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Tag Archives: Irish Rebellion of 1798


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Birth of John Thomas Troy, Archbishop of Dublin

John Thomas Troy, an Irish Dominican friar who serves as Archbishop of Dublin from 1786 to 1823, is born at Annefield House, near Porterstown, County Dublin on May 10, 1739.

Troy receives his early education at Liffey Street, Dublin. At the age of sixteen he joins the Dominican Order and proceeds to their house of San Clemente at Rome. Historian Edward D’Alton notes that he is “amenable to discipline, diligent in his studies, and talented.” He makes rapid progress, and while still a student is appointed to give lectures in philosophy. Subsequently, he teaches theology and canon law, and finally becomes prior/rector of the convent in 1772.

When Thomas Burke, the Bishop of Ossory, dies in 1776, the priests of the diocese recommend one of their number, Father Molloy, to Rome for the vacant see, and the recommendation is endorsed by many of the Irish bishops. But Troy, who is held in high esteem at Rome, has already been appointed Bishop of Ossory. He is consecrated at Leuven in June 1777 by the nuncio to Flanders, Archbishop (later Cardinal) Ignazio Busca.

Troy arrives at Kilkenny in August 1777 and for the next nine years he Labour a hard for the spiritual interests of his diocese. Maddened by excessive rents and tithes, and harried by grinding tithe-proctors, farmers have banded themselves together in a secret society called the “Whiteboys,” so called from the white smocks the members wear in their nightly raids. They attack landlords, bailiffs, agents, and tithe-proctors, and often commit fearful outrages. Bishop Troy frequently and sternly denounces them, declaring any who join the secret society to be excommunicated. He has no sympathy with oppression, but he had lived long in Rome, and does not fully appreciate the extent of misery in which the poor Catholic masses live.

Troy is ready to condemn all violent efforts for reform, and has no hesitation in denouncing not only all secret societies in Ireland, but also “our American fellow-subjects, seduced by specious notions of liberty.” This makes him unpopular. He is zealous in correcting abuses in his diocese and in promoting education. So well is this recognized at Rome that in 1781, in consequence of some serious troubles which have arisen between the primate and his clergy, Troy is appointed Administrator of Armagh. He holds this office until 1782.

Upon the death of Archbishop John Carpenter of Dublin in 1786, Troy is appointed to succeed him. At Dublin, as at Ossory, he shows his zeal for religion, his sympathy with authority, and his distrust of popular movements, especially when violent means are employed. Though his circular, issued on March 15, 1792, disavowing the authority of any ecclesiastical power to absolve subjects from their allegiance, is believed to influence the concession in that year of the relaxations embodied in Langrishe’s Act, and the extension of the franchise to Roman Catholics in 1793, he declines to associate himself with John Keogh and other Catholic reformers in their demands for further relief.

In early 1798, the French Directory conquers Rome, and establishes the Roman Republic. Its ally in Ireland, the Society of United Irishmen, starts a rebellion in May 1798. Troy issues a sentence of excommunication against all those of his flock who decide to join the rebellion. In a pastoral read in all the churches, he speaks of the clerical organisers of the rebellion as “vile prevaricators and apostates from religion, loyalty, honour, and decorum, degrading their sacred character, and the most criminal and detestable of rebellious and seditious culprits.” Hus action at this time appears to endanger his life. But the influence he has acquired with the government enables him to moderate the repressive measures taken by the authorities. Believing that Catholic emancipation can never be conceded by the Irish parliament, he is one of the most determined supporters of the Union.

In 1799, Troy agrees to accept the veto of government on the appointment of bishops in Ireland, and even when the other bishops, feeling they have been tricked by Pitt and Castlereagh, repudiate the veto, he continues to favour it. However, in 1809, he recommends Daniel Murray be appointed his coadjutor. Murray is an uncompromising opponent of the veto, and while Troy’s coadjutor, makes trips in 1814 and 1815 to Rome concerning the controversy.

In April 1815, Archbishop Troy lays the foundation of St. Mary’s Pro-Cathedral in Marlborough Street, Dublin, but does not live to see it completed. He dies in Dublin on May 11, 1823, at the age of eighty-four. He dies very poor, leaving scarce sufficient to pay for his burial, and is interred in the unfinished St. Mary’s Pro-Cathedral.

In the administration of his diocese and in his private life, Troy is eminently zealous, pious, and charitable. Although his cordial relations with the government expose him to many suspicions and accusations, there is no ground for questioning the integrity of his motives and conduct, which are inspired by his views of the interest of his church. His distrust of revolutionary tendencies in civil affairs is fully aligned with the policy of the Vatican throughout his career. John D’Alton speaks of Troy as “a truly learned and zealous pastor, … a lover and promoter of the most pure Christian morality, vigilant in the discharge of his duty, and devotedly solicitous not only for the spiritual good of those consigned to his charge, but also for the public quiet of the state.”


