Accession of Queen Victoria—No Change in the
Ministry—The Tithe Question settled—The Poor Relief Act passed—Rise of
the Young Ireland Party— Foundation of Queen's College, Belfast—The
Report of the Devon Commission —Low Rate of Wages in Ulster—The Famine
Years—Emigration to America from Ulster—Ulster Tenant-Right—Smith
O'Brien's Rebellion—John Mitchel, an Ulster Man, concerned—Shooting
Affray—Orangemen and Ribbonmen at Dolly's Brae—The Government and Earl
of Roden—The Queen visits Ireland.
The accession of Queen Victoria in June, 1837,
strengthened the Ministry. Instead of having the influence of the Crown
against him, as in William's reign, the Premier, who was received and
retained with marked favour, had now the advantage of the fact that the
young Queen, who had just completed her eighteenth year, was dependent
on him for guidance and advice in constitutional matters. Parliament was
prorogued on the 17th of July by Her Majesty in person, when the only
subject on which the Speaker, on his attendance with the Commons to hear
the royal address in the Lords, could reply concerning Ireland was the
settlement of the tithe question. Parliament was immediately afterwards
dissolved. The elections were conducted with unusual violence, even for
Ireland, and a large majority of Roman Catholics and Liberals were
returned. The registers of the electors were said to have been tampered
with, and an association was organized to collect money to contest the
elections of many of the Irish members. This was one of the first
subjects taken up by the new Parliament, which met in November.
A Bill introduced in 1837, but which was suspended by
the dissolution of Parliament which followed the demise of the Crown,
"proposed the erection of 100 Workhouses, where relief and employment
should be afforded to the poor, infirm, and able-bodied". The Bill
passed in July, 1838, after an important amendment had been introduced
by the House of Lords, at the instance of the Duke of Wellington,
whereby each union was subdivided into electoral districts, each
district to be chargeable with its own poor, in order that every parish
should bear its own burden. "On the whole", says Sir Rowland
Blennerhassett, "the operation of the poor law must be pronounced to
have been successful. There was at at once a perceptible diminution of
the crowds of beggars which used to be seen on the roads near the
villages and towns, and whose numbers and wild and withered appearance
have been so often described in the writings of men who travelled in
Ireland."
O'Connell now founded the Repeal Association, and,
making the Union the object of his attack, insisted that it was the
origin and sole cause of the misfortunes of Ireland. In this he was ably
aided by the writers in The Nation newspaper (founded in 1842),
of whom the most prominent were Thomas Davis and Gavan Duffy. These
writers became known as the "Young Ireland" party, and they introduced a
new element into political life in Ireland. "There are in Ireland",
wrote one of the party, "two nations, interfused yet distinct; with
separate traditions, and differing in blood, temperament, and religion."
The idea of the Young Irelanders was to get the two nations to work
together; to recognize, as in the days of the United Irishmen, that they
had become one people, and that they had interests in common, with a
common foe in the British Parliament. The two nations were, of course,
the inhabitants of Ulster and largely those of Leinster, as opposed to
the population of Munster and Connaught. O'Connell's repeal agitation
ended in his being arrested, tried, found guilty, and sentenced to
twelve months' imprisonment. His trial forms no part of the
history of Ulster, although O'Connell undoubtedly
represented Ireland, and he had a powerful influence in the north.
The parliamentary proceedings of 1845 were marked by
the introduction of Bills for the better manangement of Charitable
Trusts in Ireland. At the opening of the session Sir Robert Peel carried
a Bill, in the face of much opposition, whereby £26,000 per annum was
appropriated out of the Consolidated Fund for the better sustenance and
payment of the students and professors of the Roman Catholic College of
Maynooth. Sir James Graham followed up this measure of conciliation by
one of still greater magnitude. He, in the course of the session,
carried through Parliament the grant of £100,000 for the establishment
of three colleges for secular education, and in order to avoid the
possibility of any religious differences he determined to refrain from
instituting any faculty for theology in any of them. The colleges were
shortly afterwards founded, one of them being established in Belfast.
For this purpose the Academical Institution of the Presbyterians, to
which four Professors of Divinity were attached, and which was under the
direction of the General Assembly of Ulster, with a grant from
Parliament of £2100 per annum, was handed over for the general benefit
of the new Queen's College.
Ireland was now threatened with tribulation in
comparison with which the sufferings she had hitherto experienced faded
into insignificance. Famine, that most awful of all enemies, was soon to
hold sway over the unhappy land. In 1845 the population was over
8,000,000, of whom it was calculated that at least one-half were
dependent on the potato for subsistence. The potato enabled a large
family to live on food produced in abundance at a trifling cost, and, as
a result, the increase of the population had been enormous. There had,
however, been no corresponding improvement in the material and social
condition of the people. Their condition was deplorable, and their
sufferings, borne with exemplary patience, were, in the opinion of the
Census Commissioners of 1841, greater than that which the people of any
other country in Europe had to endure.
