Cambridge University Press
9780521843720 - The British Monarchy and Ireland - 1800 to the Present - by James Loughlin
Excerpt
The Act of Union of 1801 completed the constitutional development of the United Kingdom through the incorporation of Ireland into a polity governed from Westminster. Henceforth the monarchy, as the hegemonic identifier of the state, was faced with a problem of representation, or embodiment, that had not existed before: could it give authentic expression to the identity and interests of the eight million Irish Catholics the Act had brought within its borders?
Ireland’s connection with the monarchy had mythic, genealogical and constitutional strands. The history of the Stone of Scone – the coronation stone that until 1997 resided in Westminster Abbey – had been traced back to ancient Ireland, where for centuries it had been the coronation stone of the Irish High Kings at Tara; and from where it was believed to have gone, on loan, to Scotland early in the sixth century for the crowning of Fergus the Great, brother of Murtagh mac Erc, King of Ireland. The stone, it was believed, never came back to Ireland, and was removed to England by Edward I in 1297. Associated with it was a prophecy stating that wherever it resided a King of the Scotic (Irish-Milesian) race would reign – a prophecy that remained true, as the British royal family could trace its descent back through the Stuart line to the historic Kings of Ireland.1 This account of Ireland’s connection with the British monarchy is based on rather slim foundations; nevertheless the Irish–Scottish origins of the royal family are still, as we shall see, of importance to Ulster Unionists. Yet however strong the monarchy’s genealogical link with Ireland – the title ‘King of Ireland’ was first assumed by Henry VIII in 1542, 370 years after the first invasion of Ireland2 – there is little real evidence of a monarchical desire to acknowledge that genealogical strand; while the problems facing the monarchy in Ireland from 1800 were several, involving economic inequality, the coherence of the public realm, sectarian animosities, and antagonistic national traditions and objectives.
The example for the Irish Act of Union was clearly that of the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707. The claim was made that a Union would open up Ireland for prosperity through the investment of British capital secured by the Westminster Parliament.3 Henry Dundas, Pitt’s Secretary of War, it is safe to assume, saw the path to progress being pursued by his own homeland in the late eighteenth century – a point made much of in Unionist arguments4 – as a suitable model for Ireland; though the immediate factor pressing a Union was the Anglo-French war and associated problems of military strategy, resources and internal security.5 In the event, the Union did not create a mutually beneficial economic and political arena. Ireland was, and would remain throughout the Union period, economically underdeveloped compared to Britain;6 its sectarian divisions would remain entrenched, becoming exacerbated in Ulster as popular nationalism developed; while the overwhelming influence of British political opinion in shaping Irish policies determined that Anglo-Irish relations would remain deeply problematic. Geoff Eley’s description of the public sphere in the nineteenth century as an ‘arena of contested meanings, in which different and opposing publics manoeuvred for space’ around questions of ‘domination and subordination’7 is an apt description of the Anglo-Irish context in which the Irish question was fought out. It was one that the monarchy was supposed to embody and give meaning to.
