O’Connell was by far the most prominent Irishman in the Commons from February 1830, when he was finally allowed to take his seat, death having removed ‘old Harry Grattan’, whom he considered his country’s leading man ‘next to myself’, just after the general election of 1820.
Although it was in the context of listening to their reports of the parliamentary deeds of Grattan and the Patriots that the young O’Connell once startled his adult relatives by asserting that ‘I’ll make a stir in the world yet’, his birth into a minor Catholic gentry family on the remote Iveragh peninsula was an inauspicious beginning for a would-be politician.
Quite the opposite picture emerges, however, from O’Connell’s patchy journal, which he commenced in 1795, shortly after beginning to study at Lincoln’s Inn. In it, along with accounts of his occasionally timorous misgivings and generally unadventurous activities, are mundane expressions of youthful good intentions, including the confession that ‘I remain in general too long in bed’ and the wish ‘to get entirely rid of all propensity to falsehood’. But this private record also reveals that O’Connell, who acquired a detestation of tyranny through attending the treason trials in 1794 and found himself in the mêlée from which an attack was made on the king’s coach the following year, developed an extensive radical philosophy. So much was this the case that in December 1795 Count O’Connell had to speak forcefully to him ‘of my folly in being a democrat, of my absurdity in displaying my political opinions’.
I have been this day thinking on the plan to be pursued when I come into Parliament. If to distinguish myself was the object of my exertions that would be best done by becoming a violent oppositionist. But as it will be my chief study to serve my country, moderation will be a proper instrument for that purpose. Moderation is the character of genuine patriotism, of that patriotism which seeks for the happiness of mankind.
Having been present in the chamber, 20 Feb. 1797, he recorded that
I too will be a Member. Young as I am, unacquainted with the ways of the world, I should not even now appear contemptible. I will steadfastly and perseveringly attach myself to the real interests of Ireland. I shall endeavour equally to avoid the profligacy of corruption and the violence of unreasonable patriotism. Of real patriotism moderation is the chief mark.
Houston, 193, 202.
Transposed to Westminster, such statements would not have seemed entirely out of place over 30 years later.
O’Connell, whose sojourns in London and Dublin had equipped him with the learning, debating skills and confidence required for a legal career, soon came perilously close to jeopardizing his future through a thoughtless miscalculation. Influenced by his friend Richard Newton Bennett, he, by his own confession, became briefly a member of the United Irishmen in 1798.
As if to tempt disaster at the hands of his secretly rather admiring uncle, O’Connell contracted a clandestine and improvident marriage in 1802 with the undoubted love of his life, the Catholic daughter of his Protestant third cousin, Thomas O’Connell. Mary, who bore the trying circumstances of their early married life with quiet fortitude, quickly established herself as O’Connell’s principal psychological prop, and in her roles as family manager, political wife and emotional confidante she frequently had to draw on immense reserves of patience and courage.
Darling, if anybody were to read our love letters they would perhaps laugh at us, but we have the happiness to know that instead of exaggerating any feeling the difficulty is to find expressions sufficiently strong to describe those affections which we really entertain for each other. At least, sweet love, it is literally so with me, for from my soul I do so doat [sic] of you.
Ibid. i. 237, 247.
For all Mary’s worth, however, once Hunting Cap had been told in 1803, he disinherited O’Connell in favour of his younger brothers John (of Grenagh) and James (of Lakeview), and although the rupture was partly reversed in 1805 and their relations had been fully restored by about 1809, it had a permanent impact on his ever fraught financial situation.
O’Connell, who condemned the pointless violence of Emmet’s rebellion in 1803, when he enrolled in the Kerry yeomanry, became involved in the revived campaign against Catholic disabilities in November 1804, drafting the petition that was adopted the following year. Noted in 1806 by William Gregory, later the Irish under-secretary, to be ‘impatient for emancipation, ambitious, very warm’, he reacted against the inaction of the supposedly pro-Catholic Grenville administration that year by urging another petition, 17 Feb. 1807, when he was defeated by John Keogh, the Dublin merchant who led the still mostly aristocratic and conservative Catholic Committee. The following year he not only obtained approval for such a petition against Keogh’s resistance, but by heading the furious opposition to the proposed royal veto over Catholic episcopal appointments he combined the people and the bishops under his banner against Grattan and other moderate pro-Catholic sympathizers.
