Society of United Irishmen

The United Irishmen

The men who, in October 1791, gathered in a Belfast tavern to forward a "brotherhood of affection" and to obtain reform on "principles of civil, political and religious liberty"[2] were Protestants in what was very largely a Protestant town. With the exception of Thomas Russell, a former India-service army officer from Cork, and Theobald Wolfe Tone, a Dublin barrister, they were Presbyterians. As "Dissenters" from the established Anglican (Church of Ireland) communion they were conscious of having shared, in part, the civil and political disabilities of the Kingdom's dispossessed Roman Catholic majority.

Presbyterians were privileged to sit in Parliament in Dublin. In 1790, the future nemesis of the Society, the son of a gentrified Presbyterian family, Robert Stewart (Viscount Castlereagh), had won a county seat south of Belfast as a "friend of the people". But with its enfranchised forty-shilling freeholders, his had been a rare contest. Two thirds of the Irish House of Commons represented boroughs in the "pockets" of the Kingdom's largest proprietors. Belfast's two MPs were elected by the thirteen members of the corporation, all nominees of the Chichesters, Marquesses of Donegall. Against the Ascendancy's tithes, rack rents and sacramental tests, and against English restriction of Irish manufacture, Presbyterians voted with their feet: from 1710 to 1775, over 200,000 sailed for the North American colonies. When the American Revolutionary War commenced, the Reverend William Steel Dickson, who was to both campaign for Stewart and join the Society, remarked "there is scarcely a Protestant family of the middle classes amongst us who does not reckon kindred with the inhabitants of the extensive continent".[3]

Most of the Society's founding members and leadership were congregants of one of three Rosemary Street Presbyterian churches. Henry Joy McCracken, born into the town's leading fortunes in shipping and linen manufacture, was a Third Church member; Samuel Neilson, owner of the largest woollen warehouse in Belfast, was in the Second Church; and the obstetrician William Drennan, who called the inaugural meeting, was the son of the minister of the First Church. Despite theological differences (the First and Second Churches did not subscribe to the Westminster Confession of Faith), they were latitudinarian.[4] Educated at the University of Glasgow (Trinity College, Dublin, was closed to Dissenters), their elected ministers evinced the "New Light" inclination toward conscience rather than doctrine.

The University of Glasgow, which Drennan himself attended, was the centre of the Scottish Enlightenment. In their defence of what Drennan called "the restless power of reason", a new generation of Scottish thinkers had drawn on the republican ethos of Presbyterian resistance to royal and episcopal imposition.[5] In the cases of David Hume, Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson they also drew directly upon the work of the Irish Presbyterian Francis Hutcheson. At Glasgow Hutcheson had held the Chair of Moral Philosophy and had led those in the Church of Scotland opposed to the "Old Light" Calvinist doctrines of fallen humanity. But his influence was also to return to Ireland from America. Hutcheson's early Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, introducing his "perennial association of unalienable rights with the collective right to resist oppressive government", was used at Harvard College as a textbook as early as the 1730s.[6] Thomas Jefferson's appeals to sentiment in the Declaration of Independence (broadcast in August 1776 by the Belfast Newsletter) are thought to reflect Hutcheson's influence.[7]

Taking issue with Thomas Hobbes's "war of all against all", Hutcheson's "benevolent theory" of morals supported concepts of Natural Law and of rights consistent with the case for limited, and accountable, government. As proposed by John Locke (whose Treatises on Government Drennan owned as his "prime authority on politics"),[8] in England, the Glorious Revolution of 1688 was understood as an advance on broadly these principles. (With Drennan's father, Hutcheson himself took them somewhat further. In the 1720s their circle in Dublin published the work of the English republicans Algernon Sidney and Edmond Ludlow, and of the still more radical Irish rationalist John Toland).[9] In Ireland the outworkings of James the Second's deposition were different. By further concentrating land in Anglican hands, the Williamite Settlement established Parliament on a still narrower Ascendancy basis. It also codified the super-ordinate authority of the Crown in England. London arrogated to itself the right, through the Lord Lieutenant, to hold the Dublin Castle Executive to account; to approve and amend heads of Irish parliamentary bills; and to impose upon the Kingdom its own legislation. "We have," the new Society was to conclude, "no national government". Being "ruled by Englishmen, and the servants of Englishmen", Ireland was governed by "an extrinsic power".[10]

In the Westminster Commons the Irish peer Lord Newhaven observed that George Washington was able to "oppose our armies with our own Irish subjects, whom our own narrow policy had driven from their country". Lord Lieutenant, Lord Harcourt, could meanwhile report from Dublin that their kinsfolk remaining in Ulster were American "in their hearts".[11]

Bastille Day, 1792, Belfast. Volunteer companies parade the "The Colours of Five Free Nations, viz.: Flag of Ireland — motto, Unite and be free. Flag of America — motto, The Asylum of Liberty. Flag of France — motto, The Nation, the Law, and the King. Flag of Poland — motto, We will support it. Flag of Great Britain — motto, Wisdom, Spirit, and Liberality."[12]

For the Belfast members of the Society, there was a further source of prior association, the Irish Volunteer companies formed during the American War. Following a raid upon Belfast Lough by the American privateer, John Paul Jones, in May 1778 the townspeople assembled their own volunteer garrison. With no troops to spare, and fearing French intervention, the government allowed the precedent. While in many areas the new militia were little more than local landlords and their retainers armed and drilled, in Dublin, in the larger towns and in Ulster where, with Dissenters shouldering arms half of all Ireland's Volunteers were based, they mobilised a much broader section of Protestant society. The Volunteer corps developed as political clubs able to lend to their resolutions the weight of arms.[13][14]  

In November 1779 Volunteers paraded before the Parliament in Dublin, promised "50,000 joined together, ready to die for their fatherland," invoked the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688, and protested (as had American patriots) the inequities of the British Navigation Acts.[15] "Free Trade" (by which was intended the right of the Irish Parliament to set its own tariff and trade policy) was saluted with volleys of shot "heard with startling effect at the Castle."[16] Contending with a war further enlarged by the entry of Spain, London conceded repealing its restrictive Irish Commercial Code. Recognising them in the ranks of the Volunteers, the Castle was also directed to lift the sacramental bar for Presbyterians in public office.

