A History of Ireland in 250 Episodes – Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About Irish History: Fascinating Snippets of Irish History from the Ice Age to the Peace Process

by Jonathan Bardon

  The great ‘Patriot’ orator, Henry Grattan, had not been a member of the Irish Commons for some years. At midnight he bought the parliamentary seat of Wicklow borough for £1,200, and as soon as he had become its MP he galloped through the darkness and arrived at dawn in the House of Commons—which had been debating all day and all night—dressed in his old blue Volunteer uniform, with red cuffs and collar. Looking very ill, he was allowed to speak sitting down and, in a two-hour declamation, charged the government with bribery and deceit. Waving his finger at Lord Castlereagh, he said:

  The thing which he proposes to buy is what cannot be sold—liberty. He proposes to you to substitute the British parliament in your place.... Against such a body, were I expiring on the floor, I should beg to utter my last breath and record my dying testimony.

  Crowds rioted in Dublin’s streets; Castlereagh had to be restrained by his friends from challenging Grattan to a duel; and Grattan actually did fight a duel with another MP, leaving a bullet in the arm of Isaac Corry, the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

  The Grand Lodge of Ireland tried to be neutral on the issue, but most rank-and-file Orangemen hated the Union bill—they were certain it would be accompanied by Catholic Emancipation. No fewer than thirty-six lodges from the counties of Armagh and Louth sent in petitions against the Union. Indeed, Prime Minister William Pitt had all but promised to put forward a bill to allow Catholics to sit in parliament. For this reason most educated Catholics warmly supported the Union—with one notable exception, Daniel O’Connell, a young barrister, who spoke powerfully against it.

  And what about the rest of the population? Lord Cornwallis, the viceroy, observed: ‘The mass of the people do not care one farthing about the Union.’ He was correct. The great majority were simply thankful to have survived the slaughter of the recent rebellion and had little interest in the parliamentary debate.

  The crucial vote came on 26 May, and the Union Bill was carried comfortably by a majority of sixty votes. The debate ended with Grattan’s emotional attack on the Union. But Ireland still had a future, he said:

  I see her in a swoon but she is not dead. Though in her tomb she lies helpless and motionless, still there is on her lips a spirit of life and on her cheek a glow of beauty.... While a plank of the vessel sticks together I will not leave her. Let the courtier present his flimsy sail and carry the light barge of his faith with every breath of wind. I will remain anchored here, with fidelity to the fortunes of my country, faithful to her freedom, faithful to her fall.

  Meanwhile Pitt had no difficulty in persuading Westminster to pass an identical Union Bill. The royal assent was given on 2 July 1800, and the Irish parliament in College Green closed forever on 2 August. On 1 January 1801 the Act of Union came into force. From public buildings was unfurled the new Union Flag, incorporating the red diagonal cross of St Patrick on a white background.

  From now on Ireland would be ruled from London. A hundred Irish MPs entered the Commons, and thirty-two peers joined their equals in the House of Lords at Westminster. Now the name of the state was ‘The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland’. There would be complete free trade between Britain and Ireland. The Church of Ireland was now united with the Church of England to become one ‘Established’ Church.

  As year succeeded year in the early nineteenth century attitudes towards the Union underwent a change: the majority of the people, initially indifferent about the new system, became passionate supporters or opponents of it.

  Episode 163

  ROBERT EMMET

  King George III held an official entertainment at Windsor Castle on 28 January 1801. On the throne since the year 1760, the king in his old age had become rather deaf. He asked Lord Melville, the War Minister, to repeat what he had just said. The minister reminded His Majesty that his Prime Minister, William Pitt, had promised Catholic Emancipation—that is, the repeal of the law which prevented Catholics from becoming members of parliament.

  King George was outraged. He shouted out, so that no one there could fail to hear him: ‘The most Jacobinical thing I ever heard of! I shall reckon any man my personal enemy who proposes any such measure!’