Making the struggle one where his professional expertise would enable him to concentrate power in his own hands, he provided legal advice to Lords Ffrench and Fingall in countering attempts by police magistrates to break up the gatherings chaired by them in February and December 1811, and that year and the next, the Irish administration having decided to suppress the Committee, he assisted as counsel in the partially successful defences made against government prosecutions.
Confirmation of O’Connell’s role as the Catholic champion emerged in three adversarial arenas. In 1813 he was a defence barrister in the highly contentious political trial of John Magee, the Protestant proprietor of the pro-Catholic Dublin Evening Post, who was alleged to have printed a seditious libel on the duke of Richmond, the retiring lord lieutenant. His speech on behalf of Magee, 27 July, was an unprecedented exercise in sustained insolence and bitter invective and, in printed form, it achieved high notoriety. In it he treated the lord chief justice William Downes with defiance, demolished the Irish attorney-general, the much hated Orangeman William Saurin, who was prosecuting, with a devastating personal attack, and provided the jurors and other Protestant auditors with a wholesale indictment of the entire system of Ascendancy discrimination against the majority Catholic population. Peel, the Irish secretary, who on 29 May had been described by O’Connell as ‘Orange Peel’, ‘a raw youth, squeezed out of the workings of I know not what factory in England’, commented that in his four-hour declamation, O’Connell had taken the ‘opportunity of uttering a libel even more atrocious than that which he proposed to defend’.
By the mid-1810s O’Connell had become the acknowledged head of his co-religionists in Ireland. Employing his maxim of ‘being always in the right’, he had displaced their ‘natural leaders’, who symbolized mutual jealousies and disunity, and, by politicizing the bishops and promoting the aspirations of middle class professional Catholics like himself, he had brought the grievances of his fellow countrymen into the mainstream of British politics.
In relentlessly restating his ideas and arguments, O’Connell, whose modus operandi seems to have been that by simply declaring his desires often enough he would will into existence the overwhelming public support required to obtain them, helped to raise Catholic assertiveness to a new level.
Speaking in court, O’Connell was usually sensible and workmanlike, but at public meetings his oratory more closely reflected his cerebral and corporeal strengths, being powerful, spontaneous, lucid and provocative, as well as frequently rough, vigorous and irregular, but nonetheless masterful and compelling. Commentators agreed that his success lay in the beautiful sonority of his voice, the honest directness of his appeal and the moving vivacity of his style, his face seeming to reflect every inspired emotional impulse of his passing thoughts.
Avec lui, on sent la pensée naître et se développer; on la voit, pour ainsi dire, se revêtir d’une forme sensible; et les mots, les gestes, l’accent, tout se produit à la fois et par un seul effort. Il menace, et son corps entier semble suivre le défi qu’il lance à Angleterre; il plaisante, et avant que la plaisanterie soit sur ses lèvres, une gaîté expansive anime déjà ses traits. Je ne connais pas d’orateur qui donne autant l’idée d’une profonde conviction.
Lettres sur les Elections Anglaises (1827), 174-5, 177-8.
More critically, Lord Teignmouth judged that
he seemed to converse aloud. He hesitated occasionally, but as his pauses invariably preluded the word best adapted to convey his meaning, it was shrewdly suspected that he employed them to conceal the study of his diction ... He would sometimes, when he deemed himself bound to exhibit more warmth than he really felt, act his part by impassioned grimace, bitter language and the convenient trick of twisting his wig. But it would be a mistake to suppose that O’Connell always elaborated in his speeches. On the contrary he was often evidently unprepared, rambling on, sometimes discursively, in his own easy way, so that his audience would have been wearied but for his occasional bursts of eloquence, flashes of wit, tart replies and keen sarcasms.
Lord Teignmouth, Reminiscences of Many Years, ii. 219.
Compared favourably with the shrill niceties of Sheil’s measured delivery, O’Connell’s effectiveness at mass meetings was undoubted: one old farmer commented that his ‘voice you’d hear a mile off, and it sounded as if it was coming through honey’.
By contrast, contemporary caricaturists, in their crude and anti-Catholic cartoons, seized on O’Connell’s negative qualities, from which there was much political capital to be made.
Never was this more true than in his personal nadir of 1816-17, when he might easily have disappeared from public life. The initial disaster was the long feared bankruptcy in 1816 of the Killarney merchant James O’Leary, for whom O’Connell, against the warnings of Hunting Cap, had given security for up to £8,000. O’Connell was only saved from consequential insolvency, and the likelihood of being again disinherited, by his brother James, who, risking his own financial and family standing, masterminded a rescue package and managed to keep their uncle in ignorance of the whole episode. Nevertheless, within a year James was estimating that O’Connell’s debts amounted to over £20,000 and that the necessary interest payments could only be met by sizeable economies, even though his brother’s legal income was on average at least £5,000 per annum.
