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Promoting Irish Culture and History from Little Rock, Arkansas, USA


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The Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829 Receives Royal Assent

The Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829, also known as the Catholic Emancipation Act 1829, receives royal assent on April 13, 1829. The act removes the sacramental tests that bar Roman Catholics in the United Kingdom from Parliament and from higher offices of the judiciary and state. It is the culmination of a fifty-year process of Catholic emancipation which had offered Catholics successive measures of “relief” from the civil and political disabilities imposed by Penal Laws in both Great Britain and in Ireland in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

Convinced that the measure is essential to maintain order in Catholic-majority Ireland, Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, helps overcome the opposition of King George IV and of the House of Lords by threatening to step aside as Prime Minister and retire his Tory government in favour of a new, likely-reform-minded Whig ministry.

In Ireland, the Protestant Ascendancy has the assurance of the simultaneous passage of the Parliamentary Elections (Ireland) Act 1829. Its substitution of the British ten-pound for the Irish forty-shilling freehold qualification disenfranchises over 80% of Ireland’s electorate. This includes a majority of the tenant farmers who had helped force the issue of emancipation in 1828 by electing to parliament the leader of the Catholic Association, Daniel O’Connell.

O’Connell had rejected a suggestion from “friends of emancipation,” and from the English Roman Catholic bishop, John Milner, that the fear of Catholic advancement might be allayed if the Crown were accorded the same right exercised by continental monarchs: a veto on the confirmation of Catholic bishops. O’Connell insists that Irish Catholics would rather “remain forever without emancipation” than allow the government “to interfere” with the appointment of their senior clergy. Instead, he relies on their confidence in the independence of the priesthood from Ascendancy landowners and magistrates to build his Catholic Association into a mass political movement. On the basis of a “Catholic rent” of a penny a month (typically paid through the local priest), the Association mobilises not only the Catholic middle class, but also poorer tenant farmers and tradesmen. Their investment enables O’Connell to mount “monster” rallies that stay the hands of authorities, and embolden larger enfranchised tenants to vote for pro-emancipation candidates in defiance of their landlords.

O’Connell’s campaign reaches its climax when he himself stands for parliament. In July 1828, he defeats a nominee for a position in the British cabinet, William Vesey-FitzGerald, in a County Clare by-election, 2057 votes to 982. This makes a direct issue of the parliamentary Oath of Supremacy by which, as a Catholic, he will be denied his seat in the Commons.

As Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Wellington’s brother, Richard Wellesley, had attempted to placate Catholic opinion, notably by dismissal of the long-serving Attorney-General for Ireland, William Saurin, whose rigid Ascendancy views and policy made him bitterly unpopular, and by applying a policy of prohibitions and coercion against not only the Catholic Ribbonmen but also the Protestant Orangemen. But now both Wellington and his Home Secretary, Robert Peel, are convinced that unless concessions are made, a confrontation is inevitable. Peel concludes, “though emancipation was a great danger, civil strife was a greater danger.” Fearing insurrection in Ireland, he drafts the Relief Bill and guides it through the House of Commons. To overcome the vehement opposition of both the King and of the House of Lords, Wellington threatens to resign, potentially opening the way for a new Whig majority with designs not only for Catholic emancipation but also for parliamentary reform. The King initially accepts Wellington’s resignation and the King’s brother, Ernest Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, attempts to put together a government united against Catholic emancipation. Though such a government would have considerable support in the House of Lords, it would have little support in the Commons and Ernest abandons his attempt. The King recalls Wellington. The bill passes the Lords and becomes law.

The key, defining, provision of the Acts is its repeal of “certain oaths and certain declarations, commonly called the declarations against transubstantiation and the invocation of saints and the sacrifice of the mass, as practised in the Church of Rome,” which had been required “as qualifications for sitting and voting in parliament and for the enjoyment of certain offices, franchises, and civil rights.” For the Oath of Supremacy, the act substitutes a pledge to bear “true allegiance” to the King, to recognise the Hanoverian succession, to reject any claim to “temporal or civil jurisdiction” within the United Kingdom by “the Pope of Rome” or “any other foreign prince … or potentate,” and to “abjure any intention to subvert the present [Anglican] church establishment.”

