Editing Thomas Moore (section)

==Political and historical writing==
===Squib writer for the Whigs===
To support his family Moore entered the field of political [[Squib (writing)|squib writing]] on behalf of his Whig friends and patrons. The [[Whigs (British political party)|Whigs]] had been split by the divided response of [[Edmund Burke]] and [[Charles James Fox|Charles Fox]] to the French Revolution. But with the antics of the Prince Regent, and in particular, his highly public efforts to disgrace and divorce [[Caroline of Brunswick|Princess Caroline]], proving a lightning rod for popular discontent, they were finding new unity and purpose.

From the "Whigs as Whigs", Moore claimed not to have received "even the semblance of a favour" (Lord Moira, they "hardly acknowledge as one of themselves"). And with exceptions "easily counted", Moore was convinced that there was "just as much selfishness and as much low-party spirit among them generally as the Tories".<ref name="Moore, Political and Historical Writings" />{{rp|237, 248}} But for Moore, the fact that the Prince Regent held fast against Catholic admission to parliament may have been reason sufficient to turn on his former friend and patron. Moore's [[Satire|Horatian mockery]] of the Prince in the pages of ''[[The Morning Chronicle]]'' were collected in ''Intercepted Letters, or the Two-Penny Post-Bag'' (1813).

===The lampooning of Castlereagh===
[[File:Bloody Castlereagh (2).png|175px|thumb|right|Bloody Castlereagh, 1798]]Another, and possibly more personal, target for Moore was the [[Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs|Foreign Secretary]] [[Lord Castlereagh]]. A reform-minded [[Ulster]] [[Presbyterian Church in Ireland|Presbyterian]] turned Anglican [[Tories (British political party)|Tory]], as [[Chief Secretary for Ireland|Irish Secretary]] Castlereagh had been ruthless in the suppression of the United Irishmen and in pushing the [[Acts of Union 1800|Act of Union]] through the [[Parliament of Ireland|Irish Parliament]]. 

In what were the "verbal equivalents of the political cartoons of the day",<ref name="Poetry Foundation" /> ''Tom Crib's Memorial to Congress'' (1818), ''[https://verse.press/poem/to-the-ship-in-which-lord-castlereagh-sailed-for-31871 To the Ship in Which Lord Castlereagh Sailed to the Continent]'' (1818) and ''[[iarchive:fablesforholyal00moor/page/n15/mode/2up|Fables for the Holy Alliance]]'' (1823), Moore lampoons Castlereagh's deference to the reactionary interests of Britain's continental allies.<ref name=":6" />{{rp|332-337}} At the [[Congress of Vienna]], the Foreign Secretary had signed "away the Rights of Man/ To Russian threats and Austrian juggle" and, content with but a [https://opil.ouplaw.com/page/498 declaration against the slave trade], had left "the sinking African/ To fall without one saving struggle--".<ref>{{Cite web |title=To The Ship In Which Lord Castlereagh Sailed For The Continent |url=https://verse.press/poem/to-the-ship-in-which-lord-castlereagh-sailed-for-31871 |access-date=2025-05-02 |website=verse.press}}</ref>

Widely read, so that Moore eventually produced a sequel, was the verse novel ''[[The Fudge Family in Paris]]'' (1818). The family of an Irishman working as a propagandist for Castlereagh in Paris, the Fudges are accompanied by an accomplished tutor and classicist, Phelim Connor. An upright but disillusioned Irish Catholic, his letters to a friend reflect Moore's own views.