O’Connell, who in September 1817 felt that Ireland was ‘most wretched - fever - poverty - party spirit and want of animation’, showed great persistence: he continued to oppose securities through what was reconstituted that year as another Catholic Board. The following year, referring to agitation against the window tax, he commented that this ‘little Parliament is of infinite value and will habituate the people to form an organ to express the public sentiment on affairs of greater moment’.
O’Connell, who was obsequious in leading the Catholic deputation to George IV during the ‘conciliation’ visit in August 1821 and effusive in welcoming the appointment of the pro-Catholic Lord Wellesley as lord lieutenant in January 1822, remained utterly undaunted by the task of winning emancipation, telling a new acquaintance that year: ‘no matter; we will persevere and no doubt we shall one day or other carry it’.
Sidelining aristocratic figures like Lord Killeen* and Sir Edward Bellew and keeping such extremists as Eneas MacDonnell and Jack Lawless firmly in their place, O’Connell quickly put his stamp on the Association, which he dominated from the start.
The room is not very large, and [is] as dirty as the English House of Commons. Here too every man keeps his hat on, except while he is speaking; here too are good and bad orators, but certainly occasionally less dignified manners than there. The heat was suffocating and I had to sit out five hours, but the debate was so interesting that I scarcely remarked the annoyances. O’Connell was undoubtedly the best speaker. Although idolized by the greater number, he was severely attacked by several, and defended himself with equal address and moderation; on the other hand he assailed the government without reserve, and in my opinion in too strong expressions. It was easy to perceive that much intrigue and several firmly united parties, whose minds were made up beforehand, were to be found here, as in other bodies of the like kind, and consequently that the discussion was often only a sort of sham fight.
Tour ... by a German Prince, ii. 117-18.
For all that the Association was O’Connell’s power base, it consumed much of his energy and time, although, in having to sit through painfully tedious and callow harangues, he was at least preparing himself for the drudgery and futility of much of Westminster politics.
O’Connell, who at the Dublin dinner in his honour on 3 July 1824 had promised to continue his ‘intemperate’ struggle on behalf of the Catholics, was now, for all that his violence estranged the moderate minority among them, pre-eminent in their cause.
However, even before leaving London in late May 1825 he envisaged the setting up of a nominal ‘New’ Catholic Association to evade the provisions of what he called the ‘Algerine Act’, under which the old one had been suppressed, and this was done in July, effectively as a non-political version of the same organization. That autumn he fought a rearguard action to reassert his authority over the movement, shrewdly backpedalling over his support for the ‘wings’, for example at provincial meetings in Limerick, 24 Oct., and Carlow, 15 Dec. 1825.
Yet Liverpool’s incapacitation early in 1827 encouraged O’Connell to hope for concessions from a potentially more sympathetic prime minister. In public speeches and private letters, mostly to his friend the knight of Kerry*, he urged Lord Lansdowne to come forward with the moderate Whigs or at least to join the pro-Catholic foreign secretary George Canning* in his protracted attempts to form an administration that spring. Having threatened Irish ministerialists with being deemed enemies if they backed Peel, the duke of Wellington and other leading Protestants against Canning, he reacted furiously on receiving the news in Ennis of the defeat of the latest relief motion, 6 Mar.; at the meeting he hastily arranged for the establishment of a Liberal Club for county Clare on the 11th, he secured a resolution denouncing any Irish Members who continued to adhere to the existing ministry. He began fomenting another petitioning campaign, but, on the advice of the knight and others, reluctantly agreed to postpone it to ensure that moderate opinion would not be deterred from rallying behind Canning’s nascent coalition.
to play this fast and loose uncertain game, never adhering to any opinion steadily and manfully and giving the impression that he is swayed by principle rather than by passion. By such a shifting and incomprehensible course he deprives his hostility of all real power and his support of all grace and dignity.
O’Connell forwarded his plans for upholding Catholic education and resisting Protestant proselytization, while at the same time usually suppressing the initiatives of his colleagues, though he was subtle enough to make, for instance, Lawless’s ‘Rent Sunday’ system of monthly rent collection and Wyse’s pyramidal structure of local liberal clubs into ideas which he could represent and control as his own. Having spent much of the year dealing with challenges to his restrained stance, he reasserted his position at the vanguard of the emancipation cause by encouraging the holding of simultaneous parish gatherings and participating notably at the 14-day aggregate meeting in Dublin in January 1828.
