of bundling the landlords out of doors and putting tenants in their shoes". In 1842 he had already allied himself with James Godkin who had abandoned a bible mission to campaign for the rights of the Catholic tenants he had been tasked with bringing into the Protestant fold. He now looked to James MacKnight (M'Knight) who, closely aided by a group of radical Presbyterian ministers, in 1847 had formed the Ulster Tenant Right Association in Derry. In 1850, a convention called in Dublin by Duffy and MacKnight formed the Irish Tenant Right League. It was committed in its charter to MacKnight's "three F's’": fair rent, free sale, and fixity of tenure. Uniting activists across the sectarian and constitutional divide, in 1852 the League helped return Duffy (for New Ross) and 49 other tenant-rights MPs to Westminster. In November 1852, Lord Derby's short-lived Conservative government introduced a land bill to compensate Irish tenants on eviction for improvements they had made to the land. The bill passed in the House of Commons in 1853 and 1854, but failed to win consent of the landed grandees in the House of Lords. What Duffy optimistically hailed as the "League of North and South" unravelled. In the Catholic South, Archbishop Cullen approved the leading Catholic MPs William Keogh and John Sadlier breaking their pledge of independent opposition and accepting positions in a new Whig administration. In the Protestant North William Sharman Crawford and other League candidates had their meetings broken up by Orange "bludgeon men". An "Irish Mazzini" To the cause of tenant rights Cullen was sympathetic, but of Duffy he was deeply suspicious. Following O'Connell he described Duffy as an "Irish Mazzini"—condemnation from a man who had witnessed the Church's humiliation under Mazzini's Roman Republic in 1849. Duffy in turn accused the Church under Cullen of pursuing a "Roman policy" in Ireland "hostile to its nationality." Until O'Connell's death, Duffy suggested that Rome had "believed in the possibility of an Independent Catholic State" in Ireland, but that since O'Connell's death could "only see the possibility of a Red Republic". The Curia had, as a result, returned to "her design of treating Ireland as an entrenched camp of Catholicity in the heart of the British Empire, capable of leavening the whole." Ireland for this purpose had to be"thoroughly imperialised, loyalised, welded into England." Cullen has been described as the man who "borrowed the British Empire."