BOOKS.
MR. LECKY'S NEW VOLUMES.* [FIRST NOTICE.]
MR. LECKY need not have apologised, as he implicitly does in his preface, for the size of these two volumes, which are devoted exclusively to the history of Ireland from 1793 to the- passing of the Act of Union, a period of only eight years. Like every other Irishman, he perhaps exaggerates slightly the importance of Ireland in the universe, but that was essential to good work. No one could rightly tell the story of Holland if he thought of Holland as a reclaimed marsh on the edge of the North Sea, and no one will rightly understand Ireland who thinks of it too frequently- as a little island in the " melancholy ocean " with some herbage for its principal resource. The historian of a small country must aggrandise his subject, and space was specially necessary to Mr. Lecky. He desired to give, and he has given, an impression of cold impartiality- to a complicated story, and he could not have done that without entering into rather elaborate detail. A thousand octavo pages may seem much for the history of eight years; but of those who read those pages, not 5 per cent. will doubt that the materials for sound judgment have at length been placed before them. Mr. Lecky is no special pleader ; he never rises into eloquence, and is not invariably even animated ; but as the vast Judge's charge rolls out, with no tittle of important evidence forgotten, and no witness left with his character unrevealed, the jury feel as if but one verdict were even_ possible. That verdict is summed up in the Irishman's most often-repeated phrase, " My unfortunate country." The entire narrative is like one of those novels which hold the reader fascinated—The Bride of Lammermoor is a magnificent example —yet in which the interest is due throughout to the crimes, or the follies, or the evil fate of the principal performers. The whole of the first volume, for example, is occupied with the history and consequences of the failure of the last great attempt to avoid a fusion with Great Britain, by giving. Ireland a reasonably just and good government of its own, an attempt which was aided by an extraordinary concurrence of favouring conditions, yet which broke down, it is difficult even with Mr. Lecky's powerful assistance to understand clearly why. This attempt Mr. Lecky characterises as " the Fitz- william Episode."
In the middle of 1794, William Pitt, in one of his alliances with the great Whig " families " who then nominated so many Members, left to them the management of Ireland, and Earl Fitzwilliam accepted the Lord-Lieutenancy, with the idea in his mind that he was to have nearly a free hand. There was great dispute afterwards as to his precise powers, into which Mr. Lecky enters at much length ; but it is at all events certain that this was his own idea of his own position ; that he knew Pitt to be favourable to Catholic Emancipation ; and that he mentioned without rebuke his intention of breaking up the corrupt system under which Ireland was administered. This system was, in brief, to control the " independent " Parliament—Grattan's Parlia- ment—by dividing the whole patronage of Ireland among the families and " connections " which owned the boroughs and nominated a clear majority in the Irish House of Commons. The Executive, it will be remembered, was appointed and• guided from England, and so long as the borough-mongers were contented, England was legally absolute in Dublin. The system, however, was breaking down, owing to many
• History of England in the Eighteenth Century. Vole. VII. and VIII. By W.. E. H. Lecky. London : Longman, Green, and Co. 1890.
-causes, the principal, perhaps, being the rise of the great Secret Societies, the " Defenders " and the " United Irishmen ; " and Lord Fitzwilliam thought he could put things in a better train. He appears in Mr. Lecky's pages as a thoroughly modern statesman, of splendid sagacity and foresight, who held that a country could not be governed permanently by a sort of "dodge "—it really was no better—and that to allow Catholics in a Catholic country to vote but not to sit in Parliament—which was the arrangement under the Relief Act—was more than absurd, was a scheme which combined the minimum of security with a maximum of insult and humiliation. He resolved, therefore, to sweep away the last vestige of Catholic disabilities through a vote of the Ascendency Parliament, and this with a completeness even now scarcely attained. " It is," he wrote, " upon the large principle of leaving not a point of distinction in rights and capacities between Protestants and Catholics, that I propose, as I do, that no reserve should be made, not even of the highest offices of the State, not even the seals nor the bench. To make the reserve, would be to leave a bone of contention. It would be leaving a splinter in the wound that would to a certainty, sooner or later, break out again. It would mar the great object of laying the question to rest for ever. It would frustrate that great desideratum at this critical juncture, unanimity and harmony among all the higher orders of the kingdom." Difficult as the enterprise might appear at first sight, Mr. Lecky convinces his readers that it was not -only possible but easy, a fact admitted by the Chancellor Fitzgibbon, the bitterest and ablest opponent of the scheme. In the first place, the packed Parliament of Dublin was cer- tain, as it afterwards showed, if the Government was resolute, to do as it was bid. In the second place, the Protestant gentry were for the most part singularly free from religious bigotry, so free that, though absolute on their estates, they never refused sites for Catholic chapels. And thirdly, the whole Catholic com- munity, rich and poor, were on this subject absolutely united, and they held in law the substance of electoral power. It would have been perfectly possible, as far as Ireland was concerned, to pass the Act, and thereby bind all respectable Catholics, including a majority of the priesthood, to the cause of good government; Lord Fitzwilliam was resolute to fury, and he had, as he conceived, and as was probably true, the sanction of his chiefs.
