Henry Flood: Patriots and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Ireland, by James Kelly, Four Courts Press, 486pp, £40
Who now knows of Henry Flood? And, indeed, who cares? An Irish patriot politician who blotted his copybook by accepting government office, he was long before his death eclipsed by Caesar's wife, the virtuous and ineffective Henry Grattan. Flood's failure in his attempt to use the Volunteers to bring about parliamentary reform, his failure to transplant his political career into the snooty world of English politics, and his relentless (and ultimately futile) opposition to the admission of Catholics to political power, have all ensured entry for him to that well-stocked Pantheon of the Losers in Irish History.
In addition, his friends' bonfire of his papers after his death has meant that much of his motivation for his political strategy has appeared irrecoverable. Finally, his illegitimacy and his propensity for duelling - he was literally a murderous bastard - added to his unloved reputation in his lifetime, and have guaranteed semi-oblivion thereafter. The question now is: is he worth nearly five hundred pages of prime Amazon Rain Forest?
This book is the answer to that question. James Kelly has made a brilliant biography out of the few remaining caches of Flood papers and in doing so he has opened a window on to the political and social world of mid-18th-century Ireland.
Henry Flood was the leading politician in Ireland from the early 1760s until the mid-1780s: he was a key player in all the major political developments in that period with particularly vital roles in the winning of the Constitution of 1782 and in the reform movements of the 1780s. He was a leading member of the Volunteers and was arguably their political mastermind. In addition, he was a committed and astute parliamentarian, and in an age of accomplished orators, he stood out. He was, as this biography makes clear, a central figure in the politics of these decades. And yet, he was not loved, much less revered, and he was too independent to act with others for any length of time. He signally failed to anticipate the opprobrium that his acceptance of government office would bring down on him, and his attempt to relocate in English politics in the 1780s was ill-advised. Kelly suggests that the circumstances of his birth made him, in later life, reserved, aloof, even overbearing, and this may be so. He left no party, no followers and his well-known (and failed) attempt to bequeath his estate to Trinity College, Dublin, to set up a chair of Irish, should be read as a clumsy attempt to disinherit his cousins rather than as a sort of pre-post-colonial act of accommodation.
Mid-18th-century Ireland was an age of patriotism, and Flood was the patriot politician who best defined and articulated that portmanteau of confident assertions, gnawing anxieties and bitter resentments in all its contradictions and complexities. His whole career was devoted to the view that the kingdom of Ireland was equal to that of England and that Irish Protestants were entitled to the same rights and freedoms as Englishmen. But he could defend the dispatch of Irish troops to crush the rebellious colonists in North America, and despite his challenge to the exercise of British authority in Ireland, he rejoiced in the existence of a close British military and political connection.
Again, while he sought to maintain the integrity of the Protestant Ascendancy - no Catholics need apply - he was active in encouraging those economic projects and antiquarian researches that would in the long term undermine it. It was he rather than Henry Grattan who should be seen as the lineal and intellectual successor of William Molyneux and Jonathan Swift.
As noted above, Kelly bases his study of Flood on the small number of surviving Flood papers, but this meagre bundle of straw has been supplemented with extensive and intensive researches in all relevant archives on both sides of the Atlantic in order to make the necessary bricks. The result is a fine, and arguably definitive, study that will take its place among the very select list of 18th-century Irish biographies that will endure.
Thomas Barlett is Professor of Modern Irish History at UCD, and editor of The Life of Theobald Wolfe Tone