At Westminster, O'Connell championed liberal and reform causes (he was internationally renowned as an abolitionist) but he failed in his declared objective for Ireland—the restoration of a separate Irish Parliament through the repeal of the 1800 Act of Union. Against the backdrop of a growing agrarian crisis and, in his final years, of the Great Famine, O'Connell contended with dissension at home. Criticism of his political compromises and of his system of patronage split the national movement that he had singularly led.

O'Connell was born at Carhan near Cahersiveen, County Kerry, to the O'Connells of Derrynane, a wealthy Roman Catholic family that, under the Penal Laws, had been able to retain land only through the medium of Protestant trustees and the forbearance of their Protestant neighbours.^[2] His parents were Morgan O'Connell and Catherine O'Mullane. The poet Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill was an aunt; and Daniel Charles, Count O'Connell, an Irish Brigade officer in the service of the King of France (and twelve years a prisoner of Napoleon), an uncle. O'Connell grew up in Derrynane House, the household of his bachelor uncle, Maurice "Hunting Cap" O'Connell (landowner, smuggler and justice of the peace) who made the young O'Connell his heir presumptive

In 1791, under his uncle's patronage, O'Connell and his elder brother Maurice were sent to continue their schooling in France at what is now Downside School. Revolutionary upheaval and their mob denunciation as "young priests" and "little aristocrats", persuaded them in January 1793 to flee their Jesuit college at Douai. They crossed the English Channel with the brothers John and Henry Sheares who displayed a handkerchief soaked, they claimed, in the blood of Louis XVI, the late executed king.^[3] The experience is said to have left O'Connell with a lifelong aversion to mob rule and violence.^[4]

After further legal studies in London, including a pupillage at Lincoln's Inn, O'Connell returned to Ireland in 1795. The Roman Catholic Relief Act 1793, while maintaining the Oath of Supremacy that excluded Catholics from parliament, the judiciary and the higher offices of state, had granted them the vote on the same limited terms as Protestants and removed most of the remaining barriers to their professional advancement. O'Connell, nonetheless, remained of the opinion that in Ireland the whole policy of the Irish Parliament and of the London-appointed Dublin Castle executive, was to repress the people and to maintain the ascendancy of a privileged and corrupt minority.^[5]

On 19 May 1798, O'Connell was called to the Irish Bar. Four days later, the United Irishmen staged their ill-fated rebellion. Toward the end of his life, O'Connell claimed to have been a United Irishman. Asked how that could be reconciled with his membership of the government's volunteer Yeomanry (the Lawyers Artillery Corps), he replied that in '98 "the popular party was so completely crushed that the only chance of doing any good for the people was by affecting ultra loyalty."^[6]

O'Connell appeared to have had little faith in the United Irish conspiracy or in their hopes of French intervention. He sat out the rebellion in his native Kerry. When in 1803 Robert Emmet faced execution for attempting an insurrection in Dublin he was condemned by O'Connell: as the cause of so much bloodshed Emmett had forfeited any claim to "compassion".^[7]

In the decades that followed, O'Connell practised private law and, although invariably in debt, reputedly had the largest income of any Irish barrister. In court, he sought to prevail by refusing deference, showing no compunction in studying and exploiting a judge's personal and intellectual weaknesses. He was long ranked below less accomplished Queen's Counsels, a status not open to Catholics until late in his career. But when offered he refused the senior judicial position of Master of the Rolls.^[8][9]

In 1802, O'Connell married his third cousin, Mary O'Connell. He did so in defiance of his benefactor, his uncle Maurice, who believed his nephew should have sought out an heiress.^[10] They had four daughters (three surviving), Ellen (1805-1883), Catherine (1808-1891), Elizabeth (1810-1883), and Rickarda (1815-1817) and four sons. Maurice (1803-1853), Morgan (1804-1885), John (1810-1858), and Daniel (1816-1897), all of whom were all to join their father as Members of Parliament. Despite O'Connell's early infidelities,^[11] the marriage was happy and Mary's death in 1837 was a blow from which her husband is said never to have recovered.^[12]

O'Connell's personal principles reflected the influences of the Enlightenment and of radical and democratic thinkers some of whom he had encountered in London and in masonic lodges. He was greatly influenced by William Godwin's Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (public opinion the root of all power, civil liberty and equality the bedrock of social stability),^[13] and was, for a period, converted to Deism by his reading of Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason.^[14] O'Connell from the 1820s has been described as an "English rationalist utilitarian",^[15] a "Benthamite".^[16] For a time Jeremy Bentham and O'Connell did become personal friends as well as political allies.^[17]

At Westminster O'Connell played a major part in passage of the Reform Act of 1832 and in the abolition of Slavery (1833) (a cause in which he continued to campaign).^[18] He welcomed the revolutions of 1830 in Belgium and France,^[18] and advocated "a complete severance of the Church from the State".^[19] Such liberalism made all the more intolerable to O'Connell the charge that as "Papists" he and his co-religionists could not be trusted with the defence of constitutional liberties.

