Henry Grattan (3 July 1746 – 4 June 1820)[1] was an Irish politician and lawyer who campaigned for legislative freedom for the Irish Parliament in the late 18th century from Britain. He was a Member of the Irish Parliament (MP) from 1775 to 1801 and a Member of Parliament (MP) in Westminster from 1805 to 1820. He has been described as a superb orator and a romantic. With generous enthusiasm he demanded that Ireland should be granted its rightful status, that of an independent nation, though he always insisted that Ireland would remain linked to Great Britain by a common crown and by sharing a common political tradition.[2]
After studying at the Middle Temple, London and then King's Inns, Dublin, he was called to the Irish Bar in 1772. He never seriously practised law but was drawn to politics, influenced by Flood. He entered the Irish Parliament for Charlemont in 1775, sponsored by Lord Charlemont, just as Flood had damaged his credibility by accepting office. Grattan quickly superseded Flood in the leadership of the national party, not least because his oratorical powers were unsurpassed among his contemporaries.[4]
In the Irish Parliament
Catholics, who made up the majority of the Irish population, were completely excluded from public life at this time under the Penal Laws, in force in Ireland from 1691 until the early 1780s. The Presbyterians of Ulster had a lot more power as they were primarily of British ancestry, although most of the penal laws also affected them. Power was held by the King's Viceroy and by a small element, the Anglo-Irish families loyal to the Anglican Church of Ireland who owned most of the land.
The politicians of the national party now fought for the Irish Parliament, not with the intention of liberating the Catholic majority, but to set the Irish parliament free from constitutional bondage to the British Privy Council. By virtue of Poynings' Law, a statute of King Henry VII of England, all proposed Irish legislation had to be submitted to the Privy Council for its approval under the Great Seal of England before being passed by the Irish Parliament. A bill so approved might be accepted or rejected, but not amended. More recent British Acts had further emphasised the complete dependence of the Irish parliament, and the appellate jurisdiction of the Irish House of Lords had also been annulled. Moreover, the British Houses claimed and exercised the power to legislate directly for Ireland without even the nominal concurrence of the parliament in Dublin. This was the constitution which William Molyneux and Swift had denounced, which Flood had attacked, and which Grattan was to destroy, becoming leaders of the Patriot movement.[4]
The Irish House of Commons by Francis Wheatley (1780) shows Grattan (standing on right in red jacket) addressing the House of Commons
Calls for the legislative independence of Ireland at the Irish Volunteer Convention at Dungannon, County Tyrone, greatly influenced the decision of the government in 1782 to make concessions. It was through ranks of Volunteers drawn up outside the Irish Parliament in Dublin that Grattan passed on 16 April 1782, amidst unparalleled popular enthusiasm, to move a declaration of the independence of the Irish parliament. A posthumous publication of Grattan's speeches which were revised by Grattan himself contains his speech from this day which became famous in Irish political history: "I found Ireland on her knees," Grattan exclaimed, "I watched over her with a paternal solicitude; I have traced her progress from injuries to arms, and from arms to liberty. Spirit of Swift, spirit of Molyneux, your genius has prevailed! Ireland is now a nation!" However, the parliamentary register for that sitting contains no record of these lines meaning Grattan most likely altered the speech in later years.[5] After a month of negotiation, the claims of Ireland were conceded. The gratitude of his countrymen to Grattan was shown by a parliamentary grant of £100,000, which had to be reduced by half before he would accept it.[4]
Grattan then asked for the British House of Commons to reconfirm the British Government's decision, and on 22 January 1783, the final Act was passed by parliament in London, including the text:
Be it enacted that the right claimed by the people of Ireland to be bound only by laws enacted by his Majesty and the Parliament of that kingdom, in all cases whatever shall be, and is hereby declared to be established and ascertained for ever, and shall at no time be questioned or questionable.
In September of the same year, Grattan became a member of the Privy Council of Ireland. He was expelled in 1798, but was re-admitted on 9 August 1806.
