that day!" he admitted that
separation would be the worse evil of the two.

In the same year Lord Lifford resigned the chancellorship, and
Fitzgibbon was appointed in his place, being raised to the peerage as
Baron Fitzgibbon. His removal to the House of Lords greatly increased
his power. In the Commons, though he had exercised great influence as
attorney-general, his position had been secondary; in the House of Lords
and in the privy council he was little less than despotic. "He was,"
says Lecky, "by far the ablest Irishman who had adopted without
restriction the doctrine that the Irish legislature must be maintained
in a condition of permanent and unvarying subjection to the English
executive." But the English ministry were now embarking on a policy of
conciliation in Ireland. The Catholic Relief Bill of 1793 was forced on
the Irish executive by the cabinet in London, but it passed rapidly and
easily through the Irish parliament. Lord Fitzgibbon, while accepting
the bill as inevitable under the circumstances that had arisen, made a
most violent though exceedingly able speech against the principle of
concession, which did much to destroy the conciliatory effect of the
measure; and as a consequence of this act he began persistently to urge
the necessity for a legislative union. From this date until the union
was carried, the career of Fitzgibbon is practically the history of
Ireland. True to his inveterate hostility to the popular claims, he was
opposed to the appointment of Lord Fitzwilliam (q.v.) as viceroy in
1795, and was probably the chief influence in procuring his recall; and
it was Fitzgibbon who first put it into the head of George III. that the
king would violate his coronation oath if he consented to the admission
of Catholics to parliament. When Lord Camden, Fitzwilliam's successor in
the viceroyalty, arrived in Dublin on the 31st of March 1795,
Fitzgibbon's carriage was violently assaulted by the mob, and he himself
was wounded; and in the riots that ensued his house was also attacked.
But as if to impress upon the Catholics the hopelessness of their case,
the government who had made Fitzgibbon a viscount immediately after his
attack on the Catholics in 1793 now bestowed on him a further mark of
honour. In June 1795 he was created earl of Clare. On the eve of the
rebellion he warned the government that while emancipation and reform
might be the objects aimed at by the better classes, the mass of the
disaffe