The Castle Hill Rising: Transportation

Most rebels were fiercely republican after having seen the successful creation of the United States and the changes caused by the French Revolution. Republican notions such as natural rights and a popularly elected upper house were a major threat to those whose power rested on established monarchical and oligarchic institutions. Political dissidents were seen and handled as a threat to British society. Audrey Oldfield suggests

There is a case for contending that Britain (unlike many other European nations) escaped outright revolution in the nineteenth century by being able to siphon off its radicals (as convicts) and its paupers (as assisted immigrants) to the other side of the world. [1]

The British Government preferred deporting or exiling political prisoners to Botany Bay rather than risk creating martyrs if they were executed, something that was largely confined to leaders.[2] This was an effective policy for the British and the manner in which they dealt with all political dissent in England, Scotland and the British colonies.

Prison hulk c1810

The first Irish political prisoners were not the United Irishmen who arrived in NSW on the Minerva and the Friendship in January 1800.[3] Whitaker argues that about 400 of the several thousand United Irishmen sentenced to transportation actually reached NSW; a total 58 less than A.G.L. Shaw’s figure but 75 more than George Rudé’s.[4] However, of the 519 male prisoners disembarked in NSW from four ships between 1793 and 1797, between 200 and 300 convicts were probably Defenders. Defenders made up at least half of all Irish political prisoners who arrived in New South Wales before to 1806. The 233 men landed in Port Jackson from the Boddingtons[5] and Sugar Cane[6] had all been sentenced in or before 1793, predating the merger with the United Irishmen.  The many Defenders among the 286 male convicts transported on the Marquis Cornwallis[7] and Britannia[8] in 1796-1797 were technically United Irishmen.[9] There is every indication that they would have been described as United Irishmen but for the confusion of the Irish authorities about republican terminology and changing patterns of association. Although the transported Defenders did not participate in the Rebellion of 1798, there is little else to distinguish them from the later United Irishmen. Discussion of Irish political prisoners in NSW that does not include ‘United Irish Defenders’ in their calculations of Irish numerical strength provides a partial view of seditious affairs in the colony.  There is no reason to assume that the political prisoners of the Marquis Cornwallis and Britannia would have been regarded as anything but comrades by rebels arriving on the Minerva and Friendship in 1800.  Close ideological ties are also likely to have existed between them and the unaligned Defenders of the Boddingtons and Sugar Cane.

Convicts en route for Australia

The precise number of Defenders and United Irishmen transported to New South Wales prior to 1800 is a problematic issue that available sources cannot resolve.  While it seems that there were very few political prisoners on the Queen of 1791, an unknown number were put on board the Boddingtons and Sugar Cane in 1793. As 60-70 men on the Boddingtons were convicted in counties where violent Defender inspired disturbances had occurred it can be assumed, following A.G.L. Shaw’s rule of thumb, that many of them were members of that organisation.[10] The Sugar Cane, conversely, carried fewer prisoners from these districts and a higher proportion of Dubliners, an area not greatly agitated by Defenderism at that time.[11] Information concerning the Britannia and Marquis Cornwallis is more conclusive and Rudé agreed with Shaw’s identification of ‘about’ 100 Defenders on these Ships.[12] However, a close comparison of disturbed districts with prisoner trial places could yield a figure not much less than the total male complement of 163 men on the Marquis Cornwallis.[13] Sufficient numbers of Defenders were sentenced in 1793 to fill several transports though relatively few of these men arrived in NSW.  Of the 25 Louth Defenders sentenced to transportation at Dundalk assizes in March 1793, only four were embarked. Similarly, only two of the twelve sentenced at the Cork city and county assizes in March 1794 actually arrived.

In 1795 the Marquis Cornwallis had a reputation as a ‘political’ ship; contemporary accounts stated it left Cork on 9 August with ‘seventy...Defenders’ on board.[14] The Britannia also embarked substantial numbers of Defender/United Irish convicts who could have amounted to the entire male complement given the turmoil in which that year’s assizes had taken place.   A county breakdown of the most likely Defender prisoners on board the Britannia gives a figure of 145 men that included some criminals and omitted political prisoners from less disturbed counties. 60 of the 107 non-Dubliners received life sentences, a marked increase on the 40% rate on the non-political Queen, may indicate a high incidence of seditious crimes.  Britannia was also the first ship to leave Ireland after the passage of the draconian Insurrection Act in 1796 that may explain a Dublin press report of August 1796 stating ‘fifty convicts...[were] shipped from the North Wall for Botany Bay’ of whom ‘three quarters’, roughly 38, were Defenders. As the Britannia landed only 39 male convicts from Dublin city and county in Port Jackson in May 1797 it would appear it had been designated a ‘political’ ship.

