Britain 735
To recall briefly the well- known tribulations of eighteenth- century Ireland, it
seems safe to say that the contrasts between poverty and great wealth, and be-
tween discrimination and privilege, were more pronounced than in any country
of Western Europe before the French Revolution. There were three religious
communities that had little to do with each other. A tenth of the population was
Anglican. This tenth, the “ascendancy,” owned five- sixths of the land, and received
such benefits as the established Church of Ireland was able to confer; its members
occupied the government offices and enjoyed an array of pensions and sinecures;
a few hundred of them controlled the Irish Parliament at Dublin; and they in-
cluded the families of various British notables of the next generation, such as
Castlereagh, Palmerston, and the two Wellesleys, that is the Earl of Mornington
and the Duke of Wellington. A fifth of the population were Presbyterians. In
eastern Ulster they lived as a compact majority group; they were predominantly
middle- class, or at least they had no aristocracy; many were merchants, trades-
men, linen weavers, and artisans, but many also were tenant farmers; and, thanks
to their lively interest in America, to which there had been much recent emigra-
tion, and to their Dissenters’ dislike of bishops and landed gentility, they were
peculiarly susceptible to republican sentiments.
Almost three- quarters of the people were Roman Catholics. The Catholics had
been largely expropriated in the seventeenth century, through seizures by Anglican
landlords and the mass settlement of Scottish and English Presbyterians. The
Catholic Irish had joined with the French on a famous occasion, when the French
landed an army of 6,000 men in Ireland to support James II; it was upon the defeat
of the Irish and French in 1690, at the battle of the Boyne, that the eighteenth-
century regime in both Britain and Ireland was constructed. The Irish Catholics
long suffered the consequences by deprivation of almost all legal rights. By 1790
the most severe features of the penal code had been removed. No Catholic could
yet hold office or vote for a member of the Irish House of Commons, but normal
property rights had been restored, though the number of Catholic gentry and free-
holders was in fact very small. A Catholic episcopate was tolerated, a shadowy
group alongside the Protestant prelates of the Church of Ireland, who, though
often absentees, held the ancient sees, titles, and revenues—Armagh brought
£8,000 a year. The Catholic bishops of Ireland, accepting the inferior status of their
people, proved in the 1790’s to be far more conservative than those of France or
Italy. Since the middle of the century an important class of Catholic merchants
and business men had grown up, as among French Protestants before the Revolu-
tion, and for similar reasons—since they were kept legally out of the government
and the armed forces and were restricted in the professions, the universities, and
remunerative church appointments, they could advance themselves only in trade.
Catholics and Presbyterians had long held each other in mutual aversion and
horror, but by the end of the century the old religious animosities had begun to
fade, and leaders of the two out- groups came to feel that they shared the same
troops in the Anglo- Russian invasion of Holland in 1799; 26,000 at Salamanca in 1812; and 26,000
at Waterloo. See J. Fortescue, History of the British Army, 13 vols. (London, 1910–1930), IV, 666; VIII,
630; X, 430.