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Reviewed by:
  • William Monsell of Tervoe, 1812–1894: Catholic Unionist, Anglo Irishman
  • Emmet Larkin
William Monsell of Tervoe, 1812–1894: Catholic Unionist, Anglo Irishman. By Matthew Potter. (Dublin and Portland, OR: Irish Academic Press. 2009. Pp. xiii, 226. $49.95. ISBN 978-0-716-52989-7.)

I first encountered William Monsell, the first Baron Emly of Tervoe, some fifty years ago, when I examined his papers and correspondence in the National Library of Ireland in Dublin. Because of the spotty nature of the collection, however, it was difficult to form a coherent picture of him, although two things became patently clear: he was very well connected and obviously influential. Over the years, I have met Monsell again and again in the archives in Rome, London, and Dublin. He has always remained, however, a shadowy and lurking figure, refracted by the light of more powerful personalities, whether a Pius IX, a Gladstone, a Newman, or a Cardinal Cullen, and therefore always oblique and somewhat mysterious.

In this excellent biography of Monsell, Matthew Potter has not only plumbed all the mysteries but also given us a deeper understanding of the Irish dimension of Victorian politics. Because politics is a game as well as a vocation, there are winners and losers in both the short and the long runs, and because Monsell had the great misfortune to have been an apparent loser on both counts, he has had to wait a long time for his historical due. In the short run, for example, his rather uninspiring Parliamentary career ended in a spectacular disaster. After a quarter of a century of painstakingly climbing the ministerial ladder in the House of Commons as the senior member for County Limerick, Monsell was obliged to resign his office of postmaster general in 1874, just as he arrived on the verge of cabinet rank, because of an extraordinary financial scandal that was not of his making, but for which he was held accountable as the responsible minister. The political disaster ironically was the occasion of his receiving his peerage.

In the long run, and what is at the heart of this biography, Monsell and his coterie also apparently lost the “great game” they were playing for the continued inclusion of Ireland as an integral part of the United Kingdom. The historical importance and significance of Monsell, Potter maintains, does not depend on whether he was “worsted in the game,” but rather on the reality and endurance of what he represented, and that in turn depended on the integrity of the political system he participated in. Monsell began life as a staunch Tory and an evangelical Protestant, but the awful impact of the Great Famine in Ireland in 1846–47, turned him into a Liberal in politics and a Roman Catholic in religion. Potter makes it clear that what might be construed as mere political careerism were profound and permanent changes of heart. Whether a Tory or a Liberal, Monsell was always a reformer, and whether a Protestant or a Catholic, he was always an enthusiast. In politics, moreover, he was always a Unionist, when Gladstone became a Home Ruler in 1885, Monsell remained a Liberal Unionist of the Whig variety. [End Page 373]

The point, of course, was that he did believe in what he represented, and in that representation, as expressed pejoratively in the lrish-Nationalist vernacular, he was a “West Brit.” In the course of a very long nineteenth century, that political formation in Ireland was eroded in the face of constitutional nationalism, but as something like the Irish Free State loomed larger, that West-British Catholic minority that had been represented by Monsell and his friends still had enough political vitality to secure safeguards such as proportional representation, a Senate, and perhaps one-third of the popular vote on the treaty in 1922 that delivered the Free State as a dominion. The long-term result of this accommodation has been the successful and peaceful political assimilation of that large minority in what is today an Irish Republic and an ironic standing example of democratic political stability to that statelet denominated as Northern Ireland that had so little regard for the rights of a very large...

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