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Death of John FitzGibbon, 1st Earl of Clare

John FitzGibbon, 1st Earl of Clare PC (Ire), an Anglo-Irish politician who serves as the Attorney-General for Ireland from 1783 to 1789 and Lord Chancellor of Ireland from 1789 to 1802, dies in Dublin on January 28, 1802. He remains a deeply controversial figure in Irish history, being described variously as an old fashioned anti-Catholic Whig political party hardliner and an early advocate of the Act of Union between Ireland and Great Britain (which finally happens in 1801, shortly before his death). 

Fitzgibbon is an early and extremely militant opponent of Catholic emancipation. The Earl is possibly the first person to suggest to King George III that granting royal assent to any form of Catholic Emancipation will violate his coronation oath.

FitzGibbon is born in 1748 near Donnybrook, Dublin, the son of John FitzGibbon of Ballysheedy, County Limerick, and his wife Isabella Grove, daughter of John Grove, of Ballyhimmock, County Cork. His father is born a Catholic but converts to the state religion in order to become a lawyer, and amasses a large fortune. He has three sisters, Arabella, Elizabeth, and Eleanor.

FitzGibbon is educated at Trinity College Dublin and Christ Church, Oxford. He enters the Irish House of Commons in 1778 as Member for Dublin University, and holds this seat until 1783, when he is appointed Attorney-General for Ireland. From the same year, he represents Kilmallock until 1790. He is appointed High Sheriff of County Limerick for 1782.

When appointed Lord Chancellor for Ireland in 1789, FitzGibbon is granted his first peerage as Baron FitzGibbon, of Connello Lower in County Limerick, in the peerage of Ireland that year. This does not entitle him to a seat in the British House of Lords, only in the Irish House of Lords. His later promotions come mostly in the peerage of Ireland, being advanced to a Viscountcy (1793) and the Earldom of Clare in 1795. He finally achieves a seat in the British House of Lords in 1799 when created Baron FitzGibbon, of Sidbury in the County of Devon, in the Peerage of Great Britain.

FitzGibbon is a renowned champion of the Protestant Ascendancy and an opponent of Catholic emancipation. He despises the Parliament of Ireland‘s popular independent Constitution of 1782. He is also personally and politically opposed to the Irish politician Henry Grattan who urges a moderate course in the Irish Parliament, and is responsible for defeating Grattan’s efforts to reform the Irish land tithe system (1787–1789) under which Irish Catholic farmers (and all non-Anglican farmers) are forced to financially support the minority Anglican Church of Ireland. These are not fully repealed until 1869 when the Church of Ireland is finally disestablished, although Irish tithes are commuted after the Tithe War (1831–1836).

FitzGibbon opposes the Irish Roman Catholic Relief Act 1793, for which, in a “magnificently controlled vituperation in vigorous, colloquial heroic couplets,” The Gibbonade, he is pilloried by the satirist Henrietta Battier. But acceding to pressure exerted through the Irish executive by government of William Pitt in London, intent, in advance of war with the new French Republic, to placate Catholic opinion, he is persuaded to recommend its acceptance in the Irish House of Lords. Pitt, and King George III, who had been petitioned by delegates from the Catholic Committee in Dublin, expects Ireland to follow the British Roman Catholic Relief Act 1791 and admit Catholics to the parliamentary franchise (although not to Parliament itself), enter the professions and assume public office.

FitzGibbon’s role in the recall, soon after his arrival, of the popular pro-Emancipation Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, William Fitzwilliam, 4th Earl Fitzwilliam, is debatable. Although he is probably politically opposed to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Fitzwilliam is recalled, apparently due to his own independent actions. Fitzwilliam is known to be friendly to the Ponsonby family (he is married to one of their daughters), and is generally a Foxite liberal Whig. His close association with and patronage of Irish Whigs led by Grattan and Ponsonby during his short tenure, along with his alleged support of an immediate effort to secure Catholic emancipation in a manner not authorized by the British cabinet is probably what leads to his recall. Thus, if any is to blame in the short-lived “Fitzwilliam episode” it is the great Irish politician Henry Grattan and the Ponsonby brothers – presumably William Ponsonby, later Lord Imokilly, and his brother John Ponsonby—not to mention Lord Fitzwilliam himself. Irish Catholics at the time and later naturally see things very differently and blame hardline Protestants such as FitzGibbon.

