To Begin the World Over Again

by Matthew Lockwood

  Protestant factions in Armagh followed up their victory at the Battle of the Diamond with a concerted effort to drive Catholics out of the county for good. William Blacker, a gentry member of the new Orange Order, reported that “a determination was expressed of driving from this quarter of the country the entire of its Roman Catholic population . . . A written notice was thrown into or posted upon the door of a house warning the inmates, in the words of Oliver Cromwell, to betake themselves to Hell or Connaught.” Over the next year, as many as 7,000 Catholic refugees fled their homes for more hospitable areas, many eventually making their way to America. The Protestants had succeeded in driving their enemies out of Armagh, but as they would soon discover, they had unknowingly driven them into the hands of the United Irishmen.43

  Since their founding in 1791, the United Irishmen had been stymied by lack of numbers. Their core of Dissenters and urban radicals was committed but small and relatively insignificant. They had attempted to revive a military system on the model of the Volunteers, but recruiting proved difficult and largely limited to Ulster and Dublin. After the Battle of the Diamond and the flight of Catholics from Armagh, however, the United Irishmen began to see the potential benefits of an alliance with the Defenders. Catholics, disgusted by the failure of the authorities to come to their aid and protection, began to contemplate an alliance with the United Irishmen as well. United Irish leaders like James Hope began actively to recruit Defenders, transforming secret cells of Defenders into secret cells of United Irishmen. And so, as Armagh was drained of its Catholics, the ranks of the United Irishmen began to swell.

  The growth of the United Irishmen’s membership led to a growth of ambition. Opposition to Grattan’s Parliament, to increasing British encroachment on Ireland’s sovereignty, and to war with France all grew in the early 1790s. But as the United Irishmen became more numerous and more vocal, the authorities became increasingly alarmed. When Britain went to war with revolutionary France in 1793, the United Irishmen were outlawed. For the authorities, the looming threat of the ideas and tactics of the French Revolution spreading to the British Isles, where they found fertile soil among disillusioned Irish reformers, necessitated a firm hand. As the United Irishmen transformed into a revolutionary organization with strong links to France, prominent members such as William Drennan and William Jackson, an exiled Irish priest sent back home to assess the possibility for French invasion supported by an Irish revolt, were arrested and charged with treason. The leadership of United Irishmen, including its general secretary Theobald Wolfe Tone, who had aided and encouraged Jackson, fled to America or France. Driven underground or into exile, the United Irishmen became more radical, dividing into cells of twelve men each. From 1796, vague plans of rebelling with French aid began to evolve into more concrete and concerted plans for insurrection. In that year, Theobald Wolfe Tone began secret negotiations with the French government in Paris.

  At the same time, Lord Edward Fitzgerald traveled to Hamburg to begin negotiations with representatives of France. Since his days in America, the eager British soldier had been transformed into an ardent revolutionary. Perhaps his experience in the war against America had started him on this journey to radicalization, or his rescue when wounded by a former slave who became his lifelong companion, or his days after the war in Nova Scotia, where he experienced the freedoms of an equal society among Irish immigrants, or during his trip through the great lakes, down the Mississippi to New Orleans, where he met Joseph Brant, the famous Mohawk loyalist commander. Whatever the cause, Fitzgerald had entered Ireland’s Parliament as a member of the opposition and became a trenchant critic of British and Irish Ascendancy policy. When the French Revolution burst forth in 1789, Fitzgerald leapt at the opportunity to see this epochal movement for himself. In 1792 he traveled to Paris, where he lodged with Thomas Paine and rubbed elbows with the foremost figures of the revolution. He was so swept away by the excitement of it all that at a banquet to celebrate French victories he joined in toasts to “the army of France: may the example of its citizen soldiers be followed by all enslaved countries till tyrants and tyranny be extinct” and renounced his aristocratic titles.44