Connor's regular epistolary denunciations of Castlereagh have two recurrent themes. The first is Castlereagh as "the embodiment of the sickness with which Ireland had infected British politics as a consequence of the union":<ref name="Bew 2011">{{cite book |last1=Bew |first1=John |title=Castlereagh: Enlightenment, War and Tyranny |date=2011 |publisher=Quercas |location=London |isbn=978-0-85738-186-6 |pages=530–531}}</ref> "We sent thee Castlereagh – as heaps of dead Have slain their slayers by the pest they spread". The second is that at the time of the Acts of Union Castlereagh's support for Catholic emancipation had been disingenuous. Castlereagh had been master of "that faithless craft", which can "court the slave, can swear he shall be freed", but then "basely spurns him" when his "point is gain'd".<ref>{{cite book |last1=Moore |first1=Thomas |title=The Fudge Family in Paris |date=1818 |publisher=Longmans |location=London |pages=69, 76}}</ref>

Through a mutual connection, Moore learned that Castlereagh had been particularly stung by the verses of the Tutor in the ''Fudge Family.''<ref name="Bew 2011" /> For openly casting the same dispersions against the former Chief Secretary—that he bloodied his hands in 1798 and deliberately deceived Catholics at the time of the Union—in 1811 the London-based Irish publisher, and former United Irishman, [[Peter Finnerty]] was sentenced to eighteen months for libel.<ref>{{Cite web|title=Peter Finnerty – Irish Biography|url=https://www.libraryireland.com/biography/PeterFinnerty.php|access-date=27 March 2021|website=www.libraryireland.com}}</ref>

===''The Memoirs of Captain Rock''===
[[File:Maclise, Capt Rock, 1834 (2).jpg|thumb|left|"The Installation of Captain Rock", Daniel Maclise, 1834]]
{{Main|Memoirs of Captain Rock}}

As a partisan squib writer, Moore played a role not dissimilar to that of [[Jonathan Swift]] a century earlier. Moore greatly admired Swift as a satirist, but charged him with caring no more for the "misery" of his Roman Catholic countrymen "than his own [[Gulliver's Travels|Gulliver]] for the sufferings of so many disenfranchised [[Yahoo (Gulliver's Travels)|Yahoos]]".<ref name="Moore 1835">{{cite book |last1=Moore |first1=Thomas |title=Memoirs of Captain Rock |date=1835 |publisher=Baudry's European Library |location=Paris |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=eMmqG9-0jiEC&q=Memoirs+of+Captain+Rock&pg=PA146 |access-date=20 August 2020}}</ref><ref>Book the First, Chapter XIII, {{cite book |last1=Moore |first1=Thomas |title=Political and Historical Writings on Irish and British Affairs by Thomas Moore, Introduced by Brendan Clifford |date=1993 |publisher=Athol Books |location=Belfast |isbn=0-85034-067-5 |pages=49–50}}</ref> ''[[Memoirs of Captain Rock|The Memoirs of Captain Rock]]'' might have been Moore's response to those who questioned whether the son of a Dublin grocer entertaining English audiences from his home in [[Wiltshire]] was himself connected to the great mass of his countrymen – to those whose remitted rents helped sustain the great houses among which he was privileged to move.

''The Memoirs'' relate the history of Ireland as told by a contemporary, the scion of a Catholic family that lost land in successive English settlements. The character, [[Captain Rock]], is folkloric but the history is in earnest.  When it catches up with the narrator in the late [[Penal Laws against Irish Catholics|Penal Law]] era, his family has been reduced to the "class of wretched [[Cotter (farmer)|cottiers]]". Exposed to the voracious demands of spendthrift Anglo-Irish landlords (pilloried by [[Castle Rackrent|Maria Edgeworth]]), both father and son assume captaincies among the "White-boys, Oak-boys, and Hearts-of Steel", the tenant conspiracies that attack tax collectors, terrorise the landlords' agents and violently resist evictions.<ref>from ''Memoirs of Captain Rock'', Book the Second, Chapter I, {{cite book |last1=Moore |first1=Thomas |title=Political and Historical Writings on Irish and British Affairs by Thomas Moore, Introduced by Brendan Clifford |date=1993 |publisher=Athol Books |location=Belfast |isbn=0-85034-067-5 |pages=53–55}}</ref><ref name="Moore 1835" />

This low-level agrarian warfare continued through, and beyond, the [[Great Irish Famine]] of the 1840s. It was only after this catastrophe, which as Prime Minister Moore's Whig friend, Lord Russell, failed in any practical measure to allay,<ref>{{Cite book |title= The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845–1849 |last=Woodham-Smith |first=Cecil |publisher=Penguin |year=1962 |location=London |isbn=978-0-14-014515-1|pages=410–411}}</ref> that British governments began to assume responsibility for agrarian conditions. At the time of ''Captain Rock'''s publication (1824), the commanding issue of the day was not tenant rights or land reform. It was the final instalment of [[Catholic Emancipation]]: Castlereagh's unredeemed promise of Catholic admission to parliament.

