Tone himself almost at once ceased to play any active part in the Society of United Irishmen. He concerned himself more and more with the agitation for Catholic rights by Keogh’s Catholic Committee of which he became a salaried official in the course of 1792. In his own words he sank ‘into obscurity’1 in the affairs of the United Irishmen which were conducted by men like Napper Tandy and William Drennan, a doctor, who probably wrote the Dublin broadsheet of the summer and certainly coined for Ireland the phrase ‘the Emerald Isle’. Other active members of the Society at this stage were two young lawyer brothers from Cork, Henry and John Sheares, and a wealthy Wexford land-owner named Beauchamp Bagenal Harvey. All of them, like Tone, were Protestants, though Catholics did in fact join the Society in considerable numbers.
However, Tone kept up his personal links with Neilson and the branch of the United Irishmen in Belfast, and visited them twice during the summer of 1792. Each time he was again confronted by the gap between United Irish aspirations and the realities of the situation in Ireland.
He went to Belfast, for instance, to celebrate the third anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, an occasion on which he was to address some of the Northern Volunteer corps. ‘… Expect sharp opposition to-morrow,’ he wrote in his diary the day before. ‘Some of the country corps no better than Peep o’ Day Boys …’ Neilson, returning to his hotel that evening, and passing a half-open door behind which he heard a voice he recognized, pushed it open to discover one of the Volunteer Captains haranguing against the Catholics.2
Soon afterwards Tone journeyed from Belfast to the small town of Rathfriland to investigate personally the scenes of recent clashes between Peep o’ Day Boys and Defenders. Several people had been killed on both sides. Great offence was being taken by the Protestants at the Catholics ‘marching about in military array and firing shots at unseasonable times’.3 Tone claimed to find that the Protestants were universally the aggressors, and that on the whole the Catholics seemed not to ‘do anything worse than meet in large bodies and fire powder; foolish certainly but not wicked’.4 Some days later a gentleman of Sligo gave Tone ‘a most melancholy account’ of the depression and insult under which Catholics of that town were labouring. ‘… Every Protestant rascal breaks their heads and windows for his amusement … the Catholic spirit quite broken.’5
On a third visit to Belfast, in August 1792, travelling to Rathfriland again with John Keogh of the Catholic Committee, he found that the landlord in the inn would not even give them rooms there when he knew who they were. And that day he saw some 150 Peep o’ Day Boys exercising within a quarter of a mile of the town. The boisterous optimism with which he countered such evidence is revealed by a diary entry he made only three days later, on 14 August, after visiting the shipyards with an industrialist member of the United Irishmen named Henry Joy McCracken:
Walk out and see McCracken’s new ship, the Hibernia. Hibernia has an English Crown on her shield. We all roar at him …. The Co. Down getting better everyday on the Catholic question. Two of the new companies applied to be admitted in the Union regiment ** … were refused membership on the ground of their holding Peep O’ Day principles. Bon … Lurgan†† green as usual. Something will come out of all this. Agree to talk the matter over to-morrow when we are all cool. Huzza: Generally drunk. Vive la Nation! … Generally very drunk. Bed. God knows how.6
Tone’s optimistic frivolity was far more damaging to his constructive political thought than his drinking, which was probably no more than any spirited young man of his background engaged in. He was not an alcoholic but he was a chronic optimist. Finding that a new Volunteer corps which had been raised in Ballinahinch had actually been raised on Peep o’ Day principles, he pondered less the long-term implications of such an incident than the short-term success of one McClockey who, temporarily at any rate, converted them to the principles of the United Irish Society and was chosen lieutenant of the company in return. ‘All well,’ wrote Tone cheerfully, ‘… Both parties now in high affection with each other, who were before ready to cut each other’s throats.’7
In Dublin in November 1792, together with Tandy, Tone set about the formation of a new corps of city Volunteers, devoted to United Irish principles. They were to wear a uniform with buttons embossed with the Irish harp without the Crown above, and similar to that of the National Guard of Paris, after whom it was to be called.
