Hillsborough’s family (marquesses of Downshire) possessed large estates and extensive political influence in the north of Ireland, but made limited contributions to affairs of state. The 1st Marquess of Downshire’s record as a secretary of state for the colonies, 1768-72, was such that ‘no historian has had a good word to say’ for him. Hillsborough – the eldest son of the 3rd Marquess – was no exception to the family tradition. Yet in representing County Down from 1836 to 1845 he provided solid support for Sir Robert Peel before breaking with him over the Maynooth grant and the repeal of the corn laws.

From youth Hillsborough was reputed to possess ‘immense physical strength’. While studying at Oxford University in 1830 he got involved in ‘a pugilistic affray’ with two local boatmen. One of the pair, whom Hillsborough ‘easily disposed of’ due to his ‘superior science’ in fighting, was said to have died as a result of the bout. Jane Welsh Carlyle (wife of the historian Thomas Carlyle) later recorded that Hillsborough ‘is awfully strong, and his strokes tell, as he doesn’t expect!’

A few months later, in February 1831, Hillsborough accidently caused the death of Lord Conyers Osborne, the favourite son of the Duke of Leeds. After the two young men had ‘a slight rencontre’ in the quadrangle of Christ Church, Oxford, Osborne collapsed and died, the cause of his death being attributed by the Regius Professor of Anatomy to ‘an effusion of blood upon the brain’. The coroner’s verdict of death by ‘chance-medley’ satisfied Osborne’s father, and there the matter ended.

Osborne’s death left Hillsborough ‘in a state of mind approaching distraction’, but this did not prevent him entering the fray at a ‘ferocious’ election riot at Oxford just three months later. With ‘his gigantic arm’ he ‘knocked the mob about on either side of him’ in order to save a fellow undergraduate who ‘had been hung to a lamp-post by the strings of his gown!’ Nevertheless, in 1836 he was described by the king’s aide-de-camp, General William Dyott, as quiet, ‘unassuming’ and ‘gentlemanlike’, while Mrs. Carlyle later characterised him as ‘a dear, good kindhearted Savage of a Man!’ 

In August 1836 Hillsborough replaced his uncle, Lord Arthur Moyses Hill, as MP for County Down, and that November demonstrated his combative spirit at Banbridge by thanking Daniel O’Connell for giving him the opportunity to fling his ‘contemptuous defiance in his teeth’. A silent Member, Hillsborough rarely visited the division lobbies, but was a staunch Protectionist, arguing that in Ireland there was ‘no nice line of separation’ between the agricultural and the manufacturing interest, as the weaver and the farmer were ‘frequently combined in one person’. In April 1845 Hillsborough left the Commons upon succeeding as 4th Marquess of Downshire.

Generally regarded as a benevolent landlord who treated his Catholic and Protestant tenants even-handedly, he lived mainly in England, but maintained a strong electoral interest in County Down. His English estates consisted of 5,500 acres in Berkshire and Suffolk. When in Ireland he resided ‘in regal state’ at Hillsborough, the owner of 115,000 acres in five Irish counties worth a total of £72,500 a year. He remained a staunch Protectionist, using his position as president of the Royal Agricultural Society to call for ‘a war … on the part of the farmers against the Manchester cotton manufacturers’. He became one of the Conservative leader Lord Derby’s closest confidants among the aristocracy.

In 1860 his pugnacious reputation caught up with him when it was alleged that he had used his ‘Herculean strength’ to throw the skipper of his yacht overboard after finding the ‘rough, worthy sailor’ kneeling by the side of his seventeen-year-old daughter. Rumours that he was ‘being brought home to be tried by the Peers’ forced Downshire to issue a public rebuttal, in which he promised that if he ever caught the ‘scoundrel’ who had circulated the story, he would ‘throw him overboard’. Whether or not the matter ended as Jane Carlyle predicted it might, ‘in Lord Downshire giving somebody a good thrashing!’, is not known.

Having avoided further scandal, Downshire died in August 1868 at Herne Bay, Kent. His correspondence is held at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, where the Downshire Papers form a major historical archive of nineteenth-century estate management.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on the Victorian Commons website on 21 December 2015, written by Dr Stephen Ball.

It may seem surprising to some that popular anti-Catholic sentiment continued to flourish in the decades after Catholic emancipation (1829). But although this major reform ended 151 years of Catholics being formally excluded from the Commons, it was not conceived out of a mood of religious toleration. Instead, it was primarily a tactical response to events in Ireland, where Daniel O’Connell’s Catholic Association had created an army of Catholic voters willing to do his bidding. By allowing Irish Catholics to sit as MPs, but at the same time severely restricting the number of Irish voters, the Tory government led by the Duke of Wellington aimed to avert civil unrest in Ireland, whilst also dismantling O’Connell’s electoral powerbase.

For many staunch Anglicans the influx of a new breed of Irish Catholic MPs was a high price to pay for silencing O’Connell, who in any case soon began a new campaign for Ireland to leave the Union. For Irish Protestants, in particular, the presence of Irish Catholics was complete anathema, threatening both the position of the Irish Established Church and the ‘Protestant ascendancy’ of the Irish landed ruling elite. Furious clashes between these two groups, over virtually every aspect of Irish policy, helped infuse the Victorian Commons with an almost daily dose of sectarian conflict.

The curious position of English Catholics is often lost sight of in all of this, not least because of the way Irish affairs tended to dominate Victorian attitudes to Catholicism. But in many respects the prospect of English Catholic MPs sitting for English constituencies, at the heart of the Protestant nation, was even more of a threat to the Protestant constitution than Irish Catholic MPs representing predominantly Catholic constituencies. Where would the loyalties of such English Catholics lie, with their constituents or their creed?

These kinds of questions were never far away when Catholics stood for election in England, as some of our recently completed biographies have shown.

In 1832 Thomas Stonor of Stonor Park, whose ancestors were some of Oxfordshire’s most prominent recusants, became one of just five Catholic MPs to be returned for an English constituency at the general election. His election for Oxford was, as one commentator suggested, ‘extraordinary’ given the city’s well-known antipathy to Catholic emancipation. Indeed, historic graffiti against Robert Peel, the Home secretary responsible for passing emancipation, can still be seen in Oxford’s colleges today.