Transportation ship

The intriguing and ill-discipline of the exiled Defenders that concerned Governor Hunter and frightened Governor King was very apparent during the voyages of the four ships with Defender convicts.[15]  One man was summarily executed for mutiny on the Sugar Cane and some details of a plot on the Boddingtons reached the colony.[16] While mutiny and escape were common topics of conversation among all convicts, the Defender/United Irishmen of the Britannia and Marquis Cornwallis planned uprisings that resulted in the deaths of about 26 men and two official enquiries in Port Jackson.[17] The rebellious conduct of the convicts on the Britannia and Marquis Cornwallis before and after arrival in NSW seems to have prejudiced the colonial administration against later shipments of prisoners who had taken part in the 1798 rebellion.  That two mutinies of a similar nature had been suppressed on successive voyages must have struck Hunter as the probable consequence of transporting Defenders and United Irishmen en masse.  The serious problems also occurred on the Anne, Hercules, Atlas I and Minerva in 1800-1802 but not the criminal Queen and Rolla highlighted the political factor. The Minerva contained amongst the Irish rebels, Joseph Holt[18] and James Harold. Joseph Holt had struck up a friendship with the land owner William Cox on the ship and was given a job managing Cox’s Dundas farm in western Sydney. Many of the United Irishmen on the Minerva were sent off to Norfolk Island in an attempt to disperse them. There was considerable opposition to such transports by Hunter and his successor Governor King but neither had any real control over the numbers or type of prisoners embarked for NSW.[19] The Governors were also remarkably ill-informed as to the character of Irish prisoners as documents setting down their names and crimes and sentences generally only arrived years after the ships if at all.[20] This created an atmosphere of paranoia in the colony that was accentuated by the United Irish plots of 1800 and the Castle Hill uprising in March 1804.[21]

Discussion of rank and file Defenders in the Australian context has hitherto centred on a series of oft quoted comments made by Governor Hunter in 1796 regarding ‘those turbulent and worthless characters called Irish Defenders’ who had boldly ‘threatened resistance to all orders’.[22] As no such opinions were expressed by Hunter’s predecessor in relation to the Defenders sent out in 1793 it would appear that his blanket hostility resulted from the ability of the Britannia and Marquis Cornwallis convicts to destabilise the colony and his knowledge of their plotting on the voyages from Ireland. To the Governor’s intense annoyance, the Defenders who arrived in 1796-1797 not only disaffected otherwise peaceable English convicts but escaped both frequently and in large numbers.  Hunter complained they had ‘completely ruined... [those] formerly received from England’ and threatened ‘that order so highly essential to our well being’.[23]  One of the more serious and disruptive breakouts involved a twenty strong ‘gang of...Defenders’ who were so obstinate when apprehended that Hunter had two executed.[24] Hunter’s exasperation with the ‘Defenders’ moved him to suggest that they should not be sent to NSW but rather to ‘Africa, or some other place as fit for them’.[25]

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[1] Ibid, Oldfield, Audrey, The Great Republic of the Southern Seas: Republicans in Nineteenth-Century Australia, p. 212.

[2] Retribution for the rebel leaders in 1798 was swift and largely uncompromising. Bagenal Harvey, Cornelius Grogan, Mathew Keogh, and Anthony Perry, all Wexford commanders and all Protestants were executed; their heads were cut off and stuck on spikes outside the courthouse in Wexford town. Father John Murphy, the hero of Oulart and Enniscorthy was captured in Tullow, County Carlow. He was stripped, flogged, hanged and beheaded: his corpse was burned in a barrel. With an eye for detail, the local Yeomanry spiked his head on a building directly opposite the local Catholic church. By the end of the rebellion between 10,000 and 25,000 rebels including a high proportion of non-combatants had been killed, most summarily.

[3] The discussion of Defenders draws heavily on O’Donnell, Ruán, ‘Desperate and Diabolical’: Defenders and United Irishmen in early NSW’, unpublished paper.