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Birth of Conal Holmes O’Connell O’Riordan, Dramatist & Novelist

Conal Holmes O’Connell O’Riordan, Irish dramatist and novelist, is born on April 29, 1874, at 3 Gardiner’s Row, Dublin.

O’Riordan is the youngest child among two sons and three daughters of Daniel O’Connell O’Riordan, a barrister and justice of the peace (JP), and Katharine O’Riordan (née O’Neil), who is her husband’s first cousin. At age of four he witnesses his mother’s death in a carriage accident. His formal education, firstly as a day student at Belvedere College, Dublin (1881–85), and secondly as a boarder at Clongowes Wood College, County Kildare (1887–88), is interrupted by ill health and periods of self-education at home, marked by omnivorous reading in his father’s library.

While engaged in military studies in Bonn, Germany (March–September 1890), preparatory to entering Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in Great Britain, he falls from a horse during riding lessons, suffering a back injury that results in permanent spinal damage, thus precluding a military career.

Left with limited means after his father’s death, O’Riordan moves to London in 1891, where, after attempting suicide, he finds work as a stage actor with the Independent Theatre Society of J. T. Grein and other companies, both in London and touring the provinces, and is noted for his interpretations of Henrik Ibsen. Active in the Irish Literary Society, where he meets W. B. Yeats, he writes fiction under the pseudonym “F. Norreys Connell,” which he also adopts for his stage work.

O’Riordan’s early publications include In the Green Park (1894), a collection of connected short stories, The House of the Strange Woman (1895), a provocative novel of sexual promiscuity in upper-class London bohemia, boycotted by some booksellers as being “morally tainted,” and several books reflecting his deep interest in all things military, most notably The pity of war (1906), a collection of Kiplingesque short stories. Largely abandoning fiction for some years to concentrate on writing for the stage, he returns to Dublin for the first time in fourteen years to direct his controversial one-act play The Piper, which opens at the Abbey Theatre on February 13, 1908. It is jeered as a slander on Irish patriots in disturbances mildly reminiscent of the “Playboy” riots thirteen months previously. The audience on the third night is placated by Yeats, who in a speech from the stage interprets the play – in which a party of rebels in the 1798 rising disdain to set sentries as they argue interminably and discursively, only to be surprised and slaughtered by yeomanry – as a satirical allegory on the fruitless debate that followed the Parnellite split. The work can more usefully be read as a meditation on the propensity of democracy to disintegrate at moments of crisis into ineffectual and dillusory demagoguery. The Piper weathers the controversy to become a frequently performed staple of the Abbey Theatre repertoire during the 1910s.

After the death of John Millington Synge, O’Riordan serves briefly as managing director of the Abbey Theatre from March 25 to July 2, 1909, during which time he produces and directs two of his own one-act plays – Time on April 1, in which he also acts, and An Imaginary Conversation on May 13 – as well as the first revival of Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World on May 27. Wearied by the repeated interferences in the theatre’s affairs by its financial backer, Annie Horniman, he resigns abruptly during her fit of pique when the actress Sara Allgood recites poetry at a private gathering of suffragettes.

O’Riordan scores a major triumph on the London stage with Captain Hannibal (1909), his adaptation of a novel by Stanley Weyman, on the proceeds of which he lives for many years. Settling permanently in London, in 1910 he purchases a house at 106 Meadvale Road, Ealing, his home for the rest of his life. Rejected by the British Army at the outset of World War I owing to his disability, after several failed attempts to secure war work he eventually goes to the front in 1918 in charge of YMCA rest huts at Étaples railway junction, where he befriends the doomed soldier poet Wilfred Owen.

O’Riordan achieves his most accomplished writing within a cycle of twelve novels, published under his own name, chronicling the experiences of several inter-connected Irish and English families from the Napoleonic Wars to the 1920s. First of the series to appear was Adam of Dublin (1920), a combined Bildungsroman and roman-à-clef of the literary revival, with vignettes of Dublin slum life, Belvedere College, and the early years of the Abbey Theatre. He follows his protagonist, Adam Quinn, through the sexual turmoil of adolescence, an itinerant acting career, and an unhappy marriage in three sequels: Adam and Caroline (1921), In London (1922), and Married life (1924). These four novels chronologically conclude the narrative of the completed cycle. The narrative commences with the “Soldier” tetralogy – Soldier Born (1927), Soldier of Waterloo (1928), Soldier’s Wife (1935), and Soldier’s End (1938) – a picaresque treatment of the multifarious and farflung experiences of David Quinn, a forebear of Adam, from an Irish childhood and English education, to the Battle of Waterloo, where he suffers horrible facial mutilation, through the Irish famine and the American Civil War, to his death at the hands of Versaillais troops during the suppression of the Paris commune. Judith Quinn (1939) and Judith’s Love (1940), about the disappointments in love and marriage of a late-Victorian Dublin woman, link the narratives of the “Adam” and “Soldier” tetralogies, while The Age of Miracles(1925) and Young Lady Dazincourt (1926) are chronologically contemporaneous with the latter “Adam” novels. Inconsistent in intention, and uneven in execution, the cycle is strongest in its evocative descriptions of Dublin, London, and other cities, with their varied social strata, in different historical periods, in the sharp-edged, witty dialogue, and in the juxtaposition of dazzling comedy and an ironic sense of tragedy.