The Volunteers pressed forward. In February 1782 delegates from 147 Ulster Volunteer corps gathered in Dungannon (former stronghold of the O'Neill dynasty and a site for Presbyterian Synods). Taking on "the substance of a national assembly"[17] they resolved that “the claim of any body of men, other than the King, Lords, and Commons of Ireland, to make laws to bind this kingdom, is unconstitutional, illegal and a grievance".[18]

Two months later, with Volunteer cavalry, infantry, and artillery posted on all approaches to the Parliament in Dublin, Henry Grattan, leader of the "patriot" opposition, had a "Declaration of Irish Rights" carried by acclaim in the Commons. "Ireland", he proposed, "is now a nation."[19] The new Whig ministry in London put up only token resistance. Legislative independence was conceded, but the "Constitution of 1782" left the Ascendancy in possession of their "rotten boroughs" and of a Parliament manipulated by the emoluments and favours dispensed by the Lord Lieutenant. Delegates of 39 Volunteer corps, reviewed in Belfast in June 1783, resolved: "That an era so honourable to the spirit, wisdom, and loyalty of Ireland, A MORE EQUAL REPRESENTATION of the People in Parliament deserves the deliberate attention of every Irishman".[20]

A second Volunteer convention was held in Dungannon, and a general Volunteer convergence upon Dublin agreed for November 1783. With Volunteers promising not to depart the city until the outcome was certain, Grattan's patriot rival Henry Flood presented the Commons with a bill to repress proprietary boroughs and to extend the franchise to a broader class of Protestant property holders. But the Volunteer moment had passed. Having accepted defeat in America, Britain could again spare troops for Ireland, and the limits of the Ascendancy's patriotism had been reached. Parliament would not consent to the constitution being "explored with a bayonet probe".[21]

In 1789 the enthusiasm for constitutional reform returned on a flood with the news from France. With the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen France, the greatest of the Catholic powers, was seen to be undergoing its own Glorious Revolution. In his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Edmund Burke had sought to disabuse the analogy with 1688. But on reaching the town in October 1791, Tone noted that Thomas Paine's response to Burke, the Rights of Man (which ran into several Irish editions), had become "the Koran of Belfast" [22]

Three months before, on the 14th of July, the second anniversary of the Fall of the Bastille was celebrated with a triumphal procession through Belfast, three feu de joyes, and a solemn "Declaration of the Volunteers and Inhabitants at large of the Town and Neighbourhood of Belfast" in appreciation of the "Great and Gallant" people of France: "AS IRISHMEN, We too have a country, and we hold it very dear--so dear to us its Interest, that we wish all Civil and Religious Intolerance annihilated in this land."[23] Bastille Day the following year was greeted with similar scenes and an address to the French National Assembly: "May your soldiers, with whom war is not a trade, but a duty, remember that they do not fight merely for themselves, but that they are the advance guard of the world".[24]

William Drennan: "what is a country properly considered but a free constitution?"[25]

It was in the midst of this "enthusiastic love of Gallic emancipation"[26] that William Drennan proposed to his friends "a benevolent conspiracy--a plot for the people", the "Rights of Man and [employing the phrase coined by Hutcheson] the Greatest Happiness of the Greater Number its end--its general end Real Independence to Ireland, and Republicanism its particular purpose."[27] When Drennan's friends gathered, they passed three resolutions.

First, resolved--that the weight of English influence in the government of this country is so great as to require a cordial union among all the people of Ireland

Second--that the sole constitutional mode by which this influence can be opposed, is by complete and radical reform of the representation of the people in parliament.

Third--that no reform is practicable, efficacious, or just, which shall not include Irishmen of every religious persuasion.[28]

The "conspiracy", which at Tone's suggestion, called itself the Society of the United Irishmen, had moved beyond Flood's Protestant patriotism. "English influence" exercised through the Dublin Castle Executive would be checked constitutionally by a parliament in which "all the people" would have "an equal representation." Unclear, however, was whether the emancipation of Catholics was to be unqualified and immediate. The previous evening, witnessing a "furious battle on the Catholic question" over dinner with the town's leading reformers (members of the Northern Whig Club, "friends of the Constitution, Liberty, and Peace"), Tone had found himself "teased with liberality of people agreeing in principle [to Catholic emancipation], but doubting as to the expediency".[29] 

Thomas Russell had invited Tone to the Belfast gathering in October 1791 as the author of An Argument on behalf of the Catholics of Ireland.[30] In honour of the reformers in Belfast, who arranged for the publication of 10,000 copies, this had been signed "A Northern Whig". Tone wrote from an unusual vantage. He was a member, in Dublin, of the Catholic Committee.

At the beginning of the century Jonathan Swift could report that Catholics were as "inconsiderable as women and children". Fearing for possession, some of those few privileged to retain land "are already turned Protestant... and in the meantime, the common people, without leaders, without discipline, or natural courage, being little better than Hewers of Wood, and Drawers of Wood, are out of all capacity of doing mischief."[31] Several decades later, having found, with lax Penal-Law enforcement, new positions in trade and in the professions, and alert to the tensions between London and Ascendancy Parliament, from Dublin Catholics were coordinating a country-wide system of committees: an organised interest recognised by Dublin Castle and acknowledged by the Cabinet in London.  

