8 - ‘The Chief of Our Friends’: Parliamentary Management and the Rise of the Undertakers, 1715–29

Summary

In 1715 Charles Delafaye, chief secretary of Ireland, described Conolly as ‘the chief of our friends’, and he ‘to whose interest the King is more obliged than all Ireland besides’. These descriptions, by a leading government official, give some indication of Conolly’s political status, but they also raise some interesting questions. What interest? Why was the king so obliged? Whose friends? How had Conolly come to this position? The previous two chapters have described the growth of Conolly’s electoral empire in Ulster and the possibilities offered by his dominance of the revenue service. Both elements were crucial to the establishment of position of political dominance that was to have a long-term impact on the governance of Ireland. Following the Hanoverian succession in 1714 and the eclipse of the Irish Tory party in the 1715 general election, the Irish political scene changed dramatically. The party strife that had been a feature of Queen Anne’s reign was replaced by a new politics focused more on personal factions and connexions, as the different groups that had coalesced under the name of Whig dispersed into smaller groupings, each determined to gain the spoils of office. The contested politics of the previous twenty years had also helped to ensure the dominance of parliament within the governance of Ireland.

This constitutional revolution gave particular prominence to the house of commons, and by extension its managers. Since 1695, following the failure of the short-lived parliament of 1692, successive governments had entrusted the management of their parliamentary interests to party leaders on either side of the political divide. As we have seen, Conolly emerged as one of the leading Whig party leaders, during ‘the age of party’, acting in concert with other prominent party figures such as Alan Brodrick, William Whitshed and John Forster. He was rewarded for this honesty ‘during the worst of times’, first with reappointment to the revenue board, and secondly and more importantly, with the speakership of the commons. Conolly would be the most important occupant of the chair in the eighteenth century, redefining the role of speaker. Over the course of the next fifteen years he became the most powerful Irish politician of his generation, indispensable to successive lords lieutenants as they attempted to govern Ireland.