The Irish Rebellion of 1798 (Irish: Éirí Amach 1798; Ulster Scots: "The Turn Out"/"The Hurries") was a popular insurrection against the British Crown in what was then the separate, but subordinate, Kingdom of Ireland. The main organising force was the Society of United Irishmen. First formed in Belfast by Presbyterians opposed to the landed Anglican establishment, the Society, despairing of reform, sought to secure a republic through a revolutionary union with the country's Catholic majority. The grievances of a rack-rented tenantry, and of market-town traders, journeymen and weavers drove recruitment.
While assistance was being sought from the French Republic and from democratic militants in Britain, martial-law seizures and arrests forced the conspirators into the open. Beginning in late May 1798, there were a series of uncoordinated risings: in the counties of Carlow and Wexford in the southeast where the rebels met with some success; in the north around Belfast in counties Antrim and Down; and closer to the capital, Dublin, in counties Meath and Kildare.
In late August, after the rebels had been reduced to pockets of guerrilla resistance, the French landed an expeditionary force in the west, in County Mayo. Unable to effect a conjunction with a significant rebel force, they surrendered on 9 September. In the last open-field engagement of the rebellion, the local men they had rallied on their arrival were routed at Killala on 23 September. On 12 October, a second French expedition was defeated in a naval action off the coast of County Donegal leading to the capture of the United Irish leader Wolfe Tone.
In the wake of the rebellion, Acts of Union 1800 abolished the Irish legislature and brought Ireland under the crown of a United Kingdom through the Parliament at Westminster. The centenary of the rebellion in 1898 saw its legacy disputed by nationalists who wished to restore a legislature in Dublin, by republicans who invoked the name of Tone in the cause of complete separation and independence, and by unionists opposed to all measures of Irish self-government. Renewed in a bicentenary year that coincided with the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, the debate over the interpretation and significance of 1798 continues.
Background
The Volunteer movement
In the last decades of the 18th century, the British Crown in Ireland faced growing demands for constitutional reform. The Protestant Ascendancy had relaxed the Penal Laws by which, in the wake of the Jacobite defeat in 1691, it had sought to break the power, and reduce the influence, both of the Catholic church and of the remaining Catholic gentry. However, the landed Anglican interest continued to monopolise the Irish Parliament, occupying both the House of Lords and, through the system of pocket boroughs, half of the Commons. The interests of the Crown were meanwhile secured by a Viceregal administration accountable, not to the legislature in Dublin, but to the King and his ministers in London (and which also having boroughs in its pocket reduced to a third the number of Commons seats open to electoral contest). Additionally, the British parliament presumed the right to itself to legislate for Ireland, a prerogative it had exercised to restrict rival Irish trade and commerce.
The revolt of the North American colonies presented a challenge. War with the colonists and with their French allies drew down the Crown's regular forces in Ireland. In their absence Volunteer companies were formed, ostensibly for home defence, but were soon, like their kinsmen in the colonies, debating and asserting "constitutional rights". In 1782, with the Volunteers drilling and parading in support of the otherwise beleaguered Patriot opposition in the Irish Parliament, Westminster repealed its Dependency of Ireland on Great Britain Act 1719.
Volunteers, especially in the north where Presbyterians and other Protestant Dissenters had flocked to their ranks, immediately sought to build upon this grant of legislative independence by agitating for the abolition of the pocket boroughs and an extension of the franchise but the question of whether, and on what terms, parliamentary reform should embrace Catholic emancipation split the movement. The Ancien Régime survived: the Anglican aristocracy remained entrenched under the patronage of a government that continued to take its direction from London.
The disappointment was felt keenly in Belfast, a growing commercial centre which, as a borough owned of the Marquess of Donegall, had no elected representation. In October 1791, amidst public celebration of the French Revolution, a group of Volunteer veterans invited an address from Wolfe Tone, a Protestant secretary to Dublin's Catholic Committee. Acknowledging his Argument on behalf of the Catholics of Ireland, in which Tone maintained they would not enjoy liberty until banded together with Catholics against the "boobies and blockheads" of the Ascendancy, and styling themselves at his suggestion the Society of United Irishmen, the meeting 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; [and] that the sole constitutional mode by which this influence can be opposed, is by complete and radical reform of the representation of the people in parliament.
The same resolution was carried by Tone's friends in Dublin where, reflecting a larger, more diverse, middle class, the Society united from the outset Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter.
The Catholic Convention
With the support and participation of United Irishmen, in December 1792 the Catholic Committee convened a national Catholic Convention. Elected on a broad, head-of-household, franchise, the "Back Lane Parliament" was a direct challenge to the legitimacy of the Irish Lords and Commons.
Anticipating war with the new French Republic, George III received a delegation from the convention (including Tone) at Windsor, and the British government pressed the Irish Parliament to match Westminster's Roman Catholic Relief Act 1791. This relieved Catholics of most of their remaining civil disabilities and, where (in the counties) Common's seats were contested, allowed those meeting the property qualification to vote. For Parliament itself the Oath of Supremacy was retained so that it remained exclusively Protestant.
For a measure that could have little appreciable impact on the conduct of government, the price for overriding Ascendancy opposition was the dissolution of the Catholic Committee, a new government militia that conscripted Catholic and Protestant by lot, and a Convention Act that effectively outlawed extra-parliamentary opposition. The government moved to suppress the United Irishmen, who were seeking to revive and remodel the Volunteers along the lines of the revolutionary French National Guard. In May 1794, following the revelation of meetings between a French emissary, William Jackson, and United leaders including Tone and Archibald Hamilton Rowan, the Society was proscribed.
