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The document discusses the book 'Political Thought in Ireland 1776-1798' by Stephen Small, which explores the political ideas that inspired republicanism, patriotism, and radicalism in late eighteenth-century Ireland. It examines the evolution of these ideas in the context of significant historical events, such as the Rebellion of 1798 and the subsequent Act of Union. The book aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the political languages and ideologies that shaped Irish nationalism during this period.

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Political Thought in Ireland 1776-1798 ,Republicanism, Patriotism, and Radicalism
Small, Stephen
Print publication date: 2002, Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2010
Print ISBN-13: 978-0-19-925779-9, doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199257799.001.0001

Introduction
Stephen Small
Historical writing on eighteenth-century Ireland often seeks, implicitly or explicitly, to explain the Rebellion of 1798 and the Union with
Britain that followed. Events of such historical significance, concluding the century with such chronological neatness, inevitably make this
a seductive goal. This book, in part, follows the pattern, for it is an intellectual history of the political ideas that inspired republican,
separatist rebellion. But it is also an attempt to recover the cacophony of political languages used in late eighteenth-century Ireland and to
understand them in the context of their time—whether they ultimately informed the rhetoric of rebellion or slowly diminished into silence
amid the din of debate on the French Revolution.

1
The main focus is the expression and evolution of three key political themes: patriotism, radicalism, and republicanism.
1 These terms are defined and discussed in Ch. 1.

The work is primarily a history of political thought and language, but one that connects ideas and rhetoric to events and individuals. Its
purpose is threefold: first, to describe the political languages and ideas used by Patriots, radicals, and republicans in Ireland from the
American Revolution until the Rebellion; second, to understand how and why these languages and ideas developed over this period; third,
to show how they informed the mentalités of the individuals who expressed these ideas in order to understand their political actions.

These individuals, via groups like the Volunteers and the United Irishmen, had a profound influence on the history of late eighteenth-
century Ireland. They helped secure free trade and legislative independence between 1779 and 1782. They put parliamentary reform and
Catholic rights firmly on the political agenda—helping to win considerable concessions with regard to the latter in 1793. And they
contributed to the bloody and unsuccessful rebellion of 1798—an event that led directly to an Act of Union that has shaped Irish politics to
this day. This book will help explain the ideological motivations for these events. In doing so, it will shed new light on the origins of Irish
republican nationalism and place late eighteenth-century Irish political thought in the larger context of British, Atlantic, and European
ideas.

The main argument is that Irish patriotism, radicalism, and republicanism were largely constructed out of five key political languages:
Protestant superiority, ancient constitutionalism, commercial grievance, classical

end p.1

2
republicanism, and natural rights. These political languages,
2 I use this term broadly in the sense that Pocock uses it. See J. G. A. Pocock, ‘The Concept of a Language and the métier d’historien: Some Considerations
on Practice’, in A. Pagden (ed.), The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1987), 19–38.

often Irish dialects of languages common in the English-speaking and European world, were combined in the late 1770s to construct the
classic expression of eighteenth-century Irish patriotism. Over the next two decades, the American and French Revolutions, the reform
movement, popular politi-cization, Catholic political revival, and Protestant Ascendancy reaction stretched, disrupted, and transformed
these languages. The result was the fragmentation of a broad Irish Patriot consensus and the emergence from it of radical republicanism.
This development was by no means straightforward, natural, or painless. The patriotism of 1776 differed in key respects from the radical
republicanism of 1798, and the shift involved the modification or abandonment of cherished elements of ancient constitutional, Protestant,
and classical republican languages. But many patriots did become radicals and some even became anti-monarchical republicans. The
main narrative is an explanation of how these ideological and linguistic developments came about.

The overarching fivefold categorization of political language outlined above does not preclude other influences on patriots, radicals, and
republicans. Indeed, recognition of the broad and eclectic origins of their political opinions is crucial to a full understanding of eighteenth-
century Ireland. Among other influences, Presbyterian theology is worthy of note, especially as Ulster Dissenters played such an
important part in Irish radicalism. Its omission as a linguistic category is not a denial of Dissent’s organizational and motivational
3
importance, rather a recognition that the political arguments of Dissenters were largely expressed in terms of the five key languages.
3 For a detailed discussion of the political activity, thought, and influence of Ulster Dissenters, see I. McBride, Scripture Politics: Ulster Presbyterians and Irish

Radicalism in the Late Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1998). As McBride points out, ‘Ulster reformers spoke the common political languages of the British Atlantic

world [but] they did so with their own distinctive inflection... religious belief continued to shape the ways in which these paradigms were transmitted digested and

applied.’ When needed to shed light on this ‘distinctive inflection’, these religious beliefs are explained, but they are not a major theme of this work. See also A.
T. Q. Stewart, A Deeper Silence: The Hidden Origins of the United Irish Movement (London, 1993).

An exception is the millenarianism that was relatively unimportant to Patriot thought in the 1770s and 1780s, but which did inform the
popular republicanism of Dissenters in the 1790s. Aspects of this language, which was not exclusive to Dissenters, will be explored in
Chapter 7. Jacobitism is arguably another linguistic influence. However, Jacobite thought, while certainly important among Catholics for

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Subscriber: Jilin University; date: 22 September 2011
Political Thought in Ireland 1776-1798 ,Republicanism, Patriotism, and Radicalism
Small, Stephen
Print publication date: 2002, Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2010
Print ISBN-13: 978-0-19-925779-9, doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199257799.001.0001

most of

end p.2

the century and occasionally discernible in popular Catholic republicanism by the end of the 1790s, was generally antithetical to the
4
traditions examined in this book—which originated in Protestant, Whig sensibilities.
4 A Jacobite rhetoric of quasi-messianic deliverance was occasionally transposed to more promising candidates (i.e. France, the United Irishmen, or
Napoleon) in the popular radical republicanism of the late 1790s. This use of Jacobitism makes a distinctive contribution to popular radical republicanism but is

entirely absent from official United Irish writing. Some Jacobite sentiment may also have been a minor influence on Patriot ambivalence to George III (although

this is more likely to reflect the influence of Bolingbroke than native Irish thought in the pamphlets examined here). For a broader discussion of Irish Jacobitism,

see Breandan O Buachalla, ‘Irish Jacobitism and Irish Nationalism: The Literary Evidence’, in Michael O’Dea and Kevin Whelan (eds.), Nations and

Nationalisms: France, Britain, Ireland and the Eighteenth-Century Context (Oxford, 1995), 103–16.

Simply put, the weight of evidence reveals the five languages of Protestant superiority, ancient constitutionalism, classical republicanism,
commercial grievance, and natural rights to be the basic materials of patriot, republican, and radical rhetoric. Thus, the evolution,
combination, and decline of these languages provide the basic architecture of the book.

I . THE HISTORIOGRAPHICAL CONTEXT

The ever-burgeoning literature on late eighteenth-century Ireland contains much of significance for the historian of Irish political thought.
The work of McDowell, Elliott, Bartlett, Cullen, Curtin, Hill, Smyth, Kelly, Whelan, and others has greatly increased our knowledge of this
period and especially of the 1790s. The United Irishmen, in particular, have come in for serious scrutiny in the past two decades, leading
to the claim that ‘Ireland’s first republicans’ have been ‘rescued from a rather parochial nationalist hagiography as historians have begun to
5
place them in a general context of late eighteenth-century European or transatlantic radicalism’.
5 N. J. Curtin, The United Irishmen: Popular Politics in Ulster and Dublin 1791–1798 (Oxford 1994), 2.

But these historians have generally tended to examine the ideologies and arguments of groups or individuals primarily as a means to
explain their actions rather than as an end in itself. Marianne Elliott’s enormous contribution to the field has focused on the international
6
revolutionary activity of the United Irishmen
6 M. Elliott, Partners in Revolution: The United Irishmen and France (New Haven, 1982).

7
and on a definitive account of Wolfe Tone.
7 M. Elliott, Theobald Wolfe Tone: Prophet of Irish Independence (New Haven, 1989).

She plausibly depicts the United Irishmen as early individualist liberals influenced by the Enlightenment and a radical reading of Locke but
fearful of popular social upheaval. However, the broader examination of the evolution of Irish political thought has not been her main goal.
Similarly

end p.3

Jim Smyth’s The Men of No Property recognizes the importance of political ideas (giving a more socially radical and populist reading of
8
the United Irishmen) but concentrates on popular politicization and the relationship between the United Irishmen and the Defenders.
8 J. Smyth, The Men of No Property: Irish Radicals and Popular Politicsinthe Late Eighteenth Century (Dublin, 1992).

Nancy Curtin’s main work includes a good chapter on the ideology of the United Irishmen which broadly agrees with Elliott. She sees them
as bourgeois liberals influenced by classical republicanism, natural rights, and a faith in education, with little interest in social equality. As
a result, they were, she argues, reluctant converts to republican revolution.

This book generally concurs with Curtin’s view, but as her main focus is the activity, organization, and development of the United
Irishmen, her treatment of ideological issues does not fully explore the origins, evolution, and complexity of their language and
argument. Of course, this is not Curtin’s primary goal, and she acknowledges that

Little has been done to explore the sources of the nationalism and republicanism which all agree that the United Irishmen espoused, but
which few have bothered to trace. Indeed, United Irish republicanism is equated simply—and wrongly—with a desire for total separation
from Britain. In general, there has been little effort to place these republicans within a cultural and intellectual tradition; the prevailing
tendency, on the contrary, has been to regard them as having emerged, sui generis , from the storming of the Bastille in 1789, the example
9
of which provided an irresistible stimulus to the revival of Ireland’s dormant reform movement.

9 Curtin, The United Irishmen , 5.

Until recently, few Irish historians working on this period were interested in the history of Irish political thought in its own right. This neglect
has prompted the editors of a collection of essays on Irish political thought (in many ways the first of its kind) to declare that ‘the history of
10
political ideas in Ireland is largely unwritten’.
10 D. G. Boyce, R. Eccleshall, and V. Geoghegan (eds.), Political Thought in Ireland since the Seventeenth Century (London, 1993), 1.

11
There are some noteworthy exceptions to this observation, and interest has been increasing.
11 The most notable example is S. J. Connolly (ed.), Political Ideas in Eighteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin, 2000).

12
The depth and consistency of Tone’s republicanism and separatism have been analysed.
12 See Elliott, Wolfe Tone, 84–6, 126–30,167–9, 268–71, and 392–5; T. Bartlett, Theobald Wolfe Tone (Dublin, 1997), and ’The Burden of the Present: Theobald

Wolfe Tone, Repub lican and Separatist’, in D. Dickson, D. Keogh, and K. Whelan (eds.), The United Irishmen: Republicanism, Radicalism and Rebellion

(Dublin, 1993), 1–15. See also T. Dunne, Theobald Wolfe Tone: Colonial Outsider (Cork, 1982).

The recent contributions of Joep Leerssen and Jackie Hill have been

end p.4

13
important in stressing the Whiggish, Protestant, and corporatist elements in Irish Patriotism.
13 See J. Leerssen, ‘Anglo-Irish Patriotism and its European Context: Notes towards a re assessment’, ECI 3 (1988), 7–24; and J. Hill, From Patriots to

Unionists: Dublin Civic Politics and Irish Protestant Patriotism, 1660–1840 (Oxford, 1997).

14
And the influence of Scottish Enlightenment thinking on Ulster Presbyterian radicalism has begun to be explored.
14 See Stewart, A Deeper Silence; and I. McBride, ‘The School of Virtue: Francis Hutcheson, Irish Presbyterians and the Scottish Enlightenment’, in Boyce,

Eccleshall, and Geoghegan (eds.), Political Thought in Ireland , 73–99. See also McBride’s ‘William Drennan and the Dissenting Tradition’, in Dickson, Keogh,

and Whelan (eds.), The United Irishmen: Republicanism, Radicalism and Rebellion , 49–61.

But there has been no detailed examination of the transmission and development of Irish patriot and republican thought in the late
eighteenth century, nor a general synthesis of Irish political thought in this period since McDowell’s comprehensive but dated Irish Public
15
Opinion, 1750-18OO written in 1944.
15 R. B. McDowell, Irish Public Opinion, 1750–1800 (London, 1944).

Since the late 1950s, the work of J. G. A. Pocock, Quentin Skinner, and many others has revolutionized the way we think about the
16
history of political thought.
16 The seminal work is J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975), but
see also his Virtue, Com merce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1985). Q. Skinner’s

ground-breaking work is The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (2 vols., Cambridge, 1978). See also his ‘The Republican Ideal of Political Liberty’, in G.

Bock, Q. Skinner, and M. Viroli (eds.), Machiavelli and Republicanism (Cambridge, 1990), 293–309. D. R. Woolf, ‘The Writing of Early Modern European

Intellectual History, 1945–1995’, in M. Bentley (ed.), Companion to Historiography (London, 1997), 316–20, pro vides a good, brief overview of these

developments.

Their work has had such important consequences for the history of republicanism (and the related concepts of patriotism and radicalism)
that it requires a thorough re-examination of eighteenth-century Irish political language in its Atlantic, European, and British context. The
use of classical republicanism as a language to explain early modern political discourse has provoked a wide-ranging debate about the role
of republican ideas and their eighteenth-century importance. The ideological origins of the American Revolution, in particular, have been re-
examined in the light of these models, inspiring a lively debate over the relative importance of possessive individualist/natural rights
17
models versus classical republican interpretations.
17 See B. Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1967); and G. S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic,
1776–1787 (New York, 1972) for the republican synthesis. R. Shalhope, ‘Republicanism and Early American Historiog raphy’, William and Mary Quarterly , 39

(1982), 334–56 , reviews the debate broadly in sym pathy with the republican perspective. I. Kramnick, ‘Republican Revisionism Revisited’, AHR

87: 3 (1982), 629–64, does so critically. See also J. G. A. Pocock, ‘1776: The Revolution against Parliament’, in J. G. A. Pocock (ed.), Three British

Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776 (Princeton, 1980), 265–88.

This debate has enriched such key

end p.5

eighteenth-century concepts as liberty, virtue, vice, corruption, self-interest, the public good, commerce, luxury, balanced government,
18
popular sovereignty, and the English constitution. The debate continues,
18 See P. Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford, 1997) and Q. Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge, 1998) for two

important discussions of the republican thesis. M. Philp critically assesses the relevance of the classical republican model in ‘English Republicanism in the
1790s’, Journal of Political philosophy , 6 (1998), 1–28. S. Pincus emphasizes the significance of commerce for English republicans in ‘Neither Machiavellian

Moment nor Possessive Individualism: Commercial Society and the Defenders of the English Commonwealth’, AHR 103 :3 (June 1998), 677–704.

yet it is only relatively recently that the implications of this work have been felt in Irish historiography. While Marianne Elliott’s Partners in
Revolution (1982) reawakened interest in the origins of Irish republicanism, there has been no systematic attempt to apply the new history
of ideas to Irish political thought in the crucial last quarter of the eighteenth century. This book hopes to remedy this situation by tracing
the use and development of the most influential political languages used in Ireland over this period. In doing so it inevitably reassesses
the nature of early Irish republicanism.

The traditional assertion that the United Irishmen were the first Irish republicans in the modern sense of physical-force separatist
nationalism does not sit easily with their most recent ideological portraits. The reclamation of the United Irishmen for the eighteenth
century shows that the origins of 1790s Irish republicanism lie in the seventeenth-century classical republican tradition and in the real Whig
19
ideas of the early eighteenth-century Commonwealthmen.
19 C. Robbins recounts the Irish dimension of Real Whig thought in The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman: Studies in the Transmission, Development,
and Circumstances of English Liberal Thought from the Restoration of Charles II until the War with the Thirteen Colonies (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), 134–76.

Stewart in A Deeper Silence and McBride in ‘William Drennan and the Dissenting Tradition’ have traced the connections between Real Whiggism, Ulster
Dissent, and the United Irishmen.

Firmly replaced in their own era, the United Irishmen have been identified as rational, Whiggish, universalist children of the Enlightenment,
20
inspired by the French Revolution and by Paine’s radical interpretation of natural rights.
20 See Curtin, The United Irishmen , 13–37; and Elliott, Partners in Revolution, 3–34.

These insights have serious implications for our understanding of the United Irishmen and Irish republicanism more generally. First, they
imply that the evolution of Irish republicanism can only be fully understood by recognizing the elusive, complex, and diverse nature of
republicanism in the eighteenth century. Second, by reconnecting United Irish ideology to its eighteenth-century roots, they weaken the
intellectual links between the United Irishmen and later nationalist republicans. Third, by recovering an earlier, less familiar, Irish
‘republican’ tradition the assumption that the

end p.6

United Irishmen were the first Irish republicans suddenly becomes problematic. The question now becomes, what kind of republicans were
they, and how do they relate to the ancient and eclectic republican tradition described by Robbins, Pocock, and Skinner. It is this
question, among others, that this book attempts to answer.

II . A BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF METHODOLOGY

As indicated above, the book analyses political languages to understand eighteenth-century political mentalités. Such an approach raises
methodological questions. What exactly are these political languages? How do we identify them as distinct and coherent entities? Why
introduce this further conceptual tier of language to a discussion of patriotism, radicalism, and republicanism. And, perhaps most
importantly, how does this theoretical structure help us understand late eighteenth-century Ireland?

This approach to the history of political thought broadly follows that of J. G. A. Pocock, and as he points out, it is more accurately
21
described as the history of political discourse for it necessarily studies debates and utterances rather than consciousness.
21 Pocock, ‘The Concept of a Language and the métier d’historien’ .

Pocock’s basic model is one oflangue and parole — in other words, of identifiable political ‘languages’ and the utterances which use these
languages and act upon them. The historian must identify consistent sets of commonly used rhetorical styles (or ways of talking about
politics), making sure that these structures are distinct languages with an objective status (and not simply the creation of the historian or
the individual style of a single writer). Pocock suggests a number of criteria, which can be reduced to three main tests: (a) showing that
the language was used by a number of different authors; (b) showing that the responses of its users to political events, and the problems
they face in using it, can be predicted; and, ideally, (c) showing that its users consciously discussed the use of the language with each
22
other.

22 Ibid. 26–7.

Individual utterances, such as a pamphlet, are then understood in the context of these languages, which shape and even constrain the
way political ideas are expressed. These utterances may combine different languages in the same text or even consciously challenge a
language in an attempt to modify or reject it. For example, they may involve the appropriation of a language by an author not previously
associated with it, and by putting it to unexpected uses in new circumstances he may bring out critiques previously latent or develop
innovative political rhetoric.

end p.7

This methodology will play a significant but submerged role. The book identifies languages, examines their rhetoric and arguments, and
demonstrates their use by patriots, radicals, and republicans. It also shows how the utterances of certain agents modified these
languages or revealed them to be, in certain respects, inappropriate or pernicious when applied to Irish politics. However, while useful as
an organizing structure, it would be tedious and cumbersome to relate every argument or idea to a ‘language’ once these have been laid
down. Furthermore, the diverse and eclectic arguments revealed in the primary sources may not always fit neatly into these ‘languages’,
and this complexity should not be sacrificed for a spurious coherence in the overall argument. Late eighteenth-century political writing was
often messy and this should not be disguised. Most importantly, the methodology is primarily a means to an end, for while Irish political
23
language is interesting in its own right, mentalités are ultimately of more interest.
23 By mentalitéI mean a shared belief system which motivates political action.

24
Pocock rightly insists that ‘thought must be uttered in order to have a history’,
24 Pocock, ‘The Concept of a Language and the métier d’historien’ , 20.

and this necessitates a history of discourse based on primary texts. But in this book, the history of language is primarily a useful tool for
examining political mentalités.

This ultimate goal poses questions of the methodology. Why focus on these somewhat complex ‘languages’ rather than on straightforward
ideas or argument? Or, to phrase the question differently, how are these languages helping us understand the thoughts of late eighteenth-
century Irishmen? First, as we have already noted, we have no direct access to mental states and can only study mentalités through
written language and the interpretation of action. Second, this approach does not exclude discussion of ideas and argument. On the
contrary, ideas and argument expressed in familiar ways provide the substance of a political language, and much of the discussion that
follows will use terms such as ‘ideas’, ‘argument’, and ‘thought’ in a straightforward way. However, the concept of a ‘language’ is a useful
tool because it is broader and richer. It includes imagery, style, and historical references. It also places ideas and arguments firmly in a
historical context and encourages us to understand them as responses to contemporary debates and concerns rather than ahistorical
concepts. Such an approach offers a better chance of recovering an author’s intentions and of understanding how his utterances would
have been understood by contemporaries.

We need to be careful about the claims made for these languages. They can be seen merely as expressions of political mentalités which
help us

end p.8

understand and predict action, or they can be seen as powerful paradigms which, in themselves, constrain and direct action and thought.
In general, the weaker claim is more sustainable. Political languages are a means of understanding mentalités in a detailed and historically
sensitive way. They help us understand how people analysed and reacted to political events, without claiming that the languages
themselves cause these responses. However, the stronger claim does sometimes apply. These languages could occasionally dictate
25
behaviour (for example classical republican language helped to construct the actions as well as the rhetoric of the Volunteers).
25 See ch. 3.

Authors, it seems, were sometimes forced into certain actions by the logic and repetition of their arguments.

Such influence will always be difficult to prove, however, and we must be sceptical about the extent to which language can constrain or
push when other pressures are at work. Fear, pride, honour, comradeship, self-interest, and political passions of many sorts were also
powerful influences. In many instances, agents may have been pushed in one direction by their language and in another by more visceral
impulses—some of them a good deal more powerful than the desire to act consistently with their rhetoric.

This scepticism alerts us to a ‘gap’ between language and mentalité. We can never have direct access to mentalité and we can never be
sure that it corresponds with the language used. This is especially problematic in a climate of repression like the 1790s when the
expression of radical and republican views was dangerous. But authorial intention and underlying mentalité can always diverge significantly

—especially if the text is primarily a piece of propaganda. At times pamphleteers may have said one thing and believed another. Indeed,
the more sophisticated and polemical the author the more likely they are to use language, perhaps quite cynically, to elicit the response
required—a tactic which intensified in periods of conflict when polemicists sought gut responses rather than logical persuasion. But we
should not reject the analysis of language, for such usage still shows that there were recognizable and effective rhetorical structures which
26
would have a predictable impact on the audience even if the author did not believe in them himself.
26 See Q. Skinner, ‘The Principles and Practice of Opposition: The Case of Bolingbroke versus Walpole’, in N. McKendrick (ed.), Historical Perspectives,

Studies in English Thought and Society in Honour of J. H. Plumb (London, 1974), 93–128. Skinner shows how Bolingbroke used criticism of standing armies,
places, and pensions to push Patriotic buttons in order to overcome widely held objections to ongoing ‘general opposition’ to the king’s government. As well as

legitimizing his opposition, this tactic had the added benefit of embarrassing the Whig junto with impeccably Whig arguments.

Hence an analysis of languages sheds light on the

end p.9

author’s intentions and on collective mentalités if not on his own. Furthermore, it seems safe to assume that most people meant what they
said most of the time, especially when they exposed themselves to criticism and danger for no personal gain—as many radicals and
republicans did in the 178osand 1790s.

How, then, does this methodology help us understand late eighteenth-century Ireland? Essentially it provides a means for unpacking the
labels ‘patriot’, ‘radical’, and ‘republican’: terms often used in very straightforward ways which disguise the diverse and shifting political
rhetoric of late eighteenth-century Ireland. These three labels are useful for categorizing individual and collective responses to events
(whether rhetorical or physical) but they do not reveal the rich texture of debate, or the changes in this debate over time. Analysis of
political languages and utterances, based on a close examination of the primary sources, can provide a much richer context for
understanding political mentalités. By showing how these languages were deployed, developed, and abandoned as the period progressed,
we can create a more revealing and dynamic narrative of ideological change-a narrative which can accommodate the contradictions of
radicalism and republicanism, and which can show that these were an understandable but not straightforward development of patriotism.

III . SOURCES AND AUDIENCES

Given that political disputants, theorists, and propagandists saw pamphlets as the chief medium of serious, public political debate, the
27
identification of these political languages comes from an examination of around 350 Irish pamphlets,
27 This sample probably amounts to over half of the relevant political pamphlets produced in Ireland in this period. The main collections of Irish pamphlets used
were those in the British Library, the Royal Irish Academy, and the National Library of Ireland. But significant use was also made of collections in Trinity College

Dublin, Queen’s University Belfast, the Bodleian, and Marsh’s Library in Dublin.

28
and from a comparison of their content with previously identified eighteenth-century languages.
28 In this respect the book follows and draws upon H. T. Dickinson, Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London, 1977), the

best general survey of eighteenth-century British political thought. The work of Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood has also helped to inform these categories.

Newspapers, which were important in the transmission and popularization of ideas via serializations of works such as Paine’s Rights of
Man, provide another source. Especially useful are the radical papers of the middle and later 1790s (notably the Northern Star and the
Press), as censorship and fear of prosecution disrupted the normal mechanisms of pamphlet production. For this reason a

end p.10

limited number of newspapers (far from immune from censorship themselves) have been looked at to supplement the pamphlet literature.
Printed sermons, parliamentary debates, letters, plays, songs, and poems have also been used to shed light on the expression of political
language and to add colour to political debates. But their use has been selective, for it is rarely the case that ideas expressed in these
29
other sources cannot be found in more coherent form in pamphlets.
29 A possible exception is the Defender and United Irish propaganda aimed at the lower classes in the late 1790s. The crudest expressions of popular

republicanism are perhaps best found in ballads and handbills.

The audience for these pamphlets varied widely from a handful of friends and associates of the author to many thousands of the
increasingly politicized middle class (and even the lower classes by the 1790s). Price alone kept many pamphlets from the middling and
lower sorts—often deliberately so. Some were priced as high as three shillings to target only those readers deemed capable of rational
deliberation. Others were subsidized and sold for as little as a penny in a conscious attempt to reach a popular audience—most notably

30
Paine’s Rights of Man .
30 See M. Butler (ed.), Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy (Cambridge, 1984), 5; and J. R. R. Adams, The Printed Word and the Common

Man: Popular Culture in Ulster 1700–1900 (Belfast, 1987), 85.

But these were exceptions. A typical price for a pamphlet was between six pence and a shilling. Most pamphlets were printed in Dublin,
31
with much smaller but significant numbers printed in Belfast and a smattering coming from a few other large towns like Cork.
31 An analysis of the place of publication (where it exists) of the Irish pamphlets used in this study reveals that 250 came from Dublin and only 14 from Belfast.

These numbers may be skewed by greater use of archives in Dublin and London than Belfast, but they are probably a reasonably accurate indication of where

pamphlets were being published.

We can tentatively infer from content, price, and place of production that most pamphlet readers were either part of the Dublin political
elite; large landowners who also participated in Dublin public life; or clergymen, urban professionals, and merchants from Dublin, Belfast,
or other towns with connections to them. The popularization of Irish politics in the 1790s undoubtedly expanded this audience—at least for
certain pamphlets. But it is these groups who largely formed the civil society that expressed and listened to the languages explored below.

IV . THE STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK

The book has seven chapters. Chapter 1 gives a summary of the five key languages of Protestant superiority, ancient constitutionalism,
commercial grievance, classical republicanism, and natural rights. It then defines

end p.11

republicanism, patriotism, and radicalism before describing their Irish roots before 1776. Chapter 2 is an examination of the political
languages used by patriots from the start of the American Revolution to their victories over free trade. It assesses the influence of the
Revolution on Irish political thought and pays particular attention to the impact of commercial grievances and ancient constitutionalism on
patriot rhetoric. Chapter 3 examines the vital role of classical republican ideas and language in patriot and early radical thought, and
analyses the rhetorical construction of the Volunteers as classical heroes embodying civic virtue.

Chapter 4 examines the emergence of the movement for radical parliamentary reform from Patriotism, describes the various political
languages and arguments used by early radical reformers between 1783 and 1785, and analyses the tensions between classical
republicanism, Protestant superiority, and natural rights. These tensions reflected competing definitions of ‘the people’ and fundamental
doubts over popular sovereignty caused by deep-seated Protestant concerns over Catholic rationality, virtue, and capacity for liberty.

Chapter 5 charts developments in Patriotism and radical reform between 1787 and 1791. It argues that the emergence of Protestant
Ascendancy as a conceptual reaction to the Tithe Dispute, the assertion of Irish rights in the Regency crisis, and the renewal of reform
activity by the Irish Whigs in 1790 all had important consequences for the emergence of 1790s radicalism. Protestant Ascendancy, by
creating a pre-Burkean reactionary stereotype of radical reformers and their allies, was especially important in shaping the environment
within which radicals would operate.

Chapter 6 examines the effects on patriotism and radicalism of the increasing influence of the French Revolution and the emergence of
the United Irishmen. It shows how the tensions in Irish patriotism between its classical republican inheritance and its radical, egalitarian
tendencies were stretched to breaking point by the outbreak of war with France. Finally, Chapter 7 examines the rhetoric and ideas of
post-1793 radicalism and republicanism against the background of Ascendancy reaction and government repression. It argues that
although the period witnessed an irrevocable schism in a previously inclusive Patriot discourse (leading to the rejection or modification of
key elements of the Protestant, classical republican, and ancient constitutional traditions) many of the older Patriot ideas continued to
carry weight among the majority of Irish radicals and republicans.

end p.12

1 The Origins of Irish Republicanism, Patriotism, and Radicalism

Stephen Small

I . INTRODUCTION
1
Defining eighteenth-century patriotism, radicalism, and republicanism is not straightforward.
1 Henceforth ‘patriotism’ refers to the general phenomenon and ‘Patriotism’ the specific Irish variety.

‘Patriotism’ is perhaps the least problematic. For it was a widely used contemporary description with a rich, if contested, set of meanings.
‘Republicanism’ is more problematic because its meaning shifted over the period and because it was less readily used as a self-
description. Indeed, it was often disingenuously applied to Patriots and radical reformers by their opponents. But it nevertheless had
powerful contemporary meanings and one sense of the term does accurately describe a set of agents in the late 1790s. ‘Radicalism’ is the
most problematic, as it is not a contemporary label. More will be said about this later. Nevertheless it is a useful and valid category for
those who sought a radical reform of the parliamentary system.

