Lecture Eleven Wednesday 20th April
Click these links for information on
The origins of the Orange Order
Agrarian Rebels, Secret Societies and defenders
Click this link for the BBC webpage of all aspects of the 1798 rebellion
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/state/nations/irish_reb_01.shtml
The last two links will bring you original documents of the 1798 Rebellion from the National Archives.
http://www.nationalarchives.ie/topics/1798/1798intro.html
http://www.nationalarchives.ie/topics/1798/1798.pdf
The United Irishmen, 1798 Rebellion and the Act of Union
Agrarian Rebels, Secret Societies and Defenders.
Shortly after Earl Fitzwilliam took up office as lord lieutenant in 1795, he was shocked to discover that the Defenders, a militant Catholic secret society, were appearing every night in arms in County Meath. He had never, he remarked, heard of such a thing in Northamptonshire.
Whatever it might say to us, the persistence of collective violence in eighteenth-century Ireland certainly raises questions about the image and structures of that society. An examination of the forms of popular protest should therefore provide insights into the general political and social history of the period. More directly, some understandings of these forms is essential background to any discussion of popular politics in the 1790s, particularly to any discussion of Defenderism – the prime expression of lower-class disaffection during that decade.
Whiteboyism
An account of the secret societies in Ireland could begin with the Elizabethan ‘woodkerne’, with the Tories and Rapparees at the Restoration period and the early eighteenth century, or with the Connaught Houghers of 1711-13. I will take a more conventional starting-point: 1761 and the appearance of the Whiteboys
Indeed some historians have perceived so many recurring patterns of behaviour among the multitude of rural popular protest movements in pre-famine Ireland (1760 or 1780 to 1845) that they use the generic term ‘Whiteboyism’ to cover them all.
Whiteboyism, according to this thesis, was southern and agrarian, while the Defenders (and their successors, the Ribbonmen) are seen as northern-based, sectarian and quasi-political.
The distinction is valid, but it has been drawn too sharply. Each secret society had unique characteristics and specific origins. Defenderism was special. But the similarities between it and its southern cousins are at least as important as the differences.
The Whiteboys provide an appropriate starting-point for the purposes of this discussion because the Defenders of the 1790s tapped into the Whiteboy tradition. The Whiteboy shaped a popular culture of protest which evolved modes of organisation, techniques of direct action and, most importantly perhaps, a communal ambivalence towards the law and civil authority, upon which the Defenders drew.
Thomas Crofton Croker recognised the formative political potential of agrarian unrest when he observed of the 1798 rebellion that ‘two generations of the peasantry had been trained up to become actors in this event’. Croker referred to the Whiteboys, Oakboys, Steelboys, Rightboys, Peep O’Day Boys and Defenders. But he overstated their impact upon popular consciousness. He assumed too direct a relationship between the history of agrarian disturbances and the rebellion.
Nevertheless two generations’ cumulative experience of organised illegality and volience conditioned the mass politics of the 1790s.
The styles of protest action which stretched into the 1790s and the first half of the nineteenth century originated with the Whiteboys, in Tipperary in 1761. The name derived from their practice of wearing coarse white linen overshirts, and the movement grew out of local resistance to the enclosure of common land.
With the suspension of the restrictive cattle acts in 1758-59 and rising demand in Europe, investment in pasture became more profitable. Landlords re-let to graziers who in turn curtailed traditional access to commons by smaller tenants. The Whiteboys attempted to defend these customary rights by tearing down – or ‘levelling’ – fences, hedges and walls, by fillings in ditches and digging up pasture, and by maiming or ‘houghing’ cattle.
As the movement spread into most of the rest of Munster its programme widened. The primary grievance was the payment of tithes to the established church and the tithe collectors became particular targets of the Whiteboys.
The Whiteboys also tried to regulate conacre rents, by unilaterally and publicly setting ‘fair’ rates, and by punishing those tenants who dared pay more. The scale of the outbreak is indicated by the introduction of the introduction of the Whiteboy act in 1765. The key provision of the act made the administration of oaths by threat of violence a capital offence. This went to the heart of the problem. Oaths binding members to secrecy was the defining characteristic of Whiteboyism.
Since the Whiteboys drew their members and support from lower-class Catholics, and since most of the bigger landlords and the established church were Protestant, allegations of sectarian motives were almost inevitable. These charges, made against the background of the Seven Years War (1756-63), betrayed fears of French invasion. Local Protestant paranoia ensured that the agitation of social and economic questions was quickly sucked into the political arena.
Two years after the Munster unrest erupted a brief tumultuous spasm of popular agitation burst out in mid and south Ulster. The Oakboys or Hearts of Oak – a reference to the sprigs of oak which these agrarian rebels wore on their hats – first appeared in 1763 in north Armagh.
On this occasion the main grievance was an increase in county cess (or tax) for road-building. As with the Whiteboys, the movement quickly spread and the payment of tithes was also opposed.
