The Disfranchising Act, an act of parliament of the Parliament of Ireland, is debated in 1727 and receives royal assent on May 6, 1728. One of a series of Penal Laws, it prohibits all Roman Catholics from voting in parliamentary elections. Its full title is “An Act for the further regulating the Election of Members of Parliament, and preventing the irregular Proceedings of Sheriffs and other Officers in electing and returning such Members” and its citation is 1 Geo. 2. c. 9 (I).
In the eighteenth century, elections are held at irregular intervals and at the beginning of a new reign. The Act follows the death of George I on June 11, 1727, but does not take effect until after the election of 1727, coming into force in 1728.
The Act is repealed by the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1793, which receives royal assent on April 9, 1793, allowing the franchise in Ireland to all men holding a property with a rental value of at least two pounds annually.
In January and February 1689, Butler votes against the motion to put William of Orange and Mary on the throne and against the motion to declare that James II has abdicated it. Nevertheless, he subsequently joins the forces of William of Orange, by whom he is made colonel of the 2nd Troop of Horse Guards on April 20, 1689. He accompanies William in his Irish campaign, debarking with him in Carrickfergus on June 14, 1690, and commands this troop at the Battle of the Boyne in July 1690. In February 1691 he becomes Lord Lieutenant of Somerset.
Butler serves on the continent under William of Orange during the Nine Years’ War and, having been promoted to major general, he fights at the Battle of Steenkerque in August 1692 and the Battle of Landen in July 1693, where he is taken prisoner by the French and then exchanged for the Duke of Berwick, James II’s illegitimate son. He is promoted to lieutenant general in 1694.
Butler plays a dramatic role at the notorious meeting of the Privy Council on March 8, 1711, when Antoine de Guiscard, a French double agent who is being questioned about his treasonable activities, attempts to assassinate Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford, against whom he has a personal grudge for drastically cutting his allowance, by stabbing him with a penknife. Harley is wounded, but not seriously, due largely to the fact that he is wearing a heavy gold brocade waistcoat in which the knife gets stuck. Several Councillors, including Butler, stab Guiscard in return. Guiscard implores Butler to finish the deed, but he replies that it is not for him to play the hangman. In any case, he has the sense to see that Guiscard must be kept alive at least long enough to be questioned, although as it turns out Guiscard’s wounds are fatal and he dies a week later.
On April 23, 1712, Butler leaves Harwich for Rotterdam to lead the British troops taking part in the war. Once there he allows himself to be made the tool of the Tory ministry, whose policy is to carry on the war in the Netherlands while giving secret orders to him to take no active part in supporting their allies under Prince Eugene. In July 1712, he advises Prince Eugene that he can no longer support the siege of Le Quesnoy and that he is withdrawing the British troops from the action and instead intends to take possession of Dunkirk. The Dutch are so exasperated at the withdrawal of the British troops that they close the towns of Bouchain on Douai to British access, despite the fact that they have plenty of stores and medical facilities available. Butler takes possession of Ghent and Bruges as well as Dunkirk, in order to ensure his troops are adequately provided for. On April 15, 1713, he becomes Lord Lieutenant of Norfolk.
Ormonde’s position as Captain-General makes him a personage of much importance in the crisis brought about by the death of Queen Anne and, during the last years of Queen Anne, he almost certainly has Jacobite leanings and corresponds with the Jacobite Court including his cousin, Piers Butler, 3rd Viscount Galmoye, who keeps barrels of gunpowder at Kilkenny Castle. King George I, on his accession to the throne in August 1714, institutes extensive changes and excludes the Tories from royal favour. Butler is stripped of his posts as Captain-General, as colonel of the 1st Regiment of Foot Guards and as Commander in Chief of the Forces with the first two posts going to the Duke of Marlborough and the role of Commander-in-Chief going to John Dalrymple, 2nd Earl of Stair. On November 19, 1714, Butler is instead made a member of the reconstituted Privy Council of Ireland.
