The House of Commons, having failed to obtain the control of the surplus in the Exchequer, resolved that no such surplus should again exist; it began systematically to vote large bounties and grants for manufactures and public works, and it was its special object to throw the additional expenditure on the hereditary revenue so as to make it impossible for the King again to govern without the assistance of Parliament. It effected this object by voting bounties and other charges without imposing any specific taxes for paying them, thus placing the burden on the revenue at large. A curious law for the encouragement of tillage was voted and accepted by the Viceroy, granting a bounty in perpetuity on the carriage of corn to the Dublin market, and in a few years this bounty amounted to an annual charge of more than 50,000l. upon the hereditary revThe bounty system was by no means wholly evil, for in a country so backward and so torpid much artificial stimulus to industry was required, and a large number of the enterprises and institutions assisted by the Irish Parliament were of incontestable utility. But the new policy was a great source of jobbery and extravagance. enue. The Government at the same time found it necessary to bestow much more attention than in former years on the management of the Irish Parliament, and large sums were expended for this purpose. Boyle succeeded in obtaining the ascendency he desired, but he was bought by a peerage, and pensions and honours and places were now habitually bestowed with a sole view to political services. Power had passed to a great extent into Irish hands, but it was chiefly the hands of a few great Irish borough owners who obtained the name of 'undertakers' because they undertook, in consideration of obtaining a large share of the patronage DISSOLUTION OF PARLIAMENT 33 of the Crown, to carry on the King's business in Parliament. Parliamentary corruption had not been necessary and had probably not been largely practised in the first years of the century, but great sums which would once have been devoted chiefly to rewarding English politicians were now employed in securing Irish parliamentary influence. Between 1755 and 1761 the Pension List rose from 38,000l. to more than 64,0007. Even in the House of Commons there was a strong sense of the enormity of the rise. In 1756 a measure for obliging members who accepted places of profit or pensions from the Crown to vacate their seats was only rejected by eighty-five to fifty-nine, and in the following year resolutions against the abuses in the Pension List were carried in the House, and the Commons, with the Speaker at their head, placed them in the hands of the Lord Lieutenant to be forwarded to the King. Whatever doubt there might be of the sincerity of the members of Parliament, there was at least none of the feeling beyond its walls. An energetic and enlightened, though as yet purely Protestant, public opinion had grown up. The dread of revolution and confiscations which had once dominated over all other questions of internal politics had passed away. The writings of Swift and Berkeley had sunk deeply into Irish Protestant opinion. A determination to place Irish government on the same constitutional basis as the government of England, to obtain for the Irish Protestants what English Protestants had obtained by the Revolution of 1688, and to make the Irish Parliament a really representative and independent body had spread far and wide, and when the death of George II., in 1760, dissolved the Parliament which had lasted through a whole generation, all the great constitutional questions rose rapidly into prominence. Meet VOL. I. 3 ings and associations were formed demanding septennial Parliaments; the reduction of the Pension List; the immovability of the judges; the enactment of a Habeas Corpus Bill and the independence of Parliament, and at the election which took place in the following year a large number of members were returned pledged to support such measures. HENRY FLOOD 35 HENRY FLOOD It was in the last year of the long Parliament of George II. that Henry Flood, the subject of the present biography, first appeared in the field of politics. He was the son of the Chief Justice of the King's Bench in Ireland. He entered Trinity College as a fellow-commoner, but terminated his career, as is still sometimes done, at Oxford, where he applied himself with much energy to the classics, and especially to those studies which are advantageous to an orator in forming a pure and elevated style. For this purpose he learned considerable portions of Cicero by heart. He wrote out Demosthenes and Eschines on the Crown, two books of the 'Paradise Lost,' a translation of two books of Homer, and the finest passages from every play of Shakespeare. Like most persons who combine great ambition with great powers of expression, he devoted himself much to poetry, his principal production being an Ode to Fame,' which appears to have been much admired by his friends, and is written in the formal, florid style that was then popular. He was also passionately devoted to private theatricals, which were very fashionable in Ireland and which contributed not a little to form his style of elocution. The portraits drawn by his contemporaries are exceedingly attractive. They represent him as genial, frank, and open; endowed with brilliant conversational powers and the happiest manner, the most easy and best-tempered man in the world, as well as the most sensible.'' His figure in early manhood was exceedingly graceful, and his countenance, though afterwards soured and distorted by disease, of corresponding beauty. He was of a remarkably social disposition, delighting in witty society and in field-sports, somewhat prone to dissipation, but readily conciliating the affection of all classes. Lord Mountmorres, who knew him chiefly in his later years, and was inclined to judge him with severity, describes him as a pre-eminently truthful man and exceedingly averse to flattery. He married a member of the great house of Beresford, who brought him a large fortune, and as his father was a man of wealth and position, he was at no time embarrassed by pecuniary difficulties, and was enabled to devote himself exclusively to the service of his country. When we add to this that he was a man of great natural eloquence, indomitable courage, and singularly acute judgment, it will be seen that he possessed almost every requisite for a great public leader. He entered Parliament in 1759 as member for Kilkenny, being then in his twenty-seventh year, and took his seat on the benches of the Opposition. It was not probable that a Parliament constituted like that of Ireland should have given much scope for eloquence, and it was not until the reign of George III. that its debates were reported, but the Parliament of George II. contained at least one orator who appears to have been very remarkable. This was Anthony Malone, the father of the well-known editor of Shakespeare. He was a lawyer in large practice, a prominent member of more than one Government, and though no fragments of his speeches have survived, his calm and perspicacious judgment and his eminently judicial elo 1 Grattan. |