O’Riordan continues to write successful, if lightweight, stage plays. His 1928 production of Napoleon’s Josephine features a stellar cast including Edith Evans. Among his published plays are Shakespeare’s End, and Other Irish Plays (1912), Rope Enough (1914), His Majesty’s Pleasure (1925), The King’s Wooing (1929), and Captain Falstaff and Other Plays (1935). The historical commentary Napoleon Passes (1933) reflects his abiding interest in the French emperor. President of the Irish Literary Society from 1937 to 1939, he resigns after failing to persuade his colleagues to repudiate Ireland’s wartime neutrality. Despite age, disability, and increasing reclusivity, throughout World War II he serves as an air raid warden from 1940 to 1945. Elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (1945–48), he represents the society on the council of the newly formed National Book League, and is the society’s Tredegar lecturer in 1946. Charming and convivial, a witty and erudite conversationalist, he cultivates numerous literary friendships, and is an inveterate womaniser, enjoying countless intimate relationships, both sexual and platonic.

O’Riordan marries firstly Florence Derby in 1903, a nurse eight years his senior, with whom he has one son. They are estranged by the time of her death in 1923. In 1924, he marries secondly Olga Buckley, his lover since 1920, and secretary to the wife of G. K. Chesterton. They have two sons (both born before the marriage) and one daughter. Despite considerable contemporary celebrity and critical acclaim, his work compared to that of Charles Dickens and Honoré de Balzac, he has been ignored by posterity. The best of his writing, especially the “Adam” and “Soldier” novels, merit rediscovery.

O’Riordan dies at his London home on June 18, 1948, the anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo. A special O’Riordan number of the Journal of Irish Literature (September 1985), edited by his daughter Judith, includes a portrait photograph, the text of The Piper, and a detailed chronology.

(From: “O’Riordan, Conal Holmes O’Connell (‘Norreys Connell’)” by Lawrence William White and Aideen Foley, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)


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Birth of John Pratt, 1st Marquess Camden

John Jeffreys Pratt, 1st Marquess Camden, a British politician, is born at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London, on February 11, 1759. He is styled Viscount Bayham from 1786 to 1794 and known as the 2nd Earl Camden from 1794 to 1812. He serves as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in the revolutionary years 1795 to 1798 and as Secretary of State for War and the Colonies between 1804 and 1805.

Pratt is born the only son of the barrister Charles Pratt, 1st Earl Camden, and Elizabeth, daughter of Nicholas Jeffreys, of The Priory, Brecknockshire, Wales. He is baptised on the day Halley’s Comet appears. In 1765, his father is created Baron Camden, at which point he becomes The Hon. John Pratt. He is educated at the University of Cambridge (Trinity College).

In 1780, Pratt is elected Member of Parliament for Bath and obtains the position of Teller of the Exchequer the same year, a lucrative office which he keeps until his death, although after 1812 he refuses to receive the large income arising from it. He serves under William Perry, 2nd Earl of Shelburne, as Lord of the Admiralty between 1782 and 1783 and in the same post under William Pitt the Younger between 1783 and 1789, as well as a Lord of the Treasury between 1789 and 1792.

In 1786, Pratt’s father is created Earl Camden, at which point he becomes known by one of his father’s subsidiary titles as Viscount Bayham.

In 1793, Pratt is sworn of the Privy Council. In 1794 he succeeds his father as 2nd Earl Camden, and the following year he is appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland by Pitt.

As an opponent of parliamentary reform and of Catholic emancipation, Pratt’s term of office is one of turbulence, culminating in the Irish Rebellion of 1798. His refusal in 1797 to reprieve the United Irishman William Orr, convicted of treason on the word of one witness of dubious credit (and for which his own sister, Frances Stewart, Marchioness of Londonderry, petitions him), arouses great public indignation. To break the United Irish conspiracy, he suspends habeas corpus and unleashes a ruthless martial law campaign to disarm and break up the republican organization.

