Historical Sketch of the College Historical Society (1770-2020)
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Historical Sketch of the College Historical Society (1770-2020) The Forerunners The College Historical Society sprang from two associations of a similar character which were founded in the middle of the eighteenth century: Burke’s Club and the Historical Club. The Club founded by Edmund Burke and a few of his fellow students is the earliest debating society composed of students of the University of which any definite record remains. The minute book of this club, a treasured possession of the College Historical Society, relates that the first meeting took place on Tuesday, April 21st, 1747, in a house in George’s Lane, now South Great George’s Street, the members present being Edmund Burke, Matthew Mohun, William Dennis, Andrew Buck, Richard Shackelton and Richard Ardesoif. Mohun, for his ill conduct and neglect was later “formally expelled the Society for ever.” The preamble to the Club’s laws stated its intention to provide “fair opportunities of correcting our taste, regulating and enriching our judgement, brightening our wit, and enlarging our knowledge, and of being serviceable to others in the same things. The business of the Club was to be “speeching, reading, writing and arguing, in Morality, History, Criticism, Politics and all the useful branches of philosophy”; the first law related to the conduct of members and ordained that ‘decency and good manners, virtue and religion, must guide their whole behaviour, and no word, gesture or action, contrary thereto, pass uncensured.’ Burke, who sat ssix times as President and twice as Censor, was the moving spirit and was never once absent from the meetings. The last record in the minute book is of the meeting held on Friday, Jul 10th, 1747. The Historical Club was instituted on October 24, 1753. It was founded to cultivate historical knowledge, but soon began to hold monthly debates. It met, as had Burke’s Club outside College, through composed entirely of students. He last quarter of the eighteenth century was the golden age of Irish eloquence, and among the great orator of this period the names of Burke, and of Grattan, Flood, Yelverton, Hussey- Burgh and other member so the Historical Club held an honoured place. The Early years of the College Historical Society: March 1770-80 The College Historical Society sprang from “the embers of another Institution”- this Historical Club. The new Society met for the first time on Wednesday, March 31st, 1770, when thirteen students ‘who first united into a body and obtained the use of the Common Room from the Provost and Senior Fellows’ were present. The Society had codified laws, and its meetings, which began at si o’clock, included a history examination, a debate and the submission of essay and poems. The office of Auditors is original to the College Historical Society, and the title has been adopted by many other societies in College and elsewhere. The Society soon established itself, furnishing comfortable rooms, awarding medals and collecting ‘subscriptions for the relief of the poor at this period of distress and misery.’ John Hely Hutchinson, the controversial Provost elected in 1774, who opened the University to Roman Catholics, was a good friend to the Society. As the Patriot Party of the Volunteers gather strength, the Society took an increasing interest in Irish politics. At its first Irish debate, held in January 1779, it rejected the proposal of a Union between Great Britain and Ireland, and in the following months supported the Volunteers and unanimously approved of the ‘secessions of America.’ To the Rebellion of 1798 On November 19th, 1783, Theobald Wolfe Tone was elected a member of the Society and pursued an outstanding career in it. As the political atmosphere in Ireland grew more exciting, this was reflected in the Society, which Tone once took to task for being ‘a theatre of War and Tumult.’ Tone was a contemporary in the Society of Thomas Addis Emmet, who helped to establish the Societ;s reciprocal membership (still in existence) with the Speculative Society of Edinburgh. In 1798, however, the Society went too far in its independene. It refused to exclude from its meetings a sometime member who had been banned by the Board from the College and the Board retaliated by expelling the Society from College. The Society contrived to meet outside College, in William Street, but by the end of 1794 some members had decided to accept the Bord’s stringent conditions for readmission, which included as one of the fundamental regulations the stricture that ‘No question of modern politics shall be debated,’ but the spirit of this law was frequently infringed. The reconstituted Society flourished. In 1795 the enthusiasm of the Trinity students for the patriots led to their losing the privilege of watching the proceedings of the Irish House of Commons from a gallery of their own, because after a speech by Grattan against the recall of the popular viceroy Lord Fitzwilliam, the students, recalled Lord Edward Walsh, ‘rose as one man shouting and cheering with the boisterous tumult of a public meeting… We were pushed out in a heap without the slightest ceremony, and were never again gain suffered to enter as privileged persons.’ In 1797 two members who subsequently distinguished themselves joined the Society, Thomas Moore and Robert Emmet, and the two became firm friends. In 1798, Lord Clare, the Lord Chancellor of Ireland and Vice-Chancellor of the University, held a General Visitation, during which it was discovered that there were four committees of the United Irishmen and some Orange Societies within College. Nineteen students (eight of them members of the College Historical Society) were expelled, including Robert Emmet. So when the ’98 Rebellion began on May 23, the Society took a stance opoosed to that of its ex-Auditor, Wolfe Tone. At a meeting of only ten members they resolved to enter ‘with the warmest feeling into the common cause of their country, and … to join heart and hand in defence of their liberties and laws.’ The Society then adjourned until the rising ended. To the Second Expulsion, 1815 An echo of Emmet’s insurrection appears in the Journals for November 16th, 1803, when a medal, open to all members of the University, was offered for the best elegy on the death of Lord Kilwarden, who had been killed during the insurrection. The years which followed were turbulent ones for the Society, and relations with the Board deteriorated. There were many disorderly meetings. During the 1809-10 Session a debate on universal toleration led to the Auditor being summoned before the Provost, and being questioned ‘as to certain inflammatory expressions said to have been used.’ In 1812 the Provost, Dr Thomas Elrington, objected to some of the subjects chosen for debate, including universal suffrage and capital punishment. He even objected to the motion ‘Was Brutus justifiable in putting Julius Caesar to death?’ on the grounds that ‘to admit a defence to be made for assassination must be injurious to morality.’ The Board imposed more restrictive regulations in 1813, and many experienced members were excluded from the Society. Meetings became even less orderly, and the following year the Provost intervened in a Society dispute to strike two participants off the list of members. The Society protested against ever- increasing Board severity, and eventually in 1815 came to the conclusion that the Board was determined to extinguish it. In a dramatic final debate on February 15th, 1815, a committee of seven was set up, ‘for the purpose of resigning for the present into the custody of the Provost and the Board the rooms hitherto appropriated to the use of the Historical Society, the late regulations of the Board being in the opinion of the Society inconsistent with the successful prosecution of the objects for which it was instituted…’ and then the Society adjourned sine die. Provost Elrington’s notebook for December 10th, 1815, reads: ‘An application having been made by some of the students for the re-institution of the Historical Society, it was refused’. One of Elrington’s pupils. Lord Cloncurry. Later wrote of him as: “A learned man, but stupid and blockish, and thoroughly imbued with the narrowest views of his class and profession. It was he who accomplished the suppression of the Historical Society, then obnoxious to all who dreaded progression, as a nursery of genius and patriotism, and as opening a common field whereon the rising generation of Irishmen were learning mutual respect of each other…’ The Extern Society 1815-43 After 1815 the Society held its meetings outside College, and continued as a vigorous debating society. Among its members during this period were Isaac Butt, an outstanding orator, who in 1932 attempted unsuccessfully to have the Society readmitted to College, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, novelist and poet, Thomas Davis and John Black Dillon. Early in 1841 Davis and Dillon were among several members of the Society who joined O’onnell’s Repeal Association, and later helped largely to form the Young Ireland party. Dillon’s address to the Society as an ex-President in November 1841 was entitled ‘Patriotism’. The Nation newspaper was founded in 1842 by Davis, Dillon and Gavan Duffy. In 1843 Davis was elected a Honorary Member of the Society. 1843 also saw the foundation within College of an Intern College Historical Society, at the request of many students. Several member of the Extern Society, led by William Connor Magee, later Archbishop of York, brought about ht euniting of the two Societies, and in May 1843 they held their first joint meeting in College, with the Provost in the chair. MacDonnell (in the ‘Life of Archbishop Magee’) writes of it: ‘The meeting was crowded… It was a long series of oratorical triumphs.