Being of Huguenot descent, Tone may have had an instinctive empathy for the persecuted of faith, but he was "suspicious of the Catholics priests" and hostile to "Papal tyranny".[32] (In 1798 Tone was to record Napoleon's deposition and imprisonment of Pope Pius VI as an event as "of a magnitude scarce if at all inferior to the French Revolution").[33] For Tone the "argument on behalf of the Catholics" was political. In the "imaginary Revolution of 1782," objections to making common cause with Catholics had "lost the question": whether Ireland was to remain in her "oppressed and inglorious state", a Kingdom whose government is "derived from another country", or, through "a reform in the representation of the people", assert her sovereignty. In Belfast these objections were rehearsed for him again by William Bruce, who had succeeded Drennan's father in the pulpit of Rosemary Street First Presbyterian: the "danger" of "throwing power into hands" of Catholics "incapable of enjoying and extending liberty," and determined upon a restitution of forfeited lands.[34]

Against such apprehension Tone had arraigned, as general propositions, that we cannot deny men rights for an "incapacity", "ignorance", in which "we plunge them by law, and continue them by statute", and that there is no constitutional progress possible but by a "compact" that makes allowance for the "difficult sacrifice of parting with power". He referred to "historical experience". When they had the opportunity in the Parliament summoned by James II, and clearer title to what had been forfeit not ninety but forty years before (in the Cromwellian Settlement), Catholics showed no inclination to set "the property of the Kingdom afloat". And as to Parliaments "where no Catholic can by law appear": "the most profligate venality, the most shameless and avowed prostitution of principle go forward, year after year". "Protestantism is no guard against corruption".

Tone cited the examples of America where "Catholic and Protestant sit equally in Congress"; of France, where "200,000 Catholics deputed a Protestant, St. Etienne to the National Assembly . . . with orders to procure, what has since been accomplished, an abolition of all civil distinctions"; and of Catholic Poland in revolt--reference to another constitutionalist revolution reported and celebrated in Belfast.[35] Tone was later flattered by comparison to Tadeusz Kościuszko who led his countrymen against the Partition Powers in defence of the Polish Constitution of May 1791 with its promise of equality and amity between Catholic, Protestant and Jew. "So let it be in Ireland"" cried Tone. The alternative, "if we are still illiberal and blind bigots, who deny that civil liberty can exist out of the pale of Protestantism", is "submission to the present, and every future Administration... who may indulge with ease and safety their propensity to speculation and spoil".[36]

On Bastille Day 1792 in Belfast, the United Irishmen had occasion to make their position clear. In a public debate on "An Address to the People of Ireland", Waddell Cunningham (who in an anti-slavery town had the distinction of owning a Dominica sugar plantation), News Letter publisher Henry Joy, and William Bruce proposed hedging the commitment to an equality of "all sects and denominations of Irishmen".They had rather that the assembled anticipated "the GRADUAL emancipation of our Roman Catholic brethren" and the day when "their ENTIRE ENFRANCHISEMENT shall be a measure not only of SAFETY, but also of EXPEDIENCY, when Protestants shall be ready to grant, and Catholics to receive." Samuel Neilson "expressed his astonishment at hearing... any part of the address called a Catholic question: to his understanding it no more presented a Roman Catholic question than a Church [of Ireland], a Presbyterian, Quaker, an Annabaptist, or a Mountain question; the true question, if any, was whether IRISHMEN SHOULD BE FREE." William Steel Dickson, with "keen irony", wondered whether Catholics were to ascend the "ladder" to liberty "by intermarrying with the wise and capable Protestants, and particularly with us Presbyterian, [so that] they may amend the breed, and produce a race of beings who will inherit the capacity from us?"[37]  

The amendment was defeated, but the division was clear. The United Irish resolve for immediate Catholic emancipation might be well received in Belfast and the surrounding districts in Antrim and Down, counties of pre-Plantation Protestant settlement. In the Protestant marches west of the River Bann, and across the south and west of Ireland, veterans of the Volunteer movement were of a different persuasion. The Armagh Volunteers, who had called the first Dungannon Convention in 1779, boycotted a third in 1793.[38] Under Ascendancy patronage they were already moving along with the Peep o' Day Boys, battling Catholic "Defenders" in rural districts for tenancies and employment, toward the formation in 1795 of the loyalist Orange Order.

In 1793 the Government itself breached the principle of an exclusively Protestant Constitution. In January 1793 Tone had found "every reason to be content" with an audience he and other members of the Catholic Committee had had with the King, George III, in London.[39] In April Dublin Castle put its weight behind Grattan in the passage of a Catholic Relief Act. Catholics were admitted to the franchise (but not yet to Parliament or to Crown offices) on the same terms as Protestants. This courted Catholic opinion, but it also put Protestant reformers on notice. Any further liberalising of the franchise, whether by expunging the pocket boroughs or by lowering of the property threshold, would advance the prospect of a Catholic majority.

Beyond the inclusion of Catholics and a re-distribution of seats it had not been clear what the United Irishmen intended by "an equal representation of all the people". While they may have been prepared to share parliamentary mandates and public office with Catholics of like social standing, it can be doubted that the Society's original members seriously contemplated ceding place to those with little or no property. While insisting that his "sentiments are not less liberal" than their own, in his News Letter Henry Joy warned the United Irishmen that entrusting liberty to a potentially, "ignorant, licentious, idle and profligate populace" was likely, as in ancient Rome, to "terminate in a DICTATORSHIP, or EMPIRE."[40] Beginning with news of the September Massacres, many of his readers were to see in France the vindication of such caution. Yet, as they Society grew and replicated across the country it remained open to men of every station, those of humbler means being actively courted.

In 1793 Thomas Addis Emmet reported an influx of "mechanics [artisans, journeymen and their apprentices], petty shopkeepers and farmers who wanted a practicable engine by which the power of men like themselves might be most effectively combined and employed".[41][42] Some of these were maintaining in Belfast, Derry, other towns in the North, and in Dublin, their own Jacobin Clubs. Writing to her brother, William Drennan, in 1795 Martha McTier describes the Jacobins as an established democratic party in Belfast, composed of "persons and rank long kept down" and chaired by a "radical mechanick".[43] Yet the Club counted among its members the banker William Tennant, minister of Rosemary Street Third Presbyterian Sinclair Kelburn (much admired by Tone as a fervent democrat)[44] and other "well-to-do United Irishmen."[45]

The overlap between the Clubs and the Society might suggest that the Jacobins "were an auxilliary group, perhaps encouraged to take a more radical stand" while the United Irishmen "awaited the outcome of the Catholic campaign for final repeal of the penal laws".[46] When April 1795 Earl Fitzwilliam, Lord Lieutenant for just fifty days, was recalled to London for publicly urging support for Grattan's Emancipation bill, and the general prospects for reform appeared buried, the Jacobins with their radical ideas flooded United Irish societies. Unabashed republicans, with Kelburn they doubted that there "was any such thing" as Ireland's "much boasted constitution."[47] In correspondence with clubs in England and Scotland, some proposed that delegates from all three kingdoms convene to draft a "true constitution".[48]

