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| Sunday, 24 July 2005 |
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Features |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
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Famous trials that shook
the world :
The trial of Wolfe Tone by Lionel Wijesiri
Theobald Wolfe Tone (1763 - 1798) was the founder of Irish Republican nationalism. As such his political ideas and the circumstances of his life and early death have become powerful political weapons in the hands of later nationalists. Today his name still arouses strong passions and he is hailed as the first prophet of independent Ireland. The eldest son of a Dublin coach builder, Tone was born in 1763. Raised as a Protestant, he enjoyed his youth as a privileged member of Irish society, receiving an excellent education, including the study of Law at Trinity College. After graduating from Trinity, Tone spent two years in London studying Law. He practiced as a barrister in Dublin from 1789 (the year of the French Revolution) to 1795. He read widely, about the French Revolution and contemporary politics, wrote articles for the reviews, and began to write pamphlets on political questions. Tone became a lawyer in 1789, and circumstances along with the great changes taking place in the world apparently inspired him. As an educated man he watched closely the events taking place in the American and French revolutions and although he was a man of some status, did not like the conditions that his fellow Irishmen lived under. Tone's first political demand was for the reform of the Irish Parliament, a body both unrepresentative and corrupt. The great majority of the people of Ireland were barred from electing or being elected to the Parliament, because of their Catholic religion; they were also barred from most professions due to the same reason. Though Catholics were compelled by law to pay tithes - in effect an income tax of 10 per cent to the Church of Ireland, a church to which they did not belong, they were nevertheless politically invisible: indeed, members of the Ascendancy were known to use the term "the Irish nation" to refer to themselves, the exclusively Protestant fraction of the population. Tone had already come to realise that the demand for parliamentary reform without the granting of civil liberties to Catholics was meaningless, and he was disgusted by the failure of volunteers to take up the cause of Catholic emancipation. Tone and others founded the Society of United Irishmen in 1791. Originally a reform organisation, the Society sought an alliance of the Protestant upper class and the Catholic peasantry. In 1794, Tone was introduced to William Jackson, an agent of the French who first mooted the idea of French involvement. Tone was not easily convinced of the correctness of this policy, despite extracting guarantees that the French would come as liberators and not as conquerors. Jackson was betrayed and arrested; and after his trial it became clear to Tone that it was no longer safe to remain in Ireland. With his wife and children, Tone set sail in August 1795 for America. While there, he established contact with agents of the French government, and a year later he sailed for France. From the very beginning, the French were reluctant allies, already more concerned with the building of a post-revolutionary empire, than with helping aspiring republicans in other countries. Tone's task became one of simultaneously encouraging the revolutionary movement in Ireland and restraining it, until he received a promise of French help on a scale that would ensure success. In Paris, Tone managed to get some support for his ideas, and managed to get some troops and supplies to assist the Irish in their efforts at freedom. But the organisation in Ireland was full of British spies and efforts at revolution were squashed in 1796. Undaunted by this failure, Tone continued to try and gain support for the revolution. But the combination of the British spy network and less than ample support from the French, combined to thwart all his efforts. In May 1798, over a hundred thousand people rose in revolt against the British Government in Ireland. In the space of four months, 30,000 were killed. Many of them were peasants armed only with pikes and pitchforks, as well as defenceless women and children. The rebellion of 1798 was the most violent and tragic event in Irish history next to the Great Famine of the 1840s. Napoleon Bonaparte, with whom Tone had several interviews about this time, was much less interested by this time to undertake in earnest an Irish expedition; and by the time the rebellion broke out in Ireland he had started his journey for Egypt. Therefore when Tone urged the Directory (the executive branch of the Republican government of France), to send effective assistance to the Irish rebels, all that could be promised was a number of small raids to descend simultaneously on different points of the Irish coast. Two raids came to disaster when confronted with the British forces in the sea before reaching Ireland. Tone took part in the third, with a force of about 3000 men, which encountered an English squadron near Lough Swilly on October 12, 1798. Tone, who was on board, refused the offer of escape in a frigate before the action, and was taken prisoner when they were forced to surrender. At his trial by court-martial in Dublin, Tone made a speech vowing his determined hostility to England and his intention "by fair and open war to procure the separation of the two countries", and pleading in virtue of his status as a French officer to die by the musket, instead of the rope. He was, however, sentenced to be hanged on November 12, 1798; but he cut his throat with a penknife, and died of the wound several days later. A revolutionary to the end, Theobald remained true to this dream even after he was captured, as he took his own life, to avoid giving the British the satisfaction of executing him. Wolfe Tone's failed revolution cost more than his life. Ireland paid the national price of continued English dominance and there was a legacy of violence and hatred that has persisted to date. |
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