The younger son and namesake of the great Irish Patriot, who represented Dublin at Westminster from 1806, Henry Grattan junior was destined to live in his father’s shadow and he never escaped it. Having graduated from Trinity in 1808, he was in attendance at parliamentary debates and privately taking his father’s part, by the following year. ‘Law books be damned’, he once wrote to his brother James, who had entered the army, but although he neglected his legal studies, he did qualify and apparently practice at the bar, at least for a while. With a lively mind and a fiery temperament, he exhibited a youthful indignation at Ireland’s dependent status, but, as he recounted to James, 9 Aug. 1810, his father prevented him making his political debut at a Dublin meeting for repeal of the Union:
I thought it would be a measure useful to him among his constituents; that it might make me and him popular, however he differed from me ... I had some idea of embarking in the question and rising or falling with it; but there is so little spirit that the measure of repeal I fear would not be supported at all. My father of course will not advance.
He added, with characteristic hyperbole, that ‘an Irishman of ambition dies in Ireland, he droops in England ... We have become a province drained of every particle of spirit ... By God the Irish mind is debased’; and later opined that, between foolish Catholics and tyrannical Protestants, the Irish of his own type were without a country of their own, being ‘half colonists, half indigent adventurers, men on garrison duty’. His kindly father tended to tolerate such outbursts, confiding to James, 7 Oct. 1811, that Henry’s politics ‘are more violent than mine and he argues with too much acerbity, of that he will mend’.
Grattan, who was considered a possible successor at Dublin if his father resigned the seat, stood in for him at the general election of 1820, when he also backed Richard Wogan Talbot* for the county, and, as his factotum, accompanied him on his last journey to England.
In the early 1820s Grattan maintained a high profile in Dublin, where he was criticized for opposing calls for repeal of the Union as untimely at a meeting of the merchants’ guild, 14 Oct. 1822, concurred in the condemnation of the Orange theatre rioters late that year and made himself an expert on the vexed local issue of corporation taxation.
Henry writes long complaints of the state and neglect of Ireland ... He is quite too hasty, so about tumult and the inquiry, and conduct of [William] Plunket* in filing ex-officio [informations against the theatre rioters] he said he was glad he was roused and he was wrong ... He mismanages his private affairs with an apparent contempt of family ... [which] does not serve his credit; and his imprudence and misjudgement has lost him the city, and to the family, and has put him to great expense. He also writes complaints about the tithe bill ... His opinion is really good for nothing.
Grattan mss 5777.
He announced his future candidacy for Dublin by an address, 27 Nov. 1824, and was considered certain to stand on the independent interest during electoral speculation the following summer. Yet he had his detractors, like Henry Westenra, the wavering ministerialist Member for Monaghan, who in January 1825 remarked that ‘as to my voting for Grattan, it is a thing I should deplore. His politics appear to me to be childish, and the character of the man would not bear one out in the voting for him as my friend’.
By a campaign of registering dubious Catholic freeholders and, according to Richard Sheil*, a blatant attempt to woo corporators’ wives at the Dublin tabinet ball, Grattan, who appealed constantly to his father’s principles, put himself in a strong position as the only liberal candidate at the general election of 1826, when he seconded the pro-Catholic Robert Henry Southwell in the Cavan contest.
Grattan was said to have done well in speaking against the address, 21 Nov. 1826, when he was a minority teller for his own amendment for including mention of Irish grievances and promising their redress, which was defeated by 135-58.
He used the presentation of petitions to complain about the Irish Subletting Act, 25 Feb., and discrimination against Catholics in education, 28 Feb. 1828. He voted for repeal of the Test Acts, 26 Feb. He continued to raise matters connected with Dublin, such as the appointment of juries, 5 Mar., and the admission of Catholics to the corporation, 11 Mar. Having seconded Parnell’s motion for production of the treaty of Limerick as inconsistent with the penal laws, 6 Mar., he spoke forcefully for Catholic relief, 12 May. Declaring that ‘I plead not only for their rights but for your security’, he emphasized that there should be equal treatment for all and suggested, in what became one of his favourite themes, that an alienated Ireland might one day go the way of the American colonies; he divided in the majority that day. He remonstrated against government inaction over distress in Ireland, 5 June, pointed out a misapplication of public money there, 12 June, and supported his constituents’ attempts to abolish the coal duties, 20, 27 June. He unsuccessfully moved to include the protection of Catholic chapels under the Irish malicious injuries bill, 16 June; he wrote to O’Connell that ‘I tried all I could but in vain. Government is incorrigible’, adding that ‘I hope the Catholics will not fall into the trap of securities and veto’.
