The very disgraceful frequency of courts-martial and the many complaints of irregularities in the conduct of the troops in this kingdom have too unfortunately proved the army to be in a state of licentiousness which must render it formidable to everyone but the enemy.
General Ralph Abercromby
Arise then, united sons of Ireland; arise like a great and powerful people determined to live free or die.
Proclamation of 1798
Rebels act sometimes in small parties, but often in a considerable body … to at least five thousand men, the greater part of whom are armed only with pikes.
General George Cornwallis
The Irish rebellion of 1798 was the bloodiest and most widespread of all that had erupted against brutal English rule since the conquest began in the fifteenth century.1 The Irish certainly had good reasons to revolt against their British masters. The 1800 census counted 4,550,000 people in Ireland, of which Anglicans numbered 500,000, Presbyterians 900,000, and Catholics 3,150,000. This was the political, economic, social, and religious power pyramid. Although Ireland had a parliament, only Anglicans served in it. Catholics were denied most political, religious, and economic rights, including being outlawed from attending Mass, voting, or being elected to Parliament. Nearly all Catholics were tenants; only a handful of wealthy ‘Papists’ were permitted to own land. Catholics along with Presbyterians paid tithes to the Anglican Church. Shortly after the war erupted with France in February 1793, Prime Minister William Pitt got a parliamentary majority to pass the Catholic Relief Act that alleviated many repressive anti-Catholic measures. Catholics could now vote, sit on juries, bear arms, graduate from Trinity College, and hold officer commissions below that of general. They could not, however, sit in Parliament or hold government positions.
The Anglican ruling elite was split between the prevailing conservative view that discrimination, repression, and exploitation of Presbyterians and Catholics should persist, and progressives who advocated equal rights for all. Among the more outspoken liberals was General Charles Cornwallis, who King George III appointed as his viceroy to Ireland in June 1798. Cornwallis cited practical as well as ethnical reasons for enlightened policies. Repression led inevitably to rebellion; the worse the repression, the sooner, bloodier, and more destructive it became. The British government has made ‘an irrevocable alliance with a small party in Ireland (which party has derived all its consequences from, and is in fact entirely dependent upon the British Government), to wage eternal war against the Papists and Presbyterians of this kingdom, which two sects, from their fairest calculations, compose about nine-tenths of the community.’2 Eliminating discrimination would eliminate reasons to rebel.
More than anyone, Wolfe Tone was responsible for the 1798 uprising.3 Tone was a lawyer, Trinity University graduate, and Presbyterian, who, with a dozen other liberals formed the United Irishmen in 1791, as a movement to pressure King George III and Parliament for reforms including freedom of religious practice and political participation for all men who lived in Ireland. Whitehall viewed such views as sedition and, in 1794, ordered the arrest of the United Irishmen. This oppression radicalized the United Irishmen, transforming them from reformers trying to work within the system to revolutionaries trying to overthrow British rule and liberate Ireland as an independent country.
Tone evaded arrest and reached Paris in February 1796. He promised the French government, whose executive was now a five-man elected Directory, that if a French expedition landed in Ireland, 15,000 Irishmen would join them to drive the English from their land. The directors embraced the idea.4 The subsequent complex plan involved massing an overwhelming fleet of French and Spanish warships packed with an army at Brest, and then heading to Ireland. Problems plagued the plan at each stage of its implementation. French Admiral Pierre Villeneuve and Spanish Admiral Juan Langara were to sail from Toulon to Brest. When the combined fleet stopped at Cartagena, Admiral Juan de Cordova replaced Langara in command with orders not to venture beyond Gibraltar. Meanwhile, Admiral Richard Richery sailed from Île d’Aix and dropped anchor at Brest on December 11. This brought the Brest fleet to 17 ships-of-the-line, 13 frigates, 8 corvettes, and 7 transports, commanded by Admiral Justin Bonaventure Morard de Galles; General Lazare Hoche led the 13,900 troops crammed aboard. After word arrived that Villeneuve was delayed, Morard de Galles and Hoche decided to sail anyway.