===''Letter to the Roman Catholics of Dublin''===
[[File:Terrrors of Catholic Emancipation.jpg|thumb|right|"Terrors of Emancipation" – The Roman Catholic Relief Act, 1829]]
Since within a united kingdom, Irish Catholics would be reduced to a distinct minority, Castlereagh's promises of their parliamentary emancipation seemed credible at the time of the Union. But the provision was stripped out of the union bills when in England the admission of Catholics to the "Protestant Constitution" encountered the standard objection: that as subject to political direction from Rome, Catholics could not be entrusted with the defence of constitutional liberties. Moore rallied to the "liberal compromise" proposed by [[Henry Grattan]], who had moved the enfranchisement of Catholics in the old Irish parliament. Fears of "Popery" were to be allayed by according the Crown a "negative control", a veto, on the appointment of Catholic bishops.

In an open ''Letter to the Roman Catholics of Dublin'' (1810), Moore noted that the Irish bishops (legally resident in Ireland only from 1782) had themselves been willing to comply with a practice otherwise universal in Europe. Conceding a temporal check of papal authority, he argued, was in Ireland's [[Gallicanism|Gallican]] tradition. In the time of "her native monarchy", the Pope had had no share in the election of Irish bishops. "Slavish notions of papal authority" developed only as a consequence of the English conquest. The native aristocracy had sought in Rome a "spiritual alliance" against the new "temporal tyranny" at home.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Moore |first1=Thomas |title=Letter to the Roman Catholics of Dublin |date=1810 |publisher=Gilbert and Hodges |location=Dublin |pages=12–13 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=cbnARspo3BwC}}</ref>

In resisting royal assent and in placing "their whole hierarchy at the disposal of the Roman court", Irish Catholics would "unnecessarily" be acting in "remembrance of times, which it is the interest of all parties [Catholic and Protestant, Irish and English] to forget". Such argument made little headway against the man Moore decried as a [[demagogue]],<ref name=":6" />{{rp|504}} but who, as a result of his uncompromising stand, was to emerge as the undisputed leader of the Catholic interest in Ireland, [[Daniel O’Connell]].

Even when, in 1814, the [[Roman Curia|Curia]] itself (then still in silent alliance with Britain against [[Napoleon]]) proposed that bishops be "personally acceptable to the king", O'Connell was opposed. Better, he declared, that Irish Catholics "remain for ever without emancipation" rather than allow the king and his ministers "to interfere" with the Pope's appointment of Irish prelates. At stake was the unity of church and people. "Licensed" by the government, the bishops and their priests would be no more regarded than the ministers of the established Church of Ireland.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=MacDonagh |first1=Oliver |title=The Politicization of the Irish Catholic Bishops, 1800–1850 |journal=The Historical Journal |date=1975 |volume=18 |issue=1 |page=40 |doi=10.1017/S0018246X00008669 |jstor=2638467|s2cid=159877081 }}</ref>

When final emancipation came in 1829, the price O'Connell paid was the disenfranchisement of the [[Forty-shilling freeholders]] – those who, in the decisive protest against Catholics exclusion, defied their landlords in voting O'Connell in the [[1828 Clare by-election]]. The "purity" of the Irish church was sustained. Moore lived to see the exceptional papal discretion thus confirmed reshaping the Irish hierarchy culminating in 1850 with the appointment of the Rector of the [[Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples|Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith]] in Rome, Paul Cullen, as [[Primacy of Ireland|Primate Archbishop of Armagh]].

