Theobald Wolfe Tone (; 20 June 176319 November 1798), posthumously known as Wolfe Tone, was a revolutionary exponent of Irish independence and is an iconic figure for Irish republicanism. Convinced that if his fellow Protestants feared to make common cause with the Catholic majority, the British Crown would continue to govern Ireland in the English interest, he helped form the Society of United Irishmen in 1791.
Fuelled by the popular grievances of rents, tithes and taxes, driven by martial-law repression, and despairing of reform, the society developed as an insurrectionary movement. When in the early summer of 1798 it broke into open rebellion, Tone was in exile soliciting assistance from the French Republic. In October 1798, on his second attempt to land in Ireland with French troops and supplies, he was taken prisoner. Sentenced to be hanged, he died from a reportedly self-inflicted wound.
Since the mid-19th century, his name has been invoked, and his legacy disputed, by different factions of Irish republicanism. These have held annual, but separate, commemorations at his graveside in Bodenstown, County Kildare.
Early life
Tone (who pronounced his first name as "Tibbald" rather than the modern "Thee-uh-bawld") was born on 20 June 1763. His father, Peter Tone, was a prosperous coach-maker who had a farm near Sallins, County Kildare and was a member of the established Anglican church. Although records are absent, he is said to have been the descendant of a Cromwellian soldier ("the first Tone to settle in Ireland") and of French Huguenot refugees. His mother, Margaret Lamport, the daughter of a sea captain in the West India trade, was a Catholic. According to Tone's early biographer, R.R. Madden, she converted to her husband's church only when Tone was already eight years old.Madden, R. R. (1843), The United Irishmen: Their Lives and Times London: J. Madden & Company, p. 160. Tone, nonetheless, was baptised a Protestant, with the name Theobald Wolfe in honour of his godfather, Theobald Wolfe of Blackhall, County Kildare, a first cousin of Arthur Wolfe, 1st Viscount Kilwarden.
In 1783, Tone found work as a tutor in the home of Richard Martin, a Patriot member of the Irish Parliament for Jamestown, County Leitrim. Tone fell in love with Martin's well-connected wife, Elizabeth Vesey. While Tone later wrote that it came to nothing, a Martin biographer suspects that he was the father of the Martins' first child Laetitia born in 1785.
Tone studied law at Trinity College Dublin, where Kilwarden remembered him as a "sparkling conversationalist and rising talent". He was active in the College Historical Society, which had a record for honing oratory skills and preparing members for a life in politics. In 1784, he was made a scholar and graduated BA in 1786. After training in London's Middle Temple, in 1788 he qualified in Dublin's King's Inns as a barrister, a profession with which he was already disenchanted.
As a student, Tone had eloped with Martha (Matilda) Witherington, daughter of a prominent Dublin merchant. When they married, he was 22, and Matilda was about 16. With the arrival of their first daughter, and his father's bankruptcy denying him an inheritance, he cast about for new employment. To British Prime Minister William Pitt, in 1788 he submitted a plan for a Roman-style military colony on Captain Cook's newly reported Sandwich Islands. When this elicited no response, he sought enlistment as a soldier in the East India Company but applied too late in the year to be shipped to south Asia. Styling himself an "independent Irish Whig", he followed the example of a number of college friends and began reporting on the proceedings of the Irish Parliament and the conduct of the London-appointed Dublin Castle executive.
United Irishman
Invitation to Belfast In July 1790 in the visitors' gallery in the Irish House of Commons, Tone met Thomas Russell, a disillusioned East India Company veteran. He found Russell equally critical of the proceedings in the chamber below. Henry Grattan's reform-minded Patriots were floundering in their efforts to build upon the legislative independence from England (the "Constitution of 1782") that the Volunteer militia movement had helped secure. Tone later described the encounter with Russell as "one of the most fortunate" in his life.
With Russell providing the introductions, in October 1791 Tone addressed a small reform club in Belfast. Members were Protestant "Dissenters" from the established church, Presbyterians who, notwithstanding sometimes substantial commercial property, had no elected representation. Belfast was a parliamentary borough in the "pocket" of the town's proprietor, the Marquess of Donegall. They had coalesced around the proposal of one of their number, now resident in Dublin, William Drennan, for "a benevolent conspiracy, a plot for the people" dedicated to "the Rights of Man" and to "Real Independence" for Ireland.
An Argument on behalf of the Catholics of Ireland The Belfast club had invited Tone as the author of An Argument on behalf of the Catholics of Ireland. It was a tract which they had helped publish and which had appeared, in their honour, as the work of "a Northern Whig". With an eventual print-run of 16,000, in Ireland only Thomas Paine's Rights of Man (described by Tone as the "Koran of Belfast") surpassed it in circulation.
The Argument embraced what had been the most advanced Volunteer position: that the key to constitutional reform was Catholic emancipation. So long as "illiberal", "bigoted" and "blind" Irish Protestants indulged their fears of "Popery" and of Catholic repossession, the "boobies and blockheads" in Parliament and Dublin Castle would prevail. The choice was stark: either "Reform, the Catholics, justice and liberty" or "an unconditional submission to the present, and every future administration".