Pratt resigns from office in June 1798, to be replaced with Charles Cornwallis, 1st Marquess Cornwallis, who oversees the military defeat of the rebellion. In 1804, Pratt becomes Secretary of State for War and the Colonies under Pitt, and in 1805 Lord President of the Council, an office he retains until 1806. He is again Lord President from 1807 to 1812, after which date he remains for some time in the cabinet without office. In 1812 he is created Earl of Brecknock and Marquess Camden.

The enforced resignation from the Cabinet of Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, the stepson of his sister Frances (Lady Londonderry), to whom he has always been personally close, in September 1809, leads to a series of bitter family quarrels, when it becomes clear that Pratt has known for months of the plan to dismiss Stewart, but has given him no warning. Stewart himself regards Pratt as “a weak friend,” not an enemy, and they are eventually reconciled. Other members of the Stewart family, however, never forgive Pratt for what they regard as his disloyalty.

Pratt is also Lord Lieutenant of Kent between 1808 and 1840 and appoints himself Colonel of the Cranbrook and Woodsgate Regiment of Local Militia in 1809. He is Chancellor of the University of Cambridge between 1834 and 1840. He is made a Knight of the Garter in 1799 and elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1802.

Pratt marries Frances, daughter of William Molesworth, in 1785. She dies at Bayham Abbey, Sussex, in July 1829. He survives her by eleven years and dies at Seal, Kent, on October 8, 1840, aged 81. He is succeeded by his only son, George.

The family owns and lives in a house located at 22 Arlington Street in St. James’s, a district of the City of Westminster in central London, which adjoins The Ritz Hotel. In the year of his death, he sells the house to Henry Somerset, 7th Duke of Beaufort.


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Birth of Louie Bennett, Suffragette, Trade Unionist, Journalist & Writer

Louisa (Louie) Bennett, suffragette, trade unionist, and peace activist, is born on January 7, 1870, in Garville Avenue, Rathgar, Dublin, the eldest daughter of James Cavendish Bennett, a prosperous auctioneer, and his wife Susan (née Bolger). She is brought up at Temple Hill, Blackrock, and educated at Alexandra College, and at an academy for young ladies in London, where she and her sisters form an Irish League. She goes on to study singing in Bonn, Germany. Already as a teenager she shows an interest in writing, her first literary effort being Memoirs of the Temple Road in the 80s. Afterward she publishes two unsuccessful romantic novels, The Proving of Priscilla (1902) and A Prisoner of His Word (1908), the latter set in County Down in the aftermath of the Irish Rebellion of 1798.

Bennett turns her attention to women’s issues and by 1910 has become involved in the suffrage movement, initially through her reading of the suffrage monthly The Irish Citizen. In 1911, she co-founds, with her life-long friend and colleague Helen Chenevix, the Irish Women’s Suffrage Federation, an umbrella organisation, which by 1913 has connected fifteen Irish suffrage societies and has established links with Europe and the United States. She and Chenevix are the organisation’s first honorary secretaries. She is also associated with the Irish Women’s Franchise League, for which she runs public speaking classes. However, as the divide between militants and opponents of the use of violence become more pronounced, Bennett, as a confirmed pacifist, who endorses what she calls “constructive, rather than destructive action,” distances herself from the league, and through her involvement in the production of The Irish Citizen seeks to sideline the militants.

Bennett’s concerns are not limited to the question of women’s franchise. As founder of the Irish Women’s Reform League, she not only addressea the suffrage question, but examines many social issues concerning women. The league focuses on working conditions, monitors court cases involving women, and demands school meals and better education. She is among those who assist in the relief effort at Liberty Hall during the 1913 strike and lockout in Dublin, and she appeals for funds for strikers’ families through The Irish Citizen. In the period that follows she maintains her links with the labour movement. She often opposes the direct, uncompromising approach of both James Connolly and Helena Molony, and argues that labour and women’s issues can only be hampered by any affiliation with nationalist politics. The aftermath of the Easter Rising, and in particular, the murder of Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, causes her to revise some of her views on nationalism. In late 1916 she accepts an invitation to reorganise the Irish Women Workers’ Union (IWWU), on the understanding that she would have complete independence from Liberty Hall. Assisted by Chenevix and Father John Flanagan, she re-creates the union along professional lines, and by 1918 its membership has risen dramatically from a few hundred to 5,300. She consistently defends its separatist stance, arguing that women’s concerns in a male-dominated union will always be of secondary importance.

Throughout World War I Bennett campaigns for peace, and she is selected as the Irish representative to the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. She leads the IWWU in its opposition to the attempted introduction of conscription in 1918, and in 1920 she travels to the United States to highlight Black and Tan atrocities (she later meets David Lloyd George and demands the removal of the Black and Tans from Ireland). As a member of the Women’s Peace Committee, she acts as a mediator during the Irish Civil War.