The movement differed from other protest movements in the period, however, in the openness of its tactics. Mobilising at the signal of blowing horns, the Hearts of Oak marched with military precision, to the accompaniment of fife and drum.
‘Visits’ were paid to local gentlemen and Episcopalian clerics, who were then compelled to make public pledges to reduce the rate of cess and tithe. Large detachments of troops were sent to the region and after a number of skirmishes, in which all the causalities – 15 killed and one capital conviction – were on the Oakboy side, the movement collapsed.
The next Ulster-based popular movement was the Hearts of Steel or Steelboys. The Steelboy disturbances, which ran from 1769 to 1772, were triggered by the re-letting, at higher rates, of farms on the great south Antrim estate of the marques of Donegall. Increased rents, some evictions and local taxation – cess – were the principal sources of the disorders, which focused on Antrim and Down but also infected the adjoining areas of Armagh, Derry and Tyrone. The Steelboys used threatening letters and nocturnal raids to pursue their objectives. The parallels with the Whiteboys are obvious.
In fact, the unrest in Ulster coincided with the re-emergence of the Whiteboys in the south. This second agitation lasted from 1769 to 1776. Among the targets now were those Catholic clergy who condemned Whiteboy outrages from the pulpit. Pastoral letters and the ultimate ecclesiastical sanction, excommunication, were ignored.
Anti-clericalism of a sort was an even more pronounced element in the Rightboy movement of 1785-88. Named after the fictitious ‘Captain Right’ who set the rate of tithe by public notice, the agitation began in County Cork, then fanned out through the rest of Munster and into south Leinster. The early stages of the Rightboy troubles provide a striking example of how ‘agrarian’ movements could intersect with politics. John Fitzgibbon referred to the ‘independent gentlemen . . . who set them in motion’, an allusion to Sir John Conway Colthurst and other ‘independent gentry’ who had clashed with Lord Shannon and his allies in the established church during the 1783 election. By colluding with the Catholic lower classes in Cork these ‘gentlemen Rightboys’ succeeded in embarrassing Shannon and vented their own hostility to tithes. The gentry resented tithes, reasoning that money in the pockets of the Anglican clergy was money out of theirs. As the Rightboy campaign widened and they began to direct their attacks against cess, hearth tax, high rents and so on, gentry involvement faded.
Catholic Church fees – for baptisms, marriages, funerals and the twice-yearly dues payable at Easter and Christmas – were rising during the 1780s and were regarded by the Rightboys as yet another unjust exaction. However, the priests escaped comparatively unscathed.
The origins of the Defenders.
Before turning to investigate the origins of Defenderism it will be illuminating to look briefly as an eighteenth-century secret society of another kind: the free masons. The oaths and catechisms employed by the Defenders were more elaborate and esoteric than those of the Whiteboys and suggest a strong Masonic influence. The craft, moreover, served as a model for other political secret societies. Dr William Drennan proposed that the United Irishmen ( as they were to become) should have ‘much of the secrecy, and somewhat of the ceremonial attached to freemasonry’. While masonry was in one sense secret – members were oath-bound never to divulge anything concerning the craft’s ritual or business – it was not clandestine.
The sheer number of lodges, particularly in Ulster, points to the popular character of masonry in this period. Figures available for 1804 list 104 lodges in County Antrim, 92 in Tyrone and another 151 in Armagh, Derry and Down. In spite of papal bulls excommunicating masons in 1738 and 1751, the official historians of the craft claim that the majority of its members were Catholic. It can therefore be assumed that many ordinary people had first-hand experience, or had at least come into contact with, freemasonry, and were aware of its powerful mystique.
Although specific and direct ‘influences’ are often impossible to trace, the Masonic complexion of Defenderism is undeniable. The passwords and secret hand signals, the biblical language and deliberate mystification of the tests, oaths and catechisms, the use of the terms ‘lodge’ and ‘brother’ and, in at least one case, ‘Grand Master’, all suggest the Defenders’ debt to masonry.
According to a contemporary account the first Defender lodges were formed after a brawl near the village of Markethill in Armagh in 1784. These lodges resembled other pre-famine factions which engaged in pre-arranged, ritualised ‘challenges’ or fights, at fairs and markets. Initially, the political and religious elements in the rivalry were muted. Catholics and Protestants mingled in both the Nappach and the Bawn ‘fleets’, as they were called. However, in the 1780s, the unique social, economic and demographic structure and denominational geography of the county ensured that the contest soon underwent ‘a thorough reformation from a drunken war to a religious one’.
In fact, the precise chronology of events leading to the formation of the Defenders and their rivals, the Peep O’Day Boys, is in some doubt. Although the account cited above pinpoints their origins in the quite specific circumstances of 1784, Young mentions Peep O’Day Boys in the area in the late 1770s. The Markethill affray, in other words, should not be blown out of proportion. The incident, minor in itself, only triggered such repercussions because it occurred in the already unstable conditions of late-eighteenth-century Armagh.
