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.
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 War,[1] was appointed Captain of Invalids at the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham. At the age of fifteen, he sailed with his brother's regiment to India. In July 1783 he was commissioned ensign in an infantry regiment and saw action in the Second Anglo-Mysore War. At Cannanore he distinguished himself by carrying his wounded commanding officer from the battlefield.[2] 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.[3] 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 equally 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".[4]
Russell in Belfast
At the end of August 1790, Russell was appointed as an officer to the 64th Regiment of foot 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 AnglicanAscendancy and sympathetic to what they perceived as the democratic ideals of the American, and now French, revolutions.
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",[3] shared with him her enthusiasm for the female-emancipatory ideas of Mary Wollstonecraft.[5] 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".[2]
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".[6] 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.[7]
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,[8] Russell presented a history of the Catholic Committee in Dublin and of his own negotiations with leading Catholics.[9] 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.[10]
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.[2] Russell was concerned with the conditions of the workers and in 1792 supported linen workers who were in conflict with their employers.[11]
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.[12] In 1794, Russell attended Irish-language classes offered by Pádraig Ó Loingsigh (Patrick Lynch) at the Belfast Academy.[13][14]
United Irish revolutionary
Caricature of Thomas Russell circa 1795
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".[2] In Review of the Lion of Old England; or Democracy Confounded (1794) (dedicated to the reputedly enlightened "Empress of all the Russias", Catherine II),[15] 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".[16]
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'".[17]
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".[2]
In October 1793 he founded the Society in Enniskillen with William Henry Hamilton. In January 1794 he 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.[18]
Social radical
In 1796, Russell published a Letter to the People of Ireland on the Present State of the Country[19]—the fullest exposition of his democratic and increasingly millenarian outlook. He castigated the aristocracy for stalling progress towards reform in the 1780s, their moral corruption, their unworthiness to govern, and their useless, parasitic existence and 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.[2]
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".[20]
He decried the cruelties of mill work and the poverty induced by the exactions and indifference of the aristocracy and the government.[19] 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,[21] he recommended combination—unions—not for only tradesmen but also for labourers and cottiers.[2]
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'".[22] 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 they will do it themselves and adieu to property![6]
While Tone feared that the "san culottes ... are too ignorant for any thinking man to see in power",[23] Russell was perhaps closer to Martha McTier in his estimate. 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".[24][25]
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".[26]
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.[19]
State prisoner
Russell's uncompromising radicalism earned him the respect of the more extreme democrats in Belfast and, in time, was to be in line with Tone's new conviction that "if the men of property will not support us, they must fall; we can support ourselves by the aid of that numerous and respectable class of the community, the men of no property".[27] With his close friend Henry Joy McCracken, Russell was a key figure in forming the alliance between the northern United Irishmen and the greatest body, existing, of "men of no property", the Defenders. A vigilante response to Peep O'Day raids upon Catholic homes in the mid-1780s, by the early 1790s the Defenders (drawing, like the United Irishmen, on the lodge structure of the Masons) were a secret oath-bound fraternity ranging across Ulster and the Irish midlands.[28]
Such activities increasingly alarmed the authorities and on 16 September 1796, they finally struck. A large military force descended on Belfast, sealed off the town, and arrested several leading United men, including Russell. Charged with high treason, Russell was held in Newgate Prison where, in the spring and summer of 1798, he was forced to sit out the ill-fated insurrection. He was considerably more reluctant than most of his colleagues to come to terms with the government, attempting from prison to instigate further armed resistance. In March 1799 he was detained for a further three years, with other state prisoners, at Fort George in Scotland.
His letters reveal that as he brooded on the state of the world he increasingly found sense and solace in biblical prophecy. The combined effect of the continuation of the war in Europe, its spread to the Middle East, and the bloody summer of 1798 in Ireland, seems to have only intensified his belief that the world was then engaged in the time of troubles which St John had foretold would precede the coming of Christ's kingdom. His duty was to prepare the way by raising his hand against the war-mongering British monarchy.[2]
While confined to Fort George, Russell, Samuel Neilson, and the lawyer William Dowdall remained in contact with Robert Emmet, William Putnam McCabe and other young militants. They were determined to reconstruct the Society on a strict military basis, with its members chosen personally by its officers meeting as the executive directory. The immediate aim of the directory was, in conjunction with simultaneous risings in Ireland and England to again solicit a French invasion.[29]
At the end of June 1802, during what was to prove a brief cessation in the war with France, Russell was released on condition of exile to Hamburg.