This Painite radicalism had been preceded by an upsurge in trades union activity. In 1792 the Northern Star reported a "bold and daring spirit of combination" (long in evidence in Dublin) appearing in Belfast and surrounding districts. Breaking out first among cotton weavers, it then "communicated to the bricklayers, carpenters, etc." In the face of "demands made in a tumultuous and illegal manner", in the Northern Star, the movement paper to which he pledged his woollen business, Samuel Neilson came down upon the side of the authorities. Neilson did not doubt that the town's "Sovereign" (Lord Donegall's appointee) "should receive the support... of the Volunteers" in enforcing the laws against combination.[49][50] James ("Jemmy") Hope, a self educated weaver, who joined the Society in 1796, nonetheless was to account Neilson, along with Russell (who in the Star positively urged combinations for labourers and cottiers),[51] McCracken, and Emmet, the only United Irish leaders "perfectly acquainted with the main cause of social derangement": "the conditions of the labouring class".[52]

In November 1793 the leadership did commit to as radical a programme of parliamentary reform as might be imagined. A harbinger of the Chartist demands of the 1840s, it called for equal electoral districts, annual parliaments, paid representatives and universal manhood suffrage.[53] This went beyond the dispensation the Belfast's reformers had celebrated in the French Constitution of 1791. Yet despite the Society's broadening democratic base, there is no evidence that, as a body, the United Irishmen considered the implications of harnessing government to the "engine" of popular power.

The Dublin Society, formed within a month of Belfast, declared that it was to be a "principal rule of conduct... to attend those things in which we all agree, [and] to exclude those in which we differ". This did not imply an indifference to the issues. But the result was that as a movement, the United Irishmen were not associated with what could later be recognised as an economic or social programme.[54] Given the central role it was to play in the eventual development of Irish democracy, the most startling omission was the absence, beyond the disclaimer of wholesale Catholic restitution, of any scheme or principle for reforming a land system Drennan characterised as "at best a mitigated feudality, and at worst, the connection of the planter and slave".[55] Hope might be clear that this should not be "a delusive fixity of tenure [that allows] the landlord to continue to draw the last potato out of the warm ashes of the poor man's fire".[56] But it was an existential matter upon which neither he nor any central resolution spoke for the Society.

Martha McTier, "'Tis only the Rich are alarmed, or the guilty. I am neither."[57]

As in the Presbyteries, the Volunteer corps, masonic lodges and other of their original associations, the United Irishmen were a male fraternity. For some this may not have been unquestioned. From its serialisation of William Godwin's Enquiry Concerning political Justice (1793), readers of the Northern Star[58] would have been advised of the moral and intellectual enlightenment found in an "equal and liberal intercourse" between the sexes.[59]. This was something of which Archibald Hamilton Rowan, the first, and most celebrated, of Drennan's co-conspirators in Dublin, already appeared convinced.

Rowan's celebrity had been established by his defence in 1788 of the honour and testimony of Mary Neal, a twelve year-old who had been serially raped by Henry Luttrell (as Earl of Carhampton, the future Commander-in-Chief of the Crown forces in Ireland).[60] Rowan had been schooled at the dissenting Warrington Academy by Anna Laetitia Barbauld, a forward democrat and slave-trade abolitionist. In 1792 in Paris he met and befriended Mary Wollstonecroft, with whom he was to maintain a faithful correspondence.

In Belfast Wollstonecraft was known. Her political commentary appeared in the Northern Star.[61] Her circle in London--the "Revolution Society" Burke's takes to task in his Reflections--had a New Light background comparable to Drennan's "conspiracy". Joseph Priestley (the Warrington Academy's guiding spirit), Richard Price, Erasmus Darwin, and Godwin (Wollstonecraft's future husband), were all Non-Conformists drawing on a Unitarian theology they called "Rational Dissent". In advance of Paine's reply to Burke, Wollstonecroft had defended their support of the French Revolution in her Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790).

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) followed (in several Irish editions), and was read, at the very least, by women within the circle of the first United Irish societies in Belfast and in Dublin. Mary Ann McCracken, who also read Barbauld, shared Wollstonecroft's ideas with her brother Henry Joy, and with Thomas Russell.[62] Martha McTier discussed them with her brother William Drennan and with her husband Samuel, president of the first Society. Mary Anne Holmes, sister to Robert, and Thomas Addis, Emmet, corresponded about them with Wollstonecraft's former pupil, the writer Margaret King.[63] As had Tone on behalf of Catholics, Wollstonecroft argued that the incapacities alleged to deny women equality were those that law and usage themselves impose. Women, as Mary Ann McCracken explained to her brother, had to reject "their present abject and dependent situation" and secure the liberty without which they could "neither possess virtue or happiness".[64]  

In October 1796 the Northern Star recorded a letter from the "secretary of the United Irishwomen".[65] Little is known of this organisation, but to her brother Mary Ann McCracken had made clear her view of "female societies". She should "like them better were they promiscuous, as there can be no other reason for having them separate, but keeping women in the dark" and to "make tools of them".[66] The letters of Martha McTier and Mary Ann McCracken testify to the role of women as confidantes, sources of advice and bearers of intelligence. R.R. Madden, one of the earliest historians of the United Irishmen, describes various of their activities in the person of an appropriately named "Mrs. Risk".[67]

In the 1798 uprising, and in circumstances at great remove from the original United Irish meetings in Belfast and Dublin, women came forward in many capacities.[68] Rebel lore has them as combatants: in the north in the "Ballad of Betsy Gray"[69] and in the south in "the Heroine of New Ross" (Moll Doyle). In Wexford, there is also the "Ballad of Ann Flood" who kills a Hessian captain in self defence.[70] With the same impunity with which their commander had used Mary Neal, troops under Luttrell treated treated women, young and old, with great brutality.[71]

Inscription, Bodenstown

Jacques-Louis de Bougrenet de La Tocnaye, a French émigré who walked the length and breadth of Ireland in 1796-7, was appalled to encounter in a cabin upon the banks of the Upper Bann the same "nonsense on which the people of France fed themselves before the Revolution". On offering that "it was a cruel thing that any should say that the country people were not ready to defend the Constitution, etc. etc.", La Tocnaye was treated to a disposition on "equality, fraternity, and oppression", "reform of Parliament", "abuses in elections", and "tolerance", and such "philosophical discourse" as he had heard from "foppish talkers" in Paris a decade before.[72] In 1793, a magistrate in that same area, near Coleraine, County Londonderry, had been complaining of "daily incursions of disaffected people... disseminating the most seditious principles".[73] Until his arrest in September 1796, Thomas Russell (later celebrated in a popular ballad as "The man from God-knows-where’") was one such outsider. Recruiting for the Society, he ranged from Belfast as far as Donegal and Sligo.