[4] Whitaker, Anne-Maree, Unfinished Revolution: United Irishmen in New South Wales, 1800-1810, (Crossing Press), 1994, p. 29, Rudé, George, ‘Early Irish Rebels in Australia’, Historical Studies, Vol. 16, (1974-1975), p. 23 and ibid, Shaw, A.G.L., Convicts & the Colonies, p. 170.

[5] Hall, Barbara, Of Infamous Character: The Convicts of the Boddingtons, Ireland to Botany Bay, 1793, (B. Hall), 2004.

[6] Hall, Barbara, A Nimble Fingered Tribe: The Convicts of the Sugar Cane, Ireland to Botany Bay, 1793, (B. Hall), 2002, 2^nd ed., 2009.

[7] Hall, Barbara, A Desperate Set of Villains: The Convicts of the Marquis Cornwallis, Ireland to Botany Bay, 1796, (B. Hall), 2000, 2^nd ed., 2003, 3^rd ed., 2005.

[8] Hall, Barbara, Death or Liberty: The Convicts of the Britannia, Ireland to Botany Bay, 1797, (B. Hall), 2006.

[9] Boddingtons arrived 7 August 1793, Sugar Cane 17 September 1793, Marquis Cornwallis in February 1796 and Britannia on 27 May 1797.  See also, HRA, Series I, Vol. 1, pp. 446, 454 and Vol. 2, p. 31. 

[10] Ibid, Shaw, A.G.L., Convicts & the Colonies, p. 171.

[11] There were 53 county and city Dubliners on the Sugar Cane as opposed to 36 on the Boddingtons and 12 Corconians up from 3.  Only one convict on Sugar Cane came from Louth and Monaghan and none from Donegal.

[12] See, ibid, Shaw, A.G.L., Convicts & the Colonies, p. 171 and ibid, Rudé, George, ‘Early Irish Rebels in Australia’, p. 19.

[13] Over 200 men were sentenced to transportation in 1795 alone. 

[14] New Cork Evening Post, 10 August 1795.

[15] Ibid, Shaw, A.G.L., Convicts & the Colonies, p. 168.

[16] Ibid, Bateson, Charles, The Convict Ships, pp. 129-130.

[17] Hunter to Portland, 5 September 1796, HRA, Series I, Vol. 1, p. 653, HRNSW, Vol. 3, pp. 102-111.

[18] Joseph Holt was born in Ireland in 1756 and became a tenant farmer and as a trusted Protestant loyalist held some minor local positions. About 1797, he joined the United Irishmen in part because of a private feud with the landlord Thomas Hugo. In 1798, the Fermanagh Militia burned his house down on Hugo’s orders. Holt fought in the Wexford County rebellion before successfully leading a rebel guerrilla group in Wicklow County. Eventually he came to the conclusion that it was in his interests to surrender in order to get the best terms he could for himself and his wife. This led to exile without trial in the colony of NSW. After the 1804 Rebellion, he was exiled again to Norfolk Island and then VDL. He returned to Sydney and was given a land grant in order to farm. Holt was granted a pardon in 1809 before returning to Ireland in 1812. He wrote a personnel account of the rebellions in Wicklow and NSW: Croker, T.C., (ed.), Memoirs of Joseph Holt: general of the Irish rebels, in 1798, 2 Vols. (H. Colburn), 1838, Vol. 2 covers his life in Australia. He died in 1826. See also, Bolton, G.C., ‘Holt, Joseph (1756-1826)’, ADB, Vol. 1, pp. 550-551.

[19] King to Portland, 21 May 1802, HRA, Series I, Vol. 3, p. 489.

[20] Portland to Hunter, 2 March 1797, HRA, Series I, Vol. 2, p. 9.  King to Castlereagh, 24 July 1798 and Hunter to Portland, 1 November 1798, HRA, Series I, Vol. 2, pp. 234-236.

[21] King came to regard virtually all Irish male prisoners sent to New South Wales after 1793 as dangerous as the ‘diabolical characters’ of the Anne: King to Portland, 28 September 1800, HRA, Series I, Vol. 2, p. 614.  See also King to Portland, 10 March 1801, HRA, Series I, Vol. 3, p. 9.