To make full sense of all three themes we need first to take account of broader European and Atlantic traditions. Without recognizing the
similarities in political languages that Ireland shared with the rest of the English-speaking and European world, we not only lose sight of the
overall structure of Irish political language, we are unable fully to understand the meaning of its terms and arguments. The easy
transmission of people and ideas across the Irish Sea, the sharing of a common language and political culture, and the proximity of a
powerful and dominant neighbour inevitably conditioned Irish political thinking. However, if Irish political thought in the eighteenth century
was based on languages and arguments common in the wider Atlantic world, it had distinct Irish dialects. Unique Irish circumstances gave
rise to unique Irish responses, and the impact of dramatic international political events on Ireland inspired novel Irish applications of
existing arguments. As McDowell has observed, ‘Irish thought at this time was largely a reflection of current British opinion or of the
general

end p.13

eighteenth century outlook. Nevertheless in some respects Irish conditions were unique. Hence when towards the end of the period, the
prevalent liberalism and radicalism began to influence Irish politics, they were naturally conditioned by the complexities of the local
2
situation.’
2 McDowell, Irish Public Opinion, 5.

Indeed, because the underlying social, ethnic, economic, and religious conditions in Britain and Ireland were so different, attempts to
describe and analyse Irish conditions in the languages of British political culture were fraught with difficulty. This tension, between
received ‘British’ political languages and the reality of Irish conditions, inspired new political ideas—leading radicals and Patriots to
restructure their languages as they recognized their inability to explain fully the problems of Irish society. One of the most meaningful
ways to interpret Irish political thought, therefore, is to identify the ways in which Irishmen altered, subverted, and selected from the
languages available to them to meet their own needs and to understand their own predicament.

This chapter, therefore, will briefly describe the five key political languages they used, before giving definitions and historical overviews of
patriotism, radicalism, and republicanism. It will then explore the history of these languages and themes in Ireland prior to the American
Revolution.

Protestant Superiority

The language of Protestant superiority was based on the assumption of all eighteenth-century Irish Protestants that their religion was
politically inherently superior to Catholicism (an assumption so obvious to them that it barely needed articulation). It saw liberty as an
essentially Protestant quality and was deeply sceptical about the suitability of Catholics as political agents. It relied on sectarian
interpretations of pivotal historical events (notably the Revolution of 1688), and it criticized Catholics as slavish, superstitious, ignorant,
and disloyal to the crown. As McBride points out, ‘the binary opposition around which so much political discussion turned—such as
liberty/slavery or virtue/corruption-were historically, and often conceptually, linked to the master opposition of Protestantism and Popery’
3
.
3 McBride, Scripture Politics, 9.

This language, therefore, often gave a cautious character to Irish Patriotism due to fear of Catholic political revival, and when combined

with key elements in classical republicanism, it caused serious problems for would-be Protestant radicals. It was also hardly a promising
basis for an inclusive Irish Patriotism (as the United Irishmen realized in the early 1790s). But

end p.14

then many Protestants had no desire to be fully inclusive. Protestant Patriots, radicals, and republicans always thought Catholicism as a
creed to be politically tyrannical. If they recognized that individual Catholics could become politically enlightened, this was because they
were becoming less ‘Catholic’ and more like their Protestant compatriots.

We should note, however, that Protestant superiority was not synonymous with the narrower (and later) concept of Protestant
4
Ascendancy.
4 See Ch. 5 for a full discussion of the evolution of Protestant Ascendancy in the late 1780s.

For it reflects the assumptions of all Protestants, not just the ambitions of a conservative Anglican elite. Before the 1790s, for example,
liberal Protestants who genuinely deplored many of the penal laws clearly expressed their views in a language of Protestant superiority
—and they had no desire to include Catholics in the political nation. Furthermore, Dissenters often combined the language of Protestant
superiority with violent anti-Ascendancy rhetoric.

Ancient Constitutionalism

An ancient constitutional language not dissimilar to the Anglo-Saxonism of English radicals was often used by Irish Patriots. It claimed the
fundamental right of freeborn Irishmen to a mythical and pristine medieval ‘English’ constitution embodied in the Irish parliament of King,
Lords, and Commons. It drew on English common law models of political liberty, and the origin of the Irish polity was located in the
donation of the English constitution to Ireland in the Middle Ages. This language had origins in the medieval Modus Tenendi
Parliamentum, but it was essentially a seventeenth-century creation—drawing on Irish parliamentary debates, the writings of the Old
5
English constitutional theorist Patrick Darcy, and Sir William Domville’s Disquisitions.
5 S. J. Connolly, ‘Precedent and Principle: The Patriots and their Critics’, in S. J. Connolly (ed.), Political Ideas in Eighteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin, 2000),

130–58.

The classic expression is Molyneux’s The Case of Ireland’s Being Bound by Acts of Parliament in England, Stated (1698), which used
historical and legal precedent to dispute the claims of the English parliament to control the affairs of Ireland.

The language was most powerfully applied to Anglo-Irish constitutional disputes, but it also contributed to radical rhetoric concerning
parliamentary reform. Its basic premiss was that those of English blood should not lose their rights as freeborn Englishmen simply by
crossing the Irish Sea. Typically it stressed that Ireland had never been conquered. Its kings had voluntarily submitted to Henry II in the
twelfth century and in doing so they rightfully received the rights and laws of England as a separate nation.

end p.15

A compact between ruler and people not only established an English constitution in Ireland, it also proved that only the English king and
not the English parliament had a say in governing Ireland. This independence from the English parliament was confirmed when Ireland
received its own Magna Charta in 1216 and its own parliament in 1297. Thus Ireland was not a colony like Virginia, but a separate kingdom
with its own parliament. Through this parliament, so the myth went, Ireland had governed its affairs as a separate nation since 1297 until
the Tudor and Stuart monarchs began to ride roughshod over its constitutional rights—especially with regard to trade and commerce in the
late seventeenth century.

This language was fundamentally unstable as a basis for Irish Patriotism, however. For if Irish rights lay in English blood, how could they
form a foundation for ‘Irish’ identity and independence? At best the language provided an exclusive basis for Irish Patriotism that was
unlikely to appeal to the growing body of separatist republicans in the 1790s, and although it was extremely important for the formation of
1770s Patriotism, it could only be carried over into 1790s republicanism with great difficulty. By the 1790s it was far less common for
Protestant radicals to claim their birthrights on the basis of ‘English’ blood, but the sheer volume of this type of historical and legal debate
(which outweighed all other forms of political argument in the 1770s and 1780s) had left its mark on their rhetoric.

Commercial Grievances

Patriots used a powerful language of commercial grievance to assert Irish trading rights and to challenge British political control. The
language encompassed self-critical explanations of Ireland’s poverty and was informed by an introspective concern with agricultural
6
improvement, consumption, absenteeism, and unemployment stretching back to Moles worth, Berkeley, and Swift.

6 See P. Kelly, ‘The Politics of Political Economy in Mid-Eighteenth Century Ireland’, in Connolly (ed.), Political Ideas in Eighteenth-Century Ireland , 105–29, for
a discussion of Irish writing on commerce, currency, consumption, luxury, agriculture, and absenteeism in the late 1720s and 1730s. Such writing naturally

informed patriotism in its broadest sense, for it ‘testifies to a lively concern with Ireland’s economic predicament, reinforced by almost universal claims to be

motivated by love of country and a sense of duty to fellow countrymen’ (p. 107).

But it also had an increasingly critical attitude to British restrictions on Irish trade and Ireland’s subordinate trading position. By the 1770s,
7
the restrictions placed on Irish commerce by the Navigation, Cattle and Woollen Acts had become this language’s main concern.
7 The Navigation Acts of 1663 and 1671 (15 Car. 2, c. 7, and 22 & 23 Car. 2, c. 26) prevented the direct import and export of most Irish goods to and from the

colonies. The Cattle Act of 1667 (18 Car. 2, c. 23) excluded cattle, sheep, beef, pork, and bacon from the English

These impelled

end p.16

all Patriots to take up the cause of free trade. Indeed the issue became an icon of Patriotism and the main platform of the early Volunteer
movement. Annoyance at British control of Irish trade led to an increasingly intense vocabulary of grievance and injured national pride,
which in turn led to a general reappraisal of Irish political rights and even encouraged flirtations with separatism.

This language was partly an offshoot of the overarching eighteenth-century preoccupation with the role of commerce and property in civil
society, although the common concerns about luxury and the compatibility of private interest and public virtue were largely (though not
8
entirely) displaced by the more pressing Irish problem of poverty.
8 Irish concerns over the corrupting effects of luxury were evident earlier in the century, most notably in Berkeley’s The Querist . It seems that while luxury
corrupts, Irish-made luxuries did not corrupt absolutely, for they at least provided employment. See Kelly, ‘The Politics of Political Economy in Mid-Eighteenth

Century Ireland’, 119–22 and 129.

Ironically, despite the anti-British thrust of this commercial rhetoric, most 1770s Patriots were motivated by a desire to emulate British
9
commercial success through free trade.
9 While excessive luxury always provided grounds for criticism, most Irish Protestants seem to have happily shared in the general rise in consumerism that

occurred throughout the British Empire in the eighteenth century. For an account of Irish consumption and its social meaning, see T. Barnard, ‘Integration or

Separation? Hospitality and Display in Protestant Ireland, 1660–1800’, in D. Eastwood and L. Brockliss (eds.), A Union of Multiple Identities: The British Isles,

C.1750-C.1850 (Manchester, 1997).

By 1779 Patriots were beginning to draw on the work of Adam Smith, and few doubted that trade and commerce were vital to the long-term
protection of Irish liberty. Commercial issues not only provided the foundation of 1770s Irish Patriotism, they remained important to all Irish
Patriots up to 1798 and beyond.

Natural Rights

John Locke’s theories on natural rights and the social contract were common currency in Ireland throughout the eighteenth century, but the
way they were used and the strength of their influence changed over time. The language of natural rights, as applied to nations, was
always part of a powerful Patriot critique of English control in Ireland. These theories were sometimes used on their own to found a basis
for Irish rights from first principles, but they were more often used in conjunction with classical republican, commercial, and ancient
constitutionalist arguments. This practice can be traced back to Molyneux, whose extensive use of Lockean

end p.17

arguments alongside ancient constitutional ones helped to establish a genre of Irish political writing that switched with ease between these
very different languages.

However, the idea that man, simply by virtue of his God-given humanity, possessed inalienable rights to life, liberty, property, and political
power—and that government was constituted for the purpose of preserving these rights—only became widely expressed at the end of the
eighteenth century. Indeed, the language played a surprisingly constrained role in the Patriots’ understanding of domestic politics before
the 1790s. In the early 1780s, the most radical Patriots did use natural rights to justify parliamentary reform and a widening of the
franchise. But the idea that all men possessed inalienable rights to political power (or at least representation) was an uncomfortable one
for most Protestant Patriots. The right to representation (and the right to resist tyranny when this was not forthcoming) did become central
to 1790s republicanism. But this was as much to do with Paine’s Rights of Man as Locke. Before Paine, when natural rights came into
conflict with Protestant superiority and classical republicanism they were usually quietly dropped.

Classical Republicanism

The language of virtue, liberty, corruption, balanced government, tyranny, vigilance, citizen militias, and public spirit was a much-tapped
source of Irish political rhetoric in this period. A full description of this classical republicanism is given in the course of the next section.
But there are a few points to be made here.

Irishmen used a classical republican language almost identical to that used in Britain and America, but with significant differences in
emphasis. The major divergence from British usage was the rich classical republican imagery warning of foreign domination. In Ireland,
public virtue was needed to protect both internal liberty from corruption and tyranny, and national liberty from foreign influence or invasion.
This made classical republicanism the ideal public language of the Volunteers and the United Irishmen. The classical republican obsession
with citizen militias and public virtue was crucial to the vocabulary of Volunteering and formed a vital component in the justification for the
modern physical force nationalist tradition. However, while highly influential, the classical republican emphasis on the capacity of citizens
for liberty and virtue caused serious problems for Protestant theorists in a predominantly Catholic country.

end p.18

II . REPUBLICANISM
There were few self-confessed anti-monarchical republicans in eighteenth-century Ireland until the late 1790s, and even then most radicals
and Patriots were reluctant to label themselves such. But a wide variety of eighteenth-century Irishmen used arguments that can be
labelled ‘republican’ in a ‘classical’ sense. Hence, while not wishing to find republicans where they did not exist, republican ideas could,
and did, inhabit minds which simultaneously held a wide variety of both complementary and contradictory political ideas. Recognizing this
allows us a subtler view of Irish republicanism during this period: one which places it in a melting pot of ideas and rhetoric and which
acknowledges the changing nature of republicanism as a concept.

The term ‘republican’ has been used to label some very different political positions. The Latin origin of the word, ‘res publica’ , should alert
10
us to this variety by its neutrality: it simply means ‘affairs (or things) of the public’.
10 The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (Oxford, 1993).

In classical times the term was sometimes used as a general name for the state, although it was usually associated with free states, and
with the constitutional and motivational characteristics required to keep them free. By the eighteenth century Samuel Johnson identified
three distinct themes in his definitions of ‘republic’ and its derivations: sovereignty is located in the public, power is held by a plurality of
11
sources, and the state is a Commonwealth without monarchy.
11 Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language , ed. R. W. Burchfield (London, 1979).

However, this last theme was often ignored by those who nevertheless believed in the first two (i.e. a balance or ‘plurality’ of powers and
some form of popular sovereignty). Limited and accountable monarchy, as opposed to tyranny, was perfectly acceptable to most
‘classical’ republicans (or Commonwealthmen as they were sometimes known in the eighteenth century).

This classical republican tradition had its origins in the political language and perceived practice of the Greeks and Romans: in the writings
of Plato, Aristotle, Polybius, Livy, Sallust, Tacitus, Seneca, and Cicero, and in the example of Athens, Sparta, and republican Rome. As
we have noted, despite opposition to purely monarchical states, this tradition was not necessarily hostile to monarchy as part of a
balanced government. Indeed the Polybian idea that a balance between monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy could prevent the cyclical
degeneration from one form of

end p.19

12
government to another was extremely influential.
12 Polybius, The Histories, vi, chs. 3–14, in The Histories, tr. W. R. Paton (6 vols., London, 1923), iii. 271–303. See also Machiavelli’s version of the theory in
The Discourses, ed. B. Crick (Harmondsworth, 1970), 1, ch. 2, 104–11.

Hence, as long as the monarchy was limited and balanced with the other orders, even the British constitution could be said to exhibit a
republican nature. Cato’s Letters, for example, explicitly identify Britain as a republic of that peculiarly happy kind which has a king as its
13
chief magistrate.
13 John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, Cato’s Letters; or, Essays on Liberty, Civil and Religious, and Other Important Subjects (3rd edn., 4 vols., London,
1723), ii. 28. Quoted in Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment , 468.

To many classical republicans, the constitution had become corrupted by executive dominance and thrown out of balance, but the English
structure of King, Lords, and Commons could still be fitted into the classical mixed constitution of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy.

This notion of a republican who accepts limited monarchy is, on the surface, a paradoxical one. Its potential for confusion has even
14
contributed to Quentin Skinner’s recent rejection of ‘the republican theory of liberty’ in favour of ‘the neo-Roman theory of liberty’.
14 Q. Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge, 1998), 1–57.

For Skinner, the chief characteristic of the tradition in question is not its opposition to monarchy, but its commitment to a conception of
liberty that rejects arbitrary power and supports the rule of law. This commitment, while closely connected to anti-monarchical
republicanism, was much wider. Thus, while there were many real Whigs and Commonwealthmen who adhered to this theory of liberty,
only a few of them repudiated monarchy. (Skinner points out that key figures in the classical republican tradition, such as Sidney and
Neville, accepted limited monarchy.) ‘Classical republicanism’ is still the widely accepted terminology for this style of early modern
political thought and Skinner does not overtly seek to replace it. However, his argument that liberty was more important to most
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century classical republicans than the removal of the monarchy is undoubtedly warranted. In a similar vein,
Pettit sees a belief in liberty as ‘non-domination’ as the key to republicanism. He defines this kind of freedom as ‘the social status of being
relatively proof against arbitrary interference by others, and of being able to enjoy a sense of security and standing among them’. This
15
view is certainly in keeping with the mentalité of late eighteenth-century Irish republicans.
15 Pettit, Republicanism, vii.

Also key to the classical republican model was civic virtue. This has two distinct elements. First, there is the Aristotelian idea that
humans attain

end p.20

excellence by participating in rational, political decision-making along with other citizens. As ‘political animals’, citizens should have ‘the
16
right of sharing in deliberative or judicial office’,
16 Aristotle, The Politics, in, i, 12, in The Politics of Aristotle , ed. E. Barker (Oxford, 1948), 95.

17
as well as ‘the knowledge and the capacity requisite for ruling as well as for being ruled’.
17 Ibid., m, iv, 15(105).

Here, civic virtue is important because its exercise leads to eudaimonia (‘well-being’) and hence the good life. Secondly, and perhaps more
importantly for the Com-monwealthmen, civic virtue is necessary to prevent a corruption of the state. Civic virtue ensures that the citizen
is prepared to protect the body politic from tyrannous princes, mob rule, oligarchy, or foreign control in order to preserve its liberties.
18
Central to this mechanism is perseverance in the cause of freedom. As Pettit reminds us, ‘the price of liberty is eternal vigilance’.
18 Pettit, Republicanism, 6.

However, a note of caution is needed here. This classical republican tradition was far from monolithic. Indeed Wifried Nippel, an ancient
historian, claims not to recognize ‘ancient republicanism’ as a category—implying that the label ‘classical republicanism’ is a retrospective
19
simplification of a diverse and broad tradition of ancient political theory rather than a distinct political theory in itself.
19 W. Nippel, ‘Ancient and Modern Republicanism: “mixed constitution” and “ephors”’, in B. Fontana (ed.), The Invention of the Modern Republic (Cambridge,

1994), 6–26.

This is not to say that early modern Europeans did not rely heavily on classical arguments, but that they chose from a wide range of them
to serve their own purposes. Thus classical republicanism should not be seen as the adoption of a coherent and identifiable classical
theory, but rather as an early modern construct drawn from a rich resource of classical language and ideas. Concepts which were often
unconnected in classical times (such as active citizenship and the Polybian idea of mixed constitution) were, Nippel argues, yoked
together by Machiavelli and seventeenth-century Englishmen, only to be identified, somewhat misleadingly, as ‘classical republicanism’ by
20
Pocock and other twentieth-century historians.
20 Ibid. 7.

Nippel’s critique does not invalidate the use of classical republicanism as a structure of language and theory that influenced eighteenth-
century Irishmen. That it was largely an Italian Renaissance and seventeenth-century English rehash of classical ideas does not make it
any less real or powerful. But his account allows us to see that the language was shaped by concerns closer to eighteenth-century Ireland
(both geographically and

end p.21

temporally) than the model of a coherent classical tradition would suggest. And this, in turn, alerts us to the fact that eighteenth-century

writers were just as liable to ransack classical rhetoric themselves, taking a linguistic Grand Tour from the comfort of their studies (a less
destructive but often similarly haphazard activity). Thus classical republicanism was in one sense a very real and living language which
could always be replenished and reinterpreted through selective rereading of the classics. It will be used in this broad sense here.

The transmission and development of classical ideas via Renaissance and English republican theorists was crucial, therefore, for the form
that this construct took in the eighteenth century. The concept of civic virtue, for example, was transformed by Machiavelli who attached it
21
to the possession of arms,
21 Machiavelli, Discourses, I, chs. 5 and 43; and II, chs. 1 and 2 (ed. Crick, 115–18, 218, and 270–81).

and later by James Harrington, who emphasized the defensive role of the armed, independent landowner in maintaining the balanced
constitution. ‘The tillage, bringing up a good soldiery, bringeth up a good Commonwealth,’ argued Harrington, ‘for where the owner of the
plough comes to have the sword too, he will use it in defence of his own.’ For this reason, ‘the people of Oceana, in proportion to their
22
property, have always been free’.
22 The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656),in The Political Works of James Harrington , ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Cambridge, 1977), 158.

Republics had usually been fragile states, and independent property and the right to bear arms became their protection against a descent
into tyranny. It is not surprising, therefore, that classical republicans emphasized the role of independent citizen militias and despised the
idea of a professional standing army. Such armies could be used by a tyrant against his own people, were pusillanimous when faced with
external threats to liberty, and required heavy taxation to maintain them. Harrington’s connection between martial virtue and property had
important consequences. It gave rise to an ideal of public-spirited, virtuous, and independent citizens striving to maintain liberty through
the proper balance of powers in the state—an ideal which formed the heart of the British seventeenth-century republican tradition. But it
also encouraged strict property-based criteria for political participation and a belief in a hierarchy of political function or citizenship in the
people.

The intellectual tradition outlined above was transmitted from Harrington and Milton (who wrote during Cromwell’s Protectorate—a concrete
example of a fragile republic), via Sidney and Neville to important Irish real Whigs of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries,
such as John

end p.22

23
Toland and Robert Molesworth.
23 For a brief but detailed account of this tradition and its transmission from Machiavelli to Bolingbroke, see Skinner, ‘The Principles and Practice of Opposition:
The Case of Boling- broke versus Walpole’, 113–24. See Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman, for a full examination of these ideas in the late

seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For an overview of Toland, see P. McGuinness, ‘John Toland and Eighteenth-Century Irish Repub licanism’, Irish
Studies Review , 19 (Summer 1997), 15–21.

The Anglo-Irishman Molesworth was a typical classical republican. With land near Dublin and in Yorkshire, he sat in both parliaments and
straddled the political worlds of Britain and Ireland. His political acquaintances ranged from William Molyneux, to the radical Irish pantheist
and bête noire of the clergy, John Toland, to such stern defenders of the Established Church as William King and Swift. A full-blown
classical republican, with universalist tendencies, he was an important focus for the development and transmission of liberal ideas, and
his home at Swords, near Dublin, became a meeting place for a whole generation of radical thinkers. Robbins identifies Molesworth as a
24
pivotal eighteenth-century Commonwealthman,
24 Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman, 88–115.

linking the intellectual tradition of the English Civil War republicans with the radicals and revolutionaries of late eighteenth-century Britain,
Ireland, and America. His two main works, the Account of Denmark (1693) and the Preface to his translation of Hotman’s Franco-Gallia,
gave him a position of eminence among Commonwealthmen and republicans. These are cautionary tales of the corruption and
degeneration of ancient or gothic constitutions in other European countries, namely Denmark and France, but they also address
theoretical political issues of direct consequence to Britain and Ireland.

In the Preface to the Account of Denmark Molesworth repeatedly calls on his fellow subjects in ‘these kingdoms’ to recognize and
preserve their special blessing of liberty ‘at a Time, when the rest of Europe is labouring under the terrible judgements of Tyranny and the
plague’. In true classical republican style he tries to inculcate the martial virtues and increase awareness of the fragility of liberty in a
complacent people. He harks back to earlier times ‘when our Yeomanry and Commonalty were every Day exercised in drawing the Long-
bow’, and points to the degraded state of other nations who once enjoyed liberty themselves but lost it through a lack of vigilance. ‘We are
the only Nation in Christendom that now call themselves Free, and have in all Ages priz’d our Freedom, before either treasure or blood.’
For Molesworth, the ‘want of Liberty is a disease in any Society or Body Politick’, and he is determined that this disease should not afflict

25
‘this nation’, or ‘our Commonwealth’.
25 Robert Molesworth, Mr. Molesworth’s Preface [to an account of Danemark as it was in the year 1692]. With Historical and Political Remarks... (London,

1713), 2–8. The version used here is a later reprint of the 1693 edition.

end p.23

From Molesworth and his friends the republican tradition was passed on to the Patriots and radicals of the late eighteenth century via
26
Charles Lucas in Dublin and by important networks of northern Dissenters via Francis Hutcheson and the Scottish universities.
26 Stewart, A Deeper Silence , 81–125.

Indeed the Scottish Enlightenment provided an important link in this intellectual chain, and many Patriots drew on its rich resources. This
is hardly surprising, as many Dissenters studied in Glasgow and Edinburgh, imbibing the ideas of Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Adam
27
Ferguson, John Millar, and Adam Smith.
27 McBride, Scripture Politics, 56, 89.

The attempt of these writers to make sense of modern civil society, and Scotland’s gradual transformation from economic backwardness
to commercial success, involved a profound engagement with the classical republican and natural rights traditions. But this was a diverse
school which offered no straightforward transmission of ideas. The Scottish philosophers often challenged the received wisdom of these
two languages. Adam Ferguson analysed the martial culture of savage societies in order to reassert the importance of classical virtue and
28
citizen militias.
28 Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) , ed. D. Forbes (Edinburgh, 1966).

But Hume attacked key aspects of classical republicanism. For example, he had no aversion to luxury and thought that martial virtue was
dangerous. Hume’s investigations into the origins and development of society also involved the rejection of the Lockean original contract,
and the birth and growth of society was understood historically in terms of families, tribes, and the protection of property.

The way Hume, Millar, and Smith related political institutions to economic life also influenced Irish Patriots. The Patriots’ familiarity with
their work on political economy stimulated a reappraisal of the origins of their own society and its economic difficulties. (It is not entirely
coincidental that Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776) appeared just before the Irish Patriots’ most vociferous calls for Irish commercial
rights.) On the whole, Ireland’s economic improvement had been less rapid than Scotland’s, and it had not been subjected to the social
changes that inspired Smith and Hume to reject classical republican reservations about commerce. Hence, Irish Patriots drew on Smith
and Hume but were happy to praise commerce and martial virtue in the same breath.

This classical republican tradition eventually informed radicals and republicans in the late 1790s, but as we shall see, it had to confront the
very

end p.24

different republicanism of Paine. Both contained ideas in common about liberty and government for the common good, but Painite
republicanism completely rejected the hereditary principle and had a far greater faith in democracy, natural rights, and popular sovereignty.
This egalitarian character (with its rejection of property as a basis for citizenship) fundamentally contradicted key aspects of classical
republicanism. This tension (essentially a tension between natural rights and classical republicanism) had been latent in British republican
thought since the late seventeenth century. Locke’s natural rights and social contract theory ran alongside Harrington’s classical
republicanism. The Real Whig might see himself in classical pose exercising public virtue, but he also thought himself party to a social
contract with his ruler. The king was both a power to be balanced with other elements in the state, and a chief magistrate who could, in
exceptional circumstances, be usurped for breaking his contract with his subjects (Algernon Sidney’s writings are a good example of this
29
amalgam).
29 See J. Scott, Algernon Sidney and the English Republic, 1623–1677 (Cambridge, 1988) for an account of Sidney’s life and his republicanism.

This use of natural rights could lead to radical theories of revolution and universal suffrage which many classical republicans would feel
distinctly uncomfortable with.

Both of these types of thought are mixed in Irish republican writing throughout the eighteenth century, and the tension between them
caused problems for Irish radicals and Patriots. Their different assumptions about political participation and citizenship bore directly on the
vital issue of who could be included in the political nation, and differences on this issue sparked debate about the relationship between
property, rationality, virtue, and rights (issues which will be examined in Chapter 4). However, such tensions should not be overplayed, as
eighteenth-century Irish writing often ignored them. Given that the language of both classical republicanism and of natural rights were in
more obvious conflict with the practice of government than with each other, this is understandable. Both had powerful criticisms to make

of the self-interested, unrepresentative, and corrupt nature of Ascendancy politics. As a result, both languages were readily combined to
30
provide powerful rhetoric for Patriotism.
30 This polemical mixing of natural rights and classical republicanism was not new. It has been noted in Sidney’s writings by A. C. Houston, who sees sharp

distinctions between natural rights and classical republicanism as anachronistic. See A. C. Houston, Algernon Sidney and the Republican Heritage in England

and America (Princeton, 1991), 146–7 and more generally, 101–219, for Sidney’s political philosophy.

end p.25

III . PATRIOTISM
Late eighteenth-century patriotism was both a highly contested and widely applied political description. Hence defining and describing
‘patriotism’ during this period is more problematic than the ease and regularity of its use might suggest. In the Irish context, ‘Patriotism’
has often been applied by historians to radical reformers, Protestant Volunteers, and Whiggish MPs in a very straightforward manner.
However, this usage can conceal a wealth of variety in attitudes to independence from Britain, the inclusion of Catholics in the political
31
nation,
31 The attitude of this predominantly Protestant patriotism to Catholic political rights is obviously a critical one. It will be dealt with in Ch. 4.

parliamentary reform, and even free trade. Patriotism in Ireland was often a broad political description, especially between 1779 and 1782.
It encompassed social and political conservatives who were concerned primarily with economic improvement and Irish legislative rights,
as well as radical reformers and tentative advocates of separatism. The nuances and complexities of Irish Protestant Patriotism will be a
major focus of this book, especially Chapters 2 and 3, but first we must lay the groundwork with a description of the wider patriot tradition
from which it drew many of its ideas and much of its language.

32
Following Viroli, we should first distinguish eighteenth-century patriotism from later nationalism.
32 M. Viroli, For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism (Oxford, 1995).

For while patriotism encompassed certain ideas which can also be called nationalist (such as a love of one’s country, people, and
institutions), patriots generally had a more cosmopolitan outlook. They were less likely to claim intrinsic superiority for their own
community (unless this was on the basis of the liberty it defends) and they were not usually motivated by a desire for its success at the
expense of another’s. Richard Price’s cosmopolitan patriotism is firmly in this vein, combining universalist conceptions of rights and
33
liberties with a genuine love of country.
33 Richard Price, A Discourse on the Love of Our Country (London, 1790). See also M. Fitz-patrick, ‘Patriots and Patriotisms: Richard Price and the Early

Reception of the French Revo lution in England’, in M. O’Dea and K. Whelan (eds.), Nations and Nationalisms: France, Britain, Ireland and the Eighteenth-

Century Context (Oxford, 1995), 211–30.

