Ascendancy landlords, he was deeply relieved by the British victory at
Ballinamuck on September 8, when the insurgents were defeated. And yet
no sooner had the danger of invasion reced ed than Edgeworth and his
company found themselves facing a more perilous threat. Distrusted as a
liberal by his fellow Protestants, he was now targeted as a crypto-rebel.
Frenzied Orange revelers surrounded him in Longford Town and nearly
lynched him when he was denounced as a “spy.” After this frightening
episode, the family returned to the eerie silence of their abandoned estate.
“Within the house, everything was as we had left it,” Maria later recalled.
“A map that we had been consulting was still open on the library table,
with pencils and slips of paper containing the first lesson s in arithmetic in
which some of the young had been engaged.” Why, the Protestant neigh-
bors whispered, had Edgeworthstown House been spared by the
marauders, who had plundered every other estate?
2
Why, asked the Prime Minister at about the same time, was Ireland
such a recurrent disaster? Consulting his own global maps from London,
William Pitt reflected on the alarming sequence of recent English events:
poor harvests, risi ng prices, bread riots, budget deficits, banking crises,
radical conspiracies, and a barely averted invasion by 100,000 soldiers of
the army of France. Had the Irish Rebellion been better co-ordinated with
these near catastrophes, the British state would likely have collapsed.
3
If
the British Empire were to survive its war against the mobilized energies of
revolutionary France, something would have to be done about Ireland,
the weakest link in the imperial chain. By the end of the year Prime
Minister Pitt had made his decision: Ireland had to be incorporated
directly into the Union, much as Scotla nd had been a century before.
4
Yet this was easier said than done, for Ireland wa s plagued by deep
2
BME, 139; Memoir of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, II: 205–38, 232; Frances Anne Edgeworth,
A Memoir of Maria Edgeworth with Selections from her Lettters, 3 vols. (London, 1867), I: 83–
93. For additional letters see Augustus J. C. Hare, The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth,2
vols. (Boston, 1894).
3
“This country,” Pitt told the House of Commons on January 22, “is at this time engaged in
the most momentous conflict that ever occurred in the history of the world. A conflict in
which Great Britain is distinguished for having made the only manly and successful stand
against the common enemy of civil society” (Cobbett’s Parliamentary History of England
(London, 1819), XXXIV: 267; see also 242–9, 258). On Pitt’s response to the crisis
of 1797–1800, see J. Holland Rose, William Pitt and the Great War (Westport, 1971),
299–320, 339–64, and John Ehrman, The Younger Pitt: The Consuming Struggle, III
(London, 1996), 1–157, 258–64. On social conditions, see E. P. Thompson, The Making
of the English Working Class (New York, 1963), 472–97, and Asa Briggs, The Making of
Modern England: Age of Improvement, 1783–1867 (New York, 1959), 129–83.
4
For accounts of British government thinking about Ireland during this period, see
Patrick Geoghegan, The Irish Act of Union: A Study in High Politics (New York, 1999),
and G. C. Bolton, The Passing of the Irish Act of Union: A Study in Parliamentary Politics
(Oxford, 1966).
18 Imagining Great Britain