Accused of supporting the Jacobite rising of 1715, Butler is impeached for high treason by Lord Stanhope on June 21, 1715. He might avoid the impending storm of Parliamentary prosecution, if he remains in England and stands trial but instead he chooses to flee to France in August 1715, and initially stays in Paris with Lord Bolingbroke. On August 20, 1715, he is attainted, his estate forfeited, and honours extinguished. The Earl Marshal is instructed to remove the names and armorial bearings of Butler and Bolingbroke from the list of peers and his banner as Knight of the Garter is taken down in St. George’s Chapel.
On June 20, 1716, the Parliament of Ireland passes an act extinguishing the regalities and liberties of the county palatine of Tipperary; for vesting Butler’s estate in the crown and for giving a reward of £10,000 for his apprehension, should he attempt to land in Ireland. But the same parliament passes an act on June 24, 1721, to enable his brother, Charles Butler, 1st Earl of Arran, to purchase his estate, which he does accordingly.
Butler subsequently moves to Spain where he holds discussions with Cardinal Giulio Alberoni. He later takes part in a Spanish and Jacobite plan to invade England and puts James Francis Edward Stuart on the British throne in 1719, but his fleet is disbanded by a storm in the Bay of Biscay. In 1732, he moves to Avignon, where he is seen in 1733 by the writer Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. He dies at Avignon in exile on November 16, 1745, but his body is returned to London and buried in Westminster Abbey on May 22, 1746.
On July 20, 1682, Butler, then called Lord Ossory, marries Lady Anne Hyde, daughter of Laurence Hyde, who is then Viscount Hyde of Kenilworth but becomes Earl of Rochester in November. The couple has a daughter, Mary, who dies young in 1688.
Following the death of his first wife in 1685, Butler plans to marry again in order to secure a male heir. He gains permission from the House of Lords for the arranging of a jointure for another marriage in May 1685, and in August of that year, he marries Lady Mary Somerset, daughter of the Duke of Beaufort and Mary Capel. The couple has a son, Thomas (1686–1689), and two daughters, Elizabeth (1689–1750) and Mary (1690–1713). His second wife is a Lady of the Bedchamber to Queen Anne. Their younger daughter, Mary, marries John Ashburnham, 1st Earl of Ashburnham.
(Pictured: Portrait of James Butler, 2nd Duke of Ormonde, by Michael Dahl, National Portrait Gallery)
An Act for the better securing the dependency of the Kingdom of Ireland on the Crown of Great Britain (long title) is an Act passed by the Parliament of Great Britain which declares that it has the right to pass laws for the Kingdom of Ireland, and that the British House of Lords has appellate jurisdiction for Irish court cases. It becomes known as the Declaratory Act, and opponents in the Irish Patriot Party refer to it as the Sixth of George I, from the regnal year it is passed. Legal and political historians have also called it the Dependency of Ireland on Great Britain Act 1719 or the Irish Parliament Act, 1719. Prompted by a routine Irish lawsuit, it is aimed at resolving the long-running dispute between the British and the Irish House of Lords as to which is the final court of appeal from the Irish Courts. Along with Poynings’ Law, the Declaratory Act becomes a symbol of the subservience of the Parliament of Ireland, and its repeal is long an aim of Irish statesmen, which is finally achieved for Anglican Irish as part of the Constitution of 1782.
In 1709, the Irish Court of Exchequer hears a lawsuit between Maurice Annesley and his cousin Hester Sherlock over which of them have the right to possession of certain lands at Naas, County Kildare. The court finds in Annesley’s favour. Mrs. Sherlock appeals to the Irish House of Lords which upholds her appeal. Annesley then invokes the long-disputed jurisdiction of the British House of Lords to hear appeals from the Irish courts, and that house pronounces in his favour. The Court of Exchequer duly complies with the decree of the British House, but Mrs. Sherlock appeals again to the Irish house, which orders the Barons of the Exchequer to comply with its own decree and, when they refuse, imprison them for contempt of Court. The political uproar is out of all proportion to the importance of the lawsuit itself.