The Admiralty had no advanced intelligence of the pending expedition. When the armada departed, Admiral Richard Howe, the Channel fleet’s commander, was enjoying the waters at Bath, having left in charge Admiral Alexander Hood, Lord Bridport, who was with the main fleet anchored at Spithead. A squadron of ships-of-the-line and frigates lay off Ushant. Captain Edward Pellew, aboard the Indefatigable, commanded several frigates bobbing off the Brest coast.5
The French fleet emerged from Brest on the night of December 16, 1796. Rather than speed away with word of the enemy excursion, Pellew sailed his frigate through the French fleet and ordered broadsides fired at the warships silhouetted against the moonlight. This unexpected attack spooked the French captains. One 74-gun warship smashed into shore. The other warships scattered. The French captains knew that Bantry Bay was their objective, and 14, including 1 with Tone aboard, eventually anchored there. The frigate carrying Morard de Galles and Hoche, however, did not appear. The local Irish peasants viewed their would-be liberators with trepidation rather than enthusiasm and did not rebel. A gale on December 24 forced the captains to cut their cables and head for the open sea back to Brest.
Two days after learning of the French expedition, Bridport sailed from Portsmouth on December 19. Some of his captains displayed even worse seamanship than the French. First two warships collided, then two more. A fifth ship ran aground. The entire fleet anchored while the damage was repaired. Bridport’s fleet of 14 ships-of-the-line and 7 frigates finally sailed on Christmas Day but never reached Brest in time to intercept the returning French ships. Pellew, meanwhile, scored another victory when his Indefatigable and another frigate, the Amazon, caught up to and attacked the 80-gun Les Droits de l’Homme. The French captain unfurled all sails for Brest but in the confusion his warship and the Amazon wrecked on the Brittany coast. The expedition’s denouement came when the Black Legion, a motley crew of 600 French regulars and 800 adventurers and idealists led by Colonel William Tate, landed at Fishguard, Wales on February 22, 1797. Captain John Campbell, Baron Cawdor, gathered 600 reservists, militia, and sailors, and led them to attack the French the following day. Tate surrendered his entire force on February 24.
Whitehall responded to these aborted invasions with measures that actually undermined Britain’s grip on Ireland. Martial law and the arrest of thousands of suspects made increasingly likely a rebellion that the British wanted to avoid. Revolutionary leaders, who called themselves the New Irish Executive, developed an underground movement across ever more of the island. Couriers from Paris informed them to prepare their rebellion for some time in the latter half of 1798 when a French expedition would join them in liberating Ireland from England.
Dublin Castle housed Ireland’s government which in 1798 split sharply over how best to ensure continued British rule. The initial line-up included Viceroy or Lord Lieutenant John Jeffreys, Earl of Camden and Lord Chancellor John Fitzgibbon, who championed repression, while his secretary Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh and General Ralph Abercromby, the army commander, backed reform. General Gerard Lake, who would replace Abercromby, and subordinate Generals John Moore and James Craig loudly advocated the brutal crushing of any resistance. Charles Cornwallis, who replaced Camden, and subordinate General Ralph Dundas advocated conciliation.6
British military power in Ireland consisted of 13,000 infantry, 8,000 cavalry, and 1,500 artillerymen, including both regulars, who could be sent anywhere, and fencibles, who were raised and could only serve in Ireland. All these troops were considered second-rate at best. There were also about 23,000 Irish militiamen. As with militias elsewhere, the Irish militia was little more than an armed mob.7 Abercromby was appalled by the dismal quality of troops under his command. On February 26, 1798, he issued a General Order condemning the ‘very disgraceful frequency of courts-martial and the many complaints of irregularities in the conduct of the troops in this kingdom [that] … unfortunately proved the army to be in a state of licentiousness which must render it formidable to everyone but the enemy.’8 Conservatives pilloried Abercromby for this criticism and his outspoken advocacy of progressive policies toward Irish Presbyterians and Catholics; they forced him to resign on March 26.
Meanwhile, the government had penetrated the revolutionary movement with spies and conducted a series of arrests. The crackdown splintered the movement and triggered the rebellion months earlier than when the French expedition could possibly arrive. Fearing arrest, the surviving leaders reasoned that they had better act now rather than later. The first revolt erupted in County Tipperary in late March, then, as word spread, leaders elsewhere led their followers to attack British officials, soldiers, and mail coaches, and seize forts and supply depots, with the largest numbers in Kildare, Wexford, and Leinster, followed by Carlow, Meath, and Wicklow.
The proclamation that the rebels distributed was a model of revolutionary rhetoric:
Irishmen – Your country is free and you are about to be avenged. That vile Government which has so long and cruelly opposed you, is no more. Some of its most atrocious monsters have already paid the forfeit of their lives, and the rest are in our hands. The national flag, the sacred green, is … flying over the ruins of despotism … Arise then, united sons of Ireland; arise like a great and powerful people determined to live free or die.
