The Irish rebellion of 1803 was an attempt by Irish republicans to seize the seat of the British government in Ireland, Dublin Castle, and trigger a nationwide insurrection. Renewing the struggle of 1798, they were organised under a reconstituted United Irish directorate. Hopes of French aid, of a diversionary rising by radical militants in England, and of Presbyterians in the north-east rallying once more to the cause of a republic were disappointed. The rising in Dublin misfired, and after a series of street skirmishes, the rebels dispersed. Their principal leader, Robert Emmet, was executed; others went into exile.
Strategy of the new United Irish directory
In the aftermath of the 1798 rebellion a number of younger United Irishmen were still at liberty, but in communication with state prisoners held at Fort George in Scotland, worked to re-establish their organisation on strictly military lines. On the express assumption that the people, "panting for emancipation", would follow "the Republican talent ... whenever they call them forth to act", their New Plan of Organisation dispensed with the protocols of a mass-membership organisation, and reserved to themselves, as a national directorate, the authority to appoint and command.
The strategy, as before, was to solicit a French invasion and to coordinate, if possible, with radical conspirators in Great Britain. To this end, in December 1798 William Putnam McCabe (son of the co-founder in Belfast of the first United Irish society, Thomas McCabe) set out for France, stopping first in London to renew contact with the network of English Jacobins, the United Britons. But as there had been in the preparation of the earlier rebellion, there was to be a growing rift between those who believed that Ireland had to be part of a larger French-assisted scheme, and those convinced that significant French aid would be forthcoming only to defend an independence already won.
In the summer of 1800, McCabe was joined in Paris by Robert Emmet (younger brother of the Dublin society co-founder, Thomas Addis Emmet) and by Malachy Delaney (a veteran of Austrian military service). Through foreign minister Talleyrand, they presented Napoleon with a memorial that assured him that the Union with Great Britain, imposed in the wake of the rebellion, had "in no way eased the discontent of Ireland", and that the country would rise at the first news of a French landing.
From his own interviews with Napoleon, and with Talleyrand, in the autumn of 1802, Emmet concluded that in their contest with England (paused by the Treaty of Amiens, March 1802) the French would have scant regard for Ireland's interests. The most that should be sought was money, arms, ammunition and perhaps officers but not, as had been attempted by Wolfe Tone in December 1796, the landing of a French army.
Emmet's scepticism regarding French assistance, was a mark of his emerging leadership. Michael Fayne, a Kildare conspirator, later testified that Emmet used the talk of French assistance only to "encourage the lower orders of people", as he often heard him say that as bad as an English government was, it was better than a French one", and that his object was "an independent state brought about by Irishmen only".
Meanwhile, in England, hopes of reviving the allied network ("United Englishmen"/"United Britons") that Irish emissaries had helped build out of disparate democratic clubs in the 1790s were dealt a blow in November 1802. The government arrested, and in February 1803 executed, the alleged ringleaders of a United conspiracy (the "Despard Plot”) to assassinate of the King, seize the Tower of London, and spark a rising in the northern mill towns. In the proclamation he was to issue on the day of the rising in Dublin, Emmet felt it necessary to offer the assurance that the defeat of this "similar attempt in England" had neither "retarded" not "accelerated" republican preparations in Ireland. These had proceeded "without hope of foreign assistance".
Preparations for the rising
After his return to Dublin in October 1802, Emmet assembled a cadres of what, in the old society, had been mid-level activists, including, in addition to McCabe, William Dowdall, Michael Quigley, Malachy Delaney, James Hope and Nicholas Stafford. From Paris they were joined in January 1803 by William Henry Hamilton, and in April by Thomas Russell (like Dowdall a former state prisoner), who was himself sceptical of the French commitment. Assisted by a legacy of £2,000 left to Emmet by his father, they set about preparing an insurrection proposed for the end of July 1803.
On St Patrick's Day, 17 March 1803, Myles Byrne recalls Emmet, in a stirring address to his confederates, justifying their resort to arms. He reiterated the case presented in Paris: if the Irish felt that they had cause in 1798, it had only been compounded by the legislative union with Britain. As long as Ireland retained in her own parliament a "vestige of self-government", her people could entertain hopes of representation and reform. But now "in consequence of the accursed union":
[S]even-eights of the population have no right to send a member of their body to represent them, even in a foreign parliament, and the other eight part of the population are the tools and taskmasters, acting for the cruel English government and their Irish Ascendancy--a monster still worse, if possible than foreign tyranny.
At various premises in Dublin the committee supervised the manufacture and storage of weapons. In the anticipation of street fighting, there was considerable ingenuity: folding pikes that might be concealed under cloaks; gunpower-packed beams that could be rolled across the cobblestones against cavalry; various types of grenades. Meanwhile, Dowdall established hurling clubs as a cover for United Irish units to assemble and drill.
