From The Nation, May 27, 1843. This article was co-authored by both Thomas Davis and John Mitchel.1
Lords BEAUMONT and KENMARE have sent forth a decree against the Catholic Hierarchy of Ireland. They have ruled it ‘disgraceful’ for a Catholic Bishop to be a democrat, and infamous for a Catholic Hierarchy to be patriots. Most sapient and puissant princes! Their great souls were afflicted at hearing that a Catholic High-Priest could feel ‘unbounded contempt’ for the plunderers of the People—for the representatives of invasion—for the heirs of tyranny! They gaped and shook with holy horror at the picture of Prelates affording, in their Chapels, a sanctuary to hunted patriotism; and they fainted at the vision of Bishops walking to the scaffold in the name of freedom, and with their last words bequeathing to their successors the care of their own wrongs, and of their country’s rights; they fainted with grief and indignation, not at the tyranny which could thus persecute—not at the sufferings so cruelly inflicted and so nobly borne—no! but at the audacity of a Churchman pretending to have a country as well as a creed, and at the wickedness of an Irish Priest aiming at the crown of martyrdom in the cause of the oppressed.
‘Tis a peculiarity in Irish Church history that its great martyrs were men who died nominally for creed, but really for country. With rare exceptions, fanaticism was here a pretence for plunder, and not the genuine lava from the soul of a zealot. The Catholics who joined their efforts to those of the Saxon got their share of the spoils; and their belief in Transubstantiation gave little trouble to the consciences of their allies. But let a Priest add advocacy of the peasant’s rights to his other virtues, or a Bishop champion Ireland as well as his religion, and the piety of the Saxon became intolerant; his zeal against Popish abominations blazed into a pyre or blossomed into a scaffold, and the resources of the civil power were religiously lent against the patriot or democratic Papist. Archbishop OLIVER PLUNKET and Father NICHOLAS SHEEHY are only the most prominent names in an array of Irish martyrs, who died, like the Presbyterian WILLIAM ORR, ‘persecuted men for a persecuted country.’ BEAUMONT and KENMARE might have summoned many a Bishop and many a Priest from the dust of a bloody shroud, to testify how wicked and hazardous it was, in alien eyes, to have a heart for the People and a voice for Ireland. Nor was the crime diminished by Orthodoxy, as the dangling carcase of many a Presbyterian Clergyman proved in ’98.
The attack came well from Lords BEAUMONT and KENMARE. The English Lord bears a title honoured by a duration of more than five centuries. His forefathers were, therefore, among those coward, crouching slaves, who bore with the bloody rapaciousness of the TUDORS, the piratical inroads of the early STUARTS, and the systematic tyranny of the penal code. They bore these things unresisting, when ‘resistance was a duty;’ and Lord BEAUMONT represents the title, wealth, and slavery of centuries. He is a fair specimen of his class, too. The English Catholic Aristocrat is, and ever was, the most accommodating of serfs. No shame can rouse his manhood—no injury provoke him to retaliation.
Lord KENMARE hardly represents the Irish Catholic Aristocrats so well as Lord BEAUMONT does the English. Amongst them there have ever been found some endowed with courage and honesty enough to go with the People. The GORMANSTOWN, FINGAL and DELVIN families were only a little behind the Catholic merchants who stormed the outworks of the penal code in 1776; and Lord FRENCH’s family have shown a hereditary valour that more resembled the sixteenth than the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries.
But Lord KENMARE does represent his own family with miraculous fidelity. In the year one thousand seven hundred and eighty-three, upon this unfortunate island, there crawled a slave, wearing on ‘what seemed his head’ the shadow of a coronet, and bearing the title of KENMARE. He was a Catholic. He belonged to a race ground down to the dust by penal laws, and crushed under the hoof of an insolent and blood-thirsty party. Yet, when it was proposed, at the Convention of Delegates that year in Dublin, by certain Protestant Volunteers of Belfast, to include in their plan of reform a recognition of the equal rights and franchises of the Catholic body, this abject serf of KENMARE, this Helot Earl, put himself forward at the instance of the Government, and solemnly disavowed for himself, for his children, and for his countrymen, all desire of being restored to the common rights of humanity. He declared (loathsome slave!) that for his part he was well content to remain a slave, to beget slaves, and to die a slave. ‘Prostrate as the Catholics were at that period,’ says the gallant TONE, ‘this last insult was too much. They instantly assembled their General Committee, and disavowed Lord KENMARE and his disavowal, observing, at the same time, that they were not framed so differently from all other men as to be in love with their own degradation.’
In the year 1843 the native country of that servile Lord is still a province, but making a noble struggle for its independence; violating no human, no divine law—forming no dark, secret associations, but working by the peaceful might of concentrated opinion alone; collecting in the open day the suffrages of her unarmed and sober millions, under the sanction of religion and the guidance of religion’s anointed Ministers, until every Irishman shall have pronounced his opinion whether his country shall once more be a nation or not. And, behold! another KENMARE (seated now in the House of Peers, where O’CONNELL and the Irish Priesthood have placed him) rises to denounce this ‘hateful agitation,’ rebukes the venerable Clergy of the People, and calls on the English Government ‘to take stronger measures,’ to strain the law to the uttermost against his countrymen; and if the laws will not answer the purpose (that is, if the agitation be perfectly legal and constitutional), why, then this tyrannical sycophant—this worthy bearer of the KENMARE title—this fitting representative of the family honours, will give his vote in support of coercion, ‘with more cordiality than he ever gave a vote in his life.’ This is the language of Lord BEAUMONT, an English Nobleman, in which Lord KENMARE ‘expressed his entire concurrence.’
What will the next Lord KENMARE do for his country? If there be any youthful scion of that house—but pray Heaven there is none—what depth of grovelling meanness will be too low for him to descend to, if he may only ingratiate himself with the enemies of his country and his faith? They were emancipated against their will, those Noble Earls of KENMARE! and now, to their alarm and horror, they are called upon to resign their representative peerage in the English Parliament, and to come over and sit, Peers in their own right, amongst the nobles of their native land.
But it was the terrible sentiment of Dr. HIGGINS which excited such a storm of indignation. Contempt for aristocracy! Tell it not in the Herald’s office—whisper it not to Clarencieux or Garter King-at-Arms! Will this proud successor of the Apostles presume to despise the class that produced Lord HUNTINGTOWER, Lord FRANKFORD, and Lord CHESTERFIELD—Lord SHREWSBURY, Lord BEAUMONT, and Lord KENMARE? Will he dare to look but with veneration on the exterminating Lords of the South and the thorough-draining Lords of the North? What wonder that the Marquis of DOWNSHIRE shuddered to hear, and his strawberry leaves stood on end with horror!
Resolve us, then, O Most High Marquis, what does the Bishop of ARDAGH, or any other Irish Catholic, clerical or lay, or any Irish Protestant either, owe to the aristocracy as a class, but simply, as Dr. HIGGINS expressed it, ‘unbounded contempt?’ When did any measure to elevate and improve the People ever come from your order? What political or social amelioration did we ever acquire but in spite of you? In spite of you we carried Emancipation and Reform; and, if it please the Heavens, in spite of you we will Repeal the Union.
The Irish Catholics succeeded before, notwithstanding the opposition of the Catholic aristocracy. They have now a national, not a sectarian, object in view—they are not now battling alone, but side by side with their Protestant brethren—and the devil’s in it, if they need care for this opposition now. As little would the chirping of a flight of sparrows on the roof of the Tuileries have checked the rising of France or the march of NAPOLEON’s legions, as the censures of these men check the stern and deliberate movement of the Irish nation.
1 ‘This article was a composite one written by Davis and Mitchel. In Duffy’s copy the paragraph ‘In the year 1843… or not’ is attributed to Mitchel. Davis in his copy ascribes the paragraph beginning ‘But Lord Kenmare does represent…’ to Mitchel, and the last paragraph beginning ‘The Irish Catholics succeeded before…’ to himself – Writers in the ‘Nation,’ 1842-5, Kevin McGrath, Irish Historical Studies, March 1949.