On the appointment of Wellington as premier that month, O’Connell concurred in the Association’s resolution to oppose all future ministerial candidates in Irish elections. He attempted to have this rescinded after the new government had shown some evidence of good intentions by acquiescing in the repeal of the Test Acts, which he fervently supported. But, disillusioned with the Whigs and aware that there was ‘an under swell in the Irish people which is much more formidable than any sudden or showy exhibition of irritation’, he continued to urge the introduction of emancipation without restrictions, though he was tempted to retreat to his moderate position during the minor ministerial crisis in May 1828.
The Clare election victory, which confirmed O’Connell’s status as a folk hero, marked a turning point in Anglo-Irish relations, as he and many English observers, not least Wellington and Peel, realized only too well.
In an otherwise positive appraisal of O’Connell at the turn of the year, Greville claimed that ‘to accomplish any particular object he cares not to what charges of political inconsistency he exposes himself to’.
On 6 Mar. 1829 O’Connell recorded his delight over the terms of the relief bill, ‘no veto - no payment of clergy - no ecclesiastical arrangements’, and was dismissive of all other minor securities except the proposed £10 county franchise, though he admitted to his wife that ‘the £10 will really give more power to the Catholics. I must however support the freeholders’. He called for petitions against the ensuing franchise bill, and secured one against considerable resistance at the Thatched House Tavern meeting of Irishmen, 7 Mar.
one of the greatest triumphs recorded in history - a bloodless revolution more extensive in its operation than any other political change that could take place. I say political to contrast it with social changes which might break to pieces the framework of society. This is a good beginning and now, if I can get Catholics and Protestants to join, something solid and substantial may be done for all. It is clear that, without gross mismanagement, it will be impossible to allow misgovernment any longer in Ireland.
Confessing that he wished he was in Dublin to ‘laugh at the corporators’, he insisted on there being no ‘insolence of triumph’ shown.
After receiving guardedly positive responses from ministers in April 1829 about their attitude towards his being seated, O’Connell, who seems briefly to have contemplated submitting himself for re-election in Clare under the old franchise or retreating to a borough, persisted in his promise to attempt to take his seat, not least because he was determined to begin ‘an immediate active part in the proceedings’.
O’Connell, who was blackballed by the Cisalpine Club of English Catholics, 12 May, but elected to Brooks’s, 27 May 1829, was furious at the government duplicity which he blamed for his defeat, but took comfort from his triumph as a parliamentary orator. Declining the possibility of Tralee, which was again vacant, or a temporary berth in an English borough, he made strenuous preparations for his expected re-election for Clare. He issued what became known, from its litany of desired Irish reforms, as the ‘address of the hundred promises’, 25 May, when he spoke in much the same sense at the Westminster dinner in honour of Burdett. He wrote to Bentham, 28 May, that, once returned, ‘then for Utility - Utility: Law - Church - Finance - Currency - Monopoly - Representation - How many opportunities to be useful’. At Anglesey’s instigation, he forbore to raise repeal during the election, which he rather hoped would be contested, so as to raise his standing further, but it was at the forefront of his thoughts.
O’Connell, one of the first ever Members to have a considerable extra-parliamentary following, used a series of public letters and a Dublin dinner in his honour in January 1830 to promise unremitting activity in the House, where, according to popular mythology, he quickly exploited his native cunning to outwit his enemies.
He dwelt on Irish agricultural distress, 8, 12 Feb., but made reasonable suggestions about government bills, 11, 16, 24 Feb., and was thanked by Peel for his ‘temperance and moderation’ in commenting on his intended judicial changes, which O’Connell reverted to on 9 Mar. 1830. He acted as a minority teller, a task he regularly performed, for Hume’s amendment to adjourn proceedings on supply, 11 Feb., objected to the Irish yeomanry grant, 22 Feb., and divided steadily in the renewed opposition campaign for economies and lower taxation that session. At his own request, he was appointed to the select committee on vestries, 16 Feb., but a month later Hobhouse complained that he had only attended its proceedings for a total of 90 minutes.
I admit that I thought a different conduct would be proper in this House; that I struggled and easily brought myself to adopt one; and for this I have been taunted, insulted and ridiculed. In future they shall have no cause to complain of me ... I will in future take my stand on the station to which they have forced me.
