GCE AS & A Level Student Guidance History A2 Unit 2: The Act of Union Options 3 Version 1 CCEA GCE History from September 2009 The Act of Union Principal Promoters of the Union William Pitt (Pitt the Younger) Born in 1759, William Pitt was the intellectually precocious but physically delicate son of the 1st Earl of Chatham (Pitt the Elder). He was educated privately and at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge. Called to the Bar in 1780, he entered the House of Commons, where he soon made his mark, the following year. Commenting on Pitt’s maiden speech Edmund Burke observed: ‘He was not merely a chip off the old block, but the old block itself.’ This perception helped shape his meteoric rise. At the age of 23 he became Chancellor of the Exchequer and, at 24, Britain’s youngest ever Prime Minister, a distinction of which he is unlikely to be ever deprived. Pitt was a young man with unusually clear sight of what he wished to achieve in politics. Among his political goals were good relations with the newly independent American colonies, a reduction in the National Debt, parliamentary reform and the reorganisation of the East India Company. With respect to Ireland, he wished to effect a union. Charles Cornwallis, 1st Marquis Cornwallis Cornwallis was a widower, not very rich and an extremely hard worker who succeeded Lord Camden as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland on 20 June 1798. A keen professional soldier, he combined the office with that of Commander-in-Chief of the army in Ireland. The previous year when he was offered the latter position he declined because the government’s unwillingness to accede to his demand that concessions be made to Roman Catholics. Cornwallis’s appointment to both offices was clearly recognition that both an effective military response to the 1798 rebellion and a new political initiative were necessary. Cornwallis’s career hitherto revealed him to be a competent soldier with a fairly shrewd political brain. Although he was personally opposed to taxing the American colonists, he had served in America between 1775 and 1783. At Camden, South Carolina, in 1780 he had defeated a much larger force than his own and at Guildford in 1781 he had acquitted himself well. Later in the same year he found himself besieged at Yorktown, Virginia, and ultimately forced to surrender, an event that may be regarded as the prelude to the overall British defeat. However, his career did not suffer unduly and between 1786 and 1793 he was both Governor-General of India and Commander-in-Chief, during which time he defeated Tippoo Sahib (or Tipu Sultan). With respect to the 1798 rebellion, Cornwallis sought a speedy restoration of ‘complete and perfect tranquillity’ that was to be achieved by a policy combining ‘firmness and lenience’. In practice this meant the United Irish leaders should be punished and their followers pardoned. Cornwallis was firmly committed to the Union and strongly in favour of ‘coupling’ the Union with Catholic Emancipation. He was most disappointed when Pitt decided to implement his Irish policy in stages and in early 1799 fought a rearguard action to have concessions to Roman Catholics included in the Union scheme. Version 1 1 CCEA GCE History from September 2009 Cornwallis as Lord Lieutenant was viewed with distaste by some sections of Protestant opinion on account of his leniency towards the United Irish rank and file, his support for concessions to Roman Catholics and his view that 1798 was the result of Jacobinism rather than Roman Catholicism. Cornwallis resigned in 1801 after George III had vetoed further discussion of Catholic Emancipation. Robert Stewart, Lord Castlereagh If the Union was pre-eminently Pitt’s project and Cornwallis was the head of the Irish administration, Castlereagh, as Chief Secretary, was the man chiefly responsible for steering the Union through the Irish Parliament. Of Presbyterian stock, Castlereagh was the son of Robert Stewart (subsequently the 1st Marquis of Londonderry), a Co Donegal landowner who purchased an estate in Co Down in 1744 and represented the latter county in the Irish Parliament from 1771 to 1783. His son, also Robert Stewart, the future Lord Castlereagh, was born in Dublin on 18 June 1769. He was educated at the Royal School, Armagh, and at St John’s College, Cambridge. In a famous election he too became MP for Co Down. Although at that time he was viewed as the popular candidate – the avowed opponent of the Church of Ireland, Dublin Castle and the Marquis of Downshire, and on this basis secured the votes of the Presbyterian farmers and weavers – the young Robert Stewart had only limited sympathy for radical ideas. Events at home and abroad persuaded Castlereagh that it was necessary to support Pitt’s government. The appointment of his uncle, Lord Camden, as Lord Lieutenant in 1795, brought him within the ambit of Dublin castle. In July 1797 he accepted office as Keeper of the Signet and