1803 Rising
Memorial plaque, Down County Museum, Downpatrick, County Down, August 2009
Not content to sit things out in Hamburg, Russell soon made his way to Paris where he met Robert Emmet who, with the roving McCabe (Paris, Hamburg, London, Scotland, Ireland) were advancing the plans for insurrection pending the French renewal of the war against England. Russell, although having himself little confidence in the French,[30] agreed to return to Ireland in March 1803 to organise the North in conjunction with the veteran of the Battle of Antrim, James Hope[30] and with William Henry Hamilton.[18] They were to find the north subdued following the suppression of the 1798 rebellion and with little appetite for a renewed attempt.[31]
Rebuffed by United Irish remnant in north Down, Russell attempted to raise the standard in Defender country.[32] On the morning of 22 July 1803, he addressed small groups of men in Annadorn and Loughinisland. He told them that there was to be a general insurrection throughout Ireland and that blows would be struck simultaneously at Dublin, Belfast and Downpatrick. He entreated them to join him but to no avail. One man said that they would be hanged like dogs.[31][33] On a hill near Downpatrick where, dressed in his green uniform, Russell had expected to multitude, there were no more than three individuals, and of these, one objected that Ireland might as well be an English colony, as a French one.[34][35]
For his biographer James Quinn, "the picture that emerges is of man with a tenuous grip on reality, maintaining a quixotic confidence in victory in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary". "The conviction and zeal that had enabled [Russell] to tap in Ulster's millennialist expectations in the 1790s" had "rendered him completely out of touch the disillusionment that followed the defeat in 1798".[36]
According to later trial evidence on 24 July, Russell as Member of the Provisional Government, and General in Chief of the Northern District issued (or intended to issue) the following proclamation:[37]
Men of Ireland!--Once more in arms to assert the rights of mankind and liberate your country!--you see by the secrecy with which this effort has been conducted, by the multitudes in all parts of Ireland, who are engaged in executing this great object, that your provisional government has acted with wisdom.--- You will see that in Dublin, in the west, the north, and the south, the blow has been struck in the same moment. Your enemies can no more withstand than they could foresee this mighty exertion. The proclamation and regulations will shew that your interest and honour have been considered. Your general, appointed by that government to command in this district, has only to exhort you strongly to comply with these regulations. Your valour is well known; be as just and humane as you are brave, and then rely with confidence that God, with whom alone is victory, will crown your efforts with success.
The general orders that hostages shall be secured in all quarters; and hereby apprizes the English commander, that any outrage contrary to the acknowledged laws of war, and of morality, shall be retaliated in the severest manner. And he farther makes known, that such Irish, as in ten days from the date of this, as are found in arms against their country, shall be treated as rebels, committed for trial, and their properties confiscated.-But all men behaving peaceably, shall be under the protection of the law.
Head-Quarters, July 24, 1803.
Unknown to Russell, in Dublin Emmet, unable to deliver promised firearms, could not draw Michael Dwyer's men down from the Wicklow Mountains[38] nor mobilise the hoped-for support in Kildare. Plans to surprise Dublin Castle failed when his men prematurely revealed themselves, and finding many of those under his immediate command the worse for drink, he called the rising off.[39]
Trial and execution
Russell managed to hide for a number of weeks but on 9 September 1803 was arrested by Major Sirr in Dublin where he returned in hopes of rescuing Emmet (who had been captured on 25 August). Mary Ann sent £100 to Thomas Russell via Orr, which was to be used as a bribe “for the purpose of effecting his escape.”[40] But without warning on the morning of the 12th he was transferred under heavy escort to Downpatrick Gaol.
There, on 3 October, the Rev. F. Archer, inspector of prisons, reported that he attended Russell at his own request "to administer the Sacrament which he received with apparently great devotion". When the service ended, Russell declared "in the awful presence of God" that he had been guilty of "many immoral acts", but as to his political opinions and actions he had never intended "any other than the Advantage of my fellow creatures and even the Happiness of my Adversaries" and that. whether "thread" of his existence extended a further 40 years or was cut within the hour, he should not cease from the work he had begun.[41]
Convicted of high treason in Downpatrick, on 12 October Russell was hanged and beheaded. His remains were buried in the graveyard of St Margaret's Church, Downpatrick, a grave paid for by his friend Mary Ann McCracken.