In 1925, Bennett is appointed to an Irish Trades Union Congress (ITUC) committee to promote a scheme of working class education with the assistance of the labour movement. Her interest in adult education later leads to her involvement with The People’s College. A member of the national executive of the ITUC (1927–32, 1944–50), she becomes the first female president of the congress in 1932. She serves a second presidential term in 1947. Her knowledge of labour issues is officially acknowledged by the Irish government in 1932, when she is sent as a representative to Geneva to put forward the case of Irish women workers. In 1938 she delivers a paper entitled Industrialism in an Agrarian Country to the International Relations Institute in the Netherlands.

Despite the depth of Bennett’s involvement with the union movement, she has ambitions outside trade unionism, and in 1938 she lets her name be put forward by the IWWU as a congress candidate for election to the senate, but this comes to nothing. In that year she is appointed to the government commission on vocational organisation (1938–43). In 1943, she is elected as a Labour Party member of the Dún Laoghaire borough council. As a councillor she consistently lobbies for improved housing and is instrumental in the establishment of Dún Laoghaire’s housing council in 1949. She had refused a labour nomination in the 1918 general election, but she stands for Dublin County Council and Dáil Éireann in 1944, in both cases unsuccessfully. She is the only Labour Party member to criticise the party’s support for the Fianna Fáil minority government of 1932, arguing that it is “never right or wise to co-operate with another party with fundamentally different principles.” As an elected member of the Labour Party executive, she represents Ireland at the International Labour Organization in Europe. She is also a representative at the League of Nations.

Throughout her public career Bennett consistently condemns colonialism, fascism, and armaments expenditure. She is possibly best remembered for her leadership in the laundry workers’ strike of 1945, during which IWWU members successfully fight for a fortnight‘s paid holiday. Her management of the IWWU, which lasts until 1955, is marked by determination and diplomacy, though she often uses threatened resignations as a means of controlling her colleagues. She died, unmarried, on November 25, 1956, in Killiney, County Dublin.

(From: “Bennett, Louisa (‘Louie’)” by Frances Clarke, Dictionary of Irish Biography, October 2009)


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Birth of Mary Leadbeater, Irish Quaker Author & Diarist

Mary Leadbeater (née Shackleton), Irish Quaker author and diarist, is born in the planned Quaker settlement of Ballitore, County Kildare, on December 1, 1758. She writes and publishes extensively on both secular and religious topics ranging from translation, poetry, letters, children’s literature and biography. Her accounts of the Irish Rebellion of 1798 provide an insight into the effects of the Rebellion on the community in Ballitore.

Shackleton is the daughter of Richard Shackleton (1726–92) by his second wife, Elizabeth Carleton (1726–66), and granddaughter of Abraham Shackleton, schoolmaster of Edmund Burke. Her parents are Quakers. She keeps a personal diary for most of her life, beginning at the age of eleven and writing in it almost daily. There 55 extant volumes of her diaries in the National Library of Ireland.

Shackleton is educated, and her literary studies are aided by Aldborough Wrightson, a man who had been educated at Ballitore school and had returned to die there. In 1784, she travels to London with her father and pays several visits to Burke’s town house, where she meets Sir Joshua Reynolds and George Crabbe. She also goes to Beaconsfield, and on her return writes a poem in praise of the place and its owner, which is acknowledged by Burke on December 13, 1784, in a long letter. On her way home she visits, at Selby, North Yorkshire, some primitive Quakers whom she describes in her journal.

On January 6, 1791, Shackleton marries William Leadbeater, a former pupil of her father and a descendent of the Huguenot Le Batre and Gilliard families. He becomes a prosperous farmer and landowner in Ballitore. She spends many years working in the village post office and also works as a bonnet-maker and a herbal healer for the village. The couple lives in Ballitore and have six children. Their daughter Jane dies at a young age from injuries sustained after an accident with a wax taper. Another daughter, Lydia, is a friend and possible patron of the poet and novelist Gerald Griffin.

On her father’s death in 1792, Leadbeater receives a letter of consolation from Burke. Besides receiving letters from Burke, she corresponds with, among others, Maria Edgeworth, George Crabbe, and Melesina Trench. On May 28, 1797, Burke writes one of his last letters to her.

Leadbeater describes in detail the effects of the Irish Rebellion of 1798 on the lives of her family and neighbours in Ballitore. She is in Carlow on Christmas Day 1796 attending a Quaker meeting when the news arrives that the French fleet has been seen off Bantry. She describes the troops marching out of the town and the ensuing confusion in Carlow and Ballitore.

Leadbeater’s first literary work, Extracts and Original Anecdotes for the Improvement of Youth, is published anonymously in 1794 in Dublin. It contains an account of the history of Quakerism and several poems on secular and religious subjects.

