Secret Service Under Pitt

Storm had not as yet burst over Ireland; but the heavy air was charged with electricity. The following are the words with which Mr. Froude awakened widespread interest, and drew forth that missive from the Antipodes given on a previous page.

If rebellion was meditated [Froude writes], the Government required fuller knowledge; and 'a new plan of management' had to be adopted 'to obtain exact information of the conduct and motives of the most suspected persons.' 'Useful and confidential agents,' whose silence and fidelity could be relied on, 'who would write the daily history of a man's motions,' without betraying himself, were not to be found in Dublin.

The Irish Secretary applied to the English Cabinet to furnish him from their own staff of informers. Two valuable persons answering to Mr. Orde's description were sent, and the name of one of them will be an unpleasant surprise to those already interested in the history of the time.

They were both Irishmen. One was a skilled detective named Parker,551 an accomplished orator who could outmouth the noisiest patriot, and had already some knowledge of the leading agitators. Orde welcomed this man with a twinge of misgiving. 'I hope he is discreet,' he wrote, 'for he must to a certain extent be possessed of the power of hurting us by garrulity or treachery.'552

The other was no less a person than the celebrated Father O'Leary, whose memory is worshipped by Irish Catholic politicians with a devotion which approaches idolatry. O'Leary, as he was known to the world, was the most fascinating preacher, the most distinguished controversialist of his time. A priest who had caught the language of toleration, who had mastered all the chords of liberal philosophy, and played on them like a master; whose mission had been to plead against prejudice, to represent his country as the bleeding lamb, maligned, traduced, oppressed, but ever praying for her enemies; as eager only to persuade England to offer its hand to the Catholic Church, and receive in return the affectionate homage of undying gratitude. O'Leary had won his way to the heart of Burke by his plausible eloquence. Pitt seemed to smile on him: it is easy now to conjecture why. When he appeared in the Convention at the Rotunda the whole assembly rose to receive him. Had such a man been sent over on an open errand of conciliation, his antecedents would have made the choice intelligible. But he was despatched as a paid and secret instrument of treachery, in reply to a request for a trained informer.553 What the Government really thought of Father O'Leary may be gathered from Orde's language when told to expect him. 'He could get to the bottom of all secrets in which the Catholics were concerned,' and Catholics were known to be the chief promoters of the agitation in Dublin. But he too was to be dealt with cautiously, for he was a priest. 'They are, all of them,' Orde said, 'designing knaves;' 'the only good to be derived from them is, perhaps, to deceive them into an idea that they are believed.'554

Sir Jonah Barrington describes Orde as 'a cold, cautious and sententious man.'555 These letters in some respects support that impression. A few years later he was created Lord Bolton. His letter, announcing O'Leary's arrival at Dublin on secret service, is dated September 23, 1784.556 Let us look back a little and see what the previous year was doing.

The Dungannon Convention, which won great boons for Ireland, was followed by provincial assemblies in Leinster, Munster and Connaught. Resolutions were carried, delegates were appointed, and the nation anxiously awaited the great Volunteer Convention in Dublin, on which the fate of Ireland was declared to depend. Meanwhile one hundred and sixty envoys of the Volunteer army met, electing Lord Charlemont chairman. Red uniforms fringed the streets, and the delegates, two by two, marched through the lines, amid the roll of drums and the waving of national ensigns. The Earl of Bristol and Bishop of Derry rode to the Convention with an escort of dragoons.

A distinguished corps of volunteers [writes Mr. Buckley] had conferred on O'Leary the honorary dignity of chaplain; and we are assured that many of the measures submitted for consideration at the great Convention held in Dublin had been previously placed before him for his opinion as to their prudence and utility. On that memorable day, when the delegates of a hundred thousand men met in the Rotunda, with all the pomp and power that an armed nation could concentrate for a great national purpose, it was gratifying to the assembled masses of spectators to behold Father O'Leary, as he entered the building, received at the door by the entire guard of volunteers with a full salute of rested arms. He marched up the hall amidst the deafening cheers of the surrounding delegates, and, in the debate which followed, his name was frequently mentioned with honour and applause.557

