The Emergence of Irish Gothic Fiction

58 The Emergence of Irish Gothic Fiction group of men who ‘managed’ it on behalf of the Irish executive (the Lord Lieutenant, the Chief Secretary, and Dublin Castle officials). The executive was appointed directly by London, and it issued its instructions to the undertakers who were expected to handle the votes in the Irish parliament to ensure the desired outcomes. Although an inferior institution to its London equivalent because of Poynings’s Law (1495) and the Declaratory Act of 1720, it was still important to gain the consent of the Irish parliament in order to raise the revenue necessary to the workings of the government. In other words, it was very important to Westminster that the Irish parliament played ball, and to ensure this harmony, the undertakers managed the parliament, or they ‘undertook’ to do so, hence their title.

What brought the dominance of the undertakers to a close were the Money Bill dispute and its fallout. The three most important undertakers at the time were Henry Boyle, the Speaker of the House of Commons; George Stone, the Archbishop of Armagh; and John Ponsonby, the Chief Commissioner of the Irish Revenue Board. Boyle was the main political player for most of the period, and this created tension with Stone and Ponsonby, who were jealous of Boyle’s position and eagerly looked for ways to overtake him politically. A major opportunity appeared to present itself in 1751 when Stone’s patron, the Duke of Dorset, became Lord Lieutenant, and Dorset’s son, Lord Sackville, was made Chief Secretary. For Stone, his supporters were now in major positions of power, and it was time to make some bold political moves. The tensions between the undertakers boiled over in 1751–3 in relation to two issues. In the first place, Boyle was determined to resist Stone’s power games and demonstrate his own authority by destroying the career of Arthur Jones Nevill, the surveyor general and one of the archbishop’s protégés, and he effectively had Nevill expelled from parliament for defalcation, which incensed Stone. Then, an Irish money bill, which had been sent over to Westminster for inspection in accordance with Poynings’s Law, was returned altered to the Irish House of Commons where it was rejected, mostly by Boyle’s supporters, thus precipitating a constitutional crisis.

The alteration itself was significant. There was a surplus in the Irish Treasury, and the Irish Parliament decided that it would dispose of the surplus by reducing the (considerable) national debt. This disposal posed a serious financial threat to members of the Irish Monti since paying off the national debt would also involve paying off the principal loaned to the Irish Treasury by the Monti, and on whose interest payments many Irish Anglicans now depended. As Sean D. Moore highlights, ‘outcomes of earlier debates over taking such a measure suggest that the majority