[22] Hunter to Portland, 12 November 1796, HRA, Series I, Vol. 1, p. 674.

[23] Hunter to Portland, 10 January 1798, HRA, Series I, Vol. 2, p. l18.

[24] Hunter to Portland, 15 February 1798, HRA, Series I, Vol. 2, p. 129, HRNSW, Vol. 3, pp. 359-360.

[25] Hunter to Portland, 12 November 1796, HRA, Series I, Vol. 1, p. 675.

The Castle Hill Rising: the Irish context

From the early 1790s through to the last group of convicts transported to Western Australia in 1868, Australia was frequently the destination for Ireland’s political prisoners. The Defenders and United Irishmen were transported to NSW in the 1790s and early 1800s[1], the rural rebels and defeated members of Young Ireland to VDL between the 1820s and early 1850s and Fenians to Western Australia. These convicts brought the conflicts from Ireland with them and especially their struggle against ‘Imperial’ Britain.[2] As a result, they were among the most fractious and, from the perspective of the colonial authorities, the most dangerous and disruptive group in the emerging colonies. Between 1800 and 1807, there were at least three planned rebellions that were thwarted before they could break out and the Castle Hill Rising of 1804 when a convict rebellion was put down with considerable ferocity.

 

Since the sixteenth century, the fundamental division in Ireland has been and remains religious.[3] To be a full member of Irish civil society, individuals had to be members of the Anglican Church of Ireland. Irish Roman Catholics and Protestant Dissenters were barred from certain professions such as law, the judiciary and the army and had restrictions on inheriting land. Catholics could not bear arms or exercise their religion publicly. With papal recognition of the Hanoverian dynasty in 1766, the threat to the Protestant Ascendancy eased and many Penal Laws were relaxed or lightly enforced. In addition, some Catholic gentry families got around the Penal Laws by making nominal conversions to Protestantism or by getting one family member to ‘convert’ in order to hold land for the rest of his family or to take a large mortgage on it. From 1766, Catholics favoured reform and their views were represented by the ‘Catholic Committees’, a moderate organisation of Catholic gentry and clergy in each county that called for the repeal of the Penal Laws and emphasised their loyalty. Reforms on land ownership occurred in 1771 and in 1778-1779. Calls for change were also evident among the Irish Protestant elite that had come to see Ireland as their native country. Politically active Irishmen were far from disinterested when arguing their political stance on issues such as Irish independence or parliamentary reform. [4]

 

This was clear by 1776, when a trade-off between sympathy for the American cause and loyalty to the English neighbour had to be sought.[5] Due to continuing concerns about the way Ireland was treated commercially as well as politically, the debate intensified. A Parliamentary faction led by Henry Grattan agitated for a more favourable trading relationship with England, in particular abolition of the Navigation Acts that enforced tariffs on Irish goods in English markets, but allowed no tariffs for English goods in Ireland.[6] From the 1720s, Irish parliamentarians also campaigned for legislative independence for the Dublin parliament, especially the repeal of Poynings Law that allowed the Westminster Parliament to legislate for Ireland. Many of their demands were met in 1782, when Free Trade was granted between Ireland and England and Poynings Law was amended devolving legislative powers to Dublin. Partly as a result of the trade laws being liberalised, Ireland went through an economic boom in the 1780s. Canals extended from Dublin westwards and the Four Courts and Post Office were established. Dublin’s granite-lined quays were built and it boasted that it was the ‘second city of the empire’. Corn Laws were introduced in 1784 to give a bounty on flour shipped to Dublin promoting the spread of mills and tillage.

Instrumental in achieving reform was the Irish Volunteers movement, founded in Belfast in 1778.[7] This militia, up to 100,000 strong, was formed to defend Ireland from foreign invasion during the American Revolutionary War, but was outside of government control and staged armed demonstrations in favour of Grattan’s reforming agenda. Under the influence of the Volunteers, whose membership included many with different political agendas, many ideological subtleties and difficulties of practical politics were brought to the attention of Irish Patriots, especially the predicament of an elitist and elite-led political movement attracting people from very diverse backgrounds due to a commitment to egalitarian policies, as well as the issue of Catholic emancipation. For the first time, the Protestant-ascendant prejudice that Catholics were unfit for political participation, was criticised, and became especially dangerous to articulate because of increasing Catholic membership in some Volunteer clubs. These differences were aggravated when the Tithe Dispute of 1785-1788, conflict surrounding the tax that everyone including Catholics, many of whom expressed their opposition to it, had to pay to the Church of Ireland raised the Catholic cause again. This sparked a row between those who would accept the treatment of Catholics as a somewhat inferior class of citizens denying that they had the same reasons to demand civil liberties and non-interference by the state as Protestants and those who refused to subscribe to this notion.

