History and Politics: Macaulay and Ireland

HISTORY AND POLITICS: MACAULAY AND IRELAND JANE MILLGATE Recent events in Ireland have given a certain adventitious interest to Macaulay's attempt, in the twelfth chapter of his History of England, to make the seventeenth-century sources of the Irish problem comprehensible to his nineteenth-century audience. But the chapter has mOre intrinsic claims to consideration: it not only possesses unity and shapeliness of structure and excitement of actual event - presenting as it does the story of the year 1689 in Ireland up to the relief of Londonderry and the Battle of Newton Buder - but it affords, in its dependence upon Macaulay's own visits to Ireland as well as upon written sources, an opportunity for watching the historian put together different kinds of material to form an effective narrative whole. The record of his Journal allows us to follow the order of the writing, discover the points at which various structural changes were probably made, and catch occasional glimpses of what Macaulay saw as the problems calling most urgently for solution. The overriding interest of the chapter consists, however, in Macaulay's handling of the historical narrative for his contemporary audience within the acknowledged context of the nineteenth-century political situation. Nowhere in the History is the relevance of the seventeenth century to the nineteenth more painfully apparent, and Macaulay's exploration of that relevance has both a tangible literary effect on the structure and content of the chapter itself and an intended political effect on the minds of its readers. Ireland was the lirst subject to which Macaulay turned his attention when he began work in earnest on the second two volumes of the History. As early as February 1849, before the reviews of his first two volumes were in and while he was still revising the text for later printings, he was already working out for himself the way in which he would write volumes III and N. The new plan of campaign involved three stages: lirst, the collection of material for the whole of William III'S reign, a process he envisaged as taking eighteen months or so; then the actual writing; finally, the 'polishing, retouching, and printing." On the very day on which he sketched out this scheme in his Journal, 8 February 1849, Macaulay went to work making copious extracts from Avaux's Irish UTQ, Volume XLI[, N1,mber 2, Winter 1973 mSTORY AND POLITICS III despatches, and during the ensuing months a good proportion of his reading was supplied by books and pamphlets relating to Ireland. But although Macaulay was no von Ranke, the collection of material meant for him more than reading printed sources: he must examine archives in England and abroad, and he must see with his own eyes, whenever possible, the sites of the events he wished to describe. In August 1849 he set 01I for Ireland to yjsit the Record Offices in Dublin, and to see for himself Kerry, Limerick, Cork, Armagh, and Londonderry. Once the Irish materials, documentary and visual, were in his head, Macaulay found it impossible to adhere to his plan and leave the actual composition until he was ready to write about the whole of William's reign. Hayjng collected, as he noted in his Journal, 'a large store of images & thoughts,'2 he was no sooner at home than he was bUSily drawing on that store for the narrative of Irish events which now forms chapter XII of the History. The freshness and vividness of that narrative no doubt owe something to the change of plan. The writing began on 18 September 1849, and he commented in his Journal the next day that he would go on for a month or so before pausing for revision.· It is clear from the Journal that Macaulay intended to have three separate sections of Irish narrative which would combine with English and Scottish sections to form three mixed chapters with which to open his third volume. On 6 October he noted: 'nnished the Irish part of my nrst Chapter. Tomorrow I shan proceed to the Irish part of my 2nd Chapter - then to the Irish part of my 3d - Then I think I shan take the Scotch...