In contrast, nationalism (a more recent and largely post-French Revolution phenomenon) relies on the perceived superiority of one group
over another using some combination of ethnic, linguistic, cultural, religious, historical, and geographical characteristics. As Colin Kidd
argues, race and ethnicity were flexible, imprecise, and far less important than custom and precedent in eighteenth-century constructions
of ‘British’

end p.26

34
identity in the Atlantic world.
34 C. Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge, 1999).

This distinction between patriotism and nationalism is especially important in the Irish case, as Jackie Hill points out, in order to distance
Irish Patriotism from the unhelpful teleological assumptions about its development into nationalism which have been common in Irish
35
historiography.
35 Hill, From Patriots to Unionists, 3–7.

Nor was patriotism simply an early or mild form of nationalism, for it usually had a distinctive attitude to power, liberty, and the structure of
the state not found in nationalism. Eighteenth-century patriotism was generally based on an opposition to ‘tyranny’ that had greater
implications for domestic politics than foreign relations. Dryden identified a republican edge to the patriot as early as the late seventeenth
36
century by defining him as ‘one that wou’d by Law supplant his Prince’,
36 The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (Oxford, 1993).

and until the 1790s, patriotism usually implied opposition to the government or court from a radical, republican, or ‘Country’ position. Viroli
characterizes the distinction between republican patriotism and nationalism thus, ‘Whereas the enemies of republican patriotism are
tyranny, despotism, oppression, and corruption, the enemies of nationalism are cultural contamination, heterogeneity, racial impurity, and
37
social, political, and intellectual disunion.’
37 Viroli, For Love of Country , 1–2.

We must not push the eighteenth-century association between patriotism and republicanism or opposition to the point of identity. For while
this ‘republican patriotism’ was often the dominant form of patriotism there was also a significant tradition of using it in more neutral or
conservative ways. This often involved distinctions between ‘true’ patriots whose activities were ruled by moderation and discernment and
those who simply wished to oppose government on every issue. To be a patriot was to be committed to public life and to improving the
common wealth rather than to personal interests, but there could be considerable disagreement on how this was to be achieved. Hence,
we need an inclusive understanding of patriotism—one which recognizes the centrality of ‘the common good’ for all patriots, but which
allows for disagreement about means. For some it was through parliamentary reform, for others through economic improvement and social
38
stability. In its broadest sense, therefore, patriotism was a concern for the common good based on a ‘love of country’.
38 Price, A Discourse on the Love of Our Country .

Indeed the Latin root of ‘patriotism’ (‘patria’) simply implies a connection with, or love of, one’s fatherland. Mid-century definitions,
therefore, could describe the

end p.27

39
patriot in a politically neutral manner, and in 1755 Samuel Johnson defined him as ‘One whose ruling passion is the love of his country’.
39 Johnson, Dictionary .

However, oppositionist or republican patriotism was the increasingly dominant form in the eighteenth-century English-speaking world. In
England John Wilkes and Major John Cartwright pushed patriotism in a confrontational and oppositionist direction, creating an association
between patriotism, populism, and radical parliamentary reform. By enlisting the rowdy support of Englishmen previously outside the
political nation, Wilkes besmirched the term ‘patriotism’ for many government supporters. (Charles Lucas had been performing a similar
function in Ireland since the late 1740s.) In the court’s view, this systematic opposition to the king and his ministers, which drew on extra-
parliamentary power, threatened to undermine the constitution and could even be seen as sedition. Thus by the mid-177Os, patriotism had
40
become, for Johnson, an ironical term ‘for a factious disturber of the government’ and, famously, ‘the last refuge of a scoundrel’.
40 Quoted from H. Cunningham, ‘The Language of Patriotism, 1750–1914’, History Work shop , 12 (1981), 8–34 .

This shift by Johnson shows how the partisan and oppositionist understanding of patriotism had gained ground. The use of ‘patriot’ to
evoke a ‘party’ position, while recognized across the political spectrum, did not go uncontested. Some struggled to keep the term available
to describe a neutral, or politically conservative, love of country. But many, including Johnson, were resigned to the appropriation of the
term by opponents of government, and so used ‘patriot’ as a term of abuse. For him patriotism had been irretrievably debased as a cloak
for political ambition.

The popular patriotism of Wilkes became linked to radical parliamentary reform and a widening of the franchise: a process aided by
Cartwright’s Take Your Choice (1776). For Cartwright, the patriot’s deep love of country required annual parliaments and equal
41
representation.
41 Major John Cartwright, TAKE YOUR CHOICE! (London, 1776), 92.

Hence patriotism is inevitably a creed of opposition until the corrupted parliament is reformed. ‘It is downright quixotism to imagine, that so
long as your parliament remains corrupt, you can ever have a patriot minister: and except parliament be reformed, ‘tis a matter of very
great indifference who are in and who are out. I will utterly deny the possibility of your having a patriot minister prior to a parliamentary
42
reformation.’
42 Ibid., xxiii.

43
Thus, by the 1780s English Patriotism had developed into radical opposition with parliamentary reform at its heart.
43 Cunningham, ‘The Language of Patriotism’, 12–13.

end p.28

Irish Patriotism had much in common with this English model, which can serve as a useful point of comparison. Hugh Cunningham sees

three main sources of English patriotism: a classical republican tradition concerned with virtue, liberty, the balanced constitution, and the
dangers of corruption; an ancient constitutional element that sought the restoration of Anglo-Saxon constitutional purity; and the
44
providential idea that England was an elect nation favoured by God and ‘seen to be the birthplace of liberty’.
44 Ibid. 9–10.

With modifications and additions, these sources also apply to Ireland. The classical republican tradition was shared by Irish and English
Patriots. Irish ancient constitutionalism had distinctively Irish elements, but it also shared many basic political, legal, and historical
assumptions with its English counterpart. And like English Patriots, Irish Patriots drew on Protestant providence to establish their rights
and liberties. Indeed, the Irish Protestant nation saw the successful defence of its liberty and property from Catholics in the seventeenth
century as incontrovertible evidence of God’s favour. As Tom Bartlett puts it, ‘The disaster for Irish Protestants of the Catholic uprising of
1641 and the deliverance of 1688 could hardly be interpreted in any way other than providential... No one could now doubt that the
45
Protestants of Ireland were under God’s special protection, that they were His chosen people in Ireland.’
45 T. Bartlett, ‘Protestant Nationalism in Eighteenth-Century Ireland’, in O’Dea and Whelan (eds.), Nations and Nationalisms , 81.

However, Cunningham’s model of classical republicanism, ancient constitutionalism, and providence can only go so far in explaining Irish
Patriotism. As indicated in the introduction, there are two further languages or sources needed. These are commercial grievances and
natural rights (especially the infringement of Irish rights by Britain). The next chapter will show in detail how commercial concerns gave a
forward-looking and improving aspect to Irish Patriotism, which saw increased trade and commerce as vital to the long-term protection of
Irish liberty. But given the importance of classical republicanism for Irish Patriotism, and its often critical attitude to commerce, this
requires some explanation.

The privileged status accorded by classical republicans to landed property in conferring virtue and independence usually had important
consequences for patriot attitudes to commerce and to the forms of property commerce created. As a result, some patriots questioned the
compatibility of civic virtue with self-interested commercial spirit, especially if this led to extremes of wealth and luxury. Some even
proposed agrarian laws to limit unhealthy accumulations of wealth that might unbalance the state.

end p.29

Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees had scandalized those of classical republican sympathies due to its assertion that public benefit could
result from private avarice, and in the early eighteenth century, the landed ideal had been severely undermined by new forms of property.
New mechanisms of finance, credit, and stock (such as in the East India or South Sea companies) deprived property of its ‘solidity’.
Bubbles can burst, land cannot. Hence, the new forms of property corrupted the political virtue of its owners by rendering them dependent
on a complex and uncertain economic system which they could neither control nor predict.

However, gradually, trade and commerce were allowed to take on the mantle of a public good. As early as the 1720s, Cato’s Letters speak
46
of commerce as ‘a grateful and beneficent mistress’ who ‘cannot breathe in a tyrannical air’.
46 Cato’s Letters, ii. 267. Quoted in Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment , 471. Most of these letters were written by John Trenchard, who was educated at

Trinity College Dublin.

47
The argument that commerce leads to general benefit was then made more palatable by Montesquieu, and more systematic by Smith.
47 See A. O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before its Triumph (Princeton, 1977) for an elegant analysis of the
transformation of commerce from a vice to a virtue in eighteenth-century Britain and France.

Montesquieu even claimed commercial spirit as a modern agent of civilization to replace ancient civic virtue, which he thought
unobtainable in modern civil society. These developments may have alleviated tensions within classical republicanism: they did not
eradicate them. Pocock’s remark that ‘behind all this lay the ancient problem of showing how society might operate rationally and
48
beneficially when the individuals composing it were denied full rationality and virtue’,
48 Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment , 464–5.

has relevance for Ireland also. There was still a widespread belief that the new commercial class was not worthy of significant political
power, even if their interests must be accommodated for the public good. Thus, the classical republican landed ideal which inspired
independent opposition to tyrannical government could also be used in a conservative way to protect the interests of a ruling landed
oligarchy against the political ambitions of merchants and professionals. But in the Irish case, poverty and the onerous restrictions placed
on their commerce by the Navigation, Woollen, and Cattle Acts (which prohibited most direct trade with the colonies and exports of wool,
49
livestock, and dairy products for much of the eighteenth century)
49 See L. M. Cullen, Anglo-Irish Trade, 1660–1800 (Manchester, 1968).

50
enabled Patriots to take up the cause of free trade with few worries about the largely hypothetical dangers of self-interest and luxury.
50 Swift’s contrast between English luxury and Irish poverty shows how this early eighteenth-century debate had different premisses when applied to Ireland.

See S. Deane, ‘Swift and the Anglo-Irish Intellect’, ECI 1 (1986), 9–22.

end p.30

The second addition to Cunningham’s model, a sense of infringed national rights, was an even more important difference. The relative
strength and independence of a Patriot’s country naturally affected the degree to which his vigilance was directed internally or externally.
Thus, the fact that Ireland was partly controlled by Britain gave Irish Patriotism a notably different character than English Patriotism. Irish
liberty was threatened both from within and from without, hence Irish Patriotism needed the exercise of virtue and vigilance with regard to
both kinds of threat. Although often bellicose supporters of an aggressive foreign policy, English Patriots were usually more concerned
with the state of internal political liberty than external relations with other nations. In Ireland both were important. This dynamic gave Irish
Patriotism added intensity and eventually pushed some Patriots in a nationalist direction.

Of course, not all Irish Patriots were constantly concerned with the nature of the Anglo-Irish relationship. We can broadly agree with
Leerssen’s portrayal of eighteenth-century Patriotism as a non-national Whiggism with philanthropic and Country overtones, and in many
respects he is right to place Irish Patriotism in a tradition which leads to liberalism rather than nationalism. However, while Leerssen is
correct to strip Irish Patriotism from anachronistic links to the nineteenth century and the straitjacket of Anglo-Irish national Manichaeism,
51
concerns akin to nationalism were emerging.
51 J. Leerssen, ‘Anglo-Irish Patriotism and its European Context: Notes towards a Reassessment’, ECI 3 (1988), 7–24.

A serious survey of the political writing of the period 1779 to 1782 shows that the Anglo-Irish relationship did dominate much Patriot
rhetoric. They were deeply worried by the role of the British parliament in Irish politics and expressed a dissatisfaction that can, on
occasion, be described as proto-nationalist. Thus, while recognizing that eighteenth-century Patriotism was not nineteenth-century
nationalism, we must still explain its proto-nationalist preoccupation with the Anglo-Irish relationship in terms of the political languages
available to it. This book will show that classical republicanism, commercial grievances, ancient constitutionalism, and natural rights all
contained powerful arguments concerning liberty, power, and independence that could be used for nationalist ends.

The Patriot focus on external usurpations of Irish rights also created very broad support at key moments. Until the granting of legislative
independence in 1782, many internal disagreements could be temporarily

end p.31

smoothed over. Thus, Irish Patriotism, at times, encompassed a wider range of political and social attitudes than British Patriotism.
Almost everyone, from radical reformers to socially conservative loyalists, could call themselves a Patriot during the agitation for free
trade and legislative independence. We must, therefore, be wary of too close a connection between Patriotism and radicalism in Ireland,
especially before 1783, and remember that not all Patriots would become radical parliamentary reformers.

Above all else, patriotism relied on a concept of virtuous citizenship. Rousseau, for example, argued in his Discourse on Political
Economy (1758) that ‘there could be no patriotism without liberty, no liberty without virtue, no virtue without citizens; create citizens and
52
you have everything you need.’
52 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse on Political Economy , in The Social Contract and Discourses , tr. G. D. H. Cole (London, 1973), 135.

The implication being that people will only love their country if it is free, and only if the people have certain virtues (i.e. skills and moral
attributes) can this freedom be created and maintained. Thus, a focus of republican patriotism was always the moral, intellectual, and
emotional prerequisites for liberty, and as we shall see in Chapter 3, Irish Patriots were especially preoccupied with the personal qualities
necessary for liberty. But the association between liberty, virtue, and patriotism had ambiguous consequences for Ireland and was not
necessarily a good basis for popular citizenship. Bolingbroke’s influential contribution to the theory of patriotism argued that liberty and
53
good government would be best secured through a virtuous elite or a patriot king.
53 See H. T. Dickinson, Bolingbroke (London, 1970), 254–76, for the context of Bolingbroke’s patriotism in the emergence of a patriot party around Prince
Frederick in opposition to Walpole in the late 1730s.

In A Letter on the Spirit of Patriotism (173 6) Bolingbroke combined elements of the Commonwealth tradition with ideas that are clearly far
more hierarchical and elitist. He emphasized the patriot’s duty to oppose corruption with vigilance, spirit, and political knowledge, but these
duties fell overwhelmingly on the superior sort of man. The majority, he argued, live only to consume, and they perform their moral duties
imperfectly. But the superior spirits ‘are they who engross almost the whole reason of the species; who are born to instruct, to guide, and
54
to preserve’.

54 Henry St John, Visc. Bolingbroke, ‘A Letter on the Spirit of Patriotism’, in Works, ed. D. Mallet (5 vols., London, 1754; reprinted Darmstadt, 1968), iii. 4.

And while this superior sort need not be the nobility, it is obvious that Bolingbroke’s patriotism is not designed for the mob or even the
middling sorts. This idea is taken to its logical extreme in The Idea of a Patriot King (1738) in which patriotic renewal of the corrupted
state is best achieved by just one superior sort—the patriot king. In Bolingbroke’s view,

end p.32

‘nothing can so surely and effectually restore the virtue and public spirit essential to the preservation of liberty and national prosperity, as
55
the reign of such a prince’.
55 Ibid. 40. If the 1782 catalogue for White’s bookshop in Dublin is anything to go by, the works of Bolingbroke, esp. The Idea of a Patriot King and A

Dissertation on Parties, were popular reading.

Such patriotism supports the individual virtue of a Grattan or a Charlemont far better than the popular patriotism of the radical reformers,
and his preoccupation with reason and social status bequeathed a problem to Protestant Irish Patriots. By creating a heroic tradition which
legitimized a connection between elitism and the pursuit of liberty, between glory, honour, and virtue, he made it very difficult for them to
accept ignorant, superstitious, and impoverished Catholics as virtuous patriotic citizens.

IV . RADICALISM
56
Any discussion of radicalism in this period is fraught with problems of definition and open to charges of anachronism.
56 See J. C. D. Clark’s critiques in English Society, 1688–1832 (Cambridge, 1985), and Revolution and Rebellion: State and Society in England in the

Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1986).

By labelling a diverse group of reformers with a term not commonly used until the 1820s, we run the risk of distorting the character of a
movement by imposing both a coherence, and a continuity with later reformers, which may not have existed. Making this point, J. C. D.
Clark asserts that ‘the historian’s task is to uncover the very different phenomena which have been obscured by the retrospective
57
application of a blanket label—phenomena each with its appropriate, and seventeenth- or eighteenth-century name’.
57 Clark, Revolution and Rebellion , 100.

This is a sound principle, and I hope a careful attention to eighteenth-century language will shed light on the different strains within
radicalism. However, there are strong grounds for retaining the term ‘radical’ as a descriptive label in the 1780s and 1790s.

First, the alternatives all have their own problems. ‘Democrat’ is a possibility, but this would have been anachronistic before the 1790s
(and still rare in Ireland after it). And as many ‘radicals’ accepted monarchy and aristocracy, ‘democrat’ would also be misleading.
‘Rational Dissenter’ is obviously too narrow, even if these people were very important to the phenomenon in question. ‘Reformer’ is the
most plausible alternative, and this was used at the time as a self-description, but it is too wide. Indeed it could accurately include men
like Christopher Wyvill, Charles James Fox,

end p.33

or even the young William Pitt—hardly, by the mid-179Os, the ideological bedfellows of Wolfe Tone and William Drennan. Secondly, the
term is not so anachronistic as Clark suggests. ‘Radicalism’ or ‘radical’ were not used as nouns in the late eighteenth century, but the
phrase ‘a radical reform of parliament’ was. I use ‘radical’ in this sense—as shorthand for ‘radical reformer’ and as a label to identify a
mentalité focused on the radical reform of parliament. This usage also distinguishes between radical and more moderate reformers, a
distinction which becomes increasingly important in the 1790s.

It might be argued that the lack of a contemporary self-description suggests the lack of a contemporary phenomenon, but the existence of
a well-defined radical reform programme and well-known bodies dedicated to its implementation provide very real proof of the phenomenon.
And when ideas and language are changing quickly, new political platforms may develop before an appropriate label has arrived to
describe them. Furthermore, if we search for a contemporary label in the divisive atmosphere of the 1790s, then we also run the risk of
finding one (such as ‘leveller’, ‘jacobin’, or ‘republican’) foisted upon the radical reformers for propaganda purposes by their opponents.
This would distort our understanding more seriously than the retrospective application of ‘radical’.

58
Clark’s attack on the term ‘radical’ stems, in part, from his desire to return religion to the centre of political opposition.
58 For a general critique of Clark’s project, see J. Innes, ‘Review Article: Jonathan Clark, Social History and England’s “Ancien Regime”’, P & P 115 (May

1987), 165–200 .

Religious Dissenters were certainly very prominent in reform movements and their religious ideas informed their assault on the status quo,

but they cannot be used as a catch-all category for radical reformers. First, many, at least in Ireland, were not Dissenters. Tone, Rowan,
and O’Connor were Anglicans, and some were Catholic, such as MacNeven. Secondly, many of the radical reformers’ goals were more
straightforwardly political than Clark would have us believe. Clark argues that ‘into the 1820s the attack on the establishment was
59
conducted primarily over religious issues and by those men who felt most strongly about them’.
59 Clark, Revolution and Rebellion , 102.

The strongly held dissenting religious beliefs of many ‘radicals’ is not in doubt, but this statement ignores the essentially political aspect of
their attack. The six-point programme for parliamentary reform of the Society for Constitutional Information, produced as far back as 1780,
is entirely political. It consists of annual elections, universal male suffrage, equal electoral districts, secret ballots, payment for MPs, and
the abolition of property qualification for MPs. Clark’s point is a useful corrective

end p.34

to an overly materialistic, Marxist or Whiggish interpretation. But by seeking an essentially religious explanation he also distorts the nature
of radical reform—especially for Ireland, where the repeal of the Sacramental Test Act in 1780 removed many of the substantive
60
disabilities still endured by Dissenters in Britain.
60 19 & 20 Geo. III, c. 6.

This encouraged more purely political causes to be espoused and reduced the need of rational Dissenters to focus on religious liberty.

The goal of radical parliamentary reform was found throughout the British Isles from the early 1780s, and Irish parliamentary reformers
selfconsciously saw themselves as part of this wider movement. Dickinson sees radicalism as a development of older Country forms of
opposition. The Country critique of corrupt executive patronage subverting the balanced constitution was enlarged to include its corruption
of the representation of the people. The remedy required restructuring the political system. For radical reformers, the emphasis shifted
from place and pension bills (or ‘economical’ reform) to the redistribution of seats on a more equal basis and the enlargement of the
franchise. This radicalism was fuelled by Wilkite demonstrations and external crises, such as the American Revolution: an event which
highlighted the corruption and incompetence of the administration. Radicals also extended the notion that property should be represented
in parliament into the dictum that there should be no taxation without representation—which in turn rapidly came to mean voting rights for
all or most adult men. Radicals increasingly resorted to extra-parliamentary means and were influenced by a literal reading of Lockean
theories of natural rights, the social contract, and the right to resist. This developed into a theory of popular sovereignty and popular
participation in politics. These rights to resist and participate were often combined with the need to protect the ancient liberties of
Englishmen, and English radicals commonly looked back to a pristine political order, often of Anglo-Saxon origin. Perhaps inconsistently,
they also had an Enlightenment faith in progress, reason, and toleration, and many radicals also looked forward to a utopian realization of
61
human potential: a potential currently checked by archaic, aristocratic, and tyrannical governments which would inevitably fall.
61 Dickinson, Liberty and Property , 195–269.

All of these views had an impact on Ireland, although some needed to be adapted for Irish use.

Full-blown radicalism of this sort was a post-1776 phenomenon in Ireland as well as Britain and its evolution in Ireland will be one of the
main subjects of the later chapters. However, the radical Whig tradition from

end p.35

which it stems had a number of notable Irish connections. The remainder of the chapter will, therefore, explore the ideological terrain of
Ireland before this date to provide some background to the Patriot, republican, and radical views that were adopted and used in Ireland
after the American Revolution.

V . PATRIOTISM AND REPUBLICANISM IN IRELAND BEFORE THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

Before the American Revolution, there was much that a thoroughgoing Patriot or classical republican could object to in eighteenth-century
Ireland. The Irish parliament was subordinate to the British, which had formally claimed the right to legislate for Ireland with the Declaratory
62
Act (1720) , and Irish bills had to be submitted to the English privy council for approval under Poynings’ Law (1495).
62 J. L. McCracken, The Irish Parliament in the Eighteenth Century (Dundalk, 1971), 13–14.

63
By the mid-eighteenth century, the Lord Lieutenant, a political appointee of the British cabinet,
63 In theory, the Lord Lieutenant was the monarch’s choice, and he had been in the early eighteenth century. But by the mid-eighteenth century he was
appointed by the British ministry of the day.

managed the Irish parliament through an extensive system of patronage and undertakers. And although this often proved difficult
64
(particularly over issues of finance),
64 Wood’s half-pence crisis in 1723–4 and the money bill disputes of the 1750s being the most notable examples.

the Irish parliament did not seriously challenge British authority until after the onset of the American war. Up to a third of Irish MPs
65
received patronage,
65 McDowell, Irish Public Opinion, 28.

and it is estimated that in 1776 only 64 of the 300 seats in the Irish Commons were ‘open’, the rest being controlled by ‘50 peers and
66
sundry commoners’.
66 See J. Kelly, ‘Parliamentary Reform in Irish Politics: 1760–90’ in D. Dickson, D. Keogh, and K. Whelan (eds.), The United Irishmen: Republicanism,
Radicalism and Rebellion (Dublin, 1993) 77.

This situation could hardly be viewed as a harmonious balance of interests, nor could many prominent politicians be described as virtuous
and independent by classical republican criteria. Indeed not only did one element, the executive, dominate the others, this element was
strictly speaking not even Irish for it accepted pensions and places to do the bidding of a foreign power.

In short, because the Protestant Ascendancy was ultimately dependent upon Britain for its position of superiority, Irish politics could be
seen as even more corrupt than British. Patriots saw it as an unhealthy mixture of tyranny, oligarchy, and foreign domination, and for
many this situation

end p.36

created both resentment of England and a degree of self-loathing for their own compromised position. Ideally, Patriots needed political
space and autonomy to be complete citizens, but this implied a rejection of British support which could cost them their privileged position.
This distaste for dependency among Irish Patriots led to a style of politics which often valued rhetoric and bravado above substance, in an
attempt to create the impression of independence where little actually existed. But most notably it led to an increasingly aggressive Patriot
movement which culminated in the Volunteers and their campaigns for free trade and legislative independence.

As a result, it is tempting to view Irish political thought in the early eighteenth century as merely a prelude to the Patriotism, radicalism,
and republicanism of the latter part of the century. The popular image of such diverse theorists as Molyneux, Swift, and Lucas suggests
such a teleo-logical approach, as does their powerful use of natural rights, savage social criticism, and populist rhetoric. Any introduction
to late eighteenth-century republican, Patriot, and radical political thought should certainly point to such men as forebears, not least
because later Patriots and radicals themselves acknowledged a debt to them. But their role in the development and transmission of
Patriotic ideas was by no means straightforward, and they would have undoubtedly abhorred the principles of many Irishmen who later
claimed them as heroes. The remainder of this chapter, therefore, will explore the ambiguous legacy of the early Irish Patriots and
republicans.

Four points must be made initially. First, these early attempts to challenge English control of inadequate and corrupt Irish institutions were
neither radical by the standards of the 1780s and 1790s, nor republican in the anti-monarchical sense. Secondly, these thinkers were often
minority voices within the Protestant political nation. Many Protestants responded favourably to them in a political crisis (notably to Swift’s
67
Drapier’s Letters during the Wood’s half-pence affair of 1724),
67 See F. P. Lock, Swift’s Tory Politics (London, 1983), 161–8, for Swift’s role in the affair.

but the political elite invariably rejected their arguments as dangerous and even seditious. Thirdly, they were rarely populist in the widest
sense: political rights were almost never claimed for all of the Irish people before 1776. Fourthly, all of these early Irish Patriots exhibit
ambiguous political identities, and their self-identification as those of English blood in Ireland is both flexible and unstable. They cannot be
described as Patriots in any inclusive or separatist sense.

end p.37

Molesworth, while not a typical Irish Patriot, is an interesting example of this ambiguity. His writing often confuses England with the larger
political community of the British Isles, and he writes as an Englishman, not as an Irishman, even when addressing an issue which bears
directly on Ireland. This is demonstrated in his statement on Irish union with England in the Preface of his translation of Hotman’s Franco-
Gallia (written, but not published, before the 1707 Act of Union with Scotland ).

No man can be a sincere Lover of Liberty, that is not for increasing and communicating that Blessing to all People; and therefore
the giving or restoring it not only to our Brethren of Scotland and Ireland, even to France it self (were it in our Power) is one of the
principle Articles of Whiggism. The Ease and Advantage which would be gained by uniting our own Three Kingdoms upon equal

Terms ... is so visible, that if we had not the Example of those Masters of the World, the Romans, before our Eyes, one wou’d
wonder that our own experience (in the Instance of uniting Wales to England) shou’d not convince us, that altho both Sides wou’d
68
incredibly gain by it, yet the rich and opulent Country, to which such an Addition is made, wou’d be the greater Gainer.
68 Robert Molesworth, ‘The Translator’s Preface’ to Hotman’s Franco-Gallia (London, 1721), XX.

There are a number of different personas behind this statement. By referring to ‘our Brethren of Scotland and Ireland’ he places himself
firmly as an Englishman, but ‘our own Three Kingdoms upon equal terms’ suggests a British identity based on affection and cultural unity
not yet manifested in formal political arrangements. There is also the indication that his political principles are more ‘international’ or
universalist than nationalist in his desire to extend Whiggish principles to France. Perhaps the link between these positions is the revealing
allusion to Rome. He aspires to a Whig Empire with an English political centre but based on common principles. This would command
loyalty by the equal enjoyment of law and liberty throughout its lands, rather than by the subjugation of the periphery by the centre. Ireland
becomes a British Sicily, and its inhabitants citizens of a larger political brotherhood united by common religious and political traditions.

Molesworth’s perspective is perhaps broader than most Irish Patriots and certainly more English than Irish, but such ambivalence towards
Irish-ness was not uncommon among early Patriots. Even Molyneux, the supposed forefather of Irish Patriotism, had a very ambiguous
identity. Like Molesworth and many other Whiggish Anglo-Irishmen in the early eighteenth century, he desired a union and wished to be
ruled by an English parliament which contained Irish representation (although he thought

end p.38

69
this a ‘Happiness we can hardly hope for’).
69 William Molyneux, The Case of Ireland’s Being Bound by Acts of Parliament in England, Stated (Dublin, 1698), 98. See J. Hill, ‘Ireland Without Union:
Molyneux and his Legacy’, in J. Robertson (ed.), A Union for Empire: The Union of 1707 in the History of British Political Thought (Cambridge, 1995), 271

–96.

70
As part of the recently reestablished Anglo-Irish Protestant elite, such attitudes are understandable.
70 Molyneux’s family had been part of this elite before the Williamite victory. His great grandfather arrived in Ireland from England in the 1570s and became
Chancellor of the Irish Exchequer. His grandfather was an Irish MP, and his father had fought under both the royal ist, Ormond, and later in the Commonwealth

army. See J. G. Simms, William Molyneux of Dublin, /656-/69# (Dublin, 1982), 11–18.

But they show the significant differences between Patriots at either end of the eighteenth century, for unionism was abhorrent to late
eighteenth-century Patriots. Molyneux’s place in radical and republican lineage is also ambiguous. When he became MP for Trinity College
in the Williamite parliament of 1692 he was generally regarded as a supporter of the Irish executive, and the publication of The Case of
Ireland ... Stated in 1698 caused considerable embarrassment to friends and political colleagues. Despite the allegations directed at him
by English enemies, however, it contains no hint of anti-monarchical republicanism and little to place it in a classical republican tradition
except for the occasional rejection of absolutism in favour of balanced government. Because of its perceived centrality to the Patriot
71
tradition (and in order to understand its relationship to later Patriotism) a brief analysis of The Case of Ireland... Stated is necessary.
71 For a fuller analysis of Molyneux, see T. McLoughlin, Contesting Ireland: Irish Voices against England in the Eighteenth Century (Dublin, 1999), 41–64.