  The Act of Union had been in force only for a month. William Pitt had all but promised to grant Emancipation as soon as the act had been passed. Now, without the king’s agreement, he could not do that. Pitt felt he had no choice but to resign. The failure to give Catholic men of property the same rights as Protestants of their own class would, over time, gravely weaken support for the Union. Catholic gentlemen and their descendants would form an alternative elite in Ireland, presenting a formidable challenge both to the Protestant Ascendancy and the Westminster government.

  Meanwhile there was a more immediate threat to the Act of Union—the threat of revolution. Almost every day spies brought in alarming reports of conspiracies to bring down the government with the help of the French. On 16 November 1802 Bow Street Runners arrested thirty men in a public house at Lambeth in London. Their leader was an Irishman, Colonel Edward Despard; he and six others were tried for treason, convicted and hanged. Other Irish revolutionaries in Britain now hurried back to Ireland. Several offered their services to Robert Emmet, busily preparing for an insurrection in Dublin.

  Robert Emmet, son of the surgeon to the Lord Lieutenant, had helped to revive the Society of United Irishmen after the rebellion of 1798. In 1799 he travelled to France. In Paris he joined his brother, Thomas Addis Emmet, who, along with other Irish exiles, was attempting to persuade Napoleon to send an expedition to Ireland. Robert Emmet then returned to Ireland in October 1802. He had repeated assurances of French help ringing in his ears. Using a legacy of £2,000 left to him by his father, Emmet began in great secrecy to prepare an Irish rebellion. Many veterans of the 1798 insurrection were living in Dublin, and these now threw themselves into the conspiracy.

  Emmet put his plans into operation with such care that the government had not the slightest idea that a rebellion was in preparation in the capital. Sympathetic businessmen provided more money, and with these funds Emmet bought or rented premises at strategic points around Dublin. In Emmet’s main depots in Patrick Street, Thomas Street and Marshalsea Lane the walls rang to the sound of beaten metal as throngs of men prepared weapons for the coming revolution. This activity aroused no suspicion since tradesmen were always clanging and banging in this congested part of Dublin. The armoury grew to an impressive size. Emmet, an enthusiastic inventor, designed rockets to be launched all at once from special batteries, and hollowed-out beams packed with gunpowder to be pulled into the middle of streets to halt cavalry charges. In one depot alone Emmet had 240 hand-grenades made to his own design, formed of ink bottles filled with gunpowder and encircled with buckshot; a hundred larger grenades made from wine bottles covered with canvas; thousands of pikes; numerous rockets and flares; explosive beams; and fire-balls made of flax, tar and gunpowder which would stick to walls when thrown and burn fiercely when ignited.

  Still the government suspected nothing. Thomas Russell, a founder member of the United Irishmen who had been Wolfe Tone’s closest friend, now returned from France. Russell agreed to travel to Ulster to seek the support of the Presbyterian farmers there. Trusted leaders from the counties of Wicklow, Kildare and Wexford quietly rallied their men. And Michael Dwyer, the legendary rebel leader who had been holding out in the heart of the Wicklow Mountains since 1798, promised his support.

  Then, on Saturday 16 July 1803, an accidental explosion at Emmet’s Patrick Street depot could not fail to attract the attention of the authorities. Fearing suffocation, one of the workmen thrust his fist through a window, severed an artery, and bled to death. Someone called the fire brigade. Emmet’s men refused to let the firemen in. This explosion, however, seemed to indicate that Emmet’s cover had been blown.

  Episode 164

  ‘NOW IS YOUR TIME FOR LIBERTY!’

  Saturday 23 July 1803 was the date fixed by Robert Emmet for the overthrowing of British rule in Dublin. Th
e day began badly: at 10 a.m., in a College Green warehouse, the Dublin leaders advised him to call off the rebellion. An hour later Emmet met the leaders from Co. Kildare in the White Bull Inn in Thomas Street. They demanded to see the arms that were being held in readiness. Emmet took them to a depot and showed them great numbers of pikes, grenades, rockets and his specially designed exploding hollowed-out beams. They were not impressed. Where were the firearms? They left and turned back other Kildare insurgents on the road to Dublin.