O'Connell protested that, while "sincerely Catholic", he did not "receive" his politics "from Rome".^[20] In 1808 "friends of emancipation", Henry Grattan among them, proposed that fears of Popery might be allayed if the Crown were accorded the same right exercised by continental monarchs, a veto on the confirmation of Catholic bishops. Even when, in 1814, the Curia itself (then in a silent alliance with Britain against Napoleon) proposed that bishops be "personally acceptable to the king", O'Connell was unyielding in his opposition. Refusing any instruction from Rome as to "the manner of their emancipation", O'Connell declared that Irish Catholics should be content to "remain for ever without emancipation" rather than allow the king and his ministers "to interfere" with the Pope's appointment of their senior clergy.^[20][21]

In his travels in Ireland in 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville remarked on the "unbelievable unity between the Irish clergy and the Catholic population." The people looked to the clergy, and the clergy "rebuffed" by the "upper classes" ("Protestants and enemies"), had "turned all its attention to the lower classes; it has the same instincts, the same interests and the same passions as the people; [a] state of affairs altogether peculiar to Ireland".^[22] This is a unity, O'Connell argued, the bishops would have sacrificed had they agreed to Rome submitting their appointments for Crown approval. Licensed by the government they and their priests would have been as little regarded as the Anglican clergy of the Established Church.^[23] For O'Connell this would have represented a strategic loss. In most districts of the country, the priest was the sole figure, with standing independent of the Protestant landlords and magistrates, around whom a national movement could be reliably built.^[24][25] It would also have been to compromise the very conception of the Irish people as a nation.

Against the charge of political dictation from Rome, O'Connell insisted that the Catholic Church in Ireland "is a national Church". At the same time, he openly declared that "if the people rally to me they will have a nation for that Church".^[26] For O'Connell Catholicism defined the nation for which he sought both a civil and political emancipation. The "positive and unmistakable" mark of distinction between Irish and English, according to O'Connell's newspaper, the Pilot, was "the distinction created by religion".^[27]

In 1837, O'Connell clashed with William Smith O'Brien over the Limerick MP's support for granting state payments to Catholic clergy.^[28] The Catholic Bishops came out in support of O'Connell's stance, resolving "most energetically to oppose any such arrangement, and that they look upon those that labour to effect it as the worst enemies of the Catholic religion".^[29]

Conscious of their minority position in Ulster, Catholic support for O'Connell in the north was "muted". William Crolly, Bishop of Down and Connor and later Archbishop of Armagh, was ambivalent, anxious lest clerical support for Repeal disrupt his "carefully nurtured relationship with Belfast's liberal Presbyterians".^[30]

O'Connell "treasured his few Protestant Repealers". But to many of his contemporaries he appeared "ignorant" of the Protestant (largely Presbyterian) then-majority society of the north-east, Ulster, counties.^[31][32] Here there was already premonition of future Partition. While protesting that its readers wished only to preserve the Union, in 1843 Belfast's leading paper, the Northern Whig, proposed that if differences in "race" and "interests" argue for Ireland's separation from Great Britain then "the Northern 'aliens', holders of 'foreign heresies' (as O'Connell says they are)" should have their own "distinct kingdom", Belfast as its capital.^[33]

O'Connell seemed implicitly to concede the separateness of the Protestant North. He spoke "invading" Ulster to rescue "our Persecuted Brethren in the North". In the event, and in the face of the hostile crowds that disrupted his one foray to Belfast in 1841 ("the Repealer repulsed!"), he "tended to leave Ulster strictly alone".^[34] The northern Dissenters were not redeemed, in his view, by their record as United Irishmen. "The Presbyterians", he remarked, "fought badly at Ballynahinch ... and as soon as the fellows were checked they became furious Orangemen".^[35]

Perhaps persuaded by their presence through much of the south as but a thin layer of officials, landowners and their agents, O'Connell proposed that Protestants did not the staying power of true "religionists". Their ecclesiastical dissent (and not alone their unionism) was a function, he argued, of political privilege. To Dr Paul Cullen (the future Cardinal and Catholic Primate of Ireland) in Rome, O'Connell wrote:

The Protestants of Ireland... are political Protestants, that is, Protestants by reason of their participation in political power... If the Union were repealed and the exclusive system abolished, the great mass of the Protestant community would with little delay melt into the overwhelming majority of the Irish nation. Protestantism would not survive the Repeal ten years.^[36]

(O'Connell's view of the link between nation and faith is one that a number of Protestant Irish nationalists in converting to Catholicism may have embraced: Repealer and O'Connell's mayoral secretary William O'Neill Daunt,^[37] Home Ruler Joseph Biggar, Gaelic Leaguer William Gibson, Sinn Féiner William Stockley, and, on the day of his execution, Roger Casement).

Consistent with the position he had taken publicly in relation to the rebellions of 1798 and 1803, O'Connell focused on parliamentary representation and popular, but peaceful, demonstration to induce change. "No political change", he offered, "is worth the shedding of a single drop of human blood".^[38] His critics, however, were to see in his ability to mobilise the Irish masses an intimation of violence. It was a standing theme with O'Connell that if the British establishment did not reform the governance of Ireland, Irishmen would start to listen to the "counsels of violent men".^[38]

O'Connell insisted on his loyalty, greeting George IV effusively on his visit to Ireland in 1821. In contrast to his later successor Charles Stewart Parnell (although like O'Connell, himself a landlord), O'Connell was also consistent in his defence of property.^[8] Yet he was willing to defend those accused of political crimes and of agrarian outrages. In his last notable court appearance, the Doneraile conspiracy trials of 1829, O'Connell saved several tenant Whiteboys from the gallows.^[39]

Irish was O'Connell's mother tongue and that of the vast majority of the rural population. Yet he insisted on addressing his (typically open-air) meetings in English, sending interpreters out among the crowd to translate his words. At a time when "as a cultural or political concept 'Gaelic Ireland' found few advocates", O'Connell declared:

I am sufficiently utilitarian not to regret [the] gradual abandonment [of Irish]... Although the language is associated with many recollections that twine round the hearts of Irishmen, yet the superior utility of the English tongue, as the medium of all modern communication is so great, that I can witness, without a sigh, the gradual disuse of Irish.^[40]

O'Connell's "indifference to the fate of the language", a decade before the Famine, was consistent with the policies of the Catholic Church (which under Cullen was to develop a mission to the English-speaking world)^[41] and of the government-funded National Schools. Together, these were to combine in the course of the century to accelerate the near complete conversion to English.^[42]

There is no evidence to suggest that O'Connell saw "the preservation or revival or any other aspect of 'native culture' (in the widest sense of the term) as essential to his political demands".^[40]

To broaden and intensify the campaign for emancipation, in 1823, O'Connell established Catholic Association. For a "Catholic rent" of a penny a month (typically paid through the local priest), this, for the first time, drew the labouring poor into a national movement. Their investment enabled O'Connell to mount "monster" rallies (crowds of over 100,000) that stayed the hands of authorities, and emboldened larger enfranchised tenants to vote for pro-Emancipation candidates in defiance of their landlords.^[43]

The government moved to suppress the Association by a series of prosecutions, but with limited success. Already in 1822 O'Connell had manoeuvred his principal foe, the Attorney General, William Saurin, into actions sufficiently intemperate to ensure his removal by the Lord Lieutenant.^[44] His confrontation with Dublin Corporation, equally unbending in its defence of the "Protestant Constitution", took a more tragic turn.

Outraged at O'Connell's refusal to retract his description of the corporation as "beggarly",^[45] one of their number challenged O'Connell to a duel. John D'Esterre (who happened to be a distant cousin of Mary O'Connell) had thought O'Connell might back down, for he had earlier refused a challenge from an opposing lawyer. The former royal marine was in any case confident of his aim. Recognising that his reputation would never be safe if he again demurred, O'Connell accepted.^[46] The duel took place on 2 February 1815 at Bishopscourt, Kildare. Both men fired. O'Connell, unharmed, mortally wounded D'Esterre. Distressed by the killing, O'Connell offered D'Esterre's widow a pension. She consented to an allowance for her daughter and this O'Connell paid regularly for more than thirty years until his death.^[5]