Speaking at his victory dinner, Stonor went out of his way to allay fears that he would ‘confederate with the Irish demagogues in their diabolical endeavours to revolutionize the kingdom’. He also looked forward to proving ‘that a Catholic was not necessarily an enemy to the establishment’. Stonor barely had time to take his seat, however, before he was unseated on petition for corrupt practices that were endemic in the city.

Stonor’s short-lived triumph in 1832 was unusual. The kind of reception more commonly encountered by Catholic candidates was amply demonstrated when he decided to stand for the county in 1837. Placards with ‘Will Oxfordshire add another joint to O’Connell’s tail?’, and ‘No farmers’ friend can vote for Stonor, the Papist’, set the tone for what became a highly charged campaign. After he was defeated at the bottom of the poll, the local Tory paper rejoiced that ‘Protestant feelings are triumphant in this county’.

The additional difficulties faced by English Catholic MPs (as opposed to their Irish counterparts) were perhaps nowhere better illustrated than when a sitting Anglican chose to convert. When John Simeon, Liberal MP for the Isle of Wight, adopted the Roman Catholic faith in 1851, he resigned his seat, believing that he had forfeited the electoral mandate given to him ‘whilst he was a member of the Anglican church’. When Edward Hutchins, Liberal MP for Lymington, refused to do the same after ‘embracing Rome’ five years later, he caused a political scandal. ‘Such conduct is an abuse of the representative principle’ since he ‘is no longer the same man’, protested one local paper. ‘That Mr Hutchins was returned to Parliament by Protestants, will scarcely be denied’, remarked another observer. ‘As a Romanist, then, he is in a false position and it behoves the constituency to call upon the recusant to resign’.

Given these kinds of sentiments in the English constituencies, one of the more surprising features to emerge from our ongoing work on the Victorian Commons is the intellectual attraction that Roman Catholicism was still able to exert over an entire generation of English MPs, many of whom, even if they didn’t convert, clearly came pretty close.

To obtain access to our recent articles, including those referred to above, click here.

PS

This is an updated version of an article originally published on the Victorian Commons website on 5 November 2014, written by Dr Philip Salmon.

It is particularly satisfying when the various sections of the History of Parliament allow the fortunes of one family to be traced through time. The Southwell family of Kings Weston, Gloucestershire, can be followed through each section of the House of Commons from 1660-1790 and then the 1715-90 section of the House of Lords.

The first member of the family to sit in the Commons was Sir Robert Southwell (1635-1702), who sat for Penryn in Cornwall from 1673-79, and again in 1685. Southwell’s father, also Robert (died 1677) had been involved in administration in Ireland since 1631. Southwell began his public service as a clerk to the privy Council in 1664, and during his career he accumulated many offices in both Ireland and England, and served on numerous diplomatic missions. By 1672 he had purchased a property in Spring Gardens, Westminster, and in 1679 he purchased Kings Weston in Gloucestershire, a place convenient for taking frequent trips to Ireland. He was buried at Henbury, near Kings Weston in 1702.

His son Edward Southwell (1671-1730) succeeded to some of his father’s offices and became an Irish MP in 1692. He served in the Dublin Parliament until his death, either for Kinsale or Trinity College. Shortly after his father’s death he was elected to serve for Rye in the English Parliament. He retained his seat until 1708, and later served for Tregony in Cornwall and Preston in the British Parliament. Andrew Hanham summed him up for the History as ‘a particularly polished example of the class of middling administrators who, though having no particular aspiration to the highest bureaucratic offices, nevertheless served with exemplary skill and industry.’ [House of Commons, 1690-1715, v. 528].

His son, Edward Southwell (1705-1755) was an Irish MP for Downpatrick 1727-1755 and served for Bristol 1739-54. He was more of a sinecurist, but made a step-up in the marriage stakes, his bride being the daughter of Edward Watson, Viscount Sondes, and the sister of the 2nd and 3rd earls of Rockingham.

His son Edward Southwell (1738-1777) sat for Kinsale in the Irish parliament (1761-8), and Bridgwater 1761-63 and Gloucestershire 1763-76. Interestingly, he took office as steward of the manor of East Hendred, which allowed him to relinquish his seat and stand successfully for the county. The death on 28 February 1775 of Margaret Tufton, one of the coheirs of Thomas Tufton, 6th earl of Thanet, countess of Leicester by marriage, and suo jure Baroness de Clifford, raised the prospect that Southwell would again have to relinquish his seat, upon elevation to the House of Lords. There were several claimants to the title, which took some time to resolve, although George III quickly went to the nub of the question when he told Lord North that:

“the Earl of Salisbury and Lady Egmont having for their families seats in the House of Lords are out of the question, the decision must lie between Mr. Southwell and the dowager countess of Gower, the former being descended from the eldest sister and having an estate sufficient to support the dignity seems to have a prior claim to favour.”

[Correspondence of George III, ed. Fortescue, iii. 183, George III to North, 28 February 1775]

After due consideration, Southwell was summoned by writ on 17 April 1776 and took his seat as 20th Baron de Clifford on 24 April. His short tenure of a seat in the Lords was ended when he died in France on 1 November 1777. His widow was to become the governess to Princess Charlotte of Wales, the only child of the future George IV.

His son, Edward Southwell (1767-1832), succeeded as 21st Baron de Clifford, taking his seat on 21 April 1789 and last attending in 1831. He was succeeded by his niece Sophia Coussmaker (1791-1874) as 22nd Baroness de Clifford, wife of John Russell, a nephew of the 6th duke of Bedford.