He was defeated by 75-12 and, despite his more vigorous approach, shortly afterwards Leveson Gower rated him ‘the most insignificant man it has been my lot to meet with’ in Parliament.
O’Connell made what Richard Monckton Milnes† called ‘an energetic, but not well pointed’ speech for Jewish emancipation and voted in the minority for this, 17 May 1830.
In early July 1830 Mary O’Connell reassured her youngest son Daniel that his father, who ‘goes through great fatigue’ and ‘is now going to bed when formerly he used to be getting up’, had several offers of county seats at the forthcoming general election.
Agreeing with Staunton, whom he exhorted to ‘AGITATE! AGITATE! AGITATE!’, that repeal of the Union should be the focus of their attention, he now contemplated establishing a new movement and raising more funds, since money was always necessary ‘to keep in due operation the springs of popular excitement’. Starting at Killarney, 7 Oct. 1830, he spoke at a series of local meetings organized for petitioning against the Union, including at Waterford on the 15th, and attempted to form the Irish Society for Legal and Legislative Relief as a repeal association.
there never was yet any man so beset as I was when I went into the House and, during the first speeches, every allusion to me of an unkind nature was cheered. Although Peel attacked me directly, he sat down amid rapturous applause. I got up at once. They at first were disposed to slight me but I rebuked them with indignation and certainly took my wicked will of them fully and to my heart’s content. I cannot be a judge of my own speaking but I know that I threw out in my old Association style. I also know that the result was most cheering for me for the men who had been standing off from me before, and were not only cool but hostile, became of a sudden most cordial in their manner and confidential in their declarations. One perceives a change of this description better than one can describe it, and the change was complete.
O’Connell Corresp. iv. 1722.
His powerful appeal for ending the Union was certainly a revelation: James Joseph Hope Vere* commented that with his rapid, telegraphic style, O’Connell ‘cleaned his stomach in a more perfect manner than he has ever yet done’, and Howick noted that day that O’Connell, ‘for the first time made me understand how he has acquired so much influence in Ireland as a speaker’.
a fellow of formidable powers; coarse, but acute, wily and dexterous; dealing in calumnies, and showing occasionally very bad taste, but possessing great command of forcible language and the crushing grip of a giant when he has an advantage over an opponent.
O’Connell Corresp. iv. 1725; Agar Ellis diary; Hopetoun mss 167, f. 183; Bunbury Mem. 155.
He moved for the total repeal of the Irish Subletting Act, 11 Nov., and, according to Wyse, ‘spoke with energy and was listened to with attention’, but Sir John Benn Walsh recorded that ‘his paradoxical and quibbling speech was well answered by Doherty’; having expressed his regret that a negative decision would only create greater unease in Ireland, O’Connell was not surprised to be defeated (by 150-24).
With his popularity increasing in Dublin, where he encouraged the holding of ‘repeal breakfast’ gatherings and was searching for a permanent meeting place, and the expected change of government at Westminster, where the failure of Irish Members like Wyse to come to his support laid them open to criticism at home, O’Connell was confident that this was an advantageous moment to advance the cause of repeal, and he told Dwyer that ‘I think some good may be done in the House or rather through the House. I am determined to stick to it as long as I can’.
O’Connell, who had briefly considered organizing a celebratory welcome for Anglesey, was himself greeted with remarkable scenes on his return to Ireland as a determined proponent of repeal, 18 Dec. 1830; it was a display which outshone the arrival of the lord lieutenant on the 22nd and which, the crowd having dispersed quietly at his bidding, gave a displeased William IV ‘the most striking proof of the influence he has acquired over a portion of the lower classes’.
The Irish secretary, Edward Smith Stanley, who gave his version of these events in the Commons, 14, 16 Feb. 1831, privately boasted that he envisaged nothing above ‘a very piano tone’ from his defeated and deceitful Irish enemy, but O’Connell, albeit that he was expected to fail in their forthcoming parliamentary duels, in fact thereafter became almost his opposition shadow, quizzing and baiting him at every turn.
my first mistake consisted in entertaining a high opinion of the moral worth and intellectual power of the House of Commons and I shaped my course mildly and gently in order to propitiate the opinions of men whom I respected. You have a right to despise rather than pity me for this gross mistake. The consequences are a shipwreck of my parliamentary fame and the great difficulty I now have to assert a power which perhaps would have been conceded to me had I asserted myself strongly in the first instance. Under these circumstances I am ashamed to call myself your disciple.
