Abstract
Edmund Sexten Pery is known to historians of eighteenth-century Ireland as a prominent patriot politician, speaker of the Irish House of Commons between 1771 and 1785, and promotor of Newtown Pery, the transformative urban expansion of his native Limerick. While historians (notably A. P. W. Malcomson and James Kelly) have devoted considerable attention to some of his patriot and other contemporaries, until now Pery has been rather neglected. David Fleming's meticulous biography remedies the oversight, but his work also illustrates that Pery's political outlook is sometimes difficult to pin down, not least because the subject actively obscured his motivations and positions at important junctures.
Fleming's book is mainly concerned with Pery's political career, but he also provides as full a biography as possible in the absence of extensive personal correspondence. Pery was born into a Limerick Protestant family in 1719. On the death of his father in 1738, the young Pery inherited extensive estates in Limerick and Clare, but he also pursued a legal career and, as early as 1741, he stood unsuccessfully for election to the Irish parliament in Limerick city. Pery finally entered the House of Commons in 1751 and his parliamentary career forms the backbone of the book. Fleming provides a clear but careful guide through the complications of eighteenth-century Irish high politics. One of the remarkable features of Pery's career was his transformation over the course of the money bill crisis of 1753–6 from a supporter of the administration, working within the orbit of George Stone, the English-born archbishop of Armagh, to a patriot and (initially, at least) frequent champion of apparently lost causes. Edmund Sexten Pery maintains a careful balancing act: Fleming adduces evidence which suggests that Pery's new-found patriotism was rooted in principle, but the author also recognises the possibility of ‘a strategy to gain office’ (p. 66). By the 1760s, Pery was a leading patriot with a popular reputation and he played a role in securing the Octennial Act of 1768 and during the crisis of 1767–8. At the same time, Pery admitted to a friend that, as Fleming puts it, ‘the speakership was the object of his ambition’ (p. 97). The opportunity arrived in 1771, through a complex confluence of events, and Pery effectively carved out a new kind of post-undertaker speakership. His early years in the role were relatively uneventful, but Fleming argues that Pery was determined ‘to show that he was a servant of the Commons rather than the administration’ (p. 115).
At the heart of the book is a reconsideration of Pery's role in the tumultuous events of the later 1770s and early 1780s. As speaker, Pery's room for overt politicking was circumscribed, but Fleming argues convincingly that he played an important covert role in furthering the patriot cause and in support of Catholic relief. As Fleming notes, ‘His role in these events has been underestimated’ (p. 131). Fleming argues that Pery, who had important links with Limerick Catholic families, had forged connections with the Catholic Committee in the early 1760s. In 1775, he met James Butler, the Catholic archbishop of Cashel, and he worked carefully behind the scenes in 1778 to ensure that the first major breach in the penal laws occurred. Pery had also been a long-standing champion of removing restrictions on Irish trade and Fleming provides a significant account of his part in the successful campaign for ‘free trade’, ‘the zenith of his political career’ (p. 151). Pery's place in the campaign for legislative independence is less clear, but Fleming's assessment of the available evidence is that ‘there can be no doubt that he played a significant part in Grattan's and the opposition's strategy’ (p. 156). Pery's attitude to the campaign for parliamentary reform is much more difficult to determine. Fleming notes that his nephew, Edmund Henry Pery, attended the Grand National Convention of Volunteers in November 1783 and that his relatives in the Commons supported the reform plans tabled by Henry Flood later that month. In contrast, pro-reform newspapers accused Pery of self-serving opposition to change in the expectation of a peerage, while Fleming notes that the appointment of his clergyman brother to the vacant position of bishop of Limerick was a more pressing concern. Either way, Pery's reforming instincts do not appear to have extended as far as those of his patriot colleagues, Flood or Grattan.
Pery's career in the chair ended in 1785, just as William Pitt's commercial propositions failed in the Commons; his replacement, John Foster, was a rather different kind of politician. Pery sat in the Lords following his elevation to the peerage in December 1785 and Fleming offers a detailed account of his activities in the upper house. Pery's independence was evident in his attitude to the regency question in 1789 and there is some evidence that he continued to support Catholic relief in the early 1790s, but it is no surprise that he rejected the revolutionary politics of the 1790s. While Pery opposed the Union and played some role in galvanising opposition to the measure, he was by that stage in his early eighties.
The impression that emerges from Fleming's book is of a patrician patriotism. From early in his career, Pery eschewed the demotic radicalism of contemporaries like Charles Lucas or Edward Newenham in Ireland or John Wilkes in England. He may have welcomed the public favour that flowed from his political positions, but Fleming notes that Pery did not actively seek publicity and he suggests that this was rooted in ‘an older and accepted way of politics, but one which increasingly seemed outdated’ (p. 267). Fleming adduces convincing evidence that Pery was a principled politician, even if his precise motivations, particularly in the later 1750s and 1760s, remain somewhat slippery. As Stephen Small and others have pointed out, the language of virtue or public virtue was ever present in the politics of patriotism, especially of those who saw themselves in the tradition of classical republicanism. But Fleming does not dwell on what, precisely, virtue meant to Pery, perhaps because Pery did not attempt to articulate his political ideology in any depth. Instead, this biography shows that Pery was fundamentally a parliamentarian and the ‘intrigue’ of the title captures something essential to Pery's political manoeuvrings as courtier, patriot, speaker and peer. Fleming does not neglect a related aspect of Pery's long career: self-interest. Pery was one of ‘Ireland's wealthiest’ people and his financial resources developed alongside his political profile, although, as Fleming notes, this was hardly unusual (p. 257).
Fleming emphasises Pery's interest in economic development throughout the book, and in chapter seven he provides an excellent in-depth assessment of Pery as ‘Landowner, Builder, Promoter’, focused mainly on Limerick. The book marshals new evidence to detail Pery's role in the construction of the New Square at St John's church in the early 1750s and, in particular, his promotion of Newtown Pery from the late 1760s. Again, Fleming provides a nuanced analysis. He makes it clear that Pery's direct role in the construction of his Newtown was limited: apart from two houses which he built himself, his ‘only direct building initiative was to lay down sewers and the streets; his tenants were expected to do everything else’ (p. 199). Indeed, the new urban space that transformed Limerick emerged slowly. Nonetheless, Fleming is surely correct to conclude that ‘By eighteenth-century standards, the city's progress had been extraordinary’ (p. 212). Fleming also devotes considerable space to Pery's involvement in canal construction and other economic initiatives. Pery's scheme to build a canal from Limerick to Killaloe reached completion after forty-four years; ‘it must not have given him much satisfaction’, Fleming notes dryly (p. 192).
Edmund Sexten Pery is not a straightforward subject for a biographer, but Fleming has succeeded in producing a significant study and a model work of scholarship. The book draws on a very impressive range of research, but while many pages are knee-deep in footnotes the structure is assured and the writing is clear. Fleming offers judicious and convincing assessments which place Pery carefully without over-stating his significance. As a result, Edmund Sexten Pery makes an important contribution to our understanding of eighteenth-century Ireland.