Irish Rebellion of 1798
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The Irish Rebellion of 1798, or 1798 rebellion as it is known locally, was an uprising in 1798, lasting several months, against the British establishment in Ireland. The United Irishmen, a republican revolutionary group influenced by the ideas of the American and French Revolutions, were the main organizing force behind the rebellion.
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Background
Since 1691 and the end of the Williamite war, Ireland had been controlled by a Protestant Ascendancy on behalf of the British Crown, governing the majority Catholic population via a form of institutionalised sectarianism known as the Penal Laws. As the century progressed, progressive elements among the ruling class were inspired by the example of the American Revolution and sought to form common cause with the Catholic populace to achieve reform and greater autonomy from Britain.
When France joined the American colonists in the war, London responded to the threat of invasion by calling for volunteers to join militias to protect the interests of the British Crown and defend the country from invasion. Many thousands joined the Irish Volunteers who used their new powerful position to force the Crown to grant the landed Ascendancy self rule and a more independent parliament.
Society of United Irishmen
Image:United Irish badge.gif Image:Theobald Wolfe Tone - Project Gutenberg 13112.png The promise of reform inspired a small group of Protestant liberals in Belfast to found the Society of the United Irishmen in 1791. The organisation crossed the religious divide with membership of Catholics, Presbyterians, Methodists, and other Protestant "dissenter" groups which were excluded from the Protestant Ascendancy. The Society openly put forward its policies of democratic reform and Catholic emancipation, reforms that the Irish Parliament had no intention of granting and the British government were just as unwilling to enforce. The declaration of war against France in 1793 following the execution of Louis XVI forced the Society underground and toward armed insurrection with French revolutionary aid. The avowed intent of the United Irishmen was now to "break the connection with England" and the organisation spread throughout Ireland, helped by linking up with Catholic agrarian resistance groups, known as the Defenders, and had at least 100,000 members by 1797.
A decision was made to seek military help from the French revolutionary government, and to postpone the rising until French troops landed in Ireland. The leader of the United Irishmen Theobald Wolfe Tone travelled to revolutionary France to press the case for intervention and these plans seemed to come to fruition when he accompanied a force of 15,000 French troops under General Hoche which eluded the Royal Navy and arrived off the coast of Ireland at Bantry Bay in December 1796. However unremitting storms, indecisiveness and poor seamanship all combined to prevent invasion, prompting the despairing Wolfe Tone to remark, "England has had its luckiest escape since the Armada".
Government crackdown and counter revolution
The shaken Establishment responded by launching a campaign of repression and coercion using tactics that included house burnings, torture, pitchcapping and murder, particularly in Ulster as it was the one area of Ireland where large numbers of Catholics and Protestants, (mainly Presbyterians) had effected common cause.
However, sectarianism was quickly recognised as a usefully divisive tool against the United Irishmen in the classic "divide and rule" method of colonial governance and officially encouraged by the Government. For example, Brigadier-General C.E. Knox wrote to General Lake (who was responsible for Ulster):"I hope to increase the animosity between Orangemen and United Irishmen. Upon that animosity depends the safety of the centre counties of the North." The Lord Chancellor of Ireland, John Fitzgibbon also wrote in a letter to the Privy Council in June 1798; "In the North nothing will keep the rebels quiet but the conviction that where treason has broken out the rebellion is merely popish".
Loyalists all over Ireland had already organised themselves in support of the Government, supplying recruits and vital local intelligence through the foundation of the Orange Order in 1795. The opposition of the Catholic Church in Ireland to the expected rebellion had been secured by the establishment of Maynooth College in the same year and it was, barring a few individual exceptions, firmly on the side of the Crown throughout the entire period of the rebellion.
Intelligence from informers also swept up much of the United Irish leadership in raids in Dublin in March 1798. A preemptive rising in March in Cahir, county Tipperary broke out in response, but was quickly crushed.Martial law was consequently imposed over much of the country, the unrelenting brutality of which put the United Irish organisation under severe pressure to act before it was too late. By May 1798 Lord Edward FitzGerald and most other leaders of the Dublin rebellion were arrested and the rump United Irish leadership finally decided to launch the rising without French aid, fixing the date of the rising for May 23rd.
Plan
The initial plan was to take Dublin, with the counties bordering Dublin to then rise to prevent the arrival of reinforcements with the remainder of the country to then rise and tie down other garrisons. The agreed signal for the rest of the country to rise was to be the interception of the outward bound mail coaches from Dublin.