The bill has its second reading in the Commons on March 4, 1719, where it is chiefly opposed on the grounds that it appears to have no purpose beyond increasing the power of the House of Lords. Other objections include an argument that the preamble and the enacting section of the bill are contradictory, and that Ireland has historically had an independent judiciary. It is supported by Joseph Jekyll and Philip Yorke, and carries 140 votes to 83. It is then passed on March 26, 1719.
Section I of the Act notes that the Irish House of Lords had recently “assumed to themselves a Power and Jurisdiction to examine, correct and amend” judgements of the Irish courts, which it holds to be illegal. As such, it declares that the Kingdom of Ireland is subordinate to and dependent upon the British crown, and that the King, with the advice and consent of the Parliament of Great Britain, has “full power and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient validity to bind the Kingdom and people of Ireland.” Section II declares that the House of Lords of Ireland has no jurisdiction to judge, affirm or reverse any judgement, sentence or decree made in any court within the Kingdom of Ireland, and that all proceedings before the House upon any such matter are declared to be null and void to all intents and purposes whatsoever.
The Irish House of Lords is understandably infuriated by the curtailment of its powers, and the Barons of the Exchequer, though they are soon released from custody, are subject to intense vilification. While many people think that the Irish House of Lords had brought about the crisis by its own high-handed behaviour, the “Sixth of George I” remains a source of grievance for decades.
Stewart is born in 28 Henry Street, in Dublin’s Northside. He is the second and only surviving child of Robert Stewart (the elder) and his wife Sarah Frances Seymour-Conway. His parents marry in 1766. He has recurring health problems throughout his childhood, and is sent to The Royal School, Armagh, rather than to England for his secondary education. At the encouragement of Charles Pratt, 1st Earl Camden, who takes a great interest in him and treats him as if he is a grandson by blood, he later attends St. John’s College, Cambridge (1786–87), where he applies himself with greater diligence than expected from an aristocrat and excels in his first-year examinations. But he then withdraws, pleading an illness that he admits to Camden is something “which cannot be directly acknowledged before women,” i.e. something sexually transmitted.
Stewart organises and finances the alliance that defeats Napoleon, bringing the powers together at the Treaty of Chaumont in 1814. After Napoleon’s second abdication in 1815, he works with the European courts represented at the Congress of Vienna to frame the territorial, and broadly conservative, continental order that holds until mid-century. He blocks harsh terms against France believing that a treaty based on vengeance and retaliation will upset a necessary balance of powers. France is restored to the frontiers of 1791, and her British-occupied colonies are returned. In 1820 Stewart enunciates a policy of non-intervention, proposing that Britain hold herself aloof from continental affairs.
After 1815, at home, Stewart supports repressive measures that link him in public opinion to the Peterloo Massacre of 1819. Widely reviled in both Ireland and Great Britain, overworked, and personally distressed, he commits suicide on August 12, 1822. He is found in a dressing room seconds after he has cut his own throat using a small knife. He collapses and dies almost instantly.
(Pictured: “Robert Stewart, 2nd Marquess of Londonderry,” oil on canvas by Thomas Lawrence, National Portrait Gallery)
McNally is born in Dublin in 1752, the son of a merchant and wine importer. He is raised by his mother with the support of his uncle. He is born into a Roman Catholic family, but at some point in the 1760s he converts to the Church of Ireland. He is passionate about theatre, entirely self-educated and initially becomes a merchant in Bordeaux like his father.
However, in 1774 McNally goes to London to study law at the Middle Temple but returns to Dublin to be called to the Irish bar in 1776. After returning to London in the late 1770s, he qualifies as a barrister in England as well, in 1783. He practises for a short time in London and, while there, supplements his income by writing plays and editing The Public Ledger.