In remarks to the court before sentencing, Russell expressed surprise "to see gentlemen on the jury (looking at the grand jury box) who had often expressed and advocated political opinions similar to those on which he acted, and for which he had forfeited his life, for the sentiments publicly delivered by them, had assisted to influence his conduct". He afterwards told an officer that six of the jury (probably referring to persons on both grand and petty juries) had been United Irishmen.[42]
In 1796 efforts to raise a yeomanry corps in Belfast had to be abandoned because of lack of support. On 5 April 1803, in response to rumours of Russell's mission, the town's citizens proclaimed their readiness to repel the attacks of foreign or domestic enemies, and two new corps were raised. Of the three lieutenants appointed two were all former United Irishmen: Robert Getty and Gilbert McIlveen.[31]
The physician James MacDonnell, who had warned Russell that if he returned to Belfast he would find "a great difference in this place", subscribed 50 guineas to a public subscription for arrest.[43] He later claimed that he had done so dispel suspicion of his own sudden departure from Belfast, a result of his being called away to perform an operation. They had been friends: MacDonnell had allowed Russell to lodge with him from October 1792 to February 1794 and, with Drennan, had helped him get the position at the Linen Hall library. He had corresponded with him while in Newgate (where Russell was treated by MacDonnell's Dublin counterpart and friend, Dr. Whitely Stokes).[44] But MacDonnell had always taken issue with Russell's militant republicanism, suggesting that, just as in their shared scientific interests, his judgement in politics was often rash and, in working "all from first principles", naive.[45]
Concluding his remarks to the court, Russell exhorted "those gentlemen who have all the wealth and power of the country in their hands" to "attend to the wants and distresses of the poor"-- "the labouring class of the community, their tenantry and dependants". While it might not secure their position, their solicitude may at least ensure that "their fall will be gentle".[46]
In passing sentence on Russell, the Judge said that "he was sorry and surprised that a Gentleman of education could so pervert his understanding, as to imagine that he was acting either honourably, or religiously, when he asserted to his ignorant followers what he knew was untrue, namely, that the French were [already] landed in great force at Ballywalter".[42] The charge, based on the testimony of a state witness, greatly distressed Mary Ann McCracken who, on enquiry, satisfied herself that it was false.[47] According to another witness, what Russell had offered was not that the French were ashore but that "they were to send thirty thousand arms to be landed at Kilkeel".[37] (An attempt had been made at gun-running to the Down coast by the French in 1798)[48]
In 1803 in London, Russell's brother, Captain John Russell (c.1748–c.1812), was also arrested in connection with the Emmet rising. He was released for lack of evidence, but the aspiring writer was associated with political radicals in the capital and may have had some role.[2]
Robert Emmet was an Irish Republican, orator and rebel leader. Following the suppression of the United Irish uprising in 1798, he sought to organise a renewed attempt to overthrow the British Crown and Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland, and to establish a nationally representative government. Emmet entertained, but ultimately abandoned, hopes of immediate French assistance and of coordination with radical militants in Great Britain. In Ireland, many of the surviving veterans of '98 hesitated to lend their support, and his rising in Dublin in 1803 proved abortive.
Theobald Wolfe Tone, posthumously known as Wolfe Tone, was a leading Irish revolutionary figure and one of the founding members in Belfast and Dublin of the United Irishmen, a republican society determined to end British rule, and achieve accountable government, in Ireland. Throughout his political career, Tone was involved in a number of military engagements against the British navy. He was active in drawing Irish Catholics and Protestants together in the United cause, and in soliciting French assistance for a general insurrection. In November 1798, on his second attempt to land in Ireland with French troops and supplies, he was captured by British naval forces. The United Irish risings of the summer had already been crushed. Tone died in advance of his scheduled execution, probably, as modern scholars generally believe, by his own hand.
The Society of United Irishmen was a sworn association in the Kingdom of Ireland formed in the wake of the French Revolution to secure "an equal representation of all the people" in a national government. Despairing of constitutional reform, and in defiance both of British Crown forces and of Irish sectarian division, in 1798 the United Irishmen instigated a republican rebellion. Their suppression was a prelude to the abolition of the Irish Parliament in Dublin and to Ireland's incorporation in a United Kingdom with Great Britain. An attempt, following the Acts of Union, to revive the movement and renew the insurrection led to an abortive rising in Dublin in 1803.