O’Connell Corresp. viii. 3423.
Aiming to be ‘tame and quiet but distinct’ in explaining his part in the negotiations, which he claimed amounted only to a procedural arrangement over the trial, 28 Feb., he ended up delivering an onslaught against the government’s continued repression of the subjugated Irish that day, but he at least found himself restored to his customary equanimity. As he wrote to his wife:
I really was triumphant. It is impossible for any one to conceive what a partial auditory I spoke amidst, and yet I enforced silence and I may say compelled silence. I gave Stanley some very hard knocks and Lord Anglesey still more, and I have not done with them. In short, sweetest, my mind is at ease.
Ibid. iv. 1768, 1775, 1777; viii. 3424.
He pleaded for leniency for Jacob Alexander, who from the gallery had yelled, ‘That’s a lie’, at his assertion that he would not spill one man’s blood to effect political change, and he magnanimously secured his discharge, 2 Mar. 1831.
Delighted by the ministry’s parliamentary reform proposals, which he commended to the Irish in priority to repeal, he failed to catch the Speaker’s eye during the several days of debate that followed Russell’s statement, 1 Mar. 1831, but nonetheless soon detected a marked change of attitude towards him in the House. Fearing, as he confided to his wife, that ‘I have literally the less chance of speaking well because I am puffed up with the vanity of thinking that I can and will do so’, while also amazed at times at ‘my being so absurd as to feel nervous in the rascally House’, he finally had the chance to make a strong speech in support of the ‘large, liberal and wise’ bill, which he described as generous and effectual, on the 8th. He particularly welcomed the removal of aristocratic, corporate and Protestant interests from boroughs, though he argued that Ireland deserved more seats and ought to have a bigger county electorate. He was widely congratulated, including by his supporters in Dublin, and Greville recorded that he was ‘vehemently cheered by the government, Stanley, Duncannon and all, all differences giving way to their zeal’.
I acknowledge that he has rendered good service on the reform bill, and that on many previous occasions his conduct in the House of Commons has been such as to encourage the hope that he would abstain from the pernicious courses in which he has been engaged. But these expectations have been as constantly followed by disappointment, his measures to excite in the people of Ireland a spirit of the bitterest hostility not only to the government but to the people of England - the Saxons, as he calls them - having always succeeded, as in a regular course, to his more moderate conduct in Parliament.
Patterson, ii. 586-7.
He, in his own words, ‘spoke often and rather well, ipse loquitur ... on various topics’, including the Irish juries bill, 12 Apr., when he unsuccessfully divided the House (by 44-10) against increasing the allowance for emergencies. He differed over reform with Sugden, 13 Apr., Hunt, 14 Apr., and Edward Synge Cooper, 18 Apr., and on the 19th he earned the Speaker’s rebuke on telling North that he had promoted the bill at home, not as a means to repeal, but so as to win justice for Ireland and to strengthen the institutions of monarchy, church and Lords. He spoke and voted against Gascoyne’s wrecking amendment that day, which precipitated a dissolution, and on 21 Apr. 1831 he threw out the prospect of the number of Irish reformers rising from 59 to 80. Macnamara privately commented on the 23rd that ‘O’Connell has changed his tone in the House very much and I tell you there is no man more attended to by the ministers than he is’.
Well might O’Connell bear Moore’s trenchant criticisms of his having prematurely agitated the repeal question ‘with the most perfect candour and good humour’, during their conversation on 23 Apr. 1831, because at the ensuing general election, during which no one could be unaware that ministers had made an unsavoury alliance with their untrustworthy new associate, he commanded his supporters to put that issue aside in favour of parliamentary reform.
Convinced by such encounters that the Irish administration intended only ‘to do good to Ireland provided it be in subserviency to English interest’, O’Connell prepared to bring what he called the ‘case of Ireland’ before the House.
O’Connell, who was a minority teller for his own motion for swearing the original Dublin election committee, 29 June, and for Cressett Pelham’s amendment to postpone issuing the new writ, 8 Aug., was furious at ministers’ negligence in conceding a rerun of a contest in the Irish capital, about which he busied himself in August 1831. Claiming that ‘there is a fatality about them touching Ireland which pervades their every act’, he was particularly incensed by the decision to rearm the yeomanry early that month, and, as the premier noted, he ‘said a few words in his usual false and Jesuitical tone’ against this as part of an Irish delegation to Grey on the 12th. More than ever convinced of the growing popularity of a local legislature, he informed Dwyer that ‘a domestic Parliament, an absentee rate, an arrangement of church property - these are the sine qua non of our assistance’.
