Part I

Like a beleaguered Jane Austen heroine, Ireland, in the eighteenth century at least, had to get herself married off. The only question appeared to be the possible bridegroom. Early in the century, Irish Anglican political opinion appeared eager to support an Anglo-Irish union of hearts, but the man in this case treated the overtures of his potential spouse with deep suspicion, when he didn’t ignore them completely. An Irish parliamentary address requesting union in 1703 was passed over with almost no comment at all, and eventually the Irish got the message. In the Injured Lady pamphlets, Swift offered a completely endogamous solution to Ireland’s problems in a marriage of convenience with the Anglican enclave. The Swiftian solution increasingly became the most attractive one to Irish Anglicans as the eighteenth century progressed – letting Ireland marry a man now seen as a foreign cad didn’t seem like such a good idea when he was intent on patronising you, stealing your money and reducing you to the status of a paid servant. In an anticipation of the now extremely hackneyed plot of a romantic comedy, Irish Anglicans started to hope that the boy-next-door would prove a better match than the rogue to whom the heroine seemed initially far more attracted. Ultimately, it was not to be, and a shotgun marriage between Britain and Ireland was hastily arranged at the end of the century, but until that moment, it was unclear who would be victor. Indeed, in 1782, with the granting of legislative independence, it looked as if the best man had won as political and domestic power was granted to the Irish Anglican enclave over Ireland herself. The 1798 rebellion, however, proved that Irish Anglicans simply could not keep their house in order, and the (un)loveable rogue Britain re-entered the stage at the last minute to steal the girl away.

One of the reasons why the marriage metaphor was important was because legislative union was one of the central ‘themes’ of eighteenthcentury Irish politics, and marriage was from the very start of this discussion a way to think through the implications of the unionist project. We now tend to think of the metaphor of union-as-marriage as most important for the end of the century when the debate on what would eventually be passed as the Act of Union was in full swing, and certainly this metaphor can be found everywhere in the political discourse of the 1790s and early 1800s. Claire Connolly quotes one pamphlet, To be, or not to be, a Nation; that is the Question? (1799), which described the union as ‘a treaty of marriage’, and prayed, ‘God grant that they may turn out a happy couple, and that the said union may not terminate in a divorce!’² Connolly also notes the absence of any mention of love in contemporary pamphlets using marriage as a union metaphor, despite the way the companionate marriage had become a staple of the novel of romance by this stage. Maria Edgeworth, though generally favourable to a union, famously claimed that ‘England has no right to do to Ireland good against her will’, implicating the Act of Union in a narrative of rape and enforcement rather than true love and companionship.³

While attention has been lavished on the unionist discourse of the late eighteenth century, though, a union of Ireland with Britain was on the cards throughout the century, and marriage was generally the favoured metaphor used in discussion. Union was not a new theme in Anglo-Irish affairs, introduced in the 1790s, but had been a persistent issue throughout the eighteenth century.⁴ What is crucial to understand is that while Irish Anglicans to a greater or lesser extent were sympathetic to a union at the start of the eighteenth century, and therefore could envision it as a kind of companionate marriage, by the 1750s things had begun to change and Swift’s characterisation of relations between ‘lady’ Ireland and ‘gentleman’ England as based less on companionship and love than on exploitation and expropriation was appropriated in allegorical accounts of political realities and debates.⁵

