A Nation of Politicians: Gender, Patriotism, and Political Culture in Late Eighteenth-Century Ireland

Introduction

Introduction In August 1784, as Ireland descended into political turmoil, Charles Francis Sheridan, MP and pamphleteer, wrote to Lord Northington , reflecting on the great changes he had witnessed in recent months. In April, a crowd had invaded the House of Commons and called for the execution of several leading members of the parliament. In the following months, Dublin “mobs” tarred and feathered those suspected of breaking a nonimportation agreement. Violent clashes between crowds and troops had become frequent. Throughout the country, against the wishes of elites, county meetings formulated resolutions and distributed petitions in favor of parliamentary reform. The meetings had also elected delegates to send to a national meeting on the reform issue, a meeting ominously described as a “National Congress.” At the same time, Protestant volunteer militia companies were inviting Catholics to drill and march with them and even to take up arms in companies that were little more than the armed wing of the reform movement. To explain this outbreak of political radicalism, Sheridan looked to recent changes in popular political ideas and practice. “No two nations,” he wrote, “the most dissimilar in temper, genius, habits and opinions ever differed more from each other than the people of Ireland differ at this day from what they were, previous to the American War. I remember them even within these six years almost the direct reverse of what they now are.” Here, he corrected himself, recalling his own position in Irish society and perhaps the limits of his experience; he remembered “the Protestant parts of the kingdom at least.” The Protestant Ireland Sheridan recalled was a nation “servilely partial” to England and “unreasonably suspicious of their Roman Catholick Countrymen.” Fearful of Catholics, convinced of their own “impotence and insignificance” 3
without British support, the security of the Protestant religion was of paramount importance.1 However, the change in Protestant sentiment “had been as sudden as it [was] compleat.” Sheridan believed many Protestants had lost all attachment to England and had given up their fear and suspicion of Catholics to the extent that they were now “ready to share every political right and privilege.” In this alliance, Sheridan feared his fellow Protestants were “blind to the necessary consequence, the subversion of Protestant government.” Sheridan then turned to the causes of the abrupt change he observed. What had brought about this shift in Protestant identity? In the first place, Sheridan looked to politicization as the cause of the amelioration of relations with Catholics. He noted the curious “action and reaction of religion upon politics and of politicks upon religion,” so that “which ever [was] the most prevalent at the time, whether religious bigotry, or political enthusiasm, [would] infallibly direct and govern the operations of the other.” While religious feeling and fear had previously directed Protestant policy, now “the prevalence of wild and extravagant politicks appear[ed] to . . . supercede all religious prejudices.” This political union across religious divides had resulted in the strange spectacle in which “the papist [went] to the meeting house; the Presbyterian to the mass, and the member of the Church of England to either indiscriminately.”2 Above all, it was the emergence of the Volunteers that had occasioned a new type of politics. With the entry of the French into the war on the side of the rebellious colonies in 1778 and government failure to organize the militia, ad hoc local defense forces were formed throughout the country. Outside of government control and inspired in part by the example of the American colonists, this force of as many as eighty thousand men developed a national organization and soon became involved in political agitation for the removal of British restrictions on Irish trade and subsequently for a more general reform of Anglo-Irish relations, the Irish government, and the representative system. Although the force had produced national pride, this was far from its most worrisome effect. The real consequence of volunteering was “the intimate communication it produced between the lower and higher classes of the people,” which had “excited the insolence of the former and sunk the consequence of the latter.” Volunteer meetings had been dominated by politics and were occasions where the gentry were forced to associate with “their lowest tenants or tradesmen . . . almost on a footing of equality.” Even more pernicious to established authority was 4 Introduction the regional and national structure that the originally fiercely local Volunteers had built. Meetings and assemblies produced a...