'Plowden's remarks, which you enclose, do not meet the specific statements of Froude, that O'Leary was employed as an informer at the period of the Volunteer Convention,' writes Mr. Morgan McMahon, my Australian correspondent.558 Mr. Froude's words certainly tend to convey that the Convention took place at the time of Orde's application for a spy. The date of the Convention was November 1783: Orde's letter was written in September 1784. Again, it is suggested that O'Leary was despatched in reply to a request for a trained informer. But it does not appear that though he may have been useful as a diplomatist he was already a spy. On the contrary, Sydney writes (Sept. 4): 'O'Leary has been talked to and he is willing to do what is wished for 100l. a year.' Orde replies (Sept. 8), 'I am very glad that you have settled matters with O'Leary, who can get to the bottom of all secrets in which the Catholics are concerned.' O'Leary had already a pension, ostensibly for his writings; but the pension for espionage must not be confounded with it.

It is certainly admitted by even O'Leary's panegyrists that at the period of the Convention of 1783 delicate overtures, which they assume he rejected, were made to him; but the magnanimous words supposed to have been used by O'Leary when parleying with his tempter rest on no authority whatever, and some will be disposed to suspect that a colour is imparted to the overtures more presentable to general readers than the naked truth, whatever it was. The pension, I repeat, which O'Leary already enjoyed, was, I think, merely for his writings; though, prior to September 1784, he may have accepted douceurs for distinct acts of diplomacy. At all events it is due to O'Leary to give him the full benefit of the exculpatory words of his brother priest. Describing the Volunteer Convention, Father Buckley writes, eighty years later: —

During Father O'Leary's visit to Dublin on this occasion, he was waited on by a gentleman who was well known to be on very close and friendly relations with the Government of the day.559 The visit appeared, for some time, to be merely one of ceremony, and the visitor paid many handsome compliments to the Father on the style of his writings and their good effect on the public mind. Soon, however, it was easy to see that diplomacy had more to do with the visit than etiquette, for the gentleman, in courteous language, intimated that if Father O'Leary would use his pen in extolling certain measures just then brought forward by the Administration, his services would be handsomely requited. O'Leary was displeased and indignant at the proposal to barter his patriotism for a bribe, and conveyed his feelings in no measured phrase. The request was therefore softened down into an entreaty that he would at least abstain from writing on those measures in terms of condemnation. But the minion of the Government knew not with what manner of man he had to deal. 'I will never be silent,' warmly exclaimed O'Leary, 'whilst my exertions can be of the least service to my religion or my country.'560

Thus far Buckley, the biographer of 1867. England, O'Leary's biographer of 1822, finishes the interview in less florid words: 'He was then told that a pension of 150l. per annum was to be offered for his acceptance, and that no condition repugnant to his feelings as an Irishman or Catholic was to be annexed to it. A change in the Administration561 took place shortly afterwards, and the promise remained unfulfilled.'562

Father England assumes that O'Leary spurned the overtures at the time of the Convention, though later on his acceptance of a pension is admitted. While guiltless, no doubt, of direct betrayal, he may have been led to connive at a trick by which the Irish Government succeeded in breaking up the Convention.563

O'Leary, towards the close of his life, had made copious notes illustrative of the history of Ireland – notes handed by him to Plowden, who was glad to interweave them with his own when compiling 'The Historical Review.' Plowden dismisses with the following note the great incident of the Convention: —

Whilst the business of equal representation was in agitation at a meeting of the Convention in Dublin, a pretended letter from Lord Kenmare was produced, purporting to convey the general sentiments of the Roman Catholics of Ireland, in which they were made to express their perfect satisfaction with what had been already done for them, and that they desired no more than peaceably to enjoy the privileges they had obtained.

Catholics thus became excluded from the constitutional prerogatives claimed for Protestants. The proceedings of the Convention were at last adjourned sine die. Sir Boyle Roche invented the fatal letter, and Mr. Froude conveys that he was instigated to this course by the Viceroy. Sir Gavan Duffy states – as a common belief in Ireland – that 'had the Convention not been betrayed by its leaders, the Union would never have taken place.'564

O'Leary, though his name, and that of Sir Boyle Roche, are not mentioned in the printed abstract of the proceedings, was certainly present when the fictitious letter was read. Dr. England, describing the demonstration by which O'Leary's arrival was hailed at the Rotunda, adds that it 'occurred on the same day on which the message said to be from Lord Kenmare was read at the Convention,'565 but no fault is found with O'Leary by England, who is his invariable eulogist.

