When the British Parliament created the United Kingdom with the Act of Union of 1800, formally conjoining Ireland and Great Britain after several centuries of colonialism and nominal Irish home rule, the British had high hopes that the union would bring the obstreperous Irish to heel as faithful and dutiful participants in the burgeoning empire. Yet for the great majority of the Irish population, the union had little effect other than to bind them ever more tightly to a nation that exploited their land and labor while refusing them its liberties and opportunities. Nearly three decades later, the passage of Catholic Emancipation, which allowed Catholics to participate more or less fully in British civil society for the first time in nearly three centuries, once again seemed to hold out the possibility of reconciling the two nations. Yet this measure, coming too late and offering too little, likewise did little to improve relations. A study of key documents suggests that British policies toward Ireland during the period from 1800 to the mid-1830s failed because they were fundamentally anti-Irish and frankly exploitative, forcing most of the Irish populace into desperate economic circumstances. Because the British could never bring themselves to address the most serious concerns of the Irish people or to look beyond their own immediate comfort and security, many Irish came to the conclusion that the only hope for their own interests lay in devolution.
As with the Act of Union that had wedded England and Scotland nearly a century earlier, the Act of Union of 1800 was first and foremost an effort to remove an external threat from Britain's borders. Ireland had presented a continual liability to Britain's security since the age of the Tudors, which saw the establishment of the first English plantations and the first efforts to exert Protestant control over a passionately Catholic island. Irish Catholics had sided with the Catholic Stuart kings throughout the Seventeenth Century and had supported the Jacobite uprising of 1745. But the rebellion in 1798 of Theobald Wolfe Tone and his radical republican separatist group, the United Irishmen, had introduced two new elements into the long-simmering conflict that for Britain were untenable: first, Wolfe Tone's call for complete independence from Britain, and second, the arrival, by Wolfe Tone's request, of enemy French troops on Irish soil. These were the national security considerations that prompted action by Parliament to finally bring Ireland into the fold.
Despite lofty language in the act itself about securing "the essential interests of Great Britain and Ireland" both, the circumstances surrounding the union ensured that it would not secure the interests of most of the Irish population (Alan O'Day and John Stevenson, eds., Irish Historical Documents Since 1800, 6). Indeed, from the beginning, the Irish were not even proportionately represented at Westminster, making up only twenty percent of the House of Commons where on the basis of sheer population they should have had double that percentage (O'Day, 7). Furthermore, only Protestants were allowed to sit in Parliament, meaning that the seats went overwhelmingly to landowners who shared far more in common with their English and Scottish colleagues than with the Irishmen who rented and tended their land. The Act of Union also formally established the Episcopal United Church of England and Ireland as the state religion, thus reinforcing the well-established identification between Protestantism and British rule (O'Day, 8).
What the Act of Union did not do was to address in any way the extreme inequities of the Irish economy; if anything, it exacerbated them. Most of the land was owned by a small number of wealthy landlords, some of whom did not even live in Ireland and many of whom managed their estates from afar, whether in Dublin or London. The vast majority of the population were renters who leased sections of land, farmed them, and paid rent in kind. Johan Friedrich Hering, a German soldier in the British Army, described the conditions in which the peasants lived as "desolate," "wretched," and "dismal": "The people who emerged from the low mud cabins appeared silent and stupid" (O'Day, 18). These conditions, far from being alleviated with the Act of Union, were, to the contrary, made even worse with the passage of laws written by Irish MPs (themselves landlords) to confer greater powers of "ejectment and distress" on the landlords (O'Day, 25). Inattentive landlords "acted with the most extraordinary want of foresight," wrote one landlord's agent in 1815, by subdividing the land into portions too small to support a family and then extracting exorbitant rents (O'Day, 22). When the rents could not be paid, the landlords would move to evict with the full backing of courts and custom. Because this toxic economic relationship between landlords and tenants was enshrined in, and enforced by, British law, animus against the landlords became all too easily conflated with a growing all-purpose hatred of England and the desire to see Ireland freed altogether from its union with Britain. To rebels like Robert Emmett, who led an abortive uprising in 1803, the union was tantamount to "a foreign nation [holding] my country in subjection" (O'Day, 16).
