The Irish Rebellion of 1798 (Irish: Éirí Amach 1798; Ulster Scots: "The Turn Out"/"The Hurries") was a popular insurrection against the British Crown in what was then the separate, but subordinate, Kingdom of Ireland. The main organising force was the Society of United Irishmen. First formed in Belfast by Presbyterians opposed to the landed Anglican establishment, the Society, despairing of reform, sought to secure a republic through a revolutionary union with the country's Catholic majority. The grievances of a rack-rented tenantry drove recruitment.
While assistance was being sought from the French Republic and from democratic militants in Britain, martial-law seizures and arrests forced the conspirators into the open. Beginning in late May 1798, there were a series of uncoordinated risings: in the counties of Carlow and Wexford in the southeast where the rebels met with some success; in the north around Belfast in counties Antrim and Down; and closer to the capital, Dublin, in counties Meath and Kildare.
In late August, after the rebels had been reduced to pockets of guerrilla resistance, the French landed an expeditionary force in the west, in County Mayo. Unable to effect a conjunction with a significant rebel force, they surrendered on 9 September. In the last open-field engagement of the rebellion, the local men they had rallied on their arrival were routed at Killala on 23 September. On 12 October, a second French expedition was defeated in a naval action off the coast of County Donegal leading to the capture of the United Irish leader Wolfe Tone.
In the wake of the rebellion, Acts of Union 1800 abolished the Irish legislature and brought Ireland under the crown of a United Kingdom through the Parliament at Westminster. The centenary of the rebellion in 1898 saw its legacy disputed by nationalists who wished to restore a legislature in Dublin, by republicans who invoked the name of Tone in the cause of complete separation and independence, and by unionists opposed to all measures of Irish self-government. Renewed in a bicentenary year that coincided with the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, the debate over the interpretation and significance of 1798 continues.
Background
The Volunteer movement
In the last decades of the 18th century, the British Crown in Ireland faced growing demands for constitutional reform. The Protestant Ascendancy had relaxed the Penal Laws by which, in the wake of the Jacobite defeat in 1691, it had sought to break the power, and reduce the influence, both of the Catholic church and of the remaining Catholic gentry. However, the landed Anglican interest continued to monopolise the Irish Parliament, occupying both the House of Lords and, through the system of pocket boroughs, half of the Commons. The interests of the Crown were meanwhile secured by a Viceregal administration accountable, not to the legislature in Dublin, but to the King and his ministers in London (and which also having boroughs in its pocket reduced to a third the number of Commons seats open to electoral contest). Additionally, the British parliament presumed the right to itself to legislate for Ireland, a prerogative it had exercised to restrict rival Irish trade and commerce.
The revolt of the North American colonies presented a challenge. War with the colonists and with their French allies drew down the Crown's regular forces in Ireland. In their absence Volunteer companies were formed, ostensibly for home defence, but were soon, like their kinsmen in the colonies, debating and asserting "constitutional rights". In 1782, with the Volunteers drilling and parading in support of the otherwise beleaguered Patriot opposition in the Irish Parliament, Westminster repealed its Dependency of Ireland on Great Britain Act 1719.
Volunteers, especially in the north where Presbyterians and other Protestant Dissenters had flocked to their ranks, immediately sought to build upon this grant of legislative independence by agitating for the abolition of the pocket boroughs and an extension of the franchise but the question of whether, and on what terms, parliamentary reform should embrace Catholic emancipation split the movement. The Ancien Régime survived: the Anglican aristocracy remained entrenched under the patronage of a government that continued to take its direction from London.
Formation of the United Irishmen
The disappointment was felt keenly in Belfast, a growing commercial centre which, as a borough owned of the Marquess of Donegall, had no elected representation. In October 1791, amidst public celebration of the French Revolution, a group of Volunteer veterans invited an address from Wolfe Tone, a Protestant secretary to Dublin's Catholic Committee. Acknowledging his Argument on behalf of the Catholics of Ireland, in which Tone maintained they would not enjoy liberty until banded together with Catholics against the "boobies and blockheads" of the Ascendancy, and styling themselves at his suggestion the Society of United Irishmen, the meeting resolved:
[that] the weight of English influence in the government of this country is so great as to require a cordial union among all the people of Ireland; [and] that the sole constitutional mode by which this influence can be opposed, is by complete and radical reform of the representation of the people in parliament.