Armagh was the most densely populated county in Ireland, and the most complex. Each of the three major religions was represented in roughly equal proportions. Anglicans of English settler stock were concentrated in the north, Presbyterians of Scottish origin in the middle and the indigenous Irish, often Gaelic-speaking, Catholics in the south of the county. As the use of the Irish language demonstrates, time, intermarriage and acculturation had not obliterated racial distinctions. Racial differences buttressed differences of religions. Presbyterians were commonly referred to by the Defenders as ‘Scotch’.
The population explosion which was affecting the whole rural economy was particularly acute in Armagh. Competition for land became stiffer. As new leases came on to the market Catholics began to outbid their Protestant neighbours. There is contemporary evidence to support the view that the granting of long leases to Catholics, made possible by the repeal of some property-related penal legislation in the 1770s and 1782, aroused Protestant resentment. For example, although the Steelboy troubles were supposedly free of sectarian rancour, one of their declarations announced that they were all ‘Protestants or Protestant Dissenters’, and one complained of ‘lands given to papists, who will pay any rent’.
The acquisition of property was one aspect of rising Catholic prosperity, participation in the linen trade another. Irish domestic textile production was most intense within the so-called ‘linen triangle’ of north Armagh and west Down. This zone accounted for 15,000,000 of an average 49,000,000 yards of linen manufactured in Ireland in the mid-1780s. ‘Between 16,000 and 20,000 weavers’ worked in County Armagh alone. Not surprisingly, the Peep O’Day Boys – the name refers to the tactic of raiding at dawn – were nearly all ‘journeymen weavers’. So, presumably, were their neighbours and rivals, the Defenders.
On their earliest excursions to seize arms from local Catholics the Peep O’Day raiders were instructed to ‘cut the webs in the looms’ belonging to their victims. Some of the most substantial linen merchants and manufacturers such as Bernard Coile in Lurgan, the Lisburn Teelings and the Armagh Coiglys, were Catholic. All were targets for Orange mobs or official persecution after 1795. Catholic wealth and property was easily construed as a threat to Protestant Ascendancy. The Armagh troubles, comprising about 100 separate incidents between 1784 and 1791, have been attributed to a break-down of social control. By seizing weapons they were seen to be enforcing the Penal Laws against Catholicism as no Catholic was supposed to bear arms at this time.
From the outset of the disturbances, right up to the mass expulsions of Catholics in 1795-6, magistrates were accused of complicity with the Peep O’Day Boys and Orangemen. If the Peep O’Day Boys are seen as a political phenomenon rather than a law and order problem, then the reason for the partiality of the wholly Protestant magistracy becomes clear. The leniency of the county assizes towards alleged Peep O’Day offenders strengthened local suspicions of official bias and signalled to Catholics that little protection could be expected from the civil authorities. The name Defender (the first lodge was founded at Bunkerhill near Armagh City) signifies the self-protecting vigilante role which the movement initially saw itself as fulfilling.
The tensions which these incidents vented were sharpened by a mutual economic boycott and by rumours of planned massacres. A contemporary pamphleteer accused a ‘set of vipers’, including a ‘divine’, of ‘poisoning the minds of the unwary peasants with the dregs of the 41 rebellion’. In Ireland the fear of massacres was activated by political crises and during the 1790s Catholic belief in the existence of an Orange ‘extermination oath’, played a considerable part in the genesis of the rebellion. These fears were prefigured in the 1780s when local communities posted precautionary sentinels after dark.
By the close of 1791 the Defenders were still a localised movement centred in Armagh and the adjoining areas of Down, Louth and Monaghan. Viewed from Dublin Castle, the Defender troubles at this point probably looked like a sectarian variant of the by now familiar Whiteboy-style disturbances. They presented, it seemed, merely a law and order problem of manageable proportions. By the beginning of 1793, however, the scale of violence had escalated dramatically.
The rise of the Defenders
It is only in recent years that historians have begun to glimpse their significance – to the politics of the period and as Ireland’s first ‘associational’, ‘proactive’ movement. Before the United Irishmen began to build a mass-based revolutionary organisation in the later nineties – a mass-base largely consisting of defender lodges integrated into the new paramilitary structure – Defenderism represented organisational expression of popular disaffection. No discussion of popular politics, therefore, can reasonably neglect the development of Defenderism.
The rise of the Defenders in this period can be read as the popular response to the application of Draconian law and order measures, ranging from the increased use of regular troops to quell disturbances to the (certainly perceived) partiality of the magistrates and courts. At one level the defenders’ story over 1793 to 1795, is the story of the repercussions of a tough ‘security policy’, and any attempt to explain their ‘rise’ must engage with the more general history of the time. But that ‘rise’ was not simply a matter of increasing numbers and greater geographical spread. In these years Defenderism became more ideologically complex, organisationally sophisticated and better led. A middle-class leadership emerged in Ulster. A mass revolutionary movement began to take shape.
