Discord Consensus

subject which occupied the sovereigns of Europe’ (1833: 352), no
one asked for their opinion on the matter. The creation of the United
Kingdom, however, turned out to have underestimated the mixture of
deep-​seated Catholic feeling and incipient patriotism in the Southern
Provinces. To a Protestant liberal like Grattan, the rejection of the
proposed constitution by Catholic Belgian notables remained a cause
for regret: there was ‘something monstrous in the aspect of a nation
rejecting even imperfect freedom for bigotry’s sake’ (1833: 376). But
King William’s failure to heed that lesson only spelt trouble. ‘If King
William had Joseph II in mind, it was as a model instead of a warning’:
failing to learn from the Belgian ‘national’ history that Grattan
took on board in his revised version, the King, who had ‘no useful
knowledge of history’ (1833: 400) made ‘a considerable fault’ when he
decreed that all prospective priests should attend ‘his newly-​founded
“Philosophical College” of Louvain’, where lay professors would teach
them: ‘Heresy was now the cry. The King was accused, not unjustly
perhaps, of a design to protestantise the country’ (1833: 392).
Grattan’s Irish background no doubt helped him appreciate the
rashness of King William’s policy: while no friend of ‘bigotry’ himself,
the Protestant patriot who supported Catholic Emancipation knew only
too well that a Catholic majority could only be coaxed into a civic compact,
not forcibly converted to Protestant and/​or enlightened freedom.
Around 1830, in Belgium as in Ireland, the advancement of patriotic
‘freedom’ required an acknowledgement of Catholic realities, not their
suppression, whether discursive or political. In Grattan’s eyes, then, King
William had failed where the British government had succeeded: while,
in the wake of Catholic Emancipation, the patriot Grattan grew increasingly
hopeful about the British–​Irish Union despite criticising its initial
failures, 43 his early cautious enthusiasm about the United Kingdom of
the Netherlands gave way to an assessment of its internal tensions and
of the political misjudgements that hastened its undoing.
Despite the obvious challenges that the rewriting of the History of the
Netherlands entailed after 1830, the inconsistencies of the revised edition
were perhaps more a matter of hasty rewriting than of a clash between
two incompatible visions. Beyond the opportunism which his eventful
career can suggest, Grattan’s complex Irish brand of patriotism allowed
him to provide an ideologically satisfying way of making the latest events
fit into his narrative. In that respect, Grattan made his own distinctive
contribution to the Whig interpretation of (European) history –​one that,
unlike the more familiar English Whig versions, was more prepared to
include Catholics as agents in its vision of progress. His revisions actually
A twice-told tale of a (dis)united kingdom 53