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Short title: Irish Catholic Loyalty in Context, 1829-1874
‘from education, from duty, and from principle’: Irish Catholic Loyalty in Context, 1829-1874
Richard A. Keogh*
University of Roehampton, Roehampton Lane, London SW15 5PU, UK.
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The passage of the Emancipation Act in 1829 presented an opportunity for Catholics to reimagine their loyalty as equal subjects for the first time under the union between Great Britain and Ireland. This article explores the way Catholic loyalty was conceived in the decades that followed the Act of 1829 through to the mid 1870s, when there was renewed focus on the civil allegiance of Catholics following the declaration of Papal infallibility. Historians are increasingly exploring a range of social, political and religious identities in nineteenth century Ireland, beyond the rigid binary paradigm of Catholic nationalisms and Protestant loyalisms that has dominated Irish historiography. However, Catholic loyalty in particular, remains an anachronism and lacks sufficient conceptual clarity. Our understanding of a specifically Catholic variant of loyalty and its public and associational expression, beyond a number of biographical studies of relatively unique individuals, remains limited. By providing an exposition of episodes in the history of Catholic loyalty in the early and mid-Victorian years this article illuminates the phenomenon. It demonstratesthat Irish Catholic loyalty took on different expressive forms, which were dependent on the individuals proclaiming their loyalty, their relationship to the objects of their loyalty, and its reception by the British state and Protestant establishment.
Key words: Catholic, Ireland, Loyalty, Loyalism, Unionism
When the Emancipation Act of 1829 passed into law there was a surge of popular Catholic loyalty throughout Ireland. Personal loyalty was expressed as gratefulness to the King for having given royal assent to the bill, whilst assurances were also given that Catholics would be ‘loyal to the Constitution and fearless in its defence’.[1] Such professions of loyalty attempted to overcome the accusation that Catholics could not be trusted as subjects, as their principle allegiance was owed to Rome rather than the British state. But, they were also used by Catholics to contest the exclusive vision of loyalism that was built on British patriotism, the Protestant constitution and anti-Catholicism, and the associated symbols of Magna Charta and the Glorious Revolution.[2] Indeed, the day after the act had been given royal assent The Dublin Evening Post reported on the successful passage of ‘THE IRISH BILL OF RIGHTS … THE MAGNA CHARTA OF IRELAND’.[3] In a similar vein, the newspaper drew comparisons between Catholic emancipation and the ‘Glorious Revolution’, declaring that ‘In Ireland, we have had a REVOLUTION too. But it has not cost a single life – it has not caused a single tear – thanks to Parliament – thanks to the Minister – Thanks to the King’.[4] Such rhetoric was used to facilitate a deepening sense of Catholic loyalty to the British connection by incorporating its symbols, institutions and traditions as non-partisan. In the same way, ‘prosperous’ Catholics who had benefited from the act sought to mimic their English counterparts socially and culturally as closely as possible.[5] However, for the Irish Catholics ‘of all social levels’ who had ‘entertained unrealistic, almost millenarian, expectations’ about the practical benefits the act would deliver, the coming decades would reveal that it had ‘not wrought the miracles for which they had hoped.’[6] Nevertheless, the passage of the Emancipation Act did offer an opportunity for Catholics to reimagine their loyalty as equal subjects for the first time under the legislative union between Great Britain and Ireland (1801-1921).
This article explores the ebbs and flows of Catholic loyalty, andits conception, performanceand receptionin the decades that followed the passage of the Emancipation Act in three distinct sections, which are organised chronologically. The first section considers how Catholic loyalty was articulated in the immediate aftermath of 1829 and its evolution through the 1830s and 1840s. It explores the emergence of competing visions of Catholic loyalty, as espoused by nationalists, unionists, and the state. The second section surveys the retrenchment of ‘popular’ forms of Catholic loyalty following the demise of the Repeal movement, and its existence in an increasingly confined political space. This period witnessed the concentration of public professions of Catholic loyalty amongst a more conservative, albeit reformist, lay and clerical elite who defended themselves against renewed charges of disloyalty and confronted the resurgence of ever more potent nationalisms throughout the 1850s and 1860s. The final section considers how Catholic loyalty evolved on both practical and intellectual level following the declaration of the Pope’s infallibility and the renewed focus it placed on the civil allegiance of Roman Catholics across the British Isles in the 1870s. Throughout, this article concentrates on the loyalty proffered by the Irish Catholic social, political and cultural elite, as they had the ability, opportunity, and inclination to articulate and demonstrate loyalty publicly. The fluidity and exchange of ideas and experiences across national boundaries in the context of the four nations of the United Kingdom are also acknowledged. It does so whilst recognising the absence of sustained scholarly consideration of the viability of Catholic loyalty throughout the course of the nineteenth century. Indeed,historians havetypically been preoccupied witha binary understanding of Protestant loyalisms and Catholic nationalisms, andthe presumption that Irish loyalism, in its most familiar Anglican form, was ‘uniformly reactionary and homogenous’.[7]
Catholic loyalty has long been considered an oxymoron. Not least because the emotional temporal allegiances to the crown and constitution it entailed were competing with spiritual ones to Rome, and were as a consequence complicated. Throughout the second half of the eighteenth-century and well in to the opening decades of the union a pragmatic Catholic loyalty to the crown and constitution was supposed to have been galvanised by the quest for relief from the penal laws, the desire for access to a range of professional outlets, and aspiration to status as equal subjects. Once emancipation was secured, however, Irish Catholic loyalty more broadly is presumed to have been in continuous decline throughout the rest of the century. The British state continued to prioritise the needs and wants of the Protestant establishment over the Catholic population in Ireland, whilst the symbiotic relationship between Protestantism and loyalism became increasingly pronounced. These circumstances hindered Catholic social mobility and exacerbated their increasing alienation from the state. Limited reform arrived too little too late and conflicted with the rising expectations of the Catholic population, which found expression through successive and increasingly self-assertive Irish nationalisms. This process culminated in a war of independence and the end of the union in the early twentieth century.[8] However, the contemporary reality was more complex than this traditional narrative would suggest.