The same resolution was carried by Tone's friends in Dublin where, reflecting a larger, more diverse, middle class, the Society united from the outset Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter.
The Catholic Convention
With the support and participation of United Irishmen, in December 1792 the Catholic Committee convened a national Catholic Convention. Elected on a broad, head-of-household, franchise, the "Back Lane Parliament" was a direct challenge to the legitimacy of the Irish Lords and Commons.
Anticipating war with the new French Republic, George III received a delegation from the convention (including Tone) at Windsor, and the British government pressed the Irish Parliament to match Westminster's Roman Catholic Relief Act 1791. This relieved Catholics of most of their remaining civil disabilities and, where (in the counties) Common's seats were contested, allowed those meeting the property qualification to vote. For Parliament itself the Oath of Supremacy was retained so that it remained exclusively Protestant.
For a measure that could have little appreciable impact on the conduct of government, the price for overriding Ascendancy opposition was the dissolution of the Catholic Committee, a new government militia that conscripted Catholic and Protestant by lot, and a Convention Act that effectively outlawed extra-parliamentary opposition. The government moved to suppress the United Irishmen, who were seeking to revive and remodel the Volunteers along the lines of the revolutionary French National Guard. In May 1794, following the revelation of meetings between a French emissary, William Jackson, and United leaders including Tone and Archibald Hamilton Rowan, the Society was proscribed.
Mobilisation
New System of Organisation
A year later, in May 1795, a meeting of United delegates from Belfast and the surrounding market towns responded to the growing repression by endorsing a new, and it was hoped more resistant, "system of organisation". Local societies were to split so as to remain within a range of 7 to 35 members, and through baronial and county delegate committees, to build toward a provincial, and, once three of Ireland's four provinces had organised, a national, directory.
It was with this New System that the Society spread rapidly across Ulster and, eventually, from Dublin (where the abandonment of open proceedings had been resisted) out into the midlands and the south. As it did so, William Drennan's "test" or pledge, calling for "a union of power among Irishmen of every religious persuasion", was administered to artisans, journeymen and shopkeepers, many of whom had maintained their own "Jacobin" clubs, and to tenant farmers and their market-town allies who had organised against the Protestant gentry in secret fraternities.
United Irish–Defender alliance
In rural Ireland, there was a "varied, energetic and complex structure of agrarian 'secret societies'", commonly referred to as Whiteboyism, after groups that had emerged mid-century in the south. In the north, it had included the Oakboys, Presbyterian led but admitting Catholics, who in 1763 had threatened to pursue fleeing Anglican rectors and tithe proctors into the city of Derry. There had also been the Hearts of Steel: protesting land speculation and evictions, in 1770 they had entered Belfast, besieged the barracks, and sprung one of their number from prison. By the 1790s, borrowing, like the United Irish societies (and, from 1795, their nemesis the Orange Institution), from the lodge structure and ceremonial of freemasonry, this semi-insurrectionary phenomenon had regenerated as the largely but—with some latter-day adjustments to their oaths—not exclusively Catholic, Defenders.
Originating as "fleets" of young men who contended with Protestant Peep o' Day Boys for the control of tenancies and employment in the linen-producing region of north Armagh, the Defenders organised across the southern counties of Ulster and into the Irish midlands. Already in 1788, their oath-taking had been condemned in a pastoral by the Catholic Primate Archbishop of Armagh. As the United Irishmen began to reach out the Defenders, they were similarly sanctioned. With cautions against the "fascinating illusions" of French principles, in 1794 Catholics taking the United test were threatened with excommunication.
