I

Between the Act of Union in 1801 and 1830, the British government's policy toward Ireland had been a rather one dimensional venture that relied heavily on force to try to civilize Ireland, what one historian has referred to in jest as ‘being cruel to be kind’ and what Sir Robert Peel during his time as chief secretary described as an ‘honest despotic Government’.Footnote ⁷ Successive conservative or coalition governments saw Ireland's population as recalcitrant and prone to violence. Social commentators attempting to distil political policy from Ireland's ‘national character’ often appealed to the need for the stern hand of discipline.Footnote ⁸ Coercion functioned as the thread that tied together successive Tory or coalition governments during the first thirty years of union as various iterations of legislation, such as the Peace Preservation Act or Insurrection Act, passed through parliament offering extra-constitutional power to the lord lieutenant.Footnote ⁹

In many respects, Lord Grey's Whig government of 1830 marked a clear break in Tory policies, united by their desire to pass some measure of parliamentary reform and address issues of ‘old corruption’.Footnote ¹⁰ Grey's government established a new system of national education in Ireland, adopted church reforms, and allocated capital for public works.Footnote ¹¹ What remained the same, however, was a Tory-like commitment to coercive legislation to subdue an antagonistic Irish population.Footnote ¹² Lord Stanley and Lord Melbourne, as chief secretary and home secretary, both argued for the passage of coercive legislation in 1833 that bestowed robust authority to the lord lieutenant to proclaim districts in a state of unrest, introduce curfews, suspend habeas corpus, and impose courts martial while strengthening the discretion of local magistrates and military officers.Footnote ¹³ By 1834, the new lord lieutenant, Lord Wellesley, emphatically pressed for the application of the Insurrection Act as a way to quell Irish disturbances concerning the collection of tithes to the Church of Ireland and Daniel O'Connell's clamouring for repeal of the Act of Union. In his mind, the connection between political agitation and violent outrages was akin to simple ‘cause and effect’, and it was the government's job to use coercion as an instrument to undermine the cause of political agitation.Footnote ¹⁴ Although this observation would prove a moot point with the return of conservative government in November 1834, the fact remained that up until 1834 Conservatives and Whigs used the same tactics of coercion to deal with Irish problems.

The circumstances that led to the return of Whig government in April 1835 demonstrate the marked sea change in the British government's Irish policy. The resignation of Lord Stanley and retirement of the more conservative Lord Grey opened the Whig party's leadership to a number of members decidedly more liberal in their outlook, especially toward Ireland.Footnote ¹⁵ After some initial hesitancy by members of the ‘old guard’, especially Melbourne and Lord Lansdowne, by February 1835 the liberal contingent in the party had agreed on a strategy that embraced an unspoken and informal partnership with O'Connell and a focus on active opposition to Peel's every action in parliament.Footnote ¹⁶ The decision to work with English radicals and O'Connell culminated with the meeting of roughly 180 MPs on 18 February 1835, at the home of Lord Lichfield in London. Headed by Lord John Russell, and organized through intermediaries like Lord Duncannon and John Cam Hobhouse, this meeting set the political ground upon which the united opposition would fight. The notion of doing ‘equal justice’ or ‘justice to Ireland’ stood at the heart of Russell's strategy to unseat Peel.

By the end of March 1835, Russell decided the appropriation of Irish church monies was the measure most appropriate to defeat Peel's government – it had been the issue that ‘upset the coach’, driving Stanley to resign in 1834 and propelling Russell to lead the Whigs. It was also the issue that united Whig, radical, and O'Connellite. After a meeting at Russell's, amid ‘rumours of ministers’ resignations’, a quasi-shadow government met and agreed to propose the formation of a committee to inquire into the monies of the Irish church and its varied uses.Footnote ¹⁷ The following day, a dinner given in Russell's honour was held at the Freemason's Lodge chaired by Lord Morpeth and attended by 250 MPs where O'Connell declared ‘“it was the most delightful evening he ever passed in his life”, [and] publicly acknowledged John Russell as his leader’.Footnote ¹⁸ On 30 March, Russell presented his motion to form a committee to inquire into the Church of Ireland, and how most effectively to appropriate any surplus revenue to ‘all classes of the community’. The speech went to great lengths to highlight the outrages perpetrated in Ireland, which resulted in the population having more to fear from ‘the combination of those who set up against the law, than the ministers who execute the law’, thus rendering law and order ineffectual. Importantly, however, Russell's speech set out a new vision for how to deal with Irish problems – problems that began with the Church of Ireland and the collection of tithes. Russell's new vision centred on a policy of justice, which he believed would effectively win Irish affection, ensuring their loyalty, as well as the prosperity of the empire. His speech is worth quoting at length, as it demonstrates the Whigs’ belief in the vital connection between Ireland's prosperity based in legislating justice and the wider security of the British empire:

In reporting on Russell's speech, which ended with ‘long pronounced cheering’ throughout the House of Commons, the Morning Chronicle highlighted the importance of Russell's reference of doing justice to Ireland, asking rhetorically ‘When, in the history of the world, was injustice seen to produce order?’ and further stressing the course forward for government: ‘There is no halting half-way between oppression and equal justice…Lord John now asked them to legislate in a different spirit.’Footnote ²⁰

What was this different spirit toward Ireland? Philosophically, justice was reinterpreted by Whigs like Russell from a merely retributive sense (‘the sword of justice’) towards one based on equality and inclusion (‘equal justice’).Footnote ²¹ According to this view, Irish society was not disordered because of any inherent moral shortcoming of the Irish but rather from the way the British government had failed to extend the constitutional privileges of the union equally to her shores. The solution, therefore, was to legislate reform and to demonstrate to the Irish public that, in the words of Lord Morpeth, ‘their Union with a Country whose Social advancement is centuries beyond their own…will secure to them all the advantages…to which their own political elements could not give…advantages which have heretofore been intercepted by an iron rule which is but now being overthrown’.Footnote ²² Similarly, during the debate over the King's Speech after the Whigs’ ascension to power, Russell justified their plan to extend municipal reform as ‘nothing more than the adaptation of the same general principles’ that the government had previously extended England and Scotland.Footnote ²³

Historians have disagreed on where these moral principles originated. Richard Brent has argued that a number of politicians, including Russell, Morpeth, and Mulgrave, espoused a ‘liberal Anglican’ religious conviction that de-emphasized differences of religious dogma and instead sought to instil a broadly inclusive Christian morality, which included Roman Catholics within the nation's polity. It was this Christian morality that bound the country together and was the basis for the reforms Whig officials wished to enact, especially regarding issues of church and state. Though Peter Mandler's emphasis is less on religious conviction, he nevertheless identifies Russell, Morpeth, and Mulgrave within the political tradition of ‘Foxite Whigs’, who opposed the novel philosophy of political economy and the rise of market-based understandings of the individual and social order in favour of an established tradition of paternalist social and economic policies. Accordingly, these Whigs understood their task as a highly interventionist one, addressing the social problems of the 1830s through political solutions, especially institutional reform.Footnote ²⁴

Practically, therefore, ‘justice to Ireland’ included a programme of extending institutional reforms already passed in Britain, along with the removal of religious prejudice from employment in legal and executive positions in Ireland. Building on the passage of Catholic Emancipation, the Edinburgh Review commended Grey's ministry in 1833 for their commitment to attempt reforms based on ‘the principles of justice’, listing seven areas of reform including the Irish church question, Irish grand juries, and the inclusion of Catholics into offices of government.Footnote ²⁵ On rising to power in 1835, Russell, Mulgrave, and Morpeth actively took up a number of these issues and made them the centrepiece of their governing agenda. Russell was granted ‘a suzerainty over Ireland’, which the new prime minister, Lord Melbourne, happily conceded as he allowed ministers to run ‘their own departments as independent kingdoms’.Footnote ²⁶ Morpeth believed the Irish municipal corporation bill was ‘the only sure course for Political regeneration’, because the municipal governments were one of the last bastions of Protestant ascendancy.Footnote ²⁷ Mulgrave agreed, writing that the Irish municipal corporations bill embodied the party's mantra of ‘equal rights or justice’, and stressed that those involved with politics in Ireland anticipated passage of the measure as a symbolic ‘triumph’ over the Orange party.Footnote ²⁸ Russell, Morpeth, and Mulgrave held a similar desire to resolve the Irish tithe question, an issue that had been simmering in Ireland during the decade and resulted in high levels of Irish agrarian violence, known to the British as ‘outrages’.Footnote ²⁹ Clashes between British troops or policemen and peasants during Peel's administration in 1834–5 in Counties Cork, Armagh, and Monaghan left dozens of peasants dead and wounded in their wake and the Protestant population in Ireland more convinced than ever of the necessity to employ troops to collect tithes.Footnote ³⁰ Rather than supply parsons with more troops and beat Ireland's population into submission, Russell proposed reforming Irish tithes as a way to restore tranquillity to the Irish countryside and build trust.Footnote ³¹

The Irish public welcomed the new Whig government unlike any that had come before, an indication of the rising expectations held by the public for real change from the Russell–Mulgrave–Morpeth triumvirate. On Mulgrave's official arrival in Dublin in May 1835, the moderate tory Belfast News-Letter wrote ‘Never did we behold such a mass of human beings; flags and banners waved in every direction, such as “Mulgrave for ever”, “Mulgrave and reform”, [and] “the triumph of justice”’, as tens of thousands came to greet the new lord lieutenant with enthusiasm never before witnessed on such an occasion.Footnote ³² Daniel O'Connell was ebullient with the news of the appointments. ‘We have an excellent man in Lord Mulgrave, the new Lord-Lieutenant. I tell you there cannot be better. Lord Morpeth, too, is excellent…We are, I believe, on the verge of better times.’Footnote ³³ Above all, both these men shared fresh perspectives on how to govern Ireland based on a belief in equality, and were the ‘Young men…[of] which there was a dearth in 1830’ that according to Lord Holland offered fresh hope for Whig governance.Footnote ³⁴

The government had grand plans for legislating Irish reforms, specifically in reforming the governance of Irish municipalities and in solving Irish tithes and the maintenance of the Church of Ireland.Footnote ³⁵ These bold plans for ‘equal justice’ garnered the resolute opposition of conservatives and all but guaranteed a collision with the upper house of parliament. ‘Justice for Ireland’, therefore, often entered political discourse as a way for conservatives to ridicule the Whigs’ political agenda and their reliance on O'Connell's parliamentary support. ‘The substantial justice which Ireland has long required’, pined the Quarterly Journal in April 1836, ‘was ten years’ subjection to martial law under such an officer of Cromwell, whose strictness and impartiality would have thoroughly habituated the country to peace and good order’.Footnote ³⁶ The Dublin University Magazine praised the people of England raising money for the Irish petition fund, and noted that ‘Justice to Ireland’ was nothing more than ‘a diabolical conspiracy which now pervades the whole country…[by] the promotion of ring-leaders in that conspiracy [e.g. Catholics] to places in the police, or the placing them at the head of schools for national education’.Footnote ³⁷ In one rather colourful satire, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine published an operetta containing ‘the existing philosophy of Whiggism’ in lyrical form. The operetta parodied many of the Whig minsters, in addition to their policies, but reached a crescendo with the entrance of Daniel O'Connell who took his place at the head of the cabinet table by pushing Melbourne from the stool. ‘From Emancipation to Appropriation, Some new botheriation we've constantly tried’, sung O'Connell, ‘At present our trust is in clamours for “Justice”, I mean Irish justice – that's all on one side’, to which the ministers rallied around him singing ‘All hail to Dan O'Connell, the master we obey.’Footnote ³⁸

The Whigs entered government benches in 1835 with a new policy of ‘justice to Ireland’ that included attempting to pass bold reforms on many of Ireland's most entrenched issues, an agenda that they continued to pursue throughout 1838 in spite of the House of Lords’ obstinacy. Although it is outside the scope of this article, it is important to note that national legislation was only one way, and as it turns out the least effective way, to promote the Whigs’ agenda of ‘justice to Ireland’. The Irish triumvirate made the popular decision to employ more Catholics in prominent places of Irish government, even offering O'Connell a government job in 1838, thus slowly shifting the perception of Dublin Castle as an Orange institution.Footnote ³⁹ They replaced the conservative under-secretary William Gossett for the activist and sympathetic Thomas Drummond, who has been heralded as one of the most important government appointments of the nineteenth century in part for his gifts as an administrator, but also for his tireless work charting a new course in Dublin Castle's relationship to Ireland's gentry and magistrates.Footnote ⁴⁰ And through the reformation of the Irish constabulary in 1836, the Whigs strove to remove the stain of partiality in the administration of law and order by taking the power of appointing constables out of the hands of local magistrates and placing it in the hands of the lord lieutenant.Footnote ⁴¹ It is not surprising considering the new emphasis of ‘justice to Ireland’ that the Whigs faced stiff opposition both inside parliament and among Ireland's conservative faction.

II

The single largest impediment to Irish development according to British and Irish politicians and social commentators was the violence of the Irish countryside, especially in connection to land relations and rural social order, most often referred to as ‘outrages’. Ireland had a long history of agrarian violence, especially spasmodic episodes of profound unrest that caused government frenzy and resulted in the application of coercive measures to subdue the Irish population.Footnote ⁴² As a result of this long and violent history, agrarian violence acted as a spectre haunting successive governments, a perennial failure demanding a remedy. Until 1835, however, both Whig and Tory governments adopted the same strategy towards Irish violence. By 1838, however, with the new group of Whigs at the helm of Irish government charting a new course of ‘justice to Ireland’, and a party utterly dependent on Daniel O'Connell's votes in the House of Commons, Irish outrage was transformed into a political battering ram by which the Tories could assail the Whig government – an early nineteenth-century version of rhetorically branding the government ‘soft on crime’.

Signs that Irish agrarian violence would become a political weapon in the hands of Tory MPs began in 1838 with the untimely resignation of the inspector general of the Irish constabulary, Col. James Shaw Kennedy. At the heart of the incident that led to his resignation was the inspector general's power of appointment and dismissal, and it involved an altercation between a sub-inspector of the constabulary and a resident magistrate during parliamentary elections in 1837. A sub-constable, Thomas Gleeson, refused the command of magistrate Samuel Vignoles to intervene to protect voters of the leading Tory landholder in County Carlow, Col. Henry Bruen, from a mob of the opposing political viewpoint. When Gleeson refused, claiming later that it was Vignoles's actions that threatened to ignite a riot, a scuffle broke out between the two men on the courthouse steps. Mulgrave sent Shaw Kennedy to investigate, which eventually resulted in his recommendation for Gleeson's dismissal from the force due to allegations of intimidating witnesses to testify against Vignoles. The government ignored Shaw Kennedy's recommendation and simply reassigned Gleeson to a different district.Footnote ⁴³ This decision precipitated Shaw Kennedy's resignation, writing to Mulgrave that he was ‘in such a position as to render it inconsistent that I should retain the situation of Inspector General with a due regard to the countrol [sic] which I consider that I should possess over the discipline of the Force’.Footnote ⁴⁴

The loss of Shaw Kennedy proved extremely embarrassing to the Whig government. For months in parliament when questioned about the level of violence in Ireland they pointed to the efficient workings of the constabulary under Shaw Kennedy's control. And, even though the Tories did not agree with the Whigs’ estimation of the diminution of crime in Ireland, the respect for Shaw Kennedy kept the Irish constabulary immune from criticism. The circumstances surrounding Shaw Kennedy's decision to leave his position, that ‘his recommendations [were] disregarded in the organization of the Constabulary Force’, and his inability to control all appointments and dismissals, opened the way for Tories to critique the growing executive powers of the lord lieutenant that had the effect of centralizing power in Dublin.Footnote ⁴⁵ Ever since the Constabulary Act's passage, Tories stirred up fear of O'Connell's influence over patronage in the force. Even though Shaw Kennedy said nothing directly to confirm this concern, the fact that his suggestions for dismissal were ignored by Dublin Castle offered apparent proof of the Tory view of an Irish government headed by a supine lord lieutenant listening to O'Connell rather than his inspector general. Peel summed up the view when writing to the duke of Wellington, ‘O'Connell and the Priests have had the real and essential direction of the Constabulary…his [Shaw Kennedy's] recommendations have been scarcely attended to.’Footnote ⁴⁶ Serjeant Jackson, Tory MP for Bandon, County Cork, floated the idea of a committee of inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the resignation and the overall culture of the constabulary. Though it does not appear to have ever been seriously considered by Peel or Wellington, Jackson's vision concerning the purpose of such a committee was prophetic as many of his suggestions were reintroduced in April 1839 when the prominent ultra-Tory, Lord Roden, proposed his committee on Irish crime and outrage. In the words of Jackson:

The government recovered somewhat with the appointment of Duncan MacGregor as inspector general in early April, a man who was ‘beloved by soldiers of all persuasions’, but the damage had already been done to the Irish government's credibility in enforcing the law.Footnote ⁴⁸

Aiding in throwing disrepute on the Whigs’ agenda of ‘justice to Ireland’, including the new Irish constabulary, was the barrage of articles depicting scenes of horrific violence printed in the Irish conservative press and reprinted by conservative British newspapers like the Times. By 1837, the Times had fully embraced a Tory outlook in politics, and acted as ‘the most vigorous and powerful agent’ of Conservatism publishing articles ‘irresistible on the public mind’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Between the new session of parliament in November 1837 and January 1839, the newspaper pursued a campaign to undermine the Irish government's claim of increased Irish tranquillity. It did this most directly by contrasting articles from the government's official newspaper that reported Irish criminal activity and rewards, the Dublin Gazette, with the accounts of a variety of small (and generally very conservative and Protestant) provincial newspapers across Ireland. Under the same headline – ‘gazette – state of the country’ – reports filled the columns of the Times from newspapers like the Dublin Evening Post, Nenagh Guardian, or Limerick Standard, criticizing the Gazette for not reporting the grave state of affairs in the Irish countryside. ‘The Gazette of Friday is silent, though the state of the counties of Sligo and Leitrim might have called for some notice from a Chief Governor even as paternal as our Marquizzical Viceroy’, quipped the Times in early October 1838.Footnote ⁵⁰ Less than a week later, the Times republished the Dublin Evening Post’s accusations against the government of much more than merely overlooking Irish violence:

Adding embellishing descriptions to Irish violence, like crimes that make ‘the blood run cold’, the Times played on a number of stereotypes of Irish crime that set it apart from any English crime, and deemed the acts worthy of the title of outrage. Referencing the ‘savage’ behaviour of a ‘lawless peasantry’ who ‘spread terror and desolation’ through the country, the Times provided a larger stage for these provincial Irish newspapers and offered their readers an alternative narrative of the prevalence of Irish outrages under Mulgrave's tenure.Footnote ⁵² In comparison, when discussing English murders (often in the column next to Irish matters), the paper provided a much more matter of fact tone in their reporting and refrained from the sensationalizing language and colourful adjectives ascribed to Irish outrages.

These newspaper reports not only highlighted the apparent contradiction between official reports and the actual state of the country (which would be so important in 1839), they also paraded before the public the ghastliest scenes of violence possible to make their case concerning Ireland's lawlessness. Take, for example, an article republished from the Dublin Evening Packet in the Times recounting a murder that took place in County Carlow under the headline ‘Revolting Murder’. According to the newspaper, on 9 November, the family of Lawrence Nolan departed from their home to dig potatoes and left their youngest daughter Bridget, aged eight, at home with her grandmother, Catherine Donehoe, aged eighty. While the family was out, a cousin of Bridget, John Nolan, entered the home and ‘with a shovel, which was found in it [the home] broken and covered over with hair and blood’, killed both Catherine and Bridget. Not content with having committed murder, ‘the monster threw them into the fire. A smell, like that of pork frying, reached Lawrence Nolan, who was two fields off.’ By the time the family arrived back at their home, Bridget's body had been ‘nearly consumed by fire, and nothing remaining but part of her head and neck, and about three inches over the ancle [sic] of each foot’. Nolan apparently had stolen two pounds six shillings from a chest in the bedroom. As if the graphic details of the case were not enough for their readers, the newspaper added this paragraph highlighting where to lay blame for the outrage:

This story, along with many others printed in the Times, demonstrated to English readers the senselessness of Irish violence – that such a heinous murder could be carried out for such a paltry sum of money highlighted the moral depravity of Irish actors. Killing the innocent (an eight-year-old) and defenceless (an eighty-year-old) indicated to readers just how unhinged Irish society had become under Mulgrave's tenure. The article suggested that his removal of two magistrates was for their reputation as being ‘active’, and implied the government replaced them with O'Connellite appointees. Interestingly, this story of the Nolans’ death was never published in the Freeman's Journal nor was any trial of John Nolan. If this event actually happened as the Dublin Evening Packet reported it, it is curious that it never appeared in the Freeman's Journal, as the newspaper frequently reported acts of violence, and would feel compelled to report a murder so close to Dublin, though the paper certainly would have attributed responsibility to other factors. Similarly, an account of the report never appeared in the daily dispatches of Irish outrages sent between the inspector general and Russell, which casts further doubt on its perpetration.Footnote ⁵⁴ Instead, it appears that a propaganda war had developed in the press arguing about the real state of Irish society and the level of outrage.

In addition to the report about the Nolans’ death, the Times reprinted a number of different accounts about the outrages spreading across the North Riding of County Tipperary. In early November 1838, the newspaper reprinted accounts from the Nenagh Guardian listing fifteen different murders in the vicinity of Borrisokane between July and November of that year, along with subsequent articles about acts of incendiarism and the targeting of Protestant residents.Footnote ⁵⁵ In a November 1838 letter to the editor in the Freeman's Journal, Arthur French accused the Nenagh Guardian and other conservative newspapers of making up many of these outrages for their own political ends. ‘My dear Sir – Knowing your readiness to expose the system of fabricated outrages, a trade which the provincial Conservative journals extensively deal in, I now beg to enclose you a copy of a letter from Mr. Purvis, a Protestant gentleman.’ Purvis's letter explained how the Nenagh Guardian had reported that he had received a threatening notice, and when he asked the newspaper to correct the false story they simply ignored him. French's letter to the editor laid blame for the state of Tipperary not at the feet of the peasantry, but rather with the son of the Protestant minister, the Rev. Mr Goold, who evicted twelve families totalling roughly seventy people when he took possession of the land.Footnote ⁵⁶ Regardless of what stories were accurate and which were fabricated or embellished, the Conservative press wilfully pursued a co-ordinated attack against the Irish government, and the Whigs’ claim of growing Irish tranquillity in the wake of a policy of conciliation rather than coercion.

The violence in Tipperary, which conservative newspapers used as a proxy for the entirety of Ireland, certainly caused concern for the Irish government. In 1836, Lord Mulgrave had denied a request by magistrates to reapply the Coercion Act, citing the declining number of murders, as well as other types of outrages.Footnote ⁵⁷ However, by April 1838, a group of magistrates assembled at Cashel wrote to Mulgrave with concern at the attempted assassination of three landlords, which left one dead and the other two seriously wounded. ‘There are circumstances connected with these horrible facts illustrative of the state of society in this country’, wrote the magistrates, and ‘We, the undersigned, declare, that in that district neither life or property is safe; we therefore respectfully trust that your Excellency will put in force the strongest powers which the laws of the land permit in those districts.’ The magistrates alleged that the planning of these assassinations was widely known throughout the district, and that the serious ‘state of intimidation’ prevented the jury from bringing a conviction.Footnote ⁵⁸ Immediately, Drummond with assistance from the solicitor-general, chief baron, and with a final revision by the lord lieutenant, drafted a letter defending the government from the magistrates’ attacks. He systematically contradicted the claim that juries had been intimidated at prior quarter sessions and assizes by quoting the stipendiary magistrates stationed throughout the county, all of whom denied that ‘juries had ceased to be capable of discharging their important functions, from the apprehension of danger’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Instead, using statistical data drawn from the previous five years, Drummond argued that trials and convictions of murder cases were above average. What was most significant about Drummond's letter, however, was his insistence on the role that the landed gentry had played in creating an environment where peasants responded with such violent collective action. As the great majority of serious outrages occurred because of issues related to land tenure, Drummond argued, it was not surprising that the peasantry had acted so violently when ejections doubled in number between 1833 and 1837. Drummond continued:

Although ‘property has its duties’ became the aphorism that gave this letter its fame, what arguably was more offensive to Tories, and more illustrative of Whig ideology concerning its Irish policy, was that Irish outrage did not stem from the moral depravity of the Irish peasants but rather the moral shortcomings of their landlords whose neglect of duty all but guaranteed the disorder of Irish society. Harsher laws would not fix Irish society or quell Irish outrage; only the development of a relationship born of mutual respect and trust between landlord and tenant would ultimately secure tranquillity.

From 1835 to 1838, the Whigs approached Irish policy in new ways attempting to apply their activist vision to a country they believed deserved equal treatment as an integral part of the United Kingdom. These policies threatened Tory interests, especially as they watched Dublin Castle slowly transform from the stronghold of Protestant ascendancy to a place where liberal Catholics and Protestants worked together to enact Whig policy. Irish outrages represented the largest indictment of this dangerous government policy according to Tories.

III

Against the better judgement of their party's leadership, the ultra-Tory extreme began plotting a course to undermine Mulgrave's tenure as lord lieutenant at the beginning of the 1839 parliamentary session.Footnote ⁶¹ In censuring the government's Irish policy, the ultra-Tory faction hoped to bring an end to Whig government. Lord Roden, one of the most ardent of the ultra-faction, wrote his compatriot Lord Londonderry in early March 1839 that ‘The Government are not yet aware of my Course and I am anxious that they should not.’Footnote ⁶² Two weeks later, Roden stood in the House of Lords demanding the formation of a select committee to inquire into the state of Irish crime and outrage since 1835. This was no ordinary committee of inquiry. The conspicuous period of investigation that matched Lord Mulgrave's tenure as lord lieutenant suggested the committee was a hostile one – that its purview and potential findings were intended as a censure on the Whig government's Irish policy. Rather than treat a censure on Irish policy as a tertiary attack, the Whig government considered the committee an affront to their entire ministry and were willing either to resign over the question or bring these policy matters to the House of Commons for a vote of confidence. The Whigs saw their Irish policy as a central component to their overall governing agenda.

Robert Jocelyn, the third earl of Roden, was an Anglo-Irish landowner and politician who owned considerable land in Counties Louth and Down. Religiously devout, even zealous, Roden was the president of the Sunday School Society of Ireland and an ardent proselytizer. He joined the Orange Order in 1832 in an attempt to create a united Protestant opposition to Catholic Emancipation driven by his fear of the rising political power of Ireland's Catholics and their growing resistance to tithes. Roden was elected grand master of Ireland's reconstructed Orange Order in 1837.Footnote ⁶³ When Wellington and Peel took over government after the dismissal of Melbourne in 1834 by William IV, Roden seized the opportunity to attempt rebuilding a Protestant ascendancy. Writing to Wellington, Roden fawned over the duke's return to power and ‘the deliverance which we have at last had from the misrule of those who had nearly overwhelm'd the country in irretrievable ruin’, but stressed the need to bring ‘firm and decided measures’ to break agrarian unrest, and appoint Protestants to prove ‘that their institutions will be preserv'd’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Considering himself the chief defender of Protestantism in Ireland, Roden showed a willingness to disagree with his own party when they did not align to his sectarian views, for example on non-denominational education.Footnote ⁶⁵ By 1835, Roden was panicked at the thought of O'Connell's influence with Melbourne's government and believed Ireland had little to protect it but the loyalty of ‘our Protestant people’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Consistently anti-Catholic and desirous of a return to the Protestant ascendancy into which he was born, Roden was the perfect spokesman for toryism's deepest fears concerning Ireland. Though certainly on the periphery of the Tory party, the previous four years of fear, criticism, and hyperbole about Irish outrages and their potential to destroy Ireland, Great Britain, and the British empire encouraged an environment where Roden's extreme viewpoints received ‘considerable attention’ at the centre of British politics.Footnote ⁶⁷

The temper in the House of Lords leading to Roden's motion had been particularly hostile. Ultra-Tory members, many of them Anglo-Irish, assailed Mulgrave's use of the prerogative of mercy for prisoners. The issue was raised in the Lords on five separate occasions between the first sitting of parliament on 5 February and Roden's motion on 21 March 1839.Footnote ⁶⁸ Roden, Lord Westmeath, the earl of Charleville, Lord Lyndhurst, and even Lord Brougham (now no friend of the Whigs) challenged Mulgrave to defend his use of pardons in Ireland and raised a number of cases demonstrating its imprudence. In one case, Mulgrave had offered a pardon to John Coghlan when the surgeon suggested that Coghlan was medically unfit after being sentenced to transportation for life. Within a short period of his commutation, however, Coghlan allegedly raped a woman and was rearrested.Footnote ⁶⁹ While Mulgrave asserted that his use of the prerogative of mercy was no different from that of his predecessors, the ultra-Tory faction continued to harass him over individual cases that came to their attention, and required Mulgrave to furnish official documentation from Dublin to support his arguments.Footnote ⁷⁰

To the apparent surprise of both parties, on 21 March Roden made his motion for a committee to scrutinize the Whigs’ Irish policy.Footnote ⁷¹ According to Roden, things in Ireland had never been worse, and the tranquillity that the government triumphed was ‘but the tranquility of death’.

Roden offered anecdote after anecdote of murder, assaults on Protestants, incendiary fires, and political violence. These cases, in his estimation and the opinion of many of his Tory colleagues, demonstrated that the Catholic population organized itself into so-called ‘Riband’ or ‘Ribbon’ societies, which were secret, oath-bound, avowedly sectarian, and politically hostile to the union with Britain. By connecting Ribbon conspiracies with O'Connell's Precursor Association, a political society meant to encourage further concessions to Ireland, Roden underscored the widely asserted connection between O'Connell and popular violence on the one hand, and the Whigs’ political connection to O'Connell on the other. Implicitly, Roden connected the Whigs to Irish outrages through this O'Connellite connection, while explicitly he condemned Mulgrave for his lax enforcement of law and order that benefited O'Connell's political ends. Although a long debate followed Roden's accusations and motion for a committee, the result was essentially a foregone conclusion – the House of Lords had occupied a conspicuous position over the last four years as the champion of conservatism in all Irish matters and the enduring muscle of Tory opposition to Melbourne's government, and while it is questionable whether all Tories thought the motion a wise one, Wellington's support for the committee quashed any doubt.Footnote ⁷³ The committee was composed of twenty-two members, twelve of whom were Tories, and sat between April and July 1839 receiving testimony on the state of Ireland since the beginning of Mulgrave's tenure as lord lieutenant.

How was the Whig government to respond? In the immediacy of the debate over Roden's motion, Mulgrave combatted his anecdotes of wanton violence with statistics. Relying on official returns of outrage sent from Drummond that ‘show[ed] the constant attention of the government to the means of enforcing the law’, Mulgrave demonstrated that both committals and convictions had proportionally increased during his time in office.Footnote ⁷⁴ Although it would seem that more committals to prison meant that Irish peasants committed more crime, Mulgrave countered that it demonstrated the positive effect the new constabulary force had in arresting individuals. Additionally, the rate of conviction had increased dramatically in spite of the increase in committals. Whereas convictions in murder or manslaughter cases were only 27 per cent in 1832, by 1838 the rate was 47 per cent. A similar increase was witnessed in the aggregate rate of convictions in all cases affecting life between 1832 and 1838, from roughly one in four cases reaching a guilty verdict in 1832, to one in every two cases in 1838. Mulgrave also pointed to the most immediate returns of outrages to point out the gradual success of their policy of ‘justice to Ireland’. In the last three months of 1837 and 1838, outrages had dropped from 1,254 to 769, respectively. While murders had increased slightly (from 52 to 58), the remaining outrages cited by Mulgrave showed a marked decline. The effect of quoting statistics proved quite successful in debate, demonstrating Mulgrave's command of the facts but made little difference to the outcome of the vote to establish a committee.Footnote ⁷⁵

While the committee's formation was a foregone conclusion, questions lingered about how the Whigs should respond. It was impossible for the government simply to submit to Roden's committee because Mulgrave and Melbourne framed the motion in the subsequent debate in the House of Lords as a censure on their government, and, therefore, were unwilling to concede that the principles of their government were wrong. Resigning from office seemed particularly attractive to many members of the cabinet, including Russell, Melbourne, and Mulgrave who believed it was better to resign ‘on a popular question & not wait for some vote on which the country took no interest’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Others within the cabinet worried, however, that resignations might set off violent unrest in Ireland, and because Ireland was ‘the weak point of the Tories’, resignation would making governing impossible. Instead, ministers decided to bring the question of the Whigs’ Irish policy to the House of Commons, which they considered the proper venue to determine the country's confidence in the government. According to Lord Holland's journal, Russell became particularly determined in this course: ‘“As long”, he [Russell] had said, “as we retained the Confidence of the Commons and the people…he would not abandon his post at the instigation of any set of Men.”’Footnote ⁷⁷ This course ran the largest risk as it staked the entire administration on the question of the government's Irish policy and dared the Tories to try to throw them out of office. And, while they could rely on support from O'Connell and the Irish radicals and Whigs, the support of English radicals and some English Whigs was more uncertain. Nevertheless, the government believed that the ‘approval or disapproval of the Irish administration’ was a question that needed resolution in the House of Commons where the chance of ‘correcting these misrepresentations’ might be tried.Footnote ⁷⁸

In preparation for their defence, the Irish government brought their case to the public. In Dublin, Drummond helped to organize a ‘Grand National Meeting of the Friends of Liberal Government in Ireland’, held at the Royal Theatre in Dublin on 11 April 1839. Attended by prominent members of the Irish aristocracy as well as a number of members of parliament, the meeting was an opportunity to pass a resolution ‘to support them [the Whigs] in a declaration of principle which they have made as regards Ireland’. Lord Fingal, arguably the most popular member of the Irish aristocracy due in part to his Catholicism, remarked at length on the unifying effect Roden's motion had on Irish society.

In the midst of one of the speeches, a number of Orangemen tried to disrupt the meeting but were expelled from the venue by the constabulary – a symbolic acting out of the promise of Whig government and the danger of the reintroduction of conservative government on Orange principles.Footnote ⁷⁹ The government also celebrated O'Connell's attendance and his restrained speech, which oscillated between poking fun at the Conservatives who tried to heckle him in the crowd and affirming his commitment to the Whigs’ agenda of ‘equality and justice’ toward Ireland.Footnote ⁸⁰ O'Connell's Precursor Society had been stirring up popular unrest at the inability of the government to adopt further Irish reforms, but Lord Ebrington (the new lord lieutenant) believed he would give up the society if liberals would join his Precursors ‘for the purpose of promoting Liberal government in Ireland’.Footnote ⁸¹ Although the meeting was a one-off event, it was ostensibly what O'Connell wanted from the government, and O'Connell praised the Whigs ‘repeating several times with emphasis: “I am a Ministerialist, I am a Ministerialist, I am an uncompromising Ministerialist.”’Footnote ⁸² The meeting passed a petition to parliament that affirmed the principles of Mulgrave's government, and called on the Commons to resist ‘the attempts of any party to regain an ascendancy’.Footnote ⁸³

Inside parliament, Russell prepared a motion affirming the Whigs’ Irish policy. Initially, ministers debated amongst themselves what type of resolution Russell should compose. Those connected directly to the Irish government wanted to expand the committee's purview to ten or fifteen years and provide a better picture of the fluctuation in Irish outrages across both Whig and Tory governments.Footnote ⁸⁴ Russell opted instead to make the case for the effectiveness of Whig governance in Ireland. Employing a familiar narrative, Russell argued that the Whig government of the last four years had begun to undo the damage of Protestant ascendancy and partiality in the administration of law and order that had ruled Ireland for the last hundred years. In the place of coercion, he argued, Mulgrave brought conciliation and equality in an attempt to bring the privileges of the British constitution to Irishmen. On the floor of the House of Commons, Russell argued that this was a slow process but popular sentiment and statistical data confirmed the positive effect it had on Irish society. Unsurprisingly, this was a very whiggish narrative of steady progress toward the liberal ends of Ireland's constitutional development, and ultimately equity within the Union. He noted:

Robert Peel's response to Russell's motion was complicated. On the one hand, he benefited from the Whigs solving Irish questions while labouring under the current political constraints. Encumbered by the Lords’ obstruction, Russell had been forced to moderate his Irish bills if they stood any chance of passing – evidenced by the Tithe Bill without an appropriation clause, and the passage of municipal reform that included a much higher threshold for enfranchisement. If the roles were reversed, however, Peel's options to deal with Irish grievances would have been hamstrung by the reactionary right wing of his party (voices like Roden, Londonderry, and Lyndhurst), coupled with a hostile Irish population led by Daniel O'Connell. In Charles Greville's opinion, ‘It is Peel's interest that Irish questions should assume such a shape, and make such a progress, before he returns to office, as should render their final adjustment inevitable.’Footnote ⁸⁶ On the other hand, Peel could not agree with Russell's motion of confidence in the Irish government lest he lose the confidence of his own party. Thus, Peel was in the unenviable position of wanting to stand against the government while also apprehensive about the potential consequences of attempting to throw out the government on an Irish question. As a result, Peel compromised and offered an amendment to Russell's motion for an up-or-down vote on Irish policy that instead took a principled stand against the propriety of the House of Commons expressing its opinion on the legislative decisions of the House of Lords.Footnote ⁸⁷

If there was any doubt, however, concerning the importance of the question before the House of Commons, the fact that the debate stretched over five consecutive days demonstrated how much was at stake for the Whigs. With a razor slim majority, a complicated relationship with O'Connell, and an even more fraught relationship with English radicals, the ministry needed everyone to rally behind them. Considering the speeches of many of the English radicals, it seems that an Irish question was the only one that could rally the disparate parties together. Joseph Hume argued that ‘the vote which was to be given this night, was no vote of confidence in the Ministry…[but] was confined exclusively to the policy they had pursued in Ireland’.Footnote ⁸⁸ Fellow English radical, George Grote, complained that he expected further reforms from Peel as much as ‘finality Jack’, but in the end agreed to vote with the government ‘believing sincerely, that it deserves esteem and imitation, and that it has worked beneficially for the Irish people’.Footnote ⁸⁹ Lord Holland, confiding in his diary, stressed the pains with which radicals went to distinguish their approval of Lord Mulgrave's government from the general policy of Melbourne's government, hurling political insults along the way, ‘Those Radicals…hardly concealed their chagrin at being reduced to the alternative of voting for us or openly abandoning the principles which for some years had kept us together.’Footnote ⁹⁰ Worse still for the government was the praise radicals received in the ministry's daily, the Morning Chronicle, which proclaimed that ‘the victory will be fruitless – even as to Ireland…unless it be followed up by the decisive adoption of a policy…which the country can be rallied for the discomfiture of Toryism, the banner of progressive reform’.Footnote ⁹¹ The radical contingent identified Russell's weakness and hoped that with their support in Irish affairs (which they always had given) they might obtain movement towards greater reform in the future, such as on the issue of the ballot or shorter parliaments. O'Connell thought this possible, too, writing to his political lieutenant P. V. FitzPatrick that Russell's success in the Commons resulted in ‘talk of a change in the detail of the Ministry, now in its principle sure to radicalize it a little’.Footnote ⁹² Though the radicals would be disappointed in the future, their votes of confidence led to a majority in favour of the government of twenty-four, which proved much higher than originally expected. The Whigs commanded the House of Commons, and although this did not stop Roden's committee from meeting it did undermine the strength of any of its potential conclusions.

IV

The Lords’ committee on Irish crime and outrage called over forty witnesses across forty-three days of meetings between April and July 1839. The end result was over 1,600 pages of testimony, along with copies of returns of outrages, correspondence between magistrates, landlords, and Dublin Castle, and pages of evidence concerning the early release of Irish prisoners in all thirty-two counties by the lord lieutenant between 1835 and 1839. Although the House of Commons already passed a vote of confidence in the Whigs’ Irish governance, for the majority of the committee its aim was a rather simple one – it was an opportunity to air all the miscues and missteps in Irish policy over the last four years, along with a chance to call witnesses whose evidence would undermine the government's narrative of increased tranquillity. The report itself offered nothing by way of meaningful suggestions to protect Irish life or property, as the Freeman's Journal noted that ‘the silence of the report is awful…no measure of protection is recommended, none suggested’.Footnote ⁹³ ‘The Committee to enquire into the causes of the encrease [sic] of [crime in] Ireland seemed indeed to end in nothing’, wrote Lord Holland in August 1839, ‘they could not agree in any report, and the evidence, amounting to many folio volumes which they did not report, seemed to cut the ground under them’ by showing how Irish outrages had ‘actually diminished in frequency and in intensity under Lord Normanby's ViceRoyalty [sic]’.Footnote ⁹⁴ In short, the committee was intended to embarrass the government and lay the groundwork for a reversion to patterns of governance in accordance with Tory predilections. Notwithstanding three days of testimony defending the government's policy using copious statistical evidence compiled by Thomas Drummond, Lord Brougham moved that the House of Lords censure Mulgrave's Irish government in spite of Whig attempts to dissuade him. The vote was a foregone conclusion, and carried in the House of Lords by a margin of over 30 votes (86–52). But the vote carried little consequence. Commenting on the vote of censure and the entire committee, Greville highlighted the pointlessness of the Tories’ strategy: ‘The case [for censure], after all, is not a very strong one, and…the principle on which he [Lord Mulgrave] acted was sound, and it has proved beneficial.’Footnote ⁹⁵

Although the results of the committee's testimony are a fascinating insight into the contradictory views of violence and rumours of revolution replete throughout Ireland, their substance falls outside the scope of this article. Instead, in closing, I want to highlight what the committee's formation and outcome of censure illustrates about Ireland's place in Whig governing policy during the so-called ‘Decade of Reform’.

Roden's committee on Irish crime and outrage was a testimony to the novelty, for good or ill, of the Whigs’ approach to Ireland. Rather than rely on the tried and tested policy of coercion, these aspiring stars of grand-whiggery took over Irish government influenced by the mantra of ‘justice to Ireland’ with the firm conviction that government could operate as a positive force to alleviate Ireland's long-standing grievances. And, this was not merely political rhetoric. Russell's spirited defence of the government's Irish policy, which united Whigs, English radicals, and O'Connell's Irish faction, indicates just how vital the government's approach to Ireland was to their vision of reform and the maintenance of Whig government. In the spirit of Thomas Spring Rice, quoted at the beginning of the article, Ireland under Whig direction was a place to apply legislation, for government to try to fix problems, the venue par excellence for Whig politicians to attempt to enact their reforming agenda. Although in many respects the Whigs’ legislative record for Ireland can be characterized more by its failures than its successes, to ignore the ways the Whigs attempted to deal with Irish problems is to miss some of the most innovative and compelling aspects of ‘reform’ during this vitally important decade.