The Greville Memoirs, Part 1 (of 3), Volume 3 (of 3): A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IVGreville, Charles
History
The Greville Memoirs, Part 1 (of 3), Volume 3 (of 3): A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV
Greville, Charles
Great Britain -- History -- George IV, 1820-1830; Great Britain -- History -- William IV, 1830-1837
the result of this compact pledged the House of Commons to the
principle, they refuse to retrace their steps, and offer the House
of Lords the alternative of its recognition (knowing that they
cannot in sincerity, honour, or conscience recognise it) or that
of an irreparable injury to the Irish Church, which it is the
grand object of the Lords to uphold. But the question must not be
considered as one merely affecting the interests of the clergy of
Ireland. If that were all, there might be no such great harm in
these proceedings. Entertaining very strong (and as I think very
sound) opinions with respect to the expediency of dealing with its
revenues, and for purposes ultimately to be effected which they
cannot yet venture to avow, they might be justified, or think
themselves justified, in coping with the difficulties which
embarrass this question in the best mode that is open to them, and
deem it better that the Irish clergy should suffer the temporary
privations they undergo than that the final settlement of the
ecclesiastical question should be indefinitely postponed. But they
do not pretend to be actuated by any such considerations; their
declared object is to restore peace to Ireland, to terminate the
Tithe quarrel, to raise the Protestant clergy from their fallen
state, and to assert the authority of the law by taking away the
inducements which now exist for setting the law at defiance. Those
who undertake to govern the country are above all things bound to
see that the laws are obeyed, and they do not deserve the name of
a Government if they submit to, much less if they connive at, a
permanent state of anarchy in any part of the country. They know
that the law in Ireland is a dead letter, that neither to statute
nor common law do the lower orders of Irish Catholics (the bulk of
the nation) pay the slightest obedience, and that they are
countenanced and urged on in their disobedience by those agitators
with whom the Government act in political fellowship, and in
deference to whom their measures have been shaped. Granting that
after the adoption of the resolution by the House of Commons they
were bound to insert it in their Bill, what justification is there
for their refusal to receive the Bill back from the Lords with no
other alteration than the omission of the appropriation clause? In
so refusing they destroy their own measure; they publish to the
world that it is the principle of appropriation, and not the Tithe
composition, that they really care for; and in thus strangling
their own Bill, because they cannot tack that principle on to it,
they make themselves accomplices of the outrages and violence
which are perpetrated in the Tithe warfare, and abettors of the
regular and systematic violation of the law. The King's Government
exhibits itself in a conspiracy with Catholic agitators and
Protestant republicans against the clergy of the Established
Church and against the laws of the land. If they are sincere in
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