Sir, - The Irishwoman's Diary on Henry Brooke (August 30th) offered a welcome glimpse of intellectual life in 18th-century Anglo-Ireland, though the omission of any reference to his daughter Charlotte and her Reliques of Irish Poetry (1789) was odd.
Following John Wesley and Charles Kingsley, your columnist portrayed Brooke as a liberal with proto-nationalist leanings. In fact the history of Brooke's conversion to Catholic Emancipation is a murkier tale than this suggests. Sixteen years before Tryal of the Roman Catholics (1761), Brooke issued The Farmer's Letters.
These were meant to "rouse the spirit of freedom", as your columnist remarks - yet whose freedom is the question. In the second letter he writes that the attitude of Irish Catholics during the Jacobite Rebellion of '45 was that of a crocodile which "seems to sleep when the prey approaches", reminding his Protestant readers that these were the men "by whom our Maidens were polluted, by whom our Matrons were left childless". The government liked this so well that he was made the Master of the Mullingar Barracks at £400 a year.
Brooke's prospectus for "A History of Ireland" (1744) was the outcome of the virtual theft of documents that Charles O'Connor of Belanagare had entrusted to Richard Digby in the hope of getting an impartial account to put beside David Hume's unflattering view of pre-Norman Ireland. It went no further than the title. At the time of writing he hoped to raise subscriptions for an as yet unwritten "patriotic" work. The Spirit of Party (1754), an anti-Catholic pamphlet from his hand 10 years later, resulted in parleys with O'Conor who then paid him to write the Tryal in favour of Catholic Relief. Shortly after, Brooke issued "A Proposal for the Restoration of Public Wealth", in which he pointed out that rich Catholic merchants could hardly be expected to lend more money to impecunious Anglo-Irish landlords unless their investment were secure. Lucrum vincit omnia.
Brooke was a Protestant patriot in the mould of his hero "Gustava Vasa", the constitutional monarch of Sweden (and, by implication, an admirer of William of Orange). To some degree his Whig writings partake of the "New Light" tradition of liberal Presbyterianism which was epitomised by Francis Hutcheson, the Co Down-born philosopher who promulgated a civic, humanist tradition from the 1720s. Brooke was a cultural patriot in the same sense as the Edgeworths whose Essay on Irish Bulls (1802) ridiculed the myth of Irish intellectual inferiority.
His daughter Charlotte found another way of balancing accounts in calling Irish the "elder sister" of the British cultural family, while Matthew Arnold offered a similar view of Celtic literature - a view that W. B. Yeats and others are often said to have taken as a prescription for the revival. Denis Donoghue wrote the other day (in Partisan Review) that the wondrous thing about Yeats's achievement is that he "thought to arouse from their sleep a people mainly Roman Catholic, a type he always disliked and in his later years feared".
It could be argued that Yeats is in direct descent from Henry Brooke in these matters. He is certainly in line with Sir Samuel Ferguson, who applied the "crocodile" analogy to Daniel O'Connell. Yet, however well we fare with Yeats under post-colonial colours, it will still be hard to enlist the Brookes for Irish democracy as we understand it now.
There is a plaque to family-members in Bath Cathedral which reads, inter alia, "Robert Brooke of the Bengal Civil Service, lately resident at Royal Crescent, fourth son of Henry Brooke of Ratcoffey [sic], Co Kildare, obit 1843". From the Anglo-Irish standpoint, Cavan and Bath were bound together no less than Glasgow and London. All of that is now changing, of course. - Yours, etc.,
Bruce Stewart, Adelaide Avenue, Coleraine, Co Derry.