Chapter XXII, of Cassells Illustrated History of England, Volume 7 page 2

Towards O'Connell, however, Mr. Stanley seems to have cherished a sort of antipathy. They exercised mutual repulsion upon one another, and they never came into collision without violent irritation. Lord Grey was disposed to treat the agitator in a different spirit. Mr. O'Connell having stated publicly "that the highest offices of the law were within his power," referring to his refusal of the offer of chief baron, Lord Grey remarked in the house of lords, " I may subject myself to reproach and censure from noble lords opposite; but I have no hesitation in stating that knowing the extent of his abilities and power of rendering service to the government, I should have been very glad if it could have been done, to detach him from the course in which he is now engaged, and attach him to the service of his country." On a subsequent occasion, in April, 1832, lord Grey, in replying to a charge of wishing to give a bribe to O'Connell, repeated his contradiction that an offer had been made to him of a place in the government, and said that he would have been rejoiced if any attempt at conciliation on the part of the government had had the effect of inducing Mr. O'Connell to pursue line of conduct which would have been materially conducive to the peace and tranquillity of Ireland, adding, " There is not, I am persuaded, any person who hears me, who looks at the situation of that country, and considers the weight and power of that gentleman's influence, who does not agree with me that it would have been most desirable, if practicable, to bring him over to the cause of good order."

Lord Cloncurry thus vividly sketches the agitation and its causes at this period: " From the union up to the year 1829, the type of British colonial government was the order of the day. The protestants were upheld as a superior caste, and paid in power and official emoluments for their services in the army of occupation. During the second viceroyalty of lord Anglesey, the effort was made by him to evoke the energies of the whole nation for its own regeneration. That effort was defeated by the conjoint influence of the cowardice of the English cabinet, the petulance of Mr. Stanley, and the unseasonable violence and selfishness of the lately emancipated popular leaders. Upon lord Anglesey's recall the modern whig model of statesmanship was set up and followed; popular grievances were allowed to remain unredressed; the discontent and violence engendered by those grievances were used from time to time for party purposes; the people were hung and bayoneted when their roused passions exceeded the due measure of factious requirement; and the state patronage was employed to stimulate and to reward a staff of demagogues, by whom the masses were alternately excited to madness, and betrayed, according to the necessities of the English factions. When Russells and Greys were out or in danger, there were free promises of equal laws and privileges and franchises for oppressed Ireland; the minister expectant, or trembling for his place, spoke loudly of justice and compensation, of fraternity and freedom. To these key-notes the place-hunting demagogue pitched his brawling. His talk was of pike-making, and sword-fleshing, and monster marching. The simple people were goaded into a madness, the end whereof was for them suspension of the habeas corpus act, the hulks, and the gallows; for their stimulators, silk gowns, and commissionerships, and seats on the bench. Under this treatment the public mind became debauched; the lower classes, forced to bear the charges of agitation; as well as to suffer its penalties, lost all faith in their social future; they saw not and looked not beyond the momentary excitement of a procession or a monster meeting. As time went on, those who led and robbed them felt the necessity of meeting the apathy attendant upon their increasing demoralisation by the use of more pungent stimulants. They could no longer trust for topics of agitation to a recapitulation of real grievances which might be redressed, but in the removal of which would be involved the drying up of the springs of the agitators' influence. To hold out hopes of the establishment of civil and religious equality, of the attainment of complete freedom of industry, or even of local self-government, no longer sufficed to rouse the passions of the mob, or to bring money into the exchequer of the demagogues. It therefore followed, that the staple talk of the popular meetings came to be made up of appeals to the basest passions of the multitude; old feuds between Irishmen were revived, a new appetite for vengeance was whetted - nay, even the bonds of society were loosened by intimations, not obscure, that a triumph of the people would be associated with an abatement of the sacredness of the property. The emptiness of this noise was in a direct ratio with its loudness. Yet it fulfilled its purpose of frightening the tories out of office, or of deterring them from accepting it; and the talkers were accordingly every now and then rewarded and silenced by scraps from the refuse of official patronage. It must be obvious that this state of things could not have existed, had a middle class exercised a proper and natural influence upon the public mind. There was however, practically, no such class in a position to interfere: many of those who should have belonged to it were clamorous place-beggars, in the ranks of the agitators. Those who were not sunk into that abyss of degradation were restrained by their fears from taking any part in public affairs. They were, upon the one hand, afraid of contributing to a restoration of the power of their ancient oppressors; and upon the other, distrustful of those pretended friends, whose selfish motives they could not but perceive through the disguise of their assumed patriotism."