Returning to Ireland, McNally developes a successful career as a barrister in Dublin. He develops an expertise in the law of evidence and, in 1802, publishes what becomes a much-used textbook, The Rules of Evidence on Pleas of the Crown. The text plays a crucial role in defining and publicising the beyond reasonable doubt standard for criminal trials.
Not long after returning to Ireland, McNally becomes involved in radical politics, having already in 1782 published a pamphlet in support of the Irish cause. He becomes Dublin’s leading radical lawyer of the day. In 1792, he represents James Napper Tandy, a radical member of the Irish Parliament, in a legal dispute over parliamentary privilege. In the early 1790s, he becomes a founder member of the United Irishmen, a clandestine society which soon develops into a revolutionary Irish republican organisation. He ranks high in its leadership and acts as the organisation’s chief lawyer, representing many United Irishmen in court. This includes defending Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmet, the leaders of the 1798 and 1803 rebellions respectively, at their trials for treason. In 1793, he is wounded in a duel with Sir Jonah Barrington, who had insulted the United Irishmen. Barrington subsequently describes McNally as “a good-natured, hospitable, talented and dirty fellow.”
After McNally’s death in 1820, it emerges that he had for many years been an informant for the government, and one of the most successful British spies in Irish republican circles that there has ever been. In 1794, when a United Irishmen plot to seek aid from Revolutionary France is uncovered by the British government, McNally turns informer to save himself, although, subsequently, he also receives payment for his services. He is paid an annual pension in respect of his work as an informer of £300 a year, from 1794 until his death in 1820.
From 1794, McNally systematically informs on his United Irishmen colleagues, who often gather at his house for meetings. It is he that betrays Lord Edward FitzGerald, one of the leaders of the 1798 rebellion, as well as Robert Emmet in 1803. A significant factor in the failure of the 1798 rebellion is the excellent intelligence provided to the government by its agents. McNally is considered to be one of the most damaging informers.
The United Irishmen represented by McNally at their trials are invariably convicted and he is paid by the crown for passing the secrets of their defence to the prosecution. During the trial of Emmet, he provides details of the defence’s strategy to the crown and conducts his client’s case in a way that assists the prosecution. For example, three days before the trial he assures the authorities that Emmet “does not intend to call a single witness, nor to trouble any witness for the Crown with a cross-examination, unless they misrepresent facts… He will not controvert the charge by calling a single witness.” For his assistance to the prosecution in Emmet’s case, he is paid a bonus of £200, on top of his pension, half of which is paid five days before the trial.
After McNally’s death, his activities as a government agent become generally known when his heir attempts to continue to collect his pension of £300 per year. He is still remembered with opprobrium by Irish nationalists. In 1997, the Sinn Féin newspaper, An Phoblacht, in an article on McNally, describes him as “undoubtedly one of the most treacherous informers of Irish history.”
McNally is a successful dramatist and writes a number of well-constructed but derivative comedies, as well as comic operas. His first dramatic work is The Ruling Passion, a comic opera written in 1771, and he is known to have authored at least twelve plays between 1779 and 1796 as well as other comic operas. His works include The Apotheosis of Punch (1779), a satire on the Irish playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Tristram Shandy (1783), which is an adaptation of Laurence Sterne‘s novel, Robin Hood (1784), Fashionable Levities (1785), Richard Cœur de Lion (1786), and Critic Upon Critic (1788).
McNally also writes a number of songs and operettas for Covent Garden. One of his songs, The Lass of Richmond Hill, becomes very well-known and popular following its first public performance at Vauxhall Gardens in London in 1789. It is said to be a favourite of George III and popularises the romantic metaphor “a rose without a thorn,” a phrase which he used in the song.