  Emmet was quite unable to take advantage of the gross incompetence of the authorities. General Henry Fox, the commander-in-chief, refused to take seriously several disturbing reports brought to him. Desperately Emmet attempted to raise more money to buy firearms: £500 was delivered at five in the afternoon, but the man entrusted with the money absconded. Emmet was able to buy only six additional blunderbusses.

  Men intent on joining the rebellion gathered around the Marshalsea Lane depot. There were few enough of them, and most of the 240 loaves of bread Emmet had ordered were never eaten. As the men waited they fell to carousing in the local taverns. Then one of the conspirators accidentally mixed the fuses that had been prepared with those that were still unprepared. It proved impossible to distinguish them. Emmet’s combat rockets—his key weapons—were now useless.

  Emmet’s plan was to drive six carriages—decked out to look as if they were on official business and manned by rebels armed with blunderbusses—through the gates of Dublin Castle, seize the viceroy and other officers of the state, and set up a provisional government of an Irish Republic. Ned Conlon duly hired six hackney coaches with their drivers, but as they were approaching Thomas Street they were stopped by a soldier. Conlon panicked, shot the soldier, and the terrified drivers rushed off, taking their coaches with them.

  Emmet had expected at least 2,000 men. By eight o’clock there were only eighty rebels, most of whom, as one later admitted, had been in the Yellow Bottle tavern ‘drinking and smoking, in the highest spirits, cracking jokes, and bantering one another, as if the business they were about to enter on was a party of pleasure’. Pikes were taken out in bundles from the Thomas Street depot, but there were only eighteen blunderbusses, four muskets and one sword, which Emmet carried himself. As one rebel leader, Miles Byrne, recalled:

  Emmet, Malachy, one or two others, and myself, put on our green uniform, trimmed with gold lace, and selected our arms. The insurgents, who had all day been well plied with whiskey, began to prepare for commencing an attack upon the castle; and when all was ready, Emmet made an animated address to the conspirators. At eight o’clock precisely we sallied out of the depôt, and when we arrived in Thomas-street, the insurgents gave three deafening cheers.

  The consternation excited by our presence defies description. Every avenue emptied its curious hundreds, and almost every window exhibited half-a-dozen inquisitive heads, while peaceable shopkeepers ran to their doors, and beheld with amazement a lawless band of armed insurgents ... but when the rocket ascended ... those who, a few minutes before, seemed to look on with vacant wonder, now assumed a face of horror, and fled with precipitation.…

  ‘To the castle!’ cried our enthusiastic leader, drawing his sword ... but when we reached the market-house, our adherents had wonderfully diminished, there being not more than twenty insurgents with us.

  Emmet then stopped to address the people:

  Turn out my boys, now is your time for liberty! Liberty, my boys—now turn out!

  Firing his pistol in the air he made a last attempt to rally support. Then, realising the cause was lost, he told his men to disperse. When Emmet reached his home in Rathfarnham on Dublin’s outskirts, his housekeeper, Anne Devlin, called out: ‘Who’s there?’ He replied: ‘It’s me, Anne.’

  She responded bitterly: ‘Oh, bad welcome to you. Is the world lost by you, you coward that you are, to lead the people to destruction, and then to leave them?’

  ‘Don’t blame me, the fault is not mine,’ was Emmet’s response.

  Meanwhile, as night closed in, the fighting continued in the streets of Dublin, degenerating into a drunken riot. A coach carrying Lord Kilwarden, his daughter and his nephew, the Rev. Richard Wolfe, tried to make its way through the mob. Kilwarden attempted to assert his authority, exclaiming: ‘It’s me, Kilwarden, the Chief Justice of the King’s Bench’, whereupon an insurgent shouted: ‘You’re the very man I want!’ and drove his pike into Kilwarden, mortally wounding him. His daughter was taken to safety, but the clergyman Wolfe was hacked to death. It was an ignominious and inglorious end to Robert Emmet’s rebellion.