This last abjuration in the new Oath of Allegiance is underscored by a provision forbidding the assumption by the Roman Church of episcopal titles, derived from “any city, town or place,” already used by the United Church of England and Ireland. (With other sectarian impositions of the Act, such as restrictions on admittance to Catholic religious orders and on Catholic-church processions, this is repealed with the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1926.)

The one major security required to pass the Act is the Parliamentary Elections (Ireland) Act 1829. Receiving its royal assent on the same day as the relief bill, the act disenfranchises Ireland’s forty-shilling freeholders, by raising the property threshold for the county vote to the British ten-pound standard. As a result, “emancipation” is accompanied by a more than five-fold decrease in the Irish electorate, from 216,000 voters to just 37,000. That the majority of the tenant farmers who had voted for O’Connell in the Clare by-election are disenfranchised as a result of his apparent victory at Westminster is not made immediately apparent, as O’Connell is permitted in July 1829 to stand unopposed for the Clare seat that his refusal to take the Oath of Supremacy had denied him the year before.

In 1985, J. C. D. Clark depicts England before 1828 as a nation in which the vast majority of the people still believed in the divine right of kings, and the legitimacy of a hereditary nobility, and in the rights and privileges of the Anglican Church. In Clark’s interpretation, the system remained virtually intact until it suddenly collapsed in 1828, because Catholic emancipation undermined its central symbolic prop, the Anglican supremacy. He argues that the consequences were enormous: “The shattering of a whole social order. … What was lost at that point … was not merely a constitutional arrangement, but the intellectual ascendancy of a worldview, the cultural hegemony of the old elite.”

Clark’s interpretation has been widely debated in the scholarly literature, and almost every historian who has examined the issue has highlighted the substantial amount of continuity before and after the period of 1828 through 1832.

Eric J. Evans in 1996 emphasises that the political importance of emancipation was that it split the anti-reformers beyond repair and diminished their ability to block future reform laws, especially the great Reform Act of 1832. Paradoxically, Wellington’s success in forcing through emancipation led many Ultra-Tories to demand reform of Parliament after seeing that the votes of the rotten boroughs had given the government its majority. Thus, it was an ultra-Tory, George Spencer-Churchill, Marquess of Blandford, who in February 1830 introduced the first major reform bill, calling for the transfer of rotten borough seats to the counties and large towns, the disfranchisement of non-resident voters, the preventing of Crown officeholders from sitting in Parliament, the payment of a salary to MPs, and the general franchise for men who owned property. The ultras believed that a widely based electorate could be relied upon to rally around anti-Catholicism.

In Ireland, emancipation is generally regarded as having come too late to influence the Catholic-majority view of the union. After a delay of thirty years, an opportunity to integrate Catholics through their re-emerging propertied and professional classes as a minority within the United Kingdom may have passed. In 1830, O’Connell invites Protestants to join in a campaign to repeal the Act of Union and restore the Kingdom of Ireland under the Constitution of 1782. At the same, the terms under which he is able to secure the final measure of relief may have weakened his repeal campaign.

George Ensor, a leading Protestant member of the Catholic Association in Ulster, protests that while “relief” bought at the price of “casting” forty-shilling freeholders, both Catholic and Protestant, “into the abyss,” might allow a few Catholic barristers to attain a higher grade in their profession, and a few Catholic gentlemen to be returned to Parliament, the “indifference” demonstrated to parliamentary reform will prove “disastrous” for the country.

Seeking, perhaps, to rationalise the sacrifice of his freeholders, O’Connell writes privately in March 1829 that the new ten-pound franchise might actually “give more power to Catholics by concentrating it in more reliable and less democratically dangerous hands.” The Young Irelander John Mitchel believes that the intent is to detach propertied Catholics from the increasingly agitated rural masses.

In a pattern that had been intensifying from the 1820s as landlords clear land to meet the growing livestock demand from England, tenants have been banding together to oppose evictions and to attack tithe and process servers.

One civil disability not removed by 1829 Act are the sacramental tests required for professorships, fellowships, studentships and other lay offices at universities. These are abolished for the English universities – Oxford, Cambridge and Durham – by the Universities Tests Act 1871, and for Trinity College Dublin by the “Fawcett’s Act” 1873.

Section 18 of the 1829 act, “No Roman Catholic to advise the Crown in the appointment to offices in the established church,” remains in force in England, Wales and Scotland, but is repealed with respect to Northern Ireland by the Statute Law Revision (Northern Ireland) Act 1980. The entire act is repealed in the Republic of Ireland by the Statute Law Revision Act 1983.


