The Catholic Committee was a county association in late 18th-century Ireland that campaigned to relieve Catholics of their civil and political disabilities under the kingdom'sProtestant Ascendancy. After their organisation of a national Catholic Convention helped secure repeal of most of the remaining Penal Laws in 1793, the Committee dissolved. Members briefly reconvened the following year when a new British Viceroy, William Fitzwilliam, raised hopes of further reform, including lifting the sacramental bar to Catholics entering the Irish Parliament. When these were dashed by his early recall to London, many who had been mobilized by the Committee and by the Convention, defied their bishops, and joined the United Irishmen as they organised for a republican insurrection.
By the mid 18th century, agitation in the Catholic cause had begun to shift from the gentry to the rising merchant and professional classes. In 1757 the Catholic Committee was formed by Charles O'Conor; others involved included the historian and doctor John Curry and Thomas Wyse of Waterford.[1]Prebendary of Cullen, John Carpenter, future archbishop of Dublin, also joined the Committee.
In 1760, at a meeting at the Elephant Tavern on Essex Street, Dublin, Wyse submitted a plan for a more permanent Catholic Committee, made up of clergy, nobility, and representatives of the people.[2] Before long, every county in Ireland had a committee usually headed by Catholic merchants and landed gentry. O'Conor's support for the first Catholic Committees from 1758 was copied nationwide, contributing to the successful, but slow, repeal of most of the Irish penal laws in 1774-1793.
London's hostility toward Catholics, never as intense as that of the Irish Ascendancy, moderated when, after the death of the Old Pretender in 1766, the Papacy recognized the Hanoverian succession. The British government, in turn, gratified Catholic opinion with the passage in 1774 of the Quebec Act. This not only guaranteed free practice of the Catholic faith in the formerly French North-American province but, in a precedent seized upon by Irish Catholics, removed all reference to the reformed faith from the oath of allegiance required in taking public office.[3]
From the beginning there was disagreement between the gentry and the merchants how best to achieve comparable relief from the penal laws in Ireland. The gentry, who had suffered much in fines and lands lost for adhering to their religion, were apprehensive that an overbold approach would only give rise to greater persecution. The committee did have an early success, organising a campaign of non-payment and of court challenges to the system of "quarterage", by which exclusively Protestant corporations levied surcharges upon Catholic merchants, traders and artisans.[4] Efforts to reinstate the charges legislatively were quashed by Lord Lieutenant Townsend.[2]
Under Kenmare
Despite this success, the Committee movement was paralysed by factional disputes and all but dissolved. In 1773, Thomas Browne, 4th Viscount Kenmare convened a meeting of prominent Catholics in Dublin. While pleading for Penal Law relief, they foreswore any intention of overturning the Williamite Settlement. Together with Arthur James Plunkett, seventh earl of Fingall, Anthony Preston, eleventh Viscount Gormanston, and a number of senior bishops, Kenmare believed that redress was best achieved by maintaining the confidence of the Dublin Castle and London administrations. Kenmare demonstrated his loyalty by helping to recruit the soldiers in Ireland to fight for the Crown in the American Colonies in the 1770s and by supporting the authorities as they suppressed Whiteboy agrarian protest in the 1780s.[5]
Assisted by parliamentarians like Edmund Burke, who in 1765 had published Tracts on the Popery Laws, Kenmare's pro-government policy appeared to pay dividends with the Catholic Relief Act of 1778 passed first in the parliament of Great Britain and then, with greater opposition, in the Irish Parliament. The "Papists Act" did not grant freedom of worship, but did allow Catholics on taking a modified oath that abjured the temporal, but not the spiritual, authority of the Pope, to purchase land.and join the army.[6] A further measure followed in 1782: the Irish Parliament, acknowledging the actual tolerated practice of the Catholic faith, repealed the laws that compelled Catholic bishops to quit the kingdom, and binding those who had assisted at Mass to identify the celebrant. In addition, Catholics might now own a horse worth more than £5, and, with the consent of their local Protestant bishop, open their own schools. These small concessions were not supplemented by others for ten years.[7]
Back Lane Parliament and the 1793 Catholic Relief Act
John Keogh, "Member of the Catholic Convention", 1792
