THE INSURRECTION OF 1798.
It is no longer matter of assertion merely, but simple matter of fact,
that the English and Irish ministers of George III. regarded the
insurrectionary movement of the United Irishmen as at once a pretext
and a means for effecting a legislative union between the two
countries. Lord Camden, the Viceroy who succeeded Lord Fitzwilliam in
March, '95—with Mr. Pelham as his Chief Secretary, in a letter to his
relative, the Hon. Robert Stewart, afterwards Lord Castlereagh,
announced this policy, in unmistakable terms, so early as 1793; and all
the official correspondence published of late years, concerning that
period of British and Irish history, establishes the fact beyond the
possibility of denial.
Such being the design, it was neither the wish nor the interest of the
Government, that the insurrection should be suppressed, unless the
Irish constitution could be extinguished with it. To that end they
proceeded in the coercive legislation described in a previous chapter;
to that end they armed with irresponsible power the military officers
and the oligarchical magistracy; with that view they quartered those
yeomanry regiments, which were known to be composed of Orangemen, on
the wretched peasantry of the most Catholic counties, while the corps
in which Catholics or United Irishmen were most numerous, were sent
over to England, in exchange for Scotch fencibles and Welsh cavalry.
The outrages committed by all these volunteer troops, but above all by
the Orange yeomanry of the country, were so monstrous, that the gallant
and humane Sir John Moore exclaimed, "If I were an Irishman, I would be
a rebel!"
It was, indeed, impossible for any man, however obscure, or however
eminent, to live longer in the country, without taking sides. Yet the
choice was at best a hard and unhappy one. On the one side was the
Castle, hardly concealing its intention of goading on the people, in
order to rob them of their Parliament; on the other was the injured
multitude, bound together by a secret system which proved in reality no
safeguard against traitors in their own ranks, and which had been
placed by its Protestant chiefs under the auspices of an infidel
republic. Between the two courses men made election according to their
bias or their necessities, or as they took local or general, political
or theological views of the situation. Both Houses of the legislature
unanimously sustained the government against the insurrection; as did
the judges, the bar, and the Anglican clergy and bishops. The
Presbyterian body were in the beginning all but unanimous for a
republican revolution and the French alliance; the great majority of
the Catholic peasantry were, as the crisis increased, driven into the
same position, while all their bishops and a majority of the Catholic
aristocracy, adhered to that which they, with the natural tendency of
their respective orders, considered the side of religion and authority.
Thus was the nation sub-divided within itself; Protestant civilian from
Protestant ecclesiastic, Catholic layman from Catholic priest, tenant
from lord, neighbour from neighbour, father from son, and friend from
friend.
During the whole of '97, the opposing parties were in a ferment of
movement and apprehension. As the year wore on, the administration,
both English and Irish, began to feel that the danger was more
formidable than they had foreseen. The timely storm which had blown
Grouchy out of Bantry Bay, the previous Christmas, could hardly be
reckoned on again, though the settled hostility of the French
government knew no change. Thoroughly well informed by their legion of
spies both on the Continent and in Ireland, every possible military
precaution was taken. The Lord Lieutenant's proclamation for disarming
the people, issued in May, was rigorously enforced by General Johnstone
in the South, General Hutchinson in the West, and Lord Lake in the
North. Two hundred thousand pikes and pike-heads were said to have been
discovered or surrendered during the year, and several thousand
firelocks. The yeomanry, and English and Scotch corps amounted to
35,000 men, while the regular troops were increased to 50,000 and
subsequently to 80,000, including three regiments of the Guards. The
defensive works at Cork, and other vulnerable points were strengthened
at an immense cost; the "Pigeon House" fort, near Dublin, was enlarged,
for the city itself was pronounced by General Vallancy, Colonel
Packenham, and other engineer authorities dangerously weak, if not
wholly untenable. A system of telegraphic signals was established from
all points of the coast with the Capital, and every precaution taken
against the surprise of another French invasion.
During the summer assize, almost every considerable town and circuit
had its state trial. The sheriffs had been carefully selected
beforehand by the Castle, and the juries were certain to be of "the
right sort," under the auspices of such sheriffs. Immense sums in the
aggregate were contributed by the United Irish for the defence of their
associates; at the Down assizes alone, not less than seven hundred or
eight hundred guineas were spent in fees and retainers; but at the
close of the term, Mr. Beresford was able to boast to his friend Lord
Auckland, that but one of all the accused had escaped the penalty of
death or banishment! The military tribunals, however, did not wait for
the idle formalities of the civil courts. Soldiers and civilians,
yeomen and townsmen, against whom the informer pointed his finger, were
taken out, and summarily executed. Ghastly forms hung upon the
thick-set gibbets, not only in the market places of country towns, and
before the public prisons, but on all the bridges of the metropolis.