Positive support for a union from Irish Anglicans can be found in commentary from the early eighteenth century. In the first decade a union was formally requested three times by the Irish parliament, but, largely because of English political opinion, was turned down. In 1697, William King, the bishop of Derry, argued that a union would allow a kind of mutual ‘flourish[ing]’ of Ireland and England. William Molyneux, almost in an aside, suggested that a union was ‘an happiness we can hardly hope for’ in his famous The case of Ireland . . . stated (1698). Henry Maxwell, the MP for Bangor, believed a union to be ‘highly beneficial to England as well as to Ireland by enlarging the foundation of its power, wealth and trade, and by strengthening the inward frame of its constitution’. After the Declaratory Act 1720 had demonstrated, pretty clearly, the view of the British government that Ireland was not a separate kingdom, William Nicolson, the then bishop of Derry, claimed that Irish Anglicans would be glad of ‘an incorporation into the United Kingdom of Great Britain as hath been allowed the Scots’. These declarations of support for a union were not all that unusual in terms of the sentiments being articulated by Irish Anglicans in the first half of the century.⁶ It should be noted, however, that when a union was being advocated, it was in order that the rights and liberties associated with English commonwealthmen could be guaranteed for Irish Anglicans – this was especially the case for advocates in the 1720s and 1730s like Arthur Dobbs, MP for Carrickfergus, and Samuel Madden, member of the Dublin Society.

However, by the mid-century, Irish Anglican opinion had changed. Indeed, so changed had the Irish Anglican attitude become that when Lord Hillsborough, MP in Westminster, proposed a union in 1751, he was attacked as a kind of madman. In the anonymous An humble address to the nobility, gentry and freeholders of the kingdom of Ireland (1751) his scheme was described as ‘preposterous, unnatural’, terms which suggest a rejection of the heterosexual marriage paradigm of union in favour of terms which see the union as an example of sexual perversion. The scheme was configured as not simply sexually dissipated but actually satanic in origin, ‘horrid’, ‘infernal’, ‘hellish’, and ‘abominable’, in danger of causing ‘black and dreadful scenes of desolation, calamity and distress’. Hillsborough was personally attacked as well, and dismissed as impudent and malicious, ‘a Blind, stupid Bizzard’, ‘brainless, short-sighted babbler’, a ‘poisonous, seditious, undermining Rat’:

since Infamy is the most tormenting Punishment in this World for Guilt and Villany, next to that Worm within, which preyeth upon the Conscience of those who are Partakers of the Works of Darkness; let all those who are desirous to breed Rancour, Jealousy and Confusion, between two Sister-Nations, be assured; That besides the Malediction of the Present Age, their Iniquity will be accursed from Generation to Generation.⁷

The anonymous pamphleteer is driven by what he sees as Hillsborough’s disgraceful slight on Ireland’s equality as a separate kingdom. In other words, part of his desire to emphasise the sororal relationship is his realisation that, were Britain to be gendered male and Ireland female, marriage between them would be at least a plausible scenario, and in such a marriage, a female Ireland would be doomed to a naturally subordinate role. By maintaining equal sisterhoods, the pamphleteer can indicate that any union would by definition be unnatural and indeed ‘infernal’, a violation of both human and divine law.

If the tide had turned against a union for Irish Anglicans, English politicians had also changed their minds and were now quite anxious to see such a union take place. Initially, English politicians thought Irish affairs could be controlled relatively easily without such a union, but, the more Irish Anglican patriots troubled smooth relations between the two countries, the more attractive direct control became. By the 1750s, important figures such as Henry Fox, Lord Hillsborough and George Dodington all began to argue for the merits of a legislative union as a way to guarantee control by the British parliament of Irish political affairs.⁸ In 1753, there was discussion of a possible union at the highest levels of the British government as the Prime Minister, Henry Pelham, fed up with how the undertaker system was operating, considered whether a union would solve problems in that direction. These discussions became quite advanced very quickly and the Prime Minister was presented with a paper on the benefits of union by the Irish surveyor-general, Arthur Dobbs, a paper which he considered at length, though nothing actually came of it.⁹ After the difficulties of the Money Bill dispute, British politicians were increasingly convinced that a tighter control was needed over Irish affairs. The Duke of Bedford, appointed Lord Lieutenant in 1757, argued that a new style of political control over the Irish parliament was needed as the undertaker system no longer seemed to be effective, and he insisted that far too much attention had been paid to fostering the different factions in Irish political life.

The union boat had sailed, by then, and the Irish political context had been changed utterly by the Money Bill dispute. The dispute, more than any other event in the early eighteenth century, politicised the Anglican population of Dublin, especially the literate population. The Dublin crowd had already become more politically active in the 1740s and had been energised by the Charles Lucas affair. Lucas was an apothecary with a reformist agenda in terms of corporation politics which ultimately widened to include a more nationally oriented patriotism. Although Lucas was eventually hounded out of national politics, he left behind a significant rhetorical legacy which was re-ignited by the Money Bill dispute. Indeed, the extent of popular patriot opinion in 1750s Dublin can hardly be exaggerated, and it was not uncommon for the populace to riot should this patriot perspective fail to be endorsed or supported by the Irish political system. As well as being a matter of high politics, the Money Bill dispute spilled out into the cultural ether and generated a great deal of extra-parliamentary comment and support. A number of historians have traced the extent of this extra-parliamentary activity in toasts, bonfires, dinners, crowd activity, riots and pamphlets. All these avenues were used by ‘patriot’ and ‘castle’ supporters to articulate their case,¹⁰ although strangely, no one has yet mined the representation of these conflicts in the fiction of the day – especially in the emergence of the Gothic novel – a point which this chapter hopes to begin to address. Cultural products, even ones which appeared to have no direct bearing on the Irish political matters at hand, became appropriated and used as weapons for both sides in the dispute.

A good example of the way in which apparently unconnected cultural material could find itself appropriated by the politicised Dublin crowd for the purposes of commentary is the famous Smock Alley riot of 1754, which was sparked by the refusal of the actor West Digges to repeat the lines of Alcanor, senator of Mecca, in the play Mahomet the Imposter (1744), James Miller’s rewriting of Voltaire’s Mahomet. The lines, which complain about the imposition of Mahometan religion on the city of Mecca, were apparently interpreted by the audience (in a practical example of Frye’s theory of symbolic spread) as a commentary on the politics of the Money Bill dispute and the imposition of a foreign power’s politics on the city of Dublin. When Digges refused the audience’s demands of an encore, a riot ensued.¹¹ This incident is a convincing demonstration that a Dublin audience in the mid-eighteenth century was inclined to read literature in a quasi-allegorical fashion, or – to be more accurate – to see literature (whatever its provenance) as symbolically spreading to intervene in contemporary events. It is more than likely that Digges himself, a known patriot, also saw the lines as a way to indirectly comment on the dispute.¹² Indeed, 1750s Dublin was saturated with political allegories anyway. The Money Bill dispute sparked what Eoin Megennis describes as a ‘pamphlet war’, and many of these pamphlets resorted to direct allegory in order to represent the state of Irish politics at the time.¹³

The literature that poured from the presses during and after the dispute also demonstrates the extent to which allegory itself was a default means by which politics was discussed in mid-century Ireland. David Dickson has observed that ‘much of the public rhetoric [of the Money Bill dispute] was coded’,¹⁴ and what is most noticeable about this code is its allegorical or symbolically spread status, where allegorical figures stand in for the major political and social players in the dispute. Many of these pamphlets were so popular that they were brought together in omnibus volumes such as The Cabinet: Containing a Collection of Curious Papers, Relative to the Present Contests in Ireland (1754), and The Patriot Miscellany (1756) – the main collections consulted for the writing of this chapter – and they were read by a wide audience, including the elite. As Jacqueline Hill points out, there are a number of features shared by these pamphlets: they are all anonymous or pseudonymous, use irony and fictive elements including allegory to a very large extent, and they are more often than not written by the ‘patriot’ side of the political dispute (or, to put it this way, it was generally patriots who resorted to politics as allegory).¹⁵

The use of such fictive elements was partially dictated by the censorious nature of the Irish executive, which had quite strong powers of prosecution in terms of printed matter, as was witnessed in the Charles Lucas affair, the threat of prosecution prompting Lucas to flee the country in 1749. Honesty the Best Policy: Or, The History of Roger (1752) was the first of these allegorical patriotic pamphlets, in which Henry Boyle became the English squire Sir Roger de Coverly, and his enemies became objects of satire. The squire was one of the more popular allegorical figures for Boyle in the 1750s. Importantly for this study, some of the allegorical pamphlets echo the kinds of domestic and sexual scenarios played out in the aisling poems, the national novel and Swift’s Injur’d Lady pamphlets explored in the previous chapter. One of the best of the political pamphlets is The True Life of Betty Ireland . . . Together with Some account of her Elder Sister Blanch of Britain (1753), probably by Sir Richard Cox, possibly modelled on Swift’s Injur’d Lady. ¹⁶ The pamphlet examines Irish history and resorts to the traditional representation of Ireland and Britain as women who have to fight off unwanted sexual advances while maintaining their virtue, encouraging what it calls a ‘better understanding’ between the two sisters.¹⁷ Betty represents Ireland, and she complains that her financial affairs are in tatters, as ‘her small Revenues had been embezzled by Agents, Farms let to insolvent Tenants, double Leases made out, huge Fines taken in Hand and sunk in their own Pockets. She was preyed upon by Vagabonds and Outlaws’. However, she is placed in a more dangerous situation because of the undesired attentions of ‘a Foreign Count’ who has fallen in love with her. Like the unwelcome suitors in the aisling poems, the foreign Count is prepared to rape and abduct Betty to have his way, but Cox goes further in making the Count the kind of man who will go on to become a prototypical Gothic villain. The Count is ‘an odious Monster’, who abducts her with his ‘Pack of outlandish Goths . . . to take Possession of her Freehold, and break down her Gates’. Betty is saved by her sister British Blanche, who ‘generously came in to her Assistance, repelled Force by Force, and rescued her from a Tyrant Ravisher’.¹⁸ The allegory in this case refers to Queen Elizabeth’s protection of Ireland from the machinations of Philip II of Spain, but the implication of the pamphlet in the midst of a debate about a possible union between Ireland and Britain is that while a female Britain once stepped in to rescue Ireland from abduction and rape, a male Britain who turns his lustful attention on the beautiful Betty might look less like a rescuer and more like the rapacious foreign tyrant from whom Betty will need saving.

The abduction of women was not merely an allegorical threat in this period, of course, as actual kidnapping of women (usually women of fortune) was carried out with alarming frequency in eighteenth-century Ireland. Most of the abductions were by men who wished to marry the abducted women and therefore gain access to their money. The historian A. P. W. Malcomson, in his compelling study of these cases, provides the example of Miss Charlotte Newcomen of Carrigglas, County Longford, abducted by Thomas Johnston, a member of the local aristocracy, in 1772. Newcomen was worth a large amount on the marriage market, but that money was well protected in terms of family settlement, so the whole abduction was actually pointless. Unfortunately, this did not prevent Johnston from carrying it out anyway, possibly because he did not understand the complicated legal position of supposed heiresses. It may be instructive to give the account of Newcomen’s abduction as a comparison with that of poor ‘Betty Ireland’:

Miss Newcomen . . . made all the resistance that woman could do. She was dragged downstairs. On the first flight Miss Webster met her and caught her in her arms, then both held fast by the banister of the stair. Johnston, they say, cried out ‘Break their arms!’. . . As Johnston came out of the door, a Miss Cornwell, niece to Mr Webster, who lived next door, struck him on the head with an iron pin which fastened his window . . . The poor soul [Miss Newcomen] . . . scratched Johnston’s face, cuffed Edwards, tore his hair, and kept herself so still by the help of an iron that was to the pillion, that they could not get her fixed to the horse, though they . . . dragged [her] barefoot through a street dirty as possible, and in their attempts to put her on horseback used her with as much roughness and as little delicacy as if she had been a common hussy.¹⁹

The kidnap was unsuccessful and Johnston was killed while trying to effect it. The relative frequency of incidents of this nature suggests that the educated Anglican population reading such allegorical pamphlets as The True Life of Betty Ireland would have been able to translate such fictions into the distressing realities for many women of the period, so that the gap between fiction and reality would have been quite small. Just as the use of common names for Ireland in the work of the eighteenth-century Gaelic poets may have increased the ability of their audience to see real women as at least potential embodiments of Ireland (with very serious consequences for the political power of women in the long term), so too may the use of figures like Betty Ireland to discuss the Money Bill dispute have encouraged readers to see an association between Irish Anglican heiresses and Irish sovereignty, particularly with regard to the threats against the sexual integrity of both.

The politicisation of the Irish Anglican reading public climaxed in December 1759 when Dublin erupted in a very serious riot. The cause of the riot is simple enough to discern. Rumours of a now very unwelcome parliamentary union with Britain were floating in Dublin, and they coalesced around the fact that Chief Secretary Rigby was preparing to bring the heads of a bill to the Irish parliament which would enable it to be recalled quickly in an emergency. Rigby was particularly concerned at the time with the threat of a French invasion, but this bill was interpreted by the crowd as a way to make the passage of an act of union easier. Although on 22 November, Speaker John Ponsonby assured the crowd assembled around the parliament that a union was not being contemplated, this crowd had been betrayed before by the settlement of the Money Bill dispute, and was not, it thought, to be fooled this time. The Dublin Castle administration actually placed a newspaper advertisement declaring that there was no union on the cards – directly appealing to the politicised crowd through the most popular medium of political discussion – but this did not calm the multitude which continued to congregate outside the parliament. Instead of dispersing, the crowd built a gallows, possibly with the intention of actually hanging Rigby. Because of the noisy and increasingly dangerous gathering outside parliament, the introduction of the bill was cancelled. The disturbance, however, continued; it lasted two days and had to be brought to a close by the deployment of the military. Indeed, so disturbing was the riot that Rigby pushed for the introduction of a riot bill, and the heads of such a bill were introduced and passed the House of Commons but were later dropped (a riot act was not passed in Ireland until 1787).²⁰

What actually happened during the riot is unclear, but certainly a number of members of both houses of parliament were verbally and physically abused by the crowd, and several were terrified for their lives. Many of them were struck as they tried to enter the house, and others were forced to swear oaths of loyalty to the country and against a union. Hercules Langford Rowley, MP for County Londonderry, was, despite his muscular name, dragged down a street in humiliation. According to Horace Walpole, some of the mob actually entered the parliament building itself and put an old woman on the throne – suggesting the masculinity of the undertakers was in serious question.²¹ The woman on the throne may also have been an unsubtle reference to Primate George Stone, Archbishop of Armagh, one of the major court figures in 1750s Ireland. Stone was suspected of engaging in sodomitical activity and was an open target for satire in the pamphlet press. Although Walpole claims that there were a number of fatalities incurred by the rioters during the quelling of the riots, Sean Murphy has examined contemporary sources carefully and concluded that Walpole must have been mistaken.²²

During the riot, and in a number of pamphlet responses to the riot, discussion of Irish political equality and rights was once again central, and this deeply irritated some of the more conservative sectors of the Irish Anglican enclave. One pseudonymous pamphlet, A short but true account of the rise, progress and happy suppression of several late insurrections . . . in Ireland (1760), complained bitterly that in Dublin ‘you might hear the lowest tradesmen call themselves free citizens with more than Roman arrogance’.²³ The leadership of the riot that took place on 3 December is difficult to ascertain (though Patriot politicians undoubtedly had some hand in it, given that most of them went unmolested while other politicians were forced to swear publicly that no union would be implemented). The riot demonstrated plainly that Irish Anglicans were now prepared to use violence if necessary to thwart implementation of a policy to which they were opposed.

That the anti-union riot of 1759 is connected to the political divisions opened up (and never healed) by the Money Bill dispute of the early 1750s is very clear, and Irish Anglican patriotism was the basic principle behind the crowd’s activities. The Chief Secretary, Rigby, emphasised this when he argued that the real people to blame were Patriot politicians who had used the population in order to push its policies through parliament:

For many years, the mob in this kingdom has been wickedly and infamously made use of, by different parties, as an engine to carry questions in parliament, by terrifying the members; and I know of a certainty that expressions have dropped this very session even from members of parliament, that since they had no chance for numbers in the House, they must have recourse to the old method of numbers without doors.²⁴

Given the progress of the Seven Years War with France, many British politicians were reluctant to blame Irish Anglicans, and saw Jacobite spectres, Catholic plots and a potential French invasion lying behind the riotous behaviour of the Dublin populace. British politicians often failed to register that the Irish Anglican enclave was now irrevocably split between patriot and conservative court factions, and also they did not really believe that the patriot calls were more than simply rhetorical shots across the bow. De facto Prime Minister Pitt was convinced that the ‘practices of papists and emissaries of France’ had been closely concerned with the start of the Dublin riot and he did not accept that Presbyterian weavers of the Liberties had been the main participants.²⁵ Pitt maintained this stance despite the warnings of Rigby that Catholics had probably little to do with the riot. Sir Robert Wilmot, the Lord Lieutenant’s London secretary, also insisted that Catholics were to blame, wondering whether those who believed otherwise had ‘embarrassed’ themselves ‘by representing that popery had no hand in the disturbances of the third of December . . . French incendiaries paced these simple wretches in the front of the battle and sheltered their own creatures in the rear’.²⁶ For these figures, the Catholic and Continental menace had not yet been banished.

The anti-union riot was an unambiguous indication that Ireland, and the Irish public (or at least, the Protestant section of it – though it would be unwise to restrict the politicisation to them alone), had become radicalised, even more so than during the controversy over Wood’s Halfpence in the 1720s. Moreover, unlike the brief but intense spurt of widespread political interest displayed by Irish Anglicans in the 1720s, this time the population would remain radicalised. This radicalism was expressed through a greater interest in national politics, an interest which would eventually culminate in the emergence of the ‘Patriot Party’ under Henry Flood. As a version of patriotism took hold of elite sections of the ruling class, it also filtered down to the literate and even the illiterate Anglican public. When the settlement of the Money Bill dispute became widely known, for example, the Dublin crowd was enraged and about 1,000 congregated in College Green and burned an effigy of the Speaker of the House of Commons – a warning to those ‘patriot’ politicians who had appeared to have been bought up by the Castle in negotiations, their patriotism revealed as a veil for highly personal venality. Allegory and ‘fictive’ representations of current affairs were central elements of the cultural life of the newly energised patriot population.

The Gaelic poets placed their hopes in the restoration of the old order, the ‘return’ of the Pretender, the revival of a Catholic state. Irish Anglican Patriots used some of the same imagery as their Catholic compatriots. Both communities invested heavily in allegorising intimate, sexual and conjugal relationships as a means of discussing the politics (especially Anglo-Irish relations) of the day. However, Irish Anglican patriot dreams were, of course, very different from those of the Gaelic poets. They wished for a parliament completely in their own control, a continuation of a connection to Britain through the monarch but autonomy within the empire. They essentially wanted a marriage, not between a female Ireland and the British king, but a female Ireland and the Irish Anglican nation. In the context of a very visceral debate in and about Ireland’s independence, in which marriage, seduction, coercion and abduction are common metaphors employed to discuss political union, it is strange that novels published in Ireland in the 1760s have not been examined as occluded contributions to, or interventions in, such debates. Although the term ‘allegory’ would certainly be misapplied if used in a straightforward way about popular romances written and published in mid-century Ireland, these are narratives deeply invested in a language of intimacy and desire highly politicised at the time, and certainly ‘symbolically spread’ to comment on politics and social changes. Let me now turn to one of these popular romances, the novel also considered the ‘first’ of a new genre, the Gothic novel.