In 1790, Dublin merchant John Keogh, active on the national or general Committee in Dublin since 1781, became its Chairman.[8] In February 1791 elections to the Committee from the counties and from the five Dublin parishes brought a dramatic change in its composition, with aspiring middle-class representatives now in the majority and clearly outnumbering the rural gentry delegates.[9] Stirred by news of revolution and reform in France and dissatisfied with the moderation of Committee, in October some forty members, including many in the new intake, formed a separate Catholic Society with Theobald McKenna as their secretary. They published the Declaration of the Catholic Society of Dublin to promote unanimity among Irishmen and remove religious prejudices, written by McKenna, demanding total repeal of the penal laws as a matter of right. The declaration caused a split in the Catholic Committee. After presenting to the viceroy a petition for relief which the majority considered "insidious and servile",[10] in December 1791 69 members led by Lord Kenmare publicly seceded.[11][12]
Acknowledging the departure of the more conservative, gentry, faction, at the beginning of 1792 Keogh dismissed Edmund Burke's son, Richard Burke, as assistant secretary and with McKenna's support replaced him Theobald Wolfe Tone, another Protestant but a known democrat. In Dublin, Tone was a leading member of the Society of United Irishmen first formed in October 1791 by his Presbyterian ("Dissenter") friends in Belfast, in the midst of the town's enthusiasm for the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and its defence by Thomas Paine.[13]
In the 1792 Irish Parliamentary session further petitions in favour of a Catholic relief bill, introduced at London's behest to secure Catholic loyalty in the confrontation with the new French Republic, were met with unprecedented contempt. In response the Committee successfully organised a country-wide election to a national convention. In contrast to the deference the Committee had previously shown to Catholic noblemen and gentry, by standards of the time the franchise was broadly democratic. All the Kingdom's 32 counties and fifty nine towns and cities were to return delegates. Meetings open all male communicants in each parish elected one or two delegates who, convening in county meetings, would in turn choose up to four of their number for the convention in Dublin. The Committee's instructions underscored the democratic spirit of the exercise: "men appointed by others must hold themselves accountable to those from whom they derive their trust and must therefore regulate their conduct by the standard of general opinion".[12]
At the same time, responding to the standard Ascendancy objections to their inclusion within the constitution, the Committee issued a Declaration of the civil and religious principles of Catholics. Excluding recognition of the infallibility of the Pope and of his civil authority, it insisted that in Ireland these would not "disturb" or "weaken" the establishment in Ireland of the Protestant religion or the security of the Protestant crown.[14]
The elections to the convention, "conducted in a blaze of publicity", spread "an expectation of dramatic change to Catholics at every level", and was a spur to the growth among the Catholic peasantry, petty shopkeepers and artisans of militant Defenderism[15] The Viceroy, Lord Westmorland, called on London for additional troops. The Castle saw the hand of the United Irishmen, represented not only by Tone, but also by Keogh and Secretary Richard McCormick,[16] who had followed Tone into the United ranks in Dublin. Of the 248 delegates[12] elected to the Catholic Convention, 48 were members of the Dublin Society of the United Irishmen.[17]
Moved by parallels with the election to the National Constituent Assembly in France, the democratic exercise also caused alarm among the Catholic bishops. Keogh complained of "old men used to bend power; mistaking all attempts at liberty as in some way connected with the murders in France".[18] At the opening the Convention, assembled in the Tailor's Hall in Back Lane,[19] Dublin, in December 1792, Keogh was careful to place two prelates seated on either side of the chairmen. But the petition, as finally approved and signed by the delegates, was presented to the bishops as a fait accompli, with no implication that their sanction was sought or obtained.[18]
Within the Convention, the United men operated as a pressure group. On a motion of the Lisburn linen merchant Luke Teeling (advised by Samuel Neilson of the Belfast United Irish Society) the Convention demanded the total emancipation of Catholics, the lifting of all their remaining disabilities both civil and political.[17] It was further resolved to appeal over the heads of the Dublin Parliament and Castle administration directly to the King, George III.[20]
The delegates chosen to carry the petition to London made a point of travelling through Belfast, where Presbyterian supporters insisted on removing the horses from their carriages and pulling them by hand over the Long Bridge into the town.[20] In January 1793, the delegates were well received in London, with Tone reporting "every reason to be content" with their royal audience.[21]
In April, Dublin Castle put its weight behind Henry Grattan in the passage of a Catholic Relief Act. Catholics were admitted to the franchise on the same limited terms as Protestants. They could take degrees on Trinity College, be called as barristers and serve as army officers and, most controversially of all, could carry arms.