In the Digest of Evidence given before the Devon
Commissioners we read: "In the counties of Antrim, Armagh, Down,
Londonderry, and Tyrone, the most general rate of daily wages appeared
to be 10d. a day in winter, and 1s. in summer. In Donegal,
Fermanagh, Monaghan, Louth, and Meath, 8d. in winter, and 10d. in
summer; and in all the other counties, except Dublin, where 1s.
per day was usually paid, the general daily pay seemed to be 8d." Except
in Ulster, where the linen industry held its own, great masses of the
population of Ireland were in consequence thrown back on the soil for
subsistence, and over a large portion of the country had nothing save a
few potatoes between themselves and starvation. In the debates of 1843
it was pointed out that the admitted deterioration in the quality of the
potato was likely to be followed by serious consequences. The soil,
exhausted by the crop, and not invigorated by any restoratives, was
every year producing an increasingly weaker plant, inviting, if it did
not actually produce, the attack of the blight, which in September,
1845, again began to appear in different parts of the country, and by
the end of the year was making terrible ravages.
In January, 1846, Peel introduced a measure for the
Repeal of the Corn Laws, which became law in June. The duty on imported
corn was reduced at once to 4s. per quarter; and after three
years it was to be reduced to the nominal rate of 1s. per
quarter. Peel's supporters were for a time known as the Protectionist
party, under the leadership of Lord Stanley, afterwards Earl of Derby.
On the very day on which the Lords passed the Repeal Act the Ministry
was defeated on the question of the Irish Crimes Bill. Peel at once
resigned, and in July Lord John Russell became Premier.
In Ireland, suffering and poverty brought with them
their usual concomitant of crime and outrage. In the course of 1846 the
constabulary was increased to 10,000 men, and large bodies of troops
were poured into the distracted country. Large stores of provisions were
also poured in. Lord John Russell introduced a Bill for the construction
of public works in Ireland, the cost of which was to be defrayed out of
the Consolidated Fund. Lord John also obtained the sanction of
Parliament to a grant of £50,000 for the most distressed districts, upon
urgent representations made of the state of the country by Lord
Enniskillen and others possessed of large landed property in the
country. In March, 1847, the number of those employed on the public
works is given at 734,000. Nevertheless, in remote districts, where the
famine was at its worst, men, women, and children died of hunger by
scores, owing to the difficulties of communication. " Have we
ever known or read of anything surpassing it?" Mr. Horsman exclaimed in
the House of Commons; "a rich Empire in a Christian age! One inspector
likens it to a country devastated by an enemy: it is more as if the
destroying angel had swept over it—the whole population struck down; the
air a pestilence; the fields a solitude; the chapel deserted; the priest
and the pauper famishing together; no inquest, no rites, no record even
of the dead; the highroad a charnel-house, the land a chaos; a ruined
proprietary, a panic-struck absconding tenantry; the soil untilled, the
workhouse a moral pest; death, desolation, despair, reigning through the
land."
By August, 1847, the famine may be said to have
terminated, and the public works were wound up, the destitute, amounting
to about 3,000,000 were kept alive by the action of Relief Committees,
materially aided by the splendid munificence of British charity. But
Ireland was now experiencing further changes. The population, which had
hitherto been constantly increasing, was now rapidly decreasing. Fever
came in the wake of famine, and continued (long after the potato blight
had ceased) to decimate the people. Under these combined disasters the
great mover ment of emigration from Ireland to the United States of
America began which has continued ever since. Four years earlier the
emigration had been to the Canadas, John Mitchel stating that one
M'Mullin, an Emigration Agent, inserted in a Londonderry paper, in 1843,
an announcement to the effect that: "A favourable opportunity presents
itself in the course of the present month, for Quebec, to gentlemen
residing in the Counties of Londonderry, Donegal, Tyrone, or Fermanagh,
who wish to send out to the Canadas the overstock tenantry belonging to
their estates, as a moderate rate of passage will be taken, and six
months' credit given for a lump sum to any gentleman requiring such
accommodation".
In the early years of the famine emigration on a
large scale was a novelty, and in too many instances the arrangements
were hopelessly inadequate for the comforts of the emigrants. Except
where a few wealthy and benevolent landlords (whose efforts in this
respect were referred to in Parliament with approbation by Sir Robert
Peel) were able to see that the proper conditions were fulfilled the
horrors of the journey to America were such that Mr. de Vere, who took a
passage in the steerage of an emigrant ship and remained on board two
months, describes the "hundreds of poor people", as being "huddled
together without light, without air, wallowing in filth, and breathing a
fetid atmosphere, sick in body, dispirited in heart, the fevered
patients lying between the sound, in sleeping-places so narrow as almost
to deny them the power of indulging by a change of position the natural
restlessness of the disease; by their agonized ravings disturbing those
around, and predisposing them through the effects of the imagination to
imbibe the contagion; living without food or medicine, except as
administered by the hand of casual charity; dying without the voice of
spiritual consolation, and buried in the deep without the rites of the
Church". Mr. de Vere's letter, describing what he saw, was adopted by
the Colonial Office as a public document.