The Defender movement expanded and politicised during 1792 as it interacted with the Catholic agitation conducted at parish level. One indication of these developments was the extension of defender activity, mainly arms raids, from Armagh along the Ulster border counties into Louth and Meath. Another was the increasing scale of violence perpetrated both by the Defenders and by the authorities. The number of capital convictions handed down at the spring assizes in 1793 was unprecedented. The aggressiveness of the Defenders and the harshness of ascendancy repression were conditioned by the crisis atmosphere generated by the Catholic and reform campaigns, and, from the spring, by war with France.
The militia, established by an act which became law on 8 April, was designed as a domestic defence and peacekeeping force to replace the recently suppressed Volunteers. Volunteering had been suppressed because of its political interventions, and because even ‘loyalist’ corps did not come under government control. The militia was organised by county, officered by the local (Protestant) gentry, and composed of (mainly Catholic) conscripts, raised by ballot. The element of compulsory service provided the key grievance and the coming of the Militia also ushered in another period of violence due mainly to the many rumours that were bandied about.
The underlying – as distinct from the immediate – causes of the militia riots, the form which the riots assumed and their legacy, all testify to the widening gap that was opening up between the Protestant establishment and lower-class Catholics. In the politically fluid 1790s alienation from the ruling elite could quickly turn to active disaffection, particularly since there existed an alternative, middle-class and radical, elite, eager and ready to exploit popular discontents. Not that the division was purely sectarian. Yet politics were conducted in terms of the challenge to, and defence of, the ‘Protestant Ascendancy’. All conflict whether agrarian, class or ‘national’, tended to intersect at some level with the Catholic question.
Once mobilised the Catholic masses had acquired a momentum of their own. Writing at the time of the militia riots Chief-Secretary Hobart reasoned that ‘the pains which have, for these last 18 months, been taken to persuade the people of the irresistible force of numbers, has given them such an idea of strength, that until they are actually beaten into another opinion, they will never be quiet – half the country is sworn to support the Catholic cause’.
Denis Browne, MP for Mayo, placed the disturbances in a broader context, attributing them to ‘the new political doctrines which have pervaded the lower classes – that . . . spirit [which] has been produced by the circulation of Paine’s Rights of Man, of seditious newspapers, and by shopkeepers who having been in Dublin to buy goods have formed connections with some of the United Irishmen’.
By reinforcing popular perceptions of the State as enemy, ‘persecution’, judicial and military, had ‘negative’ politicising effects. That interlocking process of repression and disaffection became particularly acute in the years from the summer of 1795 to the summer of 1798. One fed off the other. The ascendancy resorted to repression because it was under attack and because its representatives were themselves frequently the victims of this campaign of violence; repression stimulated counter-violence, and so the cycle continued.
The British government also recalled Fitzwilliam who was seen to becoming much too lenient in his policies in Ireland. From then on the British government implemented a policy of what can only be called repressions. So in a short space of time the government went from concessions to repression. This was seen as the end of any more political concessions by both the Catholics and the more moderate Protestants.
Charles Teeling called it a ‘national insult’ and recorded the indignation which he had witnessed at the Antrim freeholders meeting called to protest against the decision. Such scenes of public outrage were repeated across Ireland and the United Irish ‘system’ began to assume a more ‘general and imposing appearance’. In Wexford Edward Hay collected 22,251 signatures. Some years later he wrote of ‘the cup of redress [being] dashed from the lips of expectation, and it cannot be wondered at that the anger of disappointment should have ensued’. Levels of violence markedly increased. As early as 3 march large areas of Cavan, Roscommon and Sligo were characterised as ‘actually in a state of insurrection’. The Northern Star suggested that ‘the rejection of the Catholic Bill [which followed the recall] . . . gives the insurgents a plea for disaffection’.
The reasons why the British government abandoned its previous strategy of conciliation for the politics of confrontation are unclear. It has been suggested that after the relief acts of 1792-3 the British government considered the ‘conciliation account’ closed, or alternatively, that Pitt wished to hold concessions in reserve to barter, at some future date, for Catholic support for a union. Pitt may also have been reluctant to undermine England’s Protestant garrison in Ireland during wartime. Whatever the reasoning which lay behind the new hardline policies the consequences were disastrous: repression, disaffection and violence
After the Fitzwilliam episode there were mass arrests of Catholics whom rumour held were about to rise in rebellion. From then on the situation took yet another sharp turn for the worse. Remembered in Ireland as the incident which gave birth to the Orange Order, the so-called ‘battle of the Diamond’, which took place in north Armagh in September, 1795, and, even more so, the expulsions from the county which followed, are important in the 1790s for the effect which they had of further discrediting the ascendancy in Catholic eyes and of swelling the ranks of the Defenders and United Irishmen.
