Jackson’s trial, apart from anything else, had had the effect of publicizing the serious interest the French now had in Ireland. Fitzwilliam’s recall and the denial of total emancipation, though of little practical relevance to the peasantry, made for a hardening of their emotional attitudes.
The Defender organization had in any case continued to be active throughout 1794 and was now spreading over the whole of Ireland. In March, at Kinsale, County Cork, a body of Defenders was dispersed with ten killed – again significantly by the (Catholic) Carlow militia.1 There were as many as 185 Defenders under arrest in Cork gaol that month alone, while on the North-East circuit some three hundred more were awaiting trial at Trim, Dundalk and Drogheda.2 On 21 May an engagement was reported from County Cavan in which between one hundred and two hundred Defenders were killed.3 And in the same month seventy were killed in Ballina, County Mayo.4 By the summer of 1795, when the new secret society of United Irishmen was still only just completing its skeleton organization, there were already thirteen different Irish counties from which armed bodies of Defenders, usually numbering hundreds and sometimes thousands at a time, were being reported.5
In several counties the Defenders, who held their own primitive courts, were sufficiently strong to intimidate juries in the normal courts of law and secure acquittals against all the evidence. In return the government embarked for the first time on its own course of rough justice by rounding up the peasantry in those parts of the country where the Defender movement was strong and transporting them without trial into the navy.
Lord Camden, the new Viceroy who replaced Fitzwilliam, commented on the way in which blacksmiths everywhere were being organized by the Defenders to make pikes.6 But the structure of the Defender system, though widespread, seems to have been a very loose one, varying from county to county with different oaths and recognition signs. Objectives too were still often local: the lowering of rent or the increase of wages. Nevertheless, pervading always what was often no more than old-fashioned Whiteboy activity were the new fashions of French liberty and the doctrines of Tom Paine – ‘the whiskey of infidelity and treason’ as the Solicitor General once described them.7 Indeed, the vague feeling that ‘something ought to be done for Ireland’, and that the opportunity would come when the French landed, was spreading very like some cloudy intoxication.
Such feelings were actively encouraged by Defender organizers who moved from county to county, often with only the most rudimentary regard for security. Known as ‘committee men’, they received a shilling for each new Defender they enrolled, a fact which may well have accounted for the rashness and eagerness of their approach. Public houses were a favourite place for the transaction. ‘Where are you going?’ a man might be asked.
‘To the Defender maker,’ would come the reply, as readily as if he were off to the shoemaker.8
The new recruit might be asked to swear, as in one Defender oath of 1795, ‘to be true to the present United States of France and Ireland and every other kingdom now in Christianity’.9 He would follow this with a number of equally solemn expressions of Masonic brotherly obligation. At other times the old ambiguous formula of swearing loyalty to the king ‘… whilst I live under the same government …’ still did service. After a glass of punch, perhaps,10 and the oath on the prayer book, the new Defender would be instructed in a strange sort of catechism.
‘What is your designs?’
‘On freedom.’
‘Where is your designs?’
‘The foundation of it is grounded upon a rock.’
‘What is the password?’
‘Eliphismatis.’11
(Asked in court the meaning of the word ‘eliphismatis’ one sworn Defender said he didn’t know but that it was Latin. Counsel dismissed it as mere ‘trash of enigmatical or rather nonsensical import’.)
Another similar Defender catechism ran:
‘Are you a Christian?’
‘I am.’
‘By what?’
‘By baptism …’
‘Are you consecrated?’
‘I am.’
‘By what?’
‘To the National Convention – to equal all nations – to dethrone all Kings, and plant the tree of liberty on our Irish land – whilst the French Defenders will protect our cause and the Irish Defenders pull down the British laws …’12
There would be instruction in recognition signs: ‘Two hands joined backwards on top of the head and pretend to yawn, then draw the hands down upon the knee or on the table. Answer by drawing the right hand over the forehead and return it to the back of the left hand.’ A less complicated form of greeting seems to have been, on shaking hands, to press the thumb of the right hand on the back of the other’s – ‘and not be afraid to hurt the person’ – coupled with pronunciation of the magic password ‘Eliphismatis’.13
There would be talk of the need to get arms to help the French, and if, as frequently happened, through the action of an informer, the novitiate soon afterwards fell into the hands of the law, he would be tried with full solemnity for associating ‘… with several false traitors associated under the name of Defenders, to aid, assist and adhere to persons exercising the powers of government in France in case they should invade Ireland’.14