Unhappily, the scene was Ireland, where everything is spoiled in the working, and the Lord-Lieutenant, with all his • statesmanship and sagacity, was a precipitate man He tried to make things certain prematurely by letting his opinion be known, thus alarming politicians in England, and he struck with rash haste at the system of corruption. Before he had been in Ireland a week, he dismissed John Beresford, nominally Commissioner of Revenue, but really first distributor of patronage, and working head of the clan Beresford, which, with its dependants and allies, held one-fourth of all the profitable offices in the State. The placemen were thunder- -struck ; they bombarded Pitt and the Dnke of Portland with remonstrances and advice; and they obtained a hearing. The Cabinet declared that Earl Fitzwilliam had exceeded his powers, and he was summarily recalled. The precise cause of Pitt's action in the matter has never been revealed, and is not fully explained even by Mr. Lecky. He himself explained it as displeasure at the removal of Beresford and other friends of the King's Government, and this was also the opinion of the Lord- Lieutenant ; but it can hardly have been the real reason. Mr. Lecky suspects that Pitt had even at this date the idea of effecting a Legislative Union, and was inclined to hold Eman- cipation in reserve as a bribe with which to carry that measure, and also to retain the packed Parliament as its instru- ment; and it is possible that this idea may have weighed with him, for this was the policy he ultimately pursued. The King, however, was very angry, and Pitt hated to fight the King, -except when his own position was at stake. Moreover, he was almost certainly influenced by another cause, on which, as we confess to our extreme surprise, Mr. Lecky lays no manner of stress. It is very doubtful, more than doubtful, whether, if Pitt had agreed to emancipate the Catholics in Ireland with the completeness and suddenness proposed by Earl Fitz-
william, would not have lost his whole popularity in England itself. No English Act was required, and he might have managed, with Whig assistance, to avoid censure in the British Parliament; but he knew the people well, he sus-
pected their bitterness of bigotry, and he dared not risk a quarrel with the Crown on a subject on which the people were not heartily on his side. He preferred to take the frightful risks of waiting, perhaps believed, on the evidence of the experienced and angry Irish placemen, that they would be less than they proved to be. At the worst, he could wait till the time arrived to propose the Union, and then he certainly would either grant, or at least promise, Emancipation, a measure which he throughout life considered wise and just, but to which he, always an English statesman, did not perhaps attribute the overwhelming importance which in all Irish eyes it must always possess, and justly possesses in Mr. Lecky's.
He nearly lost Ireland by his decision. In chapter after chapter, each more melancholy and more impartial than the last, Mr. Lecky describes for us the horrible situation which gradually arose. The excited and disappointed Catholics, who had absolutely believed in Lord Fitzwilliam's mission of peace, never again fully trusted an English promise or an English agent, and turned their thoughts more and more towards a rebellion to be helped by France. Their restlessness and tendency to violence woke up the latent Protestant bigotry of the North, and led to the first " Orange " insurrection, which was, in fact, a plan to expel Catholics from Ulster, and send them, in a phrase which then first became common, " to hell or Connaught." The cruelties locally committed by the Protestants, and not punished by the ascendant party, fanned the irritated feeling into flame, until the whole Catholic popu- lace of Ireland was ready for insurrection, in full sympathy with the Revolution in France, and eagerly waiting for the descent of a French army. Mr. Lecky tells this part of his story well, though perhaps a little lengthily, and leaves his readers convinced that had such an army landed, the South would have burst into a flame, and Ireland would, for a. time at least, have been lost to the British Crown. There was no force at sea to encounter the hostile fleet ; there were scarcely any troops to resist it had an army debarked. The French, stimulated and informed by Wolfe Tone, were not insensible to their advantage ; and twice they made the attempt,—once in December, 1796, with 15,000 men and some forty ships, under Roche; and once in September, 1797, through a Dutch fleet. In both instances they were baffled by an interposition which, as Mr. Lecky remarks, our ancestors of Elizabeth's time would have attributed to the direct aid of the Almighty. Hoche's fleet actually reached the Irish coast, but was driven off again by a furious storm ; and the Dutch fleet was baffled by con- trary winds for eighteen days, lost its opportunity, and when at last it did set sail, was crushed by Admiral Duncan off Camperdown, in the bloodiest naval battle of the century. Just after this, the last attempt made by France to assist the Irish enemies of Great Britain, the Catholic irritation rose to a head, and the horrible events of '98, which were the proximate cause of the Union, covered Ireland with misery, and shook to fragments the self-confidence of the dominant caste. Of Mr. Lecky's treatment of this catastrophe, and of his history of the resulting Act of Union, we must speak in another notice of his serious and valuable, though not, we think, quite final History.
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