Charles Lucas (1713-71), politician and physician. Despite the powerful example provided by the ideological critiques offered by William Molyneux in the 1690s and Jonathan Swift in the 1720s, political dissent was slow to emerge within the Protestant ascendancy in the eighteenth century. Guided by their inability to allow the ‘massacres’ of 1641 pass into memory, by their realisation that the lands they occupied had been sequestered, and by their vivid consciousness of the fact that they were a minority community surrounded by a hostile Catholic majority, Irish Protestants targeted acts of British political and commercial oppression rather than at the manifestations of misgovernment that were identifiable at home. This was to change in the 1740s. Then Charles Lucas spearheaded an attempt to combat practices in the way Dublin Corporation conducted its business which, he maintained, were incompatible with the liberties provided for under the ‘ancient constitution’ that were the birthright of every protestant subject.

Lucas was born in 1713 near Enistymon, County Clare. He was the descendant of Lieutenant Colonel Benjamin Lucas, a Cromwellian soldier who had acquired nearly a thousand acres in the county in the 1650s, but the improvidence of his father meant that Lucas’s inheritance was a modest £80. This was sufficient to enable him to qualify as an apothecary and to secure admission to the guild of barber surgeons in 1735. It appeared, indeed, based on his authorship of a number of works on the apothecaries trade that Lucas was set fair for a successful career in medicine. But his nomination in 1741 to represent the barber-surgeons’ guild on the common council or lower house of Dublin Corporation encouraged him to turn his attention to municipal politics. More significantly, it prompted him to take up what many common councillors perceived was their unjustified subordination to the aldermen who comprised the smaller upper house.

Grounded on the so-called ‘New Rules’ that had been introduced at the behest of the crown in 1672 to ensure stable municipal government, the aldermen were entitled to choose the main officers of the Corporation and to exert a limited power of veto on the nominees of the guilds to membership of the common council. Lucas and a small number of others councillors were dissatisfied with an arrangement they adjudged incompatible with the ancient chartered rights of the commons and citizens. Determined the matter should be addressed, Lucas cannily availed of the refusal by the aldermen to accept to some minor procedural changes proposed by the commons to secure the establishment in August 1742 of a committee to inspect and report on the city ‘charters, acts of assembly and other … papers as relate to the government of the city’. Since Lucas undertook much of this work himself, it is apparent that his purpose was to demonstrate that not only the ‘New Rules’ but also a host of arrangements and practices whereby the aldermen monopolised the powers of the Corporation were incompatible with the chartered rights of the citizen. The aldermen were enabled successfully to frustrate Lucas’s attempt by this means to curb their powers and extend the active participation in municipal affairs to the common councilmen and citizens by appealing to the ‘New Rules’, and a subsequent attempt to have the matter examined by the court was denied. Despite this, Lucas ensured that the wide trawl he had made to secure documentation in support of his case was not in vain by publishing his findings in a sequence of pamphlets. This served no only to earn his cause advantageous publicity, it also enabled Lucas to raise his own public profile and to forge a reputation as a champion of constitutional probity and the citizen against vested oligarchical interests.

This did Lucas little good in the short term, as his nomination to a second term on the Corporation was vetoed by the aldermen in 1744. He was disappointed once again in 1746 and 1747, following which Lucas composed a sharply worded critique of the ‘tyrannical’ judicial and aldermanic interests that resisted his efforts to restore the ancient liberties of the Corporation. Convinced that his brand of radical Protestant politics appealed to the electorate of Dublin city, Lucas offered himself for election for the city in 1748-9 in a by-election prompted by the death of the city’s two sitting MPs. Though already well known for his forceful advocacy of the rights of the Protestant citizenry of Dublin, Lucas surpassed himself on this occasion, and by so doing changed the way in which elections were fought in open constituencies. Through the medium of The Censor, a newspaper founded specifically for this purpose, a sequence of twenty election addresses and six public letters, Lucas propounded that the citizenry of Dublin sought no more than the restoration of rights of which they had been illegally deprived.

Significantly, Lucas did not confine his observations on this occasion to Dublin. In a telling new departure, he extended his focus to embrace British policy towards Ireland. Convinced that the claims of the British parliament to make law for Ireland were as unfounded as the analogous assertions of the aldermen of Dublin, Lucas was transformed what to this point was a purely municipal struggle into a national issue. This greatly disturbed those politicians in Dublin Castle entrusted with the maintenance of the Anglo-Irish connection and in the Irish parliament who were nervous of the implications stability of his aggressive rhetoric and popular style. Persuaded that these were compelling grounds for intervention, the House of Commons approved a series of resolutions in October 1749 condemning Lucas as an enemy of the country, and ordering his arrest and prosecution for publishing sedition. Unwilling to contemplate imprisonment, Lucas fled the country.

Lucas spent the next eleven years abroad. He endeavoured at the outset to sustain his campaign in support of ‘the liberties’ of Dublin by enunciating his case through pamphlet publications, and by publishing a large compendium of his electoral and political writings – The political constitutions of Great Britain and Ireland asserted and vindicated (London, 1751) – in two volumes but this proved impossible. He instead devoted much of his time to medicine until 1760, when, following his accession to the throne, he was pardoned by George III.

Lucas’s returned to Dublin was a personal triumph, as he was elected as MP for the city in 1761. In accordance with the commitment he gave the ‘independent’ interest from which he drew his support, he stood forward as an advocate of constitutional reform. To this end, he supported the foundation of a new mass circulation newspaper appropriately titled the Freeman’s Journal. He was also an active member of a small but vigorous band of opposition MPs who campaigned for regular general elections, a restriction on the ability of government to use patronage to rewards is friends, and the dilution of the restrictions (Poynings’ Law most notably) on the Irish parliament to make law for the kingdom of Ireland. The ratification in 1768 of a measure providing for elections every eight years was due in part to his efforts. He was less successful in agitating for the legalising of a customary charge levied on Catholics to enable them to trade in the city. Lucas pursued this issue because the Protestant electorate of Dublin supported it, but also because it was in keeping with his sincerely held conviction that Catholicism, as a religion, was inimical to liberty, and specifically to the Protestant constitution of Britain and Ireland to which he was devoted. His stance assisted him to retain his parliamentary seat in 1768 and his election to Dublin Corporation.

By the time of his death, aged 58, in 1771, having overcome the intemperate reputation he had acquired in the 1740s, Lucas was widely held in high esteem as a politician of principle and conviction who had by his efforts ‘raised a spirit in the people’ and energised that strand of radical Protestantism to which he devoted his political life.

Biography & Studies. S. Murphy, ‘Charles Lucas, Catholicism and nationalism’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 8 (1993), 83–102; S. Murphy, ‘The Lucas affair: a study of municipal and electoral politics in Dublin, 1742–9’, MA diss., University College Dublin, 1981; S. Murphy, ‘Charles Lucas and the Dublin election of 1748–9’, Parliamentary History, 2 (1983), 93–111; S. Murphy, ‘Burke and Lucas: an authorship problem re-examined’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 1 (1986), 143–56; E. K. Sheldon, Thomas Sheridan of Smock-Alley: recording his life as actor and theater manager in both Dublin and London (1967), 81–95; Letters of Charles O’Conor of Belanagare, ed. R. E. Ward and others (1988), 3.11; A. P. I. Samuels, The early life, correspondence and writings of the Rt. Hon. Edmund Burke, LL. D. (1923), 389–95; R. R. Madden, The history of Irish periodical literature, 2 vols. (1867), 1.43; 2.373–4, 38; J. Hill, From patriots to Unionists (1997); The manuscripts of his grace the duke of Rutland, 4 vols., Historical Manuscripts Commission, 24 (1888–1905); Genealogical Office, Dublin, MS 142.

Dr James Kelly