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Birth of James Sheridan Knowles, Dramatist & Actor

James Sheridan Knowles, Irish dramatist and actor, is born in Cork, County Cork, on May 12, 1784. A relative of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, he enjoys success writing plays for the leading West End theatres. Later in his career he also produces several novels.

Knowles’s father is the lexicographer James Knowles, cousin of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. The family moves to London in 1793, and at the age of fourteen he publishes a ballad entitled The Welsh Harper, which, set to music, is very popular. His talents secure him the friendship of William Hazlitt, who introduces him to Charles Lamb and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He serves for some time in the Wiltshire and afterwards in the Tower Hamlets militia, leaving the service to become a pupil of Dr. Robert Willan. He obtains the degree of M.D., and is appointed vaccinator to the Jennerian Society.

Although Dr. Willan offers him a share in his practice, Knowles decides to give up medicine for the stage, making his first appearance as an actor probably at Bath, and plays Hamlet at the Crow Street Theatre, Dublin. At Wexford he marries, in October 1809, Maria Charteris, an actress from the Edinburgh Theatre. In 1810, he writes Leo, a successful play in which Edmund Kean appears. Another play, Brian Boroihme, written for the Belfast Theatre in the next year, attracts crowds. Nevertheless, his earnings are so small that he is obliged to become assistant to his father at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution. In 1817 he moves from Belfast to Glasgow, where, besides keeping a flourishing school, he continues to write for the stage.

Knowles first important success is Caius Gracchus, produced at the Belfast Theatre in 1815. His Virginius, written for William Charles Macready, is first performed in 1820 at Covent Garden. In William Tell (1825), he writes for Macready one of his favourite parts. His best-known play, The Hunchback, is produced at Covent Garden in 1832, and he wins praise acting in the work as Master Walter. The Wife is brought out at the same theatre in 1833. The Daughter, better known as The Wrecker’s Daughter, in 1836, and The Love Chase in 1837. His 1839 play Love is praised by Mary Shelley for its “inspiring situations founded on sentiment and passion.” His second wife is the actress Emma Knowles.

In his later years Knowles forsakes the stage for the pulpit and, as a Baptist preacher, attracts large audiences at Exeter Hall and elsewhere. He publishes two polemical works: the Rock of Rome and the Idol Demolished by Its Own Priests in both of which he combats the special doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church. He is for some years in the receipt of an annual pension of £200, bestowed by Sir Robert Peel in 1849. In old age he befriends the young Edmund Gosse, whom he introduces to Shakespeare. He makes a happy appearance in Gosse’s Father and Son.

Knowles dies at Torquay on November 30, 1862. He is buried under a huge tomb at the summit of the Glasgow Necropolis.

A full list of the works of Knowles and of the various notices of him can be found in The Life of James Sheridan Knowles (1872), privately printed by his son, Richard Brinsley Knowles (1820–1882), who is well known as a journalist. It is translated into German.


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Death of Arthur French, Member of Parliament

Arthur French, Irish Whig politician, patriot, orator, opportunist and hunter, dies on November 24, 1820.

French belongs to the long-established French family of Frenchpark, County Roscommon, who are substantial landowners who also make money in the wine trade. He is the eldest son of Arthur French MP and Alicia Magenis, daughter of Richard Magenis of Dublin and sister of Richard Magenis. He marries Margaret Costello, daughter of Edmond Costello of Edmondstown, County Mayo, and has nine children, including Arthur French, 1st Baron de Freyne, John, 2nd Baron and Charles, 3rd Baron.

In 1783, French is elected a Member of Parliament (MP) for Roscommon County in the Irish House of Commons. After the Act of Union 1800 he represents Roscommon in the Parliament of the United Kingdom. He is alleged to have been offered an Earldom if he would support the union of Ireland with Great Britain but refuses the honour. Later he also refuses a Barony with no strings attached, although in time three of his sons would hold the title of Baron de Freyne. The Crown is frequently irritated by his demands for offices and favours for his brothers and sons, although such behaviour is entirely typical of an Irish politician at the time.

A critic of the policy of collective fines as a deterrent to the illicit distillation of poteen, French incurs the wrath of Chief Secretary for Ireland Robert Peel who calls him “an Abominable fellow,” but his enormous popularity in Roscommon means that he cannot be ignored. He also criticizes the continuation of martial law in Ireland.