Armagh had been plagued by sectarian feuding since the mid-1780s. In December 1794, for example, Defenders and Peep O’Day Boys, ‘young boys and idle journeymen weavers’, clashed at a fair. After the twelfth of July celebrations the following year a group of Catholics were attacked near Portadown. The tensions which such incidents revealed culminated in the set-piece battle at the Diamond, a townland appropriately close to Loughgall, over ten years before the ‘cradle’ of Defenderism. Although heavily reinforced by contingents from the neighbouring areas of Down, Derry and, particularly, Tyrone, the Defenders were badly beaten, suffering between 17 and 48 fatalities. This rout was then followed by the mass expulsion of Catholics. At least one church was burned down and Catholic homes and property – looms, webs and yarn – were destroyed. As the attacks continued through the winter and spread into Tyrone, Derry and Monaghan, the exodus was accelerated by the circulation of a prophecy foretelling great calamities about to befall the Catholics of the north. Estimates of the number of refugees ran from 3,500 to 10,000.
The refugees fled in many directions: to Antrim, Down and even Scotland. But by far the greatest number, maybe as many as 4,000, resettled in north Connaught. They carried with them tales of persecution and over the coming years the fear of ‘Orange’ massacres was skilfully exploited as a recruiting agent by the United Irishmen. The expulsions were not soon forgotten. The Defenders at the battle of Randalstown in 1798 carried a banner inscribed ‘REMEMBER ARMAGH’.
Undoubtedly the experience and perception of repression and injustice helped to spread and to deepen popular alienation from the government. It gave sustenance to Defenderism and the United Irishmen, just as the mounting tide of violence stiffened the ascendancy’s resolve. The ‘rise’ of the Defenders, then, was essentially a political phenomenon, inspired by Catholic agitation and the French revolution, and accelerated by repression and sectarian conflict.
The significance of Defenderism, historically and for the politics of the period, lay in the way in which it transcended local and immediate issues – in the qualitative leap, which it represented, from rural discontent to mass disaffection
United Irishmen
In order to tap the disaffection produced by the sequence of events from the militia riots to the Armagh expulsions, the United Irishmen had first to work out an accommodation with the Defenders, an accommodation which altered the course of revolutionary politics.
By 1795 a merger or, more accurately, coalition, between the United Irishmen and Defenders was already in place, at least in Ulster. The making of that coalition carried profound implications for both movements. Like the commencement of negotiations for French military aid, United Irish efforts to assimilate Defender lodges into their new military structures signalled the seriousness of their insurrectionary designs. It also posed problems for their strategy of forging a union of Irishmen of all creeds.
Defenderism represented many things to many men, among them Catholic sectarianism. The experience of John Tuite – ‘Captain Fearnought’ of Meath – illustrates the consequent United Irish dilemma. Tuite was ‘sworn to both acts’ in 1795, that is he took first the Defender and then the United Irish oaths, but the Defender oath pledged him ‘to quell the nation of heresy’ as well as to ‘dethrone all kings, and plant the tree of liberty’. The second part of the oath indicates how interaction with the United Irishmen accelerated and strengthened the politicising impact of ‘French principles’; the first part shows how much more the secular radical gospel had still to do.
Concerted and systematic attempts to co-opt the Defenders began in the spring of 1795, but lines of communication had been established as early as 1792. By mid 1795 Wolfe Tone was able to announce himself competent to speak ‘for the Catholic, for the Dissenters and for the Defenders of Ireland’.
Initially the Defenders, particularly in Ulster and Meath, possessed a coherent, radical, middle-class Catholic leadership. From its origins in Armagh in 1784 as the Catholic faction in a local sectarian feud, the Defender movement had gradually spread along lines of religious cleavage, or ‘cultural frontiers’, into County Down, Louth and south Ulster. Stimulated by the news and controversy about the French revolution and encouraged by the Catholic agitation, the Defenders were transformed into a politicised secret society. This process was then reinforced, and the Defender organisation expanded, from Meath across the north midlands into Connaught, by the continuing economic, political, and law-and-order crisis. The militia riots, the 1794 trials, the Fitzwilliam episode, Lord Carhampton’s activities, the Armagh expulsions and the propaganda which radicals extracted from each of these affairs, all contributed to the rise of the Defenders. BY 1795 Defenderism had a presence, form Donegal to Kildare, from Galway to Louth, in at least 16 counties and in Dublin city. They had successfully infiltrated the militia and knit far-flung lodges into a co-ordinated, if not well-disciplined, organisation.
The first general meeting of the United Irishmen was held on 18th October 1791, and the following resolutions were proposed and carried ;
1. 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, to maintain that balance which is essential to the preservation of our liberties and the extension of our commerce
2. That the sole constitutional mode by which this influence can be opposed is by a complete and radical reform of the people in Parliament
3. That no reform is just which does not include Irishmen of every religious persuasion.
During the year 1796, events had moved in Ireland with extraordinary rapidity. On the one hand the Government had let loose on the country a storm of organised terrorism, and on the other the country, as a measure of self-protection, if nothing else - had gone solidly into the ranks of the ‘United’ men. Among the sinister measures adopted by Government to break the ‘Union’ was the establishment of the Orange Society.
