The epilogue of Danny Mansergh's provocative study of the relationship of the “people” and the Irish parliamentary opposition in the late eighteenth century is devoted to the “biographical metamorphosis of Henry Grattan” (263). It is appropriate that he should do so because this book proffers a major reassessment of Grattan's political life by arguing that “the Irish Whigs (Grattan and his circle in particular) … play[ed] a central role in bringing about the civil conflict of the 1790s” (1). In advancing this interpretation, Mansergh seeks explicitly to overturn the benign liberal image advanced by W. E. H. Lecky in the late nineteenth century that has dominated all subsequent writing on the grounds that this was “the version of events propounded by … Grattan” himself (261). In point of fact, it was Grattan's son, Henry Grattan Jr., who was responsible for the monumental Memoirs of the right hon, Henry Grattan, published in five volumes between 1839 and 1845, that did most to promote this image of his father. This may seem a minor historiographical correction since Grattan Jr. sought to reflect the views of his father, but it is somehow symbolic of a study that, its many valuable insights and rereadings notwithstanding, fails entirely to convince.

Grattan, historians now recognize, was neither the master parliamentarian nor dominant political leader the term “Grattan's parliament” suggests: he had a poor master of legislative detail, he consciously evaded ministerial responsibility, he could be spiteful and petty, and he possessed a penchant for rhetorical extravagance when a more direct and less emotional style would have served perfectly well. However, no commentator to date has gone as far as Mansergh and contended that Grattan and his political allies must accept a major share of the responsibility for “the collapse of the Irish polity” (259) that took place in the late 1790s. Informed by the conclusion of Simon Schama, Orlando Figes, and Theda Skocpol, in their studies of revolutionary France and Russia, that a “revolution is the result, not just of an explosion from below, but also of an implosion from above” (7), he has identified the Irish equivalent of the Duc D’Orleans and Miliukov not in Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Arthur O’Connor, or even Wolfe Tone, all of whom feature prominently in this study, but in Grattan. It is a bold conclusion, but beginning with the manner in which the patriots, with Grattan to the fore, appealed to the “People” in the late 1770s and early 1780s in order to advance a program of commercial and constitutional reform, and continuing in the 1790s with the way in which Whigs, with Grattan again preeminent, allied and intrigued with a variety of radical groups to advance radical parliamentary and constitutional reform, it is Mansergh's contention is that “Whig principles and Whig personalities” (7) contributed, by their support for and encouragement of the demand for political change, to the breakdown in order that culminated in the 1798 rebellion and the dissolution of the Irish parliament in 1800.

Given the dominance long exercised by nationalist and liberal historians, the only identifiable historiographical precedent for such a reading of late eighteenth-century Irish history is to be found in the work of a number of unionist historians working in the late nineteenth century. More pertinently, insofar as this study is concerned, its intellectual genealogy can be traced to the late eighteenth century. It is, in essence, the view articulated by the reactionary Lord Chancellor, John FitzGibbon, earl of Clare, who contended during the 1790s that factional activities, which is how he portrayed the actions patriots and Whigs, within parliament contributed, by weakening the Protestant interest, to the rebelliousness and disorder that threatened its very existence. Charles Francis Sheridan, a noted pamphleteer, was still more reductivist; he observed, in response to a pamphlet by Grattan in 1797, that the stark alternatives that faced those disposed to avoid the horrors of revolution in Ireland were “revolution” and “repression” (245). This seems to be the view of Mansergh also, based on his approbatory concluding citation of William Cusack Smith's observation that to allow the people “legislative authority” was “subversive of our mixed form of government” (254). The fact that Mansergh employs (albeit with a question mark) Lord Clare's term “a Whig War” as the title to his chapter on the breakdown in order in the later 1790s is also noteworthy.

However, it is problematic historiographically when, as in the instance just cited, it is apparent that the author's assessment of men and events is shaped by the hostile judgments of their opponents. This is true particularly of Grattan's motivation, which is amenable to a distinctly more benign interpretation than that offered here. This is not to deny that his contacts with leading Catholics in the mid-1790s and with members of the United Irishmen subsequently, which are explored here more fully than previously, can be perceived as incautious if not imprudent, but a sustainable case can still be made that Grattan was driven by an honorable rather than duplicitous commitment to steer a “constitutional course between the Scylla of United Irish sedition and the Charybdis of government-led oppression” (125) because he believed in the merits of moderate reform. This accounts also for the fact that he and others of like mind were more critical publicly of the government than they were of radicals. Mansergh is disinclined to accept this as politically or ideologically legitimate, borne out of an ostensible antipathy to the revolutionary agenda of the 1790s. This may account also for his failure both to define precisely what he means by “people,” and for his perceived identification of the “people” and the “mob” when they were palpably different phenomena. In this context, one might observe also that Mansergh's decision to commence his study with the late 1770s is doubtful; similar appeals, culminating in an invasion of the houses of parliament in 1759, were made in the 1750s.

This review has focused primarily on the larger interpretative questions raised by the study, because the conservative perspective it brings to bear is seldom invoked in this manner. This has left little space with which to consider the detailed research the author has pursued. In many respects, this does not add much to what has previously been established, but the explication of contribution of Francis Dobbs to the acquisition of legislative independence, the detailed reconstruction of the interaction of the intra- and extraparliamentary oppositions in the 1790s, and the brilliant account of the Fitzwilliam administration stand out as original and important. In sum, this is an impressive first book, for though the argument may not be entirely convincing, it is sure to prompt many questions.