Beauty and Atrocity: People, Politics and Ireland’s Fight for Peace. Joshua Levine
and Protestants. Catholics were subjected to repressive Penal Laws by the British authorities, but the United Irishmen were not Catholics; the original members were Protestants, mostly Presbyterians (known as ‘dissenters’) who were also subjected to discriminatory measures. Many tens of thousands of Presbyterians had left Ulster during the eighteenth century to begin new lives in the American colonies, where they contributed to the revolutionary fervour of the War of Independence. The democratic ideas of Tom Paine that inspired the American revolutionaries also stirred the United Irishmen. It would not be true to say that the bulk of the Ulster Presbyterians were sympathetic to Catholic grievances; the vast majority were sectarian in outlook. Nevertheless, there were those who were keen to sever links with Britain, and a few who were motivated by a desire for government by election and representation. While the Provisional IRA would one day be made up almost exclusively of Catholics, the leaders of the first republican movement to fight for an independent Ireland were Protestants.
Archibald Hamilton Rowan was an Anglican, born and raised in England, and educated at Westminster School, where he displayed ‘animal spirits and love of bustle’. His Cambridge tutor was John Jebb, an Irish radical who influenced his thinking, and an acquaintance was Lord Sandwich, with whom he ate an unusual meal of ‘thin slices of bread and butter with cold meat between each’. As a young man he went to live in France, where, during the American War of Independence, he displayed an early radical streak by introducing Benjamin Franklin, the American representative in Paris, to two Englishmen who wanted to enlist in the American forces. He came to Ireland in 1783 and became known as a defender of the rights of the oppressed after he espoused the case of a 12-year-old girl, Mary Neal, who had been abducted by the owner of a bawdy house. He became a member of the United Irishmen in November 1791 and wrote of the need for ‘reformation of the present state of the representation of the people’. He took to wandering around Dublin in a green uniform and standing up in theatres and shouting when ‘God Save the King’ was played. In 1794 he was convicted of distributing inflammatory material – a pamphlet entitled ‘Citizens to Arms!’ – and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment.
While in prison he was regularly visited by a close associate, Theobald Wolfe Tone, an Anglican lawyer from Belfast, who is nowadays the most celebrated of the United Irishmen. Hamilton Rowan asked Wolfe Tone to draft a memorandum to send to revolutionary France, encouraging the French to send an invasion force to Ireland. Wolfe Tone composed the memorandum, which assured the French that they would receive support from ‘the great bulk of the people’: 900,000 Presbyterians ‘from reason and reflection’ and 3,150,000 Catholics ‘from hatred of the English name’. Hamilton Rowan made copies of the memorandum in his own hand – and one of these copies fell into the possession of the British authorities. Realizing that he would be convicted of high treason and executed, he conceived, aided by his wife, a plan to escape from prison. He persuaded his gaoler that he would have to return home briefly in order to sign papers relating to the sale of a property. For a £100 bribe the gaoler agreed to accompany him to the house and escort him back to prison. This, at least, is the official version; Denys Rowan Hamilton said that his ancestor ‘bribed his gaoler to let him out of prison to screw his wife’. Either way Hamilton Rowan describes in his autobiography what happened next: ‘I then descended from the window by a knotted rope, which was made fast to the bedpost and reached down to the garden. I went to the stable, took my horse, and rode to the head of Sackville Street, where Mat Dowling had appointed to meet me…Some of my friends advised my taking my pistols with me; but I had made up my mind not to be taken alive, so I only put a razor in my pocket.’
Hamilton Rowan was taken first to the seaside house of a United Irishman, and then onto a boat owned by smugglers. As the little vessel passed the west coast of England, it caught sight of the British fleet, but Hamilton Rowan arrived safely in revolutionary France. But his troubles were not at an end. Expecting to be welcomed by the French as a republican hero and an enemy of Britain, he found himself imprisoned by the local authorities on suspicion of being a British spy. He was only released when his plight came to the attention of a prominent official who happened to be Irish.