SNH

Further reading
The House of Commons 1660-1690, ed. B.D. Henning (1983)
The House of Commons 1690-1715, ed. E.C. Cruickshanks, S.N. Handley and D.W. Hayton (2002)
The House of Commons 1715-1754, ed. R. Sedgwick (1970)
The House of Commons 1754-1790, ed. L.B. Namier and J. Brooke (1964)
The House of Lords 1715-1790, ed. R.D.E. Eagles (forthcoming)

The seminar takes place between 5:30 and 6.30 p.m. You can attend online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

Sir Thomas Wentworth (later earl of Strafford) served as an MP in English parliaments held during the reigns of James I and Charles I. But by the end of the 1620s, Wentworth had ‘changed sides’ from parliamentary champion to court supporter. He was appointed lord president of the council of the North in December 1628 and then became a member of the English privy council in November 1629. His rise to power continued when he was appointed lord deputy of Ireland in 1632.

From the mid sixteenth century, the colonisation of Ireland had intensified. To try and maintain control, English monarchs appointed a lord deputy or lieutenant of Ireland to rule on their behalf, although with limited powers which meant that this vice-regent was reliant on the king and English privy council. Wentworth, like previous deputies, had to try to control a kingdom which was not only divided religiously, but also between the Old and New English and the native Irish. In addition, he could be undermined by his political enemies from within England whilst he was away. On a practical level, the deputy experienced communication difficulties with letters between Ireland and England sometimes taking weeks to arrive, and was required to take long absences from Ireland when his attendance on the king was required.

Wentworth negotiated additional rights which previous lord deputies had not had, in order to try and overcome these issues. Complaints against the Irish administration had to be first heard by Wentworth’s court in Dublin rather than being taken directly to England, grants relating to Ireland could not be passed in England without his prior knowledge, and Wentworth was also permitted to clear Ireland’s debt before the king used any of Ireland’s revenues. He also acquired the right to appoint his preferred candidates to official posts in Ireland.

On his arrival in Ireland to take up his post in 1633, Wentworth chose Christopher Wandesford, whom he had known since their schooldays, as his master of the rolls and installed him on the Irish privy council. Sir George Radcliffe, who had also had a long relationship with Wentworth, became a member of the Irish privy council. The importance of these two men was noted by Wentworth when he wrote to the earl of Portland from Ireland stating that ‘there is not a Minister on this Side, that knows any Thing I either write or intend, excepting the Master of the Rolls and Sir George Radcliffe.’ Although Wentworth himself has been the subject of much attention by historians, the role of the men that he surrounded himself with has usually only been mentioned in passing, perhaps because much of their work was carried out behind the scenes. Christopher Wandesford is also particularly interesting as in Wentworth’s absences from Ireland, he acted as a lord justice during the 1630s, and then lord deputy of Ireland in 1640. Exploring Wandesford’s role as the ‘deputy’s deputy’ highlights the difficulties of governing Ireland from afar, especially when the king’s chosen representative was absent.

The particular focus here is the role of Wentworth’s close associates in the parliaments held in Ireland during Wentworth’s time in office. He relied heavily upon Wandesford and Radcliffe to help him to prepare parliament, including managing the make-up of the House. Whilst parliament was in session, he relied upon these men to generate and maintain support for governmental policy. They acted as conduits of information to Wentworth, assessing the mood of the House, acting as controllers of debate and reporting back to the lord deputy on discussions within committees. However, despite outward appearances that the Parliament of 1634–35 had been a success, the 1640 sessions of the 1640–49 Parliament were much more difficult to control. After the first session where supply was granted in spring 1640, Wentworth was then recalled to England to support the King. In his absence during the second and third sessions of parliament, Radcliffe and Wandesford struggled to maintain the government’s initiative over parliament. This culminated in the Irish House of Commons presenting the Humble and Just Remonstrance to lord deputy Wandesford on 9 November 1640. This accused Wentworth of introducing arbitrary government in Ireland and formed the basis of the later impeachment case brought against him by the English Long Parliament in November 1640.

Wandesford and Radcliffe’s Irish parliamentary careers provide an insight into how Wentworth used his associates to support his policies in Ireland. This initially appeared successful whilst Wentworth’s government was strong, but, in Wentworth’s absence, they were unable to control parliament, and this contributed significantly to the collapse of the administration.

CB

The seminar takes place on 14 November between 5:30 and 6.30 p.m. You can attend online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

Further reading

The Earl of Strafforde’s Letters and Dispatches ed. W. Knowler (2 vols., 1739)

Hugh Kearney, Strafford in Ireland 1633-41 (1959/1989)

Two packed days at the Organise! Organise! Organise! conference at Durham University last month showcased the vibrancy of new research in British and Irish political history from 1790 to 1914. From the visual culture of reform politics to the tactical choreography of political meetings, countless papers illuminated not just how politics was thought about or communicated but how it was done.

As Katrina Navickas set out in her fantastic keynote, histories of political practices are transforming a field that still looks to the (no longer) new political history for its grand narratives. Studying the practices of politics refocuses our attention on behaviours not identities, the collective not the individual. In this vein, Navickas explained, political organising allows us to think across low and high politics, to bring together social histories of politics in the everyday and the history of ideas. Its strength lies in its versatility.

Recentring political practices makes us more attentive to the material constraints of political action, as speakers highlighted in important ways. In their paper on exclusive dealing, Richard Huzzey and Kathryn Rix suggested the political tactic was more likely to succeed in larger urban areas where the politically discerning consumer had more choice over where to spend their money. Chloe Ward’s paper on Victorian painters’ belief in art as a call to action expanded our discussions on the medium of the political message. But communicating this message wasn’t always straightforward, she explained. Artists were frustrated when their life-size portraits of social injustice were hung too high on gallery walls to give the most effective jolt to the art-consuming public’s conscience.

Political organisation also thrived on material inventiveness, like the plans for a ballot box that the radical parliamentary organiser Harriet Grote drafted with a Hertford carpenter in 1837, as Martin Spychal explored in his paper. The sheer size of petitions presented their own challenges. These could be solved, Henry Miller and Mari Takayanagi explained, with purpose-built wagons to transport ‘monster’ petitions to parliament or the resourceful requisitioning of an apple seller’s cart used to conceal the 1866 women’s suffrage petition for maximum impact.