Irish Catholics and FitzGibbon agree on one point apparently – Irish political and economic union with Great Britain, which eventually takes place in 1801. Pitt wants Union with Ireland concomitantly with Catholic emancipation, commutation of tithes, and the endowment of the Irish Catholic priesthood. Union is opposed by most hardline Irish Protestants, as well as liberals such as Grattan. FitzGibbon has been a strong supporter of the Union since 1793 but refuses to have Catholic emancipation with the Union.

In a speech to the Irish House of Lords on February 10, 1800, FitzGibbon elucidates his point of view on union: “I hope and feel as becomes a true Irishman, for the dignity and independence of my country, and therefore I would elevate her to her proper station, in the rank of civilised nations. I wish to advance her from the degraded post of mercenary province, to the proud station of an integral and governing member of the greatest empire in the world.”

In the end, FitzGibbon’s views win out, leading to the Union of Ireland with Great Britain to form the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland without any concessions for Ireland’s Catholic majority (or for that matter, Catholics in the rest of the new United Kingdom). He later claims that he had been duped by the way in which the Act was passed with the new Viceroy Charles Cornwallis, 1st Marquess Cornwallis, promising reforms to Irish Catholics, and is bitterly opposed to any concessions during the short remainder of his life.

The role of the Earl of Clare (as FitzGibbon becomes in 1795) as Lord Chancellor of Ireland during the period of the Irish Rebellion of 1798 is questionable. According to some, he supports a hardline policy which uses torture, murder and massacre to crush the rebellion, or that as Lord Chancellor, he has considerable influence on military affairs, and that martial law cannot be imposed without his consent. Others allege that as Lord Chancellor, he has no say in military affairs and the Encyclopædia Britannica states that he is “neither cruel nor immoderate and was inclined to mercy when dealing with individuals.” However, the same source also states that “(FitzGibbon)… was a powerful supporter of a repressive policy toward Irish Catholics”. His former side is displayed by sparing the lives of the captured United Irish leaders, “State prisoners,” in return for their confession of complicity and provision of information relating to the planning of the rebellion. However, this willingness of the prisoners to partake of the agreement is spurred by the execution of the brothers John and Henry Sheares on July 14, 1798.

In contrast to the leniency shown to the largely upper-class leadership, the full weight of military repression is inflicted upon the common people throughout the years 1797–98 with untold thousands suffering imprisonment, torture, transportation and death. FitzGibbon is inclined to show no mercy to unrepentant rebels and, in October 1798, he expresses his disgust upon the capture of Wolfe Tone that he has been granted a trial, and his belief that Tone should be hanged as soon as he set foot on land.

FitzGibbon is quick to recognise that sectarianism is a useful ally to divide the rebels and prevent the United Irishmen from achieving their goal of uniting Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter, writing 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.”

Another anecdote is to the effect of FitzGibbon’s callousness. Supposedly, upon being informed during a debate in the Irish Parliament that innocent as well as guilty are suffering atrocities during the repression, he replies, “Well suppose it were so…,” his callous reply purportedly shocking William Pitt.

FitzGibbon is noted by some as a good, improving landlord to both his Protestant and Catholic tenants. Some claim that the tenants of his Mountshannon estate call him “Black Jack” FitzGibbon. There is, however, no evidence to support this claim, although there is little to no evidence on his dealings as a landlord. Irish nationalists and others point out that while he might be interested in the welfare of his own tenants on his own estate, he treats other Irish Catholics very differently. Without further evidence, his role as a Protestant landowner in mainly Catholic Ireland is of little importance against his known dealings as Lord Chancellor.