Original Declaration of the United Irishmen
In the present great era of reform, when unjust Governments are falling in every quarter of Europe; when religious persecution is compelled to abjure her tyranny over conscience; when the rights of man are ascertained in theory, and that theory substantiated by practice; when antiquity can no longer defend absurd and oppressive forms against the common sense and common interests of mankind; when all Government is acknowledged to originate from the people, and to be so far only obligatory as it protects their rights and promotes their welfare; we think it our duty, as Irishmen, to come forward, and state what we feel to be our heavy grievance, and what we know to be its effectual remedy. We have no national Government -- we are ruled by Englishmen, and the servants of Englishmen whose object is the interest of another country, whose instrument is corruption, and whose strength is the weakness of Ireland; and these men have the whole of the power and patronage of the country as means to seduce and subdue the honesty and spirit of her representatives in the legislature.
Such an extrinis power, acting with uniform force, in a direction too frequently opposite to the true line of our obvious interests, can be resisted with effect solely by unanimity, decision and spirit in the people -- qualities which may be exerted most legally, constitutionally, and efficaciously by that great measure essential to the prosperity, and freedom of Ireland -- an equal representation of all the people in Parliament. We do not here mention as grievances the rejection of a place-bill, of a pension bill, of a responsibility-bill,, the sale of peerages in one house, the corruption publicly avowed in the other, nor the notorious infamy of borough traffic between both, not that we are insensible to their enormity, but that we consider them as but symptoms of that mortal disease which corrodes the vitals of our constitution, and leaves to the people in their own government but the shadow of a name.
Impressed with these sentiments, we have agreed to form an association to be called "The Society of United Irishmen", and we do pledge ourselves to our country, and mutually to each other, that we will steadily support and endeavour, by all due means, to carry into effect the following resolutions:
FIRST RESOLVED -- That the weight of English influence on the Government of this country is so great as to require a cordial union among all the people of Ireland, to maintain that balance which is essential to the preservation of our liberties and the extension of our commerce. SECOND -- That the sole constitutional mode by which this influence can be opposed is by a 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. Satisfied, as we are, that the intestine divisions among Irishmen have too often given encouragement and impunity to profligate, audacious and corrupt administrations, in measure which, but for these divisions, they durst not have attempted, we submit our resolutions to the nation as the basis of our political faith. We have gone to what we conceive to be the root of the evil. We have stated what we conceive to be the remedy. With a Parliament thus reformed, everything is easy; without it, nothing can be done. And we do call on, and most earnestly exhort, our countrymen in general to follow our example, and to form similar societies in every quarter of the kingdom for the promotion of constitutional knowledge, the abolition of bigotry in religion and politics, and the equal distribution of the rights of men through all sects and denominations of Irishmen. The people, when thus collected, will feel their own weight, and secure that power which theory has already admitted to be their portion, and to which, if they be not aroused by their present provocation to vindicate it, they deserve to forfeit their pretensions for ever.
United Irish catechism
What is that in your hand?
-- It is a branch
Of What?
-- Of the Tree of Liberty
Where did it first grow?
-- In America
Where does it bloom?
-- In France
Where did the seed fall?
-- In Ireland
When will the moon be full?
-- When the four quarters meet
1798 Rebellion
The immediate origins of the 1798 Rebellion in Ireland can be traced to the setting up of the Society of United Irishmen in Belfast in October 1791. Inspired by the French Revolution, and with great admiration for the new democracy of the United States, the United Irishmen were led by Theobald Wolfe Tone, Thomas Russell, Henry Joy McCracken and William Drennan. They came together to secure a reform of the Irish parliament; and they sought to achieve this goal by uniting Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter in Ireland into a single movement.
From the beginning, Dublin Castle, the seat of government in Ireland, viewed the new organisation with the gravest suspicion, and with the outbreak of war between Britain (and Ireland) and France in February 1793, suspicion hardened to naked hostility. The unabashed admiration of the United Irishmen for the French seemed akin to treason. The discovery of negotiations between certain United Irishmen, notably Theobald Wolfe Tone, and the French government confirmed suspicions and led to the suppression of the society in May 1794.
Driven underground, the Society re-constituted itself as a secret, oath-bound, organisation, dedicated to the pursuit of a republican form of government in a separate and independent Ireland. This was to be achieved primarily by direct French military intervention. The plan came closest to success following the arrival of a French invasion fleet, carrying some 14,000 soldiers, off the southern coast of Ireland in December 1796. Adverse weather conditions, however, prevented the French from landing, and the fleet was forced to make its way back to France. From this date on, Dublin Castle stepped up its war against the United Irishmen, infiltrating their ranks with spies and informers, invoking draconian legislation against subversives, turning a blind eye to military excesses, and to those of the resolutely loyalist Orange Order, and building up its defence forces lest the French should return in strength.
