John Philpot Curran

John Philpot Curran (24 July 1750 – 14 October 1817) was an Irish orator, politician, wit, lawyer and judge, who held the office of Master of the Rolls in Ireland. He was renowned for his representation in 1780 of Father Neale, a Catholic priest horsewhipped by the Anglo-Irish Lord, Viscount Doneraile, and in the 1790s for his defence of United Irishmen facing capital charges of sedition and treason. His courtroom speeches were widely admired. Lord Byron was to say of Curran, "I have heard that man speak more poetry than I have seen written". Karl Marx described him as the greatest "people's advocate" of the eighteenth century.

Early life

Born in Newmarket, County Cork, he was the eldest of five children of James Curran, seneschal of the Newmarket manor court, and Sarah, née Philpot.

The Curran family were said to have originally been named Curwen, their ancestor having come from Cumberland as a soldier under Cromwell during the Cromwellian Conquest of Ireland and had originally settled in County Londonderry. Curran's grandfather was from Derry, but settled in Cork. The Philpot family occupation were Irish judges, lawyers, bishops, priests and noblemen.

A friend of the family, Rev. Nathaniel Boyse, arranged to have Curran educated at Midleton College, County Cork. Before his entry into Trinity College, he was examined by Rev. Charles Bunworth, who was so impressed by the young Curran that he offered him financial assistance for his studies. He studied law at Trinity College Dublin. (he was described as "the wildest, wittiest, dreamiest student") and continued his legal studies at King's Inns and the Middle Temple. He was called to the Irish Bar in 1775. Upon his first trial, his nerves got the better of him and he couldn't proceed. His short stature, boyish features, shrill voice and a stutter were said to have impacted his career, and earned him the nickname "Stuttering Jack Curran".However, he could speak passionately in court on subjects close to his heart. He eventually overcame his nerves, and got rid of his speech impediment by constantly reciting Shakespeare and Bolingbroke in front of a mirror, and became a noted orator and wit.

His occasional tendency of challenging people to duels (he fought five in all) rather than compromise his values, along with his skilful oratory, quick wit and his championing of popular Irish causes such as Catholic Emancipation and the enlargement of the franchise, made him one of the most popular lawyers in Ireland. He also could speak Irish, still the language of the majority at that time. He wrote a large amount of humorous and romantic poetry.

The case which cemented Curran's popularity was that of Father Neale and St Leger St Leger, 1st Viscount Doneraile at the County Cork Assizes in 1780. Father Neale, an elderly Catholic priest in County Cork, criticised an adulterous parishioner. The adulterer's sister was mistress to Lord Doneraile, a cruel Protestant landlord. Doneraile demanded that Neale recant his criticism of his mistress' brother. When the priest stood by his principles, Doneraile horse-whipped him, secure in the confidence that a jury of the time would not convict a Protestant on charges brought forward by a Catholic. Curran, who had a passion for lost causes, represented the priest and won over the jury by setting aside the issue of religion. The jury awarded Curran's client 30 guineas. Doneraile challenged Curran to a duel, in which Doneraile fired and missed. Curran declined to fire.

This trial and duel established Curran's reputation. In 1782, after seven years at the bar, he became, with the support of the reform-minded Attorney-General, Barry Yelverton, a king's counsel.

Political views, and political cases

Member of Parliament

Curran stood as Member of Parliament (MP) for Kilbeggan in 1783. He subsequently represented Rathcormack between 1790 and 1798 and served then for Banagher from 1800 until the Act of Union in 1801.

In his first major speech in the Irish House of Commons he supported Henry Flood's proposal to abolish the " pocket boroughs" that allowed the aristocracy, already with seats in the Lords, to nominate and control two-thirds of the Irish Commons, and to introduce a broader—albeit still Protestant—freehold suffrage. He identified with the patriot Whig opposition of Henry Grattan, a personal friend, joining in the calls, not only for parliamentary reform, but also for Catholic Emancipation which after the extension to the limited right to vote in 1795, focussed on removing the sacramental bar to Catholics sitting in Parliament.

In October 1796, Curran supported Grattan's motion, in face an anticipated French invasion, that a defence of the kingdom could best be secured by legislation to guarantee "the blessings and privileges of the constitution without distinction of religion". On 15 May 1797, he supported William Ponsonby's proposal for sweeping reform. Once this last effort of the constitutional opposition to obtain a conciliatory policy from the government was rejected, Curran and his colleagues withdrew from the Commons and ceased to attend its debates until the parliament adjourned on 3 July.

The United Irishmen

Despairing at the intransigence of the government, and in the hope of assistance from revolutionary France, United Irishmen proposed to secure a representative and national government by force of arms.. When their leading publicists and conspirators were brought up on charges, Curran, despite threats to his welfare and security, served as star counsel. Among others, he defended the Revd. William Jackson (an agent of the French Directory), Archibald Hamilton Rowan, Wolfe Tone, Napper Tandy, The Sheares Brothers, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, William Orr, William Drennan and Peter Finnerty. Loyalists condemned Curran as "the leading advocate of every murderer, ruffian and low villain".

In Ireland, the government could secure a conviction of treason on the testimony of just one witness. Curran's success depended on his lengthy cross-examination of such government witnesses (often paid informers), seeking to trap them in inconsistencies. Curran used this technique to great effect in the case in 1797 of eleven members of the congregation of the Rev. Thomas Ledlie Birch, Saintfield, County Down, charged with attacking the house of a loyalist informer. His cross-examination of the prosecution witness the Presbyterian-turned-Anglican Rev. John Cleland, sub-sheriff and land agent of the Lord Londonderry, was "withering" and all were acquitted.

