The United Irishmen's Allies

The Goals of the United Irishmen

“For nothing, we hope, is impossible that is just.”[1] – Society of United Irishmen

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The authors of this statement, the United Irishmen, formed in Belfast in October 1791 with the goal of reforming Irish parliament. The group was the design of a dozen wealthy Presbyterian linen manufacturers – who combined, dominated the booming Irish linen trade in Ulster.[2] Joining them, were two members of the Church of Ireland, Theobald Wolfe Tone and Thomas Russell, both men with strong republican sympathies.[3] The group pronounced its agenda shortly after forming with a work entitled,“Declaration and Resolutions of the Society of United Irishmen of Belfast.” In this document, the United Irishmen declared:

• First, Resolved, That the weight of English influence in the Government of this country is so great, as to require a cordial union among ALL THE PEOPLE OF IRELAND, to maintain that balance which is essential to the preservation of our liberties, and the extension of our commerce.
• Second, That the sole constitutional mode by which this influence can be opposed, is by a complete and radical reform of the representation of the people in Parliament.
• Third, that no reform is practicable, efficacious, or just, which shall not include Irishmen of every religious persuasion [sic].[4]

These men tried for nearly a decade, from 1791 to 1798, to bring parliamentary reform to Ireland. In May of 1798, frustrated by their lack of success, the United Irishmen launched a rebellion. Rebel forces in the south briefly captured the city of Wexford in southeastern Ireland and declared the republic of Wexford. In the west, a French fleet, requested by the United Irishmen, landed an army, which forced its way inland. And in the north, troops recruited by the United Irishmen – from diverse religious and social backgrounds that had in some cases been traditional enemies in Ireland – joined and battled alongside one another against Irish and British government forces. A few months later, it was all over. The rebels had lost.

Most contemporaries and historians agree that the Society of United Irishmen was the key player in this uprising as it was this group who had brought together the allies to fight against the government. Originally peaceful reformers, in the middle years of the 1790s, the United Irishmen began to ally with the groups that together would become the principle actors in the rebellion: the Irish Jacobin Club, the French and the Defenders. The United Irishmen absorbed the members of the first of these three groups, the Irish Jacobin Club, a group with similar beliefs to its own, but lower-middle class members, and a name chosen specifically to agitate the Irish government, in 1795.[5] The United Irishmen then formed a treasonous alliance with the French government, and finally, a military alliance with the Defenders, a group of lower class Irish Catholics. The Irish Jacobins were perhaps the least surprising alliance. They, like the United Irishmen, were middle class, however they were much lower in the social hierarchy than was the average member of the United Irishmen. The Irish Jacobins tended to be tavern keepers and artisans, whereas the United Irishmen were members of the mercantile elite.[6] Because of this, the Irish Jacobin club was not originally part of the United Irish plan. The latter two of these three alliances were more surprising, as they were inconsistent with the United Irishmen’s founding goals. The alliance with the French turned the peaceful United Irishmen into a group of treasonous rebels, and damaged the claim that the society led an Irish reform movement, and was not provoking outright war with Britain. Similarly, the alliance with the Defenders was a decisive change from the United Irishmen’s initial strategy to unite the middle class against the ruling minority, collectively known as the Protestant Ascendancy.[7] Furthermore, the connection to the Defenders was previously unheard of due to religious and social tensions in Ireland; the Defenders were lower class Catholics from rural Ulster and understandably had little in common with wealthy, urban Presbyterians. Why then, did the Dissenting upper-middle class form alliances with these three groups?

This work will coincide with the work of Nancy Curtin whose book, The United Irishmen: Popular Politics in Ulster and Dublin, 1791-1798 (1993), suggests that the United Irishmen politicized and changed from a peaceful reform movement into a mass-based revolutionary movement over the course of the 1790s. This book is one of the best sources of United Irish history. It focuses on how the United Irishmen were able to recruit the Defenders, and does an excellent job detailing how the United Irishmen became revolutionary. This essay, however, aims to expand upon why these particular groups allied, rather than detail how it happened. The rebellion of 1798 occurred in several locations around Ireland and was perhaps most intense in the far southeast, in county Wexford. Kevin Whelan suggested that the rebels in the south were not fighting for the same reasons as the rebels elsewhere in Ireland. He wrote a convincing argument for the origin of the Wexford rebellion in “Politicisation of County Wexford and the Origins of the 1798 Rebellion,” which suggests that this outbreak was the result of Wexford’s M.P., George Ogle’s refusal to re-run in the election of 1797 because his conscience would not permit newly enfranchised Catholics to vote for him. Because of this, a seat in Parliament became open to competition, a rarity in Irish politics at this time, and interest in politics in the county increased and became sectarian. Whelan blamed the events in Wexford on an election campaign. Since the events and motives in Wexford are so different from those in other areas of Ireland, this paper primarily focuses on the Belfast Society of United Irishmen and the events in Ulster and northern, as this is where the Irish Jacobin Club and the Defenders originated, where the United Irish were most active and organized post 1794, and where Presbyterianism was linked most strongly with the United Irishmen.

