TWO-hundred-and- fifty years ago, in early 1762, the House of Commons of the Kingdom of Ireland, meeting at College Green, refused to admit as member for Tipperary one Thomas Mathew, although he had polled the second highest number of votes in the two-seater county constituency at the general election in the previous year.
In his place they declared elected an evangelical Protestant landowner called Sir Thomas Maude who had finished third with 486 votes against Mathew’s 532. Maude had petitioned the House, contending that Mathew was disqualified from election because “he had professed the Popish religion many years after his age of Twelve and had not conformed to the Protestant religion or educated his children as required by the several acts of Parliament”.
Maude also claimed that some of those allowed to vote were disqualified by law either because they were born of Popish parents and had not conformed to Protestantism or were married to Popish wives. He alleged intimidation by “great mobs of Irish papists” who had crowded the election hall.
It was obviously a pretty fractious contest. During it a duel was fought between the agents for the two candidates in which Mathew’s agent was killed.
The election had a significance that was more than local in that it was the first real act of Catholic self-assertiveness anywhere in Ireland in face of the Anti-Popery laws enacted piecemeal in the half century following the defeat of the Catholic King James at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690.
Maude’s petition was considered by the Committee of Privileges of the House of Commons. On the basis of its report the House voted on January 13th, 1762, by 61 votes to 26 to set aside Mathew’s election and to admit Maude.
A letter sent to Henry Cole Bowen, ancestor of the writer Elizabeth Bowen, recorded what happened: “When one of the friends of Mr Mathew attempted to speak there was such a coughing and snorting that ’twas impossible to hear, but when one of the friends of Sir Thomas did so it was all silence”.
Within months of the result Thomas Mathew, who was one of the largest landowners in the county, and his only legitimate son Francis (later Earl of Llandaff) went through the formalities of conforming to the Established Protestant Church. But Thomas, like many such converts, gave that church an allegiance that was only nominal. He continued to attend Mass and remained part of the Catholic community looking after his Catholic relatives, the most famous of whom was his first cousin Nano Nagle, the founder of the Presentation Sisters.
The new assertiveness of the Catholics exhibited at the Tipperary election provoked a backlash from Maude and the bigoted Protestant faction in the southern part of the county. This culminated in the execution at Clonmel in 1766 of a Catholic priest, Nicholas Sheehy, and two others on a trumped-up charge of murder.
This corrupt blood-letting shocked liberal Protestants, one of whom, Lord Charlemont, called it “a disgrace to our mild religion”. The tide turned in favour of toleration and the relaxation of a code famously described by Edmund Burke as “a machine of wise and elaborate contrivance as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man”.
At the next general election in 1768 Francis Mathew was elected to represent Tipperary in the House of Commons where, like many members of convert families, he fought for the repeal of the Anti-Popery laws. In the 1770s and 1780s the disabilities that Roman Catholics suffered in relation to the ownership, inheritance and acquisition of land were removed. In the early 1790s they were admitted to the military, the magistracy, the legal profession and even granted the franchise.
However, what historian Thomas Babington Macaulay described derisively as “the most tyrannical and the most corrupt parliament that had ever sate in Europe” went out of existence in 1800 without making Roman Catholics eligible for membership. Promises given at the time by the British government to Catholics that they would be admitted to the parliament of the United Kingdom created by the Act of Union 1800 were not honoured until 1829, after Daniel O’Connell had forced the issue by having himself elected member for Clare and presenting himself to take his seat at Westminster.
The subsequent legislation, which made it possible for Roman Catholics to sit in parliament, is always described rather dramatically in our history as Catholic Emancipation. In fact, it was only one step in a gradual process that began earlier and continued into the 20th century, removing the disabilities and disadvantages under which Irish Catholics laboured in their own land. The Tipperary election of 1761 deserves to be recognised as a seminal episode that set that process in motion.