FitzGibbon dies at home, 6 Ely Place near St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin, on January 28, 1802, and is buried in St. Peter’s Churchyard. A hero to Protestant hardliners, but despised by the majority Catholic population, his funeral cortege is the cause of a riot and, according to a widespread story, a number of dead cats are thrown at his coffin as it departs Ely Place.


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Death of William Steel Dickson, Minister & United Irishman

William Steel Dickson, Irish Presbyterian minister and member of the Society of the United Irishmen, dies on December 27, 1824, in Belfast, in what is now Northern Ireland.

Dickson is born on December 25, 1744, the eldest son of John Dickson, a tenant farmer of Ballycraigy, in the parish of Carnmoney, County Antrim. His mother is Jane Steel and, on the death of his uncle, William Steel, on May 13, 1747, the family adds his mother’s maiden name to their own.

In his boyhood, Dickson is educated by Robert White, a Presbyterian minister from Templepatrick and enters University of Glasgow in November 1761. Following graduation, he is apparently employed for a time in teaching, and in 1771 he is ordained as a Presbyterian minister. Until the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War, he occupies himself mainly with parochial and domestic duties. His political career begins in 1776, when he speaks and preaches against the “unnatural, impolitic and unprincipled” war with the American colonies, denouncing it as a “mad crusade.” On two government fast-days his sermons on “the advantages of national repentance” (December 13, 1776), and on “the ruinous effects of civil war” (February 27, 1778) create considerable excitement when published. Government loyalists denounce Dickson as a traitor.

Political differences are probably at the root of a secession from his congregation in 1777. The seceders form a new congregation at Kircubbin, County Down, in defiance of the authority of the general synod.

In 1771 Dickson marries Isabella Gamble, a woman of some means, who dies on July 15, 1819. They have at least eight children, but he outlives them all. One of his sons is in the Royal Navy and dies in 1798.

Dickson enters with zest into the volunteer movement of 1778, being warmly in favour of the admission of Roman Catholics to the ranks. This is resisted “through the greater part of Ulster, if not the whole.” In a sermon to the Echlinville volunteers on March 28, 1779, he advocates the enrolment of Catholics and though induced to modify his language in printing the discourse, he offends “all the Protestant and Presbyterian bigots in the country.” He is accused of being a papist at heart, “for the very substantial reason, among others, that the maiden name of the parish priest’s mother was Dickson.”

Though the contrary has been stated, Dickson is not a member of the Volunteer conventions at Dungannon in 1782 and 1783. He throws himself heart and soul into the famous election for County Down in August 1783, when the families of Hill and Stewart, compete for the county seat in Parliament. He, with his forty-shilling freeholders, fails to secure the election of Robert Stewart. But in 1790 he successfully campaigns for the election of Stewart’s son, better known as Lord Castlereagh. Castlereagh proves his gratitude by referring at a later date to Dickson’s popularity in 1790, as proof that he was “a very dangerous person to leave at liberty.”

In December 1791, Dickson joins Robert White’s son, John Campbell White, taking the “test” of the first Society of United Irishmen, organised in October in Belfast following a meeting held with Theobald Wolfe Tone, Protestant secretary of the Catholic Committee in Dublin. According to Dickson himself, he attends no further meetings of the Society but devotes himself to spreading its principles among the volunteer associations, in opposition to the “demi-patriotic” views of the Whig Club.

