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GRATTAN, HENRY (1746-1820) , Irish statesman, son of James Grattan, for many years recorder of Dublin, was born in Dublin on the 3rd of July 1746. He early gave evidence of exceptional gifts both of intellect and character. At Trinity College, Dublin, where he had a distinguished career, he began a lifelong devotion to classical literature and especially to the great orators of antiquity. He was called to the Irish bar in 1772, but never seriously practised the law. Like Flood, with whom he was on terms of friendship, he cultivated his natural genius for eloquence by study of good models, including Bolingbroke and Junius. A visit to the English House of Lords excited boundless admiration for Lord Chatham, of whose style of oratory Grattan contributed an interesting description to Baratariana (see FLOOD, HENRY). The influence of Flood did much to give direction to Grattan's political aims; and it was through no design on Grattan's part that when Lord Charlemont brought him into the Irish parliament in 1775, in the very session in which Flood damaged his popularity by accepting office, Grattan quickly superseded his friend in the leadership of the national party. Grattan was well qualified for it. His oratorical powers were unsurpassed among his contemporaries. Hes conspicuously lacked, indeed, the grace of gesture which he so much admired in Chatham; he had not the sustained dignity of Pitt; his powers of close reasoning were inferior to those of Fox and Flood. But his speeches were packed with epigram, and expressed with rare felicity of phrase; his terse and telling sentences were richer in profound aphorisms and maxims of political philosophy than those of any other statesman save 379 Burke; he possessed the orator's incomparable gift of conveying his own enthusiasm to his audience and convincing them of the loftiness of his aims. The principal object of the national party was to set the Irish parliament free from constitutional bondage to the English privy council. By virtue of Poyning's Act, a celebrated statute of Henry VII., all proposed Irish legislation had to be submitted to the English 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 English acts had further emphasized the complete dependence of the Irish parliament, and the appellate jurisdiction of the Irish House of Lords had also been annulled. Moreover, the English 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 Molyneux and Swift had denounced, which Flood had attacked, and which Grattan was to destroy. The menacing attitude of the Volunteer Convention at Dungannon greatly influenced the decision of the government in 1782 to resist the agitation no longer. It was through ranks of volunteers drawn
One of the first acts of " Grattan's parliament " was to prove its loyalty to England by passing a vote for the support of 20,000 sailors for the navy. Grattan himself never failed in loyalty to the crown and the English connexion. He was, however, anxious for moderate parliamentary reform, and, unlike Flood, he favoured Catholic emancipation. It was, indeed, evident that without reform the Irish House of Commons would not be able to make much use of its newly won independence. Though now free from constitutional control it was no less subject than before to the influence of corruption, which the English government had wielded through the Irish borough owners, known as the " undertakers," or more directly through the great executive officers. " Grattan's parliament " had no control over the Irish executive. The lord lieutenant and his chief
on the regency question in 1788. In 1792 he succeeded in It is a curious circumstance, in view of the subsequent history of Irish politics, that it was from the Protestant Established Church, and particularly from the Orangemen, that the bitterest opposition to the union proceeded; and that the proposal found support chiefly among the Roman Catholic clergy and especially the bishops, while in no part of Ireland was it received with more favour than in the city of Cork. This attitude of the Catholics was caused by Pitt's encouragement of the expectation that Catholic emancipation, the commutation of tithes, and the endowment of the Catholic priesthood, would accompany or quickly follow the passing of the measure. When in 1799 the government brought forward their bill it was defeated in the Irish House of Commons. Grattan was still in retirement. His popularity had temporarily declined, and the fact that his proposals for parliamentary reform and Catholic emancipation had become the watchwords of the rebellious United Irishmen had brought upon him the bitter hostility of the governing classes. He was dismissed from the privy council; his portrait was removed from the hall
The bill establishing the union was carried through its final stages by substantial majorities. The people remained listless, giving no indications of any eager dislike of the government policy. " There were absolutely none of the signs which are invariably found when a nation struggles passionately against what it deems an impending tyranny, or rallies around some institution which it really loves." s One of Grattan's main grounds of opposition to the union had been his dread of seeing the political leadership in Ireland pass out of the hands of the landed gentry; and he prophesied that the time would come when Ireland would send to the united parliament " a hundred of the greatest rascals in the kingdom."S Like Flood before him, Grattan had no leaning towards democracy; and he anticipated that by the removal of the centre of political interest
For the next five years Grattan took no active part in public affairs; it was not till 18o5 that he became a member of the parliament of the United Kingdom. He modestly took his seat on one of the back benches, till Fox brought him forward to a seat near his own, exclaiming, " This is no place for the Irish Demosthenes ! " His first speech was on the Catholic question, and though some doubt had been felt lest Grattan, like Flood, should belie at Westminster the reputation made in Dublin, all agreed with the description of his speech by the Annual Register as " one of the most brilliant and eloquent ever pronounced within the walls of parliament." When Fox and Grenville came into power in 18o6 Grattan was offered, but refused to 3 Ibid. i. 241. ' Grattan's Speeches, iv. 23. 6 W. E. H. Lecky, History of England in the Eighteenth Century, viii. 491. Cf. Cornwallis Correspondence, iii. 250. 6 W. E. H. Lecky, Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland, i. 27o. carrying an Act conferring the franchise on the Roman Catholics; in 1794 in conjunction with William Ponsonby he introduced a reform bill which was even less democratic 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, for `.