  Episode 165

  ‘LET NO MAN WRITE MY EPITAPH’

  Following the swift collapse of his rebellion in Dublin on 23 July 1803, Robert Emmet went into hiding. Soon afterwards yeomen questioned his housekeeper in Rathfarnham, Anne Devlin. As they prodded her arms and shoulders with bayonets, covering her with blood, she declared: ‘I have nothing to tell. I will tell nothing.’ They put a noose around her neck, and she declared defiantly: ‘You may murder me, you villains, but not one word about him will you ever get from me. The Lord Jesus have mercy on my soul.’ Then they half-hanged her until she fainted.

  Finally, on 25 August, thanks to an informer, Emmet was arrested. On 19 September 1803 he was brought to Green Street Courthouse in Dublin. The evidence presented by the prosecuting counsel, Standish O’Grady, was overwhelming. Emmet had instructed his lawyers to make no defence. Convicted of treason, Emmet was asked: ‘What have you, therefore, now to say, why judgment of death and execution should not be awarded against you according to law?’

  Emmet’s long speech from the dock, frequently interrupted by the presiding judge, Lord Norbury, ended with these words:

  My lords, you are impatient for the sacrifice.... Be yet patient! I have but a few words to say ... My race is run. The grave opens to receive me and I sink into its bosom. I am ready to die.... I have but one request to ask at my departure from this world: it is the charity of its silence. Let no man write my epitaph.... When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then, and not till then, let my epitaph be written.

  On the following day he was hanged in Thomas Street. After thirty minutes his corpse was cut down and the executioner cut his head from his body, crying out: ‘This is the head of a traitor, Robert Emmet. This is the head of a traitor.’

  Meanwhile Thomas Russell had been attempting to stir the Presbyterians of the north into rebellion. At Castlereagh in north Down Russell conferred with delegates of the United Irishmen. A spy reported to Dublin that men were drilling at Carnmoney, Newry, Ballynahinch and Knockbracken. He added that, although ‘in many parts anxious for a rising, yet they cannot see how it is to be effected, having no system amongst them. Arms they have but few.’

  There was a miserable turnout as Russell raised the standard of revolt by the Buck’s Head dolmen near Loughinisland, Co. Down. The dispirited rebels quickly returned to their homes. Hearing of the collapse of the rebellion in the south, Russell dashed down to Dublin. There he was arrested while attempting to organise the rescue of Robert Emmet from Kilmainham Jail. Convicted of treason, he was hanged in front of Downpatrick Jail on 21 October 1803. The twenty-third man to be executed after Emmet’s rebellion, Thomas Russell joined the swelling ranks of Irish revolutionary martyrs and became the subject of one of Ulster’s best-known recitations, ‘The Man from God Knows Where’.

  Meanwhile tens of thousands of Irishmen were taking the king’s shilling:

  ‘Oh Mrs McGrath,’ the sergeant said,

  ‘Would you like to make a soldier out of your son Ted,

  With a scarlet coat and a big cocked hat,

  Now Mrs McGrath, wouldn’t you like that?’

  Wid yer too-ri-aa, fol-the diddle-aa, Too-ri-oori-oo-ri-aa,

  Fol-the-diddle-aa, Too-ri-oo-ri-aa. Láv beg, the cracker, O.

  Almost half the entire British army was made up of Irish recruits. Their commander in the Peninsular War was Arthur We
llesley, the future Duke of Wellington, himself an Irishman—though he did observe that just because you were born in a stable did not mean that you were a horse. These Irishmen did much to turn the tide against Napoleon in Portugal and Spain. Thousands of them died at the lines of Torres Vedras, at Salamanca and Vittoria.

  ‘Oh then were ye drunk or were ye blind

  That ye left yer two fine legs behind?’

  Many Irishmen fought in Wellington’s army at the Battle of Waterloo on 18 June 1815. The longest European war of modern times was over at last. Thousands of men, discharged from the army, streamed back to Ireland. Many were dreadfully maimed:

  ‘Oh I wasn’t drunk and I wasn’t blind

  But I left my two fine legs behind,

  For a cannon ball on the fifth of May

  Took my two fine legs from the knees away.’