Two Parliaments Escape Reform 221
posed, while leaving all else unchanged, to grant the vote to those few property-
owning and substantial Catholics who could qualify under the existing system.
This plan, which simply looked to the removal of Catholicism as a disability, was
favored by Grattan, and by Burke in England, himself of Irish birth by a Catholic
mother. Given the tepidity of religious feeling among educated persons in the
eighteenth century, and considering that the Irish Catholic bishops (without con-
sulting the pope) had formally denied that the pope had any civil or temporal
power in Ireland, the idea of granting the franchise to the substantial Catholics
was not a very bold or alarming step, though in Ireland it raised many well-
grounded apprehensions. The other plan, favored by the Volunteers, looked to a
renovation of decayed boroughs, abolition of borough- mongering, and allowing of
real freedom and actual elective powers to the electorate. It was a popular plan, and
enjoyed wide support; but its sponsors were weakened by disagreement on giving
the vote to the Catholics. There were those who predicted, and the next hundred
years were to vindicate their predictions, that political power in the hands of the
Catholics would subvert all Ireland as then known, undo all the effects of the
seventeenth- century conquests, overturn property, dissolve the established church,
and even bring English civilization into question.
The Irish reform movement reached a climax in 1783 and 1784. It was closely
related to the corresponding movement in England, to which we can now turn
before taking up the reform bills in the Parliaments of the two countries.
The “Association” Movement in England
In England the new political movement centered about the idea of “association,” in
which Professor Herbert Butterfield has seen not merely a passing disturbance but
one of the grand dates of all English history. “Our French Revolution,” he has
written, “is in fact that of 1780—the revolution that we escaped.”^5 He insists that
the movement was quasi- revolutionary, because it affirmed that assemblies of pri-
vate persons, forming spontaneously throughout the country, were more represen-
tative than Parliament itself, both in being truer spokesmen of the people’s wishes,
and in having the power to take binding action in their name. It must again be
recalled that by the accepted ideas Parliament was supposed to be “absolute,” ac-
cording to Blackstone, or so independent that it must resist pressure from either
King or people, as Fox had said in 1771.
At the same time, and somewhat inconsistently with the doctrine of parliamen-
tary absolutism, it was held that members of the House of Commons, being sent up
by constituencies in boroughs and counties, could not themselves change these con-
stituencies, much less destroy them by outright abolition of decayed boroughs.
Blackstone himself was too logical to believe this; he even held that Parliament
could make and remake the constitution, and thought it regrettable that depopu-
5 H. Butterfield, George III, Lord North and the People, 1779–1780 (London, 1949), VI. For this
whole section I am mainly indebted to this important work. See also G. S. Veitch, The Genesis of Par-
liamentary Reform (London, 1913); S. Maccoby, English R adicalism , 1762–1785 (London, 1955).