Economic and social profile:
Youghal was a post and market town, a sea-port, and ‘the practical capital’ of south-eastern Cork. Standing on the estuary of the Blackwater, it enjoyed the natural advantage of facing the ports of south-west England, with which it had an extensive trade in agricultural produce and manufactured goods.
Electoral history:
Youghal was a corporate borough, and although its charters granted no right to send MPs to parliament, two members had been returned by the self-elected corporation between 1374 and 1801. Thereafter, the borough had returned one member to Westminster. The unreformed franchise had been limited to the aldermen, burgesses, and freemen of the corporation, whether resident or non-resident, and voting was largely controlled by the aldermen, who were responsible for admitting the freemen by ‘special favour’. In 1831, there were 263 burgesses and freemen of the borough (2.7% of population).
In the years before 1832, the Whig 6th duke of Devonshire ‘reigned lord paramount over this closest of close boroughs’.
The Reform Act also ensured that elections would be more closely related to the social and political characteristics of the town. While merchants and shopkeepers were enthusiastic supporters of ‘advanced’ candidates and the town’s many publicans were a powerful element in O’Connellite politics, artisans were much less inclined to radicalism and the influential presence of Protestant voters brought the constituency within the reach of the Conservatives.
The opening of the borough by the Reform Act strengthened the hand of the Irish ‘popular interest’, then campaigning for repeal and the abolition of tithes. Daniel O’Connell confidently predicted that the town was ‘certain to return a repealer’ in 1832 and issued an address calling for the new electors’ support.
Communal tension rose after Dominick Ronayne, a prominent local radical, was arrested on charges arising from the tithe agitation and during polling ‘the violence of the O’Connellite mob’ forced Davis to withdraw after only 27 votes had been cast. Davis alleged that large bodies ‘of strangers from the adjoining country’ had entered the town and acted ‘on an apparently concerted system of violence’ to assault his supporters, who had ‘yielded to their terror, and declared themselves afraid to face the dangers of proceeding to the hustings’. In the belief that the military force provided was insufficient to preserve order beyond the immediate vicinity of the polling place, Davis proved unwilling to risk further violence and declined any further contest.
Before the 1835 general election, Daniel O’Connell had considered cementing his alliance with the Whigs by proposing his son for Cashel, thereby surrendering Youghal to a well-connected Liberal. When this proved untenable, John O’Connell persuaded the Whig chief secretary, Edward Littleton, to intervene and ascertain that Devonshire’s agent, Colonel William Curry, would not openly oppose him. Curry already accepted that Youghal was then ‘pretty generally split into two violent parties’ over whom the duke had little influence.
After this offer was rebuffed, several Conservative candidates were solicited by the leaders of the corporation before Thomas Berry Cusack-Smith came forward. Smith, the second son of the Irish baron of exchequer, Sir William Cusack-Smith, was a distinguished barrister but had no previous political experience.
A petition was duly lodged, 9 Mar. 1835, and the subsequent 14 day inquiry, under the chairmanship of Lord John Russell, placed a great financial burden on O’Connell’s father. In addition to irregularities during the polling itself, the charges concerned arrears of municipal tax owed by some electors, and the registration of unqualified voters. The committee, however, refused to re-open the register and O’Connell was duly returned, 2 June 1835.
When John O’Connell retired from Youghal to contest Athlone at the 1837 general election, his father was unable to secure Devonshire’s backing for another repealer and therefore agreed to back a ‘staunch Whig reformer’. Although Devonshire wished to further limit his involvement in Irish elections due to concerns over their cost and continuing violence, he endorsed Captain William George Cavendish, the son of his cousin, Charles Compton Cavendish on the condition that his father paid all the election expenses.
Howard’s moderate message was not sufficient to discourage a Conservative challenge from William Nicol, a wealthy Liverpool merchant opposed to corporate reform who saw nothing ‘in the practical working of the English corporations’ to convince him that their extension to Ireland would be of ‘any real benefit to the country’. Nicol’s ‘unbending Protestantism’ also ensured that the contest would again be characterized by political and religious antagonism and, as in 1835, the Catholic clergy was ‘among the leading anti-Tory forces’.