In this context, our superficial grasp of Catholic loyalty in the nineteenth century can be attributed, at least in part, to the fact that the ‘fertile terrain of contemporaneous political ideas that were inspired by Ireland’s experience of Union has yet to be analysed by historians’.[9] When Catholic loyalty has received scholarly attention in this period, it has typically been in relation to the nationalist perception and reception of the Queen in Ireland, or as the by-product of an examination of Ireland’s relationship with the monarchy more broadly. This existing research has demonstrated the endurance of plebeian displays of Catholic loyalty to the monarchy beyond 1829. It has also contributed to our understanding of the fluidity of Irish political discourses and identities throughout the Victorian period. However, in focusing on its monarchical dimension, the experience of Irish nationalists has been prioritised, and the exploration of Catholic loyalty as a viable and distinct identity in its own right has been limited.[10]Fortunately, however, the diversity of experiences ofthe union, including those of Catholics,are garnering ever more attention.[11] Allan Blackstock has recently identified three distinguishable variants of Irish loyalty in the first half of the nineteenth century, including the most recognisable and exclusively ‘Anglican, neo-conservative’ vision of loyalism, a liberal version that embraced Presbyterians and some Anglicans who pursued inclusive reform, and finally Catholic loyalty, which was similar to its liberal counterpart but drew on the support of a fundamentally different demographic.[12] Historians have also begun exploring Catholic loyalty through biography and revealed the motivational complexities and diverse expressions it found throughout the reign of Queen Victoria. In the decades that followed emancipation, it was often bound with social, cultural and economic aspirations, and with the belief that it would yield practical results both at home and in the empire. It was as much about personal ambition as it was improving the lot of Catholics more broadly.[13] What this recent scholarship has confirmed is that our ability to illuminate the associational dimensions or collective expression of Catholic loyalty has been limited by insufficient conceptual clarity. It is not a problem simply confined to Irish historiography. There has also been limited interest in ‘an actual or potential collective identity’ of non-traditional proponents of loyaltyin the territories of the British Empire during the long nineteenth century, beyond a ‘befuddled fealty to the Great White Queen across the sea’.[14]
The absence of a coherent and widely accepted definition of Catholic loyalty should not, however, come as a surprise. It has recently been noted that loyalty is most often defined by what it is not rather than what it is. The complex and multiple loyalties that come to define individual identities only complicate matters further.[15] In exploring the history of Catholic loyalty throughout the period under review, this article seeks to illustrate the contours of a schema of Catholic loyalty, or more accurately, a ‘conceptual topography’ of Catholic loyalties.[16] Loyal Catholics, or those who embodied and espoused a version of loyalty, found common ground in the distinction they drew between their necessary spiritual allegiances and civic duties. But, there were distinguishable divisions within this collective mentalité that overlapped and competed with one another. First, there were those who were invested in the British connection, crown and constitution once religious equality had been secured in principle by emancipation. They believed it their duty to try and conform to the parameters of an exclusively Protestant loyalism in all but their Catholicism. They were typically members of elite society or the higher echelons of the professions who had the necessary religious and political credentials, and the professional and social networks, to validate their loyalty. Second, there were those drawn from a broader section of society, who did not believe that religious equality had been secured by emancipation, but who invested their loyalty in the state and the constitutional status quo as the best means to achieve religious equality and advance their interests through further reform. Finally, there were those who sought to advance a version of loyalty that was compatible with an emphasis on Irish constitutional nationalism and changes to the union, but who failed to gain traction as the proponents of a widely accepted loyalty. It was this variant that would come to dominate the religious and political discourse in Ireland, first as espoused by Daniel O’Connell and the repeal movement, and then as a ‘neo-Catholic loyalty’ that coexisted with the call for national autonomy in the form of home rule and its political vehicle, the Irish Parliamentary Party.[17]
This article demonstrates that Irish Catholic loyalty took on different expressive forms, which were dependent on the individuals proclaiming their loyalty, their relationship to the objects of their loyalty, and how the British state and Protestant establishment received it. Whilst many Catholics necessarily expressed their spiritual loyalties, they were clear that it remained distinct from their civic duties. However, they had to demonstrate that when ordering their loyalties, the British connection and all it entailed did not occupy a paltry ‘second place’next to their religion.[18] There was movement within and between these forms of loyalty. Although they would all find currency in political and religious discourse, it was the final vision that would emerge as the most popular, but also as the variantthat most lacked legitimacy as a viable foundation for a ‘true’ and widely accepted loyalty.
