Whig Tactics and Parliamentary Precedent: the English Management of Irish Politics, 1754–1756

Abstract

In 1949 Sir Herbert Butterfield showed, for one important episode, the necessity of treating England and Ireland as a single political world and of explaining public events in London and Dublin concurrently. Yet most modern scholarship has persisted in examining the two nations in isolation. Ireland is typically relegated, like Scotland, to a separate chapter in the manner of the Oxford history of England; and despite studies of Anglo-Irish constitutional disputes in the light of analogous debates over the American Revolution, the close texture of the reciprocal influence of English and Irish politics in the mid eighteenth century has still received almost no attention from historians. One, indeed, has positively asserted that ‘From the end of Queen Anne's reign until the 1770s Ireland was almost outside the range of British politics’. In reality the connexion was both strong and of several kinds. Many English politicians had an opportunity to learn through personal involvement in Ireland lessons which they were later to find applicable at home. The fourth dukes of Devonshire and Bedford, Richard Rigby, Lord George Sackville, Henry Seymour Conway, the duke of Newcastle and Henry Fox were all involved both in the Irish crisis of the 1750s and in the English ministerial controversies of the 1760s. The English ministry was kept fully informed about Irish politics through both formal and informal channels. Even statesmen not directly concerned had links which encouraged them to keep in touch with events in Dublin. Fox, in Ireland in the summer of 1750 visiting his brother-in-law the earl of Kildare, sent Henry Pelham perceptive accounts of the crisis to date in which he argued for the necessity of eventual legislative union between the two countries; Charles Townshend was aware of Irish problems at the same time as he was preparing, for Newcastle, his ‘Remarks upon the Plan for a General Concert’ of the American colonies.