At a great volunteer meeting in Belfast on July 14, 1792, Dickson opposes a resolution for the gradual removal of Catholic disabilities and assists in obtaining a unanimous pledge in favour of total and immediate emancipation. Parish and county meetings are held throughout Ulster, culminating in a provincial convention at Dungannon on February 15, 1793. He is a leading spirit at many of the preliminary meetings, and, as a delegate from the Barony of Ards, he has a chief hand in the preparation of the Dungannon resolutions. Their avowed object is to strengthen the throne and give vitality to the constitution by “a complete and radical reform.” He is nominated on a committee of thirty to summon a national convention. The Irish parliament goes no further in the direction of emancipation than the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1793, which receives the royal assent on April 9, and remains unextended until 1829. While the passing of Lord Clare‘s Convention Act, still in force, makes illegal all future assemblies of delegates “purporting to represent the people, or any description of the people.”

In March and April 1798, Dickson is in Scotland arranging some family affairs. During his absence plans are made for an insurrection in Ulster, and soon after his return he agrees to take the place of Thomas Russell, who had been arrested, as adjutant-general of the United Irish forces for County Down. A few days before the county is to rise, he is himself arrested at Ballynahinch.

Dickson is conveyed to Belfast and lodged in the “black hole” and other prisons until August 12 when he is removed to a prison ship with William Tennant, Robert Hunter, Robert Simms, David Bailie Warden and Thomas Ledlie Birch, and detained there amid considerable discomfort. On March 25, 1799, Dickson, Tennant, Hunter, and Simms join the United Irish “State Prisoners” on a ship bound for Fort George, Highland prison in Scotland. This group, which includes Samuel Neilson, Arthur O’Connor, Thomas Russell, William James MacNeven, and Thomas Addis Emmet, arrives in Scotland on April 9, 1799. He spends two years there.

Unlike the more high-profile prisoners like O’Connor and MacNeven who are not released until June 1802, Tennant, Dickson, and Simms are permitted to return to Belfast in January 1802.

Dickson returns to liberty and misfortune. His wife has long been a helpless invalid, his eldest son is dead, his prospects are ruined. His congregation at Portaferry had been declared vacant on November 28, 1799. William Moreland, who had been ordained as his successor on June 16, 1800, at once offers to resign, but Dickson will not hear of this. He has thoughts of emigration but decides to stand his ground. At length, he is chosen by a seceding minority from the congregation of Keady, County Armagh, and installed minister on March 4, 1803.

Dickson’s political engagement ends with his attendance on September 9, 1811, of a Catholic meeting in Armagh, on returning from which he is cruelly beaten by Orangemen. In 1815 he resigns his charge in broken health and henceforth subsists on charity. Joseph Wright, an Episcopalian lawyer, gives him a cottage rent-free in the suburbs of Belfast, and some of his old friends make him a weekly allowance. His last appearance in the pulpit is early in 1824. He dies on December 27, 1824, having just passed his eightieth year, and is buried “in a pauper’s grave” at Clifton Street Cemetery, Belfast.


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Birth of Thomas Reynolds, United Irishman and Informant

Thomas Reynolds, United Irishman, informant, consul and heir to a fortune, is born at his father’s house, 9 West Park Street, Dublin, on March 12, 1771.

Reynolds’s family history is well documented. His great-great-grandfather was Connor Reynolds of Rhynn Castle, County Leitrim, who married the daughter of Sir Robert Nugent, by whom he leaves three sons, Conor, George Nugent and Thomas. The second of these renounces his family’s Catholicism and becomes a Protestant in order to obtain possession of the greater part of the family estates and was grandfather of the George Nugent Reynolds who was killed in a duel in 1786. The third son, Thomas, a successful wool-stapler in Dublin, married Margaret Lacy, the sister of the famous Austrian general, Franz Moritz von Lacy, and by her had three sons and one daughter. Thomas’s eldest son, James, inherited his business and was one of the seven Catholics who in 1757 met at the Globe coffee-house, Essex Street, to form a committee to request the removal of legal disabilities imposed on Catholics. Thomas’s second son, also Thomas, a manufacturer of woolen poplins, had three daughters, whose marriages connected him with several distinguished Catholic families, and an only son, Andrew, father of the main subject of this article. Andrew Reynolds, admitted into partnership with his father, later developed a new poplin “by having the warp of silk and the weft, or shoot, of worsted.” These poplins came to be “prized in foreign countries as Irish tabinets.” He had an annual turnover of £100,000 to £150,000 and eventually made profits of £15,000 to £20,000 a year. On April 20, 1767, Andrew Reynolds married as his second wife, a second-cousin, Rose Fitzgerald, eldest daughter of Thomas Fitzgerald of Kilmead, County Kildare, a distant kinsman and substantial creditor of the Duke of Leinster, and his wife Rose, daughter of Francis Lacy of Inns Quay, Dublin. By Rose he had two sons and twelve daughters.

