seek him elsewhere. 3. Speech in the House of Lords, 19 Feb. 1798, on Lord Moira's motion (printed 1798). Lord Moira attacked the government for its coercive policy. Clare justified that policy in a long reply, containing an elaborate account of the progress of disaffection, and of the failure of conciliation during a period, as he considered it, of rapid advance. He excused a case of picketing, on the ground that it led to the discovery of two hundred pikes within two days, and has been therefore denounced as the defender of torture. Clare himself, however, was inclined to temper a rigorous policy by moderation to individuals. Both he and Castlereagh supported Cornwallis's proposal of a general amnesty after Vinegar Hill, and in the case of Lord Edward Fitzgerald he went so far as to warn his friends that his doings were fully known to the government, and to promise that if he would leave the country every port should be open to him. This did not affect his determination to crush out disaffection at any cost. (The share of Clare in the government policy cannot be profitably separated from the general history, as to which see the Cornwallis and Castlereagh Correspondence, the Lords' Report of the Committee of Secrecy, which is understood to have been carefully edited by Clare, and Macneven's Pieces of Irish History.) 4. Speech in the House of Lords, 10 Feb. 1800, on a motion made by him in favour of a union (printed 1800). Clare narrated the history of the English connection, of the religious divisions, and of the land confiscations, recalled the circumstances in which the 'final adjustment of 1782' was made, the designs of the revolutionists, and the disorganised state of Irish finances, and insisted that union was the only alternative to separation and bankruptcy. Grattan replied in an indignant pamphlet, vindicating the action of himself and his friends, and rebuking Clare for the insulting language in which he spoke of his country. The speech is certainly that of an advocate, not of an historian ; but it is impossible not to admire its skilful marshalling of facts and the vigour of its language. There is little doubt that the passing of the Act of Union was due to Clare more than to any other man. For the last seven years, he said, he had urged its necessity on the king's ministers, and this statement is borne out by an unpublished letter which he wrote to Lord Auckland in 1798. 'As to the subject of the union with the British parliament,' he said, 'I have long been of opinion that nothing short of it can save this country. I stated this opinion very strongly to Mr. Pitt in the year 1793, immediately after that fatal mistake into which he was betrayed by Mr. Burke and Mr. Dundas, in receiving an appeal from the Irish parliament by a popish democracy.' He states his continued adherence to this view, and concludes : 'It makes me almost mad when I look back at the madness, folly, and corruption in both countries which has brought us to the verge of destruction' (British Museum Additional MS. 29475, f. 43). Yet in 1793 he told the House of Lords that a separation and a union were 'each to be equally dreaded.' On 16 Oct. 1798 he wrote to Castlereagh : 'I have seen Mr. Pitt, the chancellor, and the Duke of Portland, who seem to feel very sensibly the critical situation of our damnable country (highly complimentary, but it was between themselves), and that the union alone can save it' (Castlereagh Correspondence, i. 393).
Clare was equally eager that no attempt should be made to change, as a part of the union, the existing catholic laws. 'Even the chancellor,' wrote Cornwallis to Pitt, 25 Sept. 1798, 'who is the most right-minded politician in this country, will not hear of the Roman catholics sitting in the united parliament' (Cornwallis Correspondence, ii. 416 ; and see letter of Lord Grenville, 5 Nov. 1798, in Buckingham, Courts and Cabinets, ii. 411; and Cornewall Lewis, Administrations of Great Britain, p. 185).
Clare even ventured to try humour in his anxious desire for a union. In 1799 appeared a tract entitled 'No Union! But Unite and Fall! By Paddy Whack, in a loving letter to his dear mother, Sheelah, of Dame Street, Dublin,' of which he is said to have been the author, and in which Paddy Whack advises Sheelah to marry 'the rich, and generous, and industrious, and kind, and liberal, and powerful, and free, honest John Bull.' Its humour is somewhat coarse and clumsy.
After the union Clare appeared several times in the House of Lords, but he did not increase his reputation. His sharp temper brought him into frequent conflict, while the studied disrespect with which he referred to his countrymen, and his passionate insistence on the madness of conceding anything to the Roman catholics, excited a feeling of repugnance. 'Good God!' Pitt is reported to have said when listening to him on one occasion, did you ever hear in all your life such a rascal as that ?' (Grattan, Memoirs, iii. 403). He died on 28 Jan. 1802. His funeral was followed by a Dublin mob, whose curses vioently expressed the hate with which a great part of his fellow-countrymen regarded him (account by an eye-witness in Dublin Univ. Mag. xxvii. 559 ; Cloncurry, Personal Recollections, p. 146).
On his deathbed he is said to have sent for