The Irish peasantry very soon learned that whatever emancipation had done or might do for barristers and other persons qualified to hold situations under government, from which Roman Catholics had been previously almost entirely excluded, it had done nothing to remove or even to mitigate their practical grievances» They found that the rack-rents of their holdings were not reduced; that the tax-collector went round as usual, and did not abate his demands; that the tithe-proctor did not fail in his visits, and that, in default of payment, he seized upon the cow or the pig, the pot or the blanket. Through the machinery of the Catholic Association, and the other associations which O'Connell had established, they became readers of newspapers, or regularly heard them read and had their contents expounded to them, and they learned what their own leaders had said in vehement, inflammatory language of their "monster grievance," the established church; they learned that the language of their own leaders was not more violent than what was uttered by the most eminent protestant statesmen, foreign travellers, and public writers upon this great anomaly. They were told that "the 500,000 Lutherans in that island had an establishment which cost little less than the establishment of 9,000,000 of Lutherans in England; " that while England had only twenty-six bishops, Ireland had twenty-two They had heard of the picture presented by Mr. Wakefield, who thus addressed his readers: - " Place yourselves in the situation of a half-famished cotter, surrounded by a wretched family, clamorous for food; and judge what his feelings must be when he sees the tenth part of the produce of his potato garden exposed at harvest time to public ' cant; ' or if, as is most common, he has given a promissory note for the payment of a certain sum of money to compensate for such tithes when it becomes due, to hear the heart-rending cries of his offspring, clinging round him, and lamenting for the milk of which they are deprived by the cows being driven to the pound to be sold to discharge the debt. I have seen the cow, the favourite cow, driven away, accompanied by the sighs, the tears, and the imprecations of a whole family, who were paddling through wet and dirt, to take their last affectionate farewell of their only friend and benefactor at the pound-gate. I have heard, with emotions I can scarcely describe, deep curses repeated from village to village as the cavalcade proceeded; I have beheld at night houses in flames, and for a moment supposed myself in a country exposed to the ravages of war, and suffering from the incursions of an enemy. On the following morning the most alarming accounts of thrashers and whiteboys have met my ears - of men who had assembled with weapons of destruction, for the purpose of compelling people to swear not to submit to the payment of tithes. I have been informed of these oppressed people: having, in the ebullition of their rage, murdered both proctors and collectors, wreaking their vengeance with every mark of the most savage barbarity." They had been told by Mr. Wakefield - on the impartiality, accuracy, and general excellence of whose great work no eulogium can be too high - that the word u papist" carried as much contempt along with it, as if a beast were designated by the term; that the protestants regarded them as the helots of the country, who ought to be kept in perpetual bondage. They were told of the experience of lord chancellor Redesdale, who stated in the house of lords that he had been connected with that ill-fated country for the last twenty years; and he was sorry to say that there existed in it two sorts of justice, the one for the rich and the other for the poor, and both equally ill-administered. They had read the following description of the tithe-proctor by their country's most eminent protestant statesman, Henry Grattan: - u The use of the tithe-farmer is to get from the parishioners what the parson would be ashamed to demand, and so enable the parson to absent himself from his duty; the powers of the tithe-farmer are summary laws and ecclesiastical courts; his livelihood is extortion; his rank in society is generally the lowest; and his occupation is to pounce on the poor in the name of the Lord! He is a species of wolf left by the shepherd to take care of the flock in his absence." They had read that a single tithe- proctor had on one occasion processed 1,100 persons for tithes, nearly all of the lower order of farmers or peasants, the expense of each process being about eight shillings. They had heard of opinions delivered in parliament, on the platform, and from the press by protestant statesmen of the highest consideration, that it was a cruel oppression to extort in that manner from the majority of the tillers of the soil the tenth of its produce, in order to support the clergy of another church, who, in many cases, had no flocks, or only a few followers, who were well able to pay for their own religious instruction. The system would be intolerable even were the state clergy the pastors of the majority; but as the proportion between the protestants and the Roman catholics was in many parts as one to ten, and in some as one to twenty, the injustice necessarily involved in the mode of levying the impost was aggravated a hundredfold. It would be scarcely possible to devise any mode of levying an impost more exasperating, which came home to the bosoms of men with more irritating, humiliating, and maddening power, and which violated more recklessly men's natural sense of justice. If a plan were devised for the purpose of driving men into insurrection, nothing could be more effectual than the tithe-proctor system. Besides, it tended directly to the impoverishment of the country, retarding agricultural improvement and limiting production. If a man kept all his land in pasture, he escaped the impost; but the moment he tilled it, he was subjected to a tax of ten per cent, on the gross produce. The valuation being made by the tithe-proctor - a man whose interest it was to defraud both the tenant and the parson - the consequence was, that the gentry and the large farmers, to a great extent, evaded the tax, and left the small occupiers to bear nearly the whole burden; they even avoided mowing their meadows in some cases, because then they should pay tithe for the hay.

There was besides a tax called church cess, levied by protestants in vestry meetings upon Roman catholics for cleaning the church, ringing the bell, washing the minister's surplice, purchasing bread and wine for the communion, and paying the salary of the parish clerk. This tax was felt to be a direct and flagrant violation of the rights of conscience, and of the principles of the British constitution; and against it there was a determined opposition, which manifested itself in tumultuous and violent assemblages at the parish churches all over the country on Easter Monday, when the rector or his curate, as chairman of the meeting, came into angry collision with flocks who disowned him? and denounced him as a tyrant, a persecutor, and a robber.

The evil of this state of things became so aggravated that all reasonable men on both sides felt it must be put a stop to somehow. In 1831 the organised resistance to the collection of tithes became so effective and so terrible that they were not paid, except where a composition had been made, and agreements had been adopted. The terrified proctors gave up their dangerous occupation after some of their number had been victimised in the most barbarous manner; and although a portion of the clergy insisted on their rights, not merely for the sake of their incomes, but for the interest of the church which they felt bound to defend, yet many had too much Christian spirit, too much regard for the interests of the gospel, to persist in the collection of tithes at such a fearful cost. Nothing could be more violent than the contrasts presented at this time in the social life of Ireland. On the one side, there was a rapid succession of atrocities and tragedies fearful to contemplate: - the bailiffs, constabulary, and military driving away cattle, sheep, pigs, and geese to be sold by public auction, to pay the minister who had no congregation to whom he could preach the gospel; the cattle-prisons or " pounds " surrounded by high walls, but uncovered, wet and dirty, crowded with all sorts of animals, cold and starved, and uttering doleful sounds; the driving away of the animals in the night from one farm to another to avoid seizures; the auctions without bidders, in the midst of groaning and jeering multitudes; the slaughter of policemen, and in some instances of clergymen, with fiendish expressions of hatred and yells of triumph; the mingling of fierce passions with the strongest natural affections; the exultation in murder as if it were a glorious deed of war; the Roman catholic press and platform almost justifying those deeds of outrage and blood; the mass of the Roman catholic population sustaining this insurrection against the law with their support, and sympathy, and prayers, as if it were a holy war in which the victims were martyrs. On the other side were presented pictures which excited the deepest interest of the protestant community throughout the United Kingdom. We behold the clergyman and his family in the glebe house, lately the abode of plenty, comfort, and elegance, a model of domestic happiness and gentlemanly life; but the income of the rector fell off, till he was bereft of nearly all his means. In order to procure the necessaries of life for his family, he was obliged to part with the cows that gave milk for his household; the horse and car, which were necessary in the remote place where his glebe house was situated; and everything that could be spared, till at length he was obliged to make his greatest sacrifice, and to send his books - the dear and valued companions of his life - to Dublin, to be sold by auction. His boys could no longer be respectably clad, his wife and daughters were obliged to part with their jewellery and all their superfluities There was no longer wine or medicine, that the mother was accustomed to dispense kindly and liberally to the poor around her, in their sickness and sorrow, without distinction of creed. The glebe, which once presented an aspect of so much comfort, and ease, and affluence, now looked bare, and desolate, and void of life: but for the contributions of Christian friends at a distance, many of those once happy little centres of Christian civilisation - those well-springs of consolation, to the afflicted - those green spots in the moral desert - must have been abandoned to the overwhelming sand of desolation swept upon it by the hurricane of the anti-tithe agitation. During this desperate struggle force was employed on several occasions with fatal effect. At Newtownbarry, in the county of Wexford, some cattle were impounded by a tithe-proctor. The peasantry assembled in large numbers to rescue them, when they came into collision with the yeomanry, who fired, killing twelve persons. It was market day, and a placard to the following effect had been posted upon the walls: - "There will be an end of church plunder; your hot, blanket, and pig will not hereafter be sold by auction to support in luxury, idleness, and ease persons who endeavour to make it appear that it is essential to the peace and prosperity of the country and your eternal salvation, while the most of you are starving. Attend to an auction of your neighbours' cattle." At Carrickshock there was a fearful tragedy. A number of writs against defaulters was issued by the court of exchequer, and entrusted to the care of process-servers, who, guarded by a strong body of police, proceeded on their mission with secresy and dispatch. Bonfires along the surrounding hills, however, and shrill whistles soon convinced them that the people were not unprepared for their visitors. But the yeomanry pushed boldly on; suddenly an immense assemblage of peasantry, armed with scythes and pitchforks, poured down upon them. A terrible hand-to-hand struggle ensued, and in the course of a few moments eighteen of the police, including the commanding officer, were slaughtered. The remainder consulted safety and fled, marking the course of their retreat by the blood that trickled from their wounds. A coroner's jury pronounced this deed of death as " wilful murder" against some persons unknown. A large government reward was offered, but it failed to produce a single conviction. At Castlepollard, in Westmeath, on the occasion of an attempted rescue, the chief constable was knocked down. The police fired, and nine or ten persons were killed. One of the most lamentable of these conflicts occurred at Gurtroe, near Rathcormac, in the county of Cork. Archdeacon Ryder brought a number of the military to recover the tithes of a farm belonging to a widow named Ryan. The assembled people resisted, the military were ordered to fire, eight persons were killed and thirteen wounded; and among the killed was the widow's son.