At the hustings, Howard’s defence of the right of the propertied interest to return its own representatives was loudly interrupted by Tory accusations that the House of Cavendish had no right to support from ‘the perishing artisans’. It was reported that voting was evenly split and that, due to the ‘Orange complexion’ of the town, a Liberal defeat might ensue. There were, however, a small but significant number of defections from the Tory camp, specifically among the wealthier element of the town. Howard defeated Nicol by only 8 votes, and this ‘despite the lavish and unauthorised expenditure of the duke’s money’.
When Howard retired to unsuccessfully contest Bridgnorth at the 1841 general election, The Times predicted that a Conservative would be ‘triumphantly returned’. An effort was made to induce Richard Smyth of Ballynantray, one time president of the town’s Brunswick Club and a candidate in 1830, to stand.
During the famine, Youghal experienced serious food riots in September 1846 and witnessed further unrest in April 1847, as the number of people employed on public works was compulsorily reduced.
The Conservatives also declared that they would not support Ponsonby. A Protestant Operative Association had been established in the town in 1843 for the purposes of electoral organization, which had attracted both artisans and wealthier voters. It had proved a persistent critic of Devonshire’s accommodation of ‘papists’, and it was rumoured that the Conservatives bring forward Richard Samuel Guinness ‘in the hope that he might creep in through the dissensions between the Liberals and Repealers’. Guinness, however, decided to contest Kinsale and no other candidate was forthcoming.
Although English Liberals criticised Anstey for his denunciations of the Union (his address was dismissed as ‘full of the most approved republican fustian’), he was able to unite Confederate and O’Connellite repealers, and it was reported that Ponsonby left Youghal without canvassing a quarter of his voters.
Although repealers believed that they had gained an ‘able auxiliary’ in Anstey, Liberal criticism of the Conservatives for favouring ‘a political visionary’ proved more accurate.
During the long campaigning season before the election, the Protestants of the town ‘maintained a highly visible electoral presence’. An energetic Conservative registration club had been formed in 1851 which ‘proved particularly successful in attracting support from Protestant artisans’.
In 1859, Lord Eglinton, the Conservative viceroy, regarded Youghal as a possible gain for the party.
By 1865, prosperous Conservatives were happy to ally themselves with the Devonshire interest and see ‘the Protestant operative section put down’ in the interests of improving the local economy. They responded enthusiastically to the candidacy of a wealthy Catholic banker, Joseph Neale McKenna, who stood as an ‘independent’ Liberal. His promise to ‘give situations to all the young men in the town’ led Samuel LeHunte Hobson, the Conservative candidate, to withdraw and lend him his support. McKenna then vied with Sir John Arnott, the Cork philanthropist and former Liberal MP for Kinsale, who had ‘bought his way’ into that town in 1859, and sought to win Liberal support on the issue of Youghal’s ‘tumble-down wooden toll-bridge’.
On the eve of the election, with Arnott having abandoned his candidacy in the face of McKenna’s advantage as a large local proprietor with ‘powerful friends’, a walkover was anticipated.
Although McKenna subsequently persuaded the government to pass a special act freeing Youghal Bridge from its traditional tolls, he was defeated at the 1868 general election by ‘an even more open-pursed’ Gladstonian Liberal opponent. The election expenses of the ‘heroically corrupt’ London merchant and director of the Bank of England, Christopher Weguelin, amounted to £5,000 (i.e. £18 per voter).
£10 occupiers and freemen, existing £5 and forty-shilling freeholders for term of life; £8 rated occupiers from 1850.
Corporation, consisting of the mayor (also an alderman), the recorder, nine aldermen, two bailiffs, the burgesses (those who had served as bailiff), and the freemen; town commissioners from 1836.
Registered electors: 297 in 1832 512 in 1842 261 in 1851 234 in 1861
Estimated voters: 308 out of 585 (53%) in 1837.
Population: 1832 9608 1842 9939 1851 9653 1861 5826