[Above is a picture of Daniel O'Connell (1775-1847), 'the Liberator'.]
The 'Catholic Question' was a the running sore of British politics in the 1820s. Was Britain an unequivocally Protestant country or should Catholics be allowed to be members of Parliament - a privilege that had been denied them since the seventeenth century? British public opinion was strongly anti-Catholic, but denying Catholics their civil rights exacerbated discontent in Ireland, with its 90% Catholic population.
On 9 May 1817 a motion to open up all government posts, except that of Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, to Catholics was debated in the Commons. Robert Peel, the Chief Secretary for Ireland, was the main speaker on the Protestant side. The motion was defeated 221/245 and after the vote ‘Orange’ Peel (as he was known in Ireland) found himself the head of the Protestant party. A a reward he was offered the seat of Oxford University, the bastion of Tory Anglicanism.
However from 1823 the balance of opinion in the cabinet shifted in favour of emancipation though Peel remained opposed.
The Catholic Association
Events in Ireland meant that the issue would remain urgent. In 1798 Ireland had erupted in revolt against British rule. The early 19th century saw the escalation of rural protest. At a different level of society middle class Catholics were becoming part of the unofficial establishment, denied the right to enter parliament but rising in the professions. From 1792 they were allowed to enter the bar both in England and Ireland. The Catholic Church too was changing. The Napoleonic wars had prevented many of them from training abroad. The Royal College of St Patrick had been set up at Maynooth in 1795 and an annual grant paid by the state (initially the Irish parliament but continued on an annual basis by the united parliament after 1800). This profoundly changed the nature of the priesthood as the urbane cosmopolitan clergy gave way to a poorer, less educated more distinctively Irish clergy. The aroused increasing and predictable paranoia among Protestants. (On the other hand when George IV visited Ireland in 1821 he was greeted by the Catholic hierarchy in full panoply and the port of Dunleary was named Kingstown in his honour.)
In May 1823 the the radical Catholic lawyer Daniel O’Connell (1775-1847) formed the Catholic Association. This was an open, accountable mass movement funded by the ‘Catholic Rent’ of a penny a month collected after Sunday Mass. It was supported by the priests and soon acquired the nature of a religious crusade. In the first year of its existence it had an income of £1,000 a week and at the end of the year had £10,000 invested. It worked for tenants, the Church and the whole Catholic community. Because of the Irish 40s freehold electorate, it soon acquired a powerful hold on the parliamentary process. The tenants en masse, led by their priests, could defy the landlords. This was a populist, clerical-led movement. Following the fiasco of the 1825 bill it began to vet new parliamentary candidates and refused to accept them if they were not prepared to vote for emancipation. By creating a mass movement O’Connell liberated tenants from their landlords.
‘There is a moral electricity in the continuous expression of public opinion concentrated on a single point.’Because civil disobedience lay at the back of his campaign, O’Connell was widely seen in England as a dangerous rabble-rouser.
In the election of 1826 the League managed to unseat the anti-Emancipation candidate in Waterford and replace him with a supporter of Emancipation. During the campaign the Catholic Association patrolled the town to keep order. Green handkerchiefs, sashes, cockades and ribbons were worn everywhere and green flags flew in all parts of the city. An equally sensational result took place at Louth where a man whose family had controlled the county for half a century was defeated by an Emancipation candidate.
Wellington Prime Minister: In January 1828, after a period of instability, George IV chose the duke of Wellington to be Prime Minister. He was indifferent to public opinion and remote from ordinary political life. He was a staunch anti-reformer on both Catholic and constitutional questions. In spite of his prestige, his obstinacy and overbearing manner made him many political enemies. The king said he set about political questions like a battery of cannon. His most able minister was the Home Secretary, Robert Peel.