In calling town, parish and county meetings, and in seeking to form new local societies or chapters, agitators like Russell might look to enlist the support of Freemasons. Although it was the rule that "no private pique, no quarrels about nations, families, religion or politics must be brought within the doors of the Lodge", masons were involved in the Volunteer movement and their lodges remained "a battleground for political ideas".[74] In January 1793, as Grand Master of the Cookstown Masonic Lodge, James Reynolds, a member of the Dublin Society of United Irishmen, presided over a meeting of over forty lodges in his native Tyrone. The bretheren resolved "by all national means [to] promote he universal emancipation and adequate representation of all the people of Ireland, and not be satisfied until all these objects are unequivocally obtained".[75]

Drennan, himself a mason, from the outset had anticipated that his "conspiracy" would have "much of the secrecy and somewhat of the ceremonial of Free-Masonry".[76] As United Irishmen increasingly attracted the unwelcome attention of Dublin Castle and its network of informants, masonry did become both a host, a model and a cover.[77][78] The number of Masonic lodges themselves began to grow, although how far this might have been to accommodate the rival organising efforts of loyalists particularly on the sectarian frontiers of Armagh and Tyrone is unclear.[79]

From February 1793 the Crown was at war with the French Republic. This led immediately to heightened tensions in Belfast. On March 9th a body of dragoons "drove furiously through the principal streets, with their sabres drawn, cutting down anyone who came in their way," purportedly provoked by taverns displaying the likenesses of Dumouriez, Mirabeau and Franklin.[80] They withdrew to barracks when, as related by Martha McTier, about 1,000 armed countrymen came into the town and mustered at McCracken's Third Presbyterian.[81] Further "military provocations" saw attacks on the homes of Neilson, Kelburn and other United Irishmen and on the offices of the Northern Star (wrecked for the final time, and closed, in May 1797). Legislation impressed from Westminster banned extra-parliamentary conventions and suppressed the Volunteers, by then largely a northern movement. They were replaced by a paid militia, its ranks partially filled with conscripted Catholics, and by Yeomanry, an auxiliary force led by local gentry. 

The war with France was also used to crush reformers in Great Britain, costing the United Irishmen the liberty of friends and allies. In 1793 in Edinburgh, Thomas Muir, whom Rowan and Drennan had feted in Dublin, with three other of his "Friends of the People" were sentenced "to transportation" (i.e. to Botany Bay). The judge, who had been particularly scathing about Muir's propaganda among the working class in Glasgow, seized on Muir's connection to the "ferocious" Mr. Rowan (Rowan had challenged Robert Dundas, the Lord Advocate of Scotland, to a duel) and on the United Irishmen papers found in his possession.[82]

While still free to associate, and in advance of their proscription in May 1794, the northern clubs had begun to take direction from a secret committee in Belfast. These included the first societies among the farmers and market-townsmen of north Down and Antrim, those among whom Jemmy Hope believed "the republican spirit, inherent in the principles of Presbyterian community, kept resistance to arbitrary power still alive."[83]

For all the political significance that might be attached to the New Light leanings of the Rosemary Street churches, this spirit of resistance was not at odds with an older scriptural faith. It is estimated that about half the ministers of the Reformed Presbyteries in Ulster--those whose bible reading caused them to "secede" from the established Presbyterianism of Scotland--were implicated in the eventual rebellion.[84] Many were drawn to the United Irishmen by William Gibson who roamed County Antrim "to preach sedition and the word", sometimes filling a field with thousands. His prophecy of an "immediate destruction of the British monarchy" is said to have been for Catholic listeners "amends" for his occasional proselytising lapses--references to the Pope as the Whore of Babylon.[85] 

In June 1795, members of the Northern Executive, including Russell, McCracken. Neilson and Robert Simms (another of the Star's twelve proprietors) met with Tone who, under an expulsion order, was en route to exile in the United States. At McArt’s fort atop Cave Hill overlooking Belfast they swore the celebrated oath "never to desist in our efforts until we had subverted the authority of England over our country, and asserted our independence’".[86]

The original United Irish test, first taken in Dublin in December 1791, had committed, in terms more equivocating than the resolution of the Tyrone Masons, to "an impartial and adequate representation of the Irish nation in Parliament".[87] It no longer spoke to the real object. With no further expectation of the "patriot" gentry, but in hope of French assistance, this was to build a broad popular union committed to severing the Ascendancy's anchor-tie to England and to convening a constitution in which the representation of the people would be "full" and "equal".[88] In March 1796 from Paris (to which he had travelled by way of Philadephia) Tone recorded his understanding of the new resolve: "Our independence must be had at all hazards. If the men of property will not support us, they must fall; we can support ourselves by the aid of that numerous and respectable class of the community, the men of no property"..[89]  

Peep o' Day Boys attack a Catholics home.

The greatest body, existing, of "men of no property", and with whom alliance was to be sought if there was to be any substance to the "union of Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter", were the Defenders. A vigilante response to Peep O'Day raids upon Catholic homes in the mid 1780s, by the early 1790s the Defenders (drawing, like the United Irishmen, on the lodge structure of the Masons) were a secret oath-bound fraternity ranging across Ulster and the Irish midlands. Despite their professed loyalism (members had originally to swear allegiance to the King) Defenderism developed an increasingly a seditious character. Talk in the lodges was of "a release from tithes, rents and taxes," and of a French invasion that might allow the repossession of Protestant estates.[90] Arms-buying delegations were sent to London.[91] The Government responded with increasing repression, seconded by the Peep O'Day Boys, local Volunteer companies and later by the Orange Order and the Yeomanry.

