Yet Pitt's policy, dictated partly by a spirit of conciliation, and still more by feelings of justice, was gradually removing many of the grievances of which the Irish had real reason to complain. Next to the restrictions on trade, nothing had made such an impression on his mind as the iniquity of the penal laws; and those he proceeded to repeal, encouraging the introduction of bills to throw open the profession of the law to Roman Catholics, to allow them seats on the magistrates' bench and commissions in the army, and to grant them the electoral franchise, a concession which he himself would willingly have extended by admitting them to Parliament itself. But these relaxations of the old Penal Code, important as they were, only conciliated the higher classes of the Roman Catholics. Most of the Roman Catholic prelates, and most of the Roman Catholic lay nobles, proclaimed their satisfaction at what had been done, and their good-will toward the minister who had done it; but the professional agitators were exasperated rather than conciliated at finding so much of the ground on which they had rested cut from beneath their feet. So desirous was Pitt to carry conciliation to the greatest length that could be consistent with safety, that he held more than one conference with Grattan himself; but he found that great orator not very manageable, partly, as it may seem from some of Mr. Windham's letters, through jealousy of Fitzgibbon, who was now the Irish Chancellor,[134] and still more from a desire to propitiate the Roman Catholics, for whom he demanded complete and immediate Emancipation; while Pitt, who was, probably, already resolved on accomplishing a legislative Union, thought, as far as we can judge, that Emancipation should follow, not precede, the Union, lest, if it should precede it, it might prove rather a stumbling-block in the way than a stepping-stone to the still more important measure.
It is not very easy to determine what influence the "Emancipation," as it was rather absurdly called,[135] if it had been granted at that time, might have had in quieting the prevailing discontent. With one large party it would probably have increased it, for there was quite as great an inclination to insurrection in Ulster as in Leinster or Munster; and with the Northern Presbyterians animosity to Popery was at least as powerful a feeling as sympathy with the French Republicans. A subsequent chapter, however, will afford a more fitting opportunity for discussing the arguments in favor of or against Emancipation. What seems certain is, that a large party among the Roman Catholics of the lower class valued Emancipation itself principally as a measure to another end-a separation from England. Pitt, meanwhile, hopeless of reconciling the leaders of the different parties-the impulsive enthusiasm of Grattan with the sober, practical wisdom of Fitzgibbon-pursued his own policy of conciliation united with vigor; and one of the measures which he now carried subsists, unaltered in its principle, to the present day.
There was no part of the penal laws of which the folly and iniquity were more intolerable than the restrictions which they imposed on education. To a certain extent, they defeated themselves. The clause which subjected to severe penalties a Roman Catholic parent who sent his child abroad to enjoy the benefits of an education which he was not allowed to receive at home, was manifestly almost incapable of enforcement, and the youths designed for orders in the Romish Church had been invariably sent to foreign colleges-some to Douai or St. Omer, in France; some to the renowned Spanish University of Salamanca. But the French colleges had been swept away by the Revolution, which also made a passage to Spain (the greater expense of which had at all times confined that resource to a small number of students) more difficult; and the consequence was, that in 1794 the Roman Catholic Primate, Dr. Troy, petitioned the government to grant a royal license for the endowment of a college in Ireland. Justice and policy were equally in favor of the grant of such a request. For the sake of the whole kingdom, and even for that of Protestantism itself, it was better that the Roman Catholic priesthood should be an educated rather than an ignorant body of men; and, in the temper which at that time prevailed over the western countries of the Continent, it was at least equally desirable that the rising generation should be preserved from the contagion of the revolutionary principles which the present rulers of France were so industrious to propagate. Pitt at once embraced the idea, and in the spring of the next year a bill was introduced into the Irish Parliament by the Chief Secretary, authorizing the foundation and endowment of a college at Maynooth, in the neighborhood of Dublin, for the education of Roman Catholics generally, whether destined for the Church or for lay professions. It is a singular circumstance that the only opposition to the measure came from Grattan and his party, who urged that, as the Roman Catholics had recently been allowed to matriculate and take degrees at Trinity College, though not to share in the endowments of that wealthy institution, the endowment of another college, to be exclusively confined to Roman Catholics, would be a retrograde step, undoing the benefits of the recent concession of the authorities of Trinity; would be "a revival and re-enactment of the principles of separation and exclusion," and an injury to the whole community. For, as he wisely contended, nothing was so important to the well-doing of the entire people as the extinction of the religious animosities which had hitherto embittered the feelings of each Church toward the other, and nothing could so surely tend to that extinction as the uniting the members of both from their earliest youth, in the pursuit both of knowledge and amusement, as school-fellows and playmates. If Mr. Froude's interpretation of the motives of those who influenced Grattan on this occasion be correct, he was unconsciously made a tool of by those whose real object was a separation from England, of the attainment of which they despaired, unless they could unite Protestants and Roman Catholics in its prosecution. The bill, however, was passed by a very large majority, and L9000 a year was appropriated to the endowment of the college. Half a century afterward, as will be seen, that endowment was enlarged, and placed on a more solid and permanent footing, by one of the ablest of Pitt's successors. It was a wise and just measure; and if its success has not entirely answered the expectations of the minister who granted it, its comparative failure has been owing to circumstances which the acutest judgment could not have foreseen.
But it seems certain that neither the concession nor the refusal of any demands put forward by any party in Ireland could have prevented the insurrection which broke out shortly afterward. There were two parties among the disaffected Irish-or it should, perhaps, rather be said that two different objects were kept in view by them-one of which, the establishment of a republic, was dearer to one section of the malcontents; separation from England, with the contingency of annexation to France, was the more immediate aim of the other, though the present existence of a republican form of government in France to a great extent united the two. As has been mentioned before, the original movers in the conspiracy were of low extraction, Dublin tradesmen in a small way of business. Napper Tandy was an ironmonger, Wolfe Tone was the son of a coach-maker. But they had obtained a recruit of a very different class, a younger son of the Duke of Leinster, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, a man of very slender capacity, who, at his first entrance into Parliament, when scarcely more than of age, had made himself remarkable by a furious denunciation of Pitt's Irish propositions; had married a natural daughter of the Duke of Orleans, a prince, in spite of his royal birth, one of the most profligate and ferocious of the French Jacobins; and had caught the revolutionary mania to such a degree that he abjured his nobility, and substituted for the appellation which marked his rank the title of "Citizen Fitzgerald." He had enrolled himself in a society known as the United Irishmen, and had gone to France, as its plenipotentiary, to arrange with Hoche, one of the most brilliant and popular of the French generals, a scheme for the invasion of Ireland, in which he promised him that, on his landing, he should be joined by tens of thousands of armed Irishmen. Hoche entered warmly into the plan, was furnished with a splendid army by the Directors, and in December, 1796, set sail for Ireland; but the fleet which carried him was dispersed in a storm; many of the ships were wrecked, others were captured by the British cruisers, and the remnant of the fleet, sadly crippled, was glad to regain its harbors. Two years afterward another invading expedition had still worse fortune. General Humbert, who in 1796 had been one of Hoche's officers, did succeed in effecting a landing at Killala Bay, in Mayo; but he and the whole of his force was speedily surrounded, and compelled to surrender; and a month afterward a large squadron, with a more powerful division of troops, under General Hardy, on board, found itself unable to effect a landing, but fell in with a squadron under Sir John Warren, who captured every ship but two; Wolfe Tone, who was on board one of them, being taken prisoner, and only escaping the gallows by suicide.