He voted with government in both divisions on the controversial Dublin election, 23 Aug., and kept up a stream of mainly supportive suggestions in the committee on the reform bill late that month, but again condemned misdemeanours by the yeomanry, 26 Aug., when Holland judged him ‘a ready and powerful speaker but though pleasing, not so pleasing as I had expected’, and 31 Aug. 1831, when he pummelled Smith Stanley and others with a barrage of Irish grievances.
O’Connell confided to Barrett, 5 Oct. 1831, the strictly private communication that ‘I COULD be [Irish] attorney-general - in one hour’, an idea which, when rumours emerged about it later that month, was dismissed as preposterous, given his recent trial, by the Irish liberal Lord Donoughmore.
He has a hard game to play, and we must not expect immediate and cordial support and the sudden abandonment of questions which he has been advocating. Such a course would not be advantageous to us in any way and it would disable him from rendering service to the government. It is important that he should appear to come round rather from conviction than by bribe. In the mean time, it has been fully made known to him that what he obtains he must earn.
Grey mss, Smith Stanley to Grey, 23 Oct.; Derby mss 117/5, reply, 24 Oct. 1831; Anglesey mss 27A/136; 29B, pp. 91-92.
However, Anglesey’s confidence that he was ‘riding his race well’ had collapsed by the middle of November 1831, when Holland recorded that ‘O’Connell has again run out of his course, scurrilously abusing Mr. Stanley and disparaging Lord Anglesey in a letter to the newspapers, without provocation’. The king, who had been ‘not indisposed to propitiate O’Connell for the sake of quiet in Ireland’, remarked that ‘the gloss was not off his silk gown before he began flinging dirt and kicking up dust to defile it’.
O’Connell was, indeed, beset by more extreme challengers to his position that autumn, for the Dublin Trades Political Union, of which he was a member, had quickly risen to prominence as a working class organization with a strong repeal agenda. It required all his powers of guile and intimidation to subvert it, by November 1831, into the National Trades Political Union, with a broader social base and a wider reform remit, and even then he felt forced to found the National Political Union, a moderate reform association for the promotion of Irish interests, in order to absorb its potentially more dynamic rival.
O’Connell, who paired for the second reading of the revised reform bill, 17 Dec. 1831, failed to muster more than six Irish Members, including his son Maurice, in Dublin early the following month.
His return was partly due to professional commitments, and the fact that he hinted at resuming his practice at the bar may have been an indication of financial problems. He might also have desired to lie low on account of Ellen Courtenay’s public revelations. She had approached the O’Gorman Mahon and Hunt the previous year, when O’Connell had privately rejected her charges with ‘contemptuous defiance’, pointing out that such a calumny ‘would have been worth any money in Ireland at any time during the last 20 years, that is, if it had the least face of probability’. Having failed to exact anything from him then, she now issued her Narrative, dated from the Fleet Prison, 27 Feb. 1832, claiming that his refusal to honour his supposed promise of financial assistance had reduced her to bankruptcy. However, the fact that it was published from the offices of the scurrilous Satirist newspaper in The Strand marked it out as a sordid piece of sexual blackmail, and, as even his most hostile opponents refused to exploit it, for which he was grateful, O’Connell’s standing was left largely untouched by the scandal. He always treated the story as a derisory fabrication: according to his investigations, she was ‘an elderly strolling actress’, of some other name, who in 1817 had been employed in the Isle of Wight and had never had a child.
Having, among his usual plethora of daily comments, touched on reform, 7, 9 May, he leant his full support to (and voted for) Ebrington’s motion for an address calling on the king to employ only ministers who would carry the bill unimpaired, 10 May 1832, declaring that it was a question ‘between liberty and despotism of the very worst kind, the despotism of a sordid oligarchy’. His backing was crucial in ensuring the reinstatement of the Grey ministry that month, but from Brooks’s on the 17th he reported that although he had tacitly allowed repeal ‘to stand over for a fitter season’, he intended to raise its cry the moment the English reform bill had passed.
He sided with opposition on the boundaries of Whitehaven and Stamford, 22 June, and divided for a system of representation for New South Wales, 28 June 1832. He welcomed Smith Stanley’s announcement of the reinstatement of the ‘beneficial interest’ test as the technical basis of the £10 county qualification, 25 June, but called for the adoption of the new method of registration envisaged for England, largely because of his suspicions about the overworked and partisan assistant barristers who were responsible for the supervision of this process in Irish counties.