Once his identity had been verified, Hamilton Rowan was presented to Robespierre, the driving force behind the reign of terror that was gripping France. He set about convincing the French to mount an invasion of Ireland, with the aim of securing its independence. His plan was that he himself would lead the invasion; the official who placed the plan before Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety described Rowan Hamilton as ‘the most striking patriot in Ireland’. It must have looked to Rowan Hamilton as though he was destined to become Ireland’s great revolutionary leader, but the plan came to nothing. Robespierre and the Jacobins were overthrown, and Hamilton Rowan became ‘much discontented with the distracted state of Paris, where they were too busy with their own intestine divisions to think of assisting Ireland’. He hurriedly left France for a slightly more established beacon of liberty – America.
The experience of living in Paris during the bloody reign of terror, and perhaps also the disappointment of watching his heroic destiny fail to materialize, seems to have dulled Hamilton Rowan’s revolutionary zeal. From Philadelphia he wrote to his wife: ‘I owe to you candidly, when it is of no avail, that my ideas of reform, and of another word which begins with the same letter, are very much altered by living for twelve months in France; and that I never wish to see the one or the other procured by force.’ Nevertheless, within months he had been joined in Philadelphia by Wolfe Tone, whom he offered to introduce to the French Minister to the United States. For a while Wolfe Tone settled down to live as a farmer in Princeton, but he did not admire the attitudes he encountered, describing Americans as ‘a selfish, churlish, unsocial race, totally absorbed in making money’. While Hamilton Rowan remained in America, eking out a living as a farmer, dyer, and brewer, Wolfe Tone sailed to France, where he resumed his efforts on behalf of the Irish people ‘to break the connection with England, the never failing source of all our political evils’. Wolfe Tone achieved what Hamilton Rowan had not: he persuaded the French to mount an invasion of Ireland in 1796, which might have succeeded had the thirty-five expeditionary ships, laden with thousands of French troops, not been prevented by bad weather from landing in Bantry Bay in County Cork.
Wolfe Tone was on board a French ship during the failed Bantry Bay expedition, and he persuaded Napoleon Bonaparte to launch another invasion fleet in 1798. The United Irishmen attempted to stir up an internal rebellion to coincide with the French invasion, but the government’s network of informers was effective, and the insurrection was ruthlessly put down in most areas. Only in County Wexford did a band of Catholic rebels mount a serious challenge to the army, but their indiscipline and lack of strategy eventually ensured their defeat. A small French fleet landed in County Mayo, but its troops surrendered to government forces when they could find no internal rebellion with which to join.
Wolfe Tone himself arrived with a subsequent French expedition, which was defeated by a British fleet in Lough Swilly. He was arrested and taken to Dublin, where he was sentenced to hang. While in custody he slit his throat with a penknife and a week later he died of his wounds. The rebellion of the United Irishmen was at an end, but republicans still gather at Wolfe Tone’s grave in Bodenstown every year to honour the man they revere as the father of republicanism.
While Wolfe Tone was attempting to bring revolution to Ireland, Archibald Hamilton Rowan was living a quiet life of near penury in America. At home in Ireland, his wife was attempting to restore his reputation in the hope that he might be allowed to return. He was eventually given permission to come back, first to Europe, then to England, and finally to Ireland. He became the master of Killyleagh Castle in 1806, where he retained his liberal beliefs to the end of his life. He was known as a benevolent landlord who reduced his tenants’ rents during times of economic distress. He also expressed a strong disapproval of slavery; a story in his autobiography recalls an encounter with a slave in New York State in 1799: ‘I lost one of my gloves, and having searched back the road for it in vain, I continued my route. Overtaking a Negro, I threw him the other, saying that “I had lost the fellow on that hill somewhere; that perhaps he might find it, and he never was possessed of such a pair in his life.” The fellow smiled. “No, Master, you not lost it; here it is;” and he took the fellow out of his bosom and gave them both to me. And this man was a slave, whose portion was stripes, and black dog his appellation from a whey-faced