Thomas Paliser Russell (21 November 1767 – 21 October 1803) was a founding member, and leading organiser, of the United Irishmen marked by his radical-democratic and millenarian convictions. A member of the movement's northern executive in Belfast, and a key figure in promoting a republican alliance with the agrarian Catholic Defenders, he was arrested in advance of the risings of 1798 and held until 1802. He was executed in 1803, following Robert Emmet's aborted rising in Dublin for which he had tried, but failed, to raise support among United and Defender veterans in the north.
Background
Russell was born in Dromahane, County Cork to an Ascendancy family that, early 1770s, moved to Dublin when his father, a veteran of the American Revolutionary War, was appointed Captain of Invalids at the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham. At the age of fifteen, he sailed with the 100th Regiment of Foot (Loyal Lincolnshire Regiment), his brother's regiment, to India. In July 1783 he was commissioned an ensign into the 100th Foot and saw action in the Second Anglo-Mysore War. At Cannanore he distinguished himself by carrying his wounded commanding officer from the battlefield. His services made him "favourably known" to Sir John Burgoyne and Lord Cornwallis. He was, however, disgusted by what he regarded as "the unjust and rapacious conduct pursued by the authorities in the case of two native women", and returned disaffected to Ireland in 1786. After briefly studying for the church ministry, he spent the next four years as a half-pay officer in Dublin pursuing studies of science, philosophy and politics.
In July 1790 in the visitors' gallery in the Irish House of Commons, he met Theobald Wolfe Tone. He found Tone even more critical of the proceedings in the chamber below where the patriot leader Henry Grattan was unable to capitalise on his triumph in securing Ireland's legislative independence from England (the "Revolution of 1782"") to effect meaningful reform. Writing his Autobiography six years later in Paris, Tone was to describe the encounter with Russell as "one of the most fortunate in my life".
Russell in Belfast
At the end of August 1790, Russell was commissioned into the 64th (2nd Staffordshire) Regiment of Foot, which was then stationed in Belfast. As an officer of the garrison, Russell was received into the society of the town's newly emerging professional and business class. Largely Presbyterian, they were resentful of the privileges and monopolies of the Anglican Ascendancy and sympathetic to what they perceived as the democratic ideals of the American, and now French, revolutions.
With his keen mind and his own radical bent, Russell became a confidante of William Drennan, Samuel McTier, Samuel Neilson and later of Henry Joy McCracken, James Hope, and others who were to play a prominent role in the United Irish movement.
It is said that Russell admired and respected men and women alike. Both Drennan's sister Martha McTier and McCracken's sister Mary Ann McCracken took him into their confidence. Mary Ann, who regarded Russell as "a model of manly beauty" with a grace "which nothing but superiority of intellect can give", shared with him her enthusiasm for the female-emancipatory ideas of Mary Wollstonecraft. McTier had Russell address meetings of other radically-minded women and declared: "I admire that man much and had I the power I do believe that he would be the first man that I would serve".
Russell appeared more than willing to join McTier and McCracken in their enthusiasm for Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of their rights as women (1792): "women in public offices", he noted in his Journal, were "as clever as men. Queens, poetesses etc. etc, In merchants houses they keep accounts as well as men". His advanced thoughts on their rights, however, did not preclude a conflicted relationship with women. His Journal was also to record the torment both of a love for the idealised and unapproachable Eliza Goddard (daughter of a close friend of McTier's) and of guilt-ridden visits to Belfast prostitutes.
In October 1791, and in the presence of Tone, invited to Belfast as the proponent of political union with disenfranchised Catholics, Russell attended the inaugural meeting of the Society of United Irishmen. While Tone recapitulated his Argument on behalf of the Catholics of Ireland, Russell presented a history of the Catholic Committee in Dublin and of his own negotiations with leading Catholics. The resolutions, which Tone had asked Russell to write, called for the elimination of all remaining sacramental tests and for an "equal representation of all the people" in the Dublin Parliament.
After several months, and to avoid debt, Russell accepted the offer of Viscount Northland of Tyrone, the father of an old army friend, to become seneschal (a kind of stipendiary magistrate) to the Northlands' manor court at Dungannon. But Russell was appalled by the anti-Catholicism of his fellow magistrates and possibly also of the Northland family, and he resigned in October 1792. His experience in Dungannon contributed significantly to his developing radicalism, and he never again served in any official position or sought the patronage of his aristocratic friends.
With Drennan's assistance, in 1793 Russell was to take a position more congenial to his friends: librarian at the Belfast Society for Promoting Knowledge (the later Linen Hall Library). The year before, under the active patronage of Dr James MacDonnell, the Society had organised the Belfast Harpers Assembly. As secretary, Russell ensured that transcriptions by his friend Edward Bunting of the melodies played were published. In 1794, Russell attended Irish-language classes offered by Pádraig Ó Loingsigh (Patrick Lynch) at the Belfast Academy.