‘Is that quite wise?’ commented Tone in his diary. ‘Who cares?’8
He had to note that there was not all that much enthusiasm for the idea, and indeed owing to the lack of sufficient support for such a republican manifestation this National Guard never paraded in public.9 Tone, however, took comfort from the fact that it was becoming fashionable for Dubliners to address each other as ‘Citizen’ in the French fashion, and that ‘trifling as it is, it is a symptom’.10 An even more encouraging symptom was that on the anniversary of William of Orange’s birthday the remnants of the old Dublin Volunteers had not paraded as usual round his statue on College Green, but had simply held a normal parade wearing ‘national’ green cockades instead of the traditional orange ones. ‘This is striking proof’, wrote Tone optimistically, ‘of the change of men’s sentiments when “Our Glorious Deliverer” is neglected. This is the first time the day has passed uncommemorated since the institution of the Volunteers. Huzza! Union and the people for ever!’11
However, the Dublin Volunteers by this time numbered no more than 250 men,12 and the Great Deliverer’s birthday was hardly neglected by others, as The Times newspaper recorded. After ‘a splendid appearance’ at noon of the nobility and other persons of distinction to compliment the lord lieutenant on the anniversary, the lord lieutenant himself, attended by the nobility and gentry and escorted by a squadron of horse, went in procession round King William’s statue. Guns in the Phoenix Park fired a salute which was answered by volleys from regiments of the garrison drawn up on College Green, and at night there were bonfires, illuminations ‘and other demonstrations of joy’.13 If Tone’s concept of an Irish Union** was to progress beyond the Huzzas of his own diary, or the parochial deliberations of intellectual societies in Dublin and Belfast, this formidable establishment and the automatic respect it commanded had somehow to be assaulted.
In fact, Tone in his capacity as an official of the Catholic Committee was already on the point of breaching one bastion in the Establishment’s position. He and Keogh, besides making intensive propaganda for the Catholic cause, had, in this year 1792, succeeded in bringing about a Convention of elected Catholic delegates sitting in Dublin, the first representative body of Catholics to meet in Ireland since the Parliament of James II over a century before. And together Tone and Keogh played an important part in applying pressure which in 1793 helped lead to the admission of Catholics to the vote on exactly the same terms as Protestants.
The passing of this further Catholic Relief Act in 1793 was in itself testimony to the sycophancy and impotence of the so-called independent Irish Parliament. For the year before, this Parliament had overwhelmingly rejected exactly the same measure, because the government in England had not been in favour of it. Now, in 1793, the English Government under Pitt was prepared to accept the measure and it was passed on 9 April. Also, early in 1793 occurred an event of the greatest importance which was to colour the attitudes of both government and would-be reformers in Ireland for many years to come. This was the outbreak in February 1793 of war between England and France.
On the outbreak of war, the English Prime Minister’s immediate concern over Ireland was to prevent the country from becoming a seat of disaffection which France could exploit. And in this respect the recently passed Catholic Relief Act was distinctly helpful. Tone had more than once noted with some apprehension that the Catholics might not be interested in any political aim beyond their own sectarian Emancipation. Once when Grattan had said to him that he thought of the Catholic question only as a means of advancing the general good, Tone had commented: ‘Right! But do the Catholics consider it so? The devil a bit except one or two of them.’14
Pitt did not grant full Emancipation and there was, as Tone pointed out, a ludicrous inconsistency in granting the vote to the peasant Catholic forty-shilling freeholder and yet continuing to disallow Catholic gentry to sit in Parliament.** So that some grounds for resentment remained. But the Act was undoubtedly a major concession encouraging Catholics to look no further than their own sectarian interests when contemplating political goals.