Irish peasants were further degraded, both economically and psychologically, by the legal requirement that they tithe ten percent of what they produced or earned yearly to the Episcopal Church, regardless of whether they were Anglicans, Catholics, or dissenters. This economic intrusion undoubtedly made the existence of the established church far more galling for most Irish Catholics than it would have been were they allowed simply to ignore the Episcopalians and worship as Catholics in private. Once again, by associating British power and the British government so closely with a small, exploitative elite, the architects of the union helped to ensure that the Irish peasantry would come to see Britain as the source of all their troubles.
It was just such a turn of events that Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger had hoped to avoid as he was pushing the Act of Union through a reluctant Parliament in 1800. Pitt had recognized the dangers of allowing an apartheid-like divide between Protestants and Catholics to fester in the British Isles and especially in Ireland, and as an adjunct to the Act of Union he had tried also to pass legislation for Catholic Emancipation, which would have given (some) Catholics the vote, allowed them to sit in Parliament, and otherwise freed them to participate in public affairs. Arguing that the continued exclusion of Catholics would undermine the goal behind the Union of "tranquillising Ireland," Pitt had pressed George III to reconsider his long-standing animus towards Catholic Emancipation, but George had refused, citing the "oaths against Popery" he had taken at his coronation (O'Day, 12-13).
It would take until 1829, a full generation later, for Parliament to pass the Roman Catholic Relief Act, which in theory removed most of the obstacles to Catholic participation in British public life. Once again, the chief motive for the act in question was British security. If the Act of Union had been born, in the midst of a major war with France, out of a desire to further secure Great Britain, Catholic Emancipation was an effort to inoculate Britain against the implicit threat of a religion-fueled civil war (O'Day, 29). Daniel O'Connell, the leader of the emancipation effort in Ireland, had managed to bring thousands of poor Irish into the cause, and used their numbers to force the issue in Parliament: "the people, the physical force is ready to turn out. Let them have but an occasion " (O'Day, 31). When O'Connell himself and several other Catholics were elected to Parliament in 1829, resistance within the government finally gave way.
Nevertheless, the fact that emancipation had been granted under duress drove the leadership in Britain to find ways to prevent a repeat performance from O'Connell's stinking masses. They did so by appending onto the emancipation act a provision limiting enfranchisement to citizens whose property exceeded ten pounds in value, up from forty shillings, thereby excluding tens of thousands of potential Catholic voters in Ireland. This provision infuriated O'Connell and set him on the course he was to follow for the next several years of advocating a full repeal of the Act of Union. "The moral and political revolution is plainly on its march," he wrote in 1830 (O'Day, 43). Aside from the widespread disenfranchisement, O'Connell agitated against the tithe (which continued to be extracted), the dictatorial powers of landlords, corporate monopolies and various tolls and taxes that further crippled the average Irish peasant's ability to pay his rent; barring the prompt enactment of all these reforms, he called for "direct and constant agitation of the Repeal measure" (O'Day, 48). Of course, most of the reforms he called for were rejected, and indeed the ten-pound enfranchisement limit was explicitly reinforced. Catholic Emancipation had offered a brief glimmer of hope that Britain might be prepared to deal fairly and honestly with Irish grievances; but as that glimmer swiftly faded and Irish leaders like O'Connell realized how little if any real change had taken place, the notion of independence took on a new luster.
Thus did Britain, with its naked lack of regard for the concerns of the average Irishman, miss two major opportunities in the span of thirty years to make material improvements in the lives of millions of its poorest subjects. The fruits of this neglect in the next two decades would be continued unrest, famine, and massive depopulation in Ireland. The mutual distrust and hatred built up on both sides would eventually metastasize into civil war. In its search for short-term security, Britain unwittingly secured for itself nearly two more centuries of Irish bloodshed.
Bibliography
O'Day, Alan and John Stevenson, eds. Irish Historical Documents Since 1800. Dublin: Gill and MacMillan, 1992.