One of the first acts of Grattan's Parliament was to prove its loyalty to the constitution by passing a vote for the support of 20,000 sailors for the Royal Navy. Grattan was loyal to the Crown and the British connection. He was, however, anxious to achieve moderate parliamentary reform, and, unlike Flood, he favoured Catholic Emancipation. It was evident that without reform, the Irish House of Commons would not be able to make much use of its newly won legislative independence. Though now free from Westminster constitutional control, it was still subject to the influence of corruption, which the British government had wielded through the British and Irish borough owners, known as the "undertakers", or more directly through the great executive offices. Grattan's Parliament had no control over the Irish executive. The Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and his chief secretary continued to be appointed by the British ministers; their tenure of office depended on the vicissitudes of English, not Irish, party politics; the royal prerogative was exercised in Ireland on the advice of British ministers.[4]
The Irish House of Commons was unrepresentative of the Irish people at a time when democracy was rare in Europe. The majority were excluded, who were either Roman Catholics or Presbyterians; two-thirds of the members of the House of Commons were returned by small boroughs at the disposal of individual patrons, whose support was bought by the distribution of peerages and pensions. It was to give stability and true independence to the new constitution that Grattan pressed for reform.[4]
Having quarrelled with Flood over simple repeal, Grattan also differed from him on the question of maintaining the Volunteer Convention.[4] Drawing the attention of the House to "the alarming measure of drilling the lowest classes of the populace", Grattan implied that reformers had a duty to protect the prerogatives of property even as they protested its abuses. Better that those who had been "respectable" as the armed "property of the nation" should retire than run the risks of an "armed beggary". (Writing a generation later, Thomas MacNevin proposed that Grattan's judgement marked "the transition point", when "composed of a different class of men, and ruled by politicians with very different views", the rump of the Volunteer movement entered upon "a career which terminated only in the establishment of the United Irishmen").[7]
Grattan also opposed the policy of protective duties in favour of Pitt's commercial propositions in 1785 for establishing Free Trade between Great Britain and Ireland. This, however, had to be abandoned owing to the hostility of the British mercantile classes. Grattan supported the government for a time after 1782, and spoke and voted for the repressive legislation that followed the Whiteboy violence in 1785; but as the years passed and without Pitt's personal favour towards parliamentary reform resulting in legislation, he gravitated towards the opposition, agitated for commutation of tithes in Ireland, and supported the Whigs on the regency question in 1788.[8] In 1790, Grattan was elected for Dublin City, a seat he held until 1798.
Henry Grattan, MP, 1792
In 1792–93, he succeeded in carrying the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1793, conferring the franchise on Catholics; in 1794, in conjunction with William Ponsonby, he introduced a reform bill which was even milder than Flood's bill of 1783. He was as anxious as Flood had been to retain the legislative power in the hands of men of property. Grattan had a strong conviction that while Ireland could best be governed by the Irish, democracy in Ireland would inevitably turn to plunder and anarchy. At the same time, he wished to open membership of the House of Commons to Catholic men of property, a proposal that was the corollary of the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1793.[9]
The defeat of Grattan's mild proposals helped to promote more extreme opinions, which, under growing influence from France, were now making inroads in Ireland. The Catholic question had come to the fore, and when a powerful section of the Whigs joined Pitt's ministry in 1794, Lord Fitzwilliam, who shared Grattan's views, was appointed Viceroy, expectations for further Catholic relief were raised. That may have been Pitt's intention, but it is not clear how far Lord Fitzwilliam had been authorised to pledge the government. Fitzwilliam privately asked Grattan to propose a bill for Catholic emancipation, promising British government support. It appeared, however, that the Viceroy had either misunderstood or exceeded his instructions; on 19 February 1795, Fitzwilliam was recalled. In the outburst of indignation, followed by increasing disaffection which this produced in Ireland, Grattan acted with conspicuous moderation and loyalty. This won him warm acknowledgements from a member of the British cabinet.[9]
That cabinet, however, doubtless influenced by the wishes of the King, to whom Emancipation was anathema, was now determined to firmly resist the Catholic demands, with the result that Ireland rapidly drifted towards rebellion. Grattan warned the government in a series of masterly speeches of the lawless condition to which Ireland had been driven. He could now count on no more than 40 followers in the Irish House of Commons, and his words were unheeded. In protest, he retired from parliament in May 1797, and departed from his customary moderation by attacking the government in his 24-page Letter to the Citizens of Dublin, in which he said it was now "absolutely necessary to reform the state" as the people no longer had confidence in Parliament.[9]