Meanwhile, almost entirely dissociated from the middle-class reformers represented in the Society of United Irishmen and the Catholic Committee, the peasantry had been stirring on its own account. For the first time in Irish history the Irish common people had begun to take something like primitive political action of their own. In Louth and Meath, counties adjacent to Ulster where Catholics were in the majority, the Defenders were assuming a more and more aggressive role. Their activities were still very like those of the agrarian secret societies already so long a feature of Irish rural life, and for many who took part in the raiding of gentlemen’s houses for arms and horses there can have been little distinction in their minds between these and the familiar Whiteboy raids of the past. However, the vague political innuendoes in the Defender oath for those who chose to see them, and the general revolutionary infection of the time, gave a rather more generalized attitude to protests which in the past had been limited and localized. In the South, where the Defender Society as such had not yet superimposed itself on the old Whiteboy system as it was soon to do, raids when they occurred were described as simple Whiteboy activities, as for instance on the night of 17 September 1792 when arms, horses, bridles and saddles were taken from houses near Cork.15 But in other parts of Ireland a new organized pattern of such activity under the banner of the Defenders was becoming unmistakable.
Defenders, acting more and more on the principle that attack was the best form of defence, had started appearing in armed bodies in Louth in April 1792 and by the end of the year they had spread to Meath, Cavan, Monaghan and other predominantly Catholic counties adjacent to the Protestant areas of Ulster, and had attacked some forty houses for arms in County Louth alone, mostly successfully. In the last week of December they assembled in very large numbers first at Dunleer and then at Dundalk, armed with guns and pitchforks. Their exact purpose was not clear, but it was thought that they would possibly try to liberate a large number of convicts then collected in that area from all over the North on their way to transportation. There were no military available to deal with them, but The Times reported that ‘the respectable inhabitants of the town, principally Roman Catholics, went among them, and having conferred with them for some time they dispersed’.16
On 9 January 1793 The Times again referred to ‘those infatuated and deluded people’, the Defenders, being involved in an engagement with troops at Carrickmacross. The ‘insurrection’ was reported to be spreading, and the insurgents’ aims were variously described as sometimes the abolition of tithes, sometimes the Towering of rents. ‘… In Louth,’ said The Times, ‘the first object seems to be to get arms and ammunition.’17 There was another engagement with the military later in January, this time at Kells, in County Meath, and eighteen Defenders were killed.18
A correspondent from the Bishop of Meath’s palace at Ardbracken wrote in February 1793: ‘Not a night passes that the Defenders do not assemble and break open houses in some part or other of this country’, and he recounted how 150 of them on foot and horseback with a drum and three sledges had raided Lord Maxwell’s house, where, however, ‘they had behaved with some degree of politeness’. After taking three double-barrelled guns, two muskets and two cases of pistols, his Lordship, who was particularly fond of one of the cases of pistols, asked if he could buy it back from them. The Defenders complimented him on his taste and returned it to him, refusing the money. ‘This house’, wrote the correspondent, ‘now looks more like a Bastille than a Bishop’s Palace, from the quantity of bolts, bars and cross barricades on the doors and windows of the house and offices.’19
On 22 February 1793 The Times drew attention to what was different about this outbreak of disturbances from previous Whiteboy activities. ‘The disturbances in Ireland’, it wrote – much too sweepingly in fact – ‘are not on account of any complaint of grievances. They arise from the pure wantonness of a set of desperadoes called Defenders … encouraged and abetted by a secret Junto, that like the French Jacobins, wish to throw all government into confusion …’20
Retribution of course was not long in catching up with such a primitively organized movement, and the Defenders were soon being hanged in droves. In the months of March and April 1793 alone, sixty-eight Defenders were reported by The Times as being sentenced to death while a further seventy-seven were sentenced to transportation for administering or taking the Defender oath. But the cheapness with which the Defenders regarded life right up to the final bloodbath of 1798 was always the most impressive tribute to the desperation with which they pursued their confused cause. And though the sentence of capital punishment was at this period a particularly savage one, including as it did the phrase ‘… but being yet alive, should be cut down, but being alive their bowels be taken out and burned before their faces’,21 it seems to have had surprisingly little force as a deterrent. More than two years later an Irish government official was writing to the English Prime Minister: ‘Defenderism puzzles me more and more; but it certainly grows more alarming daily, as the effect of the executions seems to be at an end and there is an enthusiasm defying punishment.’22
The intensity of Defender activity varied from time to time, but as a crudely organized secret system, controlled apparently by a shadowy and probably rather ineffectual central committee, it was throughout the 1790s superimposing itself on all already existing secret society organizations in Catholic Ireland, giving them for the first time some appearance of uniformity and at least a primitive political tinge. Where any particular grievance was uppermost the Defenders now organized crude protest. Their significance lay in the fact that they were expressing, however incoherently, for the first time in Irish history, something like a national resentment of the long general grievance of the Irish common people’s everyday suffering.
