Henry Grattan (3 July 1746 – 4 June 1820) was an Irish politician and lawyer who campaigned for legislative freedom for the Irish Parliament in the late 18th century from Great Britain. He was a Member of the Irish Parliament (MP) from 1775 to 1801 and a Member of Parliament (MP) in Westminster from 1805 to 1820. He has been described as a superb orator and a romantic. With generous enthusiasm he demanded that Ireland should be granted its rightful status, that of an independent nation, though he always insisted that Ireland would remain linked to Great Britain by a common crown and by sharing a common political tradition.R. B. McDowell (1994) "The Protestant Nation (1775–1800)," in T. W. Moody and F. X. Martin, eds., The Course of Irish History. 2nd ed. p. 233.
Grattan opposed the Act of Union 1800 that merged the Kingdoms of Ireland and Great Britain, but later sat as a member of the united Parliament in London.
Early life Henry Grattan was born in Fishamble Street, Dublin, and baptised in the nearby church of St. John the Evangelist in 1746.D. A. Chart (1907) in The Story of Dublin. J. M. Dent & Co., London A member of the Anglo-Irish elite of Protestant background, Grattan was the son of James Grattan MP, of Belcamp Park, County Dublin and Mary, youngest daughter of Thomas Marlay, Attorney-General of Ireland, Chief Baron of the Irish Exchequer and finally Lord Chief Justice of the Court of King's Bench and his wife Anne de Laune. Grattan attended Drogheda Grammar School and then went on to become a distinguished student at Trinity College Dublin, where he began a lifelong study of classical literature, and was especially interested in the great orators of antiquity. Like his friend Henry Flood, Grattan worked on his natural eloquence and oratory skills by studying models such as Bolingbroke and Junius. In the late 1760s and early 1770s, he spent some years in London, and he visited France in 1771. He attended debates in the British House of Commons regularly, and also enjoyed visiting the celebrated Grecian Coffee House in Devereux Court, where he met Oliver Goldsmith. It was in London where he formed his lifelong friendship with Robert Day, later a judge of the Court of King's Bench.
After studying at the Middle Temple, London and then King's Inns, Dublin, he was called to the Irish Bar in 1772. He never seriously practised law but was drawn to politics, influenced by Flood. He entered the Irish Parliament for Charlemont in 1775, sponsored by Lord Charlemont, just as Flood had damaged his credibility by accepting office. Grattan quickly superseded Flood in the leadership of the national party, not least because his oratorical powers were unsurpassed among his contemporaries.
In the Irish Parliament
Catholics, who made up the majority of the Irish population, were completely excluded from public life at this time under the penal laws, in force in Ireland from 1691 until the early 1780s. The Presbyterians of Ulster had a lot more power as they were primarily of British ancestry, although most of the penal laws also affected them. Power was held by the King's Viceroy and by a small element, the Anglo-Irish families loyal to the Anglican Church of Ireland who owned most of the land.
The politicians of the national party now fought for the Irish Parliament, not with the intention of liberating the Catholic majority, but to set the Irish parliament free from constitutional bondage to the British Privy Council. By virtue of Poynings' Law, a statute of King Henry VII of England, all proposed Irish legislation had to be submitted to the Privy Council for its approval under the Great Seal of England before being passed by the Irish Parliament. A bill so approved might be accepted or rejected, but not amended. More recent British Acts had further emphasised the complete dependence of the Irish parliament, and the appellate jurisdiction of the Irish House of Lords had also been annulled. Moreover, the British Houses claimed and exercised the power to legislate directly for Ireland without even the nominal concurrence of the parliament in Dublin. This was the constitution which William Molyneux and Swift had denounced, which Flood had attacked, and which Grattan was to destroy, becoming leaders of the Patriot movement.
Calls for the legislative independence of Ireland at the Irish Volunteer Convention at Dungannon, County Tyrone, greatly influenced the decision of the government in 1782 to make concessions. It was through ranks of Volunteers drawn up outside the Irish Parliament in Dublin that Grattan passed on 16 April 1782, amidst unparalleled popular enthusiasm, to move a declaration of the independence of the Irish parliament. A posthumous publication of Grattan's speeches which were revised by Grattan himself contains his speech from this day which became famous in Irish political history: "I found Ireland on her knees," Grattan exclaimed, "I watched over her with a paternal solicitude; I have traced her progress from injuries to arms, and from arms to liberty. Spirit of Swift, spirit of Molyneux, your genius has prevailed! Ireland is now a nation!" However, the parliamentary register for that sitting contains no record of these lines meaning Grattan most likely altered the speech in later years.O'Brien, Gerard. "The Grattan Mystique." Eighteenth-Century Ireland/Iris an dá chultúr (1986): 177–194. in JSTOR After a month of negotiation, the claims of Ireland were conceded. The gratitude of his countrymen to Grattan was shown by a parliamentary grant of £100,000, which had to be reduced by half before he would accept it.
