Two Parliaments Escape Reform 219
publicity, the British yielded. The first real concessions came in 1780. The British
Parliament amended the trade controls to allow export of Irish woolens and glass-
wares and trade with the colonies. But these concessions came so late, so grudg-
ingly, and so obviously under pressure of armed defiance, that they inspired no
confidence and won no credit for the British. And it was thought that what Parlia-
ment gave it could take away.
Agitation therefore continued. A Volunteer convention, with delegates from
143 companies, met at Dungannon in Ulster. It was presided over by the Earl of
Charlemont and the two leading reformers in the Irish Parliament, Henry Flood
and Henry Grattan. Flood was a reformer of more drastic type, who had even tried
to tax absentee landlords. Grattan was a kind of Whig, primarily interested in Irish
parliamentary liberties. The convention passed resolutions repudiating the power
“of any other than the King, Lords, and Commons of Ireland to make laws to bind
this kingdom.” Meanwhile Cornwallis had surrendered at Yorktown. The British
ministry was helpless and its policies wholly discredited. In England, too, a vocif-
erous reform movement had arisen, of which Fox was now the chief spokesman
within the parliamentary governing class. The English reformers looked on those
of Ireland as allies against the same evils.
In 1782 the British gave the Irish what they seemed to want, and what the
Americans had seemed to want in 1775, namely, freedom from the Parliament of
Great Britain, and a coordinate status for their own Parliament under the crown.
Poynings’ Law and the Declaratory Act of 1719 were rescinded. The Irish Parlia-
ment was now “free,” and the two kingdoms were supposedly equal. For a moment
there was great joy in Ireland. It was indeed a momentous hour. Never had En-
gland so relaxed its hold on the lesser island. An applauding Parliament at Dublin,
expressing the real enthusiasm of the country, voted a national award of £50,000 to
the patriot hero, Henry Grattan.
England had yielded before the armed strength of the Volunteers, whose num-
bers rose to 80,000 by 1782. It must be noted, however, that the Volunteer compa-
nies, spirited as they were, were never put to the test. The way in which the very
similar Dutch free companies melted away before a few Prussian regiments in
1787 suggests what might have happened if a few Hessian regiments had landed
at Dublin. The English, who might conceivably have shifted troops after the sur-
render at Yorktown, must be given credit for not making the experiment. As it
turned out it was the Americans who were put to the test, and by surviving it se-
cured concessions for Ireland. Many Irish, in their American sympathies, gladly
admitted as much. “It was on the plains of America,” wrote one in 1782, “that
Ireland obtained her freedom.”^2
“Grattan’s Parliament,” as the independent Irish Parliament has always been
called, lasted from 1782 until the Act of Union with Great Britain in 1801. It
represented the apogee of the “Protestant nation,” which is to say of the Anglican
nation, for Catholics still had no political rights, and although Presbyterians were
relieved from the Test Act in 1780 very few of them, in the real circumstances of
2 McDoweIl, op.cit., 40; see also M. Kraus, “America and the Irish Revolutionary Movement in
the 18th Century,” in Era of the American Revolution (N.Y., 1939), 332–48.