Phantom Terror: The Threat of Revolution and the Repression of Liberty 1789-1848. Adam Zamoyski
devolution, and while even the most radical continued to toast the king, the questions of reform and self-rule became entangled with notions emanating from Paris.
In October 1791 a group of young radicals, both Catholic and Presbyterian, including Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Hamilton Rowan and Theobald Wolfe Tone, set up the Society of United Irishmen in Belfast. Although, or perhaps because, its motives were confused and its membership inconsistent, it grew rapidly, with branches springing up in Dublin and many other places. The organisation was not sectarian in character, and the one sentiment common to the whole membership was resentment of the government at Westminster and its perceived arrogance. When that government took Britain to war against France at the beginning of 1793, it strained the island’s already weak sense of loyalty, and some began to see France as a more sympathetic partner than England.
Although Catholics were granted some additional rights in 1793, the sectarian gap widened, as a consequence of often entirely local factors. In Armagh, Protestants formed bands known as the Peep o’Day Boys to harass Catholics considered to be getting above themselves economically. The Catholics responded by founding the Defender movement, and the violence spread, with varying motivations and inspirations attendant on regional gripes. The situation was not improved by the irresolute and often panicky behaviour of the lord lieutenant, the effective viceroy of the island, ruling from Dublin Castle. France, which saw Ireland as a convenient place in which to make trouble for the British government and a potential back door through which to invade the United Kingdom, began to meddle.
The London government took the step of suppressing the Dublin United Irishmen and arresting their leaders, and sent out a new lord lieutenant, Earl Fitzwilliam, to resolve the crisis. Burke had been calling for the sweeping away of penal laws against Catholics, arguing that the one thing which could prevent the Jacobin pestilence spreading to the island and turning it against England was the Catholic Church. Fitzwilliam agreed, and moved energetically to bring in Catholic emancipation, but when he heard of this Pitt grew alarmed and promptly withdrew him. The disappointment felt by Catholics turned to anger, and sectarian animosities flared. Protestants who felt under threat founded the Orange Order, while United Irishmen re-organised along paramilitary lines and, under the leadership of Fitzgerald, began to seek French assistance to break away from English rule. Other United Irishmen, such as Wolfe Tone, had fled to Paris, where they began plotting a French invasion for the liberation of the island.6
The Irish Insurrection Act, passed in 1796, which gave magistrates sweeping powers and provided for the mobilisation of the militia, only led to further polarisation. A countrywide search for weapons resulted in the houses of Catholics being burned down and their owners arrested and flogged. At the same time, it was not at all clear where the loyalties of the militia and the yeomanry being raised by the Protestant landowners really lay. The situation was nevertheless under control, if the twenty-seven-year-old MP and colonel of the Londonderry militia, Robert Stewart, is to be believed. ‘Indeed I have no apprehension that the mischief existent within can ever be productive of any serious calamity, unless the enemy should pay us a visit,’ he wrote to Pitt on 17 October 1796.7
As it happened, the enemy were planning a visit, and two months later a force of 14,500 French troops under the command of General Lazare Hoche set sail from the port of Brest bound for the south-west of Ireland. Had they been able to land there the island might well have been lost to the British crown. Although there was a large standing army in Ireland, it was poorly commanded and equipped, and was scattered around the country. As it was, the French expedition was cursed from the outset. One vessel went down with its full complement of crew and troops in sight of the French coast, and over half of the others were blown out into the Atlantic by violent gales. Only a few reached Bantry Bay, with 6,500 men on board, and rode at anchor there for a week in fierce blizzards vainly waiting for the rest to join them before abandoning the enterprise and sailing back to France.
No armed bands of United Irishmen appeared on shore to support the French in the course of that week, but the British government could not be sure that they would not come out on some future occasion. The French actually landed some troops in the south of Wales in February 1797, but they re-embarked after a couple of hours, once they had realised that there was no wish by the local population to have anything to do with them. The Edinburgh radical Thomas Muir, transported to New South Wales in 1793, had escaped and was in Paris agitating for a landing in Scotland. There were reports of activity there by a secret association of United Scotsmen, and of the existence of some thousand United Englishmen in Manchester mobilising in sympathy with their Irish counterparts. There were certainly some among the English radicals who were ‘for putting an end to government by any means, foreign or domestic’.8
Another French invasion was planned for July 1797, this time with the use of the Dutch fleet. Although it was cancelled, the threat lingered. In March 1798 the government imposed martial law in Ireland, and magistrates took suspects into custody and impounded arms. Sympathisers of gaoled individuals would gather together to dig up their potato crops so they should not be lost. The authorities saw such activities as intended ‘to terrify the peaceable and well-disposed’, and as part of a pattern of meeting ‘under various pretences, such as funerals, foot-ball meetings, &c. with a view of displaying their strength, giving the people the habit of assembling from great distances upon an order being issued, and making them more accustomed to shew themselves openly in support of the cause’. The cause did not benefit much.9
In May, one faction of the United Irishmen started a rebellion near Dublin which spread rapidly, generating a rash of savage skirmishes of terrible intensity which cost some 30,000 lives before it was put down at Vinegar Hill in County Wexford on 21 June. A ‘Turn out’ in Antrim that same month proved hardly more effectual: after two days of random and mostly criminal violence, the insurgents melted away at the sight of small detachments of regular troops.10
In August, a French force of a thousand commanded by General Humbert did manage to land, at Killala. It marched inland, joined by a rabble of locals brandishing banners with inscriptions such as ‘France and the Virgin Mary’, but surrendered when confronted by a force of regulars. Another landing was made on the coast of Donegal in September, but for all his bluster, its Irish leader, Napper Tandy, was unable to muster support on the ground, and sailed away having achieved nothing. A third force, under the command of General Hardy and Wolfe Tone, was intercepted at sea and headed off. With plenty of regulars and some 50,000 yeomanry to defend the island from the French and their potato-digging allies, the only thing British rule needed to fear in Ireland was its own incompetence: unnecessarily bloody reprisals for the rising, followed by the imposition of a less than sensible Act of Union and the failure to emancipate the Catholics, would lead to further rebellion.11
That was not how the authorities viewed the situation. ‘Upon a review of all the circumstances which have come under the consideration of your Committee,’ ran the concluding paragraphs of the Report of the Committee of Secrecy of the House of Commons in 1799, ‘they are deeply impressed with the conviction – that the safety and tranquillity of these kingdoms have, at different periods from the year 1791 to the present time, been brought into imminent hazard, by the traitorous plans and practices of societies, acting upon the principle, and devoted to the views, of our inveterate foreign enemy.’ It went on to declare that although only the United Irishmen had actually risen, ‘the societies instituted on similar principles in this country had all an undoubted tendency to produce similar effects …’12
There was certainly some anti-government agitation, with Whigs and radicals holding meetings calling for reform and an end to the war. Charles Grey tabled a motion for parliamentary reform in the House of Commons, and in their speeches both he and Fox praised aspects of the French Revolution. On 18 May 1798, at a dinner for a thousand people at the Crown and Anchor in the Strand to celebrate Fox’s birthday, the Duke of Norfolk proposed a number of subversive toasts. In June, the Whig Club ostentatiously presented the Polish revolutionary Tadeusz