Papers by Nicholas Barone on apathy in radical politics from 1790 to 1840 and Matthew Roberts on the changing feeling rules governing mid-Victorian parliamentary performance reflected the important ‘turn’ towards the history of emotions in studies of nineteenth-century politics. For a historian more at home after 1870, Laura Forster’s reappraisal of socialist conversion narratives and appeal to reimagine the history of socialist thought as a lifetime’s accumulation of intimate encounters struck a chord.

I think there’s much more that sensory history and the histories of the body can bring to our understanding of political organising. At least in the papers I heard, the history of disability was conspicuously absent. But if we go back to the first principles that Katrina Navickas outlined in her keynote, the actions that increasingly defined nineteenth-century politics – to meet, to be elected to a committee, to claim public space and the right to free speech – necessarily privileged certain bodies and excluded others.

We’re more attuned to thinking about the politics of the everyday, and this is a helpful reminder that political practices were often rooted in familiar rhythms and routines. Vic Clarke’s research on targeted advertising in radical publications like the Northern Star showed how medicines, beverages, and reading material were marketed in imaginative ways to a Chartist consumer audience. Everyday sites were reworked for political organising. According to Niall Whelehan, the Ladies’ Land League owed its success in Dundee in part to conversations involving Irish migrants in jute workshop dormitories. Mapping this across a neighbourhood, Katrina Navickas’s case study of the ‘radical locale’ of Dod Street elucidated how histories of socialist organising were embedded in working-class street and associational life in London’s East End.

Although more papers addressed radical than conservative politics, organising is a framework that holds across the political spectrum. In their introduction to Organizing Democracy: Reflections on the Rise of Political Organizations in the Nineteenth Century, Henk te Velde and Maartje Janse observe that as Western Europe grappled with questions about how to accommodate new modes of participation, ‘[p]olitical organizations offered an answer that, eventually, appealed to both political outsiders and members of the political establishment’. As Shaun Evans showed in his paper on the North Wales Property Defence Association, landowners in the 1880s and 1890s organised to resist land reform being replicated on the other side of the Irish Sea. If the practices of politics are to become a new framework across the field, we should welcome more research into how far competing political organisations did politics differently, and consider whether organisers’ activities, tactics, and timings varied in line with their political persuasions.

Refreshingly, the conference had a good range of papers on political organising across the four nations. Research by Erin Geraghty and Ciara Stewart unravelled moments of tension and cooperation between British and Irish women campaigners for suffrage and repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts. At opposite ends of our period, papers on the politics of translation by Marion Löffler and Martin Wright illuminated the intricate transnational networks across generations of Welsh radical writers and fraught contests over how best to accommodate socialism to Welsh national identity.

My own work on schoolgirls’ politics aims to take the history of political practices into other unexpected places. As I argued in my paper, school mock elections expand our view of who counted as political organisers and where political organising happened. Looking at mock elections in three secondary and one elementary school in London and Manchester, I showed that girls were active electoral organisers amid the heightened partisan atmosphere of the 1909-11 constitutional crisis.

In mock elections, girls voted and stood for election years before women had the parliamentary vote. Schoolgirls learnt about politics by doing it. Their meticulous re-creation of the electoral process was an education for future citizenship and a radical claim to participation in the political nation. School mock elections help explain how women voters were assimilated into the electoral system after 1918.

Taking schoolgirls’ electioneering seriously helps us think differently about non-voter electoral culture. Mine was one of several papers challenging the idea that politics became more exclusionary as it became more democratic. School electoral activity represented a new, vibrant, and playful form of non-voter politics that, at least for girls and working-class pupils, only took hold on a significant scale from the turn of the twentieth century.

Fittingly for a conference on organisation, Naomi Lloyd-Jones did a stellar job putting the two days together. A huge thank you to Naomi, the conference sponsors, and all the speakers for such a stimulating event. I’m especially grateful to the History of Parliament Trust for their generous support for PGR and ECR attendees. I’m looking forward to continuing the conversations!

HS

Dr Helen Sunderland is a historian of children and young people’s politics in modern Britain and is based at the University of Oxford. She is currently writing a book on schoolgirls’ politics in England, 1870-1918.

To mark the collaboration between the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland and the UK Parliamentary Archives, last month the UK Parliamentary Archives hosted an event to discuss the importance of sharing knowledge and collections as a way to digitally recreate and reconnect archives lost in disasters. The Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland is a collaborative project led by researchers at Trinity College Dublin, to digitally recreate the Public Record Office of Ireland 1867-1922 that was destroyed in June 1922, in the opening engagement of the Irish Civil War.

This event began with Adrian Brown, Director of the UK Parliamentary Archives, discussing the importance of this project in democratising access to historical records. The Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland is a freely and permanently available online open-access resource to all those interested in Ireland’s history and its international links. As former Taoiseach and current Tánaiste Micheál Martin, TD, explained,

The Beyond 2022 Project is a landmark initiative, not just because of what it will achieve through ground-breaking technology, but because of its collaborative approach. It allows for the re-exploration of the history of our island and the links forged over centuries with our neighbours.

Tánaiste, Micheál Martin, TD

By 2022, the project had five core partners and over seventy archives, libraries, and learned societies around the world collaborating to compile records covering seven centuries of Irish history. These records are free and open access to all which, as Adrian Brown stated, means that this project not only tells important stories, but it allows everyone to tell their own story, too. The Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland helps researchers, both novice and expert, with their work in multiple ways. It displays ‘Curated Collections’ of sources that combine digitised materials with detailed descriptions from archival partners. It also has a section on ‘Gold Seams’ research which are full-scale reconstructions of entire series of archives that had previously been destroyed and this section also includes exploration tools to help researchers. And, the website includes a section on ‘Research Strands’ that showcases the latest discoveries and research to come from this collection.

Dr Ciaran Wallace, the Deputy Director of the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland then reflected on the history of the Public Record Office of Ireland 1867-1922 and its ultimate destruction. The repository itself was designed to keep the archival documents safe; it had big windows to let in light, no gas lamps, and a fire break between the admin block and where the records were held to limit any risk of fire damage. Unfortunately, even with these measures in place the Public Record Office of Ireland was destroyed in 1922 on the outbreak of the Irish Civil War.