Soon after the outbreak of war between England and France, Pitt began to balance his conciliatory approach to Irish Catholics with strictly defensive measures. At almost the same time as the Catholic Relief Act, an Act went through the Irish Parliament creating an Irish militia whose rank and file were to be drawn by ballot from among the peasantry. The government’s refusal at first to allow substitutes for those drawn for this militia led to widespread resistance which was organized by the Defenders. By June 1793 reports of anti-militia riots were coming in from all over Ireland.
The Times reported from Sligo: ‘The abstracts of the Militia Act which have been lately circulated through this country operated like electric fire on the weak understanding of the poor uninformed multitude.’23 Reports, possibly exaggerated, spoke of bands of six or seven thousand men roving the Sligo countryside, and it was noted that two Catholic country gentlemen in particular, one actually a delegate to the recent Catholic Convention in Dublin, had been treated with uncommon cruelty when their houses had been raided by the Defenders for arms. Nineteen Defenders were killed and several prisoners taken at a battle at Boyle in County Roscommon; eight more were killed at Manor Hamilton in County Leitrim, and a further large anti-militia assembly was reported from Baltinglass in County Wicklow, all within a few days.
In July 1793 the most serious engagement of all took place just outside the town of Wexford, where fifty of the recruited militia under a Major Valloton confronted some two thousand Defenders, armed with guns, scythes and picks. The Defenders demanded the return of two men taken prisoner a few days earlier. While a parley was taking place between the two sides the Major was suddenly struck down and killed, whereupon the militia fired, killing some eighty Defenders and putting the rest to flight. The leader of the Defenders, a young farmer of twenty-two named John Moore, whose legs were broken by the militia’s first volley, fought on his stumps until his men fled. He himself was then shot out of hand. Five prisoners taken were executed two days later.
Grievances over the enrolment of the militia were largely met by government concessions which allowed voluntary enlistment as well as conscription by ballot, and at the same time permitted substitutes to be found for those upon whom the ballot fell. But one significant feature had emerged from these events: the loyal behaviour of those militia whom the Defenders had engaged in the Wexford incident. For it was to be by the Catholic militia itself, drawn from exactly the same class as the Defenders, that the Defenders were eventually to be crushed.
The Defender system, which continued to grow dramatically after the particular grievance of the militia had abated, was almost as much of a puzzle to the radical middle-class members of the Society of United Irishmen and the Catholic Committee as it was to the government. Certainly they seem to have known little about the Defenders for a long time, though a Committee of the (Irish) House of Lords which reported in 1793 claimed that there was a liaison between the leaders of the Catholic Committee and the Defenders.24 However, the experiences suffered by the Catholic gentry at the Defenders’ hands makes this improbable, and the allegation seems to have been based solely on the fact that the Catholic Committee had subscribed funds for some of the unfortunate peasants facing trial. The Catholic Committee, besides refuting the House of Lords committee’s charge, issued a strong condemnation of the Defenders on their own account, describing them, like The Times, as ‘deluded people’, expressing their ‘utmost detestation and abhorrence of such illegal and criminal proceedings’ and calling upon ‘these unhappy men … to desist from such unwarrantable acts of violence … and to return to their obedience to the laws and the laudable pursuits of honest industry’.25 The Catholic Bishops in Dublin also issued a strong condemnation of Defenderism.