The work is a mixture of historical, legal, and theoretical arguments, which aim to demonstrate the right of Irishmen to submit only to laws
and taxes to which they have consented. Molyneux argued that Ireland ought not to be dependent on the English parliament and had only
been regarded as such in rare and exceptional circumstances until the more frequent violations of the seventeenth century. This was
72
confirmed by the fact that Ireland had the constitutional form of ‘a Compleat Kingdom within it self
72 Molyneux, The Case of Ireland... Stated , 148.

and was styled as such among the titles of the monarch (unlike the American colonies). Essentially, Molyneux’s Case is an attempt to
justify this interpretation by using natural rights, contract theory, theories of conquest, and the rights of the ‘English in Ireland’.

The tract owed much to John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government and was perhaps the first of many to put Locke’s arguments to more
subversive ends than Locke himself intended. Ironically, Locke, a close friend of

end p.39

Molyneux, disapproved of his conclusions, despite the fact that Moly-neux’s most powerful arguments were lifted straight from the Two
Treatises. Echoing Locke on natural rights, Molyneux asserted that ‘Liberty seems the Inherent Right of all Mankind; and on whatever
73
Ground any one Nation can Challenge it to themselves, on the same Reason may the rest of Adam’s Children Expect it.’

73 Molyneux, The Case of Ireland... Stated , 3.

Molyneux then argued that ‘All men are by nature in a state of Equality in respect of Jurisdiction or Dominion’, and this Equality forms the
foundation of

that right which all men claim of being free from all Subjection to Positive Laws, till by their own Consent they give up their
Freedom, by entering into Civil Societies for the common benefit of all the Members thereof... And on this Consent depends the
Obligation of all Humane Laws; insomuch that without it, by the unanimous Opinions of all Jurists no sanctions are of any
74
Force.
74 Ibid. 150–1.

However, Molyneux obviously expected few to be swayed by assertions of natural rights alone. He devoted most of the tract to arguments
based on historical and legal precedents, from the Middle Ages to his own time, which disputed the claims of the English parliament to
75
meddle in Irish affairs.
75 The historical and legal portion of The Case of Ireland...Stated draws on Patrick Darcy’s Argument (1643) and on a Disquisition on the traditional
independence of the Irish parliament drawn up in 1660 by Molyneux’s father-in-law, Sir William Domville. See Simms, William Molyneux of Dublin , 102–3.

This appeal to history forced Molyneux to ask whether Ireland was a conquered country and a mere colony of England. Were Henry II’s
invasion and the subsequent waves of English settlement a conquest? And if they were a conquest, what rights did that give to the
English parliament? In answer, he adopted a twofold strategy: denial of English conquest alongside rejection of any rights that might arise
from conquest. Molyneux contrasted the ‘Acquisition of a Kingdom by Force of Arms, to which, Force likewise has been opposed’ with
Henry’s invasion, which ‘was no violent Subjugation of this Kingdom’. The event was, rather, ‘an Intire and Voluntary Submission of all the
76
Ecclesiastical and Civil States of Ireland, to King Henry II, without the least Hostile Stroke on any side’.
76 Molyneux, The Case of Ireland... Stated , 11–12.

Thus, Ireland was portrayed as a sovereign and unconquered country that freely gave its crown to the English king, as a separate
kingdom. This submission was then conceptualized as a Lockean original compact between ruler and people to emphasize the point that
only the English king and not the English

end p.40

parliament had a role in governing Ireland. ‘I am sure ‘tis not possible’, Molyneux declared, ‘to shew a more fair Original Compact between
77
a King and People, than between Henry, the Second, and the People of Ireland.’
77 Ibid. 38.

However, this model of a settled civil society based on an original compact between king and people dating back to the twelfth century
ignored centuries of conflict over legitimacy, authority, and property rights. Molyneux, obviously uncertain that this view of Ireland’s
submission would convince everyone, backed it up with Locke’s theories on the rights of conquerors. Even if conquest were admitted,
Molyneux argued, a just invader had ‘no power over those who Conquered with him’. Hence, ‘Supposing Henry II had Right to invade ... it
was only the Antient Race of the Irish, that would suffer by this subjugation; the English and the Britains, that came over and conquered
with him, retain’d all the Freedoms and Immunities of Free-born Subjects’. Such reasoning conflicted with voluntary submission, but it did
secure Irish rights through the rights of those Englishmen in Ireland who were descended from the original conquerors. This explanation
threatened to exclude the majority of Irishmen, yet Molyneux, undeterred, produced an audacious solution to the problem.

Now ‘tis manifest that the great Body of the present People of Ireland, are the Progeny of the English and Britains ... and remains
but a meer handful of the Antient Irish at this day; I may say, not one in a thousand: So that if I, or any body else, claim the like
78
freedoms with the natural born Subjects of England, as being descended from them, it will be impossible to prove the contrary.
78 Ibid. 18–20.

This is a crucial passage, for it is both an attempt to answer the exclusionary dilemma at the heart of Irish Patriotism and a means of
reconciling Molyneux’s two main arguments. It does not matter now whether Irish rights rest on universal natural rights or specific English
rights. According to Molyneux, it conveniently rests on both, because virtually all Irishmen were descended from English settlers, who, of
course, possessed both kinds of right.

This nonsense did have the potential for inclusiveness, but only if the ‘antient Irish’ were willing to take on the identity of free-born
Irishmen of ‘English’ blood. And by placing Irish rights in this English blood, Molyneux weakened his rejection of colonial status for Ireland
(which he thought the ‘most extravagant’ of all charges made against it). For his identification of the ruling class as the English in Ireland

sounds suspiciously like a colonial elite, and his view of the conduct of a free Irish parliament

end p.41

does little to dispel this thought. In an attempt to soothe English nerves, he asserted that ‘whilest Ireland is in English hands, I do not see
79
how ‘tis possible for the parliament of Ireland to do anything that can be in the least prejudicial to England’.
79 Molyneux, The Case of Ireland... Stated , 173.

Hence, Molyneux’s legacy to Irish Patriots is an ambiguous one, despite its perceived centrality, and in some respects he is an unlikely
hero for later Patriots.

In recent years, the significance of Molyneux to later Patriots has been re-evaluated. Traditionally, a symbolic link in the Patriot tradition
from Molyneux to Henry Grattan was the latter’s speech in the Irish Commons on 16 April 1782 (the eve of Irish legislative independence).
Gerard O’Brien, after examining other known accounts and reports of the speech, doubts whether Grattan ever uttered the famous phrase,
80
‘Spirit of Swift, spirit of Molyneux, your genius has prevailed; Ireland is now a nation.’
80 The Speeches of the Rt. Hon. Henry Grattan in the Irish and the Imperial Parliament , ed. H. Grattan the Younger (4 vols., Dublin, 1822), i. 123.

He argues that it was a later addition to the published version. After finding only one casual reference to Swift, and none to Molyneux, in a
‘determined search’ of Grattan’s speeches, O’Brien claims that ‘Grattan was not especially concerned to justify his case in a distinctly
Irish Patriotic context and that he did not regard his speech as part of a long-standing argument’. O’Brien even goes so far as to assert
that ‘the concept of the eighteenth-century “Patriot tradition” is the longest standing, most deeply entrenched myth in the canon of Irish
81
history; it is also the myth with the shakiest foundation’.
81 G. O’Brien, ‘The Grattan Mystique’, ECI 1 (1986), 177–94.

This revision of the Patriot legacy has in turn been scrutinized, with Patrick Kelly pointing out that Molyneux’s The Case of Ireland...
82
Stated was reprinted nine times after its publication in 1698, with four of those reprints appearing between 1770 and 1782.
82 The nine reprint dates were: 1706,1719,1720,1725,1749,1770,1773,1776, and 1782. See Simms, William Molyneux of Dublin , 141–2.

Kelly does, however, identify a lull in the frequency of references to Molyneux in the middle of the century. He attributes his later
popularity to a reworking of his message by Charles Lucas, whose ‘reinterpretation of Molyneux in terms of the eighteenth-century
discourse of corruption versus Patriotism, though doing violence to historical reality, presented the pioneer Irish Patriot in a guise
acceptable to the radicalism prevalent both in England and Ireland in the latter 1760s’. Helped by this facelift, it seems to Kelly ‘undeniable
that Irishmen did regard Molyneux in a particularly privileged light in the last

end p.42

83
three decades of the eighteenth century’.
83 P. Kelly, ‘William Molyneux and the Spirit of Liberty in Eighteenth-Century Ireland’, ECI 3 (1988), 133–48.

Thus, O’Brien is right to question the continuity of the Patriot tradition, but Molyneux was still important to later Patriots. They often
referred to him, and their need for a recognized, sympathetic authority on the ancient constitution of Ireland outweighed any reservations
they may have had about his other views.

Swift’s role in the evolution of Irish Patriotism is also a complex one. Often called the ‘Hibernian Patriot’, and cited by Grattan as a
founding father of Irish Patriotism, he only reluctantly took up Irish issues after the fall of the Tories in 1714. Indeed his Patriotism has
even been seen as disgruntled revenge for his exile from England and lack of preferment. Lock argues that Swift ‘never concealed his
contempt for Ireland, the Irish, and Irish politics’, and despite his ‘perfectly genuine belief in the moral right of Ireland to be legislatively
independent of the English government’, his desire to embarrass the Whig regime, George I, and Walpole was probably a more important
84
motivation for his Patriotism.
84 Lock, Swift’s Tory Politics , 162.

Swift also wrote in a variety of voices—many of them English in tone rather than Irish. But he did develop a genuine concern for the
economic well-being and the political rights of Ireland, and despite his essentially Tory outlook, he often used radical Whig arguments.
85
Indeed, his Lockean assertion that ‘all Government without the Consent of the Governed, is the very Definition of Slavery’
85 Jonathan Swift, Drapier’s Letter IV, To the Whole People of Ireland, in Swift’s Irish Pamphlets , ed. J. McMinn (Gerrards Cross, 1991), 80.

could have been uttered by any of his Real Whig contemporaries, and he was even admired by later English radicals such as Henry

86
Yorke, William Godwin, and Thomas Spence.
86 The admiring tone of Michael Foot’s introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Gulliver’s Travels (London, 1967) is just one demonstration of the
continuing affinity of the ‘left’ of British politics for Swift.

Swift could never be accused of anti-monarchical republicanism. He was a staunch defender of the principle of monarchy and the English
87
constitution, and he strongly opposed Sidney’s Discourses concerning Government
87 Lock, Swift’s Tory Politics , 157–61.

But his irreverent, sustained criticisms of ministers and royal advisers often implied hostility to individual monarchs such as George I. His
vigorous defence of the Established Church in Ireland, and his strong opposition to toleration for Dissenters and Catholics make his
relationship to later Patriotism problematic, but his rigid Anglican superiority was perfectly in keeping with early Irish Patriotism. In short,
Swift’s political philosophy is

end p.43

complex and not easily pigeonholed, and I will simply highlight those key elements (especially his economic and constitutional arguments)
that were to prove helpful to later Patriots.

Central to Swift’s Patriotism was his concern for the economic condition of Ireland. As we have seen, early Irish Patriotism often centred
on ancient constitutional rights and historical precedent, but these claims were crucially supported by arguments for improving Ireland’s
depressed economy and relieving its extreme poverty. Swift, Berkeley, Molesworth, and others were distressed by the poverty of Ireland
and inspired to take up the pen because of it. This concern was the direct ancestor of the language of commercial grievance that pervaded
Irish political writing in the late 1770s. Swift’s first important work on Ireland was the allegory, The Story of the Injured Lady , in which
Ireland is portrayed as a beautiful but impoverished lady who is wooed, seduced, and then abandoned by an ungrateful suitor (England)
—before he proceeds to marry her ugly and undeserving rival (Scotland). Not only does the suitor jilt the lady, he forces her to take his
own tenants on to her land and be governed by an under-steward (the viceroy) under the direction of his own steward (the English
monarch). This essentially exploitative and colonial model of Anglo-Irish relations forms the basis of all Swift’s subsequent writings on the
subject, and the advice he offers in The Answer to the Injured Lady touches on many key preoccupations for Irish Patriots. He reminds
the lady of her independence (excepting her obligation to have the same ‘steward’ as England); of her right to trade freely with England
and all other nations; of the obligation of placemen and government officials to live in Ireland and not spend their wages in England; and
that her former suitor has no power to interfere with the leasing of her property and land. Parliamentary independence, free trade, criticism
88
of absenteeism, and the right of Protestant Irishmen to protect their privileges were all crucial issues to Patriots.
88 Swift, The Story of the Injured Lady , in McMinn (ed.), Swift’s Irish Pamphlets, 23–8.

The importance placed on economic grievances by Swift foreshadowed the campaign for free trade which was at the heart of 1770s
Patriotism. The idea of an embargo on English goods was not simply imported from the American revolutionaries. In A Proposal for the
Universal Use of Irish Manufacture, Swift had called, as far back as 1720, for ‘a firm resolution ... never to appear with one single Shred
89
that comes from England’.
89 Swift, A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture , in McMinn (ed.), Swift’s Irish Pamphlets, 50.

These themes are repeated in A Short View of the State of Ireland (1727), in which Swift listed all the factors which affect a nation’s
prosperity and pointed out

end p.44

those in which Ireland was deficient. He is not uncritical of Irish failings, but the main criticisms are directed at England, at the corrupt Irish
placemen it supported, and at the absentee governors and landowners who drained the country of money. His practical remedies included
free trade, schemes for the improvement of land, the restriction of office-holding to Irishmen, and increased consumption of home-
produced goods.

The root of much of Swift’s thinking on Ireland is the infringed rights of the Anglo-Irish. Fundamentally, these economic problems were all
linked to the constitutional and political problem that Ireland was subject to laws to which it did not consent. This issue is most vividly
summed up in the fourth Drapier’s Letter .

One great merit I am sure we have which those of English birth can have no pretence to, that our ancestors reduced this kingdom
to the obedience of England, for which we have been rewarded with a worse climate, the privilege of being governed by laws to
which we do not consent, a ruined trade, a House of Peers without jurisdiction, almost an incapacity for all employments; and the

90
dread of Wood’s halfpence.
90 Swift, Drapier’s Letter IV, To the Whole People of Ireland , in McMinn (ed.), Swift’s Irish Pamphlets, 73.

Swift’s achievement as a Patriot was to blend ancient constitutional and commercial language with selected elements of the classical
republican and natural rights tradition in the Protestant, Anglo-Irish cause. With skilful sleight of hand he also encouraged the Patriot
tradition of using the inclusive language of ‘nation’ and ‘people’ to refer to the Protestant nation and people alone. The fourth Drapier’s
Letter is addressed disingenuously ‘To the Whole people of Ireland’, but the focus is on those of English blood and Irish birth. Despite
these divergences from later Patriots, Swift provided them with a rich fund of rhetoric, argument, and imagery to draw on. And although he
was never a separatist, nor a republican, there was a bitter anti-English twist to his rhetoric which became an important, if somewhat
ambiguous, strand in Irish Patriotism.

Charles Lucas’s role in the transmission and popularization of classical republican and ancient constitutional ideas among Patriots in the
91
1750s and 1760s was also crucial.
91 See Hill, From Patriots to Unionists, 83–90, for a discussion of his political philosophy.

As Sean Murphy points out, Lucas’s writings ‘contain an exhaustive analysis of the British constitution with its balance between the three
92
estates of king, lords and commons, and stress the ever present danger of degeneration due to corruption’.
92 S. Murphy, ‘Charles Lucas, Catholicism and Nationalism’, ECI 8 (1993), 83–102.

He tried to demonstrate that this constitution was as much the birthright of the Irish as the English, and he campaigned to limit the
duration of Irish parliaments in the

end p.45

1760s. He also echoed Trenchard and Gordon in declaring the British system to have ‘more of the true republic in its composition than any
93
of those that now bear the name of republic’.
93 Charles Lucas, The Political Constitutions of Great Britain and Ireland Asserted and Vindicated (London, 1751), xvi. Quoted in Murphy, ‘Charles Lucas,

Catholicism and Nationalism’, 89.

All of these ideas could be found in earlier Real Whig writing, but given Lucas’s popularity, Murphy’s claim that Lucas ‘represented an
important pivotal stage in the transition from Anglo-Irish or Protestant constitutional nationalism to the more radical and inclusive
94
republican separatism of the United Irishmen’ is plausible.
94 Ibid. 88.

95
There are elements of his rhetoric which place him firmly in a mid-century mentalité, however.
95 For a discussion of the mid-century Patriot press, see R. MunterR. Munter, The History of the Irish Newspaper, /685-/760 (Cambridge, 1967), 169–88.

Despite Murphy’s convincing refutation of Lucas’s Protestant bigotry, his sense of Protestant superiority was still strong. Murphy argues
that Lucas was eventually prepared to envisage Catholic equality in civil rights as long as they renounced the temporal authority of the
Pope (a not insignificant concession in the 1750s). However, there is no sign of him advocating any political rights for Catholics.

VI . CONCLUSION
From this overview an interesting picture of pre-1776 Patriotism emerges. Despite its protestations of Irish rights, Patriots accepted that,
politically, Ireland was an English construction. The foundation of the Patriots’ thought was their rights as the heirs of free-born Protestant
Englishmen in Ireland. Patriots were also concerned with liberty and corruption, with balanced government, with Irish commercial
grievances, and occasionally with natural rights. But they did not wish to sever the connection with England, nor remove the monarch, nor
reform the basis of representation, nor include Catholics in the political nation. The staunch Protestantism and even unionism of early
Patriotism should not surprise us. In the face of a potentially hostile Catholic majority, all Irish Protestants in the early and mid-eighteenth
century were ill disposed to arguments that would seriously weaken bonds with the British crown or damage Protestant authority within
Ireland. The ambiguous Patriots Molyneux, Swift, and Lucas are no exceptions.

However, the nature of the political connection to Britain and the role of the British parliament in controlling Irish affairs deeply troubled
many Protestant Irish minds, and in this sense there was a continuity to Irish

end p.46

Patriotism over the century. Indeed J. C. Beckett has gone so far as to argue that ‘from the end of the seventeenth century to the end of
96
the eighteenth Irish political writing was dominated by one theme, the constitutional relationship between Ireland and Britain’.
96 J. C. Beckett, ‘Literature in English, 1691–1800’, in T. Moody and W. E. Vaughan (eds.), A New History of Ireland, iv. Eighteenth-Century Ireland 1691
–1800 (Oxford, 1986), 456.

Ironically, this discontent at British authority can be seen as the subversive application of thoroughly British political languages and
arguments. Chapter 2 will show how these languages and arguments were used by Patriots in the era of the American Revolution to
develop a powerful critique of British control in Ireland.

end p.47

2 Patriotism in the Age of the American Revolution, 1776-1780

Stephen Small
1
Between the outbreak of the American Revolution in 1776 and the achievement of free trade
1 The contemporary meaning of this term is discussed in Sect. V of this chapter.

in 1780, the eclectic languages of Irish patriotism evolved into an increasingly strident critique of British political control of Ireland. This
chapter charts that process while assessing the impact of events in America on Irish political thought. In Sections I and II the influence of
the American Revolution on Irish Patriotism is examined and its ideological importance questioned. Section III shows how Irish ancient
constitutional traditions gave Irish Patriots both a sense of shared ‘English’ inheritance with American Patriots as well as a distinctly
different understanding of their constitutional position. Section IV shows how these ancient constitutional rights were often merged with
natural rights. Section V examines the emergence of commercial grievances as the dominant Patriot language between 1776 and 1780,
and Section VI explores its fusion with the Commonwealth tradition among radical Patriots in the late 1770s.

I . AMERICAN INFLUENCE ON IRELAND

The American Revolution is often assumed to have profoundly influenced Irish political thinking by inspiring the Patriot campaigns for free
2
trade and legislative independence.
2 D. N. Doyle, Ireland, Irishmen and Revolutionary America, 1760–1820 (Dublin, 1981), 152–81.

But many historians of the period describe an ambiguous and divided Irish response that needs careful decoding. As Maurice Bric puts it,
‘Irish assessments of the American Revolution were pragmatic’. He argues that ‘the revolution was ... something about which no stratum
3
of Irish Society was precisely clear and which, each in its own way, related to its own domestic situation’.
3 M. J. Bric, ‘Ireland, America and the Reassessment of a Special Relationship, 176O-1783’, ECI II (1996), 88–119.

It is fair to say that the conflict in America, by a variety of means, did significantly affect Ireland. Many Patriots undoubtedly saw
similarities in their causes as they both struggled

end p.48

against British ‘tyranny’. And it is doubtful whether the British parliament would have granted free trade to Ireland in 1779-80 or legislative
independence in 1782 without the British defeats at Saratoga and York-town and the fall of Lord North’s government. If, however, we wish
to understand how the American Revolution affected Irish Patriot thought (as opposed to activity) we must distinguish carefully between
different kinds of cause and effect and treat Irish pro-Americanism with caution.

The most important mechanism by which American events altered Irish attitudes was not direct ideological influence. The perceived
economic impact of the American war was far more influential in reshaping Irish attitudes towards fundamental political issues than any
4
straightforward adoption of American political arguments. Ireland had been suffering a short-term economic decline since 1771,
4 J. C. Beckett, The Making of Modern Ireland, 1603–1923 (London, 1969), 206.

and the imposition in 1776 of an embargo on Irish exports stretched pre-existing resentment of British restraints on Irish trade to breaking
point. The Patriot movement coalesced around demands for ‘free trade’ born out of these commercial grievances, and these demands, in
turn, focused attention on the fundamentals of the Irish polity—giving impetus to a wide-ranging discussion of rights, sovereignty, and the
very nature of government. In terms of direct ideological impact American influence has been overestimated, but the perceived economic
hardship caused by the war could hardly have been more influential. In so far as the economic and the ideological can be separated, the
American Revolution seems less important as a direct influence on the way Irishmen thought and wrote about politics than as a catalyst
for expressions of dissatisfaction. The example of American rebellion and Patriotic agitation for free trade were, of course, highly
compatible, but the sense of affront and injustice caused by the British regulation of Irish trade was far more important than any amount of
ideological inspiration from across the Atlantic. As Roy Foster has pointed out, ‘commercial resentment ... accomplished more than any
5
lofty feelings of brotherhood could have done’.
5 R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland, 1600–1972 (London, 1988), 242.

However, given the emphasis placed on American influence in the existing historical literature, it would be perverse not to examine the
issue.

Historians usually analyse three related manifestations of American influence: expressions of support for, and interest in, the American
struggle; Irish recognition of the similarities between Irish and American constitutional positions; and the use in Ireland of political

arguments and language commonly used in America. The next section will argue that the significance of these expressions of support for
the American cause

end p.49

generally took second place to Irish concerns over trade and should, in any case, be treated with caution. Section III questions the extent
to which Irish thinkers viewed their constitutional relationship to Britain as similar to America’s and shows how their ancient
constitutionalism led to serious differences in Irish and American constitutional thinking.

The third type of evidence, relating to the similarities between American and Irish political arguments and language, implies that Irish
thinkers began to adopt American arguments. This raises many complex issues about the mechanisms of ideological transmission that
are difficult to resolve conclusively. Mapping influences and tracing the dissemination of ideas within the broad English-speaking political
culture is an inexact science. At times, very similar arguments were used by both American and Irish Patriots, and they both used
6
identical political terms, such as rights, tyranny, property, liberty, virtue, and corruption in very similar ways.
6 See Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution , 23–51.

Yet it seems more plausible to assume that both were drawing on common languages of political thought that had been in place for some
time than to conclude that Irishmen were drawing extensively on American political rhetoric. The brief history of earlier Irish Patriot and
republican thought given in Chapter 1 supports this claim. Of course, none of this disputes the fact that events in America significantly
influenced events in Ireland, nor that many Irishmen found American resistance to Britain both laudable and inspirational.

II . IRISH SUPPORT FOR THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

Expressions of support for the former colonists, or censure of British treatment of them, are commonly used to demonstrate the hold of
7
America on Irish minds.
7 McDowell, Irish Public Opinion, 39–50.

Maurice O’Connell thinks ‘it was a forgone conclusion that the Patriots would see the colonists’ cause with sympathy and as resembling
their own’. He agrees with McDowell that ‘there was widespread sympathy for the colonists’ and even argues that ‘sympathy with the
8
Americans was widespread among the Anglican ruling classes’.
8 M. R. O’Connell, Irish Politics and Social Conflict in the Age of the American Revolution (Philadelphia, 1965), 25–8.

There is undoubtedly much truth in this view, and it is not difficult to find good evidence of pro-American sentiment throughout Ireland. As
early as 1771 Benjamin Franklin had noted the sympathy of Dubliners for the American cause. In 1775 a letter from Lord Midleton in Cork
succinctly stated, ‘We are all

end p.50

9
Americans here except such as are attached securely to the Castle, or papists’.
9 National Library of Ireland, MS 52: Lord Midleton to Townshend, 16 Aug. 1775. Quoted in McDowell, Irish Public Opinion, 41.

10
By 1776 Dublin Patriots, led by James ‘Napper’ Tandy, were vocal in their condemnation of the war.
10 See Hill, From Patriots to Unionists, 142–9.

They expressed their support of the Americans through bodies such as the Free Citizens of Dublin, the Dublin Guild of Merchants, and the
11
Common Council of the Corporation.
11 See J. Sainsbury, Disaffected Patriots: London Supporters of Revolutionary America, 1769–1782 (Gloucester, 1987), for the analogous support from

London’s ‘middling sort’.

Among Presbyterians in the north sympathy for the Americans was also often strong, partly due to the extensive family links produced by
large-scale emigration. Many people in Belfast, in particular, strongly opposed the war, with the staunchest opponents including future
12
United Irishmen.
12 R. B. McDowell, Ireland in the Age of Imperialism and Revolution, 1760–1801 (Oxford, 1979), 240–56. See also Curtin, The United Irishmen , 17–18.

Patriot MPs such as Sir Edward Newenham and George Ogle carried this opposition into the Irish parliament, and many newspapers
initially took pro-American stances. The Hibernian Journal, for example, vigorously endorsed the American revolutionary principle of no
taxation without representation, as the following passage shows. ‘If a man is attacked by another, with intent to rob him of his property,
and he shall think, that the Best way to defend himself against such [a] Robber, is to attack him in his Turn, he certainly hath, according

13
to the Law of Nature, and Self-defence, an unquestionable Right to do so.’
13 Hibernian Journal , 8 Apr. 1776.

The numerous petitions, meetings, and public dinners all testify to significant unease over the British government’s struggle with American
colonists.

Thus, it would be inaccurate to deny that the public opinion was broadly sympathetic to the Americans, but we should recognize that Irish
opinion on America was far from monolithic. First, Catholics were divided on their view of the former colonists. The lower classes seem to
have supported them and the growing body of Catholic merchants also generally opposed the war, primarily because it disrupted their
14
trade.
14 Bric, ‘Ireland, America and the Reassessment of a Special Relationship’, 102.

However, many Catholics were ill disposed to the Americans due to their opposition to the Quebec Act of 1774 (which established
15
Catholicism as a legal state religion in Canada).
15 Despite the illegality of Catholics bearing arms, large numbers of them were recruited for American service much to the alarm of many Protestants.

For the Catholic aristocratic elite, distaste for intolerant colonial rebels was a natural reaction that fitted neatly with their cautious policy of
supporting the government.

end p.51

Secondly, support for the Americans was also variable among Protestants. The Irish Commons rejected Burke’s appeal to act as a
16
friendly mediator and passed an address supporting the king’s belligerent stance by 90 votes to 54 on 10 October 1775.
16 The Journals of the House of Commons of The Kingdom of Ireland, 1613–1800 (19 vols., Dublin, 1796–1800), xvii. 10–14.

The Commons also allowed the government to remove 4,000 troops from Ireland to augment the British armies in America. Both of these
measures faced significant opposition in the Commons, but they passed nonetheless. After the entry of France into the war in 1778,
loyalty to the crown often took precedence over support for the Americans. The initial raison d’être of the Volunteers (the main Patriot
vehicle after 1778) was to protect Ireland from an invasion by the traditional enemy, Catholic France. This prospect was worrying to all
Protestants and many Patriots distanced themselves from the Americans at this point. For all the Patriot rhetoric about British ministerial
misconduct, Ireland remained essentially loyal during the war.

Perhaps more important than the numbers who expressed support for one side or the other, however, is the depth and significance of the
support. Expressions of support that are not backed up by action or genuine sacrifice are easy to make. Such expressions are not
necessarily insincere, but they often reveal little of core political goals and motivations. Hence, while expressions of support for the
colonists by eighteenth-century Irishmen often show a genuine sympathy for their American ‘brethren’, they should not necessarily be
interpreted as showing that American issues exercised a dominant hold on the Irish mind. The important question is whether Irishmen
reflected upon events in America, and, as a result, changed fundamentally the way they thought and wrote about politics. It is far from
clear that this was the case in the period between 1776 and 1780.

Indeed the reaction was one of indifference among most Irish political writers. Except for foreign reprints, the Irish pamphlet literature of
1775 to 1780 shows very few detailed discussions of the political issues involved in the American crisis, and the language used in these
pamphlets provides little evidence that Irishmen were beginning to express their political utterances in a new ‘American’ idiom. With the
partial exception of William Steele Dickson’s sermons and Hugh Boyd’s pamphlet discussed below, I have not discovered one pamphlet or
political tract written by an Irishman in this period whose primary focus is on the political and constitutional problems of America. Many
Irish writers referred to the American war, but few discussed American politics in a systematic way. Detailed analysis of the issues at the
heart of the disagreement between Britain and America

end p.52

were largely ignored. There was little discussion of imperialism, federalism, representation, taxation, and constitutional rights as they
applied to America. Bric asserts that ‘both pamphlets and newspapers largely ignored the theoretical basis of contemporary American
Patriotism for the narrower political capital that could be made from berating what Franklin termed “the heavy yoke of [imperial] tyranny”
17
’
17 Bric, ‘Ireland, America and the Reassessment of a Special Relationship’, 105.