Grattan then asked for the British House of Commons to reconfirm the British Government's decision, and on 22 January 1783, the final Act was passed by parliament in London, including the text: In September of the same year, Grattan became a member of the Privy Council of Ireland. He was expelled in 1798, but was re-admitted on 9 August 1806. In Dublin, he was a member of Daly's Club.T.H.S. Escott (1913) Club Makers and Club Members. pp. 329–333
Grattan's Parliament
One of the first acts of Grattan's Parliament was to prove its loyalty to the constitution by passing a vote for the support of 20,000 sailors for the Royal Navy. Grattan was loyal to the Crown and the British connection. He was, however, anxious to achieve moderate parliamentary reform, and, unlike Flood, he favoured Catholic Emancipation. It was evident that without reform, the Irish House of Commons would not be able to make much use of its newly won legislative independence. Though now free from Westminster constitutional control, it was still subject to the influence of corruption, which the British government had wielded through the British and Irish borough owners, known as the "undertakers", or more directly through the great executive offices. Grattan's Parliament had no control over the Irish executive. The Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and his chief secretary continued to be appointed by the British ministers; their tenure of office depended on the vicissitudes of English, not Irish, party politics; the royal prerogative was exercised in Ireland on the advice of British ministers.
The Irish House of Commons was unrepresentative of the Irish people at a time when democracy was rare in Europe. The majority were excluded, who were either Roman Catholics or Presbyterians; two-thirds of the members of the House of Commons were returned by small boroughs at the disposal of individual patrons, whose support was bought by the distribution of peerages and pensions. It was to give stability and true independence to the new constitution that Grattan pressed for reform.
Having quarrelled with Flood over simple repeal, Grattan also differed from him on the question of maintaining the Volunteer Convention. Drawing the attention of the House to "the alarming measure of drilling the lowest classes of the populace", Grattan implied that reformers had a duty to protect the prerogatives of property even as they protested its abuses. Better that those who had been "respectable" as the armed "property of the nation" should retire than run the risks of an "armed beggary". (Writing a generation later, Thomas MacNevin proposed that Grattan's judgement marked "the transition point", when "composed of a different class of men, and ruled by politicians with very different views", the rump of the Volunteer movement entered upon "a career which terminated only in the establishment of the United Irishmen").
Grattan also opposed the policy of protective duties in favour of Pitt's commercial propositions in 1785 for establishing Free Trade between Great Britain and Ireland. This, however, had to be abandoned owing to the hostility of the British mercantile classes. Grattan supported the government for a time after 1782, and spoke and voted for the repressive legislation that followed the Whiteboy violence in 1785; but as the years passed and without Pitt's personal favour towards parliamentary reform resulting in legislation, he gravitated towards the opposition, agitated for commutation of tithes in Ireland, and supported the Whigs on the regency question in 1788. In 1790, Grattan was elected for Dublin City, a seat he held until 1798.
In 1792–93, he succeeded in carrying the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1793, conferring the franchise on Catholics; in 1794, in conjunction with William Ponsonby, he introduced a reform bill which was even milder than Flood's bill of 1783. He was as anxious as Flood had been to retain the legislative power in the hands of men of property. Grattan had a strong conviction that while Ireland could best be governed by the Irish, democracy in Ireland would inevitably turn to plunder and anarchy. At the same time, he wished to open membership of the House of Commons to Catholic men of property, a proposal that was the corollary of the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1793.
The defeat of Grattan's mild proposals helped to promote more extreme opinions, which, under growing influence from France, were now making inroads in Ireland. The Catholic question had come to the fore, and when a powerful section of the Whigs joined Pitt's ministry in 1794, Lord Fitzwilliam, who shared Grattan's views, was appointed Viceroy, expectations for further Catholic relief were raised. That may have been Pitt's intention, but it is not clear how far Lord Fitzwilliam had been authorised to pledge the government. Fitzwilliam privately asked Grattan to propose a bill for Catholic emancipation, promising British government support. It appeared, however, that the Viceroy had either misunderstood or exceeded his instructions; on 19 February 1795, Fitzwilliam was recalled. In the outburst of indignation, followed by increasing disaffection which this produced in Ireland, Grattan acted with conspicuous moderation and loyalty. This won him warm acknowledgements from a member of the British cabinet.
That cabinet, however, doubtless influenced by the wishes of the King, to whom Emancipation was anathema, was now determined to firmly resist the Catholic demands, with the result that Ireland rapidly drifted towards rebellion. Grattan warned the government in a series of masterly speeches of the lawless condition to which Ireland had been driven. He could now count on no more than 40 followers in the Irish House of Commons, and his words were unheeded. In protest, he retired from parliament in May 1797, and departed from his customary moderation by attacking the government in his 24-page Letter to the Citizens of Dublin, in which he said it was now "absolutely necessary to reform the state" as the people no longer had confidence in Parliament.
Rebellion and Union