Dissolution and the United Irishmen
In the wake of the 1793 Relief Act the Committee voted Tone a sum of £1,500 with a gold medal, subscribed to a statue of the King, and (as agreed in London) voted to dissolve.[22]
As a final gesture, the Catholic Committee had issued a declaration calling for parliamentary reform. While this displeased the government, it was seen as poor recompense for those radical Dissenters in the North who believed they had hazarded much to advance the Catholic cause.[23]William Drennan, an original mover of the United Irishmen, complained that the Catholic Committee had "two strings to their bow. One to deal with government, the other to treat with the Society: and its strategy was to go with the one that would promise and deliver the most.[23]
Catholic opinion had not been placated. The concessions under the Relief Act were "permissive rather than obligatory and a newly awakened Protestant Ascendancy chose as often as not to withhold them". Moreover the retention of the Oath of Supremacy which continue to bar Catholics from parliament, from the judicial bench and from the higher offices of state, when all else was conceded, seemed petty, and was "interpreted by the newly politicised Catholic populace as final proof that the existing government was their natural enemy".[24]
Late in 1794 the Committee briefly reconvened.[25] Hope of seeing Catholic Emancipation complete had revived under a new viceroy. But having declared in favour of admitting Catholics to Parliament, in February 1795 Earl William Fitzwilliam was recalled after just 6 months in post. Some Committee members were content to lobby for Catholic education: in June 1795 they helped secure government funding for the new Catholic seminary, Maynooth College.[26] Others leaned toward the United Irishmen who, despairing of reform, now moved to draw the agrarian Catholic Defenders with them toward a French-assisted republican insurrection.[27] Committee men served as "the bridge over which United Irishmen and Defenders [were to] join forces".[15]
Keogh, Richard McCormick[28] and Thomas Broughall (who had been in correspondence with the now defeated Girondins in Paris)[29] hesitated. The government informer Samuel Turner (himself a delegate from Newry) reported in June 1797 that while they were still acknowledged as members of the "National Committee" of the United Irishmen meeting in Dublin, they did not attend.[30] Alarmed by the violent and anti-clerical turn of events in France, McKenna had resigned from the society already in 1793.[11]
Theobald Wolfe Tone, posthumously known as Wolfe Tone, was a revolutionary exponent of Irish independence and is an iconic figure in Irish republicanism. Convinced that, so long as his fellow Protestants feared to make common cause with the Catholic majority, the British Crown would continue to govern Ireland in the interest of England and of its client aristocracy, in 1791 Tone helped form the Society of United Irishmen. Although received in the company of a Catholic delegation by the King and his ministers in London, Tone, with other United Irish leaders, despaired of constitutional reform. Fuelled by the popular grievances of rents, tithes and taxes, and driven by martial-law repression, the society developed as an insurrectionary movement. When, in the early summer of 1798, it broke into open rebellion, Tone was in exile soliciting assistance from the French Republic. In October 1798, on his second attempt to land in Ireland with French troops and supplies, he was taken prisoner. Sentenced to be hanged, he died from a reportedly self-inflicted wound.
James Napper Tandy, known as Napper Tandy, was an Irish revolutionary and a founder of the United Irishmen. He experienced exile, first in the United States and then in France, for his role in attempting to advance a republican insurrection in Ireland with French assistance.
The Society of United Irishmen was a sworn association, formed in the wake of the French Revolution, to secure representative government in Ireland. Despairing of constitutional reform, and in defiance both of British Crown forces and of Irish sectarian division, in 1798 the United Irishmen instigated a republican rebellion. Their suppression was a prelude to the abolition of the Irish Parliament in Dublin and to Ireland's incorporation in a United Kingdom with Great Britain.
The Irish Rebellion of 1798 was a popular insurrection against the British Crown in what was then the separate, but subordinate, Kingdom of Ireland. The main organising force was the Society of United Irishmen. First formed in Belfast by Presbyterians opposed to the landed Anglican establishment, the Society, despairing of reform, sought to secure a republic through a revolutionary union with the country's Catholic majority. The grievances of a rack-rented tenantry drove recruitment.