The French Revolution had a dual impact on Irish Patriotism.[8] First, it helped less radical Patriots to overcome their assumptions respecting the political maturity of Catholics that many Republicans and radical Patriots had already abandoned by that time. Since in France contemporary Catholics had proven their ability to overthrow a system synonymous with injustice for most Patriots, Catholics were no longer regarded as politically incapable. After 1789, some Volunteer units showed their sympathy with the French Revolution by holding parades on 14 July to commemorate the fall of the Bastille. In 1792, Grattan succeeded in carrying an Act conferring the franchise on the Roman Catholics; in 1794, he introduced a reform bill that was even less democratic than Flood’s bill of 1783. He was as anxious as Flood had been to retain the legislative power in the hands of men of property, for he had a strong conviction that while Ireland could best be governed by Irish hands, democracy in Ireland would inevitably turn to plunder and anarchy. The defeat of Grattan’s mild proposals helped to promote more extreme opinions. However, as soon as the Jacobin regime assumed power in France, radical Patriots became more reluctant to refer to France as a prime example of Catholic political action for the causes of liberty and justice. Nevertheless, one of the main inconsistencies on the Patriot political agenda by calling for increasing powers of the Irish parliament while maintaining the selective as opposed to universal suffrage seemed to have been dissolved.

However, the French Revolution also had a second, contrasting, effect. Conservative loyalists such as John Foster, John Fitzgibbon and John Beresford, however, remained opposed to further concessions to Catholics and, led by the ‘Junta’, argued that the ‘Protestant Interest’ could only be secured by maintaining the connection with Britain. In reactionary circles, it was used to emphasise the point that an open political debate without censorship as well as parliamentary reform could entail a severe blow to their special interests, and could be tantamount to inviting Radicals to overturn the political structure of the country, rather than just appeasing them. In particular, the French Revolution prompted relentless action against the radical wing of the Patriot movement, the United Irishmen that included many former Whigs. It also prevented more moderate Patriots from supporting some radical Patriot activities without reservation, depriving the Patriot movement of solidarity and unity.

The United Irishmen movement, formed in 1791, was based on an alliance between the Dissenter and Catholic bourgeoisie including Northern manufacturers, merchants and professionals; Belfast and Dublin artisans; and Catholic peasants (the Defenders), against an entrenched Protestant Ascendancy that had many features of the French pre-revolutionary ‘ancien regime’. An anonymous eleven-page pamphlet, The Union Doctrine; or Poor Man’s Catechism, voiced the aspirations of many ordinary workers and peasants in the 1790s

I believe in a revolution founded on the rights of man, in the natural and imprescriptable rights of all citizens to all the land...As the land and its produce was intended for the use of man ‘tis unfair for 50 or 100 men to possess what is for the subsistence of near five millions...the almighty intended all mankind to lord the soil.[9]

Initially the United Irishmen campaigned for the end to religious discrimination and the widening of the right to vote. However, the group soon radicalised its aims and sought to overthrow British rule and found a non-sectarian republic.[10] The United Irishmen spread quickly throughout the country. Republicanism was particularly attractive to the largely literate Ulster Presbyterian community, being literate, who were also discriminated against for their religion, and who had strong links with Scots-Irish American emigrants who had fought against Britain in the American Revolution. Many Catholics, particularly the emergent Catholic middle-class, were also attracted to the movement and it claimed over 200,000 members by 1798. Both the United Irishmen and the Volunteers were suppressed after Revolutionary France in 1793 declared war on Britain and they developed from a political movement into a military organisation preparing for armed rebellion. However, these measures did nothing to calm the situation in Ireland and these reforms were bitterly opposed by the ‘ultra-loyalist’ Protestants such as John Foster. Violence and disorder became widespread and in 1795, hardening loyalist attitudes led to the foundation of the Orange Order, a hard-line Protestant grouping.