In 1808, Leadbeater publishes Poems with a metrical version of her husband’s prose translation of Maffeo Vegio‘s Thirteenth Book of the Æneid. She next publishes in 1811 Cottage Dialogues among the Irish Peasantry, of which four editions, with some alterations and additions, appear by 1813. In 1813, she tries to instruct the rich on a similar plan in The Landlord’s Friend. Intended as a sequel to Cottage Dialogues, in which persons of quality are made to discourse on such topics as beggars, spinning-wheels, and Sunday in the village, Tales for Cottagers, which she brings out in 1814 in conjunction with Elizabeth Shackleton, is a return to the original design. The tales illustrate perseverance, temper, economy, and are followed by a moral play, Honesty is the Best Policy.

In 1822, Leadbeater concludes this series with Cottage Biography, being a Collection of Lives of the Irish Peasantry. The lives are those of real persons, and contain some interesting passages, especially in the life of James Dunn, a pilgrim to Lough Derg. Many traits of Irish country life appear in these books, and they preserve several of the idioms of the English-speaking inhabitants of the Pale. Memoirs and Letters of Richard and Elizabeth Shackleton … compiled by their Daughter is also issued in 1822. Her Biographical Notices of Members of the Society of Friends who were resident in Ireland appears in 1823, and is a summary of their spiritual lives, with a scanty narrative of events. Her last work is The Pedlars, a Tale, published in 1824.

Leadbeater’s best known work, the Annals of Ballitore, is not printed until 1862, when it is brought out with the general title of The Leadbeater Papers (2 vols.) by Richard Davis Webb, a printer who wants to preserve a description on rural Irish life. It tells of the inhabitants and events of Ballitore from 1766 to 1823, and few books give a better idea of the character and feelings of Irish cottagers, of the premonitory signs of the rebellion of 1798, and the Rebellion itself. The second volume includes unpublished letters of Burke and the correspondence with Mrs. Richard Trench and with Crabbe.

Leadbeater dies at Ballitore on June 27, 1826, and is buried in the Quaker burial-ground there.


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Death of William FitzGerald, 2nd Duke of Leinster

William Robert FitzGerald, 2nd Duke of Leinster, KP, PC (Ire), an Irish liberal politician and landowner, dies at Carton House in Maynooth, County Kildare, on October 20, 1804.

FitzGerald is born on March 13, 1749, in Arlington Place, Piccadilly, London, the second son of nine sons and ten daughters of James Fitzgerald, 20th Earl of Kildare and later 1st Duke of Leinster, and his wife, Lady Emily Lennox. He is educated at Eton College (1758–63). He is the elder brother of the 1790s revolutionary Lord Edward FitzGerald, and is a first cousin of the English liberal politician Charles James Fox.

FitzGerald makes his Grand Tour between 1768 and 1769. During the same time, he is also a Member of Parliament (MP) for Kildare Borough. He then sits in the Irish House of Commons for Dublin City until 1773, when he inherits his father’s title and estates. He is appointed High Sheriff of Kildare for 1772. Politically he is a liberal supporter of Henry Grattan‘s Irish Patriot Party and he co-founds the Irish Whig Club in 1789. He controls about six Kildare members of the Irish House of Commons. In 1779, he is elected colonel of the Dublin Regiment of the Irish Volunteers.

In November 1775, FitzGerald marries Emilia Olivia Usher, daughter of the 1st Baron Saint George and Elizabeth Dominick and sole grand daughter of Sir Christopher Dominick. They have three sons and six daughters.

In 1770, FitzGerald is chosen Grandmaster of the masonic Grand Lodge of Ireland, a post he holds for two years. He is re-elected for another year in 1777. In 1783, he is among the first knights in the newly created Order of St. Patrick.

In 1788–89, FitzGerald is Master of the Rolls in Ireland. In theory a senior judicial office, it is then largely a sinecure, but so blatant a choice of a man who is wholly unqualified for it gives rise to unfavourable comment, and a few years later it becomes the rule that the Master must be a lawyer of repute.

FitzGerald is a supporter of Catholic emancipation and helps to found the Royal College of St. Patrick at Maynooth on land he donates, in 1795. Withdrawing from Parliament with Grattan in 1797, he moves to England to be with his sick wife and remains there during the Irish Rebellion of 1798.

FitzGerald’s homes are at Carton and Kilkea Castle in County Kildare, and at Leinster House in Dublin (now the home of the Oireachtas). He is a founder member of the Order of St. Patrick in 1783 and of the Royal Irish Academy in 1785, and is a large investor in the Royal Canal company launched in 1790. His family’s estates of 60,000 acres (25,000 Ha) in Kildare are in three main parts, around Maynooth, Rathangan and Athy. He rebuilds the main bridge in Athy over the River Barrow.