Last minute intelligence from informers provided details of rebel assembly points at Smithfield and Haymarket however, and they were occupied by a huge force of military barely one hour before rebels were to assemble. Deterred by the preparedness of the military, dismayed groups of rebels slunk away from their intended rallying point, dumping weapons in the surrounding lanes. In addition, the plan to intercept the mail coaches miscarried with only the Munster bound coach halted on the first night.
Outbreak of the rebellion
The nucleus of the rebellion had imploded but the counties surrounding Dublin rose as planned and the long threatened rising finally began. Surrounding districts of Dublin were first to rise and rebels quickly began to assemble in Wicklow, Meath and Kildare. The first clashes of the rebellion took place just after dawn on May 24th, and widespread fighting quickly spread throughout Leinster with the county of Kildare bearing the brunt of the initial fighting.
Despite the Government successfully beating off almost every rebel attack, all military forces in Kildare were ordered to withdraw to Naas for fear of their isolation and destruction as at Prosperous which tempoarily handed control of much of county Kildare to the rebels. However, rebel defeats at Carlow, and the hill of Tara, Co Meath effectively ended the rebellion in those counties. News of the rising spread panic and fear among loyalists in Wicklow who responding by massacring rebel suspects held in custody at Dunlavin Green, and in Carnew.
The rebellion spreads
Image:New ross.gif In Wicklow large numbers rose but largely operated away from settled areas and engaged in a bloody rural guerrilla war with the military and loyalist forces. "General" Joseph Holt led up to 1,000 men in the Wicklow Hills forcing the British to commit substantial forces to the area until his capitulation in October.
In the north-east, mostly Presbyterian rebels led by Henry Joy McCracken rose in Antrim on 6th June and briefly held most of the county but the rising there collapsed following defeat at Antrim town. In Down, after initial success at Saintfield, rebels led by Henry Munro were defeated in the longest battle of the rebellion at Ballynahinch.
The rebels had most success in the south-eastern county of Wexford, where they seized control of the county but a series of bloody defeats at New Ross, Arklow, and Newtownbarry prevented the effective spread of the rebellion beyond the county borders. 20,000 troops eventually poured into Wexford inflicting defeat at the battle of Vinegar Hill on 21 June. The dispersed rebels spread in two columns through the midlands, Kilkenny and finally towards Ulster. The last remnants of these forces fought on until their final defeat on 14th July at the battles of Knightstown Bog, Co. Meath and Ballyboghill, County Dublin.
Atrocities
The prelude to the rebellion was characterised by the vicious brutality of Crown forces towards rebels, real or imagined, but large scale massacres quickly accompanied the outbreak of the rebellion. Almost every British victory in the rising was marked by the massacre of captured and wounded rebels, and they were responsible for particularly gruesome massacres at Gibbet Rath, New Ross and Enniscorthy, burning rebels alive in the latter two. In addition, countless civilians were murdered by the rampaging military who also practiced gang rape especially in county Wexford. Captured rebels were not treated as prisoners of war, but as a matter of course, were executed as traitors to the Crown, usually by hanging. Many individual instances of murder were also carried out by aggressive local Protestant and Loyalist Yeomanry Units who often targeted "pardoned" rebels and terrorized the countryside especially after nightfall.
The rebels in turn were guilty of massacres in Rathangan, Co. Kildare but the worst took place in Co. Wexford, at the Vinegar Hill camp, Scullabogue, Wexford bridge and in the Gorey vicinity. Despite the United Irishmen being an avowedly non-sectarian organisation, many of the rebel atrocities had a sectarian tinge especially where rebel discipline broke down, with Protestantism being identified with loyalism. There were also some reported instances of loyalist civilians being forced to "convert" to Catholicism to safeguard their lives and property.
Sectarian animosity was fuelled by the Penal Laws and prior repression, which largely targeted Catholics -including house and church burnings. Rumours of an "Orange Extermination Oath" (which said that Protestant loyalist were planning a massacre of Catholics) were also widespread in the days preceding the outbreak of the rebellion and some may have been actively spread by individual United Irishmen in order to attract recruits. In Wexford, such rumours were given credence by Loyalist massacres of Catholics at Dunlavin Green and Carnew.
French landing
On 22 August, nearly two months after the main uprisings had been defeated, about 1,000 French soldiers under General Humbert landed in the north-west of the country, at Killala in County Mayo. Joined by up to 5,000 local rebels, they inflicted a humiliating defeat (known as the Castlebar races to commemorate the speed of the British retreat) on the British at Castlebar and set up a short-lived "Republic of Connaught", before final defeat at the Battle of Ballinamuck, in County Longford, on 8 September 1798. The French troops who surrendered were repatriated to France in exchange for British prisoners of war; the Irish rebels were massacred at the site of the battle.