Encountering a political outlook more Jacobite than Jacobin, and speaking freely to the grievances of tithes, taxes and rents, United agents sought to convince Defenders of something they had only "vaguely" considered, namely the need to separate Ireland from England and to secure its "real as well as nominal independence". As the promise of reform receded, and as French victories built hopes of military assistance, Catholic emancipation and parliamentary reform became a demand for universal manhood suffrage (every man a citizen), and hopes for accountable government were increasingly represented by the call for an Irish republic—terms that clearly anticipated a violent break with the Crown.
Preparation
Beginning with an obligation of each society to drill a company, and of three companies to form a battalion, the New System of Organisation was adapted to military preparation. With only Ulster and Leinster organised, the leadership remained split between the two provincial directories. In June 1797, they met together in Dublin to consider the demands for an immediate rising from the northerners who, reeling from martial-law seizures and arrests, feared the opportunity to strike was passing. The meeting broke up in disarray, with many of the Ulster delegates fleeing abroad. The authorities were sufficiently satisfied with the severity of their countermeasures in Ulster that in August they restored civil law in the province.
The initiative passed to the Leinster directory which had recruited two radically disaffected members of the Patriot opposition: Lord Edward FitzGerald, who brought with him experience of the American war, and Arthur O'Connor (later, undistinguished, as an officer of Napoleon's Irish Legion). In August 1797, their military refinement of the New System retained a measure of democratic practice. Townland societies of 12 men, mustered as platoons, chose their own sergeants; ten sergeants commissioned a company captain, and ten captains—a combined command of 1,200 men—elected a regimental colonel. The directory intervened only at the level the county adjutant-general, the colonels advancing a shortlist of names for their selection. Under this "military constitution", the movement strengthened in existing strongholds such as Dublin, County Kildare and County Meath, and broke new ground in the midlands and the south-east.
In February 1798, a return prepared by Fitzgerald computed the number of United Irishmen, nationwide, at 269,896 but there were doubts as to the number who would heed call to arms and whether they could muster more than simple pikes (over the previous year the authorities had seized 70,630 of these compared to just 4,183 blunderbusses and 225 musket barrels). While the movement had withstood the government's countermeasures, and seditious propaganda and preparation continued, there was hesitation to act without the certainty of French arms and assistance.
Soliciting French, and British-Jacobin, alliances
Hoche's expedition December 1796
In 1795, from American exile Tone had travelled to Paris where he sought to convince the French Directory that Ireland was the key to breaking Britain's maritime stranglehold. His "memorials" on the situation in Ireland came to the attention of Director Lazare Carnot, and by May, General Henri Clarke, the Irish-descendant head of the War Ministry's Bureau Topographique, had drafted an invasion plan. In June, Carnot offered General Lazare Hoche command of an Irish expedition that would secure "the safety of France for centuries to come."
Originally, it was to have been accompanied by two diversionary raids on England: one against Newcastle, the other against Bristol. In the event, because of pressing demands in Italy, the forty thousand men called for could not be mustered.
Under Hoche, a force of 15,000 veteran troops was assembled at Brest. Sailing on 16 December, accompanied by Tone, the French arrived off the coast of Ireland at Bantry Bay on 22 December 1796. Unremitting storms prevented a landing. Tone remarked that "England [...] had its luckiest escape since the Armada". The fleet returned home and the army intended to spearhead the invasion of Ireland was split up and sent, along with a growing Irish Legion, to fight in other theatres of the French Revolutionary Wars.
Bantry Bay had nonetheless made real the prospect of French intervention, and United societies flooded with new members. There were increasing reports of Defenders and United Irishmen "marauding" for weapons, and openly parading. In May 1797, Yeomanry, which in the north had begun recruiting entire Orange lodges, charged gatherings near Cootehill in Cavan killing eleven, and in Dundalk killing fourteen.
Naval mutinies
In advance of Hoche's expedition, Tone told Carnot that there were 80,000 Irishmen in the Royal Navy and prepared an address calling on them to steer their ships into the ports of Ireland, "now an independent nation". When, months later in April and May 1797, mutinies broke out at Spithead and Nore, the British authorities (who estimated the actual number of Irish in the fleet as 11,000, or 11 percent of the total) were quick to see the hand of the United Irish and their radical allies .