Grattan congratulated the Wellington administration on its decision to grant Catholic emancipation, 5 Feb. 1829, and brought up numerous Dublin parish and other favourable petitions that session. He rebutted his colleague’s insistence on the unsympathetic attitude of public opinion in relation to hostile petitions from county Dublin, 3 Mar., Dublin corporation, 13 Mar., and the Protestants of Ireland, 17 Mar., and deplored the invidious distinctions drawn between Protestants and Catholics in parliamentary debates, 12 Mar. He voted for emancipation, 6, 30 Mar., but, as he had made clear he would, 10 Mar., he spoke and divided against the franchise bill, 19 Mar., when he argued that no proof had been advanced as to the delinquency of the 40s. freeholders either among the Catholics, who he said were not dominated by their priests, nor among the Protestants of the North. The following day he was in the minority for Duncannon’s amendment to allow reregistration, but on the 26th he objected to Moore’s attempt to extend the franchise bill to boroughs as a ruse to disfranchise the Catholics altogether. He briefly raised a query about whether O’Connell would be permitted to take his seat, 23 Mar., and voted to allow him to do so unimpeded, 18 May.
No stranger to journalistic confrontations, Grattan fell foul of the law late in 1829, when the Freeman’s Journal, despite its support for emancipation, was one of the papers made an example of by the Irish secretary Lord Francis Leveson Gower, who wished to suppress the publication of inflammatory and libellous press comment. He was obliged to remain in Dublin during the early part of the following year, and was eventually convicted, without punishment, in May 1830. He parted company that year with the Journal, which was said to have declined considerably because of inefficient management during his proprietorship; it picked up thereafter under Patrick Lavelle.
Although praised by the Freeman’s Journal for his parliamentary exertions and championing of liberal causes, Grattan was forced on to the defensive at the general election of 1830, when he suffered from a relative lack of mercantile credibility and was challenged by a coalition of Moore and Frederick Shaw*, the recorder.
Like his brother, Grattan, whom Robert Gordon had intended to call on to respond in his place to allegations of fraudulent freeholder creations in Dublin borough, did not vote on the resolutions relative to the Dublin election, 23 Aug. 1831. The first evidence found of parliamentary activity that session was on 29 Aug., when he objected to excessive church taxes and voted for making legal provision for the Irish poor. The following day he spoke of the difficulties of registering freeholders and divided against preserving the voting rights of Irish freemen. In addition to numerous minor interventions, he handled business relating to Dublin (such as the coal meters establishment, 2 Sept.) and Meath (such as the Navan Catholics’ petition for the redistribution of church revenues, 9 Sept.), and constantly raised matters concerning the other eight counties in which he claimed (on 20 Mar. 1832) to own properties. He condemned Orange outrages perpetrated by the Irish yeomanry, 31 Aug., and called for its total disbandment, despite being himself an officer in it, 7, 9 Sept. His clashes with James Gordon, Member for Dundalk, 9 Sept., Sir Richard Vyvyan, Member for Okehampton, 13 Sept., and Frederick Shaw (on the subject of improper electoral influence), 21 Sept., illustrated the acerbity he often resorted to in debate. He voted for transferring Aldborough from schedule B to schedule A, 14 Sept., but for the third reading, 19 Sept., and passage of the Grey ministry’s reintroduced reform bill, 21 Sept., the second reading of the Scottish bill, 23 Sept., and Lord Ebrington’s confidence motion, 10 Oct. He welcomed the Irish secretary Smith Stanley’s bills to amend the Whiteboy Act, 22 Sept., and to reform Irish grand juries, 29 Sept., but continued to oppose his arms bill, 23 Sept., and to raise complaints against the Irish yeomanry, 3 Oct., police, 4 Oct., magistrates, 5 Oct., and clergy, 6 Oct. He defended Maynooth College and its grant, 26 Sept., and urged greater attention to Irish affairs in general, 27 Sept. He intervened acrimoniously about the Dublin election, 12 Oct. 1831, and the following day, when he stated that he opposed government as far as Ireland was concerned, he was silenced by the Speaker during an attack on Sir Charles Wetherell, the former attorney-general.
Grattan, who signed the requisition for a Meath county meeting on reform in October, spoke in its favour at the Navan dinner held in his and Killeen’s honour, 28 Nov., and at the county Dublin meeting, 3 Dec. 1831.
Grattan, who was returned unopposed for Meath with Maurice O’Connell* at the general election of 1832, was later described by James Grant as tall, sallow and gentlemanlike in appearance and to be a reasonably good speaker, although
there is always an abundant infusion of burning liberalism in his speeches. It is impossible for him to give expression to half a dozen sentences without getting into a downright passion ... He is by far the best specimen of a wild Irishman ... in the House.
Grant also commented that Grattan ‘has much of the attachment to his native country which blazed in the breast of his illustrious father, but unhappily he has not a tithe of the talent’.