The Civil War was between those for the Anglo-Irish treaty and those who opposed it, and its opening engagement was the ‘Battle of the Four Courts’. Prior to the outbreak of the war, the Anti-Treaty garrison had been occupying the Four Courts and Public Record Office. In June 1922, the Pro-Treaty side surrounded the Four Courts complex and threatened the Anti-Treaty side that they would open fire if they did not evacuate the building. The Anti-Treaty side did not evacuate, and the battle began. After two days of fighting, there was an explosion in the Four Courts complex which destroyed the eastern wall of the Record Treasury of the Public Record Office, and a fire broke out. Most of the documents held in the repository quickly caught on fire and seven centuries of Ireland’s historical records were destroyed in a few hours. It has been claimed as one of the greatest cultural tragedies of the war.

In 1922, the Record Treasury contained 100,000 square feet of archival shelving organised into 4,500 series of records accumulated over 7 centuries. It was destroyed in 1 afternoon.

Virtualtreasury.ie

Dr Ciaran Wallace explained that the fire break designed to save the Record Treasury worked, but in reverse, and instead saved the admin block. While not what was intended, this meant that many catalogues and books that held descriptions and summaries for the records were saved from the flames. These summaries were the starting point for the creation of the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland.

Not only were the documents saved from the admin block, but two hundred pieces of archival documents were saved from the rubble. The project has created a ‘Virtual Treasury Tour’ that allows you to walk around the reconstructed building. You can find out information about the destruction of the archives, who worked there, and even find some original pages that were salvaged.

These discussions were followed by Dr David Brown, Senior Researcher and Archival Discovery Lead, Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland, who discussed his paper on ‘Minutes of the Committee of the Lords and Commons for Irish Affairs, 1642-3’ and Dr Liz Hallam Smith, an Historical Research Consultant and Honorary Research Professor at the University of York, who compared the fire and loss of archival documents of the Public Record Office of Ireland to the 1834 fire that destroyed the Palace of Westminster.

Each speaker explained why archives matter today and reinforced the importance of digitisation and democratisation of an archive to allow multiple audiences to tell their own stories. The Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland is one such project that has allowed this democratisation of an archive to take place. If you want to be able to tell your own stories, see the stories that others have begun to tell, or even take a virtual tour of an archive that was destroyed, then you can visit the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland website, here: https://virtualtreasury.ie/

KOR

Thomas Lindsay, archbishop of Armagh, died in the summer of 1724, after a long illness. Although William King, archbishop of Dublin, was widely expected to succeed to the Primacy, he was passed over in favour of Hugh Boulter, bishop of Bristol and dean of Christ Church in Oxford. Boulter came to embody the ‘English interest’ in the Irish Church and in Irish politics in general, as was demonstrated in his published correspondence covering his early period as archbishop of Armagh, Letters written by His Excellency Hugh Boulter…to several ministers of state in England, and some others: Containing an account of the most interesting transactions which passed in Ireland from 1724 to 1738 (1770). In 2016 a new edition was published, with an extensive introduction, edited by Kenneth Milne and Patrick McNally. This blog seeks to add to the account of his early career in this volume (written by Milne) and the biography of Boulter in the Oxford DNB (authored by McNally).

One of the most interesting aspects of Boulter’s early life was his marriage, which took place on 12 November 1719, to Elizabeth, eldest daughter of Charles Savage of Mark Lane, a mere three days before his consecration as bishop of Bristol (15 November). Thomas Hearne, the Jacobite chronicler of Oxford affairs, described Boulter’s bride as the ’daughter of Mr. Savage, a packer in Mark Lane’. The ‘packer’ in question was Charles Savage, who described himself in his April 1729 will, as a merchant. However, he was still ‘a packer’ bequeathing all his packing equipment to his youngest son, Samuel. The will revealed the extent of his wealth, leaving his wife £10,000 and adding £1,000 to the portions of £3,000 given to his four daughters. His Mark Lane property was given to his eldest son, Charles Savage, junior, along with £6,000 in addition to the sums already given to him; the second son, William, received £5,000 and Samuel £4,000. It seems likely that Boulter was only able to marry once he had proved capable of providing Elizabeth Savage with a standard of living consistent with her wealthy background. A bishopric and a plumb deanery were sufficient to meet the demands of her father, especially as he retained his rectory of St. Olave, Southwark in commendum for three years.

Elizabeth Savage’s brother, Charles junior, is of considerable interest, as he is described in the introduction to the correspondence as an advisor in ‘currency’ matters to the archbishop of Armagh (Letters, p. 29). Having succeeded his father, Savage became very successful, serving as a director of the East India Company 1725-9, 1731-2, and then as a director of the Bank of England 1733-43, 1747-60, serving as deputy-governor 1743-5 and governor 1745-7.

During his early career Boulter associated with a group of Whig Churchmen, many of whom became senior members of the episcopal bench. In 1698 he was ordained by John Hough, bishop of Oxford (later of Lichfield and Coventry and then of Worcester); in 1716 he preached Edmund Gibson’s consecration sermon as bishop of Lincoln and succeeded him as archdeacon of Surrey. At Boulter’s own consecration, Archbishop Wake was assisted by Gibson, Hough, Richard Willis of Gloucester (later bishop Salisbury and Winchester) and William Talbot of Salisbury (later bishop of Durham). When the episcopate divided in May 1721 over Bishop Atterbury’s plans for a dormitory in Westminster School, Boulter was joined in the lobby of those opposing Atterbury’s scheme by (among others) Gibson, Talbot, Willis, White Kennett, bishop of Peterborough, Benjamin Hoadly, bishop of Bangor (later Winchester) and Lancelot Blackburne, bishop of Exeter (later archbishop of York).

