In 1782 Edmund Burke had written in his letter to a peer of Ireland on the Penal Laws—­“Never were the members of a religious sect fit to appoint the pastors of another.  It is a good deal to suppose that even the present Castle would nominate bishops for the Irish Catholic Church with a religious regard for its welfare.”  If this was the case under Grattan’s Parliament, its application thirty years later was very much more cogent.  Behind the scenes, however, the wires continued to be pulled, as is seen by what Melbourne told Greville in 1835, after the latter had expressed the opinion that the sound course in Irish affairs was to open a negotiation with Rome.[11] “He then told me ... that an application had been made to the Pope very lately (through Seymour) expressive of the particular wish of the British Government that he would not appoint MacHale to the vacant bishopric—­anyone but him.  But on this occasion the Pope made a shrewd observation.  His Holiness said that he had remarked that no place of preferment of any value ever fell vacant in Ireland that he did not get an application from the British Government asking for the appointment.  Lord Melbourne supposed that he was determined to show that he had the power of refusal and of opposing the wishes of the Government, and in reply to my questions he admitted that the Pope had generally conferred the appointment according to the wishes of the Government.”

These facts must be borne in mind on the part of those by whom the admitted support given by the Whig Catholic “Castle Bishops” of the early part of the nineteenth century to the Government is urged as evidence of a consistent tendency on the part of the Church in Ireland, the political views of the prelates of which, so soon as in the second half of the nineteenth century Governmental lobbying ceased, were of an entirely different colour.

At a later date Greville returned to the topic and noted that[12] “Palmerston said there was nothing to prevent our sending a minister to Rome; but they had not dared to do it on account of their supposed Popish tendencies.  Peel might.”  Melbourne was not alone among Prime Ministers of the time in his appeals to the Holy See.  In 1844 the Government of Sir Robert Peel, when troubled with the manifestations of sympathy which O’Connell was arousing, made an appeal to Gregory XVI. to discourage the agitation, and three years later, when the Whigs under Lord John Russell were in office, Lord Minto, Lord Privy Seal, who was Palmerston’s father-in-law, was sent to Rome in the autumn recess to secure the adherence of Pius IX., then in the first months of his Pontificate, to the same line of action, and to bring to the notice of His Holiness the conduct of the Irish priesthood in supporting O’Connell.  The fact that neither Gregory XVI. nor Pio Nono made any response to these appeals lends point to the sardonic comment of Disraeli on the Minto mission—­that he had gone to teach diplomacy to the countrymen of Machiavelli.  The views of Palmerston, on the other hand, are to be seen from a letter addressed to Minto, which is extant, in which, with characteristic bluntness, the Foreign Secretary wrote that public opinion against the Irish priests at home was so exasperated that nothing would give English people more satisfaction than to see a few of them hanged.