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Wolfe Tone

1763–1798

 

It is to Wolfe Tone, and his enthusiasm for the French revolution, that modern Irish republicanism in its various forms traces its origins.  Every year several political parties of different outlooks make their individual pious pilgrimages to his burial place in Bodenstown, County Kildare, to pay homage to his memory and re-dedicate themselves to eliminating the divisions in Ireland that they see as having been fostered by a foreign invader.  But Tone's lasting influence over Irish life and politics is not as straightforward as they would hope to suggest.

      Theobald Wolfe Tone was born in Dublin on 20th June 1763, the son of a prosperous coach maker with family connections with Kildare.  A Protestant, he was educated at Trinity College, in Dublin.  While a student he eloped with a girl of sixteen, and the marriage, though affected by his politics, was happy.  Later Tone studied at the Middle Temple, the lawyer's college in London.  He was called to the Irish bar in 1789, but like many impatient revolutionaries, he never had much taste for the law.

      Like other lawyers of the day, he turned instead to politics, agitation, and writing.  In 1791 he published what proved to be a most influential pamphlet, An Argument on Behalf of the Catholics of Ireland.  Along with Thomas Russell and Napper Tandy, he founded the Society of United Irishmen.  Their aims were 'to break the connection with England, the never-failing source of all our political evils ... and to substitute the common name of Irishman in place of the denominations of Protestant, Catholic, and Dissenter ...'

      He was active in the Catholic Committee, and called the Catholic Convention in Dublin in 1792.  The Catholic Relief Act of 1793 (one of a series that would end with full Catholic Emancipation in 1829) gave partial concessions to the aspirations of the native Irish, but not enough for Tone and his friends, who were deeply influenced by the French Revolution, just as the Irish Volunteers had been influenced by the American Revolution.

      It should be remembered that at this time Ireland had its own parliament and could legislate for itself.  Though dominated by Protestant landowners, this parliament could have evolved along the lines suggested by the American Revolution.  But it was not to America that Wolfe Tone looked for either inspiration or help.

      In 1794 Ireland was visited by a clergyman named William Jackson, an emissary of the French revolutionary government.  Wolfe Tone prepared a note for him, claiming that Ireland was ripe for revolution.  Jackson was arrested, but the authorities agreed that Tone would not give evidence against him, and that he could leave for America.

      This he did, taking his young family with him.  In Philadelphia he got letters of introduction to the French Directory, and was soon in France plotting an invasion of Ireland.  For the French, of course, there was a great advantage in a sideshow in Ireland, which would distract the British from events elsewhere.

      An expedition sailed in 1796, but was driven off by the weather.  A second expedition, planned with Gen. Lazare Hoche, came to nothing with the general's death.  When the uprising in Ireland broke out in the spring of 1798, Wolfe Tone renewed his efforts with the French, and other forces sailed later in the year - while Napoleon was invading Egypt, directly threatening British interests in the East.

      One expedition landed in Mayo in support of the rebels there.  Tone himself reached Lough Swilly onboard a French ship in October, but was captured.  He was quickly court-martialled, treated as a British traitor rather than a French officer.  Though he pleaded to be shot like a soldier, the authorities wished to hang him like a criminal.  On the morning of the day appointed for his execution, in November 1798, he used a penknife to open a vein in his neck.  Inevitably, Irish nationalists, rather than accept that Wolfe Tone, a deist, had committed suicide, claimed he had been murdered by the British government.

      Though Tone's influence was immense, his ambition to bring the French to Ireland was unlikely to have brought either independence or peace to Ireland.  The rebellion in 1798, which he had fostered, proved to be an appalling bloodbath in which Catholic insurgents murdered Protestants and local Protestant yeomanry exacted appalling revenge in their turn.  This led to the Act of Union, which Irish Protestants saw as the only way in which their interests could be protected.  Rather than break the connection with England, Tone's activities strengthened it.  As is so often the case, the revolutionaries brought about a result quite the opposite of what they intended.

      Though Tone's words are still quoted today, the development of the French Revolution, whose support he had sought, cast a shadow over all of Irish nationalism that has still not been thrown off.  Nominally democratic, the French Revolution quickly became arbitrary.  In the cause of one kind of freedom, its deistic leaders attacked the church.  Despite Tone's rhetoric, none of this could have had wide appeal to the Irish people, for subservience to Napoleon would have been an even worse fate than union with England.

      High-minded and idealistic, the results of his life brought destruction and ruin to many.  Yet in the end they also brought about the independence of a large part of Ireland.  His autobiography, edited by his son in America, became one of the sacred texts of Irish republicanism.

      Yet it was the parliamentary tradition which he rejected that the Irish people as a whole clung to, and which forms the basis of the modern advanced democracy which Ireland enjoys today.  Tone may be honoured, but his revolutionary ideals have not found a place in the public life of modern Ireland.