Defenders and United Irishmen began to seek one another out. Religion was not a bar to joining the Defenders. In Dublin, in particular, where the Defenderism appealed strongly to "a significant body of radical artisans and petty shopkeepers", Protestants joined in the determination to make common cause. Oaths, catechisms and articles of association supplied to Dublin Castle nonetheless suggest the Defenders were developing of a kind of Catholic "liberation theology"--their own version of Gibson's millenarianism. Apocalyptic biblical allusions and calls to "plant the true religion" sat uneasily with the rhetoric of inalienable rights and fealty to a "United States of France and Ireland".[92] Oblivious to the anti-clericalism of the French Republic, Defender rank-and-file tended to view the French through a Jacobite, not Jacobin, lens, as "Catholics at war with Protestants".[93] Although Hope and McCracken did much to reach out to the Defenders, recognising the sectarian tensions (Simms reported to Tone that "it would take a great deal of exertion" to keep the Defenders from "producing feuds"), the Belfast Executive choose emissaries from its small number of Catholics.[94]

With their brother-in-law John Magennis, in 1795 the United Irish brothers, Bartholomew and Charles Teeling, sons of a wealthy Catholic linen manufacturer in Lisburn, appear to have had command over the Down, Antrim and Armagh Defenders.[95] That Defenders should have been willing to acknowledge leadership drawn from the weaker body, and one composed largely of Presbyterians, may in part have been due to social deference. But from their sometimes more exalted rank, United Irishmen were able to offer the Defenders practical assistance. In the face of loyalist provocations and biased magistrates, they provided legal counsel, aid and refuge. Catholic victims of the Armagh disturbances and of the Battle of the Diamond (at which Charles Teeling had been present)[96] were sheltered on Presbyterian farms in Down and Antrim, and the goodwill earned used to open the Defenders to trusted republicans. Emmet records these as being able to convince Defenders that "the something which Defenders vaguely conceived ought to be done for Ireland was by separating it from England to establish is real as well as nominal independence; and they urged the necessity of combining into one body all who were actuated with the same views".[97]

"Terrors of Emancipation"--The final Roman Catholic Relief Act, 1829

The Society Tone helped establish in Dublin on his return from Belfast in November 1791 held itself aloof from the Jacobin, Defender and other radical clubs in the capital (in these, Richard Musgrave, one of the first chroniclers of the 1798 Rebellion, recalls "labourers, tradesmen and even ragged apprentice boys... were taught... to think themselves amply qualified to dethrone kings, and regulate states").[98][99] The Society also shied from the kind of submersible organisation the Belfast leadership was seeking to develop in the north. While societies accepting direction form the Northern Executive restricted their membership to thirty six, in Dublin the United Irish maintained just one society boasting, at its height, 400 members.

The crucial difference at the outset between the Belfast and Dublin societies was that in the very much larger city the United Irish counted representatives of a growing Catholic mercantile and professional class. Among them were prominent members of the Catholic Committee (of which Tone was then organising secretary), including its chairman John Keogh.

The Catholic interest was conscious of being courted by London and, as vouched by Committee's audience with the King in January 1791, at the highest level. The first breach in the Penal Code since Papal recognition of the Hanoverian Succession in 1766, had had to await France's entry into the American War in 1778. But with war threatening again with, a now anti-clerical, France, Catholic rapprochement was made "respectable" as counter-revolutionary, anti-French policy.[100] With the Castle's indulgence, to weight its demands the Committee convened in Dublin a Catholic Convention (the "Back Lane Parliament") in December 1792. The 1793 Relief Act, passed by in bad grace by the Irish Parliament, still denied Catholics their own representation. But it had removed the remaining legal constraints on their commercial and professional advance, and London made additional overtures to the Church. With French seminaries closed, the government supported the foundation in 1795 of St Patrick's, Maynooth.

Announcing that there were paid informers in their midst, in January 1794 Neilson had tried to press the Belfast system upon his Dublin comrades. They should coordinate and transact all their business through a twelve-member committee. His proposal was rejected on the grounds that "the United Irishmen, as a legal, constitutional reform movement, were loath to engage in any activity which could not bear the scrutiny of the public or the Castle".[101]

Koegh's dismissal of Edmund Burke's son, Richard Burke, as Committee secretary in 1792, and his replacement by Tone, a known democrat still suggested a political shift. The British Prime Minister Pitt was already canvassing support for a union of Ireland and Great Britain in which Catholics could be freely--because securely--admitted to Parliament.[102] London might yet be an ally in securing Catholics emancipation but it would be as a permanent minority in the enlarged Kingdom, not as a national majority in Ireland. Even that prospect was uncertain. Although tempered since the Gordon Riots, "Anti-Popery" remained a virulent strain in English politics. Meanwhile, Drennan recalls, "Catholics were being driven to despair and were resolved to go to extremities rather than again be driven from the door of the constitution".[103]

In April, matters were brought to a head by the arrest of the Reverend William Jackson. An agent of the French Committee of Public Safety, Jackson had been having meetings with Tone in the prison cell of Archibald Hamilton Rowan. Rowan, who had been serving time for distributing Drennan's "seditious" appeal to Volunteers, managed to flee the country. Whether because of his association with the Catholic Committee or his family's connections, Tone was allowed to go into American exile. Catholic gentry and clergy withdrew from the Catholic Committee and the United Irish Society was proscribed.

Former and potential United Irish members regrouped with previously neglected lower-rank Jacobins and Defenders in a series of "ephemeral organisation" (The Philanthropic Society, the Hugenots, the Illuminati, the Druids' Lodges...) used as a cover for their activities in Dublin, but also to spread the movement into the provinces. The authorities came down heavily on the Belfast radicals, with Castlereagh personally supervising the arrests of Neilson, Russell and Charles Teeling in September 1796.[104] But early in 1797 their organising vision prevailed. All the various republican clubs and cover lodges, and much of Defender network, were formally marshalled in a local and provincial delegate-structure under a national United Irish executive in Dublin[105] Among others, the directorate included Thomas Addis Emmet; Richard McCormick, Tone's replacement as secretary to the Catholic Committee; and two disillusioned parliamentary patriots: the future Napoleonic general Arthur O'Connor (whose sister had killed herself for the forbidden love of a Catholic) and Hamilton Rowan's successor in popular affection, Lord Edward Fitzgerald.