  Back in Ireland and dismissed from the army in 1793, Fitzgerald received a visit from Eleazar Oswald, an American veteran of the revolution now returning the favor by fighting for France in her revolution. Oswald had been sent by the French authorities to establish the possibility of a concerted French invasion and United Irish Rising. Three years later, in 1796, Fitzgerald officially joined the United Irishmen, adding his illustrious name and pedigree to the cause of revolution and equality. His prominence, resources, and connections made him a natural leader, and a natural candidate to engage in negotiations with the French. The result of Fitzgerald’s and Tone’s negotiations was a treaty of alliance between France and the Society of United Irishmen. France would invade Ireland with the support of an Irish revolt, provided that “the French would come as allies only, and consent to act under the direction of the new [Irish] government, as Rochambeau did in America.”45

  An invasion was launched in 1796, but bad weather prevented the French general Hoche from landing his 15,000 men. The abortive invasion further alarmed the British authorities, and martial law was declared. By 1798, the United Irishmen had hundreds of thousands of members across Ireland, but they were increasingly besieged by government crackdowns on their activities and membership. No longer certain that the French would hold up their end of the bargain, it was decided that the United Irishmen would rise with or without French support on May 23, 1798. Before they could act, however, they learned that the British had infiltrated the United Irishmen and knew of the planned revolt. Fitzgerald and the other United Irish leaders went into hiding, but Fitzgerald’s position was given away by visits from his wife. Fitzgerald resisted arrest, leaping from his bed to kill one of his attackers and wound another, but he was eventually shot in the arm and subdued. While he lay in prison, a loyalist friend of Fitzgerald’s from his days as a soldier in America paid him a visit. He was shocked at this turn of events, how Fitzgerald had been transformed from wounded British soldier to wounded Irish rebel. Fitzgerald replied, “I was wounded then in a very different cause; that was in fighting against liberty—this, in fighting for it.”46

  While Fitzgerald slowly succumbed to his wounds in prison, fighting raged outside on the streets of Dublin. Despite the arrest, the United Irishmen had risen as planned. They were sure that the people of Ireland would rise with them to throw off their chains of British oppression, but in this they were disappointed. Few joined the rebellion, and even some among the United Irishmen decided that the better part of valor was discretion. Alarmed by the prospect of Ireland joining France in revolution, in June 1798, the villain of Yorktown Lord Cornwallis, fresh from a successful stint as Governor-General of India, was appointed Lord Lieutenant and commander of royal forces in Ireland. With reinforcements from Britain he set about mopping up the scattered Irish rebellions. In August, 1,000 French troops finally landed in County Mayo to aid the rebels, but it was too little too late. By the time Theobald Wolfe Tone arrived with 3,000 more French troops in October, the British had the upper hand. The fleet was intercepted by the British navy while still off the coast, and Tone captured and imprisoned. The defiant leader of the United Irishmen cut his own throat in prison to cheat the British of a traitor’s execution. Sporadic guerrilla warfare and further risings would continue for several years, but none would pose a real threat to British control.

  That same year, shortly after Wexford, the stronghold of the rebellion and scene of the most intense violence on all sides, had been recaptured, Jonah Barrington rode out from Dublin to survey the devastation. He had been to Wexford before, in fact quite recently, and as he made his way through the hills and valleys, his stomach tightened as he contemplated the fate of his many friends caught up in the insurrection. In April, a mere month before the desperate United Irishmen rose, Barrington had dined at the home of Bagenal Harv
ey in Wexford. The atmosphere of the dinner party had been a mixture of light-hearted jocularity and somber premonition. Most of the guests, including their host, were deeply involved in radical politics, many already secretly members of the United Irishmen—a fact that became increasingly clear as the night progressed. Barrington knew these men well, and had guessed at their political sympathies, but he was shocked at the frankness with which they now discussed the possibility of armed rebellion, its potential for success, and the new government that would follow. As they talked, it dawned on Barrington that this was no mere speculation but discussion of an actual plan, and a plan that was near to fruition. Unwittingly, Barrington had found himself “in the midst of unavowed conspirators. I perceived that the explosion was much nearer than the government expected; and I was startled at the decided manner in which my host and his friends spoke.”47