What followed were some very practical tactics for destroying the enemy:
Attack them in every direction by day and by night. Avail yourselves of the natural advantages of your country, which are innumerable, and with which you are better acquainted than they. Where you cannot oppose them in full force, constantly harass their rear and their flanks; cut off their provisions and magazines, and prevent them as much as possible from uniting their forces. Let whatever moments you cannot devote to fighting for your country be passed in learning how to fight for it, or preparing the means of war; for war, war alone must occupy every mind and every hand in Ireland, until its long oppressed soil be purged of all its enemies.9
At their peak, the rebels numbered about 13,000 men split among 11 regiments.10 Their uniforms generally consisted of civilian clothes with green cockades in their hats. Homemade pikes, long poles with knife blades riveted to the end, were their most common weapon. The rebels had few firearms, and those were mostly taken from magazines or dead redcoats. And they were as poorly organized as they were armed and supplied. As for tactics, Cornwallis explained that the ‘Rebels act sometimes in small parties, but often in a considerable body … to at least five thousand men, the greater part of whom are armed only with pikes.’11 Yet these seeming rebel weaknesses were actually strengths, Cornwallis noted, because ‘the difficulty of coming up with an army of this kind without artillery and baggage in that wild and mountainous country has hitherto prevented our striking any serious blow.’ Compounding these rebel strengths was ‘the ignorance of our officers who have commanded small detachments, has afforded the Rebels some encouraging advantages.’12 A final handicap was the loyal militia, the Orangemen, who ‘are totally without discipline, contemptible before the enemy when any serious resistance is made to them, but ferocious and cruel in the extreme when any poor wretches either with or without arms come within their power; in short murder appears to be their favorite pastime.’13
Camden proclaimed martial law for Ireland on March 30, and ordered General Lake to mobilize the troops and militia against the rebels. Lord Chancellor John Fitzgibbon, Earl of Clare, advocated the most ruthless means to crushing the rebellion whose ‘nature and extent have been so completely developed that no man will now venture to condemn the necessary acts of vigour which have been, and will, I trust, continue to be, exerted for its suppression.’14 The result was a war without mercy as each side butchered the other. John Beresford, the revenue commissioner, wrote vividly of the vicious fighting, pillaging, raping, and murdering that he witnessed: ‘The most wanton murders are being committed … the cry is for instant trial and execution … they want actually to hang every person taken, some even without trial.’15 Cornwallis grieved at the vicious cycle of violence whereby ‘the deluded wretches who are still wandering about in considerable bodies and … committing still greater cruelties than they themselves suffer.’16
At his Knockallen Hill headquarters, General Dundas received a delegation of Kildare rebel leaders under a truce flag on May 28. The rebels promised to lay down their arms and return home if the government released and pardoned all prisoners. Dundas sent to Camden a report on what transpired along with the recommendation that Camden sign a document acknowledging that ‘the rebels had taken up arms for the redress of their wrongs … and they were willing to forgive and forget what had passed, and to lay down their arms, on condition of indemnity to them and their friends.’ This provoked Camden immediately to gallop an order to Dundas ‘not to accept any terms short of unconditional submission by the rebels, and the surrender of their leaders to be punished as they deserve.’17
The campaign’s turning points came in May and June. First came the arrests of most of the movement’s leadership, including John Sheares, John Lawless, and, the chief, Lord Edward Fitzgerald.18 Then came the surrender of 3,000 rebels at Knockallen Hill on May 26, and the battles of New Ross on June 3, Antrim on June 7, Ballynahinch on June 13, Arklow on June 9, and, most decisively, Vinegar Hill on June 21, when British troops routed and slaughtered thousands of rebels. Lake unleashed his men to exterminate any Irish men and many women and children they found regardless of their proclaimed religion or loyalties.