Militia pitch-capping in County Kildare, 1798

In February 1798 a return prepared by Fitzgerald for the national executive reported the number of sworn United Irishmen at their command as 269,896. Some United Irish had not been adverse to employing intimidation to swell these numbers,[106] and it is certain that, in the event of their heeding the call, what most would have pulled from their cottage thatch were simple pikes (of these the authorities, in the year 1797, had seized 70,630 compared to just 4,183 blunderbusses and 225 musket barrels).[107] Released in December after more than a year in Kilmainham, McCracken was undaunted, but most of the leadership had been with Tone in believing French assistance imperative.

This Tone almost succeeded in securing. On 15 December 1796, he arrived off Bantry Bay with fleet carrying about 14,450 men, and a large supply of war material, under the command of Louis Lazare Hoche. A gale ("the Protestant wind") prevented a landing. "England," wrote Tone, "has not had such an escape since the Spanish Armada". The unexpected death of Hoche in 1797 was a blow to Tone's otherwise adept handling of the politics of the French Directory. With the forces (and ambition) that might have allowed a second attempt upon Ireland, Hoche's rival, Napoleon, sailed in May 1798 for Egypt.

Bantry Bay, nonetheless, had made real the prospect of French intervention. In the months preceding magistrates had noted defections from among gentleman, prosperous farmers and substantial tradesmen. Just days before the first news of the French, a magistrate reported to the Castle from Derry that persons of such rank "having embarked in one vessel with a populace who look only to plunder,... already begin to quarrel at the helm."[108] But with the sighting of the French such tensions abated. Jemmy Hope found the societies again drawing in "the rich farmers and shopkeepers" on a wider tide. From December to May 1797 membership in Ulster alone increased fourfold, reaching 117,917.[109]

The government responded with an Insurrection Act, allowing the Lord Lieutenant to govern by martial decree. The United Irishmen had their first martyr in William Orr. Charged in April with administering a United Irish oath to a soldier, Orr was hanged in October. He was given a masonic funeral. The Reverend William Porter, who had been enraging Viscount Castlereagh, now in the Dublin-Castle executive, with a hugely popular satire of the County Down landed-interest Billy Bluff,[110] was in time to prove a second. In February he asked his congregation neighbouring Castlereagh's family demesne at Mount Stewart (then under armed guard, and with tenants withholding rent), why Ireland was at war: "it is in consequence of our connection with England". A French invasion threatened only the government, not the people.[111] Porter was hung outside his Church in July 1798.

Orr's arrest signalled the onset of General Lake's "dragooning of Ulster". By the end of 1797 Lake was turning his attention to disarming Leinster and Munster. His troops' reputation for half-hanging, pitch-capping and other interrogative refinements travelled before them.

In March 1798, the national executive and its papers were seized in Dublin. Faced with the breaking-up of their entire system, the few leaders at large in the capital, joined by Neilson who had been released in ill health from Kilmainham Prison, resolved, with or without the French, on a general uprising for May 23rd. Betrayed by informants, Fitzgerald was mortally wounded on the 19th, and on the 23rd Neilson was re-arrested. Tens of thousands heeded the call, but in what proved to be a series of uncoordinated local uprisings.

"Father Murphy's flag"

Some suggest that what connects the United Irishmen to most widespread and sustained of the uprisings in 1798 are "accidents of time and place, rather than any real community of interest".[112] Edward Hay, whose brother John was among the leaders of the Wexford Rebellion, insisted that there had been no premeditated plans in the county for a revolt: "the multitudes" joined the insurgents "as the only means of self preservation", while an Orange yeomanry inflamed "the resentments of an irritated, insulted and violated community."[113] Rebellion broke not in the securely Catholic south, but in the sectarian-divided north and centre of the county,[114] and not for the first time. In July 1793 arms had been taken up by tithe-protesting "Right Boys", a hundred of whom had been killed on their approach to Wexford town.

The trigger on May 26, 1798, according to Hay, was the arrival of the notorious North Cork Militia.[115] The insurgents swept south through Wexford Town meeting their first reversal at New Ross on May 30th. There followed the massacre of loyalist hostages at Scullabogue and, after a Committee of Public Safety was swept aside, at Wexford Bridge. A "striking resemblance" has been proposed to the 1792 September massacre in Paris",[116] and it is noted that there were a small number of Catholics among the loyalists killed, and of Protestants among the rebels present.[117] But for loyalists the sectarian nature of the outrages was unquestioned and was used to great effect in the north to secure defections from the republican cause. With no allowance made for his chapel having been burned down by the militia, much was made of the report that a Catholic priest, Father John Murphy, had commanded the rebels in their initial victory over the North Cork Militia at Oulart Hill. (Father Murphy was so far from being a committed United Irishman that at Easter he had refused the sacrament to those who did not abjure the Society's oath).[118]

After a merciless bombardment and rout of upwards of 20,000 rebels upon Vinegar Hill on June 21st remnants of the "Republic of Wexford" marched north through the Midlands--the counties thought best organised by the Executive--but no one joined them. Those in the region who had turned out on May 23rd had already been dispersed. On 20 July, rejoining insurgents in Kildare, the few hundred remaining Wexford men surrendered. All but the their leaders benefited from an amnesty intended by the new Lord Lieutenant, Charles Cornwallis (who had had command in America), to flush out remaining resistance. The law was pushed through the Irish Parliament by the Chancellor, Lord Clare. A supreme defender of the Ascendancy, Clare was determined to separate Catholics from the greater enemy, "Godless Jacobinism."[119]  

Contending with marauding bands of rebel survivors (the "Babes in the Wood" and the "Corcoran gang"), Wexford did not see martial law lifted until 1806. In continued expectation of the French, and apprised through Jemmy Hope of Robert Emmet's plans for a renewed uprising, Michael Dwyer sustained a guerrilla resistance in the Wicklow mountains until the end of 1803.