Among his admirers, however, there was disquiet over his performance in the case of Peter Finnerty, charged for seditious libel in publishing an attack on the judges in the capital trial of William Orr and on the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, who, on the charge of administering the United Irish Test to militia men, refused to reprieve him. Curran, appeared to observers to be concerned less with addressing the charge against Finnerty than in decrying process that had sent Orr to the gallows, and in maximising the embarrassment of the government. Finnerty was sentenced to a session in the pillory and two years in prison.

In 1802, Curran won damages from Major Sirr, who in 1798 had fired the fatal shot in the arrest of Lord Edward FitzGerald. Curran represented a proven loyalist who had collapsed a treason trial by convincing a jury of the "infamous" character of Sirr's key witness. Sirr and his colleague were alleged then to have used wrongful arrest, imprisonment incommunicado, and condemnation to hanging as means of extortion and personal satisfaction. Curran used the occasion to underscore that these were the same illegitimate methods used to suppress the United movement. Niles' Register of 24 March 1821 describes Sirr as "this old sinner, given to eternal infamy by the eloquence of Curran'".

It was rumoured that had the rebels succeeded in 1798, they would hav nominated Curran to a governing committee of one hundred.

Emmet's Rebellion

Curran was bitterly disappointed by the Act of Union, which abolished the Irish Parliament in favour of representation at Westminster. Alhough in its wake his house was searched and he was brought before the Privy Council to answer inquiries, he no truck with the attempt by Robert Emmet and others to mount a new insurrection in Dublin. That, in the course of the hapless their rising, the rebels murdered his friend Lord Kilwarden confirmed Curran in his rejection of physical-force republicanism. Nonetheless, he had been prepared to defend Emmet until interrogators revealed that his daughter Sarah had continued in a romantic relationship with the defendant. Curran (who had already experienced his wife's elopment), was scandalised. He disowned Sarah, who was to die five years later of tuberculosis in Sicily.

Curran did appear on 1 September for several of the nineteen persons who were tried for complicity with Emmet in the rising, though he spoke only on behalf of the tailor, Owen Kirwan. Representing Kirwan, Curran, recently returned from a visit to France, derided the rebel's trust in French intentions. Napoleon, he said, would have rewarded "his rapacious generals and soldiers by parcelling out the soil of the island among them, and by dividing you into lots of serfs to till the respective lands to which they belonged". Kirwan, like Emmet who at his trial offered no defence, was hanged on 3 September.

Death and commemoration

Curran retired in 1814 and spent his last three years in London. He died in his home in Brompton in 1817. In 1837, his remains were transferred from Paddington Cemetery, London to Glasnevin Cemetery, where they were laid in an 8-foot-high classical-style sarcophagus. In 1845 a white marble memorial to him, with a carved bust by Christopher Moore, was placed near the west door of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin.

Reading Curran's courtroom defence of the United Irishmen, Karl Marx was so impressed that he accounted Curran "the only great lawyer (people's advocate) of the eighteenth century and the noblest personality" (Henry Grattan, by comparison, he judged a "parliamentary rogue").Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels (10 December 1869) reprinted in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ''Ireland and the Irish Question'', New York, International Publishers, 1972

Private life

In 1774, Curran married his cousin Sarah Creagh (1755–1844), the daughter of Richard Creagh, a County Cork physician. His eldest daughter Amelia was born in 1775, and eight more children resulted from the union, but his marriage disintegrated, his wife eventually deserting him and eloping with Reverend Abraham Sandys, whom Curran sued afterwards for criminal conversation in 1795.

In Dublin, he was a member of Daly's Club.T. H. S. Escott, ''Club Makers and Club Members'' (1913)
pp. 329–333
/ref>

Curran was appointed Master of the Rolls in Ireland in 1806, following Pitt's replacement by a more liberal cabinet.

Quotations and legacy

*"I have never yet heard of a murderer who was not afraid of a ghost." - A retort to a unionist MP who spoke of how he shuddered each time he passed the now-empty Parliament House, Dublin. The MP had voted in favour of the Act of Union which abolished the Irish Parliament.
*"Assassinate me you may; intimidate me you cannot."
*"His smile is like the silver plate on a coffin."
*"In this administration, a place can be found for every bad man."
*"Twenty four millions of people have burst their chains, and on the altar erected by despotism for public slavery, have enthroned the image of public liberty" – ''Speaking of the French Revolution, 4 February 1790.''
*"It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt." – Speech upon the Right of Election for Lord Mayor of Dublin, 1790, as quoted in ''Bartlett's Familiar Quotations''
*"No matter with what solemnities he may have been devoted on the altar of slavery, the moment he touches the sacred soil of Britain, the altar and the god sink together in the dust; his soul walks abroad in her own majesty; his body swells beyond the measure of his chains which burst from around him, and he stands redeemed, regenerated, and disenthralled, by the irresistible genius of universal emancipation." – ''(Curran's speech in defence of James Somersett, a Jamaican slave who declared his freedom upon being brought to Britain here_slavery_was_banned.html"_;"title="slavery.html"_;"title="here_slavery">here_slavery_was_banned">slavery.html"_;"title="here_slavery">here_slavery_was_bannedby_his_master;_quoted_extensively_by_US_Abolitionism_in_the_United_States.html" "title="slavery">here_slavery_was_banned.html" ;"title="slavery.html" ;"title="here slavery">here slavery was banned">slavery.html" ;"title="here slavery">here slavery was bannedby his master; quoted extensively by US Abolitionism in the United States">abolitionist