Ensor further outraged prevailing opinion by inveighing against the constitutional ascendancy not merely (as a supporter of Catholic emancipation) of Protestantism, but more broadly of the Christian religion.

In 1783, his mother Sara Ensor (née Clarke) inherited Ardress House,[1] a modest farmhouse in County Armagh, that his father transformed with, amongst other alterations, a facade with false windows to increase the property's apparent size.

[5][6] Regardless of what might be done to improve their condition, Malthus maintained that the labouring classes tend to propagate until, outpacing the means of their subsistence, their numbers invite "correction" by war, hunger, and pestilence.

[21] Among other things, these included ejecting the unelected representatives of the landed interest (the hereditary Lords) from Parliament; taxing real estates passing by descent ("death duties" as they came to be known in Britain); ending the presumption of primogeniture (Ensor accounted the suppression of gavelkind as "greatest evil" the Norman Conquest visited upon England); admitting women to their share of inheritance, and recognising tenant right.

[24] As described by Ensor, these were associations of "illiberals" whose "loyalty" to the Crown rests on the impunity to exclude, "abuse and insult" their Catholic fellow countrymen.

[25] In Armagh, Ensor did have an unexpected ally: the sitting MP Charles Brownlow recanted his Orange Order opposition to emancipation, and was successfully returned to Westminster for the county in the general election of 1826.

[24] Loyalist opposition, however, was sufficiently intimidating that Ensor and a coterie of Ulster reformers around Lord Rossmore had to abandon plans to build on this success with a provincial meeting to be convened, as they imagined, in the patriotic spirit of the Irish Volunteers.

[28] The by-election was to be a decisive test of the government's revolve to uphold the oaths of allegiance, supremacy and abjuration that barred Catholics from higher office and from Parliament.

[3] He described Ensor as "a man of pure principle and excellent notions", although, "if a Christian at all, certainly not a Catholic", and a radical rather than [as most of O'Connell's Protestant and English friends] a Whig.

[33] O'Connell sought rationalise the disenfranchisement of so many of the tenants who, in defiance of their landlords, had voted for him: the new ten-pound franchise might actually "give more power to Catholics by concentrating it in more reliable and less democratically dangerous hands".

[34] Ensor, meanwhile, described their abandonment as a "crime ... against the whole Irish people [for which] wretches are found to applaud, corrupted or cajoled by insidious agents of our ancient enemy".

The Reform Act 1832 had left the peoples of Britain and Ireland reason yet to envy France where the right to vote, albeit still tied to property, was exercised by secret ballot (out of sight of landlord and employer), and was undiluted by hereditary and ecclesiastical legislators.

[43] As first proposed in his treatise On National Government (1810) (a work forwarded to Thomas Jefferson by Ensor's Trinity College classmate and United Irish exile, William Sampson),[44] this was based on the confidence that:Most people know in the main what is good for them.

Ensor not only found "the moral doctrines of the Christian religion, for which it is so rapturously applauded", resting on wholly contradictory and inconsistent scripture and teaching.

The result is:[a priesthood that] require their followers apostolically to sacrifice temporal for eternal concerns; and labour incessantly to appropriate to themselves all the good things of the earth in order to prevent their flock from sinning, and suffering by their enjoyments.

[52] There followed Letters showing the inutility, and exhibiting the absurdity, of what is rather fantastically termed "the new Reformation" (1828), Ensor's broadside against the evangelical revival which had spurred Protestant "home missions" to Irish peasantry.

It had also required "the Bible without note or comment to be a schoolbook"[53] which upended the government's conciliatory plans, broadly supported by Doyle,[54] for a non-denominational system of primary education.

[57] Conservative reviewers accused Ensor of an excessive and ridiculous "pedantry",[47] and, among radical pamphleteers, classed him as a writer of the second rank—as an imitator of William Cobbett[58] and of Thomas Paine.

Describing Ensor as "a political economist of English origin", and as a Protestant who "being himself indifferent to religious matters ... can be witty in defending Catholicism", he recommended his pamphlets to Friedrich Engels.

[61] In his anti-Malthusian polemic,[62] Ensor had suggested that in the Highland clearances Scottish grandees effected what the Mongols in China had only contemplated: "to exterminate the inhabitants and convert the land into pasture".

[63] Today a "neglected" figure, Ensor had sufficient renown in his lifetime for a recent history of Irish thought to class him with his radical contemporaries William Thompson (whose Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth[64] also receives an honorary mention in Capital),[65] Thompson's sometime collaborator, the radical feminist Anna Doyle Wheeler, and the holistic philosopher Henry MacCormac.

[33] An extract from Ensor's On the State of Europe in January 1816, in which he decries the restoration of divine-right monarchy, has been included in a collection of texts —Romanticism and Politics, 1789-1832 (2007)—illustrating the development of radical debate in Britain in the decades following the French Revolution.