The Irish republicans were reportedly behind the resolution of the Nore mutineers to hand the fleet over to the French "as the only government that understands the Rights of Man". Much was made of Valentine Joyce, a leader at Spithead, described by Edmund Burke as a "seditious Belfast clubist". Yet no evidence was brought forth of United Irish sympathisers aboard ship being directed by agents of the Society. It was only after the mutinies that leaders in Ireland began to address compatriots in the fleet, and it was in terms, replicating Tone's purely patriotic appeal, that displayed no interest in, or understanding of, their on-board predicament and grievances.
The mutinies had paralysed the British navy, but the Batavian fleet that the French had prepared for their forces at Texel was again opposed by the weather. In October 1797, after Tone and the troops he was to accompany to Ireland had been disembarked, the fleet sought to reach the French naval base at Brest and was destroyed by the Royal Navy at the Battle of Camperdown.
The First Consul
In Paris, Tone recognised the rising star of Napoleon Bonaparte but he found the conqueror of Italy incurious about the Irish situation being in need of a war of conquest, not of liberation, to pay his army. In February 1798, British spies did report that the First Consul was preparing a fleet in the Channel ports ready for the embarkation of up to 50,000 men, but the preparations were soon reversed. Bonaparte deemed both the military and naval forces assembled inadequate to the task.
In later exile, the dethroned emperor was to claim that he might have made an attempt on Ireland (instead of sailing in May 1798 for Egypt) had he had confidence in Tone and the other United Irish agents appearing in Paris. He describes them as divided in opinion and constantly quarrelling.
British co-conspiracy
These agents from Ireland included James Coigly. A Catholic priest who had been active in bringing Defenders into the movement in Ulster, Coigly sought to persuade both French Directory and the leadership in Ireland of a larger project. Beginning in 1796, United Irish agents had helped build networks of United Englishmen and United Scotsmen, societies whose proceedings, oath-taking, and advocacy of physical force "mirrored that of their Irish inspirators". Describing himself as an emissary of the United Irish executive, assisted by a tide of refugees from Ulster, and tapping into protest against the Combination Acts and wartime food shortages, Coigly worked from Manchester to spread the United system across the manufacturing districts of northern England. In London, he conferred with Irishmen prominent in the city's federation of democratic clubs, the London Corresponding Society. With these he drew together delegates from Scotland and the provinces who, as "United Britons", resolved "to overthrow the present Government, and to join the French as soon as they made a landing in England".
In July 1797, the resolution of the United Britons was discussed by the leadership in Dublin and Belfast. Although addressed to the prospect of a French invasion, the suggestion that "England, Scotland and Ireland are all one people acting for one common cause", encouraged militants to believe that liberty could be won even if "the French should never come here".
The risings
Eve-of-rebellion arrests
In early 1798, a series of violent attacks on magistrates in County Tipperary, County Kildare and King's County alarmed the authorities. They were also aware that there was now a faction of the United Irish leadership, led by Fitzgerald and O'Connor, who felt "sufficiently well organised and equipped" to begin an insurgency without French assistance. The Viceroy, Lord Camden, came under increasing pressure from hardline Irish MPs, led by Speaker John Foster, to crack down on the growing disorder in the south and midlands and arrest the Dublin leadership.
Camden hesitated, partly as he feared a crackdown would itself provoke an insurrection: the British Home Secretary Lord Portland agreed, describing the proposals as "dangerous and inconvenient". The situation changed when an informer, Thomas Reynolds, produced Fitzgerald's report on manpower with its suggestion that over a quarter of a million men across Ulster, Leinster and Munster were preparing to join the "revolutionary army". The Irish government learned from Reynolds that a meeting of the Leinster Provincial Committee and Directory had been set for 10 March in the Dublin house of wool merchant Oliver Bond, where a motion for an immediate rising would be tabled. Camden decided to act, explaining to London that he risked having the Irish Parliament turn against him.
