Two boroughs, Penryn and East Retford, had been disfranchised for bribery and corruption. The question arose whether their members should be transferred to the counties in which they were situated or given to some of the large towns like Manchester, Leeds, and Birmingham, which had no members at all. Huskisson, the President of the Board of Trade, took the Liberal view, and in an important division voted against the Government. The letter in which he explained his action was accepted by Wellington as a resignation. His post was given to Vesey Fitzgerald, the member for Clare, who submitted himself for re-election in the ordinary way. To the consternation of the Tories, O'Connell himself came forward as a Catholic candidate. The Catholic Association and the priests led or drove the voters to the poll, Fitzgerald was beaten out of the field, and O'Connell, disqualified by his religion, but with three-fourths of the Irish people at his back, claimed a seat in the House of Commons. The Government had the choice of two courses, neither of which promised them any credit. They might give way to organized illegality and emancipate the Catholics. They might exclude O'Connell and undertake a new civil war in Ireland. Wellington was as good as a soldier as he was bad as a statesman, and he knew when a position had become untenable. He was now ready to retreat in good order. Peel supported him, and the two together controlled the Cabinet. The Relief Bill and the Bill disfranchising the freeholders were both law by the end of April, 1829.[201] The endowment of the clergy was abandoned. Two facts of vital importance were involved in this defeat of the Government. The first was that, for the first time in English history, a political association had compelled Parliament against its will to pass a measure into law. The people were beginning to control their Government. The second fact was that the Irish had been forced into the belief that patience and endurance were less likely to succeed in obtaining redress than violence and { 165} intimidation. The stupid resistance of the House of Lords had planted this idea ineradicably in the Irish mind, and the events of the next fifty years watered it and made it flourish to excess. The reaction of these events upon English politics resembled that of the success of the American Rebellion. The people were no longer at the disposition of the governing class. What Ireland had done, England could do. All over the country Political Unions for Reform came into existence, and imitated the success of the Catholic Association. In two years the old system came to an end.