By the spring of 1798, it appeared that Dublin Castle had been successful in its determined efforts to destroy the Society's capacity for insurrection: many of its leaders were in prison, its organisation was in disarray, and there seemed no possibility of French assistance. Despite these difficulties, on the night of the 23rd/24th May, as planned, the mail coaches leaving Dublin were seized - as a signal to those United Irishmen outside the capital that the time of the uprising had arrived.
However, as a result of the failure of Dublin to rise, the Rebellion when it came was distinguished everywhere by a lack of concert and by a lack of focus. The uprisings outside the capital had been intended by the United Irishmen as supporting acts - sideshows - to the main event in Dublin, but as Dublin did not perform as planned, rebels in outlying areas now found themselves promoted to centre-stage. In the lack of co-ordination between the rebel theatres of war lay the salvation of Dublin Castle and British rule in Ireland.
Rebellion
The initial outbreak of the rebellion was confined to a ring of counties surrounding Dublin. The fighting in Kildare, Carlow, Wicklow and Meath had been largely suppressed by government forces, and the capital secured, when news arrived of a major rebel success in County Wexford. On 29 May 1798 a terse communiqué was issued from Dublin Castle confirming the rumours that had swept the city a day earlier. For the first time in the rebellion, a detachment of soldiers - in this case over 100 men of the North Cork Militia - had been cut to pieces in an open engagement at Oulart, County Wexford. Wexford was ablaze.
The eruption of Wexford was a most unexpected (as well as most unwelcome) development for Dublin Castle for the county had, by and large, escaped official scrutiny in the months and years before the rebellion. The Castle had had very few informants (or informers) in Wexford and, most unwisely, it had clearly considered this lack of information as pointing towards a general quiescence among the people there. Accordingly, the garrison in that county numbered only a few hundred men
Two developments had pitched Wexford over the edge and into full-scale rebellion. The first of these was the campaign of terror unleashed - particularly to the north of the county from mid-May 1798 onwards. Reports of half-hangings, floggings, pitch-cappings and house-burnings conducted principally by the North Cork Militia, under the direction of loyalist magistrates, inflamed that part of County Wexford that bordered on Wicklow, and induced panic everywhere. On 26th May came stunning news of the summary execution of some 34 suspected United Irishmen at Dunlavin, in south Wicklow; and there was a further report that at Carnew, across the border in Wexford, 35 prisoners had been summarily executed. Fevered rumours of extirpation now appeared to have substance. In terror, the peasantry - United Irishmen or not - prepared to resist.
Irish breakthrough
The second precipitating factor was the very fact of the crushing rebel victory at Oulart. This victory in an open engagement, the first such for the rebels anywhere, electrified the county, tempting many to join in who might otherwise have hung back. Undoubtedly, it also had the effect of re-igniting the rebellion in those areas near Dublin in which it had shown every sign of petering out; and in a broader context, news of the rebels' success at Oulart sparked off renewed efforts to raise the hitherto quiescent north-east of Ireland, principally counties Antrim and Down.
On 29th May, under the command of Father Murphy of Boolavogue, a priest who had been in dispute with his bishop and who had reluctantly stepped forward as leader, the Wexford insurgents, gaining strength as they advanced, stormed Enniscorthy. The defences of the town were swept aside by means of a stampede of cattle, and behind the terrified animals came the rebels. The next day the rebel army, by now possibly 15,000 strong, turned its attention to Wexford town. Plans to defend the county capital were given up on news of the destruction of the approaching relief column, and the town was abandoned by its defenders. The fall of Wexford was the highpoint of the rebellion in the south-east: thereafter, the rebels' campaign met with devastating defeats at New Ross, Arklow and Newtownbarry and these had the effect of corralling them within the county. Demoralised, and having suffered thousands of casualties, the rebels fell back to re-group on Vinegar Hill, outside Enniscorthy.
Ulster rising
While rebellion had been raging in the south-east, the north generally had been quiet. On receipt of news of the fighting in Leinster, there had been a stormy meeting of the Ulster Provincial Council of the United Irishmen on 29th May, at which there were loud protests at the failure to rise in support. The existing leadership was accused of having 'completely betrayed the people both of Leinster and Ulster' and it was promptly deposed. New men, Henry Joy McCracken among them, were now appointed and plans were hurriedly made for a rising.
On 7th June a large number of rebels assembled in different parts of County Antrim. In Ballymena, the green flag was raised over the market house, and there were attacks on Larne, Glenarm, Carrickfergus, Toomebridge and Ballymoney. The rebels, almost entirely Presbyterian, captured Antrim town for a few hours but were then driven out 'with great slaughter' by government artillery fire. An attempted mobilisation in County Derry had come to nothing, and by the evening of 8th June, the Antrim rebels had also lost heart and had begun drifting home. Some weeks later McCracken was captured and executed.