FitzGerald dies of strangury, a urinary tract disorder, at Carton House on October 20, 1804. He is buried in Kildare Abbey. His funeral is so well attended that the mourners reach across The Curragh. He is succeeded by his second, but eldest surviving, son, Augustus Frederick Fitzgerald, as 3rd Duke of Leinster.


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The Battle of Ballinamuck

The Battle of Ballinamuck takes place at Ballinamuck, County Longford, on September 8, 1798, marking the defeat of the main force of the French incursion during the Irish Rebellion of 1798.

The victory of General Jean Joseph Amable Humbert at the Battle of Castlebar, despite gaining him around 5,000 extra Irish recruits, did not lead to a renewed outbreak of the rebellion in other areas as hoped. The defeat of the earlier revolt devastated the Irish republican movement to the extent that few are willing to renew the struggle. A massive British force of 26,000 men is assembled under Charles Cornwallis, 1st Marquess Cornwallis, the new Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and is steadily moving west. Humbert abandons Castlebar and moves toward Ulster, with the apparent intention of igniting an uprising there. He defeats a blocking force of government troops at Collooney in County Sligo. Following reports that rebellions have broken out in County Westmeath and County Longford, he alters course.

Humbert crosses the River Shannon at Ballintra Bridge on September 7, destroying it behind them, and continues to Drumshanbo where they spend the night – halfway between his landing-point and Dublin. News reaches him of the defeat of the Westmeath and Longford rebels at Wilson’s Hospital School at Multyfarmham and Granard from the trickle of rebels who have survived the slaughter and reached his camp. With Cornwallis’ huge force blocking the road to Dublin, facing constant harassment of his rearguard and the pending arrival of General Gerard Lake‘s command, Humbert decides to make a stand the next day at the townland of Ballinamuck on the Longford/Leitrim county border.

Humbert faces over 12,000 Irishmen and English forces. General Lake is close behind with 14,000 men, and Cornwallis is on his right at Carrick-on-Shannon with 15,000. The battle begins with a short artillery duel followed by a dragoon charge on exposed Irish rebels. There is a brief struggle when French lines are breached which only ceases when Humbert signals his intention to surrender and his officers order their men to lay down their muskets. The battle lasts little more than an hour.

While the French surrender is being taken, the 1,000 or so Irish allies of the French under Colonel Bartholomew Teeling, an Irish officer in the French army, hold onto their arms without signaling the intention to surrender or being offered terms. An attack by infantry followed by a dragoon charge breaks and scatters the Irish who are pursued into a bog where they are either bayoneted or drowned.

A total of 96 French officers and 746 men are taken prisoner. British losses are initially reported as 3 killed and 16 wounded or missing, but the number of killed alone is later reported as twelve. Approximately 500 French and Irish lay dead on the field. Two hundred Irish prisoners are taken in the mopping-up operations, almost all of whom are later hanged, including Matthew Tone, brother of Wolfe Tone. The prisoners are moved to the Carrick-on-Shannon Gaol. The French are given prisoner or war status however the Irish are not and some are hanged and buried in St. Johnstown, today known as Ballinalee, where most are executed in a field that is known locally as Bully’s Acre.

Humbert and his men are transported by canal to Dublin and exchanged for British prisoners of war. Government forces subsequently slowly spread out into the rebel-held “Irish Republic,” engaging in numerous skirmishes with rebel holdouts. These sweeps reach their climax on September 23 when Killala is captured by government forces. During these sweeps, suspected rebels are frequently summarily executed while many houses thought to be housing rebels are burned. French prisoners of war are swiftly repatriated, while United Irishmen rebels are executed. Numerous rebels take to the countryside and continue guerrilla operations, which take government forces some months to suppress. The defeat at Ballinamuck leaves a strong imprint on Irish social memory and features strongly in local folklore. Numerous oral traditions are later collected about the battle, principally in the 1930’s by historian Richard Hayes and the Irish Folklore Commission.

(Pictured: Watercolour plan by an I. Hardy of the Battle of Ballinamuck in County Longford on September 8, 1798, showing position of the English & French Armies previous to the surrender of the latter at Balinamuck)


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Death of Sir Denis Pack, British Army General

Sir Denis Pack, British Army major general who serves in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, dies in London on July 24, 1823.

Pack is born on October 7, 1775 in Kilkenny, County Kilkenny, the younger son of Rev. Thomas Pack, Dean of Ossory, and Catherine Pack (née Sullivan), of St. Andrew’s parish, Dublin. In June 1790, he enters Trinity College Dublin (TCD), aged 15, but does not take his degree. His elder brother, Thomas Pack, previously attends TCD, but dies in December 1786.

