Daniel O'Connell and Britain

 

I spoke at this year's Daniel O'Connell Summer School at Derrynane on O'Connell and Britain. Here is a summary of what I said.

While Daniel O'Connell enjoyed an exceptional international reputation during his lifetime, Britain was the country, aside from Ireland, with which he had the closest association. It was to Britain that he fled when the French Revolution made life on the continent unpalatable. It was in London, at Lincoln's Inn, that O'Connell undertook his legal studies and it was at the Westminster Parliament that he served as an M.P. for 17 years following the enactment of Catholic Emancipation in 1829. In the 1830s and 1840s, he became a significant figure in British politics as a supporter of various reforming, radical causes. To this day, indeed, a fine portrait of O'Connell hangs prominently in the main hall of London's Reform Club, of which O'Connell was a founding member.

O'Connell and Britain: Unusually for an Irish nationalist, O'Connell, who was a supporter of monarchy, had a fondness for Queen Victoria, believing that the young Queen would help bring justice to Ireland.

O'Connell's first Prime Ministerial adversary was the Duke of Wellington, whom he described as a villain with 'neither heart nor head.' Yet, it was Wellington who was instrumental in persuading a very reluctant King George IV to support Catholic Emancipation. Wellington ultimately took a pragmatic stance, believing that the alternative to Catholic Emancipation would be a violent conflict. O'Connell contributed to a fund set up in Dublin to recognise the Iron Duke's contribution to the achievement of Catholic Emancipation.

Peel was probably O'Connell's longest-running political adversary, an adversity that resulted in a challenge to a duel which happily never took place. O'Connell memorably described Peel's smile as like a silver plate on a coffin. Peel turned out to be a nemesis for O'Connell, when he banned the monster meeting planned for Clontarf in 1843, an outcome that damaged O'Connell's image of political invincibility in the Irish public mind.

Another long-running feud was with Stanley who was Chief Secretary for Ireland during the early 1830s. O'Connell described him as 'snappish, impertinent, over bearing.' He tried without success to have Stanley removed from his post. It is revealing that O'Connell's sharpest animosities were with politicians who had served the British Government in Ireland.

Contemporary British views of O'Connell: Five men held Prime Ministerial office during O'Connell's parliamentary heyday, 1829-1847 - Wellington, Melbourne, Grey, Peel and Russell.

Melbourne was the Prime Minister with whom O'Connell had the most sustained, cooperative relationship, for he broadly supported his Government during its 7-year term. Yet, Melbourne was personally hostile to O'Connell. According to his biographer, Melbourne saw O'Connell as 'a braggart and bully' ... 'whose word was worth nothing and whose objective was to make good government impossible.' Although a moderate by the standards of his time, Melbourne had no love for the Irish who he saw as 'the most conspiring people on the face of the earth' and as 'a very violent and a very noisy people .. but not a very courageous people, particularly not morally courageous.' This illustrates just what O'Connell was up against in the social and political climate of the early Victorian period.

Stanley saw O'Connell as a seditious influence and went so far as to suggest that he ought to be transported overseas. This, Stanley believed, would serve to calm Ireland, when it would almost certainly have had the opposite effect.

O'Connell also had an unpleasant spat with a young Benjamin Disraeli, who attacked him as a traitor and a violent rebel. His reply was predictably sharp and made reference to Disraeli's Jewish origins. This was ironic because O'Connell was a strong supporter of Jewish emancipation.

O'Connell was more at home among the advanced political reformers of his day. He had great admiration for the radical Richard Cobbett, who paid O'Connell the compliment of referring to him as 'the member for Ireland.' But even within this circle, there could be ferocious polemical exchanges and O'Connell and Cobbett eventually came to rhetorical blows with each other. Ultimately, very few British radicals were willing to support Irish demands for the Repeal of the Act of Union.

A good example of O'Connell's relations with English political reformers was John Bright, who shared his belief in agitation as a harbinger of reform, but was firmly opposed to Repeal and, at the end of his career, to Home Rule.

The British liberal and free trade advocate, Richard Cobden, once wrote that O'Connell was 'the most potent champion that was ever raised up by heaven to defend the cause of good government against the arts of tyrants and bigots.'

In the years that followed, Cobden became more ambivalent towards O'Connell, doubting the wisdom of his strategy, as he put it, of 'arraying the inferior race against the superior'. Even though O'Connell consistently supported the repeal of the Corn Laws, Cobden, felt 'a complete antagonism and repulsion' towards O'Connell and his supporters.