In September 1832 O’Connell informed Fitzpatrick that his political life was henceforth to be devoted to repeal or the obtaining of ‘a local and domestic legislature’, and not long afterwards he explained:
My plan is to restore the Irish Parliament with the full assent of Protestants and Presbyterians as well as Catholics. I desire no social revolution, no social change ... In short, salutary restoration without revolution; an Irish Parliament, British connection; one king, two legislatures.
O’Connell Corresp. iv. 1921; v. 1957.
Never reliably secure in any seat that he occupied, he left Kerry to be returned for Dublin, where nothing came of his intended alliance with a Conservative Repealer, at the general election of 1832.
indisputably the greatest orator in the House: nervous, passionate, without art or ornament; concise, intrepid, terrible; far more in the style of the old Demosthenic directness and vehemence than anything I have heard in this modern world, yet often coarse and sometimes tiresome.
[J. Grant], Random Recollections of Commons (1837), 313-28; T. de V. White, ‘English Opinion’, in O’Connell: Nine Centenary Essays, 211.
Greville, who commented that ‘it would not be very easy to do him perfect justice’, wrote that
history will speak of him as one of the most remarkable men who ever existed; he will fill a great space in its pages; his position was unique ... To rise from the humblest station to the height of empire like Napoleon is no common destiny.
He concluded that ‘it is impossible to question the greatness of his abilities nor the sincerity of his patriotism’.
His greatest feat was, without question, Catholic emancipation, not least because, in the words of Fingall, here classing himself with the ‘criminally cowardly’ aristocratic leadership
we never understood that we had a nation behind us - O’Connell alone comprehended that properly, and he used his knowledge fitly. It was by him that the gates of the constitution were broken open for us; we owe everything to his rough work.
Fagan, i. 162.
But, despite such accolades, O’Connell, alluding to the inadequacies of his associates, was resentful that ‘I never will get half credit enough for carrying emancipation because posterity never can believe the species of animals with which I had to carry on my warfare with the common enemy’.
For more than 20 years before emancipation, the burthen of the cause was thrown upon me. I had to arrange the meetings, to prepare the resolutions, to furnish replies to the correspondence, to examine the case of each person complaining of practical difficulties, to rouse the torpid, to avoid the shoals and breakers of the law, to guard against multiplied treachery and at all times to oppose, at every peril, the powerful and multitudinous enemies of the cause. To descend to particulars: at a period when my minutes counted by the guinea, when my emoluments were limited only by the extent of my physical and waking powers, when my meals were shortened to the narrowest space and my sleep restricted to the earliest hours before dawn, at that period, and for more than 20 years, there was no day that I did not devote one to two hours, often much more, to the working out of the Catholic cause. And that without receiving or allowing the offer of any remuneration, even for the expenditure incurred in the agitation of the cause itself.
D. O’Connell, Observations on Corn Laws (1842), 66-67.
In the end, at least in his own analysis, backbreaking grind eventually provided him with the opportunity to best the victor of Buonaparte, and this - for, despite his protestations of non-violence, he was apt to encourage excitement and was epitomized in popular poems and songs as a warlike hero - he obtained by the threat of a barely contained military and social upheaval.
did emancipate the Catholics, but he emancipated them because (as he himself avowed) emancipation was no longer to be resisted. We had our moral Waterloo, my lord, and our victory was more useful, if not more glorious. We chained the valiant duke to the car of our triumph and compelled him to set us free.
D. O’Connell, Observations on Corn Laws, 34.
Many, like Count O’Connell, admired him greatly for this crowning achievement, but also, like the later lord lieutenant Lord Clarendon, damned him for continuing to further the politics of extremism.
I dreamed a day-dream - was it a dream? - that Ireland still wanted me; that ... the benefits of good government had not reached the great mass of the Irish people, and could not reach them unless the Union should be either made a reality or unless that hideous measure should be abrogated.
D. O’Connell, Observations on Corn Laws, 67-69.
There followed the two further stages of his career: the later 1830s, during which, making himself influential by alternately wooing and wounding his Whig ally Melbourne, he partly succeeded in bringing greater justice to Ireland; and the early 1840s, during which, rerunning the mass agitation of the 1820s in the form of the Repeal Association, he failed to wrest an independent Parliament from Peel.