Boulter’s career in the British House of Lords is briefly dealt with in the introduction to Boulter’s Letters, where it is stated that on 9 March 1721, he was the only bishop to vote against the engraftment bill for the South Sea Company (p. 38 note 39). The source for this is the Lords Journal for that date, which shows that the protest against the committal of the bill was actually signed by John Hervey, earl of Bristol, not the bishop. Similarly, it is stated that on 17 January 1723 Boulter ‘supported the right of the Quakers to affirm’ (p. 37 and note 36). The source for this is Cobbett’s Parliamentary History, vii. 945, which lists those protesting on 17 January 1722 against the decision to reject a petition from the London clergy against the Quaker affirmation bill. Again, the protester is the earl of Bristol, although two Tory bishops Archbishop Dawes of York and Atterbury of Rochester did join the protest.

Boulter did not sign any protests during his time in the British House of Lords. Significantly, Boulter also cast his vote in May 1721 in favour of reversing the decree in the cause of the duke of Marlborough against Strong, joining Hoadly of Bangor, Talbot of Salisbury, Blackburne of Exeter and Gibson of Lincoln. This put him in the good books of Sarah, duchess of Marlborough, and he was the recipient of several gifts of bucks from her park in the following years.

Boulter died in London on 27 September 1742 during a rare visit to England.

SNH

Further Reading:
The Boulter Letters, ed. Kenneth Milne and Patrick McNally (Four Courts Press, 2016)

As discussed in an earlier blog, Sinn Féin (translated as we ourselves) garnered popularity following the 1916 Easter Rising and became the biggest party in Ireland at the 1918 general election. Its popularity grew during a time of unrest and revolution that included the War of Independence (1919-1921) and the Irish Civil War (1922-23). This impacted its ability to develop a cohesive and detailed party policy; between 1917 and 1921 it was only able to hold one Ard Fheis (party conference).

The core policy that attracted and unified a broad range of voters for Sinn Féin was establishing a republic. This group included Gaelic revivalists, suffragettes, socialists, economic nationalists, and agrarian radicals. While they agreed on the goal of a republic, their ideas on what this republic should look like were drastically different. The Declaration of Independence was reasonably detailed and had ‘left-wing’ policies including state intervention but there were key disagreements in the party itself.

One of these disagreements was on the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. When the War of Independence was stopped by a truce in the summer of 1921, negotiations began to take place between the British government and the Irish delegation led by Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins. The Anglo-Irish Treaty which detailed the terms for ending the War of Independence was signed in December the same year, but this treaty did not include Sinn Féin’s core demand: an Irish Republic. Sinn Féin members voted in favour of the treaty by 64 votes to 57, but the anti-treaty members refused to accept it. They disagreed with the separation of Ireland into Northern Ireland and Ireland and did not want to accept dominion status. This disagreement led to the Irish Civil War and Sinn Féin split into two groups. Pro-treaty members formed Cumann na nGaedheal (translated as Society of the Gaels) which in 1933 merged with smaller groups to form the Fine Gael party (translated as Family of the Irish), while anti-treaty members remained as Sinn Féin.

The civil war was won by the pro-treaty National Army which received support from the British government and the Catholic Church. Following the ceasefire, the Irish Free State government enacted two Public Safety (Emergency Powers) Acts in August 1923 to permit continued internment of anti-treaty prisoners. This enabled the arrest of thousands of Anti-Treaty IRA members including Éamon de Valera during his election campaign for County Clare on 15 August 1923. On 27 August 1923, a general election was held and Cumann na NGaedheal (the pro-Treaty Free State party) won with about 40% of the first-preference vote and Sinn Féin won about 27% of the first-preference vote. Elections in Ireland use proportional representation by means of the single transferable vote, which means that voters have the option to rank candidates, and their vote may be transferred according to alternate preferences if their preferred candidate is eliminated. It is difficult to say that the 1923 election represented the consensus within Ireland when many Sinn Féin and anti-Treaty supporters had been imprisoned.

De Valera returned to political methods after the Irish Civil War and served as the political leader for Sinn Féin until 1926. He began to believe that abstentionism, the policy of abstaining from attendance at both Westminster and Dáil Eireann, did not work and that the best way to create an Irish Republic was involvement in the Irish Free State government. When he put forward a motion for Sinn Féin to stop abstaining from the Dáil, it was narrowly defeated. In response, de Valera resigned from Sinn Féin and considered leaving politics; he instead created a new party called Fianna Fáil (translated as Soldiers of Destiny or Warriors of Fál) who could then take their seats in the Dáil. Key Sinn Féin MPs joined de Valera in this new party including Seán Lemass and Constance Markievicz. In the years following this split, Fianna Fáil became a central party in Irish politics, whereas Sinn Féin became viewed as more of a protest party than a political party; they were now a minority. During the 1930s Sinn Féin did not contest any elections.

Throughout the mid-20^th century, Sinn Féin continued under different leaders. After World War II Sinn Féin moved towards more right-wing policies; the party opposed parliamentary democracy and proposed the creation of a Catholic state. However, in 1962 Tomás Mac Giolla was elected president of Sinn Féin, signifying a change in political ideology as Sinn Féin began to attract more left-wing thinkers. While each leader led a drastically different Sinn Féin, there was not another formal split until 1970. Mac Giolla not only felt that Sinn Féin should have left-wing policies, but also that the policy of abstentionism should be abandoned. Abstentionism was once again voted on at the 1970 Sinn Féin Ard Fheis. While there was a majority who voted in favour of ending abstentionism, by 153 votes to 104, the majority was not large enough to pass the policy.

This, along with differing opinions on nationalist and left-wing politics, led to another split. Two Sinn Féin parties emerged, Sinn Féin (Gardiner Place), which was a Marxist-Leninist political party, now the Workers’ Party, and Sinn Féin (Kevin Street), which is the modern-day Sinn Féin. During the Troubles, Sinn Féin (Kevin Street) had a change of leadership in 1983 with Gerry Adams, and in 1986 Sinn Féin ended its abstentionism from the Dáil, however, it continued, and still continues, to abstain from the House of Commons.

In 2022, Sinn Féin secured the most votes and seats in the Northern Ireland Assembly and in 2023, Sinn Féin became the largest party in Northern Ireland’s local government. In the Irish general election of 2020, Sinn Féin won 24.5% of the first-preference vote and 37 seats; Fine Gael, who emerged in 1933 from the pro-Treaty Free State Party, won 20.9% of the votes and 35 seats; and Fianna Fáil, founded by de Valera in 1926, won 22.2% of the votes and 38 seats.

