Molyneux’s innovation was to extend the principle of rule by consent to nations, a term he used repeatedly in cases where Locke had referred only to individual men. He argued that the principle of consent was breached when laws made in the English Parliament were applied to Ireland. This went against the Common Laws of England that were in force in both England and Ireland. The Irish were not represented in the English parliament but had its laws applied to them.
Even though Locke eventually came to be canonised as the great Whig theorist of the 1688 Glorious Revolution, only a handful of English acquaintances or correspondents are known to have mentioned the Two Treatises with Locke’s approval. Thanks to Molyneux he gained public identification as a major political authority in Ireland before he did so in England even though he was intellectually influential amongst the emerging Whigs during his own lifetime. By the mid-eighteenth century The Two Treatises loomed large in Whig histories of the Glorious Revolution; notably in the writings of David Hume. By the end of the eighteenth century Locke emerged as the most frequently cited authority in Irish pamphlet literature generated by the debate preceding the Act of Union. These took from Locke what Molyneux did, refutations of the notion that claims based on conquest conveyed power over the descendants of the conquered and assertions of the principle of rule by consent.
Following the original 1698 edition The Case of Ireland was reprinted in 1706, 1719, 1720 and 1725. After a twenty-four year gap it was again republished in 1749. A further four editions were published between 1770 and 1782. The foreword to the 1770 edition explained that The Case of Ireland was first published at a time when William of Orange had rescued Irish Protestants from the ‘bigotry of the deluded followers’ of James II. It restated Molyneux’s sense of grievance at having been driven temporarily abroad as part of a history of Protestant anxiety and grievance:
… the Protestant Families had been stripped of their Properties, and forced to seek Refuge in this Country; they were received with Humanity, by many particular Persons, and Money was raised by private Subscription for their Relief; their Lands had been wasted, their Houses burned, and the whole Island thrown back, as to matter of Improvement, at least a Century; all this did the Irish suffer in the Cause of Liberty …
The oppressed Irish so described were Protestant Irish descended ‘from Ancestors, who brought with them the Manners, Customs, Laws, and Constitution of England’. They ‘saw their Independence as a Kingdom, unjustly violated, their Trade wantonly restrained, and Mr Molyneux’s modest dispassionate irrefragable Proof of the Rights and Liberties of his native Country, profanely burned by the Hands of the common Hangman’. The 1770 foreword argued that inadequate parliamentary autonomy had brought to pass constitutional dangers foreseen by Molyneux. A weakened monarchy and the absence of Irish parliamentary autonomy had rendered the interests of Ireland a pawn on the chessboard of English parliamentary politics:
An English Minister would move Heaven and Earth to corrupt a Majority in the House of Commons, and contrary to that Golden Rule of Politicks, which prefers the greater Part to the smaller, he would, in order to secure a single Member, the Circumstances of whose Estate may render it convenient to destroy the entire Trade of Ireland, readily Sacrifice so respectable a Part of the British Empire: To cut off the left Arm, in order to save a little Finger of the Right Hand from Amputation, would be strange in Surgery. Ireland has many unhappy Peculiarities in her political Situation, the chief of which seems to be, that she is a Kingdom without a King, for the Minister with an obsequious British Privy Council, has assumed the Power of putting a Negative upon the most salutary Laws; the Man who is not well acquainted with the Interest of Ireland, must surely be incapable of advising his Majesty concerning such Interest.
The 1770 foreword distinguished the Irish, meaning the Protestant patriot Irish, from ‘the wild ferocious Natives of Ireland’. This was not a phrase ever used by Molyneux himself though it was congruent with his obvious indifference to their existence and to his Lockean rationale for not considering their entitlement to rule by consent. However, the late eighteenth century witnessed new readings of Locke that did. At a 1791 celebration of Bastille Day in Belfast, Molyneux was the sole Irishman other than Grattan to be toasted.
In April 1782 Grattan secured the Irish Parliament that Molyneux wished for. In May that year the London Parliament rescinded Poynings’ Law and passed various other Acts that gave independence to Irish judges subject to the Irish House of Lords. In his April 1782 speech that divined the Spirit of Molyneux at work, Grattan optimistically summarised the new political settlement:
I rejoice that the people are a party to this treaty, because they are bound to preserve it. There is not a man of forty shillings freehold that is not associated in this our claim of right, and bound to die in its defence; cities, counties, associations, Protestants and Catholics; it seems as if the people had joined in one great national sacrament; a flame has descended from heaven on the intellect of Ireland, plays round her head, and encompasses her understanding with a consecrated glory.3
While Catholics did secure some important freedoms within the 1782 settlement, the revitalised Parliament came to be defined by the Penal Laws and a Protestant patriot mindset proposed by Molyneux at the end of the previous century. It took a mere eighteen years for Grattan’s Parliament to fall asunder.
BF
Notes
1William Molyneux, The Case of Ireland’s being bound by Acts of Parliament in England, Stated (facsimile, Online Library of Liberty, 1698).
2Jonathan Swift, The Drapier’s Letters and Other Works, 1714–1725, in H. Davis (ed.), The Works of Jonathan Swift, vol. X (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966), p.88.
3Henry Grattan, 16 April 1782, Irish House of Commons.
4
Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal (1729)
A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of poor People in Ireland from being a Burden to their Parents or Country, and for making them beneficial to the Publick, to give its full title, proposed that the babies of the impoverished poor, a vast proportion of the population as a whole, ‘destined to turn thieves for want of work, or leave their dear native country to fight for the Pretender in Spain, or to sell themselves to the Barbados’ could be made into useful members of the community, if reared as a luxury dish for the tables of persons of quality or fortune. At one year old, Swift proposed, babies could be rendered plump and fat for the good table. Swift computed the gaps between the rich and poor that made his modest proposal financially feasible. He assessed the charge of nursing a beggar’s child (he included all cottagers, labourers and four-fifths of the farmers in this category) to be about two shillings per annum. A gentleman would, he assured, pay ten shillings for the carcass of a good fat child, leaving the mother with eight shillings net profit and fit for work until she produced her next child. The market would be seasonally glutted by babies born nine months after the end of Lent. This he attributed to a Lenten diet that included fish, popular in Catholic countries. Swift lampooned the conclusions that could be drawn from the marshalling of facts. ‘Empiricks’ and Royal Dublin Society scientists with faith in progress were always in his crosshairs. A Modest Proposal invoked statistics, weights and measures to propose a mad panacea for Ireland’s problems.1
A year before the publication of A Modest Proposal in the third of his Intelligencer Papers, Swift sprang to the defence of John Gay’s