[10] At this time antipathy towards the Anglican elite in Ireland was such that people of different faiths were ready to combine for common political objects. Thus the Presbyterians of the north, who were mainly republican in sentiment, combined with a section of the Roman Catholics to form the United Irishmen organisation, promoting revolutionary ideas imported from France; and a party prepared to welcome a French invasion soon came into existence. Thus stimulated, the increasing disaffection culminated in the 1798 rebellion.[9] The Presbyterian-Catholic rebellion in Ulster was accompanied by outbreaks elsewhere, notably in County Wexford. Grattan was cruelly lampooned by James Gillray as a rebel leader for his liberal views and his stance against a political union with the Kingdom of Great Britain.[citation needed]
Almost immediately, the project of a legislative union between the British and Irish parliaments, which had been from time to time discussed since the beginning of the 18th century, was taken up in earnest by Pitt's government. Grattan fiercely denounced the scheme.[9]
The constitution of Grattan's parliament offered no security, as the differences over the regency question had made evident that in matters of imperial interest the policy of the Irish parliament and that of Great Britain would be in agreement. At a moment when Britain was engaged in a life-and-death struggle with France, it was impossible for the ministry to ignore the danger, recently emphasised by the fact that the independent constitution of 1782 offered no safeguard against armed revolt. Sectarian violence during the rebellion put an end to the growing reconciliation between Roman Catholics and Presbyterians, and the island divided anew into two hostile factions.[9]
It was from the Anglican established church, and particularly from the Orangemen, that the bitterest opposition to the union proceeded. The proposal found support among the Roman Catholic clergy and especially the bishops, while in no part of Ireland was it received with more favour than in the city of Cork. This attitude of the Catholics was caused by Pitt's encouragement of the expectation that Catholic emancipation, the commutation of tithes, and the endowment of the Catholic priesthood, would accompany or quickly follow the passing of the measure.[9]
Henry Grattan
When in 1799, the government brought forward its bill it was defeated in the Irish House of Commons. Grattan was still in retirement. His popularity had declined, and the fact that his proposals for parliamentary reform and Catholic emancipation had become the watchwords of the United Irishmen had brought him the bitter hostility of the governing classes. He was dismissed from the Privy Council; his portrait was removed from the hall of Trinity College; the Merchant Guild of Dublin struck his name off their rolls. The threatened destruction of the constitution of 1782 quickly restored its author to his former place in the affections of the Irish people. The parliamentary recess had been employed by the government in securing by lavish corruption a majority in favour of their policy. On 15 January 1800, the Irish Parliament met for its last session; on the same day Grattan secured by purchase a seat for Wicklow; and at a late hour, while the debate was proceeding, he appeared to take his seat, and was cheered from the galleries. Grattan's strength gave way when he rose to speak, and he obtained leave to address the House sitting. Nevertheless, his speech was a superb effort of oratory; for more than two hours he kept them spellbound. After prolonged debates Grattan, on 26 May, spoke finally against the committal of the bill, ending with an impassioned peroration in which he declared, "I will remain anchored here with fidelity to the fortunes of my country, faithful to her freedom, faithful to her fall." These were the last words spoken by Grattan in the Irish Parliament.[9]
The bill establishing the union was carried through its final stages by substantial majorities. One of Grattan's main grounds of opposition to the union had been his dread of seeing the political leadership in Ireland pass out of the hands of the landed gentry; and he prophesied that the time would come when Ireland would send to the united parliament a hundred of the greatest rascals in the kingdom. Like Flood before him, Grattan had no leaning towards democracy; and he anticipated that by the removal of the centre of political interest from Ireland the evil of absenteeism would be intensified.[9]
In the Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland
For the next five years, Grattan took no active part in public affairs; it was not again until 1805, that he became a Member of the Parliament of the United Kingdom for Malton. He modestly took his seat on one of the back benches, until Fox brought him forward, exclaiming, "This is no place for the Irish Demosthenes!" His first speech was on the Catholic question and all agreed with the description of his speech by the Annual Register as one of the most brilliant and eloquent ever made within the walls of parliament. When Fox and William Grenville came into power in 1806 Grattan, who sat at this time for Dublin City, was offered, but refused to accept, an office in the government. In the following year, he showed the strength of his judgment and character by supporting, in spite of consequent unpopularity in Ireland, a measure for increasing the powers of the executive to deal with Irish disorder. Roman Catholic emancipation, which he continued to advocate with unflagging energy, though now advanced in age, became complicated after 1808 by the question whether a veto on the appointment of Roman Catholic bishops should rest with the crown.[11]
Grattan supported the veto, but a more radical Catholic party was now arising in Ireland under the leadership of Daniel O'Connell, and Grattan's influence gradually declined. He seldom spoke in Parliament after 1810, the most notable exception being in 1815, when he separated himself from the Whigs and supported the final struggle against Napoléon. His last speech of all, in 1819, contained a passage referring to the Union he had so passionately resisted, which exhibits the statesmanship, and at the same time the equable quality, of Grattan's character. His sentiments with regard to the policy of the Union remained, he said, unchanged; but "the marriage, having taken place, it is now the duty, as it ought to be the inclination, of every individual to render it as fruitful, as profitable and as advantageous as possible."[12]
In the following summer, after crossing from Ireland to Britain when in poor health to bring forward the Irish question once more, he became seriously ill. On his deathbed he spoke generously of Castlereagh, and with a warm eulogy of his former rival, Flood. He died at his home in Portman Square on 4 June 1820,[13] and was buried in Westminster Abbey close to the tombs of Pitt and Fox.[14] His statue is in St Stephen's Hall in the Palace of Westminster.[12]
Sydney Smith said of Grattan soon after his death: "No government ever dismayed him. The world could not bribe him. He thought only of Ireland; lived for no other object; dedicated to her his beautiful fancy, his elegant wit, his manly courage, and all the splendour of his astonishing eloquence."[12]
Grattan Bridge crossing the river Liffey between Parliament Street on the south side of Dublin and Capel Street on the north side is named in his honour. The building housing the faculty of Law and Government at Dublin City University has also been named the Henry Grattan Building in his honour.[15]
Grattan Square Dungarvan, County Waterford. The establishment of the Dungarvan Town Commissioners in 1855 was the catalyst for the renaming of many of Dungarvan Streets.[citation needed] Irish Nationalists and Catholics were finally getting a say in how they were governed and they set about renaming streets to reflect their nationalist sensibilities. Despite having no connection to Dungarvan that we know of, as one of the leading constitutional nationalists of his era Henry Grattan was an obvious choice when the Town Commissioners were looking for a new name.[citation needed] Grattan Square was constructed between 1806 and 1826 at the instigation of the Duke of Devonshire. The architecture of the square has changed little to this day.[citation needed]
Family
Grattan's father was James Grattan (d. 1766), a Recorder and then MP for Dublin City, who married a daughter of Thomas Marlay, Mary.
Grattan married Henrietta Fitzgerald in 1782, the daughter of Nicholas Fitzgerald of County Mayo (d. 1761), a son of Thomas FitzGerald of Turlough, County Mayo and Elizabeth Browne. Henrietta's mother Margaret was the daughter of James Stephenson and Ann Price. Grattan's in-laws' history gave him a sensitivity to former Irish political difficulties, as Henrietta's Cavalier great-grandfather John Fitzgerald was transplanted from Gorteens Castle in County Kilkenny to Mayo in 1653 under the Cromwellian Settlement, and his son Thomas felt it necessary to conform to the Church of Ireland in 1717.[16]
William Pitt was a British statesman who served as the last prime minister of Great Britain from 1783 until the Acts of Union 1800, and then first prime minister of the United Kingdom from January 1801. He left office in March 1801, but served as prime minister again from 1804 until his death in 1806. He was also Chancellor of the Exchequer for all of his time as prime minister. He is known as "Pitt the Younger" to distinguish him from his father, William Pitt the Elder, who had also previously served as prime minister.
Robert Stewart, 2nd Marquess of Londonderry,, usually known as Lord Castlereagh, derived from the courtesy title Viscount Castlereagh by which he was styled from 1796 to 1821, was an Irish-born British statesman and politician. As secretary to the Viceroy in Ireland, he worked to suppress the Rebellion of 1798 and to secure passage in 1800 of the Irish Act of Union. As the Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom from 1812, he was central to the management of the coalition that defeated Napoleon, and was British plenipotentiary at the Congress of Vienna. In the post-war government of Lord Liverpool, Castlereagh was seen to support harsh measures against agitation for reform, and he ended his life an isolated and unpopular figure.
Lord Edward FitzGerald was an Irish aristocrat and nationalist. He abandoned his prospects as a distinguished veteran of British service in the American War of Independence, and as an Irish Parliamentarian, to embrace the cause of an independent Irish republic. Unable to reconcile with Ireland's Protestant Ascendancy or with the Kingdom's English-appointed administration, he sought inspiration in the American Revolution and revolutionary France where, in 1792, he met and befriended Thomas Paine. From 1796 he became a leading proponent within the Society of United Irishmen of a French-assisted insurrection. On the eve of the intended uprising in May 1798, he was fatally wounded in the course of arrest.
Henry Flood was an Irish statesman and Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench for Ireland. He was educated at Trinity College Dublin, and afterwards at Christ Church, Oxford, where he became proficient in the classics. He was a leading Irish politician, and a friend of Henry Grattan, the leader of the Irish Patriot Party. He became an object of public interest in 1770, when he was put on trial for murder, after killing a political rival in a duel.
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 Parliament of Ireland was the legislature of the Lordship of Ireland, and later the Kingdom of Ireland, from 1297 until the end of 1800. It was modelled on the Parliament of England and from 1537 comprised two chambers: the House of Commons and the House of Lords. The Lords were members of the Irish peerage and bishops. The Commons was directly elected, albeit on a very restricted franchise. Parliaments met at various places in Leinster and Munster, but latterly always in Dublin: in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin Castle, Chichester House (1661–1727), the Blue Coat School (1729–31), and finally a purpose-built Parliament House on College Green.
John Hely later Hely-Hutchinson was an Anglo-Irish lawyer, politician, and academic who served as the 21st Provost of Trinity College Dublin from 1774 to 1794. He also served as Principal Secretary of State for Ireland from 1766 to 1794. He was a member of the Irish House of Commons from 1759 to 1794.
William Wentworth-Fitzwilliam, 4th Earl Fitzwilliam, styled Viscount Milton until 1756, was a British Whig statesman of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In 1782 he inherited the estates of his uncle Charles Watson-Wentworth, 2nd Marquess of Rockingham, making him one of the richest people in Britain. He played a leading part in Whig politics until the 1820s.
John FitzGibbon, 1st Earl of Clare PC (Ire) was Attorney-General for Ireland from 1783 to 1789 and Lord Chancellor of Ireland from 1789 to 1802.
John Philpot Curran was an Irish orator, politician, and lawyer known for his skills in defence of civil and political liberty. He first won popular acclaim in 1780, as the only lawyer in his circuit willing to represent a Catholic priest horsewhipped by an Anglo-Irish lord. In the 1790s he was celebrated as a champion in the Irish House of Commons of Catholic emancipation and parliamentary reform, and in court as defence counsel for United Irishmen facing charges of sedition and treason. Following the rebellion of 1798, he was vocal in his opposition to Britain's incorporation of Ireland in a United Kingdom.
John de la Poer Beresford, PC, PC (Ire) was an Anglo-Irish statesman.
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 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.
The Roman Catholic relief bills were a series of measures introduced over time in the late 18th and early 19th 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.
The Irish Patriot Party was the name of a number of different political groupings in Ireland throughout the 18th century. They were primarily supportive of Whig concepts of personal liberty combined with an Irish identity that rejected full independence, but advocated strong self-government within the British Empire.
All main Christian churches are organised on an all-island basis. Roman Catholicism is the largest religious denomination, representing over 73% for the island and about 78.3% of the Republic of Ireland.
British General Charles Cornwallis, the 1st Marquess Cornwallis was appointed in June 1798 to serve as both Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and Commander-in-Chief of Ireland, the highest civil and military posts in the Kingdom of Ireland. He held these offices until 1801.
The 1797 Irish general election was the last general election to the Irish House of Commons, with the Acts of Union three years later uniting the Kingdom of Ireland with the Kingdom of Great Britain. The election followed the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1793, meaning it was the first general election in Ireland in which Catholics could vote, provided they met the property requirements. The election also coincided with simmering rebellion in Ireland, coming not long after an attempted French expedition to Ireland, and the following year witnessing the Irish Rebellion of 1798.
↑ R. B. McDowell (1994) "The Protestant Nation (1775–1800)," in T. W. Moody and F. X. Martin, eds., The Course of Irish History. 2nd ed. p. 233. ISBN978-1570980152
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