KOR

Further Reading:

Terrence Brown, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, 1922-2002 (2004)

Henry Patterson, Ireland Since 1939: The Persistence of Conflict (2007)

Eoin Ó Broin, Sinn Féin and the Politics of Left Republicanism (2009)

R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland, 1600-1972 (1988)

Throughout the 20^th century, the Sinn Féin party (translated as we ourselves) underwent multiple changes and divisions. Between its formal founding of 1905 (Sinn Féin was not an official party until 1907) to the election of Gerry Adams as president in 1983, there were several Sinn Féin parties. While the name and symbols remained the same, the form and factions of the party showed discontinuity. The history of Sinn Féin is, therefore, a history of change and factions, and the modern-day Sinn Féin looks very different from its origins.

Arthur Griffith is generally regarded as having founded the party on 28 November 1905, when he presented the Sinn Féin policy at the first annual convention of the National Council, an organisation Griffith created to campaign against King Edward VII’s visit to Ireland in 1903. Among the policies he outlined was a system of dual monarchy, which would mean that Ireland and Great Britain would have two separate governments but be ruled by the same monarch. This was a policy that Griffith had studied at length, including in his book The Resurrection of Hungary: A Parallel for Ireland (1904), which discussed the dual monarchy of Austria and Hungary as a possible model for Ireland.

Before 1905, Griffith had founded and edited the Irish nationalist newspaper The United Irishman, and this was where he first put forward the ideas of the future Sinn Féin party. In 1900, he had called for an association that brought disparate Irish nationalist groups together, and as a result, later that same year, Griffith and William Rooney founded Cumann na nGaedheal (translated as Society of the Gaels). Significantly, during the 1902 Cumann na nGaedheal convention Griffith had put forward a proposal for a policy that would become a characteristic policy of Sinn Féin: abstentionism.

Abstentionism was not a novel policy; it had been previously adopted by the Irish Repeal party under Daniel O’Connell in 1845 and was the practice of abstaining from attending the House of Commons. But it was found to be unsuccessful and was quickly abandoned. It was not until the 1918 election that Sinn Féin adopted this policy. Similarly, the name Sinn Féin was not an invention of Griffith. In the late 19^th century, it had been a popular phrase to express separatist thinking, and ‘Sinn Féin, Sinn Féin amháin’ (translated as ourselves, ourselves alone) was the motto of Conradh na Gaeilge (translated as The Gaelic League), an organisation founded to combat the near extinction of the Irish language. In 1902, the newspaper Sinn Féin: the Oldcastle Monthly Review was launched, describing Sinn Féin as:

‘the movement that is at present being carried on by thinking men and women of Ireland to revive our ancient language, music, literature, our National sports and pastimes, our decaying industries, and the cause of Temperance’.

It is from this backdrop and thought that Arthur Griffith’s party emerged in the early 20^th century. While Sinn Féin’s foundation has been dated to 1905, it was in August 1907 that, due to financial pressure, the Sinn Féin League (a party formed earlier that year as a merger of Cumann na nGaedheal and the Dungannon clubs) amalgamated with the National Council to form the party called Sinn Féin. However, this party did not prove immediately popular and by 1915 it was financially insolvent.

The turning point for Sinn Féin’s popularity was the 1916 Easter Rising, the armed insurrection led by Irish Republicans. On 24 April 1916, on the steps outside the General Post Office, Pádraig Pearse read the Proclamation of the Republic, declaring ‘the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies, to be sovereign and indefeasible’. While Sinn Féin did not lead the Rising, many members were involved, and some newspapers referred to it as the ‘Sinn Féin Rising’. After that, many Republicans came together under the party’s banner.

The aftermath of the Easter Rising caused shockwaves across Ireland. The execution of its leaders substantially changed public views in Ireland on the country’s position within the United Kingdom. In 1917, Sinn Féin dropped their dual monarchy policy and instead called for the establishment of an Irish Republic and abstentionism. The 1918 General Election appears to show the change of opinion in Ireland. At this time the largest party in Ireland and the primary political voice for nationalist Ireland, the Irish Parliamentary Party, advocated for self-governance in Ireland, not for a Republic. It was defeated at the election by Sinn Féin, which won 73 out of 105 seats.

47 out of 73 of these MPs were in prison, including the first-ever woman elected to the House of Commons: Constance Markiewicz. Therefore, these 47 MPs were unable to take their seats in Westminster. However, in line with their policy of abstentionism, all Sinn Féin MPs refused to take their seats. Instead, they set up a separate Parliament in Dublin called Dáil Eireann (translated as Assembly of Ireland) and first met in the Mansion House on 21 January 1919. At its first meeting, the Dáil proclaimed itself the parliament of the Irish Republic and issued a Declaration which claimed jurisdiction over the whole of Ireland and proclaimed the independence of the Irish nation and its people.

On the same day, two Royal Irish Constabulary officers were killed in the Soloheadbeg ambush by Irish Volunteers, a paramilitary organisation established in 1913 by nationalists and republicans, acting on their own initiative. The Irish War of Independence soon followed and in September 1919 the British government outlawed Dáil Eireann and Sinn Féin. In August 1920 Dáil Eireann adopted a motion that the Irish Volunteers would swear allegiance to the Dáil and the Republic as a state army, becoming the Irish Republican Army (IRA). The 1920s marked the start of divisions and factions in Sinn Féin, as will be addressed in the second blog of this series.

KOR

Further Reading:

Ireland in Transition, 1867-1921, ed. by D. George Boyce and Alan O’Day (2004)

Eoin Ó Broin, Sinn Féin and the Politics of Left Republicanism (2009)

R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland, 1600-1972 (1988)

On 21 March 1902 between thirty and forty MPs met in a committee room at Westminster, not to discuss parliamentary business, but to make plans for the coronation of Edward VII later that year to be celebrated by bonfires across the United Kingdom. They set up a Central Coronation Bonfires Committee, presided over by Viscount Cranborne, MP for Rochester and the son of the Conservative prime minister, Lord Salisbury. It took its duties seriously, issuing detailed recommendations on the best methods of bonfire construction. By late May between 500 and 600 bonfires had been planned, to be lit on the evening of 26 June, after the king had been crowned in Westminster Abbey. However, the proposed coronation festivities were suspended after Arthur Balfour announced in the Commons ‘with considerable emotion’ on 24 June that the king had undergone a surgical operation to treat perityphilitis (an abdominal abscess), and was ‘going on as well as possible’.