` he had through the whole of his life a strong conviction that while Ireland could best be governed by Irish hands, democracy in Ireland would inevitably turn to plunder and anarchy."' At the same time he desired to admit the Roman Catholic gentry of property to membership of the House of Commons, a proposal that was the logical corollary of the Relief Act of 1792. The defeat of Grattan's mild proposals helped to promote more extreme opinions, which, under French revolutionary influence, were now becoming heard in Ireland. The Catholic question had rapidly become of the first importance, and when a powerful section of the Whigs joined Pitt's ministry in 1794, and it became known that the lord-lieutenancy was to go to Lord Fitzwilliam, who shared Grattan's views, expectations were raised that the question was about to be settled in a manner satisfactory to the Irish Catholics. Such seems to have been Pitt's intention, though there has been much controversy as to how far Lord Fitzwilliam (q.v.) had been authorized to pledge the government. After taking. Grattan into his confidence, it was arranged that the latter should bring in a Roman Catholic emancipation bill, and that it should then receive government support. But finally it appeared that the viceroy had either misunderstood or exceeded his instructions; and on the 19th of February 1795 Fitzwilliam was recalled. In the outburst of indignation, followed by increasing disaffection in Ireland, which this event produced, Grattan acted with conspicuous moderation and loyalty, which won for him warm acknowledgments from a member of the English cabinet .2 That cabinet, however, doubtless influenced by the wishes of the king, was now determined firmly to resist the Catholic demands, with the result that the country rapidly drifted to-wards rebellion. Grattan warned the government in a series of masterly speeches of the lawless condition to which Ireland had been driven. But he could now count on no more than some forty followers in the House of Commons, and his words were unheeded. He retired from parliament in May 1797, and departed from his customary moderation by attacking the government in an inflammatory "Letter to the citizens of Dublin." At this time religious animosity had almost died out in Ireland, and men of different faiths were ready to combine for common political objects. Thus the Presbyterians of the north, who were mainly republican in sentiment, combined with a section of the Roman Catholics to form the organization of the United Irishmen, to promote revolutionary ideas imported from France; and a party prepared to welcome a French invasion soon came into existence. Thus stimulated, the increasing disaffection culminated in the rebellion of 1798, which was sternly and cruelly repressed. No sooner was this effected than the project of a legislative union between the British and Irish parliaments, which had been from time to time discussed since the beginning of the 18th century, was taken up in earnest by Pitt's government. Grattan from the first denounced the scheme with implacable hostility. There was, however, much to be said in its favour. The constitution of Grattan's parliament offered no security, as the differences over the regency question had made evident that in matters of imperial interest
1 W. E. H. Lecky, Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland, i. I27 (enlarged edition, 2 vols., 1903). 2 Ibid. i. 204. 381 GRATTIUS [FALISCUS], Roman poet, of the age of Augustus
accept, an office in the government. In the following year he showed the strength of his judgment and character by supporting, in spite of consequent unpopularity in Ireland, a measure for increasing the powers of the executive to deal with Irish disorder. Roman Catholic emancipation, which he continued to advocate with unflagging energy though now advanced in age, became complicated after 18o8 by the question whether a veto on the appointment of Roman Catholic bishops should rest with the crown. Grattan supported the veto, but a more extreme Catholic party was now arising in Ireland under the leadership of Daniel O'Connell, and Grattan's influence gradually declined. He seldom spoke in parliament after 181o, the most notable exception being in 1815, when he separated himself from the Whigs and supported the final struggle against Napoleon. His last speech of all, in 1819, contained a passage referring to the union he had so passionately resisted, which exhibits the statesmanship and at the same time the equable quality of Grattan's character. His sentiments with regard to the policy of the union remained, he said, unchanged; but "the marriage having taken place it is now the duty, as it ought to be the inclination, of every individual to render it as fruitful, as profitable and as advantageous as possible." In the following summer, after crossing from Ireland to London when out of health to bring forward the Catholic question once more, he became seriously ill. On -his death-bed he spoke generously of Castlereagh, and with warm eulogy of his former rival, Flood. He died on the 6th of June 1820, and was buried in Westminster Abbey close to the tombs of Pitt and Fox. His statue is in the outer lobby of the Houses of Parliament at Westminster. Grattan had married in 1782 Henrietta Fitzgerald, a lady descended from the ancient family of Desmond, by whom he had two sons and two daughters. The most searching scrutiny of his private life only increases the respect due to the memory of Grattan as a statesman and the greatest of Irish orators. His patriotism was untainted by self-seeking; he was courageous in risking his popularity for what his sound judgment showed him to be the right course. As Sydney Smith said with truth of Grattan soon after his death: " No government ever dismayed him. The world could not bribe him. He thought only of Ireland; lived for no other object; dedicated to her his beautiful fancy, his elegant wit, his manly courage, and all the splendour of his astonishing eloquence." 1 1 Amhurst, History of Catholic Emancipation (2 vols., London, 1886); Sir Thomas Wyse, Historical Sketch of the late Catholic Association of Ireland (London, 1829) ; W. J. MacNeven, Pieces of Irish History (New York
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Sydney Smith's Works, ii. 166-167.author of a poem on hunting (Cynegetica), of which 541 hexameters remain. He was possibly a native of Falerii. The only reference to him in any ancient writer is incidental (Ovid, Ex Ponto, iv. 16. 33). He describes various kinds of game, methods of hunting, the best breeds of horses and dogs. There are editions by R. Stern (1832); E. Bahrens in Poctae Latini Minores (i., 1879) and G. G. Curcio in Poeti Latini Minori (i., 1902), with bibliography.; see also H. Schenkl, Zur Kritik des G. (1898). There is a translation by Christopher Wase (1654). End of Article: GRATTAN, HENRY (1746-1820) If you wish, you can link directly to this article.
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