===''Travels of an Irish Gentleman in Search of a Religion''===
[[File:Thomas Moore c1817.jpg|thumb|Thomas Moore by Martin Archer Shee c 1817, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin.]]
In a call heeded by Protestants of all denominations, in 1822 the new Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin, [[William Magee (archbishop of Dublin)|William Magee]], declared the absolute necessity of winning an Irish majority for the Reformed faith — a "Second Reformation".<ref>{{Cite book |title=The Bible War in Ireland: the "Second Reformation" and the Polarization of Protestant-Catholic Relations, 1800–1840 |last=Whelan |first=Irene |publisher=University of Wisconsin Press |year=2005 |location=Madison WI}}</ref> Carrying "religious tracts expressly written for the edification of the Irish peasantry", the "editor" of Captain Rock's Memoirs is an English missionary in the ensuing "bible war".<ref name=":8" />{{rp|18}} Catholics, who coalesced behind O'Connell in the [[Catholic Association]], believed that proselytising advantage was being sought in hunger and distress (that tenancies and food were being used to secure converts), and that the usual political interests were at play.<ref>{{Cite book |title=Irish Unionism-1920 |last=Good |first=James Winder |publisher=T Fisher Unwin |year=1920 |location=London |pages=106}}</ref><ref>Desmond Bowen: ''The Protestant Crusade in Ireland, 1800–70: A Study of Protestant–Catholic Relations between the Act of Union and Disestablishment'' (1978).</ref>

Moore's narrator in ''[[iarchive:travelsofirishge01mooruoft|Travels of an Irish Gentleman in Search of a Religion]]'' (1833) is again fictional. He is, as Moore had been, a Catholic student at Trinity College. On news of Emancipation (passage of the 1829 Catholic Relief Bill), he exclaims: "Thank God! I may now, if I like, turn Protestant". Oppressed by the charge that Catholics are "a race of obstinate and obsolete religionists […] unfit for freedom", and freed from "the point of honour" that would have prevented him from abandoning his church in the face of continuing sanctions, he sets out to explore the tenets of the "true" religion.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Moore |first1=Thomas |title=Travels of an Irish Gentleman in Search of a Religion (in Two Volumes) |date=1833 |publisher=Longman |location=London |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=9TIJAAAAQAAJ}}</ref><ref name=":8" />{{rp|161-162}}

Predictably, the resolve the young man draws from his theological studies is to remain true to the faith of his forefathers (not to exchange "the golden armour of the old Catholic Saints" for "heretical brass").<ref name="Moore, Political and Historical Writings" />{{rp|178}} The argument, however, was not the truth of Catholic doctrine. It was the inconsistency and fallacy of the bible preachers. Moore's purpose, he was later to write, was to put "upon record" the "disgust" he felt at "the arrogance with which most Protestant parsons assume […] credit for being the only true Christians, and the insolence with which […] they denounce all Catholics as [[Idolatry|idolators]] and [[Antichrist]]".<ref name="Moore, Political and Historical Writings" />{{rp|248}} Had his young man found "among the Orthodox of the first [Christian] ages" one "particle" of their rejection of the supposed "corruptions" of the Roman church – justification not by [[sola fide|faith alone]] but also by [[good works]], [[transubstantiation]], and veneration of saints, relics and images — he would have been persuaded.<ref name="Moore, Political and Historical Writings" />{{rp|178}}

Moore's work elicited an immediate riposte. The ''Second Travels of an Irish Gentleman in Search of Religion'' (1833)<ref>{{Cite book |last=White |first=Joseph Blanco |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=YOGSTJNloE4C&pg=PA1 |title=Second travels of an Irish gentleman in search of a religion / |date=1833 |publisher=R. Milliken |series= |location=Dublin}}</ref> was a vindication of the reformed faith by an author described as "not the editor of ''Captain Rock's Memoirs''" — the Spanish exile and Protestant convert [[Joseph Blanco White]].<ref>{{Cite web |last=Whelan |first=Brian |date=2017 |title=The Faith Journey of Joseph Blanco White |url=https://www.ireland.anglican.org/news/7212/the-faith-journey-of-joseph |access-date=2023-04-11 |website=Church of Ireland}}</ref>

