James II. It restated Molyneux’s sense of grievance at having been driven temporarily abroad as part of a history of Protestant anxiety and grievance:
… the Protestant Families had been stripped of their Properties, and forced to seek Refuge in this Country; they were received with Humanity, by many particular Persons, and Money was raised by private Subscription for their Relief; their Lands had been wasted, their Houses burned, and the whole Island thrown back, as to matter of Improvement, at least a Century; all this did the Irish suffer in the Cause of Liberty …
The oppressed Irish so described were Protestant Irish descended ‘from Ancestors, who brought with them the Manners, Customs, Laws, and Constitution of England’. They ‘saw their Independence as a Kingdom, unjustly violated, their Trade wantonly restrained, and Mr Molyneux’s modest dispassionate irrefragable Proof of the Rights and Liberties of his native Country, profanely burned by the Hands of the common Hangman’. The 1770 foreword argued that inadequate parliamentary autonomy had brought to pass constitutional dangers foreseen by Molyneux. A weakened monarchy and the absence of Irish parliamentary autonomy had rendered the interests of Ireland a pawn on the chessboard of English parliamentary politics:
An English Minister would move Heaven and Earth to corrupt a Majority in the House of Commons, and contrary to that Golden Rule of Politicks, which prefers the greater Part to the smaller, he would, in order to secure a single Member, the Circumstances of whose Estate may render it convenient to destroy the entire Trade of Ireland, readily Sacrifice so respectable a Part of the British Empire: To cut off the left Arm, in order to save a little Finger of the Right Hand from Amputation, would be strange in Surgery. Ireland has many unhappy Peculiarities in her political Situation, the chief of which seems to be, that she is a Kingdom without a King, for the Minister with an obsequious British Privy Council, has assumed the Power of putting a Negative upon the most salutary Laws; the Man who is not well acquainted with the Interest of Ireland, must surely be incapable of advising his Majesty concerning such Interest.
The 1770 foreword distinguished the Irish, meaning the Protestant patriot Irish, from ‘the wild ferocious Natives of Ireland’. This was not a phrase ever used by Molyneux himself though it was congruent with his obvious indifference to their existence and to his Lockean rationale for not considering their entitlement to rule by consent. However, the late eighteenth century witnessed new readings of Locke that did. At a 1791 celebration of Bastille Day in Belfast, Molyneux was the sole Irishman other than Grattan to be toasted.
In April 1782 Grattan secured the Irish Parliament that Molyneux wished for. In May that year the London Parliament rescinded Poynings’ Law and passed various other Acts that gave independence to Irish judges subject to the Irish House of Lords. In his April 1782 speech that divined the Spirit of Molyneux at work, Grattan optimistically summarised the new political settlement:
I rejoice that the people are a party to this treaty, because they are bound to preserve it. There is not a man of forty shillings freehold that is not associated in this our claim of right, and bound to die in its defence; cities, counties, associations, Protestants and Catholics; it seems as if the people had joined in one great national sacrament; a flame has descended from heaven on the intellect of Ireland, plays round her head, and encompasses her understanding with a consecrated glory.3
While Catholics did secure some important freedoms within the 1782 settlement, the revitalised Parliament came to be defined by the Penal Laws and a Protestant patriot mindset proposed by Molyneux at the end of the previous century. It took a mere eighteen years for Grattan’s Parliament to fall asunder.
BF
Notes
1William Molyneux, The Case of Ireland’s being bound by Acts of Parliament in England, Stated (facsimile, Online Library of Liberty, 1698).
2Jonathan Swift, The Drapier’s Letters and Other Works, 1714–1725, in H. Davis (ed.), The Works of Jonathan Swift, vol. X (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966), p.88.
3Henry Grattan, 16 April 1782, Irish House of Commons.
4
Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal (1729)
A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of poor People in Ireland from being a Burden to their Parents or Country, and for making them beneficial to the Publick, to give its full title, proposed that the babies of the impoverished poor, a vast proportion of the population as a whole, ‘destined to turn thieves for want of work, or leave their dear native country to fight for the Pretender in Spain, or to sell themselves to the Barbados’ could be made into useful members of the community, if reared as a luxury dish for the tables of persons of quality or fortune. At one year old, Swift proposed, babies could be rendered plump and fat for the good table. Swift computed the gaps between the rich and poor that made his modest proposal financially feasible. He assessed the charge of nursing a beggar’s child (he included all cottagers, labourers and four-fifths of the farmers in this category) to be about two shillings per annum. A gentleman would, he assured, pay ten shillings for the carcass of a good fat child, leaving the mother with eight shillings net profit and fit for work until she produced her next child. The market would be seasonally glutted by babies born nine months after the end of Lent. This he attributed to a Lenten diet that included fish, popular in Catholic countries. Swift lampooned the conclusions that could be drawn from the marshalling of facts. ‘Empiricks’ and Royal Dublin Society scientists with faith in progress were always in his crosshairs. A Modest Proposal invoked statistics, weights and measures to propose a mad panacea for Ireland’s problems.1
A year before the publication of A Modest Proposal in the third of his Intelligencer Papers, Swift sprang to the defence of John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera which had been dismissed in a sermon by a fellow Divine as containing merely a low kind of humour. Swift accepted that some things were too serious, solemn, or sacred to be ridiculed but abuses of them certainly were not. It was wrong perhaps to mock religion, politics or law but corruptions in these made proper topics for satire. He argued that The Beggar’s Opera would probably do more good than a thousand such sermons. His defence of Gay identified two reasons for writing satire. The less noble was for the private satisfaction of the author. The other was to write it in a public spirit, to prompt men of genius and virtue to mend the world as far as they were able. Swift argued that The Beggar’s Opera had such a moral purpose. It placed vices of all kinds in the strongest and most odious light and thereby, did eminent service to both religion and morality.
A Modest Proposal appeared at the tail end of a decade during which Swift wrote a number of anonymous pamphlets on the condition of Ireland. The first major one, A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture, was published in 1720.2 This exhorted its Irish readers to burn everything that came from England except its people and its coal. It was partly inspired by the distress of the 1,700 or so weavers living in the vicinity of St Patrick’s cathedral over whom Swift presided as Dean and magistrate when the export of Irish woollens to England was prohibited. Swift set up a loan fund of £500 to help them fund the purchase of looms and tools which many weavers had pawned off to avoid starvation.
Swift came to present himself as a patriotic Protestant Irishman loyal to the King, but like William Molyneux he argued for parity with, rather than subservience to, England. In his fourth Drapier letter in 1724 he ranked Molyneux and John Locke amongst the dangerous authors who regarded ‘Liberty as a blessing to which the whole Race of Mankind hath an Original Title.’ The Irish ought to be constitutionally ‘free’ under a limited Monarchy. But the disabilities of Ireland had everything to do with the Monarchy. His 1724 Letter