TEMPLE ON THE SITUATION

67

Portland and Temple, who held in succession the viceroyalty at this critical period, both formed a very unfavourable impression of the character of Flood, though they both rated very high his ability and his influence. His ambition,' Portland wrote to Shelburne, is so immeasurable that no dependence can be placed upon any engagement he may be induced to form.' Temple urged that the most strenuous opposition should be given to the policy of Flood as the slightest concession would only increase his demands; he spoke of the universal dislike that the nobility and persons of property bear to him,' and he described him as 'the only person in his party whom any contingency of circumstances might make it necessary for us to buy,' but he states that Flood's doctrines were daily becoming more popular and his ascendency over the volunteers more formidable. He notices the support which Flood's doctrine received from Belfast; he declared that the Presbyterians in the north of Ireland were totally republican and averse to English government,' and the whole situation was described in his confidential letters as almost desperate. The representations of perfect content and pacification so much heard in England are treacherously and insidiously false.' The country is too wild to act from reflection, and till you can oppose Parliament effectually to the volunteers nothing can be done.' Those to whom the people look up with confidence are not the Parliament, but a body of armed men composed chiefly of the middling and lower orders, influenced by no one, but leading those who affect to guide them.' 'There is hardly a magistrate who will enforce or a man who will obey any law to which he objects.' 'It is my unalterable opinion that the concession is but the beginning of a scene which will close for ever the account between the two kingdoms.'

6

Temple was not a man of great ability or foresight, and he had but a very slight experience of Irish affairs. It is impossible, however, to deny the great danger of the situation, and difficult to acquit Flood of having been largely actuated by personal motives. No man was more attached to him than Charlemont, but he clearly recognised the strong personal element in Flood's later policy. Ambition,' he says, though tempered by many amiable and estimable qualities, was ever his ruling passion.' He was always suspicious, intractable, too fond of preeminence.' He had expected when leaving office under Lord Harcourt to find himself at the head of his party, but he found himself wholly displaced by Grattan, and his new policy seemed intended to regain his popularity. Portland hoped to restore him to the side of the Government by offering to replace him in the Privy Council without office, but the negotiation was clumsily conducted and the offer was scornfully rejected. When Northington, succeeding Temple, became Viceroy in the brief Coalition Ministry, new overtures were made unofficially to Flood through Edward Malone and through Markham, the Archbishop of York, and it was clearly intimated to him that he might have a leading place in the new Administration.

In estimating his true character it must be noticed that he entirely refused these overtures. Charlemont, who knew him well, has said of him that 'avarice made no part of his character.' Nor is there any evidence that he ever asked for or desired a peerage, which was the usual reward of a wealthy politician who was negotiating with Governments. Nothing in the Irish history of the latter half of the century is more conspicuous than the lavishness with which peerages were then granted as a means of parliamentary management.

COLLISION WITH GRATTAN

69

It was stated that between 1762 and 1783 inclusive, thirtythree barons, sixteen viscounts, and twenty-four earls had been added to the Irish peerage. But Flood, though from his fortune and political position he might most easily have attained this dignity, never aspired to it. The ambition of power, which was largely patriotic but also in some measure personal, was his guiding influence, and the question of Simple Repeal and the Renunciation Act which had been granted by England, and which was regarded as a confirmation of the justice of his view, had placed him once more in a position of great power and wide, though certainly not unchallenged, popularity.

Under these circumstances it needed but little to produce an explosion, and that little was supplied by a discourteous and unfair allusion to Flood's illness which escaped from Grattan in the heat of the debate. The question before the House was the necessity of reducing the Irish army, to which Grattan strongly objected and which Flood vehemently advocated. Flood rose indignantly, and, after a few words of preface, launched into a fierce diatribe against his opponent. His task was a difficult one, for few men presented a more unassailable character. Invective, however, of the most extravagant description was the custom of the time, and invective between good and great men is necessarily unjust. He dwelt with bitter emphasis on the grant the Parliament had made to Grattan. He described him as that mendicant patriot who was bought by his country, and sold that country for prompt payment;' and he dilated with the keenest sarcasm upon the decline of his popularity. He concluded, in a somewhat exultant tone: Permit me to say that if the honourable gentleman often provokes such contests as this, he will have but little to boast of at the end of the session.' Grattan, however, was not unprepared. He had long foreseen the collision,

and had embodied all his angry feelings in one elaborate speech. Employing the common artifice of an imaginary character, he painted the whole career of his opponent in the blackest colours, condensed in a few masterly sentences all the charges that had ever been brought against him, and sat down, having delivered an invective which, for concentrated and crushing power, but also for outrageous violence, is almost or altogether unrivalled in modern oratory.

Thus terminated the friendship between two men who had done more than any who were then living for their country, who had known each other for twenty years, and whose lives are imperishably associated in history. Flood afterwards presided at a meeting of the volunteers, where a resolution complimentary to Grattan was passed; Grattan, in his pamphlet on the Union, and more than once in private conversation, gave noble testimony to the greatness of Flood; but they were never reconciled, and their cordial co-operation was henceforth almost an impossibility.

The dissension between the Parliament and the volunteers had now become very marked, and it was evident that there was at least one important man among the latter who desired open war with England. It is curious that he should have been by birth an Englishman, and by position a bishop. The Earl of Bristol and Bishop of Derry was son of that Lord Hervey who was long remembered only as the object of the fiercest of all the satires of Pope, but who was revealed to a later generation in altogether a new light, by the publication of those masterly memoirs in which he had described the Court and much of the State policy of George II. The character of the Bishop has been somewhat differently painted, but its chief ingredients are sufficiently evident, whatever controversy there may be

about the proportions in which they were mixed. He appears to have been a man of respectable learning and of real public spirit. He expended large sums on public works of undoubted utility; his ecclesiastical patronage is said to have been excellently administered, and he was an advocate of the abolition of all religious disqualifications in politics; but he was at the same time utterly destitute of the distinctive virtues and probably also of the beliefs of a clergyman, and he was one of the most dangerous politicians of his time. Vain, impetuous, and delighting in display; with an insatiable appetite for popularity, and utterly reckless about the consequences of his acts, he exhibited, though an English peer and an Irish bishop, all the characteristics of the most irresponsible adventurer. Under other circumstances he might have been capable of the policy of an Alberoni. In Ireland, for a short time, he rode upon the crest of the wave; and if he had obtained the control he aspired to over the volunteer movement, he would probably have headed a civil war. But though a man of indisputable courage, and of considerable popular talents, he had neither the caution of a great rebel nor the settled principles of a great statesman. His habits were extremely convivial; he talked with reckless folly to his friends, and even to British officers, of the appeal to arms which he meditated; and he exhibited a passion for ostentation which led men, probably with good reason, to question his sanity. He appeared always,' says Barrington, dressed with peculiar care and neatness, generally entirely in purple, and he wore diamond knee and shoe buckles; but what I most observed was, that he wore white gloves with gold fringe round the wrists, and large gold tassels hanging from them.' The ostentation he manifested in his dress he displayed in every part of his public life. A troop of horse, commanded by his nephew, used to accompany him when he went out,