From the beginning that was difficult. Owing to a combination of political incompetence on the part of Pitt and Henry Dundas in failing to prepare the King adequately for the concession, and, more significantly, the King’s entrenched belief that Catholic emancipation was fundamentally inconsistent with his coronation oath,8 the Union was enacted without this crucial accompaniment.9 It was an entirely personal matter of principle, impervious to arguments for ‘tranquillising Ireland, and attaching it to this country’ through safeguards for the Anglican Church establishment; the demise of ‘dangerous principles’ among Irish Catholics; and state control through the part-payment of the Catholic clergy, together with superintendence and ‘political tests’.10 Against the logic of such arguments had to be set the place of the coronation ceremony and, more widely, the place of monarchy within a popular discourse of constitutionalism: ‘If there was unanimity about anything in the world of nineteenth century politics it was that the English constitution was, or, at the very least had been, the best in the world … the most sacred symbol of Englishness.’11
At the centre of English constitutional exceptionalism was the ‘Glorious Revolution’, a foundation myth focused on monarchy, a Protestant monarchy framed in opposition to the alien ‘reference societies’ of Catholic Europe.12 Divine dispensation objectified in functional efficacy had invested the constitution with almost fetishistic dimensions. The centrality of monarchic constitutionalism to English history and politics was registered by Edmund Burke. His ideologically formative Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) consecrated the existing constitutional order through an ‘organic’ theory of society: belief in the aristocracy as a governing class, and in the state as a great spiritual entity uniting the living and the dead. Burke claimed: ‘we have given to our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood; binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties; adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections; keeping inseparable, and cherishing with the warmth of all their combined and mutually reflected charities, our state, our hearths, our sepulchres, and our altars’.13
In so doing Burke created a contemporary legitimising framework for an essentially archaic notion of the monarch as the overarching ‘parent’ of the people. Moreover, the monarchy was not only the master symbol giving identity to the system, but a proof of its efficacy and legitimacy based on ancient tradition. Radical as the events of 1689 appeared, ‘the new [monarchical] line was … still a line of hereditary descent … in the same blood, though a hereditary descent qualified with Protestantism’.14
For his contribution to the state Burke was rewarded with a civil list pension of £1,200 a year,15 and aided by the war patriotism of the Napoleonic era his version of nationality developed a hegemonic authority progressively throughout the nineteenth century, displacing earlier radical conceptions based on the ‘Norman Yoke’.16 By 1920, its influence was such that the historian A. F. Pollard could claim that the historical evolution of the constitution had a determining influence on the making of both the English-British state and nation: ‘It is really coeval with them both.’17 Moreover, in the nineteenth century the monarchic shift of 1688 could be read anthropologically as denoting the emergence of an era of not only political but cultural enlightenment. In his great work of armchair anthropology, Sir James Frazer saw it as indicative of a new progressive order that William III, unlike ‘the dull bigot James the Second’, refused to practise the royal touch as a cure for illness.18 It was in this sense also that Sir Walter Scott, the pageantmeister of the great display of national tartanry that greeted George IV on his visit to Scotland in 1822, described Catholics as ‘still with a touch of the savage about them’ and their ‘Popery’ on a par with ‘animal magnetism, [and] phrenology’.19 The eminent constitutional lawyer A. V. Dicey thought that the people of England being ‘ripe for Protestantism at a time when the people of Ireland had hardly risen [my italics] to the level of Roman Catholicism was to each country a grievous misfortune’.20 Such opinions were the common currency of British popular Protestantism, which persisted until the twentieth century; indeed they were validated in the crude language of the Royal Declaration which each new monarch had to recite when first opening Parliament. Deriding the Catholic religion as ‘superstitious and idolatrous’,21 it continued in existence until George V insisted on its amendment in 1910.22 A blend of theological contempt and cultural superiority, the attitudes it legitimated, when combined with traditional British ethnocentric attitudes towards the Irish, were to be influential in determining perceptions of the role that monarchy could perform in the Irish context.
However, although Burke’s defence of the Protestant constitution appeared to legitimise British nativist sentiment, and was used as such by opponents of Catholic emancipation,23 he never intended his arguments to apply to Ireland, which he regarded as a distinctive national entity culturally riven by fiercely antagonistic traditions, made worse by the enforcement of penal laws against Catholics. It was with Ireland in mind that he explicitly rejected the coronation oath argument on which royal opposition to Catholic emancipation was based: ‘[In] that oath itself, as it is settled in the Act of William and Mary … I do not find one word to preclude His Majesty from consenting to any arrangement which Parliament may make with regard to the civil privileges of any of his subjects.’24 The maintenance of the penal laws merely perpetuated a deep chasm of values between Britain and Ireland. While in Britain dynastic and constitutional amendments were framed in the context of traditions and a culture which legitimised those changes, in Ireland the Protestant Ascendancy had kept alive the memory of conquest and expropriation on which its power was based, ensuring that a trans-sectarian, state-supportive, culture did not develop.25 Whereas the traditions of Britain acted as a cement for the constitutional order, those of Ireland were subversive of it.26 Ireland was not simply another region of the United Kingdom like Wales and Scotland whose local patriotic traditions were being overlaid in the early nineteenth century by a British cultural palimpsest acting to secure the state. In this context the failure to combine the Act of Union with the promised Catholic emancipation served only to reinforce ethno-cultural antagonism within the kingdom, and especially the moral illegitimacy the Act of Union immediately assumed for Irish nationalists.27 A deep sense of betrayal was created that prepared the agitational ground for Daniel O’Connell’s political career and with it the Irish constitutional tradition. That tradition, especially as it was informed by O’Connell’s ideas, was to shape a multifaceted relationship between Catholic Ireland and the British monarchy, combining elements of opposition, attachment and indifference depending on context, and explicable in terms of neither undiluted allegiance or rejection.