Lord Kenmare was a fast friend of our friar,566 and is uniformly praised by him.567 It was when on a visit to this peer that O'Leary, seeing a wounded stag approaching Yelverton, wittily said: 'How naturally instinct leads him to come to you to deliver him by a nolle prosequi.'568 Kenmare, this leader of the higher class of Catholics, was falsely represented as announcing at the Convention that his co-religionists were satisfied with the concessions they had got. I find that O'Leary had privately expressed, very much to his honour, but a short time before, an opinion diametrically opposite; and urging the Catholics not to cease agitation till every link in their fetters had been struck off;569 but he now held his peace, and thus wittingly, or otherwise, aided the base schemes of the Viceroy. O'Leary himself had long been recognised as the most prominent exponent and mouthpiece of the Catholic demand; and, from his intimacy with Lord Kenmare, he could hardly fail to have known his sentiments on a question in which both were naturally most interested; the forged letter, however, claiming authority to speak for the Catholics of Ireland, was allowed to pass unchallenged, to the ruin of the Convention and the exultant triumph of a faction.

O'Leary and Sir Boyle Roche are not persons likely to have been intimate; and yet it can be shown that an intimacy did exist. A letter from O'Leary, written a year before the Convention, and to be found later on, avows that he was the friend and political correspondent of Roche.570 The forged letter – in which were travestied the opinions and aspirations of the Catholics of Ireland – was read on November 11, 1783.571 Not until a fortnight after was the fraud exposed by the popular Earl-Bishop of Derry, who read a letter from Lord Kenmare, dated Killarney, Nov. 20, saying, 'I utterly disavow having given the least authority,'572 &c., &c. Sir Boyle Roche thereupon addressed to several leading Catholics a remarkable note dated 'Dublin Castle, 14th February, 1784.' This document was, of course, the act of the Administration, Roche having been merely wound up and used as an automaton. His letter, seeking to entrap slavish Catholics and sink them in the mire of unpopularity, began by saying that it would flatter him in the highest degree 'if I should find that my conduct was not disapproved by yourself and friends,' and he holds out the hope that, being once more in Parliament, he would be not unmindful of Catholic interests.

I had certain intelligence [he adds] that the Bishop of Derry had leagued himself with some of the unthinking part of the Catholics, who were in town for the purpose, and that the admission of that body to the rights of voting for members of Parliament was to be the first matter agitated in the Convention. I now thought that the crisis was arrived in which Lord Kenmare573 and the heads of the body should step forth to disavow these wild projects, and to profess their attachment to the lawful powers… I therefore resolved on a bold stroke.574

He adds that he was elated to the greatest degree by his success, having 'entirely disconcerted the measures of the leaders of the Convention.'

The Earl-Bishop of Derry was a decided revolutionist and very eager for separation, and is alleged to have said to Lord Charlemont, 'Things are going well, my lord: we shall have blood.' O'Leary, author of 'Loyalty Asserted,' and notoriously a man of peace, would probably have felt little scruple in seeking to avert by diplomatic means what Orde feared might become a bloody chaos. Burke, writing to a brother priest of O'Leary's, said, 'Do everything in your power to check the growth of Jacobinism on the one hand, and oppression, which is its best friend, on the other.' No wonder that the Irish Government blenched at the outlook. One Dublin paper, called the 'Volunteer Journal,' urged assassination; and some men had been arrested, in the previous spring, on a charge of conspiring to murder seven unpopular members of Parliament. The supineness of magistrates and the absence of any regular police force opened great facilities for crime. Riots raged in the streets owing to trade strikes; men were 'tarred and feathered' and let loose before the infuriated mob; soldiers were houghed and left bleeding on the pavement. New corps of volunteers advertised for recruits, and men of the worst repute rushed into their ranks. Meanwhile the Bishop of Derry was raising a fresh regiment of volunteers in Ulster. 'The Viceroy, at Fitzgibbon's advice,' writes Froude, 'sent down officers in disguise to watch him, with a warrant in their pockets should an arrest be necessary;' and he adds that 'this singular prelate ran a near chance of ending his career on the gallows.' The withdrawal from public life of so remarkable a figure was second only in its effect to the collapse of the Convention, of which he was the animating spirit. When, six years later, Bancroft was sent by France on a secret mission to Ireland, his report, now preserved in the Foreign Office at Paris, states, as we learn from Lecky, that the fall of the Convention had 'thrown a certain ridicule on Irish democracy, and it may be long before it is repaired.'