Until the age of eight, Reynolds, the future United Irishman and the only son to survive to adulthood, lives at the seat of his maternal grandfather in the care of a Catholic priest, William Plunkett. He is then moved to the school of a Protestant clergyman named Crawford at Chiswick near London and by the age of twelve he spends all vacations in the house of Sir Joshua Reynolds, who appears to take pleasure in teaching him the first principles of drawing. From Chiswick, he moves to Liège in 1783 to be educated by Catholics priests, former Jesuits, returning to Ireland shortly before his father’s death, at the age of 44, on May 8, 1788.

After 1784, the introduction of cottons to Ireland spoiled Andrew Reynolds’s trade. Loans to his nephews, the O’Reilly brothers (Thomas, Patrick and Andrew), iron-smelters at Arigna, County Roscommon, worsen his losses, which reach £200,000 at the time of his death. Lodging with his mother in Dublin, 17-year-old Reynolds mixes with “dissipated idlers” such as Simon Butler and Valentine Lawless. He revisits the Continent and is in Paris in July 1789 when the Bastille is stormed. At the behest of his mother, he becomes a member of the Catholic Committee in succession to his father on February 9, 1791, and attends the Catholic Convention as a delegate of the Dublin parish of St. Nicholas Without in December 1792. He chooses not to enter his late father’s business, preferring, despite his small income, the carefree life of a gentleman, doing the rounds of his well-to-do country relations. On March 25, 1794, he marries Harriet Witherington, fourth daughter of William Witherington, a Dublin woolen merchant, and a younger sister of Matilda Tone. His mother thereupon assigns to him half of the capital in the family business – now carried on by a relation, Thomas Warren, formerly clerk to Andrew Reynolds – and one third of the profits. He has other property as well and expectations of more, including a life-interest in an estate in Jamaica and the promise from the Duke of Leinster of the reversion of Kilkea Castle in County Kildare. A poor manager, Warren is forced out and later testifies against him in a judicial process. He still has £18,500 in assets and in 1797 obtains possession of Kilkea Castle and winds up his business affairs.

On the eve of the rebellion of 1798, Reynolds is a gentleman “of ample fortune and of the first connexions in the country.” In January or February 1797, he is drawn into the United Irish organisation by Peter Sullivan, a confidential clerk in the Reynolds family business, who refers him to Richard Dillon, a Catholic linen-draper, and to Oliver Bond, in whose house in Bridge Street he is sworn in, believing, according to his son, that the sole objects of the organisation are Catholic emancipation and the reform of parliament. Soon he is attending meetings of a baronial committee, but only after meeting Lord Edward FitzGerald in November 1797 achieves a position of importance, that of County Kildare treasurer and membership of the Leinster provincial committee. After being informed of a plan for an insurrection and for the assassination of approximately eighty individuals, some of them his own relations, and knowing the provincial committee is to meet on March 12 at the house of Oliver Bond to decide finally on a general rising, he communicates the United Irishmen’s plan to Dublin Castle through William Cope, a merchant. Those present at Bond’s house are arrested and so the plan is spoiled. He resigns as county treasurer on March 18, to be replaced by John Esmonde. Known to the United Irish leadership as an informant and in danger of his life – at least two unsuccessful attempts on his life are made – but known to Dublin Castle only as an influential United Irishman, he suffers the ransacking of his house at Kilkea on April 20 by dragoons and militia, who believe FitzGerald is concealed there. Finally, he is arrested and is to face a court-martial at Athy but, his true identity being disclosed to Dublin Castle by Cope, he is delivered to a grateful Irish privy council on May 5.