At one level the refusal of emancipation belied the increasingly congenial relationship that had developed between the Hanoverian dynasty and the Catholic Church since the middle decades of the eighteenth century. On the death of the ‘Old Pretender’, James III, in 1766 Pope Clement XIII, hoping thereby to improve Anglo-papal relations and effect the removal of the penal laws, refused to recognise his son, Prince Charles Edward Stuart, as the rightful King of Britain and Ireland.28 The progress of conciliation was enhanced enormously by the transforming effect of the French Revolution, which rendered obsolete the religiously framed conflicts of the previous century. Britain became a refuge for continental Catholic clergy; in Ireland the great seminary of Maynooth was established. Moreover, the French occupation of Rome in 1797 and capture of Pius VI led the pope to recognise George III formally as rightful King of Britain, and the King to confer on the economically straitened last Stuart heir to the British throne, Cardinal Henry, Duke of York, an annual pension of £4,000.29 From 1804 to 1817 Pius VII facilitated the transfer of the Stuart archives from Rome to London.30 A highly symbolic process, it served to confirm the Hanoverian regime as Britain’s legitimate royal house at a time when, under the impetus of war, British patriotism was being shaped in the hegemonic monarchical mode it would henceforth assume.31 Indeed, the end of the Stuart claim to the throne with the death of the Cardinal Duke of York in 1807, and the disengagement of Jacobite symbolism and ideas from fears of dynastic destabilisation, left them available for exploitation as props and affectations to add glamour, an air of romance, and historical ‘authenticity’ to contemporary royal ceremonial.32 George IV’s coronation in July 1821, for instance, towards the cost of which Parliament authorised almost £243,000,33 was modelled on that of James II.34 His coronation visit to Scotland in 1822, choreographed by Sir Walter Scott, was a riot of tartanry, with the King disporting himself in the Stuart tartan the Young Pretender had devised on his arrival in Edinburgh in 1745.35 At her coronation, Queen Victoria was impressed by aspects that connected it to that of James II,36 and developed an illogical romantic attachment to her Stuart predecessors.37 She had the sitting room in her ‘medieval’ Balmoral residence decorated in tartan.38 In all of this it is possible to detect a desire for enhanced British rootedness – intuitively prescient given the monarchy’s ancestral vulnerability during World War I – framed largely in the imaginative terrain sketched out in the works, and under the influence, of Sir Walter Scott. Scott was the ideal guide, for his selective appropriation of the Stuart period sidelined the Catholic question which was central to their demise and the ‘Glorious Revolution’ that established the less legitimate Protestant succession.
In Ireland, however, where the revolution of 1688–90 had served merely to consolidate problems of religious conflict, land ownership and state legitimacy, and where the historical passions that period had generated deeply informed contemporary political debate, the religious issue was a central political concern, and the place of the monarchy in popular opinion problematic. It was made more so by the crown’s surrogate presence – the Irish Viceroyalty – the British state’s constitutional and administrative apparatus.
Originating in the reign of Henry VI, the post of Lord Lieutenant increased in significance in the later eighteenth century, together with that of Chief Secretary to assist in handling Irish administration. It was a crucial office for the management of Government business during the period of Irish constitutional independence from 1782 to 1800, but the dissolution of the Irish Parliament on the enactment of the Union reduced its importance39 and its abolition was repeatedly debated during the Union period. Its survival was due chiefly to inertia and, as nationalist Ireland showed little inclination to accept the Union, the need to have special provision for the direction of Irish affairs.40 But while ‘Lord Lieutenant’ was the official description of the post, the term of office was known as a Viceroyalty, and ‘Viceroy’ is, in fact, a more appropriate description of the officeholder.41 Centred in Dublin Castle and equipped with all the forms and ceremony of a court, the office was enhanced in 1783 when George III instituted, to accompany the Orders of the Rose and the Thistle, The Most Illustrious Order of St Patrick for ‘the dignity and honour of Our Realm of Ireland’.42 Moreover, just as the monarchy in Britain sat at the apex of a hierarchical social order, so in Ireland the Viceroyalty was supported by the landed aristocracy whose great houses provided staging posts for Viceroys on their tours of the Irish countryside.
More generally, the viceregal court functioned as a cohesive force in the Irish non-nationalist – though not entirely non-Catholic – world, setting a standard and pattern of social culture and manners.43 It was a British world whose landscape, certainly in the urban thoroughfares of Dublin – Edward McParland has referred to the ‘Englishness of Irish architecture’44 in regard to the city’s neo-classical public buildings – was signified through
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1 Viceregal Lodge, the Phoenix Park, 1890s.
naming and monuments. Dublin’s synecdochal embodiment of loyal Ireland was marked topographically by street names, hospitals, bridges, monuments – contentiously in the case of the equestrian statue of William III in College Green and strikingly in the great memorials to Admiral Lord Nelson in Dublin’s main thoroughfare, Sackville (now O’Connell) Street, and the Duke of Wellington in the Phoenix Park.45
The Phoenix Park was the location of the Viceregal Lodge (Fig. 1), the Viceroy’s private residence, and underwent its own marking as a British landscape when, in common with royal palaces in Britain, it was renovated in the 1830s and 1840s.46 But unlike in Britain, where such sites acted to reinforce a developing British nationality, in Ireland they represented an assertion of authority. Necessarily encoded in the Nelson and Wellington monuments was the message that Irish nationalists should not look for successful assistance to England’s enemies. Moreover, in Ireland as a whole it is possible to read the residences of great landlords – Britain’s ‘garrison’ in Ireland – as themselves identity statements47 in an often hostile environment and outnumbered by many more historically resonant ‘oppositional’ structures. As Burke remarked, the ruins and monuments of native Ireland could encode effective counter-narratives to misleading victors’ accounts.48 In fact a relationship between architecture and environment in general has long been noted, especially a close connection between ‘architectural strength and political disorder’,49 or in Ireland’s case, more often, constitutional uncertainty. The Viceroyalty itself, structurally and constitutionally, embodied such uncertainty.
The Union may have established constitutional unity between Britain and Ireland, but the continued existence of the Viceroyalty suggested that Ireland’s relationship to Britain was, in fact, colonial; an impression popular British attitudes to Ireland lent plausibility to. In Britain royalty developed massively its charity work in the nineteenth century to create a ‘welfare monarchy’50 that functioned to consolidate the status quo; so too – but with a more serious issue of legitimacy to address – can a viceregal dimension in Ireland to this practice be observed.51 Certainly the differences between the monarchy and the Viceroyalty were more significant than the similarities. Whereas in Britain the monarchy increasingly was the master-symbol embodying state and nation, not only did the Viceroyalty denote ambiguity about Ireland’s place in the expanded British state, but the relationship between ‘monarch’ and ‘Prime Minister’ in Ireland – Viceroy and Chief Secretary – was not permanently fixed. In a period of crisis a personally authoritative Viceroy could dominate his Chief Secretary and combine the powers of both offices, and with it the seat in Cabinet that was usually the Chief Secretary’s preserve.52 In this context, as we shall see, the elevated arena above party politics that the monarchy increasingly assumed in Britain from 1830 onwards was difficult to establish in Ireland and could easily disappear. This was due not merely to the dynamics of Irish politics, but to the fact that the Viceroy’s assumption of a royal persona was undermined by the officeholder always being a political appointee whose term ended with that of the administration that appointed him. Accordingly, not only were the Viceroy’s regal pretensions a subject of popular ridicule, but the officeholders were themselves often astounded at having to play royalty.53
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