The Convention belongs to the year 1783. Not until the autumn of 1784 are any letters found compromising O'Leary – letters not revealing any distinct acts of espionage, or even penned by himself, but showing him to have yielded to the voice of the tempter.

In judging a man who is not alive to defend himself, one whose memory has been for a century revered, I am reluctantly led to encumber this narrative with various considerations for and against, so that readers may have the result of a conscientious study of the case, and he able to form a judicial conclusion.

The promptitude of O'Leary's arrival in Dublin impressed badly all who read it in Froude; for Orde, according to that historian, asked the English Secretary of State to send him over two trained men from their own staff of informers.575 The letter containing this request, however, I have not seen in print or manuscript. O'Leary came over at the same time as a detective named Parker; but the alacrity of the priest's arrival, though it looks badly, may not be altogether due to his readiness to play the spy. This man, 'poor in everything save genius and philosophy,' to quote Grattan's words, was informed, according to England, one of his biographers, that his presence in Dublin was necessary in order that some formalities should be gone through ere his name could be placed on the Irish Civil List.576 England says that a pension which, during the previous year, he was on the point of receiving, fell through because of a change in the Cabinet; and may not this consideration have been in itself enough to expedite the journey?

O'Leary had been interviewed in London by Sir Evan Nepean, a practised diplomatist, and consented, we are told, to come to Dublin to make certain inquiries. But who can tell what wily words were employed to induce him to wait on the Irish Secretary, Orde, at Dublin Castle? Orde posed as a man rather liberal for the time, and was the correspondent of Grattan and Lord Kenmare. Men of the world know that very different language is often used when writing of a person, than when addressing that person direct. On the other hand it should be remembered, assuming that Sydney conveys a correct impression of what passed, that O'Leary seemed willing to accept 100l. for services dealing, not with the special exigencies of the hour, but on condition that he continued, from year to year, and for the same annual fee, to probe to the bottom certain secrets of his party.

When he arrived in Dublin the country was rent by great and just discontent. One grievance was that Parliament possessed no adequate representation of the popular voice. In March 1784, Flood brought in a Bill for 'Reform,' and twenty-six counties petitioned in its favour.

It had been decided that the Convention577 of the previous year should be followed up by a national Congress. This announcement brought dismay to the Castle. The loss of her American Colonies had just taught Pitt a lesson. Contemporary pamphleteers, thinking perhaps of the then fashionable melodrama, 'The Castle Spectre,' saw Dublin Castle scared by mysterious terrors.

'The letters C.O.N.G.R.E.S.S.,' writes Orellana,578 'are magic letters, of themselves sufficient to rise an apparition before the eyes of a guilty Minister – an apparition that will seem to draw his curtains in the dead of night, and rouse him from his pillow!'

The Congress was in fact the ghost of the Betrayed Convention.

There was to be a great meeting at the Tholsel in Dublin, on September 27, 1784, preliminary to the coming Congress. The prompt arrival from London, on September 24, of O'Leary and Parker, and Orde's confidential whisper that they were to begin operations at once, lead to the belief that both attended this meeting. Indeed, from O'Leary's prominent attitude at the previous Convention, he is almost certain to have taken part in the deliberations that followed it. No mention, however, is made of O'Leary or Parker in the Dublin prints of the day.579 The Congress and its preliminary meeting are, no doubt, constantly referred to, but they sat with closed doors, and no reports appear. What took place must be gleaned from other sources. A letter from Orde, published in Grattan's 'Life,' and dated September 18, 1784, six days before O'Leary's arrival from London, mentions that at the coming meeting opposition would be made to putting a question upon the election of representatives for a National Congress.580

As this was a period full of great issues, and yet but little known, perhaps I may be allowed to cull from the local journals of the day a few remarks to show the spirit which animated both sides.