On the 10th, In March 1798, almost the entire committee were seized, along with two directors, the comparative moderates (those who, in the absence of the French, had counselled delay) William James MacNeven and Thomas Addis Emmet, together with all their papers. Meanwhile, in England, O'Connor had been arrested alongside Coigly. Having been found in possession of a further address to the French Directory, Coigly was hanged, and the United network he had helped build in Britain was broken up by internment. In Dublin, Fitzgerald went into hiding.
The Irish government imposed martial law on 30 March, although civil courts continued sitting. Overall command of the army was transferred from Ralph Abercromby to Gerard Lake who turned his attention to Leinster and Munster where from Ulster his troops' reputation for public floggings, half-hanging, pitch-capping and other interrogative refinements preceded him.
The Call from Dublin
Faced with the breaking-up of their entire system, Fitzgerald, joined by Samuel Neilson (publisher in Belfast of the Society paper Northern Star, recently released from Kilmainham Prison), and by John and Henry Sheares, resolved on a general uprising for 23 May. There was no immediate promise of assistance from France (on the 19th a French expeditionary force had set sail, under Napoleon, but for Egypt, not Ireland). The United army in Dublin was to seize strategic points in the city, while the armies in the surrounding counties would throw up a cordon and advance into its centre. As soon as these developments were signalled by halting mail coaches from the capital, the rest of the country was to rise.
On the appointed day, the rising in the city was aborted. Fitzgerald had been mortally wounded on the 19th, the Sheares brothers were betrayed the 21st, and on the morning of the 23rd, Neilson, who had been critical to the planning, was seized. Armed with last minute intelligence, a large force of military occupied the rebels' intended assembly points, persuading those who had turned out to dump weapons and disperse. The plan to intercept the mail coaches miscarried, with only the Munster-bound coach halted at Johnstown, County Kildare, near Naas. The organisation in the outer districts of the city nonetheless rose as planned and were swiftly followed by the surrounding counties.
Leinster
The first clashes of the rebellion took place just after dawn on 24 May in County Kildare. After the Munster mail coach was attacked on its approach to Naas on the night of the 23rd, as 1,000 to 3,000 men approached the town. Their pikes could not prevail against grapeshot and steady musket fire. A garrison of less than 200 routed the rebels, with a small cavalry detachment cutting down over a hundred as they fled.
Success did attend a smaller rebel force, commanded by John Esmonde, a Protestant physician who had deserted from the Yeomanry, later that day at Prosperous. The town was not to be re-occupied until after a rebel defeat at Ovidstown on 19 June, but a succession of rebel reversals further afield, including defeats at Carlow (25 May) and of a larger host at the Hill of Tara in County Meath (May 26) persuaded many of the Kildare insurgents that their cause was lost.
Rebels were to remain longest in the field in south-east, in Wexford and in the Mountains of Wicklow. It is commonly suggested that the trigger for the rising in Wexford was the arrival on 26 May of the notorious North Cork Militia. On 27 May, underestimating the hill-top position and resolve of a rebel party hastily assembled under a local priest, John Murphy (who only months before had led his congregation in taking an oath of loyalty to the King) a force of the militia and yeomanry was cut down outside the town of Oulart. The insurgents then swept south through Wexford Town where they released, and gave command to, the local United Irish leader, a Protestant barrister, Bagenal Harvey.
On 5 June, Bagenel, leading a force of 3,000, failed in an attempt to storm New Ross whose capture might have opened the way to the large bodies of Defenders known to exist in Kilkenny and Waterford. During and after the battle, government forces systematically killed captured and wounded rebels. On news of the defeat, rebels in the rear killed up to 200 loyalist prisoners (men, women and children): the notorious Scullabogue Barn massacre.
Meanwhile, attempts to break northward and open a road through Wicklow toward Dublin were checked 1 June at Bunclody and, despite the deployment of guns captured by Murphy's division in an ambush at Tubberneering, at Arklow on 9 June. The rebels fell back toward the south, meeting the survivors of New Ross and forming a camp of 16,000 on Vinegar Hill outside the town of Enniscorthy. There, on 21 June, they were surrounded, bombarded and routed by a force of 13,000 under General Lake.