Many of the soldiers, in every military district were shot weekly and
almost daily for real or alleged complicity with the rebels. The horrid
torture of picketing, and the blood-stained lash, were constantly
resorted to, to extort accusations or confessions. Over all these
atrocities the furious and implacable spirit of Lord Clare presided in
Council, and the equally furious and implacable Luttrel, Lord
Carhampton, as Commander-in-Chief. All moderate councils were denounced
as nothing short of treason, and even the elder Beresford, the Privy
Counsellor, was compelled to complain of the violence of his noble
associates, and his inability to restrain the ferocity of his own
nearest relatives—meaning probably his son John Claudius, and his
son-in-law, Sir George Hill.
It was while this spirit was abroad, a spirit as destructive as ever
animated the Councils of Sylla or Marius in Old Rome, or prompted the
decrees of Robespierre or Marat in France, that the genius and courage
of one man redeemed the lost reputation of the law, and upheld against
all odds the sacred claims of personal liberty. This man was John
Philpot Curran, the most dauntless of advocates, one of the truest and
bravest of his race. Although a politician of the school of Grattan,
and wholly untainted with French principles, he identified himself
absolutely with his unhappy clients, "predoomed to death." The genius
of patriotic resistance which seemed to have withdrawn from the Island
with Grattan's secession from Parliament, now re-appeared in the last
place where it might have been expected—in those courts of death,
rather than of justice—before those predetermined juries, besides the
hopeless inmates of the crowded dock, personified in the person of
Curran. Often at midnight, amid the clash of arms, his wonderful
pleadings were delivered; sometimes, as in Dublin, where the court
rooms adjoined the prisons, the condemned, or the confined, could hear,
in their cells, his piercing accents breaking the stillness of the
early morning, pleading for justice and mercy—pleading always with
superhuman perseverance, but almost always in vain. Neither menaces of
arrest, nor threats of assassination, had power to intimidate that
all-daring spirit; nor, it may be safely said, can the whole library of
human history present us a form of heroism superior in kind or degree
to that which this illustrious advocate exhibited during nearly two
years, when he went forth daily, with his life in his hand, in the holy
hope to snatch some human victim from the clutch of the destroyer
thirsting for his blood.
In November, '97, some said from fear of personal consequences, some
from official pressure in a high quarter, Lord Carhampton resigned the
command of the forces, and Sir Ralph Abercromby was appointed in his
stead. There could not be a more striking illustration of the system of
terror patronized by government than was furnished in the case of Sir
Ralph as Commander-in-Chief. That distinguished soldier, with his half
century of services at his back, had not been a week in Dublin before
he discovered the weakness of the Viceroy, and the violence of his
principal advisers, the Chancellor, the Speaker, Lord Castlereagh and
the Beresfords. Writing in confidence to his son, he says, "The abuses
of all kinds I found here can scarcely be believed or enumerated." The
instances he cites of such abuses are sufficiently horrible to justify
the strong language which brought down on his head so much hostility,
when he declared in his proclamation of February '98, that the Irish
army was "formidable to every one but the enemy." These well-known
opinions were so repugnant to the Castle policy, that that party held a
caucus in the Speaker's Chambers, at which it was proposed to pass a
vote of censure in Parliament on the General, whom they denounced as "a
sulky mule," "a Scotch beast," and by other similar names. Though the
Parliamentary censure dropped, they actually compelled Lord Camden to
call on him to retract his magnanimous order. To this humiliation the
veteran stooped "for the sake of the King's service," but at the same
time he proffered his resignation. After two months' correspondence, it
was finally accepted, and the soldier who was found too jealous of the
rights of the people to be a fit instrument of their destruction,
escaped from his high position, not without a profound sentiment of
relief. His verdict upon the barbarous policy pursued in his time was
always expressed, frankly and decisively. His entire correspondence,
private and public, bears one and the same burthen—the violence,
cruelty, and tyranny of Lord Camden's chief advisers, and the pitiful
weakness of the Viceroy himself. Against the infamous plan of letting
loose a lustful and brutal soldiery to live at "free quarters" on a
defenceless and disarmed people—an outrage against which Englishmen had
taken perpetual security at _their_ revolution, as may be seen in "the
Bill of Rights," he struggled during his six months' command, but with
no great success. The plan, with all its horrors, was upheld by the
Lord-Lieutenant, and more than any other cause, precipitated the
rebellion which exploded at last, just as Sir Ralph was allowed to
retire from the country. His temporary successor, Lord Lake, was
troubled with no such scruples as the gallant old Scotsman.
Events followed each other in the first months of 1798, fast and
furiously. Towards the end of February, Arthur O'Conor, Father James
Quigley, the brothers John and Benjamin Binns, were arrested at Margate
on their way to France; on the 6th of March, the _Press_ newspaper, the
Dublin organ of the party, as the _Star_ had been the Ulster organ, was
seized by Government, Lord Edward Fitzgerald and William Sampson being
at the time in the office. On the 12th of March, on the information of
the traitor, Thomas Reynolds, the Leinster delegates were seized in
conclave, with all their papers, at the house of Oliver Bond, in Bridge
Street, Dublin. On the same information. Addis Emmet and Dr. McNevin
were taken in their own houses, and Sampson in the north of England: of
all the executive, Lord Edward alone escaping those sent in search of
him. This was, as Tone notes in his journal, on the ill news reaching
France, "a terrible blow." O'Conor's arrest in Kent, Sampson's in
Carlisle, and the other arrests in Belfast and Dublin, proved too truly
that treason was at work, and that the much-prized oath of secrecy was
no protection whatever against the devices of the Castle and the
depravity of its secret agents. The extent to which that treason
extended, the number of associates who were in the pay of their deadly
enemies, was never known to the United Irish leaders; time has,
however, long since "revealed the secrets of the prison-house," and we
know now, that men they trusted with all their plans and hopes, such as
McNally and McGucken, were quite as deep in the conspiracy to destroy
them as Mr. Reynolds and Captain Armstrong.
The most influential members of the Dublin Society remaining at large
contrived to correspond with each other, or to meet by stealth after
the arrest at Bond's. The vacancies in the Executive were filled up by
the brothers John and Henry Sheares, both barristers, sons of a wealthy
Cork banker, and former member of Parliament, and by Mr. Lawless, a
surgeon. For two months longer these gentlemen continued to act in
concert with Lord Edward, who remained undetected, notwithstanding all
the efforts of Government, from the 12th of March till the 19th of May
following. During those two months the new directors devoted themselves
with the utmost energy to hurrying on the armament of the people, and
especially to making proselytes among the militia, where the gain of
one man armed and disciplined was justly accounted equal to the
enlistment of three or four ordinary adherents. This part of their plan
brought the brothers Sheares into contact, among others, with Captain
John Warneford Armstrong, of the Queen's County Yeomanry, whom they
supposed they had won over, but who was, in reality, a better-class
spy, acting under Lord Castlereagh's instructions. Armstrong cultivated
them sedulously, dined at their table, echoed their opinions, and led
the credulous brothers on to their destruction. All at last was
determined on; the day of the rising was fixed—the 23rd day of May—and
the signal was to be the simultaneous stoppage of the mail coaches,
which started nightly from the Dublin post-office, to every quarter of
the kingdom. But the counterplot anticipated the plot. Lord Edward,
betrayed by a person called Higgins, proprietor of the _Freeman's
Journal_, was taken on the 19th of May, after a desperate struggle with
Majors Swan and Sirr, and Captain Ryan, in his hiding-place in Thomas
Street; the brothers Sheares were arrested in their own house on the
morning of the 21st, while Surgeon Lawless escaped from the city, and
finally from the country, to France. Thus, for the second time, was the
insurrection left without a head; but the organization had proceeded
too far to be any longer restrained, and the Castle, moreover, to use
the expression of Lord Castlereagh, "took means to make it explode."
The first intelligence of the rebellion was received in Dublin on the
morning of the 24th of May. At Rathfarnham, within three miles of the
city, 500 insurgents attacked Lord Ely's yeomanry corps with some
success, till Lord Roden's dragoons, hastily despatched from the city,
compelled them to retreat, with the loss of some prisoners and two men
killed, whom Mr. Beresford saw the next day, literally "_cut to
pieces_—a horrid sight." At Dunboyne the insurgents piked an escort of
the Reay Fencibles (Scotch) passing through their village, and carried
off their baggage. At Naas, a large popular force attacked the
garrison, consisting of regulars, Ancient Britons (Welsh), part of a
regiment of dragoons, and the Armagh Militia; the attack was renewed
three times with great bravery, but finally, discipline, as it always
will, prevailed over mere numbers, and the assailants were repulsed
with the loss of 140 of their comrades. At Prosperous, where they cut
off to a man a strong garrison composed of North Cork Militia, under
Captain Swayne, the rising was more successful. The commander in this
exploit was Dr. Esmonde, brother of the Wexford baronet, who, being
betrayed by one of his own subalterns, was the next morning arrested at
breakfast in the neighbourhood, and suffered death at Dublin on the
14th of the following month.
There could hardly be found a more unfavourable field for a peasant war
than the generally level and easily accessible county of Kildare, every
parish of which is within a day's march of Dublin. From having been the
residence of Lord Edward, it was, perhaps, one of the most highly
organized parts of Leinster, but as it had the misfortune to be
represented by Thomas Reynolds, as county delegate, it laboured under
the disadvantage of having its organization better known to the
government than any other. We need hardly be surprised, therefore, to
find that the military operations in this county were all over in ten
days or a fortnight; when those who had neither surrendered nor fallen,
fell back into Meath or Connaught, or effected a junction with the
Wicklow rebels in their mountain fastnesses. Their struggle, though so
brief, had been creditable for personal bravery. Attacked by a numerous
cavalry and militia under General Wilford, by 2,500 men, chiefly
regulars, under General Dundas, and by 800 regulars brought up by
forced marches from Limerick, under Sir James Duff, they showed
qualities, which, if well directed, would have established for their
possessors a high military reputation. At Monastereven they were
repulsed with loss, the defenders of the town being in part Catholic
loyalists, under Captain Cassidy; at Rathangan, they were more
successful, taking and holding the town for several days; at Clane, the
captors of Prosperous were repulsed; while at Old Killcullen, their
associates drove back General Dundas' advance, with the loss of 22
regulars and Captain Erskine killed. Sir James Duff's wanton cruelty in
sabring and shooting down an unarmed multitude on the Curragh, won him
the warm approval of the extermination party in the Capital, while
Generals Wilford and Dundas narrowly escaped being reprimanded for
granting a truce to the insurgents under Aylmer, and accepting of the
surrender of that leader and his companions. By the beginning of June
the six Kildare encampments of insurgents were totally dispersed, and
their most active officers in prison or fugitives west or south.
By a preconcerted arrangement, the local chiefs of the insurrection in
Dublin and Meath, gathered with their men on the third day after the
outbreak, at the historic hill of Tara. Here they expected to be joined
by the men of Cavan, Longford, Louth and Monaghan; but before the
northerners reached the trysting place, three companies of the Reay
Fencibles, under Captain McClean, the Kells and Navan Yeomanry, under
Captain Preston, (afterwards Lord Tara,) and a troop of cavalry under
Lord Fingal, surrounded the royal hill. The insurgents, commanded by
Gilshine and other leaders, intrenched themselves in the graveyard
which occupies the summit of Tara, and stoutly defended their position.
Twenty-six of the Highlanders and six of the Yeomanry fell in the
assault, but the bullet reached farther than the pike, and the
defenders were driven, after a sharp action, over the brow of the
eminence, and many of them shot or sabred down as they fled.
Southward from the Capital the long pent-up flame of disaffection broke
out on the same memorable day, May 23rd. At Dunlavin, an abortive
attempt on the barrack revealed the fact that many of the Yeomanry were
thoroughly with the insurgents. Hardly had the danger from without
passed over, when a military inquiry was improvised. By this tribunal,
nineteen Wexford, and nine Kildare Yeomanry, were ordered to be shot,
and the execution of the sentence followed immediately on its rending.
At Blessington, the town was seized, but a nocturnal attack on Carlow
was repulsed with great loss. In this last affair, the rebels had
_rendezvoused_ in the domain of Sir Edward Crosbie, within two miles of
the town. Here arms were distributed and orders given by their leader,
named Roche. Silently and quickly they reached the town they hoped to
surprise. But the regular troops, of which the garrison was chiefly
composed, were on the alert, though their preparations were made full
as silently. When the peasantry emerged from Tullow Street, into an
exposed space, a deadly fire was opened upon them from the houses on
all sides. The regulars, in perfect security themselves, and abundantly
supplied with ammunition, shot them down with deadly unerring aim. The
people soon found there was nothing for it but retreat, and carrying
off as best they could their killed and wounded, they retired sorely
discomfited. For alleged complicity in this attack, Sir Edward Crosbie
was shortly afterward arrested, tried and executed. There was not a
shadow of proof against him; but he was known to sympathize with the
sufferings of his countrymen, to have condemned in strong language the
policy of provocation, and that was sufficient. He paid with the
penalty of his head for the kindness and generosity of his heart.