The 'Dublin Evening Post,' the popular organ, 'most earnestly recommends a numerous and respectable meeting at the Tholse on Monday next. The occasion,' it adds, 'is great.'581 But ere long the Castle journalist gleefully chronicles a collapse.

The weeping and gnashing of teeth among the city Patriots on account of yesterday's melancholy disappointment at the Tholsel is not to be described. What a damp must this falling off in the metropolis give to the yet unassembled bailiwicks. Alas! alas! that the city which laid the first stone of 'a national Congress' should now give a shock to the precious building! How are the mighty aggregate Committee fallen! ah, how are they despised! Resolutions, address, circular letters – all, all are scattered to the winds; and commotion, revolution, and scramble, sunk in an abyss of despair beyond all hopes of resurrection.582

If O'Leary attended the meeting at the Tholsel, it is easy to know what tone he took. Three years later he published a pamphlet in which he seems very familiar with the incidents of that month.

I recollect the unmerited abuse given for a long time in the papers to the Catholics, because seventeen housekeepers in Dublin unguardedly signed a requisition to the high sheriff for the purpose of convening an aggregate meeting relative to a parliamentary reform, though I am confident the seventeen knew as little about the impropriety of their signing that requisition, and foresaw as little the offence it would give, as the high sheriff himself. And as to the Catholics, in their disqualified situation, they could not with either prudence or propriety follow any other line but that of a strict neutrality in a political question, on which neither the friends nor opponents of a parliamentary reform would acknowledge them competent to determine.

This tamed tone will not fail to strike on comparing it with his intrepid letter583 written not two years before.

Meanwhile the National Congress was announced to hold its first meeting. 'Whatever underhand engines may endeavour to effect,' says the popular organ, 'we hope to see these just and constitutional deliberations re-establish the purity of representation.'584

One prime object of the Castle is detected and denounced by the same courageous journalist, John Magee. The 'Dublin Evening Post' of November 5, 1784, records: —

The borough-ridden Government, disappointed in its impotent attempts to prevent the laudable exertion of the people in prosecuting a Parliamentary Reform, and finding that even the venal knaves of the Castle nauseate the fulsome charges so long run on Binns and Tandy, has directed the venal writers, as the last effort of an expiring and despairing cause, to endeavour to sow those seeds of dissension which so long desolated this divided Kingdom, and set father against son, and brother against brother, that all might become the easy slaves of foreign tyranny.585

These extracts do not criminate O'Leary, but are useful as illustrating the history of the time, and developing secret policy, while, moreover, they correct some strange inaccuracies. For instance: the Viceroy, writing to Sydney, as printed in Mr. Lecky's History, calls Tandy's colleague 'Binney.' Of course it should be Binns, a name frequently found in the dark records of '98.

The Castle scribe, in another paragraph, states of Binns and Tandy, both thoroughly honest men – 'Fame is very busy that they have received the all-subduing touch of "aurum mirabile."' This was probably to divert suspicion from the really subsidised quarter. It will be remembered that the date of O'Leary's arrival, and that of Parker, quite tallies with the meeting on the 27th September; and it may be asked what else could have brought the popular orators to Dublin at that juncture? Parker knew Tandy, and, as Orde remarks, might be 'able to dive to the bottom of his secrets.'

While diplomacy sought to work its ends in one quarter, brute force laboured in another to disable the arm which had been upraised. The Sheriff of the County Dublin having convened his bailiwick to meet on the subject of Reform, Fitzgibbon, then Attorney-General, addressed an unconstitutional letter to him threatening to proceed by attachment against those who responded to his call. The sheriff himself was fined and imprisoned.

The subsidised journalist, Francis Higgins, writes on December 24, 1784: —

The Roman Catholics may evidently see how wickedly intent on their ruin certain people have been, with a serious idea of extending the elective franchise, or, indeed, any other privilege to them. They endeavoured to cajole (the Roman Catholics) into a commotion.586