Pack enters the army in November 1791, being commissioned as a cornet in the 14th Light Dragoons, and serves with this regiment in Flanders in 1794 as part of Francis Rawdon-Hastings‘s expedition. Transferring to the 8th Light Dragoons, he is promoted to lieutenant In March 1795 and takes part in the expedition to Quiberon Bay. He is promoted to captain in February 1796 and serves with the 5th Dragoon Guards in Ireland during the Irish Rebellion of 1798. Promoted to major In August 1798, he is attached to the 4th Royal Irish Dragoon Guards, and after the surrender of the French expeditionary force at Ballinamuck, County Longford, on September 8, 1798 he commands the troops that escort General Jean Joseph Amable Humbert and the other French officers to Dublin.

Promoted to lieutenant colonel in December 1800, Pack commands the 71st (Highland) Regiment of Foot and takes part in the expedition to the Cape of Good Hope in 1806. He then takes part in General John Whitelocke‘s expedition to South America and is captured after an unsuccessful attack on Montevideo. His fellow-prisoner is William Carr Beresford, later 1st Viscount Beresford, and the two men remain friends for the rest of their lives. Refusing to give their parole to General Santiago de Liniers, they escape from La Plata in a boat, meeting a British cruiser at sea. Pack later takes part in the successful attack on Montevideo on February 9, 1807.

Pack is posted to Portugal in 1808 and is present at the Battle of Roliça on August 17 and the Battle of Vimeiro on August 21. In 1809, he takes part in the Walcheren Campaign and, promoted to colonel in July 1810, he is made aide-de-camp to George III. Returning to Portugal in 1810, he serves under Beresford, commanding a Portuguese brigade, and takes part in the Battle of Bussaco on September 27, 1810. Promoted to brigadier general in January 1812, he takes part in the Siege of Ciudad Rodrigo and is present at the Battle of Salamanca on July 22, 1812. In June 1813, he is promoted to major general and later is present at the battles of Vitoria (June 21, 1813), Nivelle (November 10, 1813), Nive (December 10-13, 1813), Orthez (February 27, 1814) and the final French defeat at Toulouse (April 10, 1814). In January 1815, he is made a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath (KCB) in recognition of his services in the Peninsula.

During the Waterloo campaign of 1815, Pack commands one of the brigades in General Sir Thomas Picton‘s division. Present at the Battle of Quatre Bras (June 16, 1815), he plays a prominent part in the Battle of Waterloo, bringing his brigade forward at a crucial moment to stop the advance of the French 3rd Division under General Pierre-Louis Binet de Marcognet. During the course of his career he is wounded several times and is awarded numerous honours including the Peninsular Gold Cross (with seven clasps), the Military Order of the Tower and Sword (Portugal) and the Order of Saint Vladimir (Russia). In 1819, he is appointed Lieutenant-Governor of Plymouth, and is later made honorary colonel of the 84th (York and Lancaster) Regiment of Foot in 1822.

In July 1816, Pack marries Lady Elizabeth Louisa de la Poer Beresford, daughter of George Beresford, 1st Marquess of Waterford. They have two sons and two daughters. His descendants adopted “Pack-Beresford” as their family name. He dies on July 24, 1823, at Lord Beresford’s house in Upper Wimpole Street, London. A monument to him is later erected in St. Canice’s Cathedral, Kilkenny. A portrait by G. L. Saunders is in family possession; another by Charles Turner, showing Pack wearing his numerous orders and decorations, is in the National Portrait Gallery, London. A collection of his papers is held by the University of Southampton.


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The Union with Ireland Act 1800 Receives Royal Assent

The Union with Ireland Act 1800, which is one of the two complimentary Acts of Union 1800, receives royal assent on July 2, 1800, uniting the Kingdom of Great Britain and the Kingdom of Ireland to create the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The act means Ireland loses its own independent Parliament and is now to be ruled from England. It will be 1922 before Ireland regains legislative independence.

Two acts are passed in 1800 with the same long title: An Act for the Union of Great Britain and Ireland. The short title of the act of the British Parliament is Union with Ireland Act 1800, assigned by the Short Titles Act 1896. The short title of the act of the Irish Parliament is Act of Union (Ireland) 1800, assigned by a 1951 act of the Parliament of Northern Ireland, and hence not effective in the Republic of Ireland, where it was referred to by its long title when repealed in 1962.

Before these acts, Ireland has been in personal union with England since 1542, when the Irish Parliament passes the Crown of Ireland Act 1542, proclaiming King Henry VIII of England to be King of Ireland. Since the 12th century, the King of England has been technical overlord of the Lordship of Ireland, a papal possession. Both the Kingdoms of Ireland and England later come into personal union with that of Scotland upon the Union of the Crowns in 1603.

In 1707, the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of Scotland are united into a single kingdom: the Kