 Chapter 8. Part II. O'Connell's Leadership. The Clare Election. Emancipation of the Catholics. The Catholic Association, on the accession of the Wellington Peele Cabinet, had publicly pledged itself to oppose every man who would accept office under these statesmen. The memory of both as ex-secretaries, but especially peals, was odious in Ireland. When, however, the Duke had sustained, and ensured thereby the passage of the repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts, Mr. O'Connell, at the suggestion of Lord John Russell, the mover of the repeal, endeavored to get his angry and uncompromising resolution against the Duke's government rescinded. Powerful as he was, however, the association refused to go with him, and the resolution remained. So it happened that when Mr. Fitzgerald presented himself to the electors of Clare, as the colleague of Peele and Wellington, the association at once endeavored to bring out an opposition candidate. They pitched with this view on Major McNamara, a liberal Protestant of the county, at the head of one of its oldest families and personally popular, but this gentleman, after keeping them several days in suspense till the time of nomination was close at hand, positively declined to stand against his friend, Mr. Fitzgerald, to the great dismay of the associated Catholics. In their emergency, an idea, so bold and original, that it was at first received with general incredulity by the external public, was started. It was remembered by Sir David DeRousse, a personal friend of O'Connell's, that the late sagacious John Keough had often declared the Emancipation Question would never be brought to an issue till some Catholic member-elect stood at the bar of the House of Commons demanding his seat. A trusted view were at first consulted on the daring proposition, that O'Connell himself, in despite of the legal exclusion of all men of his religion, should come forward for Clare. Many were the consultations and diverse the judgments delivered on this proposal, but at length, on the reception of information from the county itself, which gave strong assurance of success, the hero of the adventure decided for himself. The bold course was again selected as the wise course, and the spirit-stirring address of the arch-agitator to the electors was at once issued from Dublin. Your country, he began by saying, wants a representative. I respectfully solicit your suffrages to raise me to that station. Of my qualifications to fill that station, I leave you to judge. The habits of public speaking, and many, many years of public business, render me perhaps equally suited with most men to attend to the interests of Ireland in Parliament. You will be told I am not qualified to be elected. The assertion, my friends, is untrue. I am qualified to be elected and to be your representative. It is true that as a Catholic I cannot, and of course never will, take the oaths at present prescribed to members of Parliament. But the authority which created these oaths, the Parliament, can abrogate them. And I entertain a confident hope that, if you elect me, the most bigoted of our enemies will see the necessity of removing from the chosen representative of the people an obstacle which would prevent him from doing his duty to his king and to his country. This address was followed instantly by the departure of all the most effective agitators to the scene of the great contest. Sheel went down as conducting agent for the candidate, Lawless left his Belfast newspaper, and Father Maguire his letram-flog, Messers Steele and O'Gorman Mahon, both proprietors in the county were already in the field, and O'Connell himself soon followed. On the other hand, the leading county families, the O'Brien's, McNamara's, Vendalur's, Fitzgerald's and others, declared for their old favourite, Mr. Fitzgerald. He was personally much liked in the county, the son of a venerable anti-unionist, the well-remembered prime sergeant, and a man besides of superior abilities. The county itself was no easy one to contest. Its immense constituency, the forty shilling freeholders had not yet been abolished, were scattered over a mountain and valley region more than fifty miles long by above thirty wide. They were almost everywhere to be addressed in both languages, English and Irish, and when the canvas was over they were still to be brought under the very eyes of the landlords upon the breath of whose lips their subsistence depended to vote the overthrow and conquest of those absolute masters. The little county town of Ennis, situated on the river Fergus, about one hundred and ten miles south-west of Dublin, was the centre of attraction or of apprehension, and the hills that rise on either side of the little prosaic river soon swarmed with an unwanted population, who had resolved, subsist how they might, to see the election out. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the eyes of the empire were turned, during those days of June, on the ancient patrimony of King Brian. I fear the clear election will end ill, wrote the viceroy to the leader of the House of Commons. This business, wrote the Lord Chancellor, Eldon, must bring the Roman Catholic question to a crisis and a conclusion. May the God of Truth and Justice protect and prosper you, was the public invocation for O'Connell's success by the Bishop of Kildare and Leglan. It was foreseen, said Sir Robert Peel, long afterwards, that the clear election would be the turning point of the Catholic question. In all its aspects, and to all sorts of men, this then was no ordinary election, but a national event of the utmost religious and political consequence. Thirty thousand people welcomed O'Connell into Ennis, and universal sobriety in order characterised the proceedings. The troops called out to overall the peasantry, infected by the prevailing good humour, joined in their cheers. The nomination, the polling, and the declaration have been prescribed by the graphic pen of Sheil. At the close of the poll the numbers were O'Connell, 2057, Fitzgerald, 1075, so Daniel O'Connell was declared duly elected amidst the most extraordinary manifestations of popular enthusiasm. Mr. Fitzgerald, who gracefully bowed to the popular verdict, sat down and wrote his famous dispatch to Sir Robert Peel. All the great interests, he said, my dear Peel, broke down, and the desertion has been universal. Such a scene as we have had! Such a tremendous prospect as is open before us. This tremendous prospect, disclosed at the hustings of Ennis, was followed up by demonstrations which bore a strongly revolutionary character. Mr. O'Connell, on his return to Dublin, was accompanied by a levy en masse all along the route of a highly imposing description. Mr. Lawless, on his return to Belfast, was escorted through Mietha in Monahan by a multitude estimated at one hundred thousand men, whom only the most powerful persuasions of the Catholic clergy, and the appeals of the well known liberal commander of the district, General Thornton, induced to disperse. Troops from England were ordered over in considerable numbers, but whole companies, composed of Irish Catholics, signalized their landing at Waterford and Dublin by cheers for O'Connell. Reports of the continued hostility of the government suggested desperate councils. Mr. Ford, a Catholic solicitor, openly proposed in the association exclusive dealings and a run on the banks for specie, while Mr. John Claudius Beresford, and other leading Orange men, publicly predicted a revival of the scenes and results of 1798. The Claire election was indeed decisive. Lord Anglesey, who landed fully resolved to make no terms with those he had regarded from a distance as no better than rebels, became now one of their warmest partisans. His favorite councillor was Lord Cloncurrie, the early friend of Emmett and O'Connell, the true friend to the last of every national interest. For a public letter to Bishop Curtis, towards the close of 1828, in which he advises the Catholics to stand firm, he was immediately recalled from the government, but his former and his actual chief, within three months from the date of his recall, was equally obliged to surrender to the association. The Great Duke was, or affected to be, really alarmed for the integrity of the Empire, from the menacing aspect of events in Ireland. A call of Parliament was accordingly made for an early day, and on the 5th of March, Mr. Peel moved a committee of the whole house, to go into consideration of the civil disabilities of His Majesty's Roman Catholic subjects. This motion, after a two days debate, was carried by a majority of 188. On the 10th of March the relief bill was read for the first time, and passed without opposition, such being the arrangement entered into while in committee. But in five days all the bigotry of the land had been aroused. Nine hundred and fifty-seven petitions had already been presented against it. That from the City of London was signed by more than a hundred thousand freeholders. On the 17th of March it passed to a second reading, and on the 30th to a third, with large majorities in each stage of debate. Out of three hundred and twenty members who voted on the final reading, one hundred and seventy-eight were in its favour. On the 31st of March it was carried to the lords by Mr. Peel, and read a first time. Two days later, on the second of April, it was read a second time, on motion of the Duke of Wellington. A bitterly contested debate of three days followed. On the 10th it was read a third time, and passed by a majority of one hundred and four. Three days later the bill received the royal assent and became law. The only drawbacks on this, the great measure of long withheld justice, were that it disenfranchised the forty shilling freeholders throughout Ireland, and condemned Mr. O'Connell by the insertion of the single word hereafter, to go back to Claire for re-election. In this there was little difficulty for him, but much petty spleen in the framers of the measure. While the relief bill was still under discussion, Mr. O'Connell presented himself with his counsel at the Bar of the House of Commons to claim his seat as Member for Claire. The pleadings in the case were adjourned from day to day, during the months of March, April and May. A committee of the House, of which Lord John Russell was Chairman, having been appointed in the meantime to consider the petition of Thomas Mayan and others, against the validity of the election, reported that Mr. O'Connell had been duly elected. On the 15th of May, introduced by Lord Ebrington and Duncanon, the new member entered the House and advanced to the table to be sworn by the clerk. On the oath of abjuration being tender to him, he read over audibly these words, that the sacrifice of the Mass and the invocation of the Blessed Virgin Mary and other Saints, as now practiced in the Church of Rome, are impious and idolatrous. At the subsequent passage, relative to the falsely imputed Catholic doctrine of the dispensing power of the Pope, he again rattled out and paused. Then, slightly raising his voice, he bowed and added, I decline, Mr. Clerk, to take this oath. Part of it I know to be false. Another part I do not believe to be true. He was subsequently heard at the bar, in his own person, in explanation of his refusal to take the oath, and according to custom withdrew. The House then entered into a very animated discussion on the Solicitor General's motion, that Mr. O'Connell, having been returned a member of this House before the passing of the Act of the Relief of Roman Catholics, he is not entitled to sit or vote in this House unless he first takes the oath of supremacy. For this motion the vote on a division was one hundred and ninety against one hundred and sixteen, majority seventy-four. So Mr. O'Connell had again to seek the suffrages of the electors of Clare. A strange but well authenticated incident struck with a somewhat superstitious awe both Protestants and Catholics, in a corner of Ireland the most remote from Clare, but not the least interested in the result of its memorable election. A lofty column on the walls of Denny bore the effigy of Bishop Walker, who fell at the boine, armed with a sword, typical of his martial inclinations, rather than of his religious calling. Many long years, by day and night, had his sword sacred to liberty or ascendancy, according to the eyes with which the spectator regarded it, turned a steadfast point to the broad estuary of Loch Foyle. Neither wintry storms nor summer rains had loosened it in the grasp of the warlike churchman's effigy. Until, on the thirteenth day of April, eighteen twenty-nine, the day the royal signature was given to the act of emancipation, the sword of Walker fell with a prophetic crash upon the ramparts of dairy, and was shattered to pieces. So we may now say, without bitterness and almost without reproach, so may fall and shiver to pieces every code in every land beneath the sun, which impiously attempts to shackle conscience, or endows an exclusive case with the rites and franchises which belong to an entire people. LibreVox.org