By coincidence, Cobden was in Genoa the day after O'Connell's death and spoke with members of the Liberator's travelling party including his physician. Cobden mused that O'Connell might have lived to 90 'if he had moderated his mental excitement a few years ago.' Cobden may not have heeded his own

advice for he died at the age of 60!The diarist, Charles Greville, offers another contemporary British assessment of O'Connell. In 1828, he predicted that he would probably fail as an orator in the Commons. Greville acknowledged that without O'Connell the Catholic question would never have been carried, but added that his 'bad taste' and 'scurrility' had 'made him lose the lustre of his former praise'.

O'Connell and the historians: For most historians of 19th century Britain, O'Connell is a sideline figure. Writing at the end of the 19th century, the historian, William Nassau Molesworth, wrote of O'Connell's 'varied and persuasive eloquence' and felt that he exhibited 'a rare mixture of caution an audacity'. His 'versatile genius' was able to goad the Irish people almost to madness and then 'restrain them in the wildest transports of their fury'. He led them to display just enough violence enough 'to terrify their opponents without breaking out into open insurrection'. In his early 20th century History of England, CRL Fletcher saw O'Connell as 'the first great agitator', but also an example of Irish ingratitude as, according to this view, whenever they secured concessions, it only whetted their appetite for more.

In a biography of O'Connell written in 1888, J.A. Hamilton acknowledged him as a very great genius as an orator, who spoke clearly and calmly in the Commons. On the negative side, he blamed O'Connell for being 'extravagant in the abuse of his enemies' although he did, by way of extenuation, acknowledge how vigorously and remorselessly he had always been attacked by opponents. He argued that O'Connell should have enlisted English support, but 'he jarred upon them, offended them, alarmed them.' The violence of his language was, in his estimation, a misfortune to his country and a discredit to himself.

More contemporary British historians have been more positive about O'Connell, generally recognising him as a political innovator. Kenneth Morgan credited him with 'the expert management of Irish opinion' while for Jonathan Clarke, he was 'a Catholic politician of genius' having created in the Catholic Association 'the first mass movement'. For Norman Davies, O'Connell's Catholic Association 'the most effective political lobby of the day.'

The conservative historian, Paul Johnson, writing in the 1990s in his book, The Birth of the Modern, 1815-1830, said that it was O'Connell's 'very Irishness which enabled him to speak for his country as no-one had ever spoken before and to become the first modern populist politician.' He attributed to O'Connell 'a political brain of great originality' and considerable organisational skills that enabled 'to create the first modern machine of mass politics'.

For Eric Hobsbawn, writing from a left-wing perspective, O'Connell's aim was not national independence but 'moderate middle class Irish autonomy by agreement with the Whigs.'

Douglas Hurd in his biography of Peel viewed O'Connell as 'a romantic radical' and described Catholic emancipation as 'one of the great reforms of British history' which had an effect on the politics of Britain as well as Ireland because 'for the first time a pressure group outside of Parliament had forced Parliament to alter the Constitution.'

Perhaps the last British word on O'Connell should be left to Gladstone, who was impressed by his cosmopolitanism epitomised by a principled opposition to slavery. For Gladstone, O'Connell was 'as thorough an English Liberal as if he had had no Ireland to think of' and supported whatever trended 'to advance human happiness and freedom.'

Conclusions:

Daniel O'Connell was a significant figure in British politics during an age of political reform when radical causes were on the rise. He was a member of the parliament that passed the Great Reform Act of 1832, and indeed the votes of his fellow Irish MPs were vital to the passage of that reform. He skilfully used his position in parliament to extract concessions from the Whig Government.

His problem was that he had no alternative to an alliance with the Whigs. And, while he benefited from a growing swell of support in Britain for Catholic Emancipation, this did not extend to the Repeal of the Union. Those who believe that O'Connell ought to have faced down Peel in 1843 and secured Repeal in the 1840s should consider how willing senior figures were to use force against expressions of dissent in England itself. Wellington once remarked that 'the people of England are very quiet ... but if they won't be quiet there is a way to make them.' In the political climate of his time, O'Connell went as far as he could have gone in pressing Ireland's claims at Westminster. He laid the foundations for a distinctive Irish contribution to the politics of the British Parliament by successors like Butt, Parnell, Dillon and Redmond.

Daniel Mulhall is Ireland's Ambassador in London