The emigration from Ulster, notwithstanding the
statements of Mitchel, was not so numerous as from other parts of
Ireland; for while the rest of the country was clamouring for what
O'Connell called "fixity of tenure", Ulster enjoyed a kind of unwritten
law, or established custom, which gave tenants permanence of tenure in
their lands. It is known as the Tenant-Right of Ulster. By virtue of
that tenant-right a farmer, though his tenure might be nominally at
will, could not be ejected so long as he paid his rent; and if he
wished to remove to another part of the country he could sell his
goodwill in the farm to an incoming tenant. Of course the greater
his improvements were the larger the price his tenant-right would
command; in other words, the improvements made by his own or his
father's industry were his to dispose of. This custom prevented rents
from being arbitrarily raised in proportion to the improved value; so
that in many cases lands held at will in Ulster, and subject to
an ample rent, were sold by one tenant-at-will to another tenant-at-will
at full half the fee-simple value of the land. Conveyances were made of
it; it was a valuable property, and any violent invasion of it would, as
a witness told the Devon Commission, have "made Down another Tipperary".
This custom was almost wholly confined to Ulster. It was by no means
created or commenced by the terms of the Plantation of Ulster, but was a
relic of the ancient free social polity of the Irish, and had continued
in Ulster longer than in the other provinces simply because Ulster was
the last portion of Ireland to be brought under British rule and forced
to exchange for feudal tenures the ancient system of tribal lands.
The year 1848 was stormy all over Europe. In France
there was a third Revolution. There were tumults at Vienna, Berlin, and
Rome. There were Chartist riots in England, and a great meeting
assembled on the 10th of April on Kennington Common to escort Feargus
O'Connor to Parliament with a petition embodying their demands. These
disturbances were taken advantage of by William Smith O'Brien and other
members of the Repeal Society (O'Connell having died in May, 1847) to
excite the people to rebel. A feeble rising took place in Tipperary, but
it was suppressed by a few policemen. The leaders were soon taken, four
being condemned to death, but the sentence was afterwards changed to
exile. They were ultimately released one by one, or allowed to escape.
The northern province was represented in this "Cabbage-garden" affair
(as it was called from the fact of Smith O'Brien having concealed
himself in such a garden) by John Mitchel, the son of a Unitarian
minister of Ulster. He remained till his death an uncompromising enemy
of England.
At this time circumstances occurred in Ulster which
were peculiarly vexatious and embarrassing to the Government. The Party
Processions Act of 1829 had for some time expired, when the Orangemen in
the north determined on the 12th of July, the anniversary of the Battle
of the Boyne, to pay a compliment to the Earl of Roden, who was
considered the head of the Protestant party in Ireland. Accordingly
large numbers of Orangemen assembled on the morning of the 12th arrayed
in scarves and wearing favours, and variously armed, and proceeded to
Tollymore Park, the seat of the Earl. They set out, some on foot and a
large number on horseback, carrying the flags and banners usually
exhibited in the old days of Orange ascendancy, and reached the Pass of
Dolly's Brae, near Castlewellan, the summit of a little height which was
in the direct route to the Park. Here they found a large body of
Ribbonmen collected, also armed; and a number of police had also
assembled to keep the peace; and, chiefly through the efforts of the
latter, peace was maintained.
On arriving at the mansion the procession was
received by the Earl, to whom an address was presented expressing great
admiration for his conduct as a Protestant nobleman. This having been
graciously replied to by Earl Roden, the members of the procession were
entertained in the Park, and, as was natural, much enthusiasm was
displayed, and in high spirits the Orangemen fired guns and made
speeches. On their return journey they found the Ribbonmen still
occupying their former position. It was agreed that no gun should be
fired, and silence was preserved as the Orangemen defiled through the
pass. It was then dusk, and all might have been well but that a lighted
squib was thrown into the midst of the Orangemen, by whose hand it was
never discovered.
The Orangemen, excited by the apprehension of an
attack, immediately turned and fired. This the Ribbonmen returned, and,
notwithstanding the efforts of the police, a sort of running fire was
kept up, by which several on both sides were wounded and six of the
Ribbonmen were killed on the spot. Everyone now desired to escape, with
the result that the ground was soon cleared of the assailed and the
assailants. A commission was appointed to enquire into the facts, and
the result of the investigation was a decision on the part of the
Government to remove several magistrates from the Commission of the
Peace and to displace the Earl of Roden from the Lord-Lieutenancy of the
County Armagh.
With the view of restoring confidence, and evoking
the sentiment of personal loyalty to the Throne on the side of law and
the existing form of government, the Queen, in August, 1849, visited
Ireland, and received an enthusiastic welcome from all classes and
creeds.