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XXI.

1829.

CHAP. ministers the necessity of the most vigorous measures to repress it.* It was only by unremitting exertions, and representing the measure, on repeated occasions, to his Majesty, as one of absolute necessity, that the King's consent to bring in the bill had been obtained; and even when it was given, he repeatedly declared that "he only allowed them to go on, and pledged himself to nothing." He indulged to the very last in the hope that the bill would be rejected by the House of Peers, which would enable him, as his father had done with the India Bill in 1784, to dissolve the House of Commons, and appeal to the people on the subject. The passing of the bill by the Peers by so large a majority struck him with consternation, and revealed at once the helplessness to which the monarch of these mighty realms might be reduced when deprived of the support of his Parliament. In his In his agony he sent for Lord Eldon, to whom he declared "that the measures proposed gave him the greatest possible pain ; that he was in the state of a person with a pistol presented to his breast; that he had nothing to fall back upon; that his ministers had twice threatened to resign if he did not allow the measure to be introduced; that he had been deserted by an aristocracy that had supported his father; that, instead of forty-five peers, as he had expected, against the measure, there were twice that number for it; that everything was revolutionary, that the Peers and aristocracy were giving way to it; that, if he did give his consent, he would go to Hanover, and return no more to England,-they may get a Catholic king in Sussex." Such was his despair that the un

* "I cannot express to you adequately the extent of the difficulties which these and other occurrences in Ireland create in all discussions with his Majesty. He feels that in Ireland the public peace is every day violated with impunity by those whose duty it is to preserve it; that a formidable conspiracy exists; and that the supposed conspirators--those whose language and conduct point them out as the avowed principal agitators of the country-are admitted to the presence of his Majesty's representative in Ireland, and equally well received with the King's most loyal subjects."-Duke of WELLINGTON to Lord ANGLESEA, 11th Nov. 1828; Ann. Reg. 1829, pp. 96, 97.

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happy monarch threw his arms round Lord Eldon's neck CHAP. and wept, entreating him not to desert him, for he had no other to advise with. Lord Eldon, however, was too sensible a man not to see that when the King had, by his own admission, consented to a measure which had been fully explained to him, a ministry could not be found which would support him in rejecting it, and that, after the bill had passed both Houses by such large majorities in consequence of that consent, the King had no longer any choice in the matter. He advised his Majesty, therefore, to yield, which the latter agreed to with infinite reluctance, and the bill received the royal assent on April 13 by commission: the established mode of indicating it Eldon's was the measure of the Ministry rather than the Sove- 83, 86. reign.1*

Life, iii.

franchising

freeholders.

The passing of the Catholic Relief Bill was imme- 151. diately followed by another which was understood by all Bill for disparties to form part of the measure, and this was a bill the fortyfor the disfranchisement of the forty-shilling freeholders shilling in Ireland, and raising the county suffrage to ten pounds. As it was mainly by their exertions that the Relief Bill had been carried, a more flagrant instance of ingratitude never was exhibited, even in that wide field of selfishness and thanklessness which political affairs exhibit. It passed, however, with scarcely any opposition, through both Houses, and with none on the part of the Catholic

* The circumstances attending the King's original consent to bringing in the bill were thus stated by George IV. to Lord Eldon on this occasion: "In the former interview it had been represented by his Majesty that, after much conversation, twice with his Ministers, or such as had come down, he had said, 'Go on;' and upon the latter of those two occasions, after many hours' fatigue, and exhausted by the fatigue of conversation, he had said, 'Go on.' He now produced two papers, which he represented as copies of what he had written to them, in which he assents to their proceeding and going on with the bill, adding certainly in each, as he read them, very strong expressions of the pain and misery the proceeding cost him. It struck me at the time that, if I had been in office, I should have felt considerable difficulty about going on after reading these expressions; but whatever might be fair observation, as to giving or not effect to these expressions, I told his Majesty it was impossible to maintain that his assent had not been expressed, or to cure the evils which were consequential." -TwIss's Life of Eldon, vol. iii. p. 85.

VOL. IV.

M

XXI.

1829.

CHAP. Association or the leaders of the agitation in Ireland. The Tories, in consistency with their principles, supported it as tending to lessen the strength of the priesthood, which had shown itself so formidable on the late crisis; the Whigs supported it, albeit an infringement on popular rights, as an essential part of a whole, the better part of which they were unwilling to lose. Mr Brougham said, "he consented to it as the price, the almost extravagant price, of the inestimable good which would result from the other measure." Sir James Mackintosh described it "as one of those tough morsels which he had scarcely been able to swallow." The bill passed both Houses almost unanimously-in the Commons only seventeen voted against it; in the Lords, after some divisions on matters of detail in the committee, it passed without a division. Scarcely a voice was raised in Ireland against the disfranchising of the very men by whose energy and perseverance the victory had been gained. As is too often the case with wounded veterans, they were allowed

1829, 98,

"To beg their bread through realms their valour won."

