736 Chapter XXX
grievances, suffering alike from the insecurities of farm tenancy, from the expense
of paying tithes to an alien church, and from exclusion from politics. The coming
together of Catholics and Dissenters was correspondingly feared by the ascen-
dancy and by the British government. The failure of the two groups to cooperate in
1783, a failure due both to themselves and to the manipulations of Anglicans, had
been a main cause of the collapse of the movement for Parliamentary reform at the
time of the American Revolution.^49 From the upheavals of those years somewhat
opposite results had ensued. The Irish Parliament enjoyed a little more freedom
with respect to Great Britain after 1782. But as the instrument of an entrenched
and hereditary minority, the Irish Parliament firmly refused any extension of po-
litical rights. The governing class, anticipating that the granting of power to the
“native” Irish would undermine the whole system in church and state, and undo
the whole seventeenth- century settlement of law and property (as eventually it
did), stood fast against what was called reform, and would indeed mean revolution.
The troubles of Ireland were thus primarily internal, though the Anglicans could
maintain their position only through the connection with England. As so often in
the history of the empire, however, the central government at Westminster was
sometimes more willing than the local rulers to listen to popular discontents. Wil-
liam Pitt, as early as 1791, was coming to feel that the only solution might be in an
abolition of the Irish Parliament and a union with England, as happened in 1801.
Only thus, he reasoned, could the obstinacy of the Irish ascendancy be overcome,
and the causes of revolutionary ferment alleviated; only thus, by merging the Irish
Catholics, along with the Dissenters, into a larger United Kingdom in which they
would be a minority, could they be given political rights without danger to Great
Britain. Pitt’s views on union with England, in short, while unwelcome to the Irish
Parliament, were not unfriendly to the Irish people.
Unrest in Ireland was endemic. Agricultural workers, made desperate by poverty
or by loss of land through eviction, or stirred up when landlords replaced Catholic
with Protestant tenants, or vice versa, formed secret associations to offer threats
and retaliation. Such, in the last decades of the century, were the Defenders, who
were mostly Catholic, and the Protestant Peep- of- Day Boys in Ulster. Very differ-
ent were the middle- class organizations, public and avowed, such as the armed
Volunteer companies which had formed about 1778, and worked without success
for a reformation of Parliament. Discouraged and inactive after 1784, the members
of these companies were still in possession of their weapons, especially among the
Presbyterians of the north. In 1789 they were reawakened to politics by news of
the French Revolution. The press and the theaters of Dublin, Cork, Belfast, and
other towns re- echoed with enthusiastic praises for the new order in France.
In Ireland, however, as in England and Scotland, organized disaffection came to
a head in 1792, in the very months that preceded the outbreak of war between
France and Britain. The new feature, distinguishing it from the agitation of a de-
cade before, was a more determined resolution to overcome the old Catholic-
Protestant differences. The Catholic Committee, a kind of self- help organization
formed many years before, fell into new hands in 1792, when the Catholic bishops
49 For Ireland, 1778–1784, see above pp. 569–76, 620–29.