Several historians have pointed to what is known as the Fitzwilliam crisis as the cause of the alliances that led to rebellion. The best two examples are Rex Syndergaard’s “The Fitzwilliam Crisis and Irish Nationalism” (1971), and R.B. McDowell’s “The Fitzwilliam Episode” (1966). Syndergaard’s thesis suggests that the United Irishmen were driven towards an alliance with the Defenders when Lord Lieutenant Fitzwilliam (a man who was popular with Catholics and reformers and supported increased Catholic rights), was recalled by British cabinet and replaced by Lord Camden. Syndergaard pointed out that this recall alienated the Catholic population’s hopes, and suggested that Camden led a far more oppressive regime from March 1795 to June 1798, which helped politicize and militarize the lower class Catholics. This is a convincing argument, but its focus is very narrow and it fails to recognize that international events and events prior to Camden’s Lord Lieutenancy also drove the United Irishmen to seek these new allies. R.B. McDowell’s, “The Fitzwilliam Episode” astutely points out that though Catholic hopes of emancipation were raised when talk of a Catholic Emancipation bill surfaced during Fitzwilliam’s brief Lord Lieutenancy, at the time, this emancipation was unlikely. Irish Parliament did not support the bill, nor did Fitzwilliam’s superiors, the duke of Portland, and William Pitt the Younger, British Home Secretary and Prime Minister, respectively. According to McDowell, Fitzwilliam overestimated the importance of popular opinion, as it is now clear that Irish Parliament and British cabinet were unwilling to accept emancipation, despite its popularity amongst the lower classes at this time.

This paper does not contend with McDowell’s analysis of the Fitzwilliam crisis, but expands upon it by looking at events before the Fitzwilliam episode of early 1795, as well as those occurring between the United Irish and the French in early 1796. This study will focus on the Ulster societies of United Irishmen, and will demonstrate that the United Irishmen had not initially intended to ally with the Irish Jacobin Club, the French, or the Defenders. Instead, shortly after they founded, the United Irishmen had hoped for a three-way alliance between themselves, the Volunteers and the Catholic Committee. The Volunteers were a Presbyterian dominated militia, formed at the government’s request, to protect Ireland during the American War of Independence, whose members had become interested in parliamentary reform during the early 1780s, and the Catholic Committee was a group of prominent, middle class Catholics who sought increased Catholic rights.[8] All three of these groups had similar goals of reform and because the United Irishmen were originally very few in number, they sought these alliances to increase their influence.[9] They hoped that by uniting the wealthy middle class, the Protestant Ascendancy would feel pressured and would agree to reform Parliament. However, the Protestant Ascendancy had no plans to give up power, as was shown by the corporation of Dublin’s declaration that, “experience has taught us that without the ruin of the Protestant Establishment the Catholic cannot be allowed the smallest influence in the state.”[10] This posed a problem, as one of the founding principles of the United Irishmen stated that Catholics must be involved in reform; because the goals of the United Irishmen and the Irish government were mutually exclusive, the two groups were immediately at odds. The Irish Parliament, which sat continuously from 1790 to 1797, saw these alliances as a threat to its status and tried to prevent them: in the case of the Catholic Committee, through appeasement, and in the case of the Volunteers, through violence and legal repression.[11]

The measures taken by the government succeeded in preventing the middle class alliance, and scared away many less committed United Irishmen from the cause; however, the committed members of the United Irishmen were determined to reform Parliament. This handful of frustrated but dedicated members refocused and sought the only allies they could: the Irish Jacobin Club, bent on provoking the government, the French who wanted to destroy Britain, and the Defenders, who themselves were forced to seek allies to protect themselves against increasingly hostile Church of Ireland members in Ulster. By refusing to take the demands of the committed Belfast United Irishmen seriously and trying to consolidate rather than share power, the Protestant Ascendancy pushed the United Irishmen away from its benign middle class allies, the Catholic Committee and the Volunteers and into the hands of dangerous, desperate radicals. The result was the Rebellion of 1798.

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Contents

1. Goals of the United Irishmen
2. We Have No National Government
3. Becoming "Red Hot Catholics"
4. The Failed Middle-Class Alliance
5. Driven Into the Hands of the Enemy
6. Conclusion
7. Work Cited
8. Index

Cite this as:

Adam Crymble. "The United Irishmen’s Allies.United Irishmen Online. (http://publish.uwo.ca/~acrymble/)

updated Feb, 2008.