Detail of the Battle of Ballynahinch 1798 by Thomas Robinson. Yeomanry prepare to hang United Irish insurgent Hugh McCulloch, a grocer.

The northern executive had not responded to the call on May 23rd. The senior Dublin Castle secretary, Edward Cooke, could write: "The quiet of the North is to me unaccountable; but I feel that the Popish tinge of the rebellion, and the treatment of France to Switzerland [the Protestant Cantons were resisting occupation] and America [the Quasi naval war], has really done much, and, in addition to the army, the force of Orange yeomanry is really formidable."[120] In response to the claim that "in Ulster there are 50,000 men with arms in their hands, ready to receive the French," the Westiminster Commons was assured that while "almost all Presbyterians... were attached to the popular, or, what has been called, the republican branch of the constitution, they are not to be confounded with Jacobins or banditti".[121]

When William Simms brother of Robert, despairing of French aid, resigned his United Irish command in Antrim on June 1st, McCracken seized the initiative. He proclaimed the "First Year of Liberty" on June 6th. There were widespread local musters but before they could coordinate, most were burying their arms and returning to the their farms and workplaces. The issue had been decided by the following evening. McCracken commanding a body of four to six thousand (with cries of "Remember Orr!") was routed in Antrim Town. Hope, who led a "Spartan band" of weavers and labourers in the battle, observed that wealthier members had deserted the cause: "unthinkably" they had "staked more than was in them".[122]

In Down, Dickson, who had stood in for Russell, was arrested with all his "colonels". Under the command of a young Lisburn draper, Henry Monro, there was a rising on June 9th. Following a successful skirmish at Saintfield several thousand marched on Ballynahinch. The town's smoking ruins were "the funeral pyre of the short-lived Republic of Ulster".[123]

Shortly before the Battle of Ballynahinch on the 12th, The Defenders of County Down had withdrawn. John Magennis, their county "Grand Master", had been dismayed by Munro's discounting of a night attack upon the carousing soldiery as "unfair".[124] Defenders had been present at Antrim, but in the march upon the town tensions with the Presbyterian United Irish may have caused some desertions and a delay in McCracken's planned attack.[125]

Confident of a being able exploit tensions between Presbyterians and Catholics, the government not only amnestied the rebel rank-and-file it recruited them for the Yeomanry.[126] On 1 July 1798 in Belfast, the birthplace of the United Irishmen movement, it is said that every man was wearing the Yeomanry's red coat.[126] While this clearly offered security to those in fear of retribution, it may have spoken to a larger apprehension. As he enlisted former radicals into his Portglenone Yeomanry Corps, Anglican clergyman Edward Hudson claimed that "the brotherhood of affection is over"..[126]

On the eve of following his leader to the gallows, one of McCracken's lieutenants, James Dickey, is recorded by Henry Joy as saying: "the Presbyterians of the north perceived too late that if they had succeeded in their designs, they would ultimately have had to contend with the Roman Catholics".[127]  

On August 22, 1798, 1,100 French landed at Killala in County Mayo. From the remote desperately poor country, Bartholomew Teeling, accompanying, managed to raise only a small levy of Irish. From these the French reportedly were astonished to hear that they had come "to take arms for France and the blessed Virgin" and to have replied "they had just driven Mr Pope out of Italy, and did not expect to find him so suddenly again in Ireland."[128] After prevailing in a first engagement, the "Races of Castlebar", but unable to make timely contact with a new rising in Longford and Meath, General Humbert surrendered his forces on September 8th. The last action of the rebellion was a slaughter of half-armed peasants outside Kilala on the 23rd. On October 12th, the second French expedition was intercepted off the coast of Donegal, and Tone taken captive. Regretting nothing done "to raise three million of my countrymen to the ranks of citizen," and lamenting only those "atrocities committed on both sides" during his exile,[129] Tone cheated the hangman in Dublin by taking his own life.

Cornwallis professed to be shocked by the ferocity of the counter-insurgency, complaining that "the only engines of government were the bayonet, the torch and the cat o'nine tails". These engines did not work for the task with which he now tasked Castlereagh: to prepare Ireland for a union with Great Britain under the Crown at Westminster.[130] Already in September, as Mayo was being pacified, and to the dismay of many Loyalists, Lord Clare struck a deal with several of those indicted for high treason, among them Samuel Neilson, Thomas Addis Emmet, Arthur O'Connor, and William McNeven (the future "Father of American Chemistry"). Beginning with their comrade Oliver Bond, a member of the Leinster directory sentenced to be hung, disembowelled and beheaded, this halted further the executions in favour of exile (Bond, nonetheless, died in custody). In return, and without implicating individuals, the prisoners agreed reveal the plans and workings of the movement they had led. In truth, there were few questions that government informants had left unanswered.

Belfast Politics or A Collection of Debates and Resolutions.. Henry Joy, 1794

• Oliver Bond
• James Dempsey
• William Steel Dickson
• William Drennan
• Michael Dwyer
• Robert Emmet
• Thomas Addis Emmet
• Lord Edward FitzGerald
• Bagenal Harvey
• Henry Haslett
• James Hope
• Thomas McCabe
• Henry Joy McCracken
• Gilbert McIlveen
• Leonard McNally (informer)
• William James MacNeven
• Samuel McTier
• Henry Munro
• Thomas Muir, honarary member)[149]
• Samuel Neilson
• Arthur O'Connor
• James Orr
• William Orr
• Thomas Paine, honorary member[150]
• Archibald Hamilton Rowan
• Thomas Russell
• William Sampson
• The Sheares Brothers
• Robert Simms
• Whitley Stokes
• James Napper Tandy
• Bartholomew Teeling
• Charles Hamilton Teeling
• William Tennant
• Theobald Wolfe Tone
• David Baillie Warden

• Anne Devlin
• Lady Edward FitzGerald
• Betsy Gray
• Mary Anne Holmes
• Mary Ann McCracken
• Martha McTier

• Stephen Maturin