Henry Joy McCracken was an Irish republican, a leading member of the Society of the United Irishmen and a commander of their forces in the field in the Rebellion of 1798. In pursuit of an independent and democratic Irish republic, he sought to ally the disaffected Presbyterians organised in the Society with the Catholic Defenders, and in 1798 to lead their combined forces in Antrim against the British Crown. Following the defeat and dispersal of the rebels under his command, McCracken was court-martialled and executed in Belfast.
Thomas Addis Emmet was an Irish and American lawyer and politician. In Ireland, in the 1790s, he was a senior member of the Society of United Irishmen as it planned for an insurrection against the British Crown and Protestant Ascendancy. In American exile, he took up legal practice in New York, earned a reputation as a staunch abolitionist, and in 1812 to 1813 served as the state's Attorney General.
William Drennan was an Irish physician and writer who moved the formation in Belfast and Dublin of the Society of United Irishmen. He was the author of the Society's original "test" which, in the cause of representative government, committed "Irishmen of every religious persuasion" to a "brotherhood of affection". Drennan had been active in the Irish Volunteer movement and achieved renown with addresses to the public as his "fellow slaves" and to the British Viceroy urging "full and final" Catholic emancipation. After the suppression of the 1798 Rebellion, he sought to advance democratic reform through his continued journalism and through education. With other United Irish veterans, Drennan founded the Belfast [later the Royal Belfast] Academical Institution. As a poet, he is remembered for his eve-of-rebellion When Erin First Rose (1795) with its reference to Ireland as the "Emerald Isle".
James "Jemmy" Hope was a radical democrat in Ireland who organised among tenant farmers, tradesmen and labourers for the Society of the United Irishmen. In the Rebellion of 1798 he fought alongside Henry Joy McCracken at the Battle of Antrim. In 1803 he attempted to renew the insurrection against the British Crown in an uprising coordinated by Robert Emmett and the new republican directorate in Dublin. Among United Irishmen, Hope was distinguished by his conviction that "the fundamental question at issue between the rulers and the people" was "the condition of the labouring class".
William Sampson was a lawyer and jurist who in his native Ireland, and in later American exile, identified with the cause of democratic reform. In the 1790s, in Belfast and Dublin he associated with United Irishmen, defending them in Crown prosecutions, contributing to their press and, according to government informants, participating on the eve of rebellion in their inner councils. In New York, from 1806 he won renown as a trial lawyer representing the abolitionist Manumission Society and disputing race as a legal disability; challenging the conspiracy charges against organised labor; and, in the name of religious liberty, establishing Catholic auricular confession as privileged. Maintaining that the tradition of common law denied citizens equal access to the law, and was a systematic source of injustice, Sampson pioneered the American codification movement.
Mary Ann McCracken was a social activist and campaigner in Belfast, Ireland, whose extensive correspondence is cited as an important chronicle of her times. Born to a prominent liberal Presbyterian family, she combined entrepreneurship in Belfast's growing textile industry with support for the democratic programme of the United Irishmen; advocacy for women; the organising of relief and education for the poor; and, in a town that was heavily engaged in trans-Atlantic trade, a lifelong commitment to the abolition of slavery. In 2021, Belfast City Council agreed to erect a statue of Mary Ann McCracken in the grounds of Belfast City Hall.
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.
Arthur Wolfe, 1st Viscount Kilwarden was an Anglo-Irish peer, politician and judge, who held office as Lord Chief Justice of Ireland. He was assassinated during the Irish rebellion of 1803.
Ireland was involved in the Coalition Wars, also known as the French Revolutionary (1792–1802) and Napoleonic (1804–1815) Wars. The island, then ruled by the United Kingdom, was the location of the Irish Rebellion of 1798, which was aided by the French. A minor, abortive uprising in 1803 resulted in the death of Ireland's chief justice, although this rising was not aided by the French.
Robert Simms was an Irish radical, and a founding member in Belfast of the Society of United Irishmen.
