democratic base of the Catholic Association can be framed as a form of Irish constituent power that challenged Wellington’s constituted power,Footnote ²⁰⁰ Emancipationists such as Wyse were explicit in framing Catholic relief as the means to import the British constitution into Ireland. The radicalism of the cause did not imply a radical constitution, despite O’Connell’s drift towards Repeal of the Union.

Wyse was, of course, the able strategist who mobilised the forty-shilling freeholder in his native Waterford to take the seat for the Catholic interest. His great-grandfather, also Thomas, was a founder of the Catholic Committee in 1757.Footnote ²⁰¹ As the Catholic Relief Act passed into law in 1829, Wyse published his Historical Sketch of the Late Catholic Association of Ireland, which offered an ‘official’ history of the O’Connellite campaign. It is a remarkable book, providing an insight into the ideas that permeated Catholic Ireland on the eve of Emancipation. ‘In order to be free, there is one thing necessary’, Wyse proclaimed, ‘strongly, deeply, and perseveringly, to will it’.Footnote ²⁰²

This ‘will’ was summoned into existence through the lengthy campaign for political equality. ‘Catholic Emancipation’, Wyse mused,

Wyse depicted the eighteenth-century inheritance in colonial terms, explicitly labelling the Catholics of Ireland as the people of the nation who were excluded from political spaces. The ‘revolution’ of 1782 enhanced the status of the ‘colony’, but did nothing for the ‘nation’.Footnote ²⁰⁴ The ‘nation’ was the people of Ireland, a familiar refrain in pro-Emancipation works; the potential for political change based on popular sovereignty represented, in Wyse’s estimation, a break with eighteenth-century Irish thought. ‘There was no People to appeal to’, Wyse remarked of pre-1790s Ireland.Footnote ²⁰⁵ Born in 1791, Wyse was witness to a political revolution before reaching the age of forty. The Catholic Association, particularly in the contesting of elections from 1826, highlighted that ‘the people had at last become important, and all future appeals were made to the people’.Footnote ²⁰⁶

The democratic language and practical innovations of the Catholic Association are, of course, vital components of the political transformation that occurred in Ireland during the 1820s and have received due attention.Footnote ²⁰⁷ Wyse eagerly framed the campaign for Emancipation as part of a global struggle against tyranny, as Europe attempted to recover from the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. In his narrative, the British government attempted to ‘conduct affairs on old principles’ after 1815, but this was an age of a ‘greater circulation of mind, greater freedom of thought and speech’.Footnote ²⁰⁸ He believed that a ‘new alliance was formed between the Catholics and public opinion in every part of Europe’. The question was not merely whether Catholics in Ireland should obtain full political rights, but, as Wyse put it, ‘whether in a free state there should not be recognised a regenerating power, capable of correcting ancient abuse, and of throwing off when necessary, in the progress of civilization, the slough and vice of its early corruptions’.Footnote ²⁰⁹ Echoing the words of the French travellers to Ireland during the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont, Wyse believed that ‘the cause of Ireland became the cause of Europe’.Footnote ²¹⁰ The shared Catholicism of many European countries (especially France) and Ireland was an implicit theme of Wyse’s framing; despite this, Irish Catholics were able to reach a seeming rapprochement with the ‘Protestant state’ of the United Kingdom in 1829. ‘Catholic rights’ were interpreted by their adherents as a share in existing ‘Protestant rights’. As Wyse put it in his Catechism, for the Union to function effectively, genuine ‘incorporation’ was necessary. ‘I mean by incorporation’, he explained, ‘a perfect mixing of one body with the other – a perfect identity of one country with the other’.Footnote ²¹¹ It was a political vision informed by liberal constitutionalism, in which the concepts of equality and popular sovereignty were held up as pillars within a just polity. Crucially, Emancipationists such as Wyse did not believe these political virtues were incompatible with the British constitution.

Wyse’s account of the Catholic Association offers an illuminating snapshot of Irish Catholic political thought at its most brilliant victory. While O’Connell’s pessimism about the limits of Emancipation set in quickly after the passage of the Catholic Relief Act, Wyse’s history maintained a more optimistic vision for the future of Ireland. The Historical Sketch presented the end of the penal laws as the amelioration of historic grievance; with the creation of equal representative rights, a new age of political possibilities had begun. Wyse hoped that Emancipation would depoliticise religious identities in Ireland and that a political dispensation based on new interests would flourish. ‘Matters of national improvement [now had] to be argued on their own intrinsic merits, and not on the fictions and prejudices of the past’, Wyse hopefully declared.Footnote ²¹² While the ‘Catholic question’ was seemingly closed, Wyse anticipated that political argument would not cease but would build on the O’Connellite platform that had been created during the opening three decades of the Union:

The Irish political mind had been transformed in the struggle for Emancipation. Wyse concluded with the plea to extend the British constitution into Ireland: ‘all we now want is union’.Footnote ²¹³ ‘Union’ indeed dominated the next phase of the Irish political experience, but not necessarily in the way in which Wyse hoped.