  Alarmed and deeply uncomfortable, Barrington, true to form, turned to humor, laughing at the prospect of rebellion and ridiculing its chance for success. Barrington was no friend of the British, and he had joined the Volunteers and backed the Irish Patriot Party of Henry Grattan. But he was no revolutionary either. Instead Barrington was a perfect embodiment of the moderate interests of the Protestant Ascendancy. He turned to his fellow guest Captain Keogh, one of the hottest for revolution, and joked that if a revolution were indeed to happen, he and Keogh would obviously be on opposite sides. Given their divergent views, Barrington jested, “one or the other of us must necessarily be hanged at or before its termination—I upon a lamp-iron in Dublin, or you on the bridge of Wexford.” So Barrington proposed a deal, “if we beat you . . . I’ll do all I can to save your neck; and if your folks beat us, you’ll save me from the honour of the lamp-iron.” The mock bargain broke the tension, and the guests left Harvey’s house as friends. But Barrington’s loyalties lay with the Ascendancy, and, without naming names, he quickly informed the government in Dublin of the heightened danger of insurrection. A month later almost all of Barrington’s dinner companions would join the rebellion, Keogh and Harvey serving in important positions of the revolt’s leadership.48

  With this prescient scene now seared in his mind, Barrington traversed the area around Wexford, surveying the damage and inquiring into the fate of his former friends. The devastation was jaw-dropping,

  Enniscorthy had been twice stormed, and was dilapidated and nearly burned. New Ross showed most melancholy relics of the obstinate and bloody battle . . . which had been fought in every street. The numerous pits crammed with dead bodies, on Vinegar Hill, it seemed on some spots actually elastic as we stood upon them; whilst the walls of an old windmill on its summit appeared stained and splashed with the blood and brains of the many victims who had been piked or shot against it by the rebels. The court-house of Enniscorthy, wherein our troops had burned alive above eighty of the wounded rebels; and the barn of Scullabogue, where the rebels had retaliated by burning alive above 120 Protestants—were terrific ruins! The town of Gorey was utterly destroyed, not a house being left perfect; and the bodies of the killed lying half-covered in sundry ditches . . .49

  As he entered Wexford itself, Barrington began to despair. He had hoped to fulfill his bargain with Keogh and do what he could to save his friends, but as he approached the court-house his hopes were dashed. There on low spikes over the court-house door were the severed, blackened heads of his former companions: Bagenal Harvey, Mr. Colclough, and Captain Keogh. Keogh, as Barrington had predicted in jest, had been hanged from Wexford bridge the day before he arrived. He had been right, but he was too late. There was little he could do for his friends now except to plead with the general in charge of Wexford to allow the heads to be buried.50

  The shock of the 1798 rebellion and the horrific brutality of its suppression convinced British authorities that neither the populace nor the Protestant Ascendancy could be trusted to govern Ireland effectively. The people had risen up at a renewed moment of international crisis. The Ascendancy had not only failed to prevent it, but, through its heavy-handed reaction, had ensured a lasting enmity between Ireland and her rulers. To a growing number, the solution to Ireland’s ills was clear: union with Great Britain. A first attempt at union failed in 1799 after concerted opposition from Grattan, Barrington, and other members of the Irish Patriot Party, but when the measure was again pushed in 1800 support for the measure increased. Some were terrified by the events of 1798; others had been bribed with British peerages and other honors to vote for union. Cornwallis, who did much to push through union, was disgusted by the process of buying votes, but he held his nose and soldiered on all the same. “My occupation is now of the most unpleasant nature,” he conceded, “negotiating and jobbing with the most corrupt people under heaven. I despise and hate myself every hour for engaging in such dirty work, and am supported only by the reflection that without an Union the British Empire must be dissolved.” And so, in August 1800, the Irish House of Commons voted itself out of existence. Ireland would henceforth be governed by an expanded British Parliament. The United Kingdom was born; Irish independence was at an end.51

