Henry Grattan
Henry Grattan was the leading orator of the Irish parliament and the man who won its legislative independence in 1782, only to see it abolished within twenty years. Born in Dublin in 1746, the son of the city's recorder and a Member of Parliament, he was educated at Trinity College Dublin and the Middle Temple in London, where he studied the speeches of Chatham and Bolingbroke rather than the law. He entered the Irish House of Commons in 1775. The Irish parliament of the period was Protestant-only, elected on a narrow franchise, and subordinate: Poynings' Law of 1494 required its bills to be approved in advance by the English privy council, and the Declaratory Act of 1720 asserted Westminster's right to legislate for Ireland. The American war gave him his opportunity. With British regiments withdrawn, Protestant gentry raised the Irish Volunteers for defence, and the movement became a political force. Grattan used the pressure of tens of thousands of armed men outside the chamber and his own oratory within it, and in 1782 Westminster repealed the Declaratory Act and amended Poynings' Law. The body that followed is still known as Grattan's Parliament, and the Commons voted him fifty thousand pounds. He argued consistently for Catholic emancipation and for parliamentary reform, and secured a substantial relief act in 1793 that gave Catholics the vote but not the right to sit. He opposed the Act of Union with everything he had, returning from illness in January 1800 to speak against it in his Volunteer uniform. It passed anyway, carried by patronage and bribery, and the Irish parliament voted itself out of existence. He sat at Westminster from 1805 and died in London in 1820.
- Lived: 1746 CE – 1820 CE
- Nationality: Irish
- Roles: politician
