23 Soldier for Liberty kept Irishmen in subjection, and O’Connell took his seat in 1830, without having to submit to the oath. Daniel O’Connell, not Abraham Lincoln, was first known as the Great Emancipator. Peel would later on join with members of the Whigs to repeal tariffs on grain, to help bring food to Ireland during the famine. It was too little and too late, and it cost him the leadership of his party, but Orange Peel was in that battle more of a man than a partisan. I should not give the impression that Peel eventually saw things as O’Connell did. No sooner did O’Connell take his seat in Parliament, then he became the de facto ruler of Catholic Ireland, and pressed for “Repeal”—the repeal of the act that unified Ireland with England, Wales, and Scotland. The Irish wanted to govern themselves, while yet recognizing the monarch of England as the head of state, an arrangement such as would hold in Canada later on. Peel would not give in. Nor would O’Connell. Once again he led a mass movement of the Irish, but this time Peel outlawed their meetings, and in 1844 the now elderly O’Connell was thrown into prison. He appealed to the House of Lords and won his release, but his health was ruined. Accounts of his death are deeply moving. He felt he was dying, and desired to make a pilgrimage to Rome. It was not to be; the disease of the brain
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