(III.) A.D. 1830.-LORD PLUNKET (William Conyngham Plunket). -The name of Plunket is one of high antiquity, and is to be found amongst the Danish chieftans who intermingled with the Norman invaders of this country at the close of the twelfth century. This name is to be met with in the early chronicles of the Pale, and in the border battles of Clancolla; we find it, too, amongst the fathers of the Church, and among the lights of the bar.1 There was an Alexander Plunket, Lord Chancellor of Ireland, in 1492. There were chief-justices, too, of this name. There were the Plunkets, Earls of Fingal, and there were the Lords of Killeen; the families of Dunsany and of Louth; and there was the martyred Oliver Plunket, Catholic Archbishop of Armagh, who died for his faith in the reign of Charles II.3

There was one branch of this family established in the county Monaghan; this branch had, for reasons long since forgotten, abandoned the faith of their fathers, and had embraced that species of Protestant Dissent, which denies the very divinity of Christ, as professed in the Churches of England and Ireland. They had become Unitarians, and their names are to be found in the early part of the last century amongst the ministers and the ladies of that Socinian sect. The Reverend Patrick Plunket then officiated as a Unitarian Minister in Monaghan; and he had an only son, Thomas, born in 1725, who was educated at

Glasgow for the same profession, and was, in 1748, appointed minister to this dissenting body in Enniskillen. Here he selected for his future partner in life the young and accomplished daughter of a gentleman of good social position, named Redmund Conyngham. A numerous family of sons and daughters grew up about him. The youngest of these, born in 1764, was William Conyngham Plunket. From Enniskillen the Rev. Mr. Plunket was removed to Dublin, there to undertake the charge of the Unitarian chapel in Strand Street. Highly gifted as an orator, the Rev. Dr. Plunket, as he was now called, soon drew admiring crowds around his pulpit. His congregation was both influential and wealthy; and on his death, in 1778, they took charge of his widow and orphan children. A subscription was set on foot, and great exertions made to obtain some provision for the family of their beloved and departed minister. His little debts were paid, and a house (No. 32, Jervis Street) was taken, where Mrs. Plunket opened a shop for the sale of tea. By degrees she got on; her establishment or tea warehouse, as it was called-was patronised by the kindly and charitable elders and matrons of Strand Street Chapel.4

In the following year her younger son, William Conyngham Plunket, who must then have conformed to the Established Church, entered the University of Dublin, where he obtained a scholarship in his third

mont, and took his seat in the last Parliament that met in College Green His first great effort was in behalf of the liberty of the press, when the Government sought to suppress the Press newspaper, the organ of the United Irishmen. This was to be accomplished by passing an Act which would make it compulsory on every publisher to find security for £2000 before he could publish a newspaper. Plunket denounced the Bill as curtailing the liberties of the press. Mr. Toler (afterwads Lord Norbury) declared that all the Government wanted was security. "Let," he continues, "the journalist print treason, sedition, or scandal, if he pleased, but let him be properly responsible for it. What, he would ask, was satisfaction to that society which might be injured by the promulgation of sedition or slanders, to the individuals whose good fame should be blasted by the publication of the most foul and unfounded calumnies."

Plunket followed; he insisted that the liberty of the press should be unshackled. He called on the Government "to reform the abuses which polluted every department. Let them reform the Parliament; let them mitigate their system of coercion; let them conciliate the people. Then may they laugh at the slanders of a licentious press. They will have a better defence against its malice than this unconstitutional measure can afford them. If they want proof of the efficacy of this remedy, let them look to what has occurred on the case of that unfortunate man, Williaın Orr,1 of which so much has been said. The falsest calumnies have been thrown on the judges who presided at that trial. Do the public believe those calumnies? Are the names of Yelverton

or Chamberlaine less loved and revered because they have been thus calumniated? No! The shafts of malice have been blunted by the virtue, the integrity, the humanity of those learned and upright men; so will they ever fall innoxious from the seven-fold shield of public and private virtue! The constitution of these countries rests on two great pillars-the liberty of the press and the trial by jury. The imperious necessity of the times (a necessity of which the existence cannot be denied, but into the causes of which it is not now time to inquire) has made it necessary to suspend for a time the trial by jury. If the liberty of the press is also to be given up, in what situation will this country be? What security any longer remains to the people to guard them against the encroachments of power? what vestige of constitution or liberty?"

So great was the impression made on the House by Plunket's speech that the Government consented to to reduce the amount of security from £2000 to £500.

It was on the 22nd January, 1797, that the first of the Union debates was opened on the occasion of the Vice-Regal speech. The Chief Secretary, Lord Castlereagh, then invited the Irish Senate to destroy their very existence2 by a Union with Great Britain.

Plunket, who had apparently been waiting for an opportunity of reply to the Secretary, followed in a speech, of which Sir Jonah Barrington speaks in terms that are hardly an exaggeration :-"At length Mr. Plunket arose, and in the ablest speech ever heard by any member in that Parliament, went at once to the grand and decisive point, the incompetence of Parliament: he could go no further on principle than Mr. Ponsonby,

but his language was irresistible, and he left nothing to be urged. It was perfect in eloquence, and unaswerable in reasoning. Its effect was indescribable; and Lord Castlereagh, whom he personally assailed, seemed to shrink from the encounter. That speech was of great weight, and it proved the eloquence, the sincerity, and the fortitude of the speaker." 1

To repeat the arguments which took place in the Irish House of Lords and Commons during the debates that preceded the Union would be wearisome to our readers, remembering that we have given them at great length in other places. 2 But neither the eloquence of Plunket nor of Ponsonby had any force to prevent the most mistaken assembly that had ever sat in Europe from passing the suicidalact which they had then passed for their own extinction. The Parliament(we speak of 1803) was now gone from Ireland; Dublin was deserted by her own sons; her lawyers, with few exceptions, had accepted, like others, the English gold; thirty-two chairmanships had been scattered amongst the bar by Lord Castlereagh, but there were men amongst them that money could not buy. These were George Ponsonby and Curran, and William Conyngham Plunket, and some others whose names are canonised in the pages of history.