By 1817 French is complaining of ill-health. He dies on November 24, 1820. One report at the time states that he had died “from excessive fox hunting.”


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Birth of Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington

Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, Anglo-Irish soldier and statesman and one of the leading military and political figures of the 19th century, is born at 6 Merrion Street, Dublin, on May 1, 1769.

Wellesley is born to Garret Wesley, 1st Earl of Mornington and Anne Wellesley, Countess of Mornington. Fatherless at an early age and neglected by his mother, he is a reserved, withdrawn child. He fails to shine at Eton College and instead attends private classes in Brussels, followed by a military school in Angers, France. Ironically, he has no desire for a military career. Instead, he wishes to pursue his love of music. Following his mother’s wishes, however, he joins a Highland regiment.

Wellesley fights at Flanders in Belgium in 1794, and directs the campaign in India in 1796, where his elder brother Richard is Governor-General. Knighted for his efforts, he returns to England in 1805.

In 1806 Wellesley is elected Member of Parliament for Rye, East Sussex, and within a year he is appointed Chief Secretary of Ireland under Charles Lennox, 4th Duke of Richmond. He continues with his military career despite his parliamentary duties, fighting campaigns in Portugal and France, and being made commander of the British Army in the Peninsular War. He is given the title Duke of Wellington in 1814 and goes on to command his most celebrated campaigns in the Napoleonic Wars, with final victory at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. When he returns to Britain he is treated as a hero, formally honoured, and presented with both an estate in Hampshire and a fortune of £400,000.

After the Battle of Waterloo, Wellesley becomes Commander in Chief of the army in occupied France until November 1818. He then returns to England and Parliament, and joins Robert Jenkinson, 2nd Earl of Liverpool’s government in 1819 as Master-General of the Ordnance. He undertakes a number of diplomatic visits overseas, including a trip to Russia.

In 1828, after twice being overlooked in favour of George Canning and F. J. Robinson, 1st Viscount Goderich, Wellesley is finally invited by King George IV to form his own government and set about forming his Cabinet. As Prime Minister, he is very conservative; known for his measures to repress reform, his popularity sinks a little during his time in office. Yet one of his first achievements is overseeing Catholic emancipation in 1829, the granting of almost full civil rights to Catholics in the United Kingdom. Feelings run very high on the issue. George Finch-Hatton, 10th Earl of Winchilsea, an opponent of the bill, claims that by granting freedoms to Catholics Wellesley “treacherously plotted the destruction of the Protestant constitution.”

Wellesley has a much less enlightened position on parliamentary reform. He defends rule by the elite and refuses to expand the political franchise. His fear of mob rule is enhanced by the riots and sabotage that follow rising rural unemployment. His opposition to reform causes his popularity to plummet to such an extent that crowds gathered to throw missiles at his London home.

The government is defeated in the House of Commons and Wellesley resigns on November 16, 1830, to be replaced by Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey. Wellesley, however, continues to fight reform in opposition, though he finally consents to the Great Reform Act in 1832.

Two years later Wellesley refuses a second invitation to form a government because he believes membership in the House of Commons has become essential. The king reluctantly approves Robert Peel, who is in Italy at the time. Hence, Wellesley acts as interim leader for three weeks in November and December 1834, taking the responsibilities of Prime Minister and most of the other ministries. In Peel’s first cabinet (1834–1835), he becomes Foreign Secretary, while in the second (1841–1846) he is a Minister without portfolio and Leader of the House of Lords. Upon Peel’s resignation in 1846, he retires from politics.

In 1848 Wellesley organises a military force to protect London against possible Chartist violence at the large meeting at Kennington Common.

Arthur Wellesley dies at Walmer Castle, Kent, England on September 14, 1852, after a series of seizures. After lying in state in London, he is buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral. The Wellington Arch in London’s Hyde Park is named in his honor.

(From: “Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington,” GOV.UK (wwww.gov.uk) | Pictured: “Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington (1769-1852)” by Thomas Lawrence, oil on canvas)


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Proclamation Banning O’Connell’s Repeal Meeting Issued

daniel-oconnellOn the night of Saturday, October 7, 1843, a proclamation is issued from Dublin Castle banning a Repeal Association meeting called by Daniel O’Connell north of the city at Clontarf on the following day.