Tone described the Defenders contemptuously as ‘rabble’,26 though he had some correspondence with them. Nevertheless, for middle-class Protestant radicals already thinking in terms of a republican attempt at revolution, the Defenders were clearly a force of great significance about whom it was necessary to become better informed. Napper Tandy, in the summer of 1793, met some Defender leaders at Castlebellingham in County Louth and took the Defender oath, but he was betrayed by an informer and fled for his life, first to America and then to France. Such knowledge of the Defenders as was held in middle-class reforming and radical circles at this time was later summed up by the United Irishman, Thomas Emmet, as follows: ‘The Defenders were bound together by oaths obviously drawn up by illiterate men, different in different places, but all promising secrecy and specifying whatever grievance was, in each place, most felt and understood …. The views of these men were in general far from distinct.’27 There was, he continued, some sort of ‘national notion that … something ought to be done for Ireland’ but nothing more precise than that, except that arms would be necessary and therefore had to be procured.
Meanwhile, in Dublin and Belfast, the Society of United Irishmen, that more sophisticated and articulate body which also held the notion that ‘something ought to be done for Ireland’, was making singularly little progress. In Dublin it had continued to issue stirring addresses to the Irish nation and particularly to the remnants of the Volunteers.
‘Citizen Soldiers to Arms!’ it had proclaimed in December 1792, desperately trying to animate the old Volunteering spirit with the new principles of revolutionary France on behalf of parliamentary reform. ‘Fourteen long years are elapsed since the rise of your associations, and in 1782 did you imagine that in 1792 this nation would still remain unrepresented …?28
While the Catholic Convention was still sitting in Dublin the Society of United Irishmen made its theoretical position clear:
‘The Catholic cause is subordinate to our cause and included in it, for as United Irishmen we adhere to no sect but to society …. In the sincerity of our souls do we desire catholic emancipation, but were it obtained tomorrow, to-morrow we would go on, as we do to-day, in the pursuit of that reform as well as our own.’29 And on 25 January 1793 with a cry of ‘Ireland! O! Ireland!’ the society put forward its plan for reform which consisted of universal male adult suffrage with annual parliaments.
In spirit the society resembled very much those democratic clubs and societies which had become so much a feature of the radical scene in England: the London Corresponding Society, the Constitutional Society and the ‘Friends of the People’ to the last of which a member of the Irish House of Commons, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, younger son of the Duke of Leinster, already belonged. There was even in England a society of United Englishmen. What aggravated an otherwise similar situation in Ireland to such a dangerous pitch for the government was the combination of such activity with a French threat of invasion and such a significant quantity of open peasant unrest. The Society of United Irishmen itself was at this time hardly one to give the government much concern. But in the prevailing circumstances they could not afford to take any chances with it. Not long after the outbreak of war early in 1793, all the remaining Volunteer corps in Ireland were suppressed. And in Dublin the government had already begun a long and successful tradition of informers when they started receiving inside information of the proceedings of the Dublin Society of United Irishmen within six weeks of its foundation30** Their informer’s news was reassuring. He reported that the affairs of the society were in fact at a low ebb, and attendance had sunk to around thirty. Its most energetic and uncompromising leader, Napper Tandy, was in exile; another official, Hamilton Rowan, had been found guilty of seditious libel and was in prison. Tone himself was preoccupied with agitation for full Catholic Emancipation.
Thomas Emmet, a barrister who was already a member of the society and in a later phase was to become one of its principal leaders, wrote of this period: ‘The expectations of the reformers had been blasted, their plans had been defeated, and decisive means had been taken by government to prevent their being resumed. It became necessary to wait for new events, from which might be found new plans. Nor did such events seem distant, for now the French arms were again emblazoning their cause with success and hiding in the splendour of their victories the atrocities of their government.’31