Nothing is known of McNally’s first wife Mary O’Brien, other than that she dies in 1786. In London in 1787, he elopes with Frances I’Anson, as her father William I’Anson a solicitor, disapproves of McNally. Frances, and her family’s estate, Hill House in Richmond, North Yorkshire, is the subject of a song with lyrics by McNally and composed by James Hook, The Lass of Richmond Hill. In 1795, Frances dies during childbirth at age 29 and is survived by only one daughter. In early 1799, McNally marries his third wife, Louisa Edgeworth, the daughter of a clergyman from County Longford.
When McNally’s son, who has the same and professions, dies on February 13, 1820, it is widely reported to have been McNally. The son is buried in Donnybrook, Dublin, on February 17, 1820, and McNally sends a letter on March 6, 1820, to the Proprietor of Saunders’s Newsletter seeking damages for the severe injury caused by the circulation of his death. In June 1820, McNally is on his deathbed, and although he had been a Protestant for most of his adult life, he seeks absolution from a Roman Catholic priest. He dies and is also buried in Donnybrook on June 8, 1820.
The Banishment Act or Bishops’ Banishment Act, which receives royal assent on September 25, 1697, requires most Catholicclergy to leave the kingdom by May 1, 1698, and bans Catholic clergy from entering the kingdom. The Act is never efficiently enforced.
The Banishment Act is a 1697 Act of the Parliament of Ireland which banishes all ordinaries and regular clergy of the Roman Catholic Church from Ireland. All “popish archbishops, bishops, vicars general, deans, jesuits, monks, friars, and other regular popish clergy” are required to be in one of several named ports awaiting a ship out of the country by May 1, 1698. Remaining or entering the country after this date would result in punishment as a first offence with twelve months imprisonment followed by expulsion. A second offence would constitute high treason.
The Act is one of the Penal Laws passed after the Williamite War to safeguard the Church of Ireland as the established church and from fears of Catholic clerical support for Jacobitism. It is foreshadowed by proclamations issued by the Dublin Castle administration in 1673 and 1678 with similar terms. The banishment is originally and most effectively applied to regular clergy, many of whom register under the Registration Act of 1704, as parish priests to be treated as secular clergy and avoid deportation. The ban on bishops may have been intended to prevent ordination of new priests, which, coupled with a ban on clerical immigration, would lead to their eventual extinction. Of the eight Catholic bishops in Ireland when the act is passed, two leave, one (John Sleyne)is arrested, and five go into hiding. The port authorities pay for the passage of 424 clerics who emigrate. Mary of Modena estimates that about 700 in total leave, of whom 400 settle in France. Priest hunters are active in subsequent decades. Maurice Donnellan, Bishop of Clonfert, is arrested in 1703 but rescued by an armed crowd.
The Act is gradually less stringently enforced as the eighteenth-century progresses. The Roman Catholic Relief Act 1782 provides that its provisions cannot apply to a priest who has registered and taken the oath of supremacy. The Act is explicitly repealed by the Statute Law Revision (Ireland) Act 1878.
In 1783 FitzGerald visits the West Indies before returning to Ireland, where his brother, William FitzGerald, 2nd Duke of Leinster, has procured Edward’s election to the Irish Parliament as an MP for Athy, a seat he holds until 1790. In Parliament he acts with the small Opposition Irish Patriot Party group led by Henry Grattan but takes no prominent part in debate. In the spring of 1786, he takes the then unusual step for a young nobleman of entering the Military College, Woolwich, after which he makes a tour through Spain in 1787. Dejected by unrequited love for his cousin Georgina Lennox, he sails for New Brunswick to join the 54th Regiment with the rank of Major.
In April 1789, guided by compass, FitzGerald traverses the country with a brother officer from Fredericton, New Brunswick to Quebec, falling in with Indians by the way, with whom he fraternizes. He accomplishes the journey in twenty-six days and establishes a shorter practicable route than that hitherto followed. The route crosses the extremely rugged and heavily forested northern part of the present state of Maine. In a subsequent expedition he is formally adopted at Detroit by the Bear clan of the Mohawk with the name “Eghnidal,” and makes his way down the Mississippi River to New Orleans, whence he returns to England.