The fight for Catholic emancipation in the United Kingdom was hard won. The relaxation of the penal laws enabled the large Catholic population of Ireland to leverage their power and secure legislative change for Catholics across the British Isles. As one observer put it, they had forced ‘the power of England to yield’.[19] Their efforts in this endeavor are best characterised as ‘loyal opposition’, as the ‘associational bonds’ between Catholics and the state were considered ‘worthy of preservation, indeed, of repair and rebuilding’.[20] The question of prospective Catholic loyalty - or more pressingly for alarmed Britons and Protestants, disloyalty - was of central concern at this time. Those communities and individuals who opposed the legislative passage of the Emancipation Act advanced familiar rhetorical tropes about Catholic conspiracies and the Pope’s temporal authority, alongside the belief that it was a ‘burglary … on the constitution’,[21] and a ‘“stepping stone” to subvert Protestantism in church and state’.[22] They believed their fears were realisedin its immediate aftermath when Daniel O’Connell (1775-1847), ‘the liberator’ and enigmatic leader of the campaign for Catholic emancipation, declared in favour of repealing of the Act of Union. The Morning Post, panicked that ‘an Anti-Union Society, as effacious for the purposes of agitation as the late Catholic Association, may carry on its operations without violating the letter, or incurring the penalties of the law’, questioned if O’Connell’s actions were ‘to be taken as one of the proofes of Catholic loyalty and respect for the laws and constitution which were to follow, and which we are daily told have followed, the removal of religious distinctions?’[23] In reality, O’Connellism was considered alongside clandestine oath-bound societies of agrarian agitators, including the Rockites, Ribbonmen and Whiteboys, as ‘component parts of one nefarious, disloyal, Irish Catholic conspiracy hell-bent on the slaughter of Protestants and the dismantling of Crown and Constitution.’[24] Though ill-defined, the emergence of an organised repeal threat only served to consolidate this association in the minds of the establishment. By February 1834, when William IV reinforced his commitment to the constitution and the union ‘under the blessing of Divine Providence’, his speech was ‘clearly aimed at O’Connell’s repeal agitation, denying it constitutional legitimacy and typically linking the union with the vitality of the British nation.’[25]
It was not surprising that O’Connell’s call for repeal gained traction. For the forty-shilling freeholders who had been enfranchised by Catholic relief in 1793 and disenfranchised when the Emancipation Act restricted the vote to those with a property qualification of over ten pounds, neither the union nor emancipation had met expectations. Irrespective of whether they had been susceptible to the influence of their landlords or their priests, a common complaint, they had undoubtedly been crucial to O’Connell’s success.[26] As such, he was forced to find the means to balance his mobilisation of a popular base of support, whilst securing parliamentary representation for his cause.[27] However, not all Catholics saw Ireland’s future in the same terms as O’Connell and his supporters. A band of elite and aristocratic Catholics in Ireland repeatedly rejected the call for repeal. These men conformed to a more conservative vision of loyalty, and sought to mimic their Protestant counterparts socially and politically once emancipation had brought them back into the fold of elite society. For these lay Catholics, the question of constitutional loyalty was intimately bound with the union. For example, Lord Killeen (1791-1869) declared his opposition to the repeal movement in December 1830 despite his anticipation that it would become popular. MPs such as Thomas Wyse (1791-1862) paid the price for failing to support the movement and lost their parliamentary seats at the next election. This did not deter Catholic members of the aristocracy, or those who did not have parliamentary ambitions, from expressing their loyalty in reference to their unionism. For example, the Catholic-led ‘Declaration of the Friends of the Union’ was supported by Lords Killeen, Southwell (1777-1860) and Gormanston (1796-1876). They were members of some of oldest and most important Catholic families in Ireland who, irrespective of the penal laws, had held on to their status and power.[28] It is clear that in the immediate aftermath of Catholic emancipation, elite lay Catholics could be found expressing loyalty alongside very different visions of Ireland’s future under the union.