In 1803, Plunket assisted at the prosecution of Robert Emmet for high-treason, and at the close of the same year was appointed Solicitor-General for Ireland. In Trinity term, 1804, he was elected Bencher of the King's Inns. In 1805, he accepted the office of Attorney. General, under the conciliating Lord Hardwicke, and his unconciliating Chancellor, Lord Redesdale. In 1806, he was continued in office by the Duke of Bedford, acting

under the advice of his patriotic Chancellor, George Ponsonby. In 1807, Plunket retired from office and from Parliament, and did not return to either until 1812. In the interval he applied himself exclusively to his professional practice, which soon became confined almost exclusively to the Court of Chancery. His powers as an advocate were unsurpassed. "Never was there in any court," writes Lord Brougham, an advocate who worked more constantly by close reasoning, and the plain unadorned statement of facts skilfully selected and placed in cold relief, and woven into the argument; nor was there ever an advocate who more strictly performed his highest duty of keeping the interests of the cause alone in view, and sacrificing to that cause every personal consideration."

In 1812 Plunket was returned to Parliament as Member for Trinity College. The following notice of the election isfrom a Dublin înorning paper of the 12th October, 1812 :—

ELECTION INTELLIGENCE. - The elec

tion for the college took place this day. Dr. Magee proposed the Right Hon. W. C. Plunket, and was seconded by Mr. Boston, the senior scholar. There being no opposition, Mr. Plunket was unanimously elected. Mr. Plunket then returned thanks to the electors, for their unanimous support, in a very handsome speech, replete with that candour and emphatic manner for which he is so remarkable. He made no professions, but referred to his past public conduct as a test for the future. He ex

pressed a wish always to hear from his constituents, and concluded with the following manly and patriotic declaration :-So help me, God, I shall never betray your rights, or barter the trust imparted to me by this respectable body. - We sincerely hope that every representative may honestly make use of the same expression.

The parliamentary progress of the Catholic question was slow, but irresistible. The Catholics who, according to Dean Swift, were of no weight whatever, "no more than women or children," in the first half of the eighteenth century, had now become a formidable political power. The brilliant victories, too, of the Emperor Napoleon had so alarmed the English nation that legislation on the subject of Catholic Emancipation was without much difficulty forced by Plunket on an unwilling government.

On the 22nd of June, 1812, Mr. Canning moved that the House would, early in the next session, take into its consideration the state of the laws affecting his Majesty's Roman Catholic subjects, with a view to a final and conciliatory adjustment compatible with the Protestant constitution in Church and State. A brilliant debate ensued, and the motion was carried by a majority of 235 to 106 votes.

Accordingly, in the following February, Grattan proposed a committee of the whole House in the terms of Canning's motion. Before he rose, Mr. Yorke called on the clerk to read from the Bill of Rights the passages guaranteeing a Protestant constitution in Church and State. Grattan began by declaring his opinion that these very passages might and ought to be contained in the preamble of any bill for the relief of the Catholics. His speech through out was a singularly clear, simple, and earnest argument. Exception was taken to the fact that he seemed to speak of Ireland as a distinct and independent country-a lapse that might well happen to any man who had once made Ireland a nation. Plunket spoke early in the debateafter Mr. Bankes, who had taken Grattan to task for the use of such terms in an imperial parliament, and had referred to the recent controversy between the Pope and Napoleon, as a proof that the Papacy was still inspired by a spirit of utter intolerance.

A generation of Irish Catholics has grown to manhood since eman

cipation, and lost the memory of the old bondage; so, many readers may find it difficult to understand the exact bearings of the masterly argument in which Plunket pleaded the rights of our fathers. I may therefore state, in a few sentences, the condition of the then existing penal laws. In many particulars, the laws against Catholics differed in the three kingdoms; in Scotland they were most severe, even touch-ing freedom of worship. In Ireland they had been relaxed so as to recognise full freedom of worship, the right to practise professions, to act under the royal commission in peace and war, to serve on juries, and to exercise the parliamentary franchise. But the acts of real grievance affecting the general body of the Catholics throughout the three kingdoms, and especially in England, were : — 1. The 13th Charles II., commonly called the Corporation Act, by which they were excluded from offices in cities and corporations. 2. The 25th Charles II., commonly called the Test Act, by which they were excluded from all civil and military offices-unless in the cases in which. the test was abolished by the Irish act of 1793. 3. The 30th Charles II., by which Catholics were interdicted from sitting in either House of Parliament. An act of William and Mary, operative in England, prevented the use of the parliamentary franchise. The Mutiny and Admiralty laws enabled officers to compel Catholic soldiers and sailors to attend Protestant worship. There were many other statutes, especially in England and Scotland, unrepealed, but practically inoperative. machinery of exclusion was either the oath of supremacy, declaring the king's civil and ecclesiastical preeminence within the realm, or the sacramental test of taking the Protestant communion before the acceptance of office, or a declaration denying transubstantiation, and denouncing the invocation of saints

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