re six out of every seven of the
people belonged to the Church of Rome, and where the demand for
Catholic Emancipation had long been championed by the greatest and the
most patriotic of Protestant Irishmen, it was utterly impossible that
any King and any minister could impose submission on such a question.
By the time at which we have now arrived the Catholics of Ireland had
found a political leader of their own faith.

Daniel O'Connell was undoubtedly one of the greatest advocates a
popular cause has ever had in modern times. He was an Irishman who had
become one of the most successful advocates in the Irish law courts,
and as a popular orator he had no rival in his own country. He had
made himself the leader in Ireland of the movement for Catholic
Emancipation, and he had kindled an enthusiasm there which any English
statesman of ordinary intelligence and foresight might easily have seen
it would be impossible to extinguish so long as there was a struggle to
be fought. {54} Canning had always been in favor of Catholic
Emancipation. Lord Liverpool was, of course, entirely opposed to it,
and almost until the last the Duke of Wellington held out against it.
George the Fourth, for all his earlier associations with Fox and
Sheridan, declared himself now to have inherited to the full his
father's indomitable conscientious objection to any measure of Catholic
Emancipation. George seemed, in fact, to have suddenly become filled
with a passionate fervor of Protestant piety when any one talked to him
about political equality for his Catholic subjects. He declared again
and again that no earthly consideration could induce him to fall away
from the religious convictions of his father on this subject, and the
coronation oath had again become, to use Erskine's satirical phrase,
"one of the four orders of the State." When reading some of George's
letters and discourses on the subject, it is almost impossible not to
believe that he really must have fancied himself in earnest when he
made such protestations. In private life he frequently delivered long
speeches, sometimes with astonishing fluency, sometimes with occasional
interruptions of stammering, in vindication of his hostility to any
proposal for Catholic Emancipation.

[Sidenote: 1827--Lord Liverpool's successor]

In the common language of the political world of that time the members
of a Government who opposed the Catholic claims were called Protestant
ministers, an