Tone was himself suspicious of Catholic priests (regretting that the Irish people had been "bound" to them by persecution) and hostile to what he saw as "Papal tyranny" (In 1798, he was to applaud Napoleon's deposition and imprisonment of Pope Pius VI). But the Argument presents the French Revolution as evidence that a Catholic people need not endure clericalism: in the French National Assembly, as in the American Congress, "Catholic and Protestant sit equally". It also recalls the Patriot Parliament summoned by James II in 1689. When Irish Catholics had a clearer title to what had been forfeit not ninety but forty years before (in the Cromwellian Settlement), they did not use the opportunity to pursue the wholesale return of their lost estates. As for the existing Irish Parliament "where no Catholic can by law appear", it was the clearest proof that "Protestantism is no guard against corruption".
In short, in "the days illumination" the sectarian lessons of the rebellion of 1641 were no long applicable.
First resolutions Calling themselves, at his suggestion, the Society of the United Irishmen, and approving Tone's draft resolutions, his hosts declared that "we have no national government — we are ruled by Englishmen, and the servants of Englishmen". The sole constitutional remedy was "an equal representation of all the people in parliament"—"a complete and radical reform". They urged others to follow their example: to "form similar Societies in every quarter of the kingdom for the promotion of Constitutional knowledge, the abolition of bigotry in religion and policies, and the equal distribution of the Rights of Man through all Sects and Denominations of Irishmen".
Summarised by James Napper Tandy as "all Irishmen citizens, all citizens Irishmen", the same resolutions were carried three weeks later at a meeting in Dublin. Present were John Keogh, John Sweetman and other leading members of the city's Catholic Committee.
Secretary to the Catholic Committee In the new year, 1792, the Catholic Committee appointed Tone as an assistant secretary. He replaced Richard Burke, the son of Edmund Burke to whose critical Reflections on the Revolution in France, Paine's Rights of Man had been a response.
In December 1792, with the support and participation of United Irishmen, Tone helped the Committee in Dublin stage a national Catholic Convention. Elected on a broad, head-of-household, franchise, the "Back Lane Parliament" was seen to challenge the legitimacy of the Irish Lords and Commons. The impression was confirmed when the convention decided to make its appeal directly to London where the government, in advance of war with revolutionary France, had signalled a willingness to solicit Catholic opinion. In January 1793, Tone was included in the Convention delegation that, after being hosted by Presbyterian supporters in Belfast, was received by George III at Windsor. It was an audience with which, at the time, Tone believed he had "every reason to be content".
Through its appointed Dublin Castle executive, the British government pressed the Irish Parliament to match Westminster's 1791 Catholic Relief Act. This lifted the sacramental bar to the legal profession, to military commissions and, in the limited number of constituencies not in the "pockets" of either landed grandees or the government, to the property franchise, but not yet to Parliament itself or to senior Crown offices.Patrick Weston Joyce (1910) An Installment on Emancipation (1790–1793) p. 867. www.libraryireland.com But there was a substantial price to be paid for the passage, in April 1793, of similar legislation in Ireland.
In the wake of the 1793 Relief Act, the Catholic Committee voted Tone a sum of £1,500 with a gold medal, subscribed to a statue of the King and, as agreed in London, voted to dissolve. The government then passed legislation raising militia regiments by a compulsory ballot system and outlawing extra-parliamentary conventions and independent militia. United Irishmen at the time were seeking to revive the Volunteer movement on the model of the French National Guard.
Separatist and conspirator In May 1794, evidence laid against Tone helped the government justify its proscription of the Society. In July 1793, the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, John FitzGibbon, Earl of Clare, had seized upon Tone's suggestion in a letter to Russell that independence "would be the regeneration to this country", to denounce all United Irishmen as committed separatists. Tone protested, but only by way of endorsing a connection to England where it did not involve the "gross corruption in the legislature" and the "sacrifice of [Ireland’s] interests to England". In April 1794, he was found to have been meeting in the prison cell of Archibald Hamilton Rowan (a fellow United man serving time for seditious libel) with William Jackson. An Anglican clergyman radicalised by his experience of revolutionary Paris, Jackson came to Ireland to ascertain to the potential support for a French invasion. Tone had drawn up a memorandum for Jackson testifying to the readiness of the country to rise, the Presbyterians being "steady republicans, devoted to liberty" and the Catholics "ready for any change because no change can make them worse".
An attorney named Cockayne, to whom Jackson had disclosed his mission, betrayed the memorandum to the government. In April 1794 Jackson was arrested on a charge of treason and dramatically committed suicide during his trial. Rowan, and two other parties to the conspiracy, Napper Tandy and James Reynolds, managed to flee the country. None of the incriminating papers seized were in Tone's handwriting. Also, while entertaining hopes of serving Francis Rawdon, Lord Moira, as a private secretary, Tone had not attended meetings of the Dublin Society of United Irishmen since May 1793. (Rawdon, who had hosted the Catholic delegation in London, had been a rumoured replacement for the Earl of Westmorland as Viceroy in Dublin).