Pitt’s growing dislike of the system of 1782 was reinforced by the action of the Irish Parliament in the Regency crisis. When the King became insane in 1788, the Whigs contended that their patron, the Prince of Wales, should automatically exercise the power of the Crown, while Pitt retorted that it was for Parliament to appoint him Regent, and to define his powers. The Irish Parliament sided with the Whigs, Grattan and the Nationalists on the constitutional ground that Pitt’s proposed safeguards were unnecessary in Ireland, the camp-followers in view of the probable change in the source of patronage. The controversy terminated with the King’s restoration to health; but the Prime Minister never forgot nor forgave the encouragement rendered to his enemies at the crisis of his fate.
Pitt had attempted nothing for Ireland since the failure of his commercial proposals; but the ferment created by the seductive doctrines of the French Revolution determined him to conciliate the Catholics, to whom he had always been friendly and whom he agreed with Burke in regarding as naturally conservative. On being informed of his wishes in 1791 the Irish Government did its utmost to dissuade him, and succeeded in whittling down the concessions till they were scarcely worth granting. Though Flood and Charlemont were immovably opposed to the extension of any kind of political rights to Catholics, and though Grattan always explicitly reserved Protestant ascendency, there was a large body of opinion prepared for a fairly liberal policy; and the new organisation of United Irishmen, founded in 1791 by Wolfe Tone, rested on the recognition of a common effective citizenship. In view of these circumstances, Pitt for the first and last time determined to overrule his agents. The Relief Bill of 1793 enfranchised Catholics on the same terms as Protestants, admitted them to juries, to the magistracy, and to commissions in the Army and Navy, allowed them to receive degrees in Dublin University and to carry arms. This generous measure, which the Executive hated but dared not oppose, passed without difficulty. Though the main merit belongs to Pitt, the acceptance of such far-reaching concessions by a Protestant body is a proof that, left to itself, it was not unwilling to concede substantial instalments of justice to the Catholic majority. Recent attempts to minimise the importance of the Act, on the ground that the franchise without eligibility to Parliament was worthless, misjudge the situation. The measure was hailed by Catholic opinion as a decisive breach with the intolerant traditions of a century; and its easy passage to the Statute-book suggests how different might have been the record and the fate of the Grattan Parliament had Pitt throughout encouraged its more generous intuitions and compelled his agents to support the policy which he knew to be right.