Henry Flood - British Parliament

British Parliament

In 1776, Flood had made an attempt to enter the British House of Commons. In 1783, he tried again, this time with success. He purchased a seat for Winchester from the duke of Chandos, and for the next seven years he was a member at the same time of both the British and Irish parliaments. He reintroduced, but without success, his reform bill in the Irish House in 1784; supported the movement for protecting Irish industries; but short-sightedly opposed Pitt's commercial propositions in 1785. He remained a firm opponent of Roman Catholic emancipation, even defending the penal laws on the ground that after the Revolution, they were not laws of persecution but of political necessity; but after 1786, he does not appear to have attended the parliament in Dublin.

In the House at Westminster, where he refused to enrol himself as a member of either political party, he was not successful. His first speech, in opposition to Charles James Fox's India Bill on 3 December 1783, disappointed the expectations aroused by his celebrity. His speech in opposition to the commercial treaty with France in 1787 was, however, most able; and in 1790 he introduced a reform bill which Fox declared to be the best scheme of reform that had yet been proposed, and which in Edmund Burke's opinion retrieved Flood's reputation. But at the dissolution in the same year he lost his seat in both parliaments, and he then retired to Farmley, his residence in County Kilkenny, where he remained till his death.

When Peter Burrowes, notwithstanding his close personal friendship with Grattan, declared that Flood was perhaps the ablest man Ireland ever produced, indisputably the ablest man of his own times, he expressed what was probably the general opinion of Flood's contemporaries. Lord Charlemont, who knew him intimately though not always in agreement with his policy, pronounced him to be a man of consummate ability. He also declared that avarice made no part of Flood's character. Lord Mountmorres, a critic by no means partial to Flood, described him as a pre-eminently truthful man, and one who detested flattery. Grattan, who even after the famous quarrel never lost his respect for Flood, said of him that he was the best tempered and the most sensible man in the world. In his youth he was genial, frank, sociable and witty; but in later years disappointment made him gloomy and taciturn. As an orator he was less polished, less epigrammatic than Grattan; but a clear reasoner and a greater master of sarcasm and invective.

Personal ambition often governed his actions, but his political judgment was usually sound; and it was the opinion of Bentham that Flood would have succeeded in carrlting a reform bill that might have preserved Irish parliamentary independence if he had been supported by Grattan and the rest of his party in keeping alive the Volunteer Convention in 1783. Though he never wavered in loyalty to the British crown and empire, Ireland never produced a more sincere patriot than Henry Flood.