With the assistance of Anne Devlin (ostensibly Emmet's housekeeper), contact was made with Michael Dwyer, her cousin, who since the '98 rebellion had maintained a guerrilla force in the Wicklow Mountains. At two lengthy conferences at Emmet's home in Rathfarnham in April 1803, Dwyer, in return for arms, promised support. James Hope and Thomas Russell were dispatched to secure similar commitments from those they had previously organised and led in Antrim and Down.
Conspiracy within a conspiracy?
Unlike in 1798, and until the accidental explosion of their arms depot in Patrick Street on 16 July, the conspirators appear to have successfully concealed their preparations. Recalling Henry Joy McCracken's caution that "the rich always betray the poor", in his Labour in Irish History (1910), James Connolly credits this to Emmet's reliance upon workers (and consequently on an organisation that was "more distinctly democratic"—even if more military in structure—than original United movement). But Emmet did take "persons of respectability" into his confidence. Indeed, he allowed John Petty, known as Earl Wycombe, the disaffected son of the former British prime minister, Lord Shelbourne, to view the arms depots.
Emmet may have suspected that some of these confidences were misplaced. To the historian R. R. Madden, Hope suggested that Emmet realised that "the men of rank and fortune" who had urged him to head a new rising had had ulterior motives, but that he nonetheless placed his confidence in the great mass of the people to rise.
Drawing on research in the 1880s by Dr. Thomas Addis Emmet of New York City, a grandson of Emmet's elder brother, biographer Helen Landreth believes that Chief Secretary for Ireland, William Wickham, and Under-Secretary Alexander Marsden, conspired with William Pitt, then out of office but anticipating his return as Prime Minister. They sought to encourage the most dangerously disaffected in Ireland to fatally compromise the prospects for an effective revolt by acting in advance of a French invasion. Landreth believes that Emmet was their unwitting instrument. He was drawn home from Paris for the purpose of organising a premature rising by the misrepresentations of William Putnam McCabe and Arthur O'Connor whom she suspected of being double agents. Her evidence, however, is entirely circumstantial, and appears to rely chiefly on Pitt's reputed cynicism with regard to the 1798 rebellion, which he anticipated as an occasion to further secure England's western flank through a legislative union.
Hope informed Madden that Russell had said:
This conspiracy is the work of the enemy, we are now in its vortex—if we can swim ashore let it not be through innocent blood; if the people are true to themselves, we have an overwhelming force; if otherwise, we fall and our lives will be a sufficient sacrifice.
Madden, however, understood "the enemy" not to be Pitt and his party, but precisely those in the Castle and Ascendancy who had helped force Pitt's resignation by opposing his commitment to include Catholic emancipation in the Acts of Union. Madden writes:
There were two government in Ireland in 1803; the all-powerful one of Orangeism ... managed by Mr [Alexander] Marsden; and the government of the viceroy, Lord Hardwicke; ostensibly administered by the chief secretary, Mr. [William] Wickham, but virtually controlled—shut out from a knowledge of all important facts supposed to be injurious to Orange interests ... by Mr Marsden.
The implication is that Marsden saw to it that the émigré United Irish were fed a "false picture of feeling around the country" in order to promote a rebellion that would strengthen the hand of Orange leaders in their "conflict of political attrition" with the potentially conciliatory British government.
Proclamation of the Provisional Government
Emmet prepared a proclamation in the name of the "Provisional Government". Calling upon the Irish people "to show the world that you are competent to take your place among the nations . . . as an independent country", Emmet made clear in the proclamation that they would have to do so "without foreign assistance": "That confidence which was once lost by trusting to external support . . . has been again restored. We have been mutually pledged to each other to look only to our own strength".
The Proclamation also contained "allusions to the widening of the political agenda of Emmet and the United Irishmen following the failure of 1798". In addition to democratic parliamentary reform, the Proclamation announced that tithes were to be abolished and the land of the established Church of Ireland nationalised. At the same time, seeking to confirm an appeal across both class and sectarian divisions, it declared: "We are not against property – we war against no religious sect – we war not against past opinions or prejudices – we war against English dominion."
Assurances were also given that there should be no repeat of the outrages against loyalists that had occurred during the southern risings in 1798, and whose embellishment had done much to damage the United cause in the north. "Every appearance of plunder, intoxication or revenge" was to be avoided. The "nation alone" possessed the right to execute the death sentence. Russell offered the same in the proclamation he issued in the north: "any outrage contrary to the acknowledged laws of war, and of morality, shall be retaliated in the severest manner".
23 July 1803
The alarm caused by the explosion at the Patrick Street arms depot on 16 July persuaded Emmet and a majority of the leadership to bring forward the date of the rising. Without further consideration of French aid, it was set for the evening of Saturday, 23 July, a festival day which could provide cover for the gathering of their forces.