The coronation was postponed until 9 August 1902, but the carefully constructed bonfires presented an immediate problem. The bonfire at Camberley in Surrey was lit ‘surreptitiously’ by ‘some unauthorised person’ a few days after the original coronation date, while others were targeted by ‘unruly crowds’. Some local authorities headed off such actions by quietly lighting the bonfires in the early morning hours, but Cranborne and his fellow MPs on the committee found a more appropriate solution, sending out telegrams instructing that the bonfires should be lit ‘as a sign of rejoicing for the great improvement in the king’s condition’. At 9:55 p.m. on Monday 30 June, a signal rocket was sent up from the summit of the Great Wheel at Earl’s Court to initiate proceedings, and many bonfires were lit on that evening or in subsequent days.

For Queen Victoria’s coronation in June 1838, MPs had assembled in the Commons in the morning before proceeding to Westminster Abbey to take their seats, a custom reportedly followed since the reign of James II. Parliament was not sitting when Edward VII’s postponed coronation was held in August 1902, but even if it had taken place in June, before the end of the parliamentary session, it had already been decided to abandon this tradition. As Balfour explained, there was ‘a very widespread desire on the part of Members of the House that they should be accompanied by their wives’, which ‘makes it absolutely impossible to follow the old practice in this matter’. MPs who wished to attend the coronation were asked to enter their names in a book kept in the Speaker’s office, and invitations were then issued.

Those MPs and their wives who attended the coronation in Westminster Abbey on 9 August were seated in large galleries constructed in the north and south transepts, behind the seating areas allocated for peers (in the south transept) and peeresses (in the north transept). The transepts lay on either side of the central space underneath the abbey’s lantern where a large platform was built as the location for the coronation ceremony, giving MPs – who mostly wore court dress – a far better position than many of the 5,873 guests who attended. However, the parliamentary sketch-writer Henry Lucy recorded that the abbey’s ‘structural peculiarities are such as to interfere with the view of all except those in the front row of seats’.

Some MPs used the occasion to entertain local dignitaries from their constituency. The Newcastle Journal recorded that the ceremony in the abbey was attended by the MPs for Newcastle-on-Tyne, Walter Plummer and George Renwick, and the MP for Tyneside, Hugh Crawford Smith, together with Mrs. Renwick, Mrs. Smith, Alderman Newton (the mayor of Newcastle) and Councillor Sanderson (the sheriff of Newcastle). Afterwards, Plummer and the Renwicks entertained Sanderson and his wife, plus another local councillor, to lunch in the House of Commons, and this group was then photographed on the Commons terrace by Sir Benjamin Stone MP.

While MPs and their wives could attend the service in the abbey, other guests and family members of MPs were able to watch the coronation procession from stands erected in New Palace Yard and Parliament Square. There was, however, one significant contingent of MPs who avoided any involvement in the event. As ‘a protest against the mis-government of their country’, sixty-one Irish Nationalist MPs instead attended a meeting that day in Dublin’s City Hall, at which the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, John Redmond, moved a resolution declaring that ‘Ireland separates herself from the rejoicings of her merciless oppressors and stands apart in rightful discontent and disaffection’.

Before the Irish party took its decision to stay away from the coronation, a handful of its members had already accepted invitations, and despite pressure to withdraw their names from the list of invitees, they refused to do so. The Times reported that five Irish Nationalist MPs had been present in the Abbey for the coronation – Colonel John Nolan (North Galway); Samuel Young (East Cavan); Edward Thompson (North Monaghan); John Eustace Jameson (West Clare); and William O’Doherty (North Donegal) – and that these members were ‘anxious to make it plain that they rejoice in being loyal to the King and his Empire’.

Young had already been criticised by the United Irish League in 1900 for attending a garden party at Buckingham Palace, but a motion by the League’s local executive asking him to resign in the wake of his attendance at the coronation and his vote against an eight hour day for coal miners was defeated by 80 votes to 22. He continued as East Cavan’s MP until his death in April 1918 at the age of 96, when he had the distinction of being the oldest ever serving MP.

Young was, however, the only one of these five who returned to Parliament at the 1906 general election, the first of Edward VII’s reign. Nolan had already been expelled by the United Irish League before the coronation because of his harsh treatment of his tenants, and stood as an Independent Nationalist in 1906, but was defeated. Jameson joined the Unionist party in 1904 and stood for Chatham two years later, but lost to a Labour candidate. O’Doherty was called on to resign by the League’s North Donegal branch for having ‘forfeited their confidence’ by attending the coronation, but he refused, arguing that he and ‘many other’ Nationalist MPs felt that a moderate policy would succeed. Thompson leapt to O’Doherty’s defence in a defiant public letter in which he claimed that at least nine Irish MPs had attended the coronation and described the party’s mandate against attendance as ‘foolish and unnecessary’. Thompson decided against seeking re-election in 1906, while O’Doherty had died the previous year.

While the coronation may have exacerbated tensions within the Irish Parliamentary Party, for most Liberal and Conservative MPs, the main concern appeared to be that the postponement from June until August had delayed their summer departure from London. The Pall Mall Gazette reported that after the ceremony, the railway companies put on several special trains in anticipation of ‘a rush for the Scottish moors’, where the shooting season for grouse was about to start. Euston and King’s Cross stations saw ‘large quantities of luggage’, with MPs who had been in court dress for the coronation a few hours earlier now ‘attired in sporting costume’.

K.R.

Further reading:

D. Torrance, ‘The coronation: history and ceremonial’ (House of Commons research briefing)

R. Strong, Coronation: from the 8th to the 21st century (2005)