in March 1798 he assumed the duties of the Chief Secretary, Thomas Pelham, the holder of that office, being in extremely poor health. Thus, he was acting Chief Secretary during the rebellion. Castlereagh’s view on the suppression of the insurrection was identical to those of Cornwallis: ‘firmness and leniency’. In November 1798 he became Chief Secretary in his own right. As early as 1792 Castlereagh had contemplated the possibility of a union. Fearing the separation of Ireland from Great Britain, by 1798 he was absolutely convinced by the rebellion and the threat of French invasion that union was essential. Initially Castlereagh would appear to have seriously underestimated the scale of the opposition to the Union, but with great skill and hard work he converted early parliamentary defeat into a substantial parliamentary majority for the measure. Like Cornwallis, he viewed the Union as the prelude to Catholic Emancipation. He also believed in the abolition of tithes and the state payment of Roman Catholic clergy. It was his conviction that this package of measures would bind the Roman Catholic population to the Union. Castlereagh, along with Pitt and Cornwallis, resigned when George III thwarted the introduction of Catholic Emancipation. The Earl of Clare The principal Irish advocate for the Union was John Fitzgibbon, Earl of Clare. Whereas Pitt, Cornwallis and Castlereagh, initially at least, viewed the Union as a package including Version 1 2 CCEA GCE History from September 2009 Catholic emancipitation, Clare was diametrically opposed to Catholic relief. He even claimed that his visit to England in the autumn of 1798 persuaded the Cabinet to abandon their ‘popish projects’ and bring forward a Union ‘unencumbered’ by Catholic emancipitation. Ironically this avowed opponent of Catholic claims was the son of a Roman Catholic who became a convert to Protestantism in order to practice law. Normally people of similar background tended to be sympathetic to Catholic claims – Edmund Burke being an obvious example – but Fitzgibbon chose to identify himself strongly with the Protestant interest. Fitzgibbon was born near Donnybrook, Dublin, in 1749. Academically and intellectually distinguished, he was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and Christ College, Oxford. Called to the Irish bar in 1772, his brilliant courtroom performances helped him build up a large lucrative practice. In 1778 he entered the Irish House of Commons and rapidly established himself as an effective parliamentarian. His parliamentary success – like his success in court – was based upon his mental agility, his sharp tongue and his mental courage. In 1783 he became Attorney General and six years later he became the first Irishman to be Lord Chancellor of Ireland for almost a century, being raised to the peerage as Baron Fitzgibbon. He received his earldom in 1795 and a British peerage in 1799. As early as 1788, during the Regency crisis, Fitzgibbon told the Irish House of Commons ‘the only security of your liberty is the connection with Great Britain, and the gentleman who risked breaking the connection must make up their minds to a union’. Lord Westmoreland, the Lord Lieutenant between 1790 and 1795, observed that Fitzgibbon had ‘no God but English government’. His constant opposition to reform was a reflection of his strongly authoritarian nature and his conviction that any widening of the political nation to include Roman Catholics would endanger the British connection. Hence his opposition to the concession of the early 1790s. In 1793 Fitzgibbon denounced the Catholic Relief Bill during the second reading in the Irish House of Lords as ‘an indiscreet and precipitate experiment’. In Fitzgibbon’s estimation Roman Catholics, if granted political rights, would instinctively strive for predominance. ‘The reign of James II, he alleged, demonstrated vividly how Roman Catholics behaved when they possessed political power. For Fitzgibbon the penal laws were ‘a code forced on the Parliament of Ireland by harsh necessity’. Donal McCartney, in The Dawning of Democracy: Ireland 1800–1870 (1987), commented on Fitzgibbon’s political creed and support for the Union: Lord Clare, one of the leading Irish architects of the Union, had reminded his colleagues in the Irish House of Lords that, despite all rhetorical claims to the contrary, they were not the Irish nation. They were, instead colonials who owed all they held in Ireland to successive English monarchs. These monarchs had conferred the power and property of the land upon three sets of adventurers who had poured into the country at the end of three Irish rebellions. Confisication was their sole title, and they were ‘hemmed in on every side by the old inhabitants of the island brooding over their discontent in sullen indignation’. The Catholic natives were awaiting the opportunity to retake their lands, re-establish their persecuted religion and re-assert their political supremacy.