Fifty Things You Need To Know About British History. Hugh Williams

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       CHAPTER 9

       The Irish Home Rule Bill

       1886

      In 1886 the British Prime Minister, William Gladstone, introduced a bill to the House of Commons proposing Home Rule for Ireland. It was defeated. Gladstone’s failure to solve the problems of Britain’s relationship with Ireland would lead directly to the bitter troubles of the twentieth century.

      ‘My mission,’ said William Gladstone when he first became Prime Minister in 1868, ‘is to pacify Ireland.’ Gladstone was the political colossus of the Victorian Age. He was Prime Minister four times. Although he started his career as a Conservative he graduated to become the greatest Liberal leader of the nineteenth century, a constant advocate of individual liberty and free trade. He was complex, energetic and determined and during his periods of office introduced or proposed an enormous amount of reforming legislation. His arguments were sometimes a bit difficult to follow, and he was prone to outbursts of rather histrionic moral indignation, but he loomed over the political scene of nineteenth-century Britain like a great headmaster trying to drum a sense of responsibility into his pupils. But he did not succeed in his mission towards Ireland. In this he was not alone.

      The great invasions which affected the early development of Britain never got as far as Ireland. The Romans never settled there. The Vikings managed to establish a strong presence in the ninth and tenth centuries but never on the same scale as they did in England. Norman barons invaded the country in 1166 at the invitation of the Irish King of Leinster, Diarmuid MacMurrough, who enlisted their help in trying to win his throne back from his local enemies. Their success disturbed the King of England, Henry II, who was worried about a rival Norman power base being created close to his own territory. As a result, England gained control of much of the country after the Pope – in fact the only English Pope, Adrian IV – granted him permission to invade, ostensibly to sort out the abuses of the Irish Church. Henry was the first King of England to set foot in Ireland and in 1175 signed the Treaty of Windsor with the Irish leader, Rory O’Connor. O’Connor was recognised as High King on condition that he accepted Henry as his overlord. From this moment on English monarchs would always lay claim to Ireland. Their hold on the country weakened in the fourteenth century, mainly because they were preoccupied with wars in France, but the Tudor dynasty set about recapturing lands which their predecessors had lost. In 1494, Sir Edward Poyning, Henry VII’s Lord Deputy in Ireland, introduced an act which stated that the Irish Parliament was subservient to the English, and in 1541 Henry VIII declared himself King of Ireland. By the end of the sixteenth century the English were beginning to send settlers over to Ireland to manage land which had been confiscated from their Irish owners. The deliberate Anglicisation of Ireland had begun.

      At the end of the sixteenth century the Irish rebelled against their English masters. Hugh O’Neill, the Earl of Tyrone, led a nine years’ war against the forces of Elizabeth I. Her favourite, the Earl of Essex, failed completely to halt the rebels’ advance and it was not until the year she died, in 1603, that they were defeated. At the Battle of Kinsale the army of O’Neill and his Spanish allies was utterly destroyed, but in the peace that followed he and his fellow Irish nobles were not treated particularly harshly, although they did lose a substantial amount of land. Eventually in 1607, reduced and disaffected by the Protestant policies of the new English government, O’Neill and some of his companions fled the country. They never returned, and their country was left to the mercy of its English rulers.

      Ireland was and is predominantly a Catholic country. The majority of its people never accepted the teachings of the Reformation. As a result, from the beginning of the seventeenth century until Catholic emancipation in 1829, the British ruled a country which they were bound to regard with suspicion and hostility. Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate, the Glorious Revolution and the Bill of Rights had all established Protestantism and the Protestant succession on the English throne as fundamental principles of the nation’s constitution. But in the country which it governed across the Irish Sea most of the people believed in something else altogether. Despite all its eForts to settle Protestants on the land and to impose the Anglican Church upon its people, successive British governments failed to convert the majority of Irish to its religious views. In such circumstances, however enlightened in their individual attitudes or however scrupulous and fair they tried to be in their administration, they operated a system which was intrinsically unjust. At the same time, by encouraging and giving power to a minority of Protestants in order to maintain control, they created a society which was divided along sectarian lines. This was ‘the Irish problem’.

      Injustice encourages different forces to combine against it. In 1798 it was a Protestant, Wolfe Tone, who persuaded the government of revolutionary France, the Directory, to organise a naval attack on Ireland. The French fleet was defeated and Tone was sentenced to be hanged. He died before his execution took place – possibly by committing suicide. Tone’s rebellion convinced the British government that it needed even greater control of Irish affairs and it drove through the Act of Union of 1801 which abolished the Irish Parliament altogether in exchange for a hundred MPs at Westminster. Rebellion had destroyed the dream of independence: Ireland had become a full part of the United Kingdom for the first time in its history.

      Between 1845 and 1849 Ireland was struck by famine. A potato blight destroyed its crops: the population was reduced by a quarter as 2 million people either died or emigrated to places such as America to start new lives. In 1846 a letter by a Cork magistrate was published in The Times. He described what he had seen in the village of Skibbereen:

      … the scenes were such as no tongue or pen can convey the slightest idea of … six famished and ghastly skeletons, to all appearances dead, were huddled in a corner … in a few minutes I was surrounded by at least 200 such phantoms, such frightful spectres as no words can describe … The same morning the police opened a house … which was observed shut for many days, and two frozen corpses were found, lying upon the mud floor, half devoured by rats.

      The plantation of Ulster

      Britain treated Ireland as a colony. After the Irish rebellion was suppressed in the early years of the reign of James I, it set about the business of colonisation in a ruthlessly well-organised way. Six Ulster colonies were divided up and given to government supporters on condition that they settled them with Protestant English and Scottish immigrants. The people who received the land were families who had opposed Hugh O’Neill, the principal leader of the revolt against the British, or British government officials. The established Church and Trinity College, Dublin were also granted estates. So were wealthy companies: the Corporation of London received the town of Derry – and promptly added the prefix ‘London’ to its name. Derry and Armagh were planted with English settlers; Tyrone and Donegal were planted with Scottish; and Fermanagh and Cavan were opened up to both.

      The Plantation of Ulster not only enforced a complete change of land ownership, it introduced a social revolution as families arrived from СКАЧАТЬ