During the rebellion, Kilkea Castle, which had been renovated by Reynolds in 1797 at an expense of over £2,500 and contains priceless paintings, is garrisoned by troops and attacked by insurgents, rendering it uninhabitable for many years. It is refitted in the late 1830s. He is the principal prosecution witness in the trials of John McCann, William Michael Byrne and Bond. There being few other grounds of defence, the defence counsel, John Philpot Curran, seeks to impeach his character and motives, which, with adverse remarks by Thomas Moore in his Life and Death of Lord Edward Fitzgerald (1831) and a hostile obituary in The Morning Chronicle, gives rise after his death to a two-volume apologia by his son, Thomas, based on family papers and a remarkably detailed source for the history of the Reynolds family. For his action in coming forward at a critical period to save Ireland from the wicked plans of the conspirators, he is honoured by Dublin Corporation with the Freedom of the City on October 19, 1798.

His life threatened, Reynolds resides for some months in Leinster Street, Dublin, then moves with his family to Britain, spending some time in Monmouthshire before settling in London in 1803. In 1810, he is appointed British postmaster-general in Lisbon, an onerous but lucrative appointment owing to the Peninsular War. In September 1814 he returns to England. In July 1817, favoured by Lord Castlereagh, he goes to Copenhagen as consul to Iceland. He has to visit that remote island part of the kingdom of Denmark only once (June–August 1818) and in January 1820 finally leaves Copenhagen leaving his younger son, Thomas, in charge of consular affairs. With his wife and daughters, he settles in Paris. There in 1825, his elder son, Andrew Fitzgerald, fights a duel with Thomas Warren, a French army officer and son of Thomas Warren who had been Reynolds’s clerk, and is later a United Irishman. In 1831, he undergoes a religious experience and embraces evangelical Protestantism.

Reynolds dies in Paris on August 18, 1836, and is buried in a vault in the churchyard at Welton, near Brough, East Riding of Yorkshire.

(From: “Reynolds, Thomas” by C. J. Woods, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)


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First Meeting of the Dublin United Irishmen

James Napper Tandy convenes the first meeting of the Society of United Irishmen in Dublin on November 9, 1791. The group had met the previous month in Belfast.

Spurred on by Theobold Wolfe Tone’s pamphlet titled An Argument on Behalf of the Catholics of Ireland, these young radicals propose three resolutions, which are to guide the new movement forward and which leave a lasting impression on generations of Irish men and women.

Firstly, that there exists the need for “a cordial union among all the people of Ireland.” Secondly, that a complete and radical reform of the representation of the people in Parliament is needed and, thirdly, that this reform should include “Irishmen of every religious persuasion.” The new organisation immediately tries to bring about change and Wolfe Tone, through his work as secretary of the Catholic Committee, organises a Catholic Convention in Dublin in 1792.

Although a Catholic Relief Act is passed in 1793, which rescinds some of the harsh Penal Laws, the United Irishmen soon turn their attention to France where they are heavily influenced by the French revolutionary ideals of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.”

When the United Irishmen are proclaimed a secret society and members arrested, Wolfe Tone travels to the United States and then France, making known his objectives for Irish Independence and that he wishes:

“To unite the whole people of Ireland, to abolish the memory of all past dissensions, and to substitute the common name of Irishman in place of the denominations of Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter – these were my means.”

The Irish Rebellion of 1798 soon follows and, although achieving initial success is brutally suppressed, thereby ending the ideals of the United Irishmen in uniting the people of Ireland.

(From: “Society of United Irishmen formed in Dublin 09 November 1791” posted on November 9, 2019, Irish News Archives, http://www.irishnewsarchives.com)