Mobilisation
New System of Organisation
A year later, in May 1795, a meeting of United delegates from Belfast and the surrounding market towns responded to the growing repression by endorsing a new, and it was hoped more resistant, "system of organisation". Local societies were to split so as to remain within a range of 7 to 35 members, and through baronial and county delegate committees, to build toward a provincial, and, once three of Ireland's four provinces had organised, a national, directory.
It was with this New System that the Society spread rapidly across Ulster and, eventually, from Dublin (where the abandonment of open proceedings had been resisted) out into the midlands and the south. As it did so, William Drennan's "test" or pledge, calling for "a union of power among Irishmen of every religious persuasion", was administered to artisans, journeymen and shopkeepers, many of whom had maintained their own "Jacobin" clubs, and to tenant farmers and their market-town allies who had organised against the Protestant gentry in secret fraternities.
United Irish–Defender alliance
In rural Ireland, there was a "varied, energetic and complex structure of agrarian 'secret societies'", commonly referred to as Whiteboyism, after groups that had emerged mid-century in the south. In the north, it had included the Oakboys, Presbyterian led but admitting Catholics, who in 1763 had threatened to pursue fleeing Anglican rectors and tithe proctors into the city of Derry. There had also been the Hearts of Steel: protesting land speculation and evictions, in 1770 they had entered Belfast, besieged the barracks, and sprung one of their number from prison. By the 1790s, borrowing, like the United Irish societies (and, from 1795, their nemesis the Orange Institution), from the lodge structure and ceremonial of freemasonry, this semi-insurrectionary phenomenon had regenerated as the largely but—with some latter-day adjustments to their oaths—not exclusively Catholic, Defenders.
Originating as "fleets" of young men who contended with Protestant Peep o' Day Boys for the control of tenancies and employment in the linen-producing region of north Armagh, the Defenders organised across the southern counties of Ulster and into the Irish midlands. Already in 1788, their oath-taking had been condemned in a pastoral by the Catholic Primate Archbishop of Armagh. As the United Irishmen began to reach out the Defenders, they were similarly sanctioned. With cautions against the "fascinating illusions" of French principles, in 1794 Catholics taking the United test were threatened with excommunication.
Encountering a political outlook more Jacobite than Jacobin, and speaking freely to the grievances of tithes, taxes and rents, United agents sought to convince Defenders of something they had only "vaguely" considered, namely the need to separate Ireland from England and to secure its "real as well as nominal independence". As the promise of reform receded, and as French victories built hopes of military assistance, Catholic emancipation and parliamentary reform became a demand for universal manhood suffrage (every man a citizen), and hopes for accountable government were increasingly represented by the call for an Irish republic—terms that clearly anticipated a violent break with the Crown.
Preparation
Beginning with an obligation of each society to drill a company, and of three companies to form a battalion, the New System of Organisation was adapted to military preparation. With only Ulster and Leinster organised, the leadership remained split between the two provincial directories. In June 1797, they met together in Dublin to consider the demands for an immediate rising from the northerners who, reeling from martial-law seizures and arrests, feared the opportunity to strike was passing. The meeting broke up in disarray, with many of the Ulster delegates fleeing abroad. The authorities were sufficiently satisfied with the severity of their countermeasures in Ulster that in August they restored civil law in the province.
The initiative passed to the Leinster directory which had recruited two radically disaffected members of the Patriot opposition: Lord Edward FitzGerald, who brought with him experience of the American war, and Arthur O'Connor (later, undistinguished, as an officer of Napoleon's Irish Legion). In August 1797, their military refinement of the New System retained a measure of democratic practice. Townland societies of 12 men, mustered as platoons, chose their own sergeants; ten sergeants commissioned a company captain, and ten captains—a combined command of 1,200 men—elected a regimental colonel. The directory intervened only at the level the county adjutant-general, the colonels advancing a shortlist of names for their selection. Under this "military constitution", the movement strengthened in existing strongholds such as Dublin, County Kildare and County Meath, and broke new ground in the midlands and the south-east.
In February 1798, a return prepared by Fitzgerald computed the number of United Irishmen, nationwide, at 269,896 but there were doubts as to the number who would heed call to arms and whether they could muster more than simple pikes (over the previous year the authorities had seized 70,630 of these compared to just 4,183 blunderbusses and 225 musket barrels). While the movement had withstood the government's countermeasures, and seditious propaganda and preparation continued, there was hesitation to act without the certainty of French arms and assistance.
Soliciting French, and British-Jacobin, alliances
Hoche's expedition December 1796
In 1795, from American exile Tone had travelled to Paris where he sought to convince the French Directory that Ireland was the key to breaking Britain's maritime stranglehold. His "memorials" on the situation in Ireland came to the attention of Director Lazare Carnot, and by May, General Henri Clarke, the Irish-descendant head of the War Ministry's Bureau Topographique, had drafted an invasion plan. In June, Carnot offered General Lazare Hoche command of an Irish expedition that would secure "the safety of France for centuries to come."
Originally, it was to have been accompanied by two diversionary raids on England: one against Newcastle, the other against Bristol. In the event, because of pressing demands in Italy, the forty thousand men called for could not be mustered.
Under Hoche, a force of 15,000 veteran troops was assembled at Brest. Sailing on 16 December, accompanied by Tone, the French arrived off the coast of Ireland at Bantry Bay on 22 December 1796. Unremitting storms prevented a landing. Tone remarked that "England [...] had its luckiest escape since the Armada". The fleet returned home and the army intended to spearhead the invasion of Ireland was split up and sent, along with a growing Irish Legion, to fight in other theatres of the French Revolutionary Wars.