O’Connell also casts doubt on the depth of Irish sympathy by admitting that pro-Americanism was ‘expressed mainly by individuals and
18
groups under no obligation to take immediate action or accept responsibility in political affairs’.

18 O’Connell, Irish Politics and Social Conflict in the Age of the American Revolution , 29.

He goes on to express his feeling that ‘from innumerable sympathetic references to the American colonists, one gets the impression that
many Irish politicians were more interested in embarrassing Dublin Castle and the British Government than in giving moral support to the
Americans’. Perhaps even more revealing is his observation that after free trade was granted the Freeman’s Journal suddenly switched
19
from ‘editorial denunciation of the tyranny of George III... to rejoicing over the news of British victories in America and the West Indies’.
19 Ibid. 31.

The Freeman’s Journal was the former mouthpiece of the Dublin Patriot Charles Lucas and ‘the organ of Dublin liberalism’ at the time
(Grattan also contributed). It had generally been the most Pro-American of the Irish newspapers before its conversion. We must, therefore,
20
be wary of proclaiming too deep or too simple an identification between the American cause and Irish Patriotism.
20 McDowell, Irish Public Opinion, 40.

This ambiguous picture of interest and support raises the question of censorship or self-censorship. But this cannot plausibly be used to
argue for deeper influence or commitment than is evident in published works. The Freeman’s Journal was not bought offby the
government until 1784, and, according to Pollard, censorship was minimal before this date. In the late 1770s, what censorship there was
fell almost entirely on the Irish newspapers rather than pamphlets, and it was generally the former that demonstrated the most interest in
21
American events.
21 M. Pollard, Dublin’s Trade in Books, 1550–1800 (Oxford, 1989), 16–31.

In any case, censorship did not stop the reproduction in the press of works critical of the government by non-Irishmen such as Paine.
Indeed, the ‘Irish’ debate on the crisis itself seems to have been largely conducted by means of a series of American and British
22
pamphlets reprinted in Dublin.
22 Among the pro-American pamphlets re-printed in Dublin were: the delegates of the United Colonies’ letter To the People of Ireland (1775); Abbé Raynal,
Sentiments of a Foreigner on the Disputes of Great Britain and America (1775); Theophilus Philadelphius, A Sequel to Common Sense (1777); and Thomas

Paine, Common Sense (1776). Paine’s work was imported from America and also reprinted in the Freeman’s Journal in 1776. There were also several editions
of Burke’s speeches and letters published between 1775 and 1777. At least eight editions of Richard Price’s Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty were

published in 1776, and his Additional Observations on ... Civil Liberty and the War with America was published in 1777. The British case was argued in
reprinted editions of Josiah Tucker, Letter to Edmund Burke (1775); Ambrose Serle, Americans Against Liberty (1775); John Wesley, Calm Address to our

American Colonies (1775); John Roebuck, An Enquiry whether the guilt of the present civil war in America ought to be imputed to Great Britain or America
(1776); and Candidus [James Chalmers], Plain Truth: addressed to the inhabitants of America. Containing remarks on a late pamphlet intitled Common Sense

(1776).

The number of these testifies to

end p.53

a significant degree of Irish interest, but they inspired little significant response from Irish political writers.

Those pamphlets that did refer to America usually took one of two forms. A few developed classical republican criticisms of Britain’s
tyrannical treatment of America (although even these are primarily a warning to Ireland to protect its own liberties). Many more pamphlets
briefly mentioned the economic distress caused by the American war as a precursor to a general discussion of Irish commercial and
constitutional rights. In these the American Revolution was often an external irritant of little intrinsic significance for Ireland. Most Irish
pamphlets of the period simply did not discuss American issues seriously.

One of the few that did was Hugh Boyd’s colourful Letters Addressed to the Electors of County Antrim . This is a good example of how
Irish classical republicans could criticize British tyranny towards America. His portrait of a despotic and corrupted Britain, attempting to
enslave its colonies and dependent countries, was a call for vigilance firmly in the tradition of Real Whig cautionary tales about the
collapse of ancient liberty.

Let this country be timely warned. The spirit of despotism is gone forth. Oppression her object, devastation her means, famine,
sword, and fire her instruments, even now she ravages the new world. If Heaven ... permit success to the oppressor; and if that
mighty continent must sink to slavery, can this little island hope for a happier doom; unless she call forth all her virtue, and exert
all her spirit, to deserve and obtain it. Flushed with the false glories of her unnatural conquest, will the power of England spare her
passive sister-kingdom, when she has crushed the active and just exertions of her sons.... This unhappy country will then feel,
and will lament too late, the mischiefs of her voluntary folly, in abetting the tyranny of the parent-state over her dependencies. For
23
what better name than tyranny can be given to a system of arbitrary extraction, supported by the sword?

23 Hugh Boyd, Letters Addressed to the Electors of County Antrim. By a Freeholder (Dublin, 1776), p. x. Boyd was born in Ballycastle, Co. Antrim in
1746. He attended TCD and published a political paper, The Freeholder , in 1772. On moving to London he became acquainted

end p.54

Boyd’s concern for America was almost certainly genuine, but events in America were used primarily to stimulate Irish public virtue in
order to protect Ireland’s own fragile liberty—just as the collapse of Denmark’s ‘gothic’ constitution had been used by Robert Molesworth
24
80 years earlier.
24 See Ch. 1, Sect. II.

Essentially, his rhetorical focus was on Ireland rather than America. Given the traditional tendency of Antrim’s Dissenters to political
radicalism, and their family connections to America, this audience was generally more sympathetic to the American cause and more likely
25
to respond to denunciation of British tyranny than the rest of Ireland.
25 See R. J. Dickson, Ulster Emigration to Colonial America, 7775–7775 (London, 1966).

Yet Boyd was almost apologetic about burdening his supposedly sympathetic readers with American concerns. He felt the need to make it
clear that his discussion had an ulterior, Irish purpose. ‘I have been thus particular in stating the great American question’, he explained,
26
‘to warn my countrymen of the critical situation of their country.’
26 Boyd, Letters, xix.

It would be unfair to suggest that Irishmen were not troubled by American suffering. William Steel Dickson, the future United Irishman,
demonstrated genuine concern for both sides engaged in this ‘civil war’. For a war in which ‘Brother points the fatal Minister of Death
against Brother, and Father against Son; and Children imbrue their Hands in their Parent’s Blood’ must exhibit, he argued, ‘more than its
27
natural Horrors’.
27 William Steel Dickson, Sermons on the Following Subjects: I. The Advantages of National Repentance, II. On the ruinous Effects of Civil War ... (Belfast,

1778), 18–19. Dickson, the Presbyterian minister of Portaferry, was educated at Glasgow University in the 1760s when the influence of Francis Hutcheson’s
moral and political thought was still strong. John Millar was Professor of Law at the time and would have introduced Dickson to Locke, Montesquieu, and

Pufendorf.

28
Dickson’s criticism of the American war caused him problems and he was denounced as a traitor.
28 McDowell, Irish Public Opinion, 42.

But even this was not a straightforward pro-American sermon. He was just as concerned with the war’s effect on Ireland and with the
general slaughter of fellow Protestants from the ‘British’ world. It was clear to him that ‘we are, already, beginning to feel the dire Effects
29
of that civil Discord which rages on the Continent of America, in almost every branch of our Commerce’.
29 Dickson, Sermons, 10.

30
And ‘should the contest be prolonged’, he warned, ‘America must be ruined; and, in its ruins, we must suffer’.
30 Ibid. 19.

Dickson’s concerns with Irish commercial ruin then led him

end p.55

directly to fundamental political problems. ‘[D]oes it not appear that we are already suffering, by the Restriction of our Commerce, the
Capture of our Vessels, and the growing weight of our taxes; and that, if the present Contest continues, we must suffer, more and more,
every day? Should not these Things, then, engage us to enquire into the Source of our Sufferings, and endeavour to have them removed?
31
’
31 Dickson, Sermons, 20

Dickson was at the radical end of Patriot opposition in the pre-1779 period (it is not coincidental that he was also addressing a northern
Dissenting audience). But, like Boyd, he also rarely took his eye off his own side of the Atlantic for long. He was more concerned with a
diminution of Protestant power generally rather than the success of the Americans specifically. His worry was that the senseless effusion
of Protestant blood and the dislocation of the imperial economy would decrease the strength and power of ‘Britain’ (used here, revealingly,
to include Ireland). This would leave both Ireland and Britain open to invasion by French and Spanish papists. His concern for the
Americans, though heartfelt, is secondary to an apocalyptic and millenarian fear of the catastrophes that this ‘civil war’ might occasion in

the British Isles.

Questioning the ideological importance of the American Revolution for Irish Patriots is not saying that Irish men and women were ill
informed or uninterested in the revolution. Those historians who have conducted extensive surveys of the newspapers of the period, such
as McDowell and O’Connell, confirm that the Volunteer’s Journal, Dublin Evening Post, Hibernian Journal , and especially the Freeman’s
Journal contained many reports on America. In the first three years of the conflict (before the granting of free trade and the entry of France
to the war) newspapers also regularly allowed space to pro-American arguments, and McDowell detects a blandness in the coverage that
32
reveals ‘a complete lack of enthusiasm’ for the war.
32 McDowell, Irish Public Opinion, 42.

However, this is not the same as a deep identification with and sympathy for the colonists’ aims.

Furthermore, the divergence between newspaper and pamphlet coverage is more apparent than real, and it can be partly explained by the
different purpose and function of the two media. Most Irish pamphlets from this period fall into two overlapping groups. They are either
specific responses to the most important political events of the day, or more general attempts to summarize, and provide solutions for,
underlying political, economic, and social problems. In both cases the energy, effort, and expense involved in producing a pamphlet
makes it safe to assume that the subject matter was of significant contemporary importance (or at least was thought to be so by

end p.56

the author). The ongoing personal polemics that pamphlets often produced also attest to the depth of feeling that inspired them. Some
pamphlets may be attributable to a desire for advancement or recognition, but this is an inadequate explanation for most and an irrelevant
one for the many published anonymously or under pseudonyms. The nature of pamphlet production itself, therefore, suggests that few
pamphlets were produced that did not concern political issues deemed central to the Irish predicament. This need not be the case with
issues covered in the newspapers, which could include topics of superficial significance as well as serious political interest. Thus,
coverage of events in America may have been extensive, but popular interest in those events does not entail fundamental changes in
political thinking. If this ideological shift had occurred, the most obvious manifestation would be a preoccupation with America in the Irish
pamphlet literature. There is limited evidence of such a preoccupation in the late 1770s.

III . ANCIENT CONSTITUTIONALISM: THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN IRELAND AND AMERICA

Similarities in the Irish and American constitutional relationship to Britain are cited as evidence of a common cause, which could not have
33
been lost on both sets of inhabitants.
33 Ibid. 40.

The subordinate position of the Irish provincial legislature and the claim of the British parliament to legislate for Ireland certainly bore a
structural resemblance to the position of the American colonial assemblies and their relationship to Westminster. Both America (1766) and
Ireland (1720) had been the object of Declaratory Acts, which attempted to remove any doubts about the Westminster parliament’s right to
legislate for them, and parallels between the two political systems were undoubtedly drawn.

At a high level, Irish Patriots would also have shared with the American colonists a feeling that both were part of a greater ‘British’ or
‘imperial’ community that was entitled to basic ‘English’ political rights. This shared political identity drew on many of the themes already
mentioned, such as ancient constitutional rights, commerce, and Protestantism, with perhaps a sense of liberty under an English system
of common law and representation the most important unifying theme. Jack P. Greene has recently asserted that ‘while Protestantism,
social openness, intellectual and scientific achievement, and a prosperity based on trade were all an important part of that identity, liberty,
under an English system of law and government,

end p.57

34
composed its principle foundation’.
34 J. P. Greene, ‘Empire and Identity from the Glorious Revolution to the American Revolution’, in P. J. Marshall (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire,
ii. The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1998), 208.

Thus, in a general sense, we should recognize that Protestant Irish Patriots shared an early modern Imperial British identity with American
colonists, and indeed, with many Englishmen.

However, constitutional resemblances were only skin deep in the eyes of most Protestant Irishmen. We may wish to view late eighteenth-
century Ireland as a colony, but they certainly did not (even if they often claimed their rights as Englishmen in Ireland). For most Irishmen,
differences in the status of Ireland and America were ultimately more important than their perceived similarities. Molyneux had set the

tone at the end of the seventeenth century. In arguing that Ireland was not a colony, he had asked of the American colonies, ‘do they use
35
the Title of Kings of Virginia, New England, or Maryland?’
35 Molyneux, The Case of Ireland... Stated , 148.

In 1776 most Irishmen still felt their political position with respect to Britain was significantly different to America’s, and they used a
language of ancient rights that had changed little since Molyneux’s day. Among the perceived differences was the belief that Ireland was
an ancient kingdom with a rich and significant history of legal and political precedent. Political rights were built into a revered but violated
ancient Irish constitution that mirrored the British. Ireland had a parliament of King, Lords, and Commons, as well as a Viceroy and a Privy
Council. America was quite simply different. As Arthur Brooke declared in 1775:

Law and Reason speak ... that Ireland is not to be compared with Virginia, St. Christopher’s, Nevis, Montserrat, or any other
Island or Place in the American Seas or elsewhere, that have been conquered by or planted at the cost of and settled by the
People and Authority of the British Nation ... I will content myself with observing that our Case is infinitely more favourable than
36
the Case of the Americans.
36 Dr Arthur Brooke, An Inquiry into the policy of the Laws affecting the Popish inhabitants of Ireland... with some Hints respecting America (Dublin,

1775), 125–7.

Even Boyd, who pointed out similarities between the predicament of America and Ireland, distinguished clearly between the constitutional
status of the two. America, though a ‘mighty continent’, was only a dependency while Ireland, though a ‘little island’, was still a sister-
37
kingdom.
37 Boyd, Letters, p. x.

Brooke was not unsympathetic to the Americans. Indeed he placed the blame for the conflict on English ministers and their double
standards concerning ‘English’ rights, but America’s status was simply not comparable

end p.58

with Ireland’s. He preferred to see Ireland as a sister-kingdom at the core of the Empire looking out rather than as a colony on the
periphery looking in.

Ireland should be considered in every point of Interest and Policy as a part of England itself, although possessed of a peculiar
legislature of its own; as a principle Foundation stone of the Crown; as a part of the same Rock on which Great Britain itself
stands; and as a chief Support of those hands that must manage the Reins by which a vastly extended Empire is to be
38
governed.
38 Brooke, An Inquiry , 124.

The reality was, of course, otherwise, despite the desire of many Irish thinkers in this period to be at the heart of the Empire. At best,
Ireland was in an uneasy position between metropolis and colony even if it saw itself as in integral part of a greater Britain.

Nevertheless a vocabulary and style of argument was established which drew on English constitutional and common law traditions shared
throughout the Empire: English birthrights and liberties, the Magna Charta, and the British constitution were just as much the property of
Protestant Irishmen as any other subjects of the British crown. Terms such as ‘sister-kingdom’ and ‘the English in Ireland’ were used to
reinforce a mythical image of Irish constitutional and political parity with Britain that had only been subverted by British power and wealth.
After Molyneux, a well-established legalistic interpretation of Irish history could be wheeled out at the appropriate moment to establish the
rights of Ireland. This revolved around the following interpretations of key historical events.

The ‘voluntary’ submission of the Irish kings to Henry II in the twelfth century ‘proved’ that Ireland was not a conquered country and that
its people were entitled to the same rights as any other subjects of the crown. For William Knox, this submission ‘was a considerable
boon to the people of Ireland’. It secured property, law and order, and the jury system by exchanging ‘a mode of government and laws
replete with tyranny and oppression, and productive of every enormity, for a constitution framed upon principles of equal right, and for laws
39
which gave them security in their persons, and property in their possessions’.
39 William Knox, The State of Ireland (Dublin, 1778), 8–14.

Crucially this submission also demonstrated that Ireland was linked to Britain via the crown only: it had never submitted to the authority of
the English parliament. Hence, Brooke expressed a common sentiment when he stated, ‘as to the People of England, they were not
Parties to those Transactions between Henry and his Irish subjects, they had no right to interfere, and for this Reason they did not

40
interfere’.
40 Brooke, An Inquiry , 30.

end p.59

The conferral of the Lordship of Ireland on Henry II’s second son, John, while Henry was still king of England was also crucial. It
demonstrated that Ireland had originally been created as a separate title that was only united with the English crown because of Richard I’s
death and John’s subsequent inheritance of the English throne. The granting of a Magna Charta for Ireland in 1216, the establishment of
separate Irish administrative and judicial structures based on the English model, and the calling of Ireland’s first parliament in 1297 were
all seen as further indications of Ireland’s separate sovereignty. Statutes and pronouncements of the Irish parliament, such as its
conferring the title ‘King of Ireland’ on Henry VIII, and, ironically, Poynings’ Law of 1495, were also used to demonstrate that the Irish
parliament, and not the British, was the only body capable of binding Ireland. The usurpation of this right by the English parliament was
seen as a relatively recent phenomenon dating from the Stuart period and the English Civil War. For Irish Patriots the Norman yoke of
English radicals had become a Stuart yoke.

A number of pamphleteers simply reproduced Molyneux’s arguments almost verbatim. Typical is The Alarm, which reiterated Molyneux’s
thoughts on conquests, compacts, and voluntary submission, before asserting predictably that ‘the majority of the present possessors of
Ireland are the progeny of English adventurers’ and as such they should not be ‘divested of their birthrights as Englishmen, by crossing
41
St. George’s Channel’.
41 The Alarm; or, the Irish Spy. In a series of letters on the present state of affairs in Ireland, to a Lord high in the opposition. Written by an Ex-Jesuit (Dublin,

1779), 51.

The author then expressed his admiration of Molyneux’s ‘very ingenious composition’, which he thought ‘the manual of Irish liberty ...
42
replete with the best sense and justest arguments’.
42 Ibid. 53.

A few drew different conclusions from the ancient constitutional model. William Knox saw the introduction of English law as a medieval
union in which the Irish ‘became incorporated with the English, and were made one people with them’. For Knox, this was a ‘union, the
most entire and perfect that can be conceived’, and he lamented its passing. Unusually, he thought the best way to protect English
43
‘civilization’ and its constitutional traditions was to let Ireland’s ‘local legislature’ become absorbed by the Imperial parliament.
43 Knox, The State of Ireland , I5~i6and59.

Ironically, his views on unionism were close to Molyneux’s but they were not shared by many Irishmen at this time.

Some Patriot theorists were becoming weary of ancient constitutionalism by 1779 and a few even thought it inappropriate to the rational,
enlightened late eighteenth century. But for most it remained important

end p.60

throughout the late eighteenth century, even if used in combination with natural rights, classical republican, or commercial arguments.
Most Protestant Irishmen continued to value the long, shared history between Ireland and England which included the possession of
English laws and political traditions, and this history continued to support protracted historical and legal commentaries on the bloody and
contentious history of Ireland. A surprisingly large proportion of political writing took this form, and it was even given a new lease of life by
the Rebellion and the Union debate. Furthermore, it owes nothing to the influence of America and largely served to distance Irish
understanding of its constitutional position from an American colonial model. Indeed given the Americans’ perception of their political
origins in the more recent colonization of unoccupied wilderness, such a history of native-settler struggle was largely absent from their
political theory on the connection between America and Britain. This was another significant difference between Ireland and America. Irish
44
Patriots felt the need to explain their legitimacy in the context of a long history of conquest and struggle; American patriots did not.
44 J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Protestant Ireland: The View from a Distance’, in S. J. Connolly (ed.), Political Ideas in Eighteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin, 2000), 225.

Thus, the distinctive language of Irish ancient constitutionalism not only reminded Ireland (if it needed reminding) of the depth of its
political, religious, and cultural connections with Britain; it also reminded Protestant Irishmen that their country was a far more divided
society than America and much closer to the threat of Catholic, European powers. These dangers within and without inevitably dampened
desires to separate from Britain that were given free reign across the Atlantic. In doing so they gave a more cautious, historically-minded
bent to Irish Patriotism.

IV . THE ANCIENT CONSTITUTION AND NATURAL RIGHTS

An interesting synthesis of this constitutional tradition with Lockean arguments was given by Charles Francis Sheridan (the brother of
Richard Brinsley Sheridan). Like a latter-day Molyneux, Sheridan described an ancient constitution based on the Magna Charta, medieval
confirmations of the Magna Charta, assertions of the liberties of the people by Charles I, and the Bill of Rights. These could not be
45
infringed by parliament and were to be transmitted to posterity ‘without any derogation’.
45 Charles Francis Sheridan, Observations on the Doctrine laid down by Blackstone (Dublin, 1779), 6–7.

He then took issue with Blackstone’s assertions regarding Irish constitutional subordination

end p.61

to England. Blackstone had declared ‘The original and true ground of this superiority’ to be ‘the right of conquest: a right allowed by the law
of nations, if not by that of nature’. He argued that although Ireland was a ‘distinct kingdom’ with a population ‘for the most part descended
from the English’, it was nevertheless a conquered territory that had been planted ‘as a kind of colony’. In consequence Blackstone
maintained that ‘as Ireland, thus conquered, planted, and governed, still continues in a state of dependence, it must necessarily conform,
46
and be obliged by, such laws as the superior state thinks proper to prescribe’.
46 Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (4 vols., Oxford, 1765–9), i. 99–103.

Sheridan disputed the fact of conquest, and then attacked Blackstone’s arguments for British parliamentary sovereignty over Ireland.
First, he refuted the general doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty, arguing that Blackstone had misunderstood the true nature of the British
constitution. By endeavouring ‘to establish the uncontrolled, absolute, despotic power of parliament’, Blackstone had put himself in
47
opposition to English liberties and natural rights, which, in Sheridan’s view, could not be infringed even by parliament.
47 Blackstone, quoted in Sheridan, Observations on the Doctrine laid down by Blackstone , 8.

For Sheridan, these divinely ordained rights ‘are what are commonly called natural rights ... or the birthrights of the people of England; and
the full complete possession of these, constitutes liberty’. This liberty inevitably entailed general limits upon the powers of any parliament
to govern without consent. Indeed, for Sheridan, ‘the principal aim of society is to protect individuals in the enjoyment of those rights,
vested in them by the immutable laws of nature’. Sheridan then pointed out the complacency and sloppiness of Blackstone on this point.
For Blackstone himself had asserted that ‘those rights which God and Nature have established, and are therefore called natural rights, no
48
human legislature has power to abridge or destroy, unless the owner shall commit some act that amounts to forfeiture’.
48 Sheridan, Observations on the Doctrine laid down by Blackstone , 33. The source of Sheridan’s arguments seems to be a mixture of Locke and Richard

Price. Sheridan would have had easy access to both in Dublin. Locke’s Two Treatises of Government was reprinted in Dublin in the same year, 1779, and

Price’s Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty went through at least eight Dublin editions in 1776 and his Additional Observations on ... Civil Liberty were

published there in 1777.

As well as putting bounds on the actions of any representative body, Sheridan constructed a case for Irish rights, both individual and
national, from Lockean principles. Essentially, he argued that because no individual had the right to invade the natural rights of another, so
no government had the right to invade the rights of a government or people of another community.

end p.62

This understanding of natural rights became common among Irish Patriots and was used to reject the claims of the British parliament to
49
make laws for a country that had no representatives among its members.
49 Ibid., 45–6.

By 1780, Francis Dobbs was using similar arguments to draw conclusions about the Anglo-Irish connection with brutal clarity. There were
two, and only two, possible interpretations of Ireland’s political position with respect to Britain. Ireland was either a conquered country or a
free one. If conquered, then it had a right to resist. If free, then Britain must allow it those rights needed for freedom. These rights included
the complete withdrawal of the British parliament from the affairs of Ireland, which was a perversion of the Irish constitution and the very
definition of slavery. Dobbs, also following Locke, thought a man free only if’governed by laws to which he has assented either by himself
or his representative’. Conversely, a slave was ‘bound by laws, to which he never assented, and ... at the mercy of a power over which he
50
has no controul’.
50 Francis Dobbs, A Letter to the Right Honourable Lord North, on his propositions in favour of Ireland (Dublin, 1780), 8–9.

Thus the only constitutional link with Britain would be through their shared monarch and the only powers competent to govern Ireland

would be the King, Lords, and Commons of Ireland. William Drennan took a similar line. Ireland and Britain were sister-kingdoms with a
common king, and each realm was a distinct dominion with an independent parliament. The assumption of Britain to legislate for Ireland
was an innovation of the constitution which infringed royal prerogative and invaded rights to which Ireland was ‘intitled by the laws of God,
51
of nature, and of nations’.
51 William Drennan, A Letter to Edmund Burke, Esq.; By birth an Irishman, by adoption an Englishman (Dublin, 1780), 25. The title is a reference to Burke’s
opposition to the free trade concessions of Lord North. Drennan plausibly accuses him of putting his ‘party’ interest be fore those of his country, 3–5.

One blind spot in these arguments was that Patriots conveniently ignored the fact that no British monarch, including George III, had ever
shown the desire or inclination to fulfil the role assigned to him by Irish Patriots and act as their king-in-parliament divorced from his role in
Britain. The Patriots’ endless repetition of the claim that the King, Lords, and Commons of Ireland were the only powers competent to
52
make laws for Ireland (if not simply a rhetorical device) was a monumental act of self-delusion.
52 The most famous statement of this mantra was Grattan’s speech to the Irish Commons on 19 Apr. 1780 formally proposing legislative independence. An
amendment adjourning the question indefinitely was passed 136 to 97. See Beckett, The Making of Modern Ireland , 219–20.

Despite Protestant Ireland’s remarkable loyalty to the

end p.63

Hanoverian dynasty, no monarch either visited Ireland during the eighteenth century or demonstrated the slightest desire to act as
impartial umpire in disputes between the two kingdoms. The Hanoverian monarchs were spectacularly uninterested in Ireland, especially
while it gave them no trouble, and they were more than happy to govern it through the British cabinet and Privy Council. This unwelcome
fact was made obvious by the method of appointment for the Lord Lieutenant. By the 1770s, the king’s representative in Ireland was
chosen by, and openly responsible to, British ministers.

Despite their clear roots in traditional Whig and English constitutional thought, the Patriots’ forthright views on Irish sovereignty entailed
serious conflict with British politicians. For many Englishmen did view Ireland as a conquered country, which automatically placed them in
conflict with the Patriots. Even those who conceded the point on conquest could find other practical objections to Irish parliamentary
independence. Effectively, the Patriots were attempting to detach their king from the British parliament to make him a genuinely imperial
monarch presiding over a number of separate ‘English’ peoples. This directly contradicted how most Britons understood the monarch’s
place in the constitution, especially since the publication of Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England in 1765. They deemed
the king-in-parliament a single entity for legislative purposes and the ultimate location of all sovereignty. It was simply too dangerous (and
too reminiscent of the civil wars) to allow the monarch a variety of duties and attachments that could conflict with British interests or act
as alternative sources of power and wealth. The stability of Britain and the Empire demanded that the monarch exercise his powers
53
through the Westminster parliament only.
53 J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Political Thought in the English-Speaking Atlantic, 1760–1790. Part 1: The Imperial Crisis’, in J. G. A. Pocock (ed.), The Varieties of British

Political Thought, 1500–1800 (Cambridge, 1993), 246–82.

These views coincided with a metropolitan view of Imperial identity that contrasted sharply with the settler ideal of shared ‘English’ rights.
Despite protestations from Ireland and America, many Englishmen simply did not feel like equal partners in the Imperial project. This more
pervasive view saw the colonies as ‘outposts of British economic or strategic power’ populated by settlers who were subordinate to the
54
British state, not equal partners in liberty.
54 Greene, ‘Empire and Identity’, 224.

Furthermore, in Britain, the doctrine of parliamentary supremacy was generally dominant over more populist interpretations in all except
radical or liberal Whig circles. Thus, as the Americans had

end p.64

recently found, any appeal to the rights of all men, or even all Englishmen, to be governed by laws of their own making ran into difficulties
when these rights came into direct conflict with the sovereign wishes of parliament.

V . THE LANGUAGE OF COMMERCIAL GRIEVANCE

The language of commercial grievance was the most important expression of Patriot political thinking in the late 1770s. As we have seen,
it had roots in Molyneux’s criticisms of the English restrictions on Irish trade and in early eighteenth-century writing on Irish poverty by
55
Berkeley and Swift.

55 See Ch. I, Sect. V.

These concerns remained a matter of debate as the century progressed (despite economic expansion from the 1740s to the 1770s). But
with the imposition of the 1776 embargo on Irish exports, the language came into its own. It temporarily dominated political debate and
merged with older political languages to give them renewed vigour. In the years from 1777 to 1780 it largely replaced discussion of
religious problems and it subsumed the Commonwealth and Country party language that had formed the bedrock of Patriotic opposition.

The embargo, which lasted from February 1776 to December 1778, confined the export of Irish provisions (except corn) to Britain and the
obedient colonies. It thus disrupted a lucrative cattle trade to France and prohibited exports to America. The embargo also applied to
Britain, but it was seen as grossly unfair to Ireland because Britain consumed most of its own provisions whereas the Irish economy was
dependent upon their export. The provisioning of troops on their way to America made up for this disruption with regard to most provisions
and the embargo’s negative effects may have been more perceived than real. Pork and beef were still smuggled to France ‘with relative
ease’, according to Truxes, who argues that, ‘in spite of these inconveniences, the Irish provisioning trade did an enormous business
during the American Revolution. Combined military and civilian demand brought full employment and prosperity to the industry.’ The linen
trade did suffer, however, and prices for ‘black cattle’ (an inferior kind that were generally used to feed American and West Indian slaves)
did fall. Ironically, some economic distress was caused by increases in the price of food caused by this wartime boom. Prices had been
56
low before the embargo and then doubled (or in the case of potatoes, trebled) with the increased military demand.
56 T. M. Truxes, Irish-American Trade, 1660–1783 (Cambridge, 1988), 238–48.