United Irish revolutionary
Britain's entry into the war against revolutionary France at the beginning of 1793 and the increased domestic repression that followed, caused the United Irishmen increasingly to despair of reform. At the same time, the possibility of French intervention and assistance encouraged the thought of insurrection. By mid-1793 Russell had shed his sympathies for the parliamentary patriots or Irish Whigs. In a letter to Belfast's United Irish paper the Northern Star he denounced Henry Grattan's parliamentary opposition as "insignificant" and accused him of "declaiming, and grinning, and chattering at the abuses of that ministry, which but for him would not now exist". In Review of the Lion of Old England; or Democracy Confounded (1794) (dedicated to the reputedly enlightened "Empress of all the Russias", Catherine II), Russell and his friend William Sampson (John Philpot Curran's Junior Counsel) suggested that, in Ireland, the English charters Grattan celebrated in his strict constitutionalism—Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights and Habeas Corpus—did little more than "amuse the masses".
In June 1795, as a member of the Society's increasingly conspiratorial Northern Executive, Russell met with McCracken. Neilson, Robert Simms and, en route to exile in the United States, with Tone. At McArt's fort atop Cave Hill overlooking Belfast they swore the celebrated oath "never to desist in our efforts until we had subverted the authority of England over our country, and asserted our independence'".
Russell travelled widely throughout Ulster, recruiting and organising for the United Irishmen. In September 1795 an informer reported that "Capt. Russell of Belfast has been appointed to the command of all the societies in the province of Ulster"; while sometime later, one of the government's most reliable agents informed the Castle that the United Irishmen were ready to rise and that "Russell…now conducts all their plans". His role as a United Irish recruiter was commemorated in the well-known ballad "The man from God-knows-where" written by Florence Mary Wilson.
In October 1793 he founded the Society in Enniskillen with William Henry Hamilton. In January 1794, Hamilton married Russell's niece, Mary Ann Russell (c.1775–c.1840), who herself had radical political views, and he was to remain a close confidante and collaborator.
Social radical In 1796, Russell published a Letter to the People of Ireland on the Present State of the Country—the fullest exposition of his democratic and increasingly millenarian outlook. He castigated the aristocracy for stalling progress towards reform in the 1780s, for their moral corruption, and their unworthiness to govern. He insisted that all men have not only the right but the duty, to concern themselves with government and politics. Only if legislation seeks to serve "the whole family of mankind", rather than just self-interested minorities, can there be some hope that it will reflect the natural justice ordained by God.
Russell looked to a simpler, purer form of government in which the will of a benevolent deity could operate untrammelled by greed and corruption and man could realise those rights accorded him by nature. These, he believed, required radical changes to the distribution and prerogatives of property. "The way lands are held makes the people slaves" and he could not see "why a law should not be made as to the length of leases, as well as for any other purpose".
He decried the cruelties of millwork and the poverty induced by the exactions and indifference of the aristocracy and the government. As an acting magistrate in Dungannon Russell had taken the side of local linen weavers in their disputes with their employers. While some radicals took a hostile view of tradesmen's combinations, seeing them as an obstacle to the self-regulating harmony of the market, Russell looked upon them with approval. Clashing with Samuel Nielson in the Northern Star, he recommended combination—unions—not for only tradesmen but also for labourers and cottiers.
In advance of Tone's oft-quoted declaration in 1796, Russell was "among the first of the United Irishmen to conclude that they would have to depend on 'the men of no property'". In July 1793, he argued:... from what I can see, the men of property, whether landed or commercial, are decidedly against a struggle, which might risqué that and will do nothing. The people are begin[n]ing to see this and in time when they will feel their strength and injurys [sic] they will do it themselves and adieu to property!
While Tone feared that the "san culottes ... are too ignorant for any thinking man to see in power", Russell was perhaps closer to Martha McTier. In 1795 she wrote approvingly to her brother of Belfast's plebeian Jacobin Club (United Irishmen among them), describing it as composed of "persons and rank long kept down [who] now come forward with a degree of information that might shame their betters".Martha McTier to Drennan, [March 1795]. Public Records Office Northern Ireland, Drennan Letters T.765/548
Less controversially for Belfast, Russell had made clear his uncompromising opposition to slavery. The veteran anti-slavery campaigner, Henry Joy McCracken's sister Mary Ann, remembered that as a young officer in Belfast, Russell had "abstained from the use of slave labour produce until slavery in the West Indies was abolished, and at the dinner parties to which he was so often invited and when confectionery was so much used he would not take anything with sugar in it".
But Russell, with his experience in India, had a broader critique of the iniquities of the colonial trade in which Belfast was engaged. He cautioned:If the English, or any other people, think gold a sufficient cause to shed blood—if they are satisfied to fill the world with carnage and misery, that they may acquire cloves and nutmegs, and contracts, and slaves—let it not be so with us.
State prisoner