Mr O'Connell even, who had declared himself ready 1 Ann. Reg. to perish on the field or the scaffold in defence of the 104; Parl. freeholders, whom he denominated his "faithful Forties," raised not a voice in their defence, and they were quietly consigned to the vault of all the Capulets.1

Deb. xxi. 590, 595.

152.

for a seat

before the

bill is rejected.

May 15.

The passing of the Catholic Relief Bill was soon Mr O'Con- followed by a dramatic scene in the House of Commons, nell's claim which savoured rather of the impetuosity of French feeling than the sober character of the British legislature. Mr O'Connell, who had pledged his reputation, which was very considerable, as a lawyer, that he could take his seat in the House of Commons without taking the oaths, proceeded now to redeem his pledge. Without, therefore, waiting for the period when he could be returned under the new act, he presented himself, on the 15th of

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May, at the bar of the House of Commons, and offered to CHAP. take, not the oaths required when he was elected, but the new oaths prescribed for Roman Catholics by the Relief Act recently passed. That act, however, contained a clause expressly declaring that it should apply only to members returned subsequently to the date of its being passed. This clause, evidently levelled at Mr O'Connell himself, and an unworthy blot on so liberal and indulgent a statute, was obviously a bar to his taking his seat under the new act; and on the construction of the old act, it was justly held by the House, by a majority of seventy-four, that he could not take his seat without taking the oaths required by the statutes in force when he was elected. This incident was chiefly remarkable for the temperance and 1 Parl. Deb. moderation of the able legal argument he delivered on the xxi. 1378, occasion, which presented the strongest possible contrast 1458; Ann. Reg. 1829, to the vehement harangues he had been in the habit of 105, 115. delivering to his impassioned auditories in Ireland.1

1389, 1402,

Clare elec

This incident, in itself trivial, became of importance 153. from what followed, and the light which its consequences The second threw on the character of the great agitator, who for the tion. next fifteen years occupied so prominent a place in the internal history of Ireland. Mr O'Connell's claim to a seat having been set aside, a new writ was issued for a fresh election for the county of Clare. He was chosen without opposition, for the strength of the agitators in the last election left no chance of success in any subsequent contest. But in his address to the freeholders, and his various speeches to the electors, he poured forth a flood of ribaldry and abuse, especially upon the Duke of Wellington and Mr Peel, by whom the Relief Bill had been passed, which demonstrated that he was as capable of appealing to the worst passions of the people as to the reason and justice of the British legislature. "The last election for Clare," he said, "is admitted to have been the immediate and irresistible cause of producing the Catholic Relief Bill. You have achieved the

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CHAP. religious liberty of Ireland. Another such victory in Clare, and we shall attain the political freedom of our beloved country. That victory is still necessary to prevent Catholic rights and liberties from being sapped and undermined by the insidious policy of those men who, false to their own party, can never be true to us, and who have yielded, not to reason, but to necessity, in granting us freedom of conscience. A sober, moral, and religious people cannot continue slaves-they become too powerful for their oppressors-their moral strength exceeds their physical powers-and their progress towards prosperity is in vain opposed by the Peels and Wellingtons of society. These poor strugglers for ancient abuses yield to a necessity which violates no law and commits 1 Ann. Reg. no crime; and having once already succeeded by these means, our next success is equally certain if we adopt the same virtuous and irresistible means." 1

1829, 123,

126.

154.

language

tude.

Unbounded were the promises which he made to the His violent electors if they returned him again to Parliament. He was and ingrati- to obtain a repeal of the Union, of the act disfranchising the forty-shilling electors, of the Vestry Bill, the Grand Jury Assessment Act; procure for every Catholic rector a parochial house and glebe, strain every nerve for parliamentary reform, and procure a poor-law for Ireland, which should embrace everything that was good, and exclude everything that was detrimental, in the English system. So violent was his language, so unmeasured his professions, that they lost him the support even of the Liberals in England, who heretofore had been most strenuous in his support. "The atrocity," says Miss Martineau, "of his language, in regard to all English statesmen, is scarcely credible now, even when the speeches themselves are before our eyes; and this incendiarism of course appears worse after his having shown how mild and temperate he could appear away from home, and among persons too enlightened to be animated by violent language. From this time the cry for the

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