The United Irishmen now dedicated to armed revolution, forged links with the Defenders, a militant Catholic society.[11] Wolfe Tone, the United Irish leader, went to France to seek French military support and a French expeditionary force of 15,000 troops arrived off Bantry Bay in December 1796, but failed to land due to a combination of indecisiveness, poor seamanship, and storms off the Bantry coast.[12] The government began a campaign of repression targeted against the United Irishmen, including executions, routine use of torture, transportation to penal colonies and house burnings. As the repression began to bite, the United Irishmen decided to go ahead with an insurrection without French help. Their activity culminated in the Irish Rebellion of 1798.[13] The uprising in Dublin failed but the rebellion then spread in an apparently random fashion firstly around Dublin, then briefly in Kildare[14], Meath, Carlow and Wicklow.[15] County Wexford[16] in the southeast saw the most sustained fighting, to be briefly joined by rebels who took to the field in Antrim and Down in the north.[17] A small French force landed in Killala Bay in Mayo leading to a last outbreak of rebellion in counties Mayo, Leitrim and Longford. The rebellion lasted just three months before it was suppressed, but claimed an estimated 30,000 lives. The Republican ideal of a non-sectarian society was greatly damaged by sectarian atrocities committed by both sides with government troops and militia targeting Catholics in general and the rebels on several occasions killing Protestant loyalist civilians.[18]

The post-rebellion repression meant few spoke or wrote of the events from rebel perspectives, and as a result almost all initial accounts of the rebellion were written from the loyalist perspective describing it as little more then the actions of sectarian mobs intent on massacring all Protestants. Even reformers sought to hide from the programme of 1798 to unite Irishmen regardless of Creed. After 1798 they turned to the confessional politics of mobilising Catholics alone. Daniel O’Connell, the main architect of this policy went so far in 1841 as to denounce the United Irishmen as ‘wicked and villainously designing wretches who fomented the rebellion’.[19] The first response to the loyalist history in Ireland was an alternative but parallel history produced to suit a Catholic and nationalist agenda. In many loyalist histories, the role of Catholicism in the rebellion was greatly exaggerated[20] but ironically this distortion later suited the aims of the Catholic Church in Ireland, allowing it to claim a leadership role in Irish nationalism during the nineteenth century. The nationalist and largely Catholic history of the rising was determined by the needs of the Catholic Church when faced with the nationalist revival and the socialist influenced Fenian movement one hundred years later. This is a history that had several aims; to hide the role of the church hierarchy in condemning the rising and instead claim that the church led the rising; to blame the failure of the rising on underground revolutionary organisation as an attack on the Fenians; and to minimise the involvement of Northern Presbyterians and democratic ideas. The reality that it actively sided with the British during the rising was ignored and the role of the few Catholic priests who took part in the rising, such as Fr. John Murphy, was overemphasised. The secular Enlightenment ideology of the mostly Protestant United Irish leadership was deliberately obscured.[21] By the centenary of the Rebellion in 1898, conservative Irish nationalists and the Catholic Church would both claim that the United Irishmen had been fighting for ‘Faith and Fatherland’ and this version of events is still, to some extent, the lasting popular memory of the rebellion.[22]

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[1] Whitaker, Anne-Maree, ‘Swords to ploughshares? The 1798 Irish rebels in New South Wales’, Labour History, Vol. 75, (1998), pp. 9-32.

[2] See especially the discussion above, pp. 227-253.

[3] Elliott, Marianne, When God Took Sides: Religion and Identity in Irish History, (Oxford University Press), 2009.

[4] Small, Stephen, Political Thought in Ireland 1776-1798: Republicanism, Patriotism and Radicalism, (Oxford University Press), 2002, provides a detailed analysis of the development of Irish Patriotism into radical republicanism.

[5] See, Morley, Vincent, Irish opinion and the American Revolution, 1760-1783, (Cambridge University Press), 2002.

[6] On Grattan see, Madden, D.O., (ed.), The speeches of the Right Hon. Henry Grattan: to which is added his letter on the union, with a commentary on his career and character, 2 Vols. (J. Duffy), 1822, Grattan, Henry, Memoirs of the life and times of the Rt. Hon. Henry Grattan by his son, 2 Vols. (H. Colburn), 1839, 1846. See also, Mansergh D., Grattan’s failure Parliamentary Opposition and the People in Ireland, (Irish Academic Press), 2005.