Yet the crude nature of many of the Defenders’ proceedings make it clear that in so far as it was a national conspiracy it was a very clumsy one and ill-organized. Such practical projects as came to light involving anything more than arming in preparation for a French landing seem to have been of the most primitive sort. In 1793 a society called the Philanthropic Society, which later merged with the Defenders, had a theoretical plan to take Dublin Castle, the seat of government, by sending in a hundred of its members disguised in the scarlet coats of soldiers, but nothing came of it.15 When, early in 1794, Jackson finally came up for trial, the same society had a plan to kidnap Cockayne the British counter-spy, the night before the trial opened – but this plan too came to nothing.16 The next year some Dublin Defenders had a plan to take the powder magazine in the Phoenix Park and seize Dublin Castle, and ‘to put all the nobility to death there’,17 but again nothing happened. The carelessness endemic in many Defender proceedings is revealed by one ardent Defender who failed to prevent his wife being seen hiding sixty musket balls ‘in a dirt hole’ and who himself openly asked his lodging-house keeper if he could let him have a room where a society could meet.18
Some of the Defender oaths were of the wildest sort and often contained ominous portents for the future. Thus, as early as February 1795, a group of Defenders declared that they would have no king, would recover their estates, ‘sweep clean the Protestants, kill the Lord Lieutenant and leave none alive’.19 The gap which was later to prove so fatal between the semi-literate mass Defender movement and the more sophisticated world of the Belfast and Dublin radicals is here well illustrated by the fact that while Defenders were taking this oath the Lord Lieutenant was still Lord Fitzwilliam, the centre of sophisticated Catholic hopes. Indeed, the crude sectarian spirit of the Defenders, which though little more at first than a defensive mark of identity was the very opposite of the goal at which the United Irishmen were aiming, was on the increase. At least one Protestant Defender in 1795 who had been passing himself off as a Catholic among his colleagues turned informer on hearing that ‘as soon as the harvest was in’ the Defenders would rise against the Protestants and put them all to death.20
This sectarian element in the Defender system was heightened and developed by the continual feuding between Defenders and Peep o’ Day Boys which was now more than ever a feature of the North. The tension in these areas, growing as it did from economic competition, had understandably been aggravated by the recent political progress of the Catholics. Catholic forty-shilling freeholders had been admitted to the vote in 1793. Now total Emancipation itself, raising Catholics to full equal status with Protestants, had become a burning issue of the day and at one time looked like becoming a reality at any moment. The Protestants felt themselves more than ever threatened.
The new outbreak of feuding in the North reached its climax in September 1795 at the so-called Battle of the Diamond, a piece of ground near the town of Armagh. A large party of Defenders attacked a party of Peep o’ Day Boys there and got the worst of it, leaving twenty or thirty corpses on the field. The incident, which in itself constituted nothing new, is a historical landmark since it led the Peep o’ Day Boys to reorganize under a name which was to play an increasingly significant role in the future of Ireland: the Orange Society – the colour orange having long been a popular symbol with which to celebrate the victory of William of Orange over James II a century before.
For the time being the Orangemen remained a crude organization, successors to the Peep o’ Day Boys, turning Catholics out of their homes with great brutality that often ended in murder. An alternative was to affix to the doors of Catholics such threats as ‘To Hell – or Connaught’ or ‘Go to Hell – Connaught won’t receive you – fire and faggot. Will Thresham and John Thrustout.’21 Those Catholics thus ‘papered’, as it was called, seeing the barbarous punishments inflicted on those who did not obey, usually took the hint and left for Connaught. At the end of 1795, at a famous meeting of northern magistrates, all but one of whom were Protestants, the Orangemen were described by Lord Gosford, Governor of Armagh, as ‘a lawless banditti’ carrying out a ferocious persecution of Roman Catholics simply because they professed that faith. Sending the unanimous resolutions of his magistrates, condemning the Orangemen, to the Chief Secretary, Gosford wrote: ‘Of late no night passes that houses are not destroyed, and scarce a week that some dreadful murders are not committed. Nothing can exceed the animosity between Protestant and Catholic at this moment in this county …’22
But though the Defenders in other parts of Ireland were inflamed by news of these atrocities, the driving force behind their own organization still remained the poverty which so often went together with their religion, rather than their religion for its own sake. Catholicism was the mark of their identity. Their increasingly sectarian spirit denoted not proselytizing zeal but assertion of rights for that identity. They continued to be strongly condemned by the Catholic Church, and some of the worst Defender outrages were committed against Catholic magistrates. Where the Defenders were opposed by members of their own class and religion, as in the various county militias, they found themselves regarded not primarily as Catholics but as rebellious trash, and as such were fought and defeated.
In 1795 a Kildare schoolmaster called Laurence O’Connor was tried for administering a Defender oath ‘to be loyal to all brother Defenders and the French’. The judge declared astonishingly before passing the inevitable death sentence that ‘there was no country in Europe where a poor man had more advantages than in Ireland’. The prisoner was asked if he had anything to say. After listing the grievances of the poor, chief of which were the fantastically high rents, O’Connor concluded that ‘prosecutions were not the means of bringing about peace in the country; but if the rich would alleviate the sufferings of the poor, they would hear no more of risings or Defenders, and the country would rest in peace and happiness’.23
The man’s head, which was severed from his body ‘with no great dexterity’,24 ended up on a seven-foot spike outside the gaol at Naas. His words were echoed a few months later by a very different sort of Irishman, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, who, speaking almost for the last time in the Irish House of Commons in February 1796, attacked the Insurrection Act which the government then introduced in an attempt to break the Defenders and tranquillize the country. Nothing, said Lord Edward, would in fact tranquillize the country but the sincere endeavour of the government to redress the grievances of the people. If that was done the people would return to their allegiance.25
This Insurrection Act, which was passed in March 1796, was the first of the severe measures by which the government now set about trying to counteract the danger which the Defenders presented. Though the severity of these government measures was to increase steadily over the next two years and finally reach a brutal crescendo which did much to provoke the very rebellion they were designed to prevent, it is important to understand the extreme gravity of the situation as the government now saw it. It was not just a question of establishing public order in conditions of growing anarchy. The kingdoms of Ireland and of Great Britain were at war with France, whose armies in Europe, particularly in the years 1795 and 1796, were sweeping all before them. The final logical step for France was the defeat of her one unbeaten enemy, Britain, by an invasion of England, either direct, or through Ireland.
England itself was at this time full of radical clubs, founded originally to promote a return of Parliament, but in many cases now imbued with French republican principles of an extreme sort. Many of them were arming themselves with pikes and drilling. In Sheffield alone in 1797 there were forty to fifty such small clubs; and in every important town in the north of England the picture was similar.26 In London the Constitutional Society and the London Corresponding Society carried on near-treasonable activity, run by a secret committee of five persons. By 1797 there were more than seventy United Corresponding Societies in Great Britain. Yet the government knew that in England, in the event of French invasion, the probability was overwhelming that the majority of the British people, for all their grievances, would stand firmly and patriotically behind the government.
In Ireland the situation was very different. In the Defenders, a massive though ill-coordinated and unsophisticated conspiracy already existed, which for all its political incoherence linked a hazy pro-French republicanism to real everyday grievances, and was daily acquiring more supporters throughout the country. And this was the country open to French invasion from Atlantic ports much less easily supervised by the British Navy than those in the Channel. The government’s chief force for dealing with the danger, apart from the normal processes of law, was the militia, which apart from a proportion of Protestant officers and other officers of the Catholic gentry consisted almost entirely of those very Catholic peasants and artisans who were filling the ranks of the Defenders. The Defenders were already making a bid to seduce the militia from their allegiance, and numbers were known to be taking the Defender oaths. The crime of O’Connor, the executed schoolmaster, had been that of administering a Defender oath to a private of the North Mayo militia.
The government’s situation was in fact even worse than the Defender disturbances and their seduction of the militia made it seem. For the Defenders were not the only potential rebels they had to face. In the North, though not yet widely organized into any effective military conspiracy, a ready-made traditional body of radical middle-class Protestant opinion was profoundly disaffected. Disappointed for the last ten years or more in their efforts to give Parliament that broader base which would include themselves, these northern radicals had been strengthened in their natural republican instincts by the successful republican progress of the French. Here – and to a much smaller extent in the Protestant radical circles of Dublin – organized in the Society of United Irishmen was that sophisticated political approach noticeably lacking in the clumsy but much more powerful organization of the Defenders. If the two hitherto distinct forces were to come together no force of government would be able to stop them. And in August 1796 Camden, the Viceroy, wrote to the British Home Minister, Portland, that the recent endeavours of the Belfast Clubs to form a junction with the Defenders had ‘been attended with much success’.27
We have the word of the members of the Directory of United Irishmen that they themselves had no military organization, ‘until the latter end of 1796’.28 Even then, for a time its only existence was in Ulster. But plans at least for eventual revolution had begun to be formed earlier in the year. Ever since the formation of the new secret United Irish Society its members had for obvious reasons wanted to make contact with the Defenders. In 1795 and early in 1796 the northern United Irishmen sent emissaries among the Defender leaders in Meath, Dublin and elsewhere to explain the advantages of a proper unified organization with coherent political aims. The Defenders also sent deputations to Belfast.
As a result of these meetings an agreement was reached by which the Defenders undertook to incorporate their societies within the ‘Union’ and to take the United Irish oath. From then on United Irish organizers appeared more and more among the Defenders, explaining the political advantages of their ideas. In particular, they spread alarm about the outrages of the Orangemen in the North and made inflammatory suggestions that it was the Orangemen’s intention to deal similarly with Catholics throughout Ireland. The rumour was spread that the Orangemen had entered into a solemn league and covenant ‘to wade up to their knees in Papist blood’. The United Irish leaders wrote later: ‘To the Armagh persecution is the Union of Irishmen most exceedingly indebted.’29 On a short-term view they were correct, though their exploitation of it had much to do with their failure in the end. Catholics did in fact begin to think that they had no alternative but to join ‘the Union’. But by inciting Catholics to join a non-sectarian organization with threats of sectarianism from another quarter, the United Irish agents were playing with fire. Inevitably they turned the higher political principles of ‘the Union’ into something of secondary importance, and themselves encouraged a crude sectarian hate.
Evidence of these successful overtures to the Defenders by the United Irishmen caused the government great concern, particularly as the United Irishmen were simultaneously known to be strengthening their links with France.