The proclamation is written by the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Sir Robert Peel, who calls the proposed meeting for the restoration of the Parliament of Ireland, abolished in 1801, “an attempt to overthrow the constitution of the British Empire as by law established.”

Two warships, the Rhathemus and the Dee, steam into Dublin Harbour, carrying around 3,000 British troops to ensure the mass rally in favour of Repeal of the Union does not take place. The nationalist newspaper, the Freeman’s Journal, alleges that the troops have been summoned to “cut the people down” and “run riot in the blood of the innocent.”

O’Connell, the charismatic leader of the Repeal Association, has always insisted that his movement is non-violent. On the banning of the meeting and the arrival of troops, he frantically moves to call it off and to prevent “the slaughter of the people.”

Handbills are posted around the streets of Dublin advising his supporters of the meeting’s cancellation. A prominent Dublin builder and O’Connell supporter, Peter Martin, is sent to Clontarf to dismantle the platform erected there. Other activists are sent on horseback to the roads leading into the city to send back the thousands converging on Clontarf for the meeting.

The following day passes without incident. The Freeman’s Journal rages against the “corrupt and impotent Government that has perverted the form of law for the purpose of robbing the people.”

The Warder, a Dublin unionist newspaper, had been urging the suppression of the “plainly illegal under common law” O’Connellite mass meetings for months. The newspaper stops short of calling for civil war in the run–up to the meeting. Now it declares itself satisfied. It congratulates the Conservative government for belatedly seeing sense.

By contrast, the Repeal camp is deeply split. Many, particularly those Young Irelanders grouped around The Nation, blame O’Connell for capitulation to the threat of force and for his unwillingness to confront the British government. They break from him acrimoniously the following year.

With the cancellation of the Clontarf meeting, O’Connell’s strategy of mass mobilisation in pursuit of Irish self government is over. He himself is arrested on charges of “seditious conspiracy” three days later.

(From: “Today in Irish History, The Repeal Meeting at Clontarf is Banned, 8 October 1843, John Dorney, The Irish Story (theirishstory.com), October 8, 2011)


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The Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829 Receives Royal Assent

coat-of-arms-of-the-united-kingdom

The Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829, the culmination of the process of Catholic emancipation throughout the United Kingdom, receives royal assent on April 13, 1829. In Ireland it repeals the Test Act 1673 and the remaining Penal Laws which had been in force since the passing of the Disenfranchising Act of the Parliament of Ireland of 1728. Its passage follows a vigorous campaign that threatens insurrection led by Irish lawyer Daniel O’Connell. The British leaders, starting with the Prime MinisterArthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, and his top aide Robert Peel, although personally opposed, give in to avoid civil strife. Ireland is quiet after the passage.

In 1778, English Catholics are relieved of the restrictions on land inheritance and purchase. A savage reaction to these concessions produces the Gordon Riots of 1780, and the whole history of Catholic Emancipation is one of struggle against great resistance. In 1791 the Roman Catholic Relief Act repeals most of the disabilities in Great Britain, provided Catholics take an oath of loyalty. In 1793 the army, the navy, the universities, and the judiciary are opened to Catholics, although seats in Parliament and some offices are still denied. These reforms are sponsored by William Pitt the Younger, who hopes thereby to split the alliance of Irish Catholics and Protestants. But Pitt’s attempt to secure a general repeal of the Penal Laws is thwarted by George III. Pope Pius VII consents to a royal veto on episcopal nominations if the Penal Laws are repealed, but the move fails. In Ireland the repeal of Poynings’ Law in 1782 is followed by an act (1792) of the Irish Parliament relaxing the marriage and education laws and an act (1793) allowing Catholics to vote and hold most offices.

The Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829 permits members of the Catholic Church to sit in the parliament at Westminster and to hold all but a handful of public offices. O’Connell had won a seat in a by-election for Clare in 1828 against an Anglican. Under the then extant penal law, O’Connell as a Catholic, is forbidden to take his seat in Parliament. Peel, the Home Secretary, until then is called “Orange Peel” because he always supports the Orange (anti-Catholic) position. Peel now concludes, “Though emancipation was a great danger, civil strife was a greater danger.” Fearing a revolution in Ireland, Peel draws up the Catholic Relief Bill and guides it through the House of Commons. To overcome the vehement opposition of both the House of Lords and King George IV, the Duke of Wellington works tirelessly to ensure passage in the House of Lords and threatens to resign as Prime Minister if the King does not give Royal Assent.