[7] Rogers, Patrick, The Irish Volunteers and Catholic emancipation (1778-1793); a neglected phase of Ireland’s history, (Burns, Oates & Washbourne), 1934, a slightly romanticised account. Higgins, Padhraig, A Nation of Politicians: Gender, Patriotism, and Political Culture in Late Eighteenth-century Ireland, (Four Courts Press), 2010 should now be regarded as the definitive work.

[8] Smyth, Jim, (ed.), Revolution, counter-revolution, and union: Ireland in the 1790s, (Cambridge University Press), 2000, especially pp. 1-38.

[9] Cit, ibid, Smyth, Jim, The Men of No Property: Irish radicals and popular Politics in the Late Eighteenth Century, p. 168.

[10] Ibid, Elliott, Marianne, Partners in Revolution: the United Irishmen and France, ibid, Dickson, David Keogh, Dáire and Whelan, Kevin, (eds.), The United Irishmen: republicanism, radicalism, and rebellion and Curtin, Nancy, The United Irishmen: popular politics in Ulster and Dublin, 1791-1798, (Oxford University Press), 1998

[11] From its origins in Armagh in 1784 as the Catholic faction in a local sectarian feud, the Defender movement had gradually spread along lines of religious cleavage or cultural frontiers into County Down, Louth and south Ulster. Stimulated by the news and controversy about the French revolution and encouraged by the Catholic agitation, the Defenders were transformed into a politicised secret society. This process was then reinforced and the Defender organisation expanded from Meath across the north midlands into Connaught, by the continuing economic, political, and law-and-order crisis. By 1795, Defenderism had a presence in at least 16 counties and in Dublin. They had successfully infiltrated the militia and knit far-flung lodges into a co-ordinated, if not well-disciplined, organisation. Defenderism had evolved a chameleon ideology infinitely adaptable to varying local conditions: on some occasions sectarian, then agrarian, always francophile and anti-ascendancy. With the emergence of a recognisable regional command structure in Ulster and a Catholic leadership aligned to the radical northern wing of the United Irishmen, the stage had been set for the making of a revolutionary coalition.

[12] Elliott, Marianne, Wolfe Tone: Prophet of Irish Independence, (Yale University Press), 1991.

[13] Ibid, Pakenham, T., The Year of Liberty: the great Irish rebellion of 1798 remains an excellent narrative. See also, Bartlett, Thomas, (ed.), 1798: a bicentenary perspective, (Four Courts), 2003.

[14] Chambers, Liam, Rebellion in Kildare 1790-1803, (Four Courts), 1998.

[15] O’Donnell, Ruán, The rebellion in Wicklow, 1798, (Irish Academic Press), 2003.

[16] Hay, Edward, History of the Insurrection of County Wexford, (J. Stockdale), 1803, Wheeler, H.F.B. & Broadley, A.M., The war in Wexford: an account of the rebellion in the south of Ireland in 1798, told from original documents, (J. Lane), 1910, Dickson, Charles, The Wexford Rising in 1798: its causes and course, (The Kerryman), 1955 and Keogh, Dáire and Furlong, Nicholas, (eds.), The Mighty Wave: the 1798 rebellion in Wexford, (Four Courts), 1996.

[17] Stewart, A.T.Q., The Summer Soldiers: the 1798 Rebellion in Antrim and Down, (Blackstaff Press), 1995.

[18] The leadership of the rebellion both United Irishmen and the Catholic priests tried to defuse the sectarian tension and prevent massacres. None of this is to deny that there were sectarian tensions and indeed sectarian elements to the massacres, perhaps most openly after the rebel army had abandoned Wexford.

[19] Freeman’s Journal, 22 May 1841.

[20] See, for example, Musgrave, Richard, Memoirs of the different rebellions in Ireland, 2 Vols. Vol. 2, (R. Marchbank), 1801 who spent over half of this volume on the Wexford rising but paid far less attention to the rising in Ulster.

[21] Kavanagh, Fr. Patrick F., A Popular History of the Insurrection of 1798: derived from every available written record and reliable tradition, (M.H. Gill & Son), 1880.

[22] See Geary, Lawrence M., Rebellion and remembrance in modern Ireland, (Four Courts), 2001.