Lord Lieutenant of Ireland
Clarendon was twice offered the Governor-Generalship of India, and once the Governor-Generalship of Canada, but he declined as it would have meant leaving British and European politics for some years.
In 1847, Clarendon was persuaded to accept the Lord Lieutenancy of Ireland, which the Cabinet wanted to abolish and transform into an Irish secretaryship of state. He arrived during the second year of the Great Famine. His reports on the scale of the crisis were regularly discounted by a government that deferred to the permanent head of the Treasury, Sir Charles Trevelyan.
Despairing of effective famine relief, Clarendon suggested to Russell, that "there is not another legislature in Europe that would disregard such suffering as now exists in the west of Ireland, or coldly persist in a policy of extermination". Lord Russell replied: "The course of English benevolence is frozen by insult, calumny and rebellion". In London there was consternation over Irish agitation for repeal of the Act of Union, reports of violence directed against landlords and the attempted rising by the Young Irelanders.
While he was to commute the sentences of the Young Ireland conspirators from hanging to life transportation, Clarendon did take stringent security measures, proclaiming martial law in large parts of the country and persuading Westminster to suspend Habeas Corpus. At the same time, he continued to plead what he saw as Ireland's case.
In the hope of garnering greater English sympathy, in 1849 he hosted Queen Victoria in Ireland. Her visit was deemed a "great popular success". But it appeared to make no impression on Irish policy. Trevelyan, a student of Thomas Malthus, insisted that Ireland be "left to the operation of natural causes" (and was fearful that borrowing to finance relief efforts in Ireland might panic the markets).
He attempted a policy of conciliation with the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland. In 1849, he sided with Catholic bishops in their objections to a non-denominational ("godless") scheme for higher education, and when an official inquiry failed to indict the Orange Order for the death of 20 Catholics in the Dolly's Brae affray, he dismissed the magistrate concerned, Lord Roden, and helped bring in the Party Processions Act (1850) to curtail the Protestant association. However, Orangemen accused Clarendon – who previously had supplied them with arms – of double-dealing. The claim was publicly upheld by Isaac Butt, Member of Parliament, a former Orangeman whom the famine had converted to the cause of Irish self-government. When he returned to England following the fall of the Russell ministry in February 1852, "he was distrusted by all sides in Ireland".