In 1816, Moore had published a ''A Series of Sacred Songs, Duets and Trios'' of which the first, [https://hymnology.hymnsam.co.uk/t/thou-art,-o-god,-the-life-and-light "Thou art, O God"], became a popular hymn.<ref name=":2" /> But despite acknowledging Catholicism as Ireland's "national faith",<ref>Moore, as "Their Devoted Servant", dedicates ''The Travel of an Irish Gentleman'' "to the People of Ireland" as a "Defence their Ancient and National Faith", {{cite book |last1=Moore |first1=Thomas |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=9TIJAAAAQAAJ |title=Travels of an Irish Gentleman in Search of a Religion (in Two Volumes) |date=1833 |publisher=Longman |location=London}}</ref> and the example of a devout mother, Moore appears to have abandoned the formal practice of his religion as soon as he entered Trinity.<ref name="Harry White" />

[[Brendan Clifford]], editor of Moore's political writings, interprets Moore's philosophy as "cheerful paganism", or, at the very least, "''à la carte'' Catholicism" in which Moore favoured "what scriptural Protestantism hated: the music, the theatricality, the symbolism, the idolatry".<ref name=":8" />{{rp|15}} 

===Sheridan, Fitzgerald and ''The History of Ireland''===
In 1825, Moore's ''[[Memoirs of the Life of Richard Brinsley Sheridan]]'' was finally published after nine years of work on and off. It proved popular, went through a number of editions, and helped establish Moore's reputation among literary critics. The work had a political aspect: Sheridan was not only a playwright, he was a Whig politician and a friend of [[Charles James Fox|Fox]]. Moore judged Sheridan an uncertain friend of reform. But he has Sheridan articulate in his own words a good part of what was to be the United Irish case for separation from England.

Writing in 1784 to his brother, Sheridan explains that the "subordinate situation [of Ireland] prevents the formation of any party among us, like those you have in England, composed of person acting upon certain principles, and pledged to support each other". Without the prospect of obtaining power – which in Ireland is "lodged in a branch of the English government" (the Dublin Castle executive) – there is little point in the members of parliament, no matter how personally disinterested, collaborating for any public purpose. Without an accountable executive the interests of the nation are systematically neglected.<ref name="Moore, Political and Historical Writings" />{{rp|81-82}}

It is against this, the truncated state of politics in Ireland, that Moore sees [[Lord Edward Fitzgerald]], a "Protestant reformer" who wished for "a democratic [[House of Commons]] and the Emancipation of his Catholic countrymen", driven toward the republican separatism of the [[United Irishmen]].<ref name="Moore, Political and Historical Writings" />{{rp|132-134}} He absolves Fitzgerald of recklessness: but for a contrary wind, decisive French assistance would have been delivered by [[Lazare Hoche|General Hoche]] at [[Bantry]] in December 1796.<ref name="Moore, Political and Historical Writings" />{{rp|153-154}} In his own ''Memoirs'', Moore acknowledges his ''Life and Death of Lord Edward Fitzgerald'' (1831) as a "justification of the [[Irish Rebellion of 1798|men of '98]] – the ''ultimi Romanorum'' of our country".<ref name="Moore, Political and Historical Writings" />{{rp|248}}

Moore's ''History of Ireland'', published in four volumes between 1835 and 1846, reads as a further and extended indictment of English rule. It was an enormous work (consulted by [[Karl Marx]] in his extensive notes on Irish history),<ref>Karl Marx (1869), "Notes on Irish History" (1869), [https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/subject/ireland/ireland.pdf ''Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Ireland and the Irish Question,''] New York, International Publishers, 1972, pp. 316, 360.</ref> but not a critical success. Moore acknowledged scholarly failings, some of which stemmed from his inability to read documentary sources in Irish.<ref name="Harry White" />