With the Universities Tests Act 1871, which opens the universities to Roman Catholics, Catholic Emancipation in the United Kingdom is virtually complete.


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Death of Queen Victoria

queen-victoria

Queen Victoria dies at Osborne House, Isle of Wight on January 22, 1901, ending an era in which most of her British subjects know no other monarch.

With a reign of 63 years, seven months and two days, she is the longest-reigning British monarch and the longest-reigning queen regnant in world history until her great-great-granddaughter Elizabeth II surpasses her on September 9, 2015. She restores dignity to the English monarchy and ensures its survival as a ceremonial political institution. Edward VII accedes to the throne upon her death.

Born on May 24, 1819, in Kensington Palace, London, Victoria comes to the throne after the death of her uncle, King William IV, in 1837. As a young woman ascending to the throne, her future husband describes her “as one whose extreme obstinacy was constantly at war with her good nature.” Her first prime minister, William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne, becomes her close friend and adviser, and she succeeds in blocking his replacement by Tory leader Sir Robert Peel in 1839. Two years later, however, an election results in a Tory majority in the House of Commons, and she is compelled to accept Peel as prime minister. Never again does she interfere so directly in the politics of democratic Britain.

In 1839, her first cousin Albert, a German prince, comes to visit the English court at Windsor, and Victoria proposes to him five days after his arrival. Prince Albert accepts, and they are married in February 1840. He soon becomes the dominant influence in her life and serves as her private secretary. Among his greatest achievements as Prince Consort is his organization of The Great Exhibition of 1851, the first world’s fair, in the Crystal Palace in London. He also steers her support away from the Whigs to the conservative Tories. She later is a vocal supporter of Benjamin Disraeli, leader of the Conservative Party.

Victoria and Albert build royal residences at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight and at Balmoral Castle in Scotland and become increasingly detached from London. They have nine children, including Victoria, later the empress of Germany, and the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII. In 1861, Albert dies, and Victoria’s grief is such that she does not appear in public for three years. She never entirely gets over the loss and, until the end of her life, has her maids nightly lay out Albert’s clothes for the next day and in the morning replace the water in the basin in his room.

Disraeli coaxes Victoria out of seclusion, and she is impressed by his efforts to strengthen and expand the British Empire. In 1876, he has her made “empress of India,” a title which pleases her and makes her a symbol of imperial unity. During the last few decades of her life, her popularity, which had suffered during her long public absence, increases greatly. She never embraces the social and technological advances of the 19th century but accepts the changes and works hard to fulfill her ceremonial duties as head of state.

Following a custom she maintains throughout her widowhood, Victoria spends the Christmas of 1900 at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. Rheumatism in her legs has rendered her lame and her eyesight is clouded by cataracts. Through early January, she feels weak and unwell, and by mid-January she is drowsy, dazed and confused. She dies in the early evening of Tuesday, January 22, 1901, at the age of 81. Her son and successor King Edward VII, and her eldest grandson, Emperor Wilhelm II of Germany, are at her deathbed. Her favourite pet Pomeranian, Turi, is laid upon her deathbed as a last request.

Victoria’s funeral is held on Saturday, February 2, in St. George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, and after two days of lying-in-state, she is interred beside Prince Albert in Frogmore Mausoleum at Windsor Great Park. When she dies, she has 37 surviving great-grandchildren, and their marriages with other monarchies give her the name “grandmother of Europe.”


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The Peace Preservation Force is Established

robert-peelRobert Peel (pictured), chief secretary of Ireland (1812-18), establishes the Peace Preservation Force to counter rural unrest on July 25, 1814. This rudimentary paramilitary police force is designed to provide policing in rural Ireland, replacing the 18th century system of watchmen, baronial constables, revenue officers, and British military forces.

Peel masterminds Act 54, George III, c.131, which is passed on July 25, 1814, to “provide for the better execution of the Laws in Ireland, by appointing Superintending Magistrates and additional Constables in Counties in certain cases.” On foot of this Act, Peel forms the Peace Preservation Force.

The Peace Preservation Force is at the disposal of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland for use in any district that has been “proclaimed” in a disturbed area. The first resident magistrates are appointed under the 1814 Act.

Sir Richard Willcocks, a former Dublin Magistrate and Special Government Magistrate, is the first appointed Chief Magistrate of the Peace Preservation Force and is allocated to the Barony of Middlethird, County Tipperary, with twenty constables who are ex-cavalry sergeants operating from a base at Cashel. He is appointed Inspector General of Munster and Stipendiary Magistrate. He dies in Dublin and is buried in Chapelizod Church of Ireland Cemetery.

The cost of the Peace Preservation Force operation has to be paid for by the area “proclaimed,” and when tranquility is restored the force will be either withdrawn or disbanded. Between 1814 and 1922 a total of four members of the Peace Preservation Force are killed on duty, namely, Sub Constable Thomas Manning is shot dead on August 16, 1821 when his patrol challenges a gang of insurgents; Chief Police Magistrate Richard Going, is shot dead on October 14, 1821 by a gang of four men while out riding; Sub Constable Hugh Colligan is killed on January 31, 1822 when his barracks are attacked; Sub Constable Thomas Knox is killed on March 10, 1822 while on sick leave and is identified as a policeman.


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Death of Daniel O’Connell in Genoa, Italy

daniel-oconnell

Daniel O’Connell, lawyer who becomes the first great 19th-century Irish nationalist leader and is known as “The Liberator,” dies in Genoa, Italy on May 15, 1847. Throughout his life, he campaigns for Catholic emancipation, including the right for Catholics to sit in the Westminster Parliament and the repeal of the Act of Union which combines Great Britain and Ireland.

Compelled to leave the Roman Catholic college at Douai, France, when the French Revolution breaks out, O’Connell goes to London to study law, and in 1798 he is called to the Irish bar. His forensic skill enables him to use the courts as nationalist forums. Although he has joined the Society of United Irishmen, a revolutionary society, as early as 1797, he refuses to participate in the Irish Rebellion of the following year. When the Act of Union takes effect on January 1, 1801, and abolishes the Irish Parliament, he insists that the British Parliament repeal the anti-Catholic laws in order to justify its claim to represent the people of Ireland. From 1813 he opposes various Catholic relief proposals because the government, with the acquiescence of the papacy, has the right to veto nominations to Catholic bishoprics in Great Britain and Ireland. Although permanent political organizations of Catholics are illegal, O’Connell sets up a nationwide series of mass meetings to petition for Catholic emancipation.

On May 12, 1823, O’Connell and Richard Lalor Sheil found the Catholic Association, which quickly attracts the support of the Irish priesthood and of lawyers and other educated Catholic laymen and which eventually comprises so many members that the government cannot suppress it. In 1826, when it is reorganized as the New Catholic Association, it causes the defeat of several parliamentary candidates sponsored by large landowners. In County Clare in July 1828, O’Connell himself, although as a Catholic ineligible to sit in the House of Commons, defeats a man who tries to support both the British government and Catholic emancipation. This result impresses on the British prime minister, Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, the need for making a major concession to the Irish Catholics. Following the passage of the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, O’Connell, after going through the formality of an uncontested reelection, takes his seat at Westminster.

In April 1835, he helps to overthrow Sir Robert Peel’s Conservative ministry. In the same year, he enters into the “Lichfield House compact,” whereby he promises the Whig Party leaders a period of “perfect calm” in Ireland while the government enacts reform measures. O’Connell and his Irish adherents, known collectively as “O’Connell’s tail,” then aid in keeping the weak Whig administration of William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne, in office from 1835 to 1841. By 1839, however, O’Connell realizes that the Whigs will do little more than the Conservatives for Ireland, and in 1840 he founds the Repeal Association to dissolve the Anglo-Irish legislative union. A series of mass meetings in all parts of Ireland culminate in O’Connell’s arrest for seditious conspiracy, but he is released on appeal in September 1844 after three months’ imprisonment. Afterward his health fails rapidly, and the nationalist leadership falls to the radical Young Ireland group.

O’Connell dies at the age of 71 of cerebral softening in 1847 in Genoa, Italy, while on a pilgrimage to Rome. His time in prison has seriously weakened him, and the appallingly cold weather he has to endure on his journey is probably the final blow. According to his dying wish, his heart is buried at Sant’Agata dei Goti, then the chapel of the Irish College, in Rome and the remainder of his body in Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin, beneath a round tower.