The Adventures of Miss Sophia Berkley and the Politics of Consent 115
shots across the bow. De facto Prime Minister Pitt was convinced that the ‘practices of papists and emissaries of France’ had been closely concerned with the start of the Dublin riot and he did not accept that Presbyterian weavers of the Liberties had been the main participants.25 Pitt maintained this stance despite the warnings of Rigby that Catholics had probably little to do with the riot. Sir Robert Wilmot, the Lord Lieutenant’s London secretary, also insisted that Catholics were to blame, wondering whether those who believed otherwise had ‘embarrassed’ themselves ‘by representing that popery had no hand in the disturbances of the third of December . . . French incendiaries paced these simple wretches in the front of the battle and sheltered their own creatures in the rear’.26 For these figures, the Catholic and Continental menace had not yet been banished. The anti-union riot was an unambiguous indication that Ireland, and the Irish public (or at least, the Protestant section of it – though it would be unwise to restrict the politicisation to them alone), had become radicalised, even more so than during the controversy over Wood’s Halfpence in the 1720s. Moreover, unlike the brief but intense spurt of widespread political interest displayed by Irish Anglicans in the 1720s, this time the population would remain radicalised. This radicalism was expressed through a greater interest in national politics, an interest which would eventually culminate in the emergence of the ‘Patriot Party’ under Henry Flood. As a version of patriotism took hold of elite sections of the ruling class, it also filtered down to the literate and even the illiterate Anglican public. When the settlement of the Money Bill dispute became widely known, for example, the Dublin crowd was enraged and about 1,000 congregated in College Green and burned an effigy of the Speaker of the House of Commons – a warning to those ‘patriot’ politicians who had appeared to have been bought up by the Castle in negotiations, their patriotism revealed as a veil for highly personal venality. Allegory and ‘fictive’ representations of current affairs were central elements of the cultural life of the newly energised patriot population. The Gaelic poets placed their hopes in the restoration of the old order, the ‘return’ of the Pretender, the revival of a Catholic state. Irish Anglican Patriots used some of the same imagery as their Catholic compatriots. Both communities invested heavily in allegorising intimate, sexual and conjugal relationships as a means of discussing the politics (especially Anglo-Irish relations) of the day. However, Irish Anglican patriot dreams were, of course, very different from those of the Gaelic poets. They wished for a parliament completely in their own control, a continuation of a connection to Britain through the monarch but autonomy within the empire. They essentially wanted a marriage, not