As the rising in County Antrim, and elsewhere was petering out, on 10th June (known thereafter as 'Pike Sunday') the United Irishmen in the adjacent County Down began to assemble their forces. This was under the command of Henry Monro, a shopkeeper from Newtownards and, ironically, a direct descendant of General Robert Monro who had commanded the Scottish force in Ulster in the wars of the 1640s. At Ballynahinch, some 12 miles from Belfast, the rebels were routed on 12th-13th June, suffering several hundred casualties. Military losses were three dead and some thirty wounded. 'General' Monro was captured and, a few days later, hanged outside his front door. The rebellion in the north-east was over.
Vinegar Hill
With the rebels scattered in the north, attention shifted once again to those still 'out' in Wexford, and the army laid plans to attack their camp at Vinegar Hill. On 21st June, General Gerard Lake attempted to surround Vinegar Hill with some 20,000 men, in four columns of soldiers, in order to prevent a rebel breakout. Battle was joined. It lasted about two hours: the rebels were mercilessly shelled, and artillery carried the day. 'The rebels made a tolerable good fight of it' wrote Lake, and then pronounced the 'carnage ... dreadful' among them; hundreds of men may have fallen on the field of battle, though numbers managed to escape. Although a 'little war' continued in the Wicklow mountains for some time afterwards, in effect, after Vinegar Hill, the rebellion in the south-east was over.
In defeat, rebel discipline collapsed in some places. After the defeat at New Ross, about 100 loyalists had been killed at a barn in Scullabogue; and now, following the disaster at Vinegar Hill, about 70 Protestant prisoners were piked to death on the bridge at Wexford town. The army repaid these atrocities with interest: the mopping-up operations after Vinegar Hill resembled, to the fury of the newly-appointed Lord Lieutenant, Marquis Cornwallis, little other than universal rape, plunder and murder.
Retribution for the rebel leaders was swift and largely uncompromising. Bagenal Harvey, Cornelius Grogan, Mathew Keogh, and Anthony Perry - all Wexford commanders (and, incidentally, all Protestants) - were executed; their heads were cut off and stuck on spikes outside the courthouse in Wexford town. Father John Murphy, the hero of Oulart and Enniscorthy (or a latter-day mixture of Attila, Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, as loyalists viewed him), was captured in Tullow, County Carlow. He was stripped, flogged, hanged, and beheaded: his corpse was burned in a barrel. With an eye for detail, the local Yeomanry spiked his head on a building directly opposite the local Catholic church, and with great glee, they forced the Catholics of Tullow to open their windows to admit the 'holy smoke' from his funeral pyre.
For a brief period in late August, there appeared a prospect that the rebellion would flare up again. On 22nd August, a French force of some 1,100 men, under the command of General Humbert, waded ashore at Kilcummin Strand, near Killala, County Mayo. Humbert scored a striking victory at Castlebar, but then his campaign ran out of steam. It soon became clear that the apparent signal victory at Castlebar was an empty triumph. On 8th September at Ballinamuck, County Longford, the French force, vastly outnumbered, laid down its arms. The French were treated as honoured prisoners of war, but those Irish auxiliaries who had recklessly joined them were promptly massacred. The rebellion was finally over: between 10,000 and 25,000 rebels (including a high proportion of non-combatants), and around 600 soldiers had been slain, and large areas of the country had been effectively laid waste.
Legacy
The 1798 rebellion, and its aftermath, shattered existing relationships within Ireland, awakened ancient fears and evoked memories of the bloody rebellion of 1641. The very fact that a rebellion had occurred at all also called into question the future of the Irish political structure. Marquis Cornwallis had been charged in June 1798 not only with crushing the rebellion, but also with seizing the opportunity the crisis offered to put through a legislative union between Ireland and England. The Irish parliament was to be another casualty of the 1798 rebellion, while Union was represented as the perfect answer to those separatists who had sought to pull Ireland and Britain apart. Union was duly accomplished in January 1801.
The decade that began with the founding of the United Irishmen, with high hopes for an international 'brotherhood of affection' and for the inauguration of an Irish 'fellowship of freedom', was to close with increased sectarian bitterness. It also saw the end of the Irish parliament, and Ireland and England drawn ever closer together. The rebellion would cast a long shadow before it, bequeathing to subsequent generations a legacy of republican separatism, of insurrection with assistance from abroad, of heroic sacrifice, of murderous government reprisals and of sectarian cruelty. The memory of 1798 would be both a proud inspiration for some and a dire warning to others. The commemoration of the rebellion in historical writing, popular literature, and ballads was to prove equally contentious: some 200 years on, the 1798 rebellion continues to fascinate, to inspire and to appal.