  The American Revolution ultimately led to conservatism and retrenchment in Britain as well. Indeed, rather than encouraging radicalism and reform, the loss of America undermined dissent and strengthened loyalty. Instead of feeding a revolutionary fervor as in Ireland and France, in Britain the defeat and international isolation of the American War encouraged greater unity, an “us against the world mentality.” Lord North’s ministry was certainly vilified for its failures in conducting the war, but once it had been replaced, most Britons, and certainly most British elites, desired stability and order over a return to the divisive politics of the 1760s and 1770s. The lesson they took from the American Revolution was not that British rule had been overly strict and selfish, but that it had in fact been too weak. In the years after the war, Britain became more conservative and more authoritarian. The experience on the home front played its role in this shift as well. The very public instances of treason, terrorism, riot, and revolt in the British Isles had tainted radical opposition with the whiff of sedition, making it unpalatable to most Britons. With conservatism in the ascendancy there was little prospect that Britain would join France in revolution in the years after 1789. By 1789, popular British radicalism had largely been sidelined, choked out by the tumult and fear, the humiliation and repression of the years of the American War.52

  4

  HORATIO NELSON AND THE

  IMPERIAL STRUGGLE IN

  SPANISH AMERICA

  After a string of victories at the Battle of Cape St. Vincent, the Battle of the Nile, and the Battle of Copenhagen, instead of striding purposefully across the quarterdeck of a man-of-war as it safeguarded British shores, or basking in the glory of popular acclaim, on February 17, 1803, Horatio Nelson, hero of the British Empire, found himself in a crowded courtroom in London testifying on behalf of an Irish revolutionary charged with treason. Colonel Edward Despard and twelve others stood charged with plotting dockworkers, demobbed soldiers and sailors, and disaffected radicals and Irishmen, many of them members of the United Irishmen, to overthrow the government they thought to be a despotic “den of thieves.” The conspirators had planned to fire on the carriage of the king as he traveled to the opening of Parliament before seizing the Tower, the Bank of England and Parliament itself, touching off a nationwide rebellion in conjunction with a similar rebellion planned by Robert Emmet in Ireland.

  In his testimony Nelson informed the jury that during the American War he and the defendant had sailed “on the Spanish Main together; we slept many nights in our clothes upon the ground; we have measured the height of the enemies wall together.” This intimate, harrowing, hazardous shared experience had forged a bond between the two men that transcended the intervening decades of separation and strife, ensuring that the comrade of Nelson’s memory remained undiminished. “In all that period of time no man could have shewn more zealous attachment to his Sovereign and his Country, than Co
lonel Despard did,” Nelson continued, so that despite twenty-three years having passed since they last met, Nelson could say in all honesty that “if I had been asked my opinion of him, I should certainly have said, if he is alive he is certainly one of the brightest stars of the British Army.”1

  In 1779 both Horatio Nelson and Edward Despard had seemed poised for a steady rise through the ranks of the British military. Their lives and careers, however, had diverged sharply in the years since their service together during the American War. While Nelson had become one of “the most famous men in the world,” a man “whose name distinguishes and adorns his country,” the foremost hero of his age, Edward Despard had chosen to “associate himself with some of the worst traitors that exist.” After more than a decade of service in Central America, Despard had returned to London in 1790 where he and his African American wife Catherine quickly threw themselves into the radical politics of abolitionism, the London Corresponding Society, and the United Irishmen. When the latter rebelled in 1798, Despard had been arrested on suspicion of conspiring with the rebels and held in Cold Bath Fields, the Tower of London, and Newgate, where he and his fellow prisoners were treated to meals funded by Lord Gordon, who had substituted for his anti-Catholicism a radical critique of prisons. “We have reason to cry aloud from our dungeons and prison-ships, in defense of our lives and liberties,” Gordon had written, a sentiment echoed by Catherine Despard who took up the cause of prisoners’ rights while her husband languished in prison. Like many others, Catherine Despard thought the new penal regime of confinement in “Separate Cells . . . Nearly dead with Cold & Hunger” monstrously cruel and inhumane. Despard’s experience in prison confirmed his views of the British government and steeled his determination to strike a blow for liberty. But news of his plot to overthrow the government soon reached the authorities and he was re-arrested on November 16, 1802 on charges of high treason.2