Some months later, O'Connell was engaged to fight a second duel with the Chief Secretary for Ireland, Robert Peel, O'Connell's repeated references to him as "Orange Peel" ("a man good for nothing except to be a champion for Orangeism") being the occasion. Only O'Connell's arrest in London en route to their rendezvous in Ostend prevented the encounter, and the affair went no further.^[47] But in 1816, following his return to faithful Catholic observance, O'Connell made "a vow in heaven" never again to put himself in a position where he might shed blood.^[48] In "expiation for the death D'Esterre", he is said thereafter to have accepted the insults of men whom he refused to fight "with pride".^[49] (Thomas Moore privately proposed that "removing, by his example, that restraint which the responsibility of one to another under the law of duelling imposed", was "one of the worst things, perhaps, O'Connell had done for Ireland", and had given his penchant for personal abuse free rein).^[50]

In 1828, O'Connell defeated a member of the British cabinet in a parliamentary by-election in County Clare. His triumph, as the first Catholic to be returned in a parliamentary election since 1688, made a clear issue of the Oath of Supremacy—the requirement that MPs acknowledge the King as "Supreme Governor" of the Church and thus forswear the Roman communion. Fearful of the widespread disturbances that might follow from continuing to insist on the letter of the oath, the government finally relented. With the Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington, invoking the spectre of civil war, the Catholic Relief Act became law in 1829.^[51] The act was not made retroactive so that O'Connell had to stand again for election. He was returned unopposed in July 1829.^[52]

Such was O'Connell's prestige as "the Liberator" that George IV reportedly complained that while "Wellington is the King of England", O'Connell was "King of Ireland", and he, himself, merely "the dean of Windsor." Some of O'Connell's younger lieutenants in the new struggle for Repeal—the "Young Irelanders"—were critical of the leader's acclaim. Michael Doheny noted that the 1829 act had only been the latest in a succession of "relief" measures dating back to the Papists Act 1778. Honour was due rather to those who had "wrung from the reluctant spirit of a far darker time the right of living, of worship, of enjoying property, and exercising the franchise".^[53]

Entry to parliament had not come without a price. With Jeremy Bentham, O'Connell had considered allowing George Ensor, a protestant member of the Catholic Association, to stand as his running mate in the Clare election.^[54] But Ensor had objected to what he identified as the "disenfranchisement project" in the relief bill.^[55] Bringing the Irish franchise into line with England's, the 1829 Act raised the property threshold for voting in county seats five-fold to ten pounds, eliminating the middling tenantry (the Irish "forty-shilling freeholders") who had risked much in defying their landlords on O'Connell's behalf in the Clare election. The measure reduced the Irish Catholic electorate from 216,000 voters to just 37,000.^[56]

Perhaps trying to rationalise the sacrifice of his freeholders, O'Connell wrote privately in March 1829 that the new ten-pound franchise might actually "give more power to Catholics by concentrating it in more reliable and less democratically dangerous hands".^[32] The Young Irelander John Mitchel believed that this was the intent: to detach propertied Catholics from the increasingly agitated rural masses.^[57]

In a pattern that had been intensifying from the 1820s as landlords cleared land to meet the growing livestock demand from England,^[58] tenants had been banding together to oppose evictions, and to attack tithe and process servers. De Tocqueville recorded these Whiteboys and Ribbonmen protesting:

The law does nothing for us. We must save ourselves. We have a little land which we need for ourselves and our families to live on, and they drive us out of it. To whom should we address ourselves?... Emancipation has done nothing for us. Mr. O'Connell and the rich Catholics go to Parliament. We die of starvation just the same.^[59]

In 1830, discounting evidence that "unfeeling men had given in favour of cultivating sheep and cattle instead of human beings", O'Connell had sought repeal of the Sub-Letting Act which facilitated the clearings.^[60] In a Letter to the People of Ireland (1833)^[61] he also proposed a 20 percent tax on absentee landlords for poor relief, and the abolition of tithes^[62] levied atop rents by the Anglican establishment—"the landlords' Church".

An initially peaceful campaign of non-payment of tithes turned violent in 1831 when the newly founded Irish Constabulary in lieu of payment began to seize property and conduct evictions. Although opposed to the use of force, O'Connell defended those detained in the so-called Tithe War. For all eleven accused in the death of fourteen constables in the Carrickshock incident, O'Connell helped secure acquittals. Yet fearful of embarrassing his Whig allies (who had brutally suppressed tithe and poor law protests in England), in 1838 he rejected the call of the Protestant tenant-righter William Sharman Crawford for the complete elimination of the Church of Ireland levy. In its stead, O’Connell accepted the Tithe Commutation Act.^[63][64] This did effectively exempt the majority of cultivators—those who held land at will or from year to year—from the charge, while offering those still liable a 25 percent reduction and a forgiveness of arrears,^[65] and did not, as feared, lead to a general compensating increase in rents.^[66]