On 12 October 1798, a larger French force consisting of 3,000 men, and including Wolfe Tone himself, attempted to land in County Donegal near Lough Swilly. They were intercepted by a larger Royal Navy squadron, and finally surrendered after a three hour battle without ever landing in Ireland. As a result of this French involvement, 1798 was often referred to as "The Year of the French".
Aftermath
Pockets of rebel resistance remained in Wexford with the last rebel group under James Corcoran, veterans of the battle of New Ross, not being defeated until February 1804. Wicklow experienced a form of fugitive warfare in the years after 1798 but the failure of Robert Emmet's rebellion in 1803 finally convinced the last organised rebel forces under Michael Dwyer to a negotiated surrender a few months later.
The 1798 rebellion was probably the most concentrated outbreak of violence in Irish history and resulted in an estimated 15,000-30,000 deaths over the course of just three months. Research into casualty figures suggests that a maximum of 1,500 troops and 1,000 civilians died at the hands of the rebels and that the remainder were killed by Government troops and loyalist militias. While atrocities were committed on both sides, the great majority were committed by the government forces but the rebel killings of Protestants in Wexford were given much greater emphasis in the following years, with the loyalist version of events reducing the rebellion to a sectarian Catholic plot to massacre Protestants - a repeat of the Irish Rebellion of 1641.
The Act of Union on January 1st 1801 which took away the measure of autonomy granted to Ireland's Protestant minority was passed largely in response to the rebellion and the feeling that the rebellion was provoked as much by the brutish misrule of the Ascendancy as by the efforts of the revolutionaries.
Religious, if not economic, discrimination against the Catholic majority was gradually abolished after the Act of Union but not before widespread radical mobilisation of the Catholic population under Daniel O'Connell. Discontent at grievances and resentment persisted but resistance to British rule for the next 50 years manifested itself along sectarian lines as in the Tithe War of 1831-36.
Presbyterian radicalism was effectively tamed and reconciled to British rule by their inclusion in a new Protestant Ascendancy, as opposed to a mere Anglican one. The resulting effect was that Irish politics in the 19th century was steered away from the unifying vision of the United Irishmen, encouraged by Unionists, Dublin Castle, and exploited by politicians such as Daniel O’Connell, towards a sectarian model which has largely endured to the present day.
Legacy of 1798
The aftermath of the rebellion in counties most affected became known as the "Great Silence" due to the reluctance to speak of the rising both to forget horrific experiences of the fighting and fear of the ensuing repression. As a result the immediate version of the rebellion put out by the victors was of a fanatical rebel mob capable of extreme savagery led on and encouraged by priests to drive all heretics from Ireland and this crude version of events is still, to some extent, the lasting popular memory of the rebellion.
By the centenary of the Rebellion in 1898, conservative Irish nationalists and the Catholic Church claimed that the United Irishmen had been fighting for "Faith and Fatherland", emphasising the role of Catholic priests in the Rising and deliberately obscuring the secular Enlightenment ideology of the mostly Protestant United Irish leadership. By contrast, at the bi-centenary in 1998, the non-sectarian and democratic nature of the Rebellion was emphasised in official commemorations, reflecting the desire for reconciliation at the time of the Good Friday Agreement which was hoped would end the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
Sources
- Thomas Bartlett, Kevin Dawson, Daire Keogh, Rebellion, Dublin 1998
- James Smyth, The Men of No Property - Radical Politics in Ireland in the 1790s, 1992.
- Miles Byrne (1780-1862)- Memoirs
- J.B Gordon "History of the Rebellion in Ireland in the year 1798" (1801)
- Edward Hay "History of the Insurrection of County Wexford" (1803)
- H.F.B Wheeler & A.M Broadley "The war in Wexford: an account of the rebellion in the south of Ireland in 1798, told from original documents" (1910)
- Richard Musgrave "Memoirs of the different rebellions in Ireland" (1801)
- C. Dickson "The Wexford Rising in 1798: its causes and course" (1955)
- G.A Hayes-Mc Coy "Irish Battles" (1969)
See also
External links
- National 1798 Centre - Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford
- The 1798 Irish Rebellion - BBC History
- The 1798 Rebellion in County Clare - Clare library
- The 1798 Rebellion - Irish anarchist analysisnn:Det irske opprøret i 1798