Whitehall replaced Camden with Cornwallis as Ireland’s Lord Lieutenant on June 22. Cornwallis pardoned all rebels except the top leaders, who would be tried and executed for treason. In doing so, he hoped to reverse the practice whereby the ‘principal persons of this country, and the Members of both House of Parliament’ for being ‘averse to all acts of clemency … and too much heated to see the ultimate effects which their violence must produce.’19 He insisted that only reconciliation and forgiveness could break the vicious cycle of violence. Yet he understood that would only mitigate violence for a while. Rebellions would erupt as long as the government’s religious, economic, political, and social repression of Catholics persisted. Cornwallis called for a policy that could ‘soften the hatred of the Catholics to our Government. Whether this can be done by advantages held out to them from a union with Great Britain, by some provision for their clergy, or by some modifications of tithe, which is the grievance of which they complain.’20 Labels matter because they shape perceptions and thus behavior. Cornwallis insisted that British officials, officers, and soldiers recognize that a political rather than religious creed motivated the rebels: ‘I shall use my utmost exertion to suppress the folly which has been too prevalent in this quarter of substituting the word Catholicism instead of Jacobinism for the foundation of the present rebellion.’21
By the time the French invaded, the British had smothered the rebellion. The Directory did not officially order the expedition until July 13, 1798. Two forces would land on different parts of the Irish coast then rally and arm the rebels as they marched inland and joined forces. The British blockade prevented any precise departure date. Each force would sail whenever the varying weather conditions and array of enemy warships hovering off the coast appeared the most advantageous. At La Rochelle, General Joseph Humbert and 1,099 French troops boarded 3 frigates that sailed on August 6. At Brest, Wolfe Tone, General Gerald Hardy, and 3,000 troops crammed aboard a flotilla of one ship-of-the-line and eight frigates commanded by Admiral Jean Baptiste Bompart. A fiasco ensued when this armada first tried to slip past the blockade on August 20; two frigates collided, British warships converged, and the French warships reversed course for the safety of Brest’s harbor.
Humbert and his troops disembarked at Killala, a tiny port on Donegal’s remote north coast on August 22. The French distributed arms and munitions, and gave rudimentary training to rebels who gathered. Three days later, Humber led his troops and rebels inland. After learning of the invasion, General Francis Hutchinson, the region’s commander, massed his forces at Castlebar and called on General Lake for reinforcements. Lake hurried to Castlebar and took command of the 1,700 troops and militiamen. Upon reaching Castlebar on August 27, Humbert positioned his guns and troops, then ordered a bombardment. After the French gunners blasted swatches of dead and wounded through the enemy ranks, the infantry charged and routed the British. In all, the British lost 9 cannons, 53 killed, 36 wounded, and 278 missing. Lake and the remnants of his troops fled 20 miles south to Hollymount.22
Cornwallis had marched with several thousand troops from Dublin and, on August 27, reached Athlone, where he learned of Lake’s debacle at Castlebar. Cornwallis split the 10,000 troops in the region into 3 columns to converge on Humbert. On September 8, Cornwallis caught up to Humbert at Ballinamuck, and hurled his 5,000 troops at Humbert’s men, now reduced to 750 French and several hundred Irish. Facing overwhelming odds, Humbert surrendered. Cornwallis dispatched columns to capture the remaining French troops at Killala, which fell on September 23. The terms for Humbert and his troops could not have been more lenient – they were given honors of war, paroled, and shipped back to France. In stark contrast, the fate of the rebels who joined the French was harsh. Scores of leaders were tried and executed, and hundreds of their followers were imprisoned.
The campaign was not yet done. The expedition of Bompart and Hardy managed to sail past the blockade on September 16. Admiral John Warren’s squadron of 3 ships-of-the-line and 6 frigates closed with the French armada off Ireland’s north coast on October 12, and after a fierce battle captured 6 warships packed with 2,500 troops and Wolfe Tone. Hardy’s troops received the same terms as Humbert’s, pardon and repatriation. Tone, however, was tried and sentenced to death for treason. He cheated the hangman by slitting his throat on November 10.
Just how many people died during the 1798 rebellion will never be known, but the standard number is over 30,000. Perhaps a thousand political prisoners were imprisoned or deported to Botany Bay, Australia or Prussian salt mines. Thousands more fled to America and other foreign safe havens. The figures are precise for the number of captured arms, including 48,109 muskets, 1,756 bayonets, 4,463 pistols, 4,183 swords, 248 blunderbusses, 22 cannons, and 70,630 pikes. As for property damage, government claims amounted to £1,023,337, but this was just a fraction of the value of thousands of destroyed houses, churches, offices, and warehouses, and their contents.23
The Pitt government tried to follow up this military victory with conciliatory policies to placate Irish Presbyterians and Catholics. On January 1, 1800, the Union Bill took effect. The Irish Parliament was dissolved and 100 seats were opened to Irish Anglicans in Britain’s House of Commons, and 28 peers and 4 Anglican bishops in the House of Lords. This reform, of course, failed to alleviate the plight of Irish Catholics or even Presbyterians in any way. For this, Pitt tried to push through a Catholic Relief Act that would have granted full religious, political, and economic rights to all Irish men, but King George III rejected it. Pitt resigned. The oppression of Catholics persisted. The British kept nearly 50,000 regulars and fencibles in Ireland for the war’s duration to deter and, if necessary, crush other rebellions.