The embargo, as the most visible symbol of British interference in Irish trade, was naturally blamed.

end p.65

The language of commercial grievance fed on these complaints and its articulation quickly settled into a familiar set of arguments,
rhetorical strategies, and patterns of debate. The common starting point was the need to explain how Ireland could be so well endowed
with fruitful soils, a mild climate, and excellent harbours and yet still be a poor country. Patriots wrote of the damage done to the Irish
economy by the Navigation and Woollen Acts and called for ‘free trade’. Poverty was explained almost entirely by English interference.
Supporters of government, on the other hand, blamed the inherent idleness of the Irish people and recognized the right of the Westminster
parliament to regulate the mercantile system while asking for concessions to boost Irish trade. Independent minds, as well as calling for
free trade, criticized the land-holding system, castigated the damaging economic effects of the Penal Laws, and urged landowners to
embark on agricultural improvement. Absentee landlords were demonized and became fair game for anyone with the slightest pretensions
to Patriotism.

Commercial grievances had always been linked with constitutional issues and by 1779 they became inextricably bound, with irritation at
trade restraints leading naturally to a fundamental reappraisal of the Anglo-Irish connection. Indeed, this commercial-constitutional critique
encapsulates much of the intellectual content of the Patriot movement before 1780. Anti-English sentiment aroused by the trade
restrictions usually, but not always, accompanied these discussions about trade, with hostility towards England ranging from mild irritation
to vitriolic condemnation. Ironically, these increasingly vociferous articulations of political rights and Patriotic identity often emerged from
the long-held desire to become a free, commercial, civil society on the English model. Such desires naturally led to critiques of the
mercantile system and often put Patriots at the forefront of economic thinking. They also resulted in varying, and often unstable, attitudes
to Britain and the Empire. Moderate Patriots saw the fate of the two islands as inescapably connected and so had no desire to inflict
irreparable damage on the connection by seeking ‘free trade’ at any cost. By 1779, more radical Patriots were less circumspect, and some
even began to hint cautiously at separation.

The central term in this debate, ‘free trade’, had an ambiguous meaning. It usually meant access to the British and colonial markets on the
same terms as British merchants (or at least a radical reduction in the restrictions placed on Irish trade), but it did occasionally mean
57
completely free trade in the Smithian sense.
57 D. Lammey claims that free trade in this sense ‘plays no part in any examination of the Irish Free Trade demand’. See ‘The Free Trade Crisis: A

Reappraisal’, ... This is too strong. He is right to point out the essentially mercantilist nature of the movement, but a few pamphleteers were beginning to

espouse laissez-faire ideas.

An early call for unrestricted free trade can be seen in

end p.66

an anonymous pamphlet from 1775, Observations on the Finances and Trade of Ireland , which anticipates the publication of Smith’s The
Wealth of Nations a year later: ‘Let the Manufacturer and Ship-builder, and every other person concerned, be accommodated with
whatever he requires, and from whomsoever and whatever country he can procure it cheapest. His labour will be the cheaper, and the

58
Kingdom will be reimbursed by the Sale of its Manufactures.’
58 Observations on the Finances and Trade of Ireland, humbly addressed to the immediate con sideration of Gentlemen of Landed interest, more particularly
to members of the House of Commons (Dublin, 1775), 14.

The author not only argued for absolute free trade, he also anticipated the minimal state of Smith in calling for a drastic reduction in taxes.
In his view, all taxes were ‘highly injurious to Commerce, by either limiting the Demand, or increasing the Expence bestowed upon the
59
Manufacture or Export’.
59 Ibid. 16.

Thus, ‘a Trade absolutely exempt from Tax and Restrictions, is the greatest Blessing that a Free People can wish for’. In this laissez-faire
60
world, ‘all Orders of Men, from the Crown to the lowest Artificer, would be relieved by such an arrangement of Finances’.
60 Ibid. 44–5.

The author also subverted the traditional distinction between wealth derived from landed property and trade, seeing no conflict between
them. The pamphlet had a very modern flavour, even anticipating a free global economy by recognizing the inherent mobility of capital and
commercial acumen: ‘let the Landed Gentlemen therefore protect and cultivate the Trader. His Lands are stationary, and derive their value
from Trade, but the Trader is free to go where he pleases, and carry with him his Wealth and Art, and reside in that Country where he
61
should be best received.’
61 Ibid. 6–7.

The message for Ireland was clear. To become a modern, successful, commercial society, it must attract and keep manufacturers and
traders by low taxes and minimal trade restrictions. Failure to do this would hurt the landed elite as well as Ireland as a whole. The
pamphlet was directed primarily at Ireland’s political elite, but the author was aware that his ideals could only be effected with British
consent. Hence, he called, politely and naively, for the repeal of the laws restricting Irish trade on the grounds that ‘Great Britain cannot
hesitate to repeal such Acts, so far as they relate to Ireland; for it is of no Use to her that we should be bound by them, though it is highly
62
injurious to us’.
62 Ibid. 22.

He then expressed the increasingly common argument that free trade for Ireland would also be in the best interests of Britain.

end p.67

63
For ‘a wealthy kingdom would be infinitely a better Neighbour to Great Britain, than a Land of Beggars’.
63 Observations on the Finances and Trade of Ireland , 40.

A good early example of commercial grievances inspiring general dissatisfaction with the Anglo-Irish political relationship is found in
Commerce not a fit subject for an Embargo (1777). To the anonymous author (an ‘Eminent Barrister, Member of the late parliament’ and
64
self-confessed Patriot) Ireland’s restricted commerce did ‘not deserve the name of a free trade’.
64 Commerce not a fit subject for an Embargo. By an Eminent Barrister, Member of the late parliament (Dublin, 1777), 14.

The embargo was a straightforward attack on the merchant which ‘deprives him of a Part of his Property’ by confining him to a few
65
markets. It had ‘already almost suspended the Provision Trade of IRELAND, and, if continued or repeated, must annihilate this Trade’.
65 Ibid. 21.

Such serious effects led the ‘eminent barrister’ to question the embargo’s legitimacy. He concluded that ‘the Embargo is not justified by
any positive or written Law; It must derive its Force, if it be valid, from the King’s Prerogative’. Anger at this interference then provoked an
attack on both the king and the legitimacy of royal prerogative. The embargo ‘seems to be founded on the meer Power of the Crown, to
direct the Provision Trade of IRELAND’. But, for this Patriot, prerogative must be ‘compatible with the acknowledged rights of the people’
66
and should be used ‘for the Good of the State’ rather than to ‘aggrandize the King’.
66 Ibid. 27.

Thus, commercial restraints focused minds on the very foundation of government, leading to damning criticism of the king himself, which
was quite daring by the standards of the late 1770s. The damaging use of royal prerogative in the commercial arena was held up against
general standards of common good and found wanting.

These criticisms implied that the normal system of checks and balances inherent in the ‘British’ constitutional model did not operate in
Ireland, calling into question the role of the monarch, the executive and the legitimacy of Ireland’s dependent political position within the

Imperial system of government. Such a damaging prerogative power would not, he thought, be tolerated in England ‘while the Great Courts
67
of Justice at Westminster are open’. The tame submission of his own country ‘seems to be a kind of obedience peculiar to IRELAND’.
67 Ibid. 23–5.

Interestingly, for all this criticism of unlawful and unjust royal power the pamphlet contains no criticism of British conduct in America nor
support for the American cause. Indeed his only mention of America was to admit ‘that the King might prohibit his Subjects of Ireland to
feed his undutiful

end p.68

subjects in North America’, while denying the king’s right to ‘prevent his Irish Subjects from sending their Provisions to France, Spain,
Portugal, Holland, or to other countries not at war with Great Britain, because possibly these Goods might go from those other Countries
68
to the American Provinces’.
68 Ibid. 35–6.

Of course, the above passage implied no denial of monarchical power within its correct limits, nor was there any hint of separatism. In
1777 few, if any, Patriots contemplated either a completely independent Ireland or a republican one. Annoyance at trade restraints had
simply provoked a strong affirmation of the rights of the king’s subjects in Ireland to be governed by the rule of law: and these were still
seen as ‘British’ rights. The ‘eminent barrister’ asserted that ‘the general Law decrees that British Subjects, except in a few Cases
prohibited by positive Laws, may carry their Goods to any Quarter of the Globe, where they may hope to find the best market’. He went on
to argue that ‘British Subjects claim the Protection of the Laws as a Right’ (it is clear that ‘British’ here is inclusive of ‘Irish’). Thus, all that
was asked for was full participation in the ‘British’ constitutional and commercial system. Effectively the pamphlet is an appeal for equal
treatment with England based on shared birthrights. The practical irritation of the embargo inspires the appeal, but the basic axiom
underlying the argument is ‘that the unwritten or common Law of ENGLAND, is as much the birthright of the Subjects of IRELAND, as it is
69
the Birthright of Englishmen’.
69 Ibid. 38.

This claim to English birthrights was an essential component of the Irish sense of commercial injustice.

In 1779 there was an explosion in the number of political pamphlets published in Ireland with the commercial-constitutional connection the
dominant theme of nearly all of them. There were, however, articulate voices that refused to identify all of Ireland’s woes with the single
factor of British interference. These dissenting opinions were often the defensive voices of a powerful propertied elite with close ties to
Britain, but they also reveal quite radical critiques of the system of land-holding and a brave honesty about Irish problems. There had been
a strong tradition of Irish self-criticism throughout the eighteenth century. After Swift and Berkeley, scathing denunciations of peasant
ignorance or ascendancy laziness were nothing new. Yet in the Patriotic fervour of 1778 and 1779, it took a brave man to locate the root
70
causes of Irish poverty and political subservience in Ireland itself. Some blamed an idle and backward peasantry.
70 See Cursory Observations on Ireland. By a member of the Dublin Society (Dublin, 1779).

But this

end p.69

criticism in turn inspired stinging rebukes, such as the self-evidently titled, The people of Ireland not a parcel of lazy, incorrigible
scoundrels (1779). This self-criticism was a minor but important part of the language of commercial grievance, which revealed a deep
anxiety about inherent Irish capacities for commerce. William Knox, for example, compared Ireland unfavourably with America, which had
grown from a population of 4,000 in 1620 to surpass Ireland in wealth and rival it in population. He laid most of the blame at the feet of the
Irish political elite. ‘To the want of knowledge of the general and combined interests of the empire, in those who have had the direction of
the affairs of Ireland since the Revolution, may in a great measure be ascribed the slow progress Ireland has made in population,
71
cultivation, commerce, and wealth, compared with other parts of the British dominions.’
71 Knox, The State of Ireland , pp. vi-vii.

The majority of Patriots, however, placed the blame primarily on Britain. The two best examples of the moderate end of this Patriot
discourse of commerce are John Hely-Hutchinson’s cautious The Commercial Restraints of Ireland (1779) and Sir James Caldwell’s more
scathing An Inquiry how far the Restrictions laid upon the Trade of Ireland by British Acts of Parliament, are a benefit or disadvantage
to the British Dominions in general, and to England in particular (1779). Both exhibit a concern for the well-being of the British-Irish polity
as well as sophisticated arguments for free trade. Hely-Hutchinson’s tract is also noteworthy as possibly the first anywhere to make

consistent, annotated, use of the arguments for free trade in the first volume of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776). Hely-
Hutchinson was a member of the Irish Privy Council and an outrageous place-hunter, but he found no contradiction in supporting free trade
72
while holding government office.
72 John Hely-Hutchinson was called to the Bar in 1748, he entered the Irish parliament as MP for Lanesborough in 1759 but spent the majority of his political
career as MP for Cork from 1761 to 1790. After early opposition he became Prime Sergeant in 1762, Provost of TCD in 1774, and then Secretary of State for

Ireland and Keeper of the Privy Seal in 1777. Lord North is said to have remarked that ‘if England and Ireland were given to this man, he would solicit the Isle of
Man for a potato garden’.

He is a useful reminder of the difficulty of identifying a coherent and well-defined body of Patriot political thought and ascribing it to a
unified and well-defined body of people.

The tract itself is a lengthy and detailed critique of Anglo-Irish commercial relations as well as an attempt to propose improvements. It
73
points to the Act of 1699 restricting woollen manufacture and export as the most important long-term factor in Irish poverty,
73 10 & 11 W. III, c.io, England.

and it argues that the substitution of this trade by the linen trade gave inadequate recompense. Hely-

end p.70

Hutchinson thought the economic situation had reached a new low in recent years, due to the fall in prices associated with the war, and
opined: ‘The present state of Ireland teems with every circumstance of national poverty. Whatever the land produces is greatly reduced in
its value; wool is fallen one half in its original price; wheat one third; black cattle of all kinds in the same proportion, and hides in a much
74
greater ... rents are everywhere reduced, in many places it is impossible to collect them.’
74 John Hely-Hutchinson, The Commercial Restraints of Ireland (Dublin, 1779), 4.

As these difficulties actually coincided with good harvests of corn in 1778 and 1779, he concluded that the root of the problem was a
collapse in consumer demand due to a lack of purchasing power in the manufacturing and trading sectors of the economy. ‘The
manufacturers were not able to buy, and many thousands of them were supported by charity; the consequence was that the corn fell to so
75
low a price that the farmers in many places were unable to pay their rents, and every where were under great difficulties.’
75 Ibid. 77. Hely-Hutchinson’s version of economic trends seems to contradict that of Truxes given above.

The solution was to reinvigorate the Irish economy by the removal of restrictions on its trade. This, of course, did not appeal to British
commercial interests who saw Irish manufacturers as a threat. But Hely-Hutchinson drew on Smith to placate British fears of free
competition with the low-wage Irish economy. He argued that ‘with the increase of manufactures, agriculture and commerce in Ireland, the
demand for labour, and consequently its price would increase’, which implied that differences in wage levels would only be temporary. He
then pointed out that because high levels of capital were needed to achieve competitive advantage, Ireland’s relative lack of capital would
not only prevent it from seriously challenging Britain’s commercial dominance, but it would also offer excellent investment opportunities for
76
Britain.
76 Ibid. 108–11.

Like many other Irish writers, Hely-Hutchinson and Caldwell both express the view that a resurgent Ireland would also benefit Britain. Both
made extensive use of the argument that weakening Ireland through commercial restrictions was detrimental to Britain and the Empire as
a whole. This approach had obvious tactical advantages, but for Hely-Hutchinson it also reflected a genuine concern for the larger British-
Irish polity.

Whatever wealth might be gained by Ireland would be, in every respect, an accession to Great Britain. Not only a considerable
part of it would flow to the seat of government, and of final judicature, and to the centre of commerce; but when Ireland should be
able she would be found willing, as in justice she ought to be, to bear her

end p.71

77
part in the expences which Great Britain may hereafter incur in her efforts for the protection of the whole British Empire.
77 Hely-Hutchinson, The Commercial Restraints of Ireland , 112.

In a similar vein, Caldwell made the benefits to Britain of Irish free trade his primary focus. He wished to show that ‘the restrictions which

England has laid upon the trade of Ireland, with a view to her own particular advantage, have a contrary effect, or at least that they are
78
disadvantageous to the nation, as an aggregate, including England and Ireland’.
78 Sir James Caldwell, Bart., An Enquiry how far the Restrictions laid upon the Trade of Ireland by British Acts of Parliament, are a benefit or disadvantage to
the British Dominions in general, and to England in particular (Dublin, 1779), p. v.

He too decried the restriction of the woollen manufacture and export, not least because this had led to large-scale smuggling of raw wool
to France and Spain. Many foreign wool manufacturers needed British or Irish wool to mix with their own and so better prices could be got
for smuggled Irish wool in France than in England. Thus, the restrictions not only impoverished Ireland, they unwittingly augmented the
79
power of England’s natural enemies by allowing them to compete with English woollen exports.
79 Ibid. 23–8.

This smuggling culture also caused a shift from arable to pastoral farming which, according to Caldwell, depopulated and impoverished the
country, increased taxes, and raised the price of bread. By depriving the poor of employment, he argued, it ‘discourages industry,
promotes idleness and debauchery, disposes the common people to insult government, sows the seeds of rebellion, and quenches
humanity, by making violence, and, in some cases, murder, necessary to self-defence’. Caldwell demonstrated no desire to weaken the
link between Britain and Ireland, but his rhetoric reveals a deep anger at the condition of Ireland that he obviously blamed on the British
government rather than the Irish people. ‘It is as cruel and as vain to expect that the people of Ireland should abstain from smuggling
wool’, he declared, ‘as to expect that a man should drown contentedly, because he cannot come on shore, without trespassing upon the
80
ground of him that thrust him into the water.’
80 Ibid. 28.

Hely-Hutchinson’s criticisms of British interference were more moderate in tone and directed ‘not to the passions of the multitude, but to
81
the wisdom, justice and generosity of Britain’.
81 Hely-Hutchinson, The Commercial Restraints of Ireland , 232.

He had no desire to see commercial discontent escalate into separatist or revolutionary agitation at a dangerous moment for the empire.
In his opinion ‘it would be improper, in the present state of the British Empire, to agitate disputed questions that

end p.72

82
may inflame the passions of men’, and he hoped that ‘no such questions ever arise between two affectionate sister kingdoms!’
82 Ibid. 164.

It is, perhaps, difficult to ignore awkward and divisive questions given his earlier analysis and his view that ‘every man of discernment who
attends to the facts which have been stated, would conclude, that there must be some political institution in this country counteracting the
83
natural course of things, and obstructing the prosperity of the people’.
83 Ibid. 85.

But criticism of the British parliament for enacting laws restricting Irish trade is muted, and the issue is not, for him, simply one of Anglo-
Irish antagonism. Indeed, Hely-Hutchinson was concerned for the welfare of the larger British polity and not just Ireland. This point is vital.
Except for the more extreme elements of Irish Patriotism, the well-being of Ireland was usually tied to the well-being of Britain rather than
something to be achieved at its expense: Irish Patriotism is compatible with British success for most Patriots at this point. Admittedly
Hely-Hutchinson’s attachment to the Castle makes him a somewhat dubious Patriot, but his position on this issue is typical of most late
1770s Patriots.

Hely-Hutchinson envisaged a proud, largely self-governing, and commercially successful Ireland as a vital component of a larger British-
Irish polity and at the centre of the Empire. This model of the Anglo-Irish relationship is obviously incompatible with vicious Irish attacks
on the Anglo-Irish connection, especially if the health of this connection is seen as vital to the well-being of the Empire. However, the
model can withstand quite damning attacks on selective elements of British policy and British commercial self-interest that are not
conducive to the common good—providing these attacks are not directed at Britain as a nation. The safe objects of Irish invective are the
self-interested elements within this polity, such as British merchants, or more abstractly (and ironically) commerce itself. Hely-Hutchinson
follows Smith in praising the general public benefits of competition over monopoly and urges the government not to put the private
interests of British merchants above the greater good of the Empire. This allows the Patriotic cause of free trade to seem both progressive
and in the general public good of the larger British polity, rather than simply in the interest of Ireland. It was merely a rational application of
Smithian economics that would be beneficial to both countries.

For Caldwell, commerce was an uncomplicated political good. It was the natural result of modern society and advances in art and science.

Indeed it was absolutely necessary for subsistence, prosperity, and defence. Even the production of luxury items was to be encouraged,
not for any intrinsic

end p.73

value, but in order to provide employment. Caldwell had few worries concerning the massive social upheavals that modern civil society
would entail. He recognized that the production of life’s necessities depended on agricultural work that could be performed efficiently by a
relatively small number of people on land owned by an even smaller number. Therefore a self-sufficient system of producers and
84
consumers could exclude the majority unless artificial wants were to be introduced to occupy surplus labour.
84 Caldwell, An Enquiry , I-IO.

Caldwell had a modern, almost Benthamite, utilitarian view of commercial society with no classical republican worries about private
interest. For this Patriot, unrestricted commerce was the route to Irish happiness.

Happiness in a political view ... is the enjoyment which arises from the gratification of natural wants ... as the public is nothing
more than an aggregate of individuals, public happiness must be in proportion to the number of individuals who possess these
advantages, and the degree in which they are possessed. Public wealth is a general ability to procure these advantages; and trade
85
is the cause and medium of public wealth.
85 Ibid. 35.

However, Hely-Hutchinson’s call for free trade coexisted somewhat uneasily with a thinly veiled disdain for ‘trading people’, who ‘have
ever aimed at exclusive privileges’. He asked the British government, ‘Would you consult persons employed in the trade? they have in one
respect an interest opposite to that of the public. To narrow the competition is advantageous to the dealers, but prejudicial to the public.
86
’
86 Hely-Hutchinson, The Commercial Restraints of Ireland , 122–5.

Hely-Hutchinson’s main theme was the promotion of Irish free trade in opposition to the monopolizing, self-interested spirit of British
merchants. But there was also an uneasy undercurrent that distrusted the commercial spirit itself. This unease locates Hely-Hutchinson
firmly in the eighteenth-century debate concerning the compatibility of public virtue and private interest and reveals a dilemma at the heart
of Irish Patriot aspirations. Unfettered commercial spirit may be the necessary means to Irish prosperity, but in Britain it had led the
government to selfishly restrict Irish trade to kill off competition. Thus, in becoming a successful commercial nation, Ireland might cast off
civic virtue and develop the very attitudes and mentalities that partly inspired England to control and subjugate it.

end p.74

VI . MIXING THE COMMERCIAL, THE CONSTITUTIONAL, AND THE CLASSICAL REPUBLICAN

87
In 1779, Patriots developed a powerful rhetoric that combined commercial, constitutional, and classical republican languages.
87 See Ch. 3, pp. 83–102, for the influence of classical republicanism in the early 1780s.

From the mix, some increasingly radical pamphlets began to emerge. The most important were three anonymously published works: Henry
Flood’s A Letter to the People of Ireland , Dr Frederick Jebb’s Letters of Guatimozin on the Affairs of Ireland , and Joseph Pollock’s
Letters of Owen Roe O’Nial . This strategy of mixing classical, commercial, and constitutional critiques made perfect tactical sense for a
practical rhetoric of opposition, but it could entail some ideological difficulties-primarily due to classical republicanism’s complex but
largely negative attitude towards commerce.

Pocock has argued that the classical aversion to the corrupting influence of commerce was replaced by an alliance between urban
88
commercial property and landed property in a joint opposition to government corruption and financial manipulation.
88 Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History , 259.

In a similar vein, Brewer draws vital distinctions between different kinds of commercial agent: between the large speculators and
government military contractors benefiting from the expanding military state, and the smaller tradesmen and manufacturers who paid for it
through customs and excise duties. Thus, it made sense for the commercial middling sorts to oppose the uncertain system of credit,
speculation, and corruption the government had created, even if the archaic agrarian Country rhetoric they used sounded more natural in
89
the mouths of the landed gentry.
89 J. Brewer, ‘English Radicalism in the Age of George III’, in J. G. A. Pocock (ed.), Three British Revolutions: 1641,1688, 7776 (Princeton, 1980), 323–67.

Similar dynamics operated in Ireland, where industrious urban commercial and professional sorts under the guidance of Lucas effectively
90
claimed to be the modern repositories of civic virtue.
90 That ‘civic’ virtue should be claimed for city dwellers should not be surprising. In addition to the classical and Renaissance tradition of free city-states, Lucas
could also draw on the indigenous practices of guild and corporation to portray the good burghers of Dublin as independent bulwarks against executive

corruption. See J. Hill, ‘Corporatist Ideology and Practice in Ireland, 1660–1800’, in S. J. Connolly (ed.), Political Ideas in Eighteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin,
2000), 64–82.

But such sophistication is rarely needed to explain the contemporary Irish pamphlet literature. In the heat of the moment, most Patriot
pamphleteers simply did not perceive a contradiction between their Country critiques of British

end p.75

commercial self-interest and their praise for commerce in general. Almost all pamphlets saw increased Irish commerce as an unqualified
good, even if they had deeper worries about the intrinsic desirability of commerce and its compatibility with public virtue.

This is hardly surprising. Agonizing over the possible long-term drawbacks of commercial society would have been somewhat perverse
with Ireland struggling under restricted trade and widespread poverty: worries about the corrupting effect of luxury and self-interested
manufacturers on Irish public virtue could come later. Furthermore, the volatile political environment of the free trade agitation lent itself to
clear, forceful rhetoric rather than anxious classical republican warnings about the dangers of commercial society. If Irish Patriots were
concerned with the corrupting effect of luxury and commerce, they could direct such criticisms at Britain rather than Ireland. There were
some Patriot voices (notably Henry Flood) who worried about the effect of self-interest and luxury on Irish virtue, but even these used
classical republican attacks on British corruption alongside vigorous appeals for Irish free trade. It seems that Patriots quite happily used
whatever languages of opposition were at hand to rouse the spirit of the nation.

Flood’s A Letter to the People of Ireland does articulate these tensions, alongside the full range of Commonwealth and Country rhetoric.
The standing army on the Irish establishment, for example, was a burden that merely served the Empire of Great Britain and corrupted the
91
constitution of Ireland.
91 [Henry Flood], A Letter to the People of Ireland on the expediency and necessity of the present associations in Ireland in favour of our own
Manufacturers with some cursory observations on the effects of a Union (Dublin, 1779), 14.

The large pension list of Ireland also reflected the fact that ‘the ordinary revenues of the kingdom had been grossly misapplied, for a
92
course of years in a scandalous system of corruption and prodigality, in the civil and military establishment’.
92 Ibid. 22.

93
As a remedy, balanced government of an almost Machiavellian sort was advocated by Flood.
93 For Machiavelli, balanced government emerged from tension and violent struggle between the social classes, rather than from harmony or cooperation. If

the scales reached equilibrium, they did so under constant stress, with the ambitions and interests of the people, prince, and nobles invariably pulling in different
directions.

The spirit of the people (‘a thing to be dreaded’) should act as a check on ‘the influence of the Crown’, which ‘shall stand in awe of the
clamours of the people’. This popular power should be checked, in turn, by a virtuous political class. Flood thought that ‘the people of
Ireland have been always ready to submit to the authority of men of rank, provided they are also persons of public character’.

end p.76

94
Unfortunately, ‘the fraudulent moderation of a pusillanimous gentry’ had undermined this class and hence the tripartite balance as well.
94 Ibid. 46–8.

Flood saw popular agitation, within limits set by political leaders such as himself, as the check on the executive that could maintain
liberty.

However, unlike many other Patriots, Flood argued that commerce was incompatible with liberty and with all the finer human feelings,
including sympathy or sentiment for other nations and peoples. Thus, he not only questioned the Patriot enthusiasm for commerce, he
attacked the idea of mutual Anglo-Irish affection at the heart of moderate Irish Patriotism- providing a stinging explanation for British
control of Ireland. For Flood, ‘there is no such thing as political humanity; or, if the sentiment did exist, it is not likely to be found in a
country of commerce’. For ‘the habits of barter ... very much contract the political mind’. Thus, ‘jealousy, monopoly, and pride, combining
in the soul of a commercial Empire, exclude everything, except industry, punctuality, and that species of probity which is necessary for
95
credit’.

95 Ibid. 5–6.

Praise of British domestic liberty, which many (such as Montesquieu) thought was intimately connected with England’s status as a
commercial nation, was sometimes used by moderate Patriots to appeal to England’s better nature. But for Flood, it was clear that Britain
has acted tyrannically towards its colonies and connected countries precisely because it was a commercial nation rather than in spite of
that fact.

Many British Real Whigs worried about the consequences for liberty of a nation ruled by self-interest because they felt it led to decay from
within or the imposition of tyranny from without. But few would have feared that commercial spirit would lead to tyrannical treatment of
neighbouring nations. For Flood, Ireland was caught between British ministers who wanted higher revenues from Ireland, and the interests
of ‘Manchester’, which did not want competition from Irish industry. As a result, Flood even claimed to prefer an absolute monarchy for
Ireland, which would ‘only plunder the individual and the nation of part of their acquisition’, to this ‘mercantile empire, which began by
96
taking from the connected country her Trade, [and] will soon proceed to make very bold attempts upon her liberty’.
96 Ibid. 7.

This ironical inversion of the classical republican norm became a common argument among Patriots wishing to point out the hypocrisy of
liberty-loving British parliamentarians. However, Flood did not wish for a return to an idyllic, agrarian past. He knew that ‘manufacture is
97
necessary to feed and multiply the race of man and an export trade is necessary for this manufacture’.
97 Ibid. 37.

Hence, the embargo, ‘which lay upon this country for three

end p.77

98
years like a curse, and is now felt in its effects like a plague!’, was just as onerous for Flood as any other Patriot.
98 [Flood], A Letter to the People of Ireland, 11 .

Concerns over commerce did not stop his calls for free trade.

Frederick Jebb’s pithy pamphlet also drew on constitutional, Commonwealth, and commercial arguments to produce a stinging critique of
British control of Ireland. In his Letters of Guatimozin , he set out to examine ‘by what means any one nation may become entitled to
controul over another’, and ‘by what right England claims this authority over Ireland’. He argued that all sovereignty of one nation over
another is ‘DIRECT NON-SENSE’ unless by consent or conquest. If it is by consent, then this cannot alienate ‘the liberty of their
posterity’ and ‘must be for the advantages of the governed, else it is ipso facto void’. If it is by conquest, even if this is just, it still does
not ‘constitute a right in the conquerors over the liberty & property of the conquered’. Their lives ‘may no doubt be fairly taken away; but
their crime will not forfeit the liberty of their posterity, which is inalienable; nor their property, which nature appointed to sustain their
99
unoffending children’.
99 [Dr Frederick Jebb], The Letters of Guatimozin on the Affairs of Ireland (Dublin, 1779), 1–4 .

To counter English claims to conquest, Jebb resorted primarily to historical arguments. Ireland ‘consented’ to be ruled by Henry II and was
given a ‘modus’ by him to regulate its affairs and a separate king in the form of John. Furthermore even a conquest would have given no
right to the English parliament and no more power to the king than he had in England, who would in any case have an obligation as a just
conqueror to repair the damage caused by the conquest. The perversion of this idea of separate kingdoms had largely occurred since
100
1641 in Jebb’s view.
100 Ibid. 7–13.

But the Irish constitution had been corrupted ever since Poynings’ Law deprived it of the right of originating its own laws, and its
parliament now ‘resembles much more the French Parliament into which the King’s edicts come down to be registered before they become
101
laws’.
101 Ibid. 23.

The influence of both Locke and Molyneux in this analysis is clear, and in this respect it is very similar to many other Patriot tracts. But
Jebb was also developing a more radical, quasi-separatist position that is quite new. There was a new sense of anti-English sentiment
bordering on the separatist in his confession ‘that, as an Irishman, I feel considerable gratification in the checks, which the progress of
102
England’s usurpations hath received in America’.
102 Ibid. 19.

This statement obviously caused great offence at the time, as in

end p.78

a later letter he refers back to the statement and refuses to retract it. Equally startling is the attack on the British constitution, even if this
is primarily for rhetorical purposes. Jebb boldly declares it ‘the duty of a virtuous Irishman to wish to see the British constitution destroyed,
and the King of England absolute: because the condition of an Irishman would be bettered by the change’. Echoing Flood’s argument, this
duty arises primarily from the perverted state of the Irish executive.

Behold, what is our executive power! It is a MONSTER, consisting of the King of Ireland, and the Parliament of Great Britain! Can
any Irishman hesitate in a choice between being a colonist of an absolute King of England, and remaining a subject of such a
perverted government as is described above?... A people subject to the will of an absolute Prince, have nothing to gratify but the
passions of one man; and colonies at a distance from such government are, in general, mildly administered. But who can
undertake to please so many masters as we have got in the Parliament of Great Britain, whose interest consists in the means of
103
our poverty and distress!
103 Ibid. 22–8.

Jebb did not advocate rebellion but he thought that Ireland had the right to its own free legislature and the means to force change by
104
uniting ‘in the plain system of consuming, EXCLUSIVELY, the manufactures of this country’.
104 Ibid. 16.

The Association movement he is referring to, which refused to buy or import British goods, was symbolic of this union of classical,
constitutional, and commercial thinking: it combined unity and public spirit with the commercial anger generated by British interference
with Irish rights. For the British government, the movement ominously resembled earlier American activities, and it naturally saw them as
far more than a mere focus for economic discontent.

Many Patriots would have found Jebb’s prescriptions quite radical, and he felt the need to reassure Ireland that British retribution would not
follow ‘independence’. In the first place, he argued, it was unlikely that the king would order an invasion of ‘his own people’ by the English
after the lessons of the American war. As for sanctions, Ireland had sufficient resources of its own and was, in any case, used to a lack
of trade and manufactures due to ‘a malicious industry on the part of Great Britain, by wicked management, to preclude Ireland from her
105
natural claim to prosperity in agriculture, manufactures, and fisheries; the GREAT AND ONLY SOURCE OF NATIONAL WEALTH’.
105 Ibid. 35.

For Jebb, the goal, if not complete separation, was to achieve free trade and self-rule. He was so piqued by Britain’s destruction of Irish
trade that he was prepared to endure the short-term consequences of even greater

end p.79

economic disruption to achieve a long-term political solution. He also tried to break down the taboo surrounding discussions of
independence by scathing references to timid Irishmen ‘who, alarmed at the consequences of investigating our independent national
106
rights, as IRISHMEN, would willingly stop all enquiry, by the interposition of the single cabalistical word REBELLION’.
106 [Jebb], Letters on the Affairs of Ireland , 5.

Jebb’s iconoclasm was a conscious attempt to refashion the terms and language of the debate to release discussion from the weight of
fear, history, and tradition.

Interestingly, Jebb showed no signs of classical republican distrust of commerce. Like most other Patriots, in the headlong rush for free
trade he either ignored the possible drawbacks of a polity motivated primarily by commercial spirit, or simply failed to realize that the
selfishness of English manufacturers may have been an inevitable consequence of that commercial spirit. But British selfishness did form
an important part of the most radical and separatist pamphlet produced in 1779. Joseph Pollock’s Letters of Owen Roe O’Nial built on the
same foundations used by Flood but went one step further to construct a genuine appeal for full independence. Starting from the basic
premiss that ‘political bodies ... act uniformly from the narrowest kind of selfishness, and are totally incapable of a steady or uniform
107
principle of generosity’,
107 [Joseph Pollock], The Letters of Owen Roe O’Nial (Dublin, 1779), 7.

he then made extensive use of the idea that free governments treat their provinces worse than despots. ‘Free’ Athens was the tyrant of
108
Sicily; ‘free’ Americans tyrannize the Indians; ‘the Spartans have had their Helots, and the English HAVE THEIR IRISH!’
108 Ibid. 12.

The key to this idea (a common one among Patriots) was the notion that individual Englishmen saw individual Irishmen as their personal
109
subjects. He argued that ‘the free citizen of a free state will hardly put his subjects in the province on a footing with himself’.
109 Ibid. 10.

A despotic king seems mild and liberal in comparison.

Locke’s arguments ‘that no nation can by conquest... acquire a right of perpetual dominion over another’ were used alongside vigorous
110
attempts to remove widespread Irish doubts about its capacity for liberty.
110 Ibid. 13–14.

In contrast with more moderate Patriots, Pollock tried to show that Ireland was not ‘bound by any ties of duty, gratitude, or honour, to
111
remain in subjection to the parliament of England’.
111 Ibid. 27.

England was, in any case, at the beginning of a classical republican cycle of decay and decline, partly as a result of the American war.
‘Her fullness of time has come’, thought Pollock, who urged his countrymen to seize the moment. ‘We cannot prevent her sinking. Shall

end p.80

112
we allow her to grasp us in her dying convulsion, and pull us with her to the bottom?’
112 Ibid. 47. See Ch. 3, Sect. V, for Patriot use of theories of cyclical decay.

Pollock not only categorically rejected union (which would only result in a corrupted Irish representation being swallowed up by an already
corrupt British parliament), he also thought the Associations, although praiseworthy, would not be enough. He came out strongly for
independence and even went as far as hinting that Ireland might be helped to independence by foreign powers. If France and Spain would
cross the Atlantic ‘for their own interest and for the humiliation of England. Will a few leagues terrify them when their scheme is so near
arriving at almost unhoped for perfection?’ Pollock, perhaps disingenuously, assured his readers that ‘loyalty ... finds in Ireland its
happiest soil’, but this ‘Personal attachment to the King of Ireland’ was also ‘the cord which binds us to our burden, and furnishes to the
British people the occasion of loading us without bounds or mercy’. The implication was clear. If the king continued to leave Ireland ‘at the
mercy of a British Parliament’, it may be necessary to accept help from abroad. In which case, Pollock argued, ‘the worst that could
113
happen to us would be to change our masters’.
113 Ibid. 21–2.

Pollock’s suggestion of an independent Irish nation was very advanced for his day. Almost no Patriots advocated genuine separatism at
this time, but Pollock is important for openly articulating the concept. He also put forward a remarkably modern prototype of a pluralistic
and diverse Irish commercial society. His admiration for Switzerland, Holland, and Pennsylvania, which were praised for their religious
toleration as well as their ability to throw off the yoke of powerful foreign empires, is an indication of his inclinations for free trade and
toleration. Indeed it could be argued that his vision of Ireland with a ‘free and universal trade’ was also an emulation of Britain, but he went
one step further. He thought ‘that nation is most likely to be great, powerful and happy, which finds political and civil moderation necessary
114
to its very being. Where there are no sects or parties, I may venture to say there cannot be sense, science, liberty, or commerce.’
114 Ibid. 25.

For Pollock, liberal commercial society is not a goal to be achieved in spite of Ireland’s religious and ethnic divisions. Commerce, liberty,
and indeed happiness can be best achieved in the dynamic environment of a divided, yet tolerant, society.

Within a few months Pollock had been granted half of his wishes. Free trade was conceded by Lord North and the British parliament in a
series of

end p.81

115
measures in early 1780.
115 The main act was 20 Geo. III, c. 10.

The government’s troubles in America, the vigorous activity by Grattan, Flood, Yelverton, and the other Patriot MPs in the Irish
parliament, and the intense public pressure from large-scale demonstrations and conventions by the Volunteers had all contributed to its
passage. But passions had been raised so high that most Patriots now thought Ireland must achieve legislative independence as well as
free trade before it could develop the free, commercial society they desired. The next chapter will examine how the political languages

explored so far, and in particular classical republicanism, developed into the quasi-separatist Patriotism of 1780-2.

end p.82

Political Thought in Ireland 1776-1798

Print ISBN 9780199257799, 2002
pp. [81]-[85]

we allow her to grasp us in her dying convulsion, and pull us with her to the
bottom?’112
Pollock not only categorically rejected union (which would only result in a corrupted
Irish representation being swallowed up by an already corrupt British parliament), he
also thought the Associations, although praiseworthy, would not be enough. He came
out strongly for independence and even went as far as hinting that Ireland might be
helped to independence by foreign powers. If France and Spain would cross the Atlantic
‘for their own interest and for the humiliation of England. Will a few leagues terrify
them when their scheme is so near arriving at almost unhoped for perfection?’ Pollock,
perhaps disingenuously, assured his readers that ‘loyalty ... finds in Ireland its happiest
soil’, but this ‘Personal attachment to the King of Ireland’ was also ‘the cord which
binds us to our burden, and furnishes to the British people the occasion of loading us
without bounds or mercy’. The implication was clear. If the king continued to leave
Ireland ‘at the mercy of a British Parliament’, it may be necessary to accept help from
abroad. In which case, Pollock argued, ‘the worst that could happen to us would be to
change our masters’.113
Pollock’s suggestion of an independent Irish nation was very advanced for his day.
Almost no Patriots advocated genuine separatism at this time, but Pollock is important
for openly articulating the concept. He also put forward a remarkably modern prototype
of a pluralistic and diverse Irish commercial society. His admiration for Switzerland,
Holland, and Pennsylvania, which were praised for their religious toleration as well as
their ability to throw off the yoke of powerful foreign empires, is an indication of his
inclinations for free trade and toleration. Indeed it could be argued that his vision of
Ireland with a ‘free and universal trade’ was also an emulation of Britain, but he went
one step further. He thought ‘that nation is most likely to be great, powerful and happy,
which finds political and civil moderation necessary to its very being. Where there are
no sects or parties, I may venture to say there cannot be sense, science, liberty, or
commerce.’114 For Pollock, liberal commercial society is not a goal to be achieved in
spite of Ireland’s religious and ethnic divisions. Commerce, liberty, and indeed
happiness can be best achieved in the dynamic environment of a divided, yet tolerant,
society.
Within a few months Pollock had been granted half of his wishes. Free trade was
conceded by Lord North and the British parliament in a series of

end p.81

PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com)

Other documents randomly have
different content
informed." So we passed on into the town to the governor's house and
laid a complaint in due form against the over-zealous guardhouse
keeper. The governor promised to administer a reprimand, and was as
good as his word, so that when some other officers came ashore and
passed the same spot, the Japanese officers rushed out into the road
to tell them that they need not uncap.

I found the townspeople very communicative about the exploits of

the Americans and French in 1863, and from their relation it was easy
to see that while Captain M'Dougall of the "Wyoming" had given a very
modest account of his achievements in the way of sinking ships and
firing houses, the French had greatly exaggerated their own deeds of
valour. The "Wyoming" ran the gauntlet of all the batteries and sank
the "Lancefield" and the brig right in front of the town, whereas the
"Sémiramis" never ventured further than Tanoura. The common folk
were all entirely convinced that the Tycoon had given orders for the
expulsion of the foreigners, and I overheard a man in the market say
"the Bakufu is playing a double game." Bakufu was the most common
term by which the Tycoon's government was then designated. I was
asked whether the Tycoon had asked us to come down and destroy the
batteries, to which I answered "No; but he said he could not open the
straits." Then I gave them our view of the case, which was that the
Tycoon, finding himself in a tight place between the daimiôs and the
foreigners, had to give assurances to both which were inconsistent
with each other, whereupon they all cried out with one voice: "Homma
da, it is true." That evening there arrived from Nagasaki the steamer
"Victoria" with the vice-governor of that port and an interpreter.
Passing in front of the town they paid the French Admiral a call, and
then anchored near us in Tanoura Bay. Coming on board to make
inquiries, they asked whether Chôshiû had been beaten, and on our
replying in the affirmative, they produced a copy of the prince's first
letter begging for peace addressed to the Americans, which they said
had been furnished to them by the Kokura people. That I told them
bluntly must be a lie, but they would not confess the source from
which they had obtained the document. They said their instructions
were to ask the Admiral not to believe the lies Chôshiû was telling
about orders received from the Tycoon to expel foreigners, and also
that having heard the fleet was going to Ozaka, the governor of
Nagasaki, who was afraid that the appearance of so large a force
before the city, fresh from the destruction of the batteries of
Shimonoséki, might cause a panic, had sent them to prevent any
difficulties between the Admiral and the governor of Ozaka. They were
very anxious lest a treaty had been concluded with Chôshiû for the
opening of Shimonoséki to foreign trade, which would have caused the
commercial ruin of Nagasaki; but we declined to give them any
information. Having beaten the Chôshiû people, we had come to like
and respect them, while a feeling of dislike began to arise in our minds
for the Tycoon's people on account of their weakness and double-
dealing, and from this time onwards I sympathized more and more
with the daimiô party, from whom the Tycoon's government had always
tried to keep us apart.

On the 21st the "Sémiramis" and "Dupleix" quitted the straits,

leaving behind them the "Tancrède." Some of us went ashore to the
honjin to inquire whether we could obtain a supply of bullocks for the
ship. The officials promised to do all they could, but said it would be
difficult, as they killed none for themselves. We also asked them to
change some Mexican dollars into Japanese money, which they
promised to do at the Nagasaki market rate, but it was finally arranged
that if we found ourselves in actual need of coin, they should lend us a
thousand ichibus, to be returned to their agent at Yokohama. They
proved so obliging that we could not help regretting that in order to
gain their friendship it had been necessary to come to blows with
them. And it is not a little remarkable that neither the Satsuma nor the
Chôshiû men ever seemed to cherish any resentment against us for
what we had done, and during the years of disturbance and revolution
that followed they were always our most intimate allies.

That day we walked the whole length of the town unattended by

any guard, and got a glimpse of the China sea beyond the straits. We
met, however, with a little show of insolence from a couple of two-
sworded men, who motioned us back to our boats, but I discoursed to
them in their own tongue, and they were speedily reduced to silence:
the exhibition of a revolver had something to do with the production of
this effect.

Itô came on board one day with a couple of men who, he said, were
merchants, but it was evident from the respect he paid to one of them,
who wore two swords, that they belonged to the high official class.
They were conducted round the ship and entertained with various
liquors. He declared that in all the fighting they had only seven or eight
men killed, and about twice that number wounded, but one of his
companions told me that the number killed was nearly twenty. Itô said
that trade could be done at Shimonoséki in cotton, wax and silk
produced in Chôshiû, as well as in all the productions of the northern
provinces and Ozaka. Probably they might manufacture paper for the
English market. The prince, he added, was very desirous of opening
the port to foreign commerce, but just at present they expected an
invasion of the combined forces of the Tycoon and all the daimiôs, and
all their attention was directed to their own defence. The two vessels
sunk by the "Wyoming" in 1863 had been raised, and sent round to
Hagi. I was surprised to learn that the batteries at Maeda mura, as well
as those at Kushi saki Point, were within the territory of the daimiô of
Chôfu, who was however not in so far independent that he could stand
aside when the head of the family went to war. Last year, at the time
when the Dutch corvette "Medusa" was fired on as she passed the
straits, batteries had existed on the low hills behind the town, and at
two points on the sea front, but the guns had subsequently been
removed thence to Dannoura and Maeda mura; their fate was to fall
into our hands. The small three-gun battery on Moji Point within the
Kokura territory was also the work of the Chôshiû men, who had
levelled land and commenced the construction of barracks, which were
however destroyed by the Kokura people when the failure of the
prince's Kiôto schemes drove him to withdraw within his own
boundaries for self-protection.

We went one day in our boats down to Kokura with the intention of
landing there to walk through the town, but after keeping us waiting
an hour and a half, and repeatedly promising to open the gate, they
finally refused to admit us. They did indeed open it, but only to let out
a couple of fellows, who told us in the lowest of low voices that Kokura
not being a treaty port, we could not be allowed to enter. I took care
to inform them of our opinion that it was a great piece of ingratitude
on their part to treat us in so inhospitable a manner after we had
thrashed their enemy for them. Crowds of people had collected to look
at us, and doubtless we should have been mobbed if we had landed.
There was no idea on our part of forcing our way in.

Towards the end of the month smallpox broke out on board, and W.
H. Cummings, who had succeeded to the temporary command on
Captain Dowell's transfer to the flagship, determined to leave for
Yokohama as soon as the necessary arrangements could be made. On
the 27th we applied therefore to the authorities for a pilot to take the
ship through the inland sea, and gave notice that the commanders of
the three ships would pay a visit to Ibara on the morrow in order to
settle about the passage up to Yokohama which had been promised to
him and two other officers. I took the message on shore, and stopped
to have a meal with Itô, who good-naturedly had made great efforts to
get up a dinner in European style. He had built a table seven feet long
by half that width, covered with a short cloth of some coarse foreign
material. Four plates were laid, flanked by long knives, villainously
sharp, attenuated brass spoons with flat bowls, and a pair of
chopsticks. The first dish consisted of a boiled rockfish, which I found
great difficulty in cutting, but accomplished the task at last by inserting
a sharpened chopstick into the head, and using a spoon to remove the
flesh. Soy, a large bowl of rice, and a small saucer full of coarse salt,
were also placed on the table. The second course was broiled eels, and
then came a stewed terrapin, both of which were very good, but the
boiled awabi and boiled chicken which followed were quite out of the
question. It was a problem how to cut up a fowl with a knife that had
no point, and whose blade threatened at every moment to part
company with its handle. I abandoned the attempt, and served my
companions with slices from the breast. Unripe persimmons, peeled
and cut in four, with sweet rice beer (mirin) were now produced, and
this was excellent. This was certainly the earliest attempt ever made in
that part of Japan at giving a dinner in European style, perhaps the
first in Japan.
It was finally determined that the party that was to visit Yokohama
should consist of Ibara, a councillor named Sugi Tokusuké, a secretary,
and Itô, with four servants, who were to be accommodated on board
the "Barrosa" and "Djambi." The "Tancrède," which was to leave before
us, could not find room for more than half the party, and as they did
not wish to be separated longer than they could help, they elected to
come with us. On the 4th October the "Racehorse," Commander Boxer,
arrived to relieve us. Ibara and his secretary, Yamagata Keizô, and we
sailed the following morning.

News of our successful result of the naval operations and of the

conclusion of a convention with the Prince of Chôshiû was at once
conveyed to the foreign representatives at Yokohama, who lost no time
in calling the Tycoon's government to account for their apparent
complicity with Chôshiû, as evidenced by the copies of orders from
Kiôto which Itô had given us. The explanation was feeble, and the
representatives found no difficulty in obtaining from the ministers their
consent to pay whatever war indemnity might be due from Chôshiû, or
else to throw open to trade a port in the inland sea. Although in the
sequel the receipt of the indemnity money by us actually took place, it
was in a manner forced upon the four Powers and their diplomatic
agents, and certainly as far as Sir R. Alcock is concerned, he may be
entirely exonerated from the accusation of a desire to exact an
indemnity from either the defeated daimiô or the government which
assumed responsibility for him. The principal object he sought was to
obtain the sanction of the Mikado to the treaties, so as to put an end
to the agitation against foreign commerce which had been carried on
by hostile daimiôs in the Mikado's name ever since the opening of the
ports. Now that Satsuma and Chôshiû, the two ringleaders of the
opposition, had been brought to their senses, it ought to have been,
he thought, an easy matter for the Tycoon's government, if they
sincerely desired to carry out their treaty obligations, to assert their
authority and compel the whole country to accept the new policy of
foreign intercourse. The fixing of an indemnity was intended only to
provide a means of pressure upon the Tycoon's government in order to
procure the Mikado's ratification of the treaties, and the consequent
extension of commercial relations.
Ibara and his companions reached Yokohama on the 10th October,
and obtained an interview the same day with Sir Rutherford Alcock and
Mr. Pruyn, the United States minister. The reception accorded to them
was of such a nature as to convince them that the foreign powers were
not hostilely disposed towards the daimiô of Chôshiû, and it was no
doubt with a sense of relief that they learnt the intention of the foreign
representatives to claim the payment of the indemnity from the
Tycoon. At the same time it was clearly understood by both parties that
the other engagements entered into by Chôshiû respecting the
permanent disarmament of the straits of Shimonoséki and the
hospitable treatment of foreign vessels were to be faithfully adhered
to, and on these heads his subsequent conduct gave no ground for
complaint. It was somewhat a curious position for the retainers of a
prince, who had been declared a rebel against the Mikado and enemy
of the Tycoon, to land at Yokohama, a port belonging to the latter, but
as far as I remember, they confined their visit to the foreign
settlement, where they were safe from interference, and on the 14th
the "Tartar" left with them on board to return to their native province.
CHAPTER XII

THE MURDER OF BIRD AND BALDWIN

It was about this time that Sir Rutherford Alcock received Lord
Russell's despatches recalling him to England. Ostensibly for the
purpose of consulting with him on the situation of affairs, this
summons to London was accompanied by the expression of an opinion
that the passage of the inland sea was not necessary to foreign
commerce, which amounted to a censure upon his conduct. It is
seldom that an agent of the Foreign Office is told in so many words
that he is recalled because his conduct of affairs has not given
satisfaction, but inasmuch as leave of absence is usually granted upon
the application of the ambassador, envoy, or whatever the title of the
head of a mission may be, an invitation to return home is equivalent to
the removal of a diplomatic officer from his employment. But arriving
just at the moment when his policy had been successful in every
direction, and when all the foreigners in the country were united in a
chorus of gratitude to him for his energetic action, he and all the
members of his legation felt that the displeasure of Lord John Russell
was not a matter of much moment. The crushing defeat of Chôshiû by
the foreign squadrons coming so immediately after the repulse of his
troops from the gates of the palace at Kiôto restored confidence to the
Tycoon's government, and enabled them to declare firmly to the
Mikado that the idea of expelling foreigners from the country and
putting an end to trade was utterly and entirely impracticable, while on
the other hand the demonstrated superiority of European methods of
warfare had converted our bitterest and most determined foes into fast
friends. The vindication of his proceedings was no difficult task, and
the despatch in which he justified the course he had taken was
conceived in a style at once calm and convincing. It is only fair to Lord
Russell to say that he lost no time in acknowledging that his agent had
been in the right, and in conveying to him the Queen's full approbation
of his conduct. But this solatium to his feelings did not reach
Yokohama until he was already on his way to England.

The Shôgun's government voluntarily undertook to be responsible

for whatever sum might be fixed upon as the indemnity to be paid by
the Prince of Chôshiû. On the 22nd October a convention was signed
by a member of the Shôgun's second council and the four foreign
representatives by which three millions of dollars were to be paid in
satisfaction of all claims, or as an alternative the opening of
Shimonoséki or some other port in the inland sea, if the Tycoon
preferred to offer it and the Powers were willing to accept. The division
of this sum of money among the different Powers was reserved for
adjustment between the four governments. Advantage was also taken
of the desire to conciliate foreign Powers now manifested by the
Tycoon's ministers to obtain the promise of various improvements at
Yokohama calculated to add to the comfort and well-being of the
foreign residents, and Sir Rutherford, having thus reaped all the fruits
of his courage and perseverance was preparing to quit Japan in
obedience to the instructions of Lord Russell, when a fresh and totally
unforeseen event occurred which for a time delayed his departure.

After our successes at Shimonoséki, and the frank admission by the

Tycoon's government of the necessity of maintaining the treaties, the
confidence of foreign residents in the safety of the neighbourhood had
so completely revived that they no longer feared to make excursions
within the limits marked out by the treaties. But they received a rude
shock on the night of the 20th November when the governor of
Kanagawa came to Mr. Winchester, the British Consul, and informed
him that Major Baldwin and Lieutenant Bird of the xxth regiment had
been barbarously murdered at Kamakura, a well-known resort some
twelve miles from Yokohama. Baldwin was killed on the spot, but
according to the testimony of the inhabitants, Bird had lived for some
hours after he was disabled. The two officers had visited the famous
colossal Buddha, and riding along the road towards the temple of
Hachiman, were just about to turn the corner into the avenue when a
couple of men sprang out upon them with their keen-edged swords
and inflicted such ghastly wounds as brought them to the ground
almost unresistingly. The horror of the foreign community can be more
easily imagined than described, and it was further deepened when as
the result of the inquest it came to be suspected that the mortal
wound to which Bird had succumbed had been inflicted some hours
after the assassins had left the spot. This, in the opinion of the
surgeons, was a wound in the neck completely dividing the spinal cord
between the second and third cervical vertebrae, which clearly must
have been followed by instant death. Now all the evidence went to
show that the younger victim had lived until ten o'clock in the evening.
If so, by whom was this wound given, and with what motive? Those
who implicitly relied upon the report of the regimental surgeons
jumped to the conclusion that it was the act of one of the officials
despatched to the scene of the murder by the governor as soon as the
news was brought to him, which was no doubt some three or four
hours before he himself went to communicate it to Mr. Winchester, and
the motive was suggested to be a desire to prevent the wounded man
from giving such information to his countrymen as might have led to
the identification of the murderers. But I cannot believe that any
Japanese, official or not, could ever have compassed such a
treacherous deed. I believe on the contrary that the surgeons who
dissected out the wound, not using sufficient care, themselves divided
the spinal cord with a probe or some other instrument, and that Bird's
death was caused in reality by the loss of blood from his numerous
wounds. And this was the view taken by Dr Willis of our legation and
Dr Jenkins, then established as a general practitioner in Yokohama,
neither of whom was invited to assist at the post mortem.

The two surgeons having made a hurried examination and

enunciated certain views as to the nature of Bird's wounds, without
foreseeing the inferences that might be drawn, would naturally, and
probably with entire good faith, adhere to those views afterwards,
especially as it would not appear to them at all incredible à priori that
the countrymen of the men who had committed such a foul
assassination should be capable of a deed, dastardly enough in itself,
but no doubt justifiable in the opinion of any foreigner-hating Japanese
official. There are many additional considerations suggested by the
reports contained in the Parliamentary papers which would corroborate
the view here put forth, if I had space to discuss them. But as this
book is intended to be a record of my own experiences and memories,
and not a compilation from published materials, it is not the place to
go into all these particulars at length.

The Tycoon's government made all the exertions in their power to

trace the assassins, and before a month was over they had arrested
one of the guilty persons, named Shimidzu Seiji. Already on the 16th
two of his associates named Gamaiké and Inaba, accused of combining
with him in a plot to murder foreigners, and of extorting money from a
rich farmer, had been executed, though they were not actual
accomplices in the Kamakura crime.

I was present at the execution of these two men, which took place
in an enclosure outside the Japanese gaol in the afternoon of the 16th
December 1864. There was a large concourse of spectators, both
foreign and native. A little after three o'clock a whisper ran round that
the condemned were being brought out. A door opened, and a man
blindfolded and bound with cords was led through the crowd. He was
made to kneel down on a rough mat placed in front of a hole dug in
the ground to receive his blood. The attendants drew his clothes
downwards so as to lay the neck bare, and with the hand brushed his
hair upwards, so as to give full play to the sword. The executioner
secured a piece of cotton cloth round the handle of his weapon, and
having carefully whetted the blade, took up a position to the left of his
victim, then raising the sword high above his head with both hands, let
it fall with a swoop that severed the neck completely. The head was
held up for the inspection of the chief officer present, who simply
remarked: "I have seen it," and it was thrown into the hole. The
second man being then carried in, the attendants seemed to have a
little trouble in getting him to kneel in the proper position, but at last
the arrangements were completed to their satisfaction. The neck
having been bared as before, a fresh executioner advanced, took his
place at the prisoner's left side, and raising the sword with a flourish,
let it descend with the same skill as his predecessor. It was a horrible
sight to see the attendants holding the headless corpse down to the
hole, and kneading it so as to make the blood flow more readily into
the hole, and I left the spot in all haste, vowing that mere curiosity
should never induce me to witness another execution.

Capital punishment was much commoner in Japan in those days

than it has been since the promulgation of the present humane penal
code, and included transfixing with spears. Many of the foreign
residents must have been present at such sanguinary spectacles,
merely impelled by curiosity, and without the natural excuse of desiring
to see the sentence of the law fulfilled upon an offender against their
own blood.

The night before Sir Rutherford embarked for England news was
brought to him of the arrest of Shimidzu Seiji, one of the actual
murderers of Baldwin and Bird. Owing to the reputed excellence of the
native detective police, which under a despotic government is usually
efficient, it was believed by us that the Japanese Government could
always have procured the arrest of the assailants of foreigners, if they
had been determined to do so. The names, e.g., of many of those who
were engaged in the attack on our legation in 1861 were, as I learnt
some years afterwards, matter of common notoriety, but in the difficult
political position that the Tycoon's advisers had created for themselves,
they did not dare to convict the murderer of a foreigner. This then was
the first instance of such a crime being brought home to its
perpetrators. The British minister had good reason to feel gratified at
this proof that his policy had been the right one, and it was a very
natural movement that induced him to take off his watch and chain
and throw them over the neck of the messenger of good tidings.

Shimidzu Seiji was executed on the 28th December at ten o'clock in

the morning, in the presence of a detachment of the English garrison.
Whatever doubts may have existed as to the complicity of Gamaiké
and Inaba in his designs against the lives of the foreign residents,
there is none as to the fact that this man was one of the actual
murderers of Baldwin and Bird. I was instructed to accompany Mr. M.
O. Flowers, the acting consul, to the prison on the preceding day to
hear the sentence pronounced. We waited some hours till he arrived
from Yedo in custody of a strong guard, and he was at once confronted
with the witnesses, who examined his features in silence. They were
then separately interrogated, and one and all recognized him, the most
important witness being the boy who had seen the attack. Afterwards
we proceeded to another room and questioned the prisoner, who
acknowledged his guilt in the clearest manner possible. He was
proceeding to say something more, but was ordered by the Japanese
officers to be silent. But the best evidence of his identity was obtained
by another member of the consular service, who after the murderer
had been paraded round the town preceded by a banner on which his
sentence was inscribed (this was part of his punishment), accompanied
the procession back to the execution ground. Here Mr. Fletcher
overheard him say: "When I killed the foreigners, I expected one of
them might be a consul," and every one who knew our colleague will
acknowledge that he was a man of the most exact truthfulness, who
was not in the least degree likely to make a mistake in such a matter,
or over anxious to believe that the Japanese Government were in this
instance departing from the bad faith which is the usual refuge of
Asiatics in a difficult position.

On the morning of the 28th the garrison was marched over to the
execution ground, and drawn up on one side. The prisoner was
brought out about ten o'clock. The first words he uttered were a
request for some saké. Being again questioned, he frankly
acknowledged his guilt. I asked him what it was that he had been
prevented from saying to us on the previous day, to which he
answered that if Bird and Baldwin had got out of his way he would not
have attacked them. Whether this was true or not I have no means of
judging, but it does not accord with his written deposition. That, it
must be recollected, is not in Japan a simple record of everything a
prisoner says, but is a reduction in writing by an officer of the court of
the final result of all the statements made by him on the different
occasions when he was examined, and resembles much more the
summing up of the evidence on a criminal trial in England by the
presiding judge. He begged the Japanese officials not to bandage his
eyes, and began to chant a verse which might be thus translated:

"I do not regret being taken and put to death,

For to kill barbarians is the true spirit of a Japanese."

As the attendants were drawing back the clothes from his neck to
prepare it for the executioner's stroke, he bade them loosen his cords
so that they might do it with greater ease, adding: "In after ages they
will say, what a fine fellow was Shimidzu Seiji." He also remarked, "I
don't think the sword that cut off Gempachi's head will do for me,"
alluding probably to the thickness of his own neck, and begged that
the blade might be well whetted. Then saying, "Cut neatly if you
please," he stretched out his neck for the stroke. These were the last
words he spoke, but just as the sword began to descend he turned his
head to the left as if to address some further observation to the
officials, so that the cut partly missed its purpose, and the executioner
had to hack the head off—a most horrible sight. Simultaneously with
the delivery of the first blow, a gun fired by the battery of Royal
Artillery announced to all that the assassin had received the
punishment of his crime, and we dispersed as quickly as possible. The
head was taken to the bridge at the northern entrance of Yokohama
and there exposed on a gibbet for three days. Copies of the sentence
were posted up at Totsuka and at the scene of the murder, and a few
days later I accompanied the Legation mounted guard to see that this
part of the undertaking given by the Japanese authorities had been
duly performed. We found that they had fulfilled their promises to the
letter, and thus ended one of the most dramatic incidents in the whole
of my experience in the country.

It was impossible not to hate the assassin, but nevertheless, looking

at the matter from a Japanese point of view, I confess that I could not
help regretting that a man who was evidently of such heroic mould,
should have been misguided enough to believe that his country could
be helped by such means. But the blood of the foreigners who fell
under the swords of Japanese murderers, and the lives which were
sacrificed to avenge it bore fruit in later days, and fertilised the ground
from which sprang the tree of the national regeneration.
CHAPTER XIII

RATIFICATION OF THE TREATIES BY THE MIKADO

Sir Rutherford having quitted Japan, the conduct of affairs was

assumed by Mr. Winchester as Chargé d'Affaires. Before long
despatches reached us from Lord Russell expressing the entire
satisfaction of the British Government with the policy pursued by our
late chief, and we heard that he had been rewarded by promotion to
the more important post of minister at Peking. He was succeeded by
Sir Harry Parkes, who came to us invested with the prestige of a man
who had looked death in the face with no ordinary heroism, and in the
eyes of all European residents in the far east held a higher position
than any officer of the crown in those countries. And whatever may
have been his faults and shortcomings, especially towards the latter
part of his career, it must be acknowledged that England never was
represented by a more devoted public servant, and that Japan herself
owes to his exertions a debt which she can never repay and has never
fully acknowledged. If he had taken a different side in the revolution of
1868, if he had simply acted with the majority of his colleagues, almost
insurmountable difficulties would have been placed in the way of the
Mikado's restoration, and the civil war could never have been brought
to so speedy a termination. He was an indefatigable worker, entirely
absorbed in the duties of his post, untiring in his endeavours to obtain
a correct view of his surroundings, never sparing himself, and requiring
from his subordinates the same zealous assiduity. Of his personal
courage I had the opportunity afterwards of witnessing one striking
example, and brilliant as have been the achievements of many of our
Indian civilians, I do not think that his coolness and fortitude in the
moment of peril have ever been surpassed by any man not bred to
war. He was strict and severe in service matters, but in his private
relations gracious to all those who had occasion to seek his help, and a
faithful friend to all who won his goodwill. Unfortunately I was not one
of these, and the result was that from the beginning we were never
friends, down to the very last, though he never had reason to complain
of sloth or unreadiness to take my share of the work, and so it came
about that before long I became one of his assistants, and in the end
of 1866 was finally transferred from the Yokohama Consulate (where I
had been appointed interpreter early in 1865) to the Legation.

The accomplice of Shimidzu Seiji in the murder of Bird and Baldwin,

named Mamiya Hajimé, was executed on the 30th October 1865. I
went out early with Flowers in pouring rain to question the prisoner on
some points which had to be cleared up in connection with the crime.
He was condemned to the same punishment as his confederate, and
we went out again at one o'clock to be present at his decapitation. It
was a pouring wet day, and the dull leaden sky overhead was in
keeping with the melancholy occasion. Mamiya was a young fellow,
and endowed with far less fortitude than Shimidzu, and in order to
enable him to face the executioner he had been allowed to stupify
himself with drink. His head was taken off at a single blow. The usual
doubts as to his identity were expressed by the local foreign press, but
for myself I was convinced that he was one of the assassins. If the
Tycoon's government had substituted any other criminal for a man
whom they had not succeeded in capturing, the truth would have
surely leaked out, and by this time we had sources of information
which would have enabled us speedily to detect any trick.

Sir Harry Parkes reached Yokohama early in July, and Mr. Winchester
took his departure for Shanghai, where he had been appointed to be
consul. F. S. Myburgh was transferred at the same time from Nagasaki
to the Yokohama consulate. In passing through Nagasaki Sir Harry had
already learnt from the agents of some of the daimiôs that a civil war
was expected at no distant date, the object of which would be the
overthrow of the Tycoon. He already in September began to speak to
the Tycoon's council of the desirability of obtaining the Mikado's
ratification of the treaties, but the credit of the idea is in reality due to
Mr. Winchester, who (I did not know it at the time) as early as April
had suggested to the British Government that the written adhesion of
the Mikado to the treaties, and the reduction of the import duties to a
uniform tariff of 5 per cent. ad valorem might be obtained in return for
the partial abandonment of the Shimonoséki indemnity, the Tycoon's
ministers having stated they could not continue to make the quarterly
payments of $500,000 at a time, as had been stipulated in the
convention. In fact Sir Rutherford Alcock had begun to lay stress on
the necessity of the Mikado's ratification of the treaties almost
immediately after the bombardment of Shimonoséki. This suggestion
was approved by Lord Russell, who at once communicated it to the
governments of Holland, France, and the United States, and sent
despatches to Japan to the same effect which reached Sir Harry Parkes
towards the end of October. He lost no time in consulting with his
colleagues, and in proposing that they should proceed in a body to
Ozaka, supported by a considerable squadron of men-of-war, to
negotiate direct with the main body of the Tycoon's ministers. I should
have mentioned before that the Tycoon was at Kiôto, having proceeded
thither in the month of June, ostensibly for the purpose of taking
command of the army which was to chastise the presumptuous rebel,
the Prince of Chôshiû, and was still detained there by various intrigues
and the insufficiency of his military means.

The French minister, who was at first strongly opposed to the

abandonment of the indemnity in exchange for the opening of a port,
had received instructions from his government which had induced him
to come over to the views of the British representative, who found the
United States Chargé d'Affaires and Netherlands Political Agent equally
willing to follow his lead. As to the latter, we were accustomed to
believe that Sir Harry had him "in his pocket," as the phrase goes, and
the Americans had at that time partially abandoned the affectation of
acting on different lines from the "effete monarchies of Europe." Unity
of action being thus secured, the word was passed to the naval
commanders to get ready for sea, and the legations having packed up
a sufficient quantity of foolscap paper, silk tape, quill pens and bottles
of ink, embarked on board the next day but one after the signature of
a protocol in which the four diplomatic representatives had recorded
their views and projects. Sir Harry took with him John Macdonald,
Alexander von Siebold and myself.
The squadron was an imposing one, though not so overwhelmingly
strong as that which had destroyed the batteries at Shimonoséki in the
previous year. Of British ships there were the "Princess Royal," 73,
flying the broad pennant of Admiral St George Vincent King; the
"Leopard," 18; "Pelorus," 22; and "Bouncer," 1; of French, the
"Guerrière," 36; "Dupleix," 12; and "Kienchang," 4; while the
Netherlands contributed the corvette "Zoutman." Our Admiral was
extremely good-natured, and had fitted up private cabins for us three
civilians on the main deck. I was delighted to find myself on board with
my friend A. G. S. Hawes, a marine officer recently transferred to the
flagship from the "Severn."

The foreign representatives, it was rumoured, proposed, in addition

to the Mikado's ratification of the treaties and the reduction of the
tariff, to ask for the opening of Ozaka and Hiôgo to foreign trade on
the 1st January 1866. By the Treaty of 1858 these places were to have
been opened on the 1st January 1863, but the powers had in 1862
agreed to a postponement of five years, in order to give time for things
to settle down. In return, the four powers were ready to forgo two-
thirds of the Shimonoséki indemnity, and the option of deciding was to
be left to the Tycoon. This much was bruited about among the
members of the foreign legations. Outsiders said that we were about
to present an ultimatum, and that the creation of two new centres of
foreign trade was to be demanded without alternative. The men in the
service who expected appointments would of course have been eager
to believe this version but for the glorious uncertainty which surrounds
all diplomatic projects.

The Yedo government were alarmed at the energetic step on which

the representatives had resolved, and Midzuno Idzumi no Kami, the
only member of the first council who had remained behind in Yedo
when the Tycoon went up to Kiôto, came down in the company of
Sakai Hida no Kami, one of the second council, to exert all his powers
of dissuasion with Sir Harry. It was the first time that a functionary of
so high a rank had ever visited a foreign legation, and the evidence of
anxiety thus afforded simply confirmed the resolution that had been
taken to bring matters to a crisis. That Midzuno and his subordinate
hoped their efforts would be successful there is no reason to suppose,
and in fact they contented themselves mainly with offering some
advice as to the best method of proceeding on the arrival of the
representatives at Hiôgo.

We left on the 1st November, and proceeding in a leisurely manner

along the coast, passed the Idzumi Straits at 8 a.m. on the 4th. The
guns were loaded and the men beat to quarters, but the garrison of
the forts at Yura showed no signs of molesting us, and everybody soon
quieted down again. At half-past eleven we came in sight of Ozaka,
lying on the low land at the mouth of the Yodo river. The mountains
which enclose the bay on either side here appear to retire far into the
interior, until they disappear in the haze. The Tycoon's castle was easily
distinguished by its innumerable many-storied white towers, rising at
the back of the city. But of the town very little was visible owing to the
slight elevation of the houses and the distance from the deep water
outside where we were passing. The allied squadron formed in one
line, headed by the "Princess Royal," and gradually rounded off in the
direction of Hiôgo, where we anchored at half-past one. One by one
the other ships came in and took up the positions indicated to them.

The bay was crowded with junks of all sizes, and we counted seven
Japanese steamers lying at anchor. From one of these, belonging to
the Tycoon's War Department, a couple of officers came on board to
make the usual inquiries, and shortly afterwards some very inquisitive
shore-going officials came off, who put a great many questions about
the object of our visit and where we had come from. They got very
little information in reply, but were told that some officers would be
going by sea to Ozaka on the following day, and that notice should be
sent to the governor of the city in order that he might despatch
somebody down to the landing-place to meet them. They were also
requested to provide pilots for the two vessels to be despatched to
Ozaka, but they declared themselves unable to promise anything we
asked. However, as by their own rules they were under an obligation to
send information to the governor, this refusal was not of any great
consequence.
The Abbé Girard, who had acted as interpreter to Admiral Jaurès the
previous year at Shimonoséki, was on this occasion replaced by M.
Mermet de Cachon, a Jesuit attached to the French legation. He, with
Messrs Macdonald and von Siebold of our legation, and Mr. Hegt, the
clerk of the Netherlands Political Agent, were despatched on the
following day in the "Kienchang" to Ozaka bearing letters from the
foreign representatives. The "Bouncer" was to have taken our people,
but her commander was not able to get up steam in time, so that the
French flag alone made its appearance at the bar of Ozaka. First point
scored by the French. M. Mermet had ingeniously prepared the
French's minister's letter in Japanese, inserting at the end a long
paragraph, which did not appear in the other three letters, empowering
himself to state in outline to the Tycoon's council the objects of the
foreign representatives, hoping thus to become the spokesman for all
four.

On arriving at the mouth of the river, they were met by the two
governors of the city (all officials were kept in duplicate in those days),
who conducted them to a building close at hand, evidently prepared
beforehand for their reception. On learning that M. Mermet and his
companions desired to have a personal interview with one of the
council, the governors started off immediately to fetch him, as they
said, promising that he should be down by four o'clock. In the
meantime Macdonald, Siebold and Hegt started off to walk to Ozaka,
intending to seek out the ministers there, but after wandering a long
distance, they found themselves at three o'clock only just in sight of
the city, and had to hurry back in a boat. The governors, however, did
more than keep their promise, and instead of one, produced two of the
council, namely Ogasawara Iki no Kami and Abé Bungo no Kami. The
letters were delivered to them, and they listened civilly and even
affably to the messages which Mermet and Macdonald delivered, but
were unprepared of course to give any answer. It was agreed,
however, that Abé should proceed to Hiôgo on the 9th to meet the four
representatives on board the "Princess Royal," as sole negotiator on
behalf of the Tycoon, who, it was stated, had gone up to Kiôto. For me
had been reserved the less glorious task of opening up
communications with the local officials, and in company with Captain
W. G. Jones I went ashore to talk about beef, water, coals, and other
ship's requirements. We also informed them that the officers would
land, and requested that the townspeople might be ordered to treat
them with civility. This they promised to do, but added that their duty
to their chiefs, the governors of Ozaka, would oblige them to detail one
or two constables to watch over the safety of each party. After we had
conversed awhile with the head constable, a young man of 19 or 20,
some higher officials made their appearance and assumed the power.
They promised to do everything we asked, and to help their memories
made very full notes. In the afternoon accordingly, leave to go ashore
was given to all the ships, and many of the officers availed themselves
of the opportunity of visiting what was then a terra incognita to most
Europeans. The Admiral, Sir Harry and myself walked from one end of
the town to the other, and found the inhabitants well-disposed, though
they followed us in crowds.

This was a very different reception from what the Tycoon's officers
had warned us to expect. They always talked to us of the hostility of
the daimiôs and the dislike and fear of us entertained by the common
people, but we met with nothing but indications of goodwill from all
classes. It became clearer to us every day that the Shôgunate feared
lest free communication between foreigners and those sections of the
Japanese people who were outside its direct control would impair the
authority of the institutions that had now lasted, with no small benefit
to the Tokugawa family, for the last 260 years, and that consequently it
could not be a desirable policy for Great Britain to endeavour to bolster
up a decaying power. As an instance of the manner in which the
Tycoon's officials endeavoured to obstruct intercourse, it may be
mentioned that they published a notification in Ozaka forbidding the
townspeople to visit the ships, knowing full well that a closer
acquaintance would make their subjects and foreigners better friends.

The next few days were spent in exploring the neighbourhood with
a view to selecting a site for a foreign settlement, and there was a
good deal of running up and down to Ozaka by sea with messages for
the council. Abé was not able to come on Thursday, and at first it was
held out that another member of the council would replace him, but
when the day arrived, the two governors of Ozaka made their
appearance with other excuses. Sir Harry spoke very strongly to them,
and insisted on seeing some one on Saturday at the latest. But as he
did not expect that his request would be complied with, he despatched
Siebold, Hegt and myself early in the morning to Ozaka. On
approaching the anchorage, however, we saw a Japanese steamer
coming from the opposite direction, and lowering a boat we went on
board. We found that she was conveying Abé Bungo no Kami to Hiôgo
to see the foreign ministers. It was arranged therefore that Siebold
should return with him, while Hegt and I went on with a couple of
officials lent to us by Abé. But as soon as we anchored these men
began to be obstructive, refusing to accompany us on shore until the
port officers had first visited the ship. Seeing, however, that we were
determined to go, without them if necessary, they at last stepped over
the side into the boat with a very bad grace indeed. We rowed in safely
in the ship's gig, with four bluejackets well-armed, over the bar, which
a few days before had been rendered impassable by a strong west
wind, and landed in a small creek behind the battery at Tempôzan
Point. We at once took possession of a house where Macdonald and
Siebold had lodged on their last visit, disregarding the excuses of the
officials, who said it was occupied by a sick person, but we were used
to such subterfuges, and of course there was no sick man there at all.
After a while we returned to the gig, and rowing up the river in half-
an-hour, reached the outskirts of the city, where we landed to inspect a
house that had been assigned for the accommodation of the foreign
representatives. The latter intended to negotiate in Ozaka itself, but
this idea was subsequently abandoned. As this one house was
evidently not large enough for the representatives and their suites, I
said I would go to the governor and ask him to provide other
accommodation. The officials became alarmed at this, and at once
offered to show us another house, to which they would take us in a
boat. As we wished to see something of the city, I declined this
proposal, and to their horror we proceeded to walk along the bank. A
dense crowd of people gathered round us, but they were very quiet,
and after passing the Ajikawa-bashi, the first of the series of bridges
that span the river right up to the castle, we were shown a temple
which, however, proved to be again insufficient for our needs. It being
clear that our guides were not animated by goodwill, I again menaced
them with a visit to the governor, but here they became utterly
obstinate, and I had to give way. So we returned to our gig, and
resolving to have a good look at the city, got on board and started to
row up stream.

Before long we reached a barrier composed of native boats moored

right across from bank to bank, with the evident intention of impeding
our further progress. Some officials in a guardhouse on the bank
shouted to us to go back, but we pushed straight ashore, and I
ascended the steps to demand the reason of this obstruction. Orders
from the governor was the reply. A somewhat heated altercation
ensued, and I demanded that either we should be allowed to pass or
that I should at once be conducted to the governor's house. At last
they gave way and removed one or two of the junks, leaving just
enough space for our gig. Taking one of the guardhouse officials on
board, we proceeded up the river, not a little proud of our victory over
the bumbledom of a city of 400,000 people, and fully determined to go
right up to the castle. Dense crowds of people collected on the bridges,
sometimes yelling and abusing us, now and then throwing stones.
Hegt began to lose his temper, and drawing his revolver, threatened to
fire, but I made him put it back in his pouch. We were in no danger,
and could not afford to commit murder for such a trifling reason.

At last, after grounding once or twice on the sandbanks, we reached

the Kiô-bashi just below the castle. On our left was a small boat full of
officials who called to us to come and report ourselves, while on the
right extended a grassy bank crowded with soldiers dressed in semi-
European costume, among whom were a few men in plain dress,
apparently noblemen's retainers. One of these came down to the
water's edge, close to which we had approached, and shouted out to
the Japanese who was with us for his name and office. Our man
replied: "Who are you?" and they wrangled for about five minutes,
while we kept a watchful eye on the straggling soldiery. But it was
clearly unadvisable to land in the midst of a hostile armed crowd, and
we reluctantly turned the boat's head down stream, which now carried
us swiftly along. The same crowds still occupied the bridges, and
shouted abusive epithets as we passed, to the great alarm of the
Japanese official, who had not got over Hegt's fierce demeanour on
the way up, and trembled for fear lest there should be a row. Landing
the poor fellow, whose tone had become remarkably fainter and
humbler since he first made our acquaintance in the morning, we
pulled out across the bar to the "Bouncer," and in a few minutes more
were on our way back to Hiôgo, having seen a good deal more of
Ozaka than any one else, and braved the wrath of multitudinous
yakunins. I began to feel contempt for the weak-kneed officials who so
easily allowed themselves to be browbeaten by a few Europeans.

A curious rencontre took place during our stay at Hiôgo. A Satsuma

steamer was lying in the port, and one day the captain, Arigawa
Yakurô, came on board the flagship with some of his officers. One of
them remembered having seen me at Kagoshima, and we immediately
fraternized very heartily. After drinking and smoking a good deal they
took leave, promising to send a boat for me next day to accompany
them ashore to a Japanese dinner. But they forgot their promise. The
day after my expedition to Ozaka, Siebold and I went on board
Arigawa's ship to find him on the point of weighing anchor. He was
very glad to see us, abounded in apologies for being unable to fulfil his
engagement to give an onna gochisô, and showed us the cabin that
had been fitted up for the entertainment. This gentleman was too civil
by half, but still the contrast to the "offishness" of the Tycoon's officials
was very agreeable. If I would like to visit Kagoshima and Loochoo he
would be glad to give me a passage. We passed some time on board
eating raw eggs and drinking saké. I rather think I here met Kawamura
for the first time. A few days later when the steamer returned I again
went on board and made an even more interesting acquaintance. This
was a big burly man, with small, sparkling black eyes, who was lying
down in one of the berths. His name, they said, was Shimadzu Sachiû,
and I noticed that he had the scar of a sword cut on one of his arms.
Many months afterwards I met him again, this time under his real
name of Saigô Kichinosuké. I shall have more to say of him hereafter.

Abé Bungo no Kami had a five hours' interview with Sir Harry on the
10th, after which he went on board the "Guerrière" to see Mr. Roches,
the French envoy. I learnt from Siebold that the conversation had not
been of a satisfactory character. His answer to the three propositions of
the representatives amounted to a non possumus. The Tycoon would
pay up the second instalment of the indemnity rather than run the risk
of incurring unpopularity by giving way to our demands. Jin-shin fu-ori-
ai, the popular mind very unsettled, was the excuse then, and for
many a day after. Sir Harry had given Abé a piece of his mind, and said
he had better return to his colleagues and get them to reconsider their
answer.

On the 13th he was to have come down again, but feigning

indisposition as an excuse (this is well-known in Japan under the name
of yaku-biô, official sickness), he sent a member of the second council,
Tachibana Idzumo no Kami, to inform the representatives that the
Tycoon had hitherto never spoken to the Mikado about acknowledging
the treaties, but that now he had made up his mind to do so. But he
required a delay of fifteen days for this purpose. The ministers up to
this moment had believed, on the faith of assurances given by the
Tycoon's council in 1864 after the Shimonoséki business, that the
Mikado had long ago been approached on this subject, and that Abé
himself had been entrusted with a mission to Kiôto to that effect. They
were therefore naturally both surprised and incensed, but consented to
a delay of ten days. The prospects of the negotiation looked very dark
indeed. The Tycoon seemed either unable or unwilling to obtain the
Mikado's sanction to the treaties, and it began to be thought that we
should have to throw him over entirely. If the Tycoon was controlled by
a superior authority, he was clearly not the proper person for foreign
Powers to deal with, who must insist upon direct communication with
the authority. For the present, however, it was too early to talk of going
to see the Mikado against his will. We had not sufficient men in the
allied squadrons to force a way up to Kiôto, and even if we had, Sir
Harry's instructions would not have enabled him to take such a step.
So there was nothing for it but to wait.

An interesting visit was that of some retainers of Aidzu and

Hosokawa, who came on board privately to talk politics and to pick up
what information they could for their own princes. The former was the
commander of the Tycoon's garrison in Kiôto, the latter one of the
more important daimiôs in the island of Kiûshiû, nominally a partizan of
the Tycoon, but already beginning to consider whether it would not suit
him better to go over to the other party. For by this time a definite
issue had been raised between the Tycoon and the court of the
Mikado. The former being the friend of foreigners and an usurping
vassal, the war cry of the latter was "serve the sovereign and expel the
barbarians." My visitors talked a great deal about the "unsettled state
of popular feeling." They said the Mikado had already given his
sanction to the treaties in a general sort of way, and had consented to
Nagasaki, Hakodaté and Shimoda being opened to foreign trade. But
Kanagawa had been substituted for the latter port without his
approval. They felt quite certain that the Mikado would not agree at
present to the establishment of foreign merchants at Hiôgo. They
maintained that the anti-foreign feeling was pretty general among the
people, but admitted that Chôshiû made use of it as a mere party cry
with the object of dispossessing the Tycoon of his power.

After an interval of five days Tachibana paid Sir Harry another visit.
He reported that the Tycoon had not yet started for Kiôto to obtain the
Mikado's ratification of the treaties, being detained at Ozaka by a
headache! Abé and Ogasawara were afflicted with indisposition which
prevented their having the pleasure of coming down to call on the
British minister. Sir Harry administered some home-truths to the
unfortunate prevaricator, and demonstrated very clearly to him that as
the council acknowledged the inability of the Tycoon to carry out the
treaty stipulations in respect of the opening of new ports without the
Mikado's consent, which they had little hope of obtaining and still less
desire to get, they must eventually go to the wall, and the foreign
Powers would be compelled to make a demand for the ratification
direct on the Mikado. It was pitiable to see the shifts that the Tycoon's
officials were put to in face of his merciless logic; they were
perpetually being driven into a corner and left without a leg to stand
on.

The demands presented by the foreign representatives had created

a considerable movement at Kiôto, and dissension followed among the
advisers of the Tycoon. In a few days we heard that Abé and Matsumai
Idzu no Kami had been dismissed from office. They were believed to
be in favour of accepting our demands, and their disgrace seemed to
threaten the failure of the negotiations. The representatives thereupon
resolved on the important step of addressing a note identique to the
Tycoon himself, containing a repetition of the demands already made,
and warning him that if an answer were not made within the period of
ten days originally fixed, it would be assumed by them that their
propositions were refused. M. Mermet and I went ashore together to
deliver the letters of our respective chiefs, and I learnt that the
indefatigable little man had translated the French copy into Japanese
and induced his minister to sign the translation. He had also addressed
it to the council, instead of to the Tycoon, though he told me
otherwise. On our arrival at the governor's house, he wrapped it in a
sheet of Japanese paper, in order that I might not see the address, but
the officials who received the Notes, of whom I afterwards inquired,
voluntarily assured me that it was addressed to the council at Ozaka.
What Mermet's object can have been I was not able to conjecture, and
it is probable that he did it merely to keep his hand in. It is a
dangerous thing for an habitual intriguer to get out of practice by
acting straightforwardly, even in unimportant matters. We learnt that
the Tycoon had presented a memorial to the Mikado urging him to
ratify the treaties as well for his own sake as for that of the nation in
general. That on its being refused, he had resolved to return to Yedo,
but was stopped by an order from the court before he had got half-way
to Ozaka.

The dismissal of the pro-foreign members of the council seemed to

forebode resistance and the probable outbreak of hostilities. Japanese
steamers lying at Ozaka got up steam and went off in every direction,
some passing through Hiôgo on their way. Siebold and I pulled on
board one of these which belonged to Satsuma, and learnt that she
was going off to Yura in Kishiû in order to be out of the way in case the
Mikado should issue such orders to the Tycoon as might result in war-
like measures being taken by the allied squadron. On the 24th, the last
day, notice was given to the governor of Hiôgo that the ships would
move on the morrow to Ozaka to await there the answer of the
Tycoon's government. From him we learnt that Ogasawara would
surely be down next day with the reply, but as had already happened
so often in the course of these negotiations, he was ill, and Matsudaira
Hôki no Kami took his place. The interview with the foreign
representatives lasted several hours, but the gist of it was that the
Tycoon had at last obtained the Mikado's consent to the treaties, by his
own urgent representations, backed by those of his cousin
Shitotsubashi, who declared (so it was said) that he would perform
disembowelment unless the Mikado yielded. At last the latter gave way,
saying "Well, speak to the nobles of my court about it." The opening of
Hiôgo was, however, to be still deferred until January 1, 1868, but the
tariff would be revised, and the remaining instalments of the indemnity
paid punctually. Thus the foreign representatives had obtained two out
of the three conditions, and those the most important, while giving up
nothing in return. It must, however, be acknowledged that the
payment of the indemnity was never completed by the Tycoon, and
survived the revolution to be a constant source of irritation and ill-
feeling between the Mikado's government and the British minister.

Hôki no Kami, on leaving the "Princess Royal," promised that a note

embodying these arrangements should be sent off in the course of the
evening. But as it had to be sent up to Ozaka to receive the signatures
of his two remaining colleagues, the document did not reach us before
half-past two in the morning. I sat up till that hour in expectation of its
arrival, and was called into the cabin to read it to Sir Harry and M.
Roches, and then make a translation. The Mikado's decree to his vizier
the Kwambaku delegating the conduct of foreign affairs to the Tycoon,
a short document of only three lines, was enclosed in it. At Sir Harry's
request Hôki no Kami added an engagement to promulgate the decree
throughout the country. It was a proud night for me when I displayed
my knowledge of written Japanese in the presence of the French
minister, whose interpreter, M. Mermet, even could not read a
document without the assistance of his teacher.

Thus successfully ended the negotiations which up to the day before

showed no signs of fruit. The foreign representatives had to
congratulate themselves on having secured the means of tranquillizing
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