Gilbert McIlveen was a Belfast linen draper and founding member of the Society of the United Irishmen, a revolutionary organisation in late 18th century Ireland. He took no part in the rebellion of 1798 and in 1803, in response to rumours of a further republican insurrection, he joined the loyalist yeomanry.
Thomas McCabe, a prominent merchant in Belfast, was an abolitionist credited with defeating a proposal to commission ships in the town for the Middle Passage, and, with his son William Putnam McCabe, was an active member of the Society of the United Irishmen.
James Dickey was a young barrister from a Presbyterian family in Crumlin in the north of Ireland who was active in the Society of the United Irishmen and was hanged with Henry Joy McCracken for leading rebels at the Battle of Antrim.
William Tennant (1759–1832), often spelt William Tennent, was an Ulster Presbyterian banker and a leading member in Belfast of the Society of the United Irishmen who, in 1798, sought by insurrection to secure a representative and independent government for Ireland. After a period of imprisonment, he returned to the commercial and civic of Belfast, in 1810 helping to found what is today the Royal Belfast Academical Institution.
Martha "Matty" McTier was an advocate for women's health and education, and a supporter of democratic reform, whose correspondence with her brother William Drennan and other leading United Irishmen documents the political radicalism and tumult of late eighteenth-century Ireland.
James MacDonnell was an Irish physician and polymath who was an active and liberal figure in the civic and political life of Belfast. He was a founding patron of institutions that have since developed as the Royal Victoria Hospital, the Royal Belfast Academical Institution and the Linen Hall Library and, beginning with the organisation of the Belfast Harpers Assembly in 1792, was a promoter of efforts to preserve and revive Irish music and the Irish language. Among some of his contemporaries his reputation suffered in 1803 as a result of his making a subscription for the arrest of his friend, the outlawed United Irishman Thomas Russell.
The test was a pledge taken by members of a democratic political society in the Kingdom of Ireland, the United Irishmen, who in 1798 organised a republican insurrection. As the Society, despairing of reform, began to arm and drill, it amended the original wording to accommodate greater militancy and the need for secrecy. Under the Insurrection Act of 1796, the administration of the test became a capital offense. There were local variants, and societies formed by United Irish exiles, convicts and sympathisers overseas, framed their own tests.
References
↑ Castlereagh, Robert Stewart, Viscount, Robert (1850). Memoirs and correspondence of Viscount Castlereagh, second marquess of Londonderry. London, H. Colburn. p.265.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
↑ Gray, John (1998). The San Culottes of Belfast: The United Irishmen and the Men of No Property. Belfast: Belfast Trades Union Council and the United Irishmen Commemorative Society. pp.13–18.
↑ Gray, John (2020). Mary Ann McCracken. Belfast: Reclaim the Enlightenment. p.9.
↑ Elliott, Marianne (1991). Wolfe Tone, The Prophet of Irish Independence. New Haven: Yale University Press. p.232. ISBN0300051956.
↑ Martha McTier to Drennan, [March 1795]. Public Records Office Northern Ireland, Drennan Letters T.765/548
↑ Curtin, Nancy (1985). "The Transformation of the Society of United Irishmen into a mass-based revolutionary organisation, 1794-6". Irish Historical Studies. xxiv (96): 473.
↑ Curtin, Nancy (1985). "The Transformation of the Society of United Irishmen into a mass-based revolutionary organisation, 1794-6". Irish Historical Studies. xxiv (96): 467–477.
↑ Elliott, Marianne (May 1977). "The 'Despard Plot' Reconsidered". Past & Present. 75 (1): 46–61. doi:10.1093/past/75.1.46.
↑ Commentary by Kenneth Robinson in: Birch, Thomas Ledlie (2005). A Letter from an Irish Emigrant (1799) (Originally published in Philadelphiaed.). Belfast: Athol Books. ISBN0850341108. p. 114
↑ Irish Public Records Office 620-50 21, quoted in Charles Dickson (1997), Revolt in the North, Antrim and Down in 1798, London, Constable, ISBN0094772606
1 2 James D. Rose Cleland, (one of the Petty Jury) to Mary Ann McCracken, 18 November 1843, Letters of Mary-Ann McCracken, Trinity College Dublin, TCD873/627. McWilliams (2021), pp. 625-626.
↑ Froggatt, Peter. "MacDonnell, James". Dictionary of Irish Biography. Royal Irish Academy. Retrieved 4 September 2021.
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