Finding that his brother has procured his election for Kildare County, a seat he holds from 1790 to 1798, and desiring to maintain political independence, FitzGerald refuses the command of an expedition against Cádiz offered him by William Pitt the Younger and devotes himself for the next few years to the pleasures of society and to his parliamentary duties. He is on terms of intimacy with his first cousin Charles Fox, with Richard Sheridan and other leading Whigs. According to Thomas Moore, FitzGerald is only one of numerous suitors of Sheridan’s first wife, Elizabeth, whose attentions are received with favour. She conceives a child by him, a baby girl who is born on March 30, 1792.
His Whig connections, together with his transatlantic experiences, predisposed FitzGerald to sympathize with the doctrines of the French Revolution, which he embraces enthusiastically when he visits Paris in October 1792. He lodges with Thomas Paine and listens to the debates in the Convention. While in Paris, he becomes enamoured of a young girl named Pamela whom he chances to see at the theatre, and who has a striking likeness to Elizabeth Sheridan. On December 27, 1792, he and Pamela are married at Tournai, one of the witnesses being Louis Philippe, afterwards King of the French. In January 1793 the couple reaches Dublin.
Ireland is by then seething with dissent which is finding a focus in the increasingly popular and revolutionary Society of the United Irishmen, which has been forced underground by the outbreak of war between France and Britain in 1793. FitzGerald, fresh from the gallery of the Convention in Paris, returns to his seat in the Irish Parliament and immediately springs to their defence. Within a week of his return, he is ordered into custody and required to apologise at the bar of the House of Commons for violently denouncing in the House a government proclamation which Grattan had approved for the suppression of the United-Irish attempt to revive the Irish Volunteer movement with a “National Guard.” However, it is not until 1796 that he joins the United Irishmen, who by now have given up as hopeless the path of constitutional reform and whose aim, after the recall of Lord FitzWilliam in 1795, is nothing less than the establishment of an independent Irish republic.
In May 1796 Theobald Wolfe Tone is in Paris endeavouring to obtain French assistance for an insurrection in Ireland. In the same month, FitzGerald and his friend Arthur O’Connor proceed to Hamburg, where they open negotiations with the Directory through Reinhard, French minister to the Hanseatic towns. The Duke of York, meeting Pamela at Devonshire House on her way through London with her husband, tells her that his plans are known and advises that he should not go abroad. The proceedings of the conspirators at Hamburg are made known to the government in London by an informer, Samuel Turner. The result of the Hamburg negotiations is Louis Lazare Hoche‘s abortive expedition to Bantry Bay in December 1796.
In September 1797 the Government learns from the informer Leonard McNally that FitzGerald is among those directing the conspiracy of the United Irishmen, which is now quickly maturing. Thomas Reynolds, converted from a conspirator to an informer, keeps the authorities posted in what is going on, though lack of evidence produced in court delays the arrest of the ringleaders. But on March 12, 1798, Reynolds’ information leads to the seizure of a number of conspirators at the house of Oliver Bond. FitzGerald, warned by Reynolds, is not among them.
As a fellow member of the Ascendancy class, the Government are anxious to make an exception for FitzGerald, avoiding the embarrassing and dangerous consequences of his subversive activities. They communicate their willingness to spare him from the normal fate meted out to traitors. FitzGerald however refuses to desert others who cannot escape, and whom he has himself led into danger. On March 30 the government proclamation of martial law authorising the military to act as they see fit to crush the United Irishmen leads to a campaign of vicious brutality in several parts of the country.
FitzGerald’s social position makes him the most important United Irish leader still at liberty. On May 9 a reward of £1,000 is offered by Dublin Castle for his apprehension. Since the arrests at Bond’s house, he has been in hiding. The date for the rising is finally fixed for May 23 and FitzGerald awaits the day hidden by Mary Moore above her family’s inn in Thomas Street, Dublin.
Tipped off that the house is going to be raided, Moore turns to Francis Magan, a Catholicbarrister and trusted sympathiser, who agrees to hide Fitzgerald. Making its way to Magan’s house on May 18, Fitzgerald’s party is challenged by Major Henry Sirr and a company of Dumbarton Fencibles. Moore escapes with Fitzgerald and takes him back to Thomas Street to the house of Nicholas Murphy.
Moore explains to Magan what had happened and, unbeknownst to her, Magan informs Dublin Castle. The Moore house is raided that day. Mary, running to warn the Leinster Directory meeting nearby in James’s Gate, receives a bayonet cut across the shoulders. That same evening Sirr storms Murphy’s house where FitzGerald is in bed suffering from a fever. Alerted by the commotion, he jumps out of bed and, ignoring the pleas of the arresting officers to surrender peacefully, he stabs one and mortally wounds the other with a dagger in a desperate attempt to escape. He is secured only after Major Sirr shoots him in the shoulder.
FitzGerald is conveyed to New Prison, Dublin where he is denied proper medical treatment. After a brief detention in Dublin Castle he is taken to Newgate Prison, Dublin where his wound, which has become infected, becomes mortally inflamed. His wife, whom the government probably has enough evidence to convict of treason, has fled the country, never to see her husband again, but FitzGerald’s brother Henry and his aunt Lady Louisa Conolly are allowed to see him in his last moments. He dies at the age of 34 on June 4, 1798, as the rebellion rages outside. He is buried the next day in the cemetery of St. Werburgh’s Church, Dublin. An Act of Attainder confiscating his property is passed as 38 Geo. 3 c. 77 but is eventually repealed in 1819.
John Asgill, eccentric English writer and newly elected Member of Parliament (MP) for Enniscorthy, is expelled from the Irish parliament on October 11, 1703, on account of a pamphlet he published in Dublin in 1698, arguing that man may pass into eternal life without dying. The pamphlet is burned by the common hangman and he spends much of the rest of his life in prison in England for blasphemy or for matters arising from land speculation in Ireland.
John Asgill is born at Hanley Castle, Worcestershire, England, on March 25, 1659, the son of Edward and Hester Asgill. Little is known of his early life but in 1686 he becomes a student at the Middle Temple and is called to the bar in 1692. He founds the first land bank in 1695 with Nicholas Barbon, which, after proving to be a profitable venture, merges with the land bank of John Briscoe in 1696. However, after profits drop, the bank closes in 1699. He is then elected that year as Member of Parliament for Bramber.
In 1700 Asgill publishes An Argument Proving, that … Man may be Translated, a pamphlet aiming to prove that death is not obligatory upon Christians. Within days of its publication, he leaves England to travel to Ireland, where he hopes to profit from the Williamite confiscation, acting on behalf of individuals affected by the 1699 resumption act. He is reasonably successful but is unable to gain the profits that he had anticipated. He becomes involved in lengthy litigation with the estate of the Jacobite Nicholas Browne, which continues until the early 1730s.
In an attempt to further his interests Asgill enters the Irish House of Commons in 1703, representing Enniscorthy. His Irish parliamentary career is to be short. On September 25, the first day of the session, his pamphlet on death is discussed and voted “wicked and blasphemous” and ordered to be burned by the common hangman. He is allowed to make a personal defence of his work on October 11, but this proves insufficient. He is expelled and the Commons order that “he be forever hereafter incapable of being chosen, returned or sitting a member of any succeeding parliament in this kingdom.”
While in Ireland Asgill is re-elected to the English House of Commons for Bramber in 1702 and so returns to England. On June 12, 1707 he is arrested and imprisoned at Fleet Prison for debt. He claims parliamentary immunity as a member of a current parliament despite the confusion whether the last English parliament and the first Parliament of Great Britain are the same body, and in December the House of Commons agrees. Nevertheless, two days after ordering his release from prison, he is expelled from the Commons both for his religious views and because he is a declared bankrupt.
Asgill falls on hard times and spends the rest of his life imprisoned in the Fleet or within the bounds of the King’s Bench but his zeal as a pamphleteer continues unabated.
Asgill dies on November 10, 1738, in the parish of Southwark, and is survived by his sister Martha.
Before the Act, a number of “Penal laws” had been enacted in Britain and Ireland, which varied between the jurisdictions from time to time but effectively excluded those known to be Roman Catholics from public life.
By this Act, an oath is imposed, which besides a declaration of loyalty to the reigning sovereign, contains an abjuration of the Pretender, and of certain doctrines attributed to Roman Catholics, such as that excommunicated princes may lawfully be murdered, that no faith should be kept with heretics, and that the Pope has temporal as well as spiritual jurisdiction in Great Britain.
Those taking this oath are exempted from some of the provisions of the Popery Act 1698. Although it does not grant freedom of worship, it allows Catholics to join the army and purchase land if they take an oath of allegiance. The section as to taking and prosecuting priests is repealed, as well as the penalty of perpetual imprisonment for keeping a school. Roman Catholics are also enabled to inherit and purchase land, nor is an heir who conformed to the Established church any longer empowered to enter and enjoy the estate of his “papist” kinsman.
The passing of this act is the occasion of the Gordon Riots (1780) in which the violence of the mob is especially directed against William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield, who had objected to various prosecutions under the statutes now repealed.
Emmet is a son of Dr. Robert Emmet from County Tipperary (later to become State Physician of Ireland) and Elizabeth Mason of County Kerry, both of whose portraits are today displayed at Cork’s Crawford Art Gallery. He is the elder brother of Robert Emmet, who is executed for leading the Irish Rebellion of 1803, becoming one of Ireland’s most famous republican martyrs. His sister, Mary Anne Holmes, holds similar political beliefs.
Emmet is a man of liberal political sympathies and becomes involved with a campaign to extend the democratic franchise for the Irish Parliament and to end discrimination against Catholics. He is called to the Irish bar in 1790 and quickly obtains a practice, principally as counsel for prisoners charged with political offenses. He also becomes the legal adviser of the Society of the United Irishmen.
When the Dublin Corporation issues a declaration of support of the Protestant Ascendancy in 1792, the response of the United Irishmen is their nonsectarian manifesto which is largely drawn up by Emmet. In 1795 he formally takes the oath of the United Irishmen, becoming secretary in the same year and a member of the executive in 1797. As by this time the United Irishmen had been declared illegal and driven underground, any efforts at peaceful reform of government and Catholic emancipation in Ireland are abandoned as futile, and their goal is now the creation of a non-sectarian Irish republic, independent from Britain and to be achieved by armed rebellion. Although Emmet supports this policy, he believes that the rebellion should not commence until French aid has arrived, differing from more radical members such as Lord Edward FitzGerald.
British intelligence infiltrates the United Irishmen and manages to arrest most of their leaders on the eve of the rebellion. Though not among those taken at the house of Oliver Bond on March 12, 1798, Emmet is arrested about the same time, and is one of the leaders imprisoned initially at Kilmainham Gaol and later in Scotland at Fort George until 1802. Upon his release he goes to Brussels where he is visited by his brother Robert in October 1802 and is informed of the preparations for a fresh rising in Ireland in conjunction with French aid. However, at that stage France and Britain are briefly at peace, and the Emmets’ pleas for help are turned down by Napoleon.
Emmet receives news of the failure of his brother’s rising in July 1803 in Paris, where he is in communication with Napoleon Bonaparte. He then emigrates to the United States and joins the New York bar where he obtains a lucrative practice.
After the death of Matthias B. Hildreth, Emmet is appointed New York State Attorney General in August 1812, but is removed from office in February 1813 when the opposing Federalist Party obtains a majority in the Council of Appointment.
seamus dubhghaill 