Henry Joy McCracken was an Irish republican executed in Belfast for his part in leading United Irishmen in the Rebellion of 1798. Convinced that the cause of representative government in Ireland could not be advanced under the British Crown, McCracken had sought to forge a revolutionary union between his fellow Presbyterians in Ulster and the country's largely dispossessed Catholic majority. In June 1798, following reports of risings in Leinster, he seized the initiative from a leadership that hesitated to act without French assistance and led a rebel force against a British garrison in Antrim Town. Defeated, he was returned to Belfast where he was court-martialed and hanged.
William Drennan was an Irish physician and writer who moved the formation in Belfast and Dublin of the Society of United Irishmen. He was the author of the Society's original "test" which, in the cause of representative government, committed "Irishmen of every religious persuasion" to a "brotherhood of affection". Drennan had been active in the Irish Volunteer movement and achieved renown with addresses to the public as his "fellow slaves" and to the British Viceroy urging "full and final" Catholic emancipation. After the suppression of the 1798 Rebellion, he sought to advance democratic reform through his continued journalism and through education. With other United Irish veterans, Drennan founded the Belfast [later the Royal Belfast] Academical Institution. As a poet, he is remembered for his eve-of-rebellion When Erin First Rose (1795) with its reference to Ireland as the "Emerald Isle".
The history of Ireland from 1691–1800 was marked by the dominance of the Protestant Ascendancy. These were Anglo-Irish families of the Anglican Church of Ireland, whose English ancestors had settled Ireland in the wake of its conquest by England and colonisation in the Plantations of Ireland, and had taken control of most of the land. Many were absentee landlords based in England, but others lived full-time in Ireland and increasingly identified as Irish.. During this time, Ireland was nominally an autonomous Kingdom with its own Parliament; in actuality it was a client state controlled by the King of Great Britain and supervised by his cabinet in London. The great majority of its population, Roman Catholics, were excluded from power and land ownership under the penal laws. The second-largest group, the Presbyterians in Ulster, owned land and businesses but could not vote and had no political power. The period begins with the defeat of the Catholic Jacobites in the Williamite War in Ireland in 1691 and ends with the Acts of Union 1800, which formally annexed Ireland in a United Kingdom from 1 January 1801 and dissolved the Irish Parliament.
The Defenders were a Catholic agrarian secret society in 18th-century Ireland, founded in County Armagh. Initially, they were formed as local defensive organisations opposed to the Protestant Peep o' Day Boys; however, by 1790 they had become a secret oath-bound fraternal society made up of lodges. By 1796, the Defenders had allied with the United Irishmen, and participated in the 1798 rebellion. By the 19th century, the organisation had developed into the Ribbonmen.
The Volunteers were local militias raised by local initiative in Ireland in 1778. Their original purpose was to guard against invasion and to preserve law and order at a time when British soldiers were withdrawn from Ireland to fight abroad during the American Revolutionary War and the government failed to organise its own militia. Taking advantage of Britain's preoccupation with its rebelling American colonies, the Volunteers were able to pressure Westminster into conceding legislative independence to the Dublin parliament. Members of the Belfast 1st Volunteer Company laid the foundations for the establishment of the United Irishmen organisation. The majority of Volunteer members however were inclined towards the yeomanry, which fought and helped defeat the United Irishmen in the Irish rebellion of 1798.
In Ireland, the penal laws were a series of legal disabilities imposed in the seventeenth, and early eighteenth, centuries on the kingdom's Roman Catholic majority and, to a lesser degree, on Protestant "Dissenters". Enacted by the Irish Parliament, they secured the Protestant Ascendancy by further concentrating property and public office in the hands of those who, as communicants of the established Church of Ireland, subscribed to the Oath of Supremacy. The Oath acknowledged the British monarch as the "supreme governor" of matters both spiritual and temporal, and abjured "all foreign jurisdictions [and] powers"—by implication both the Pope in Rome and the Stuart "Pretender" in the court of the King of France.
John Keogh was an Irish merchant and political activist. He was a leading campaigner for Catholic Emancipation and reform of the Irish Parliament, active in Dublin on the Catholic Committee and, with some reservation, in the Society of United Irishmen.
Events from the year 1795 in Ireland.
Father James Coigly was a Roman Catholic priest in Ireland active in the republican movement against the British Crown and the kingdom's Protestant Ascendancy. He served the Society of United Irishmen as a mediator in the sectarian Armagh Disturbances and as an envoy both to the government of the French Republic and to radical circles in England with whom he sought to coordinate an insurrection. In June 1798 he was executed in England for treason having been detained as he was about to embark on a return mission to Paris.
The Roman Catholic Relief Bills were a series of measures introduced over time in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries before the Parliaments of Great Britain and the United Kingdom to remove the restrictions and prohibitions imposed on British and Irish Catholics during the English Reformation. These restrictions had been introduced to enforce the separation of the English church from the Catholic Church which began in 1529 under Henry VIII.
William James MacNeven was an Irish physician forced, as a result of his involvement with insurgent United Irishmen, into exile in the United States where he became a champion of religious and civil liberty and the reputed "father of American chemistry". One of the oldest obelisks in New York City is dedicated to him to the right facing St. Paul's Chapel on Broadway; while to the left stands another obelisk, dedicated to Thomas Emmet, a fellow United Irishman, and Attorney General of New York. MacNeven's monument features a lengthy inscription in Irish, one of the oldest existent dedications of this kind in the Americas.
The Sheares Brothers, Henry (1753–98), and John (1766–1798) were Irish lawyers and republicans. After witnessing revolutionary events in Paris, in 1793 they joined the Society of United Irishmen for whom they organised in Cork and in Dublin. They were arrested on the eve of the risings of 1798 and executed at Newgate Prison.
William Paulet Carey was an Irish art critic and publicist, known also as an engraver and dealer. In 1792 he joined the Society of United Irishmen in Dublin, but feeling unsupported as he himself faced charges of sedition, in 1794 he testified in the government case against the United Irishman William Drennan. In England, he spent half a century promoting British art, most of his writings being distributed gratuitously.
Captain Waddell Cunningham was an Irish merchant, prominent in the commercial and civic life of Georgian-era Belfast. As a patron of the Belfast Charitable Society and its Poor House; as a commander of the Volunteer patriot militia; and as a Presbyterian subscriber to the costs of erecting Belfast's first Catholic chapel, in a town much agitated by the American struggle for independence he was seen a friend of reform. But as a land speculator, a slaveholder in the West Indies, and an opponent of immediate Catholic Emancipation, he was at odds with the more democratic elements of the town and surrounding districts who, in the wake of the French Revolution, were to directly challenge the authority of the British Crown and of the landed Protestant Ascendancy
Daire Kilian Keogh is an academic historian and third-level educational leader, president of Dublin City University (DCU) since July 2020.
John Sweetman was an Irish republican, a delegate to the 1792 Catholic Convention and a member of the Leinster directory of the United Irishman.
↑ Keogh, Daire. (1993), "Archbishop Troy, the Catholic Church and Irish Radicalism, 1791-3", in D. Dickson, D. Keogh and K. Whelan eds., The United Irishmen: Republicanism, Radicalism and Rebellion, Dublin: Lilliput Press, ISBN0-946640-95-5, (pp. 124-134) p.129.
1 2 Elliott, Marianne (1993), "The Defenders in Ulster", in David Dickson, Daire Keogh and Kevin Whelan eds., The United Irishment, Republicanism, Radicalism and Rebellion, (pp. 222-233), Dubllin, Liiliput, ISBN0-946640-95-5, pp. 227-228
1 2 Smyth, Jim (1998). The Men of No Property: Irish Radicals and Popular Politics in the Late Eighteenth Century. London: Macmillan Press. pp.74–76. ISBN978-0-333-73256-4.
1 2 Keogh, Daire. (1993), "Archbishop Troy, the Catholic Church and Irish Radicalism, 1791-3", in D. Dickson, D. Keogh and K. Whelan eds., The United Irishmen: Republicanism, Radicalism and Rebellion, Dublin: Lilliput Press, ISBN0-946640-95-5, (pp. 124-134) p.131.
↑ Cameron, Don (2014). "back lane parliament". donsdublin.wordpress.com. Retrieved 6 February 2022.
1 2 Elliott, Marianne (2000). The Catholics of Ulster, a History. London: Allen Lane, Penguin Press. pp.236–237. ISBN0-7139-9464-9.
↑ Bardon, Jonathan (2008). A History of Ireland in 250 Episodes. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan. p.296. ISBN978-0-7171-4649-9.
1 2 Bartlett, Thomas (1992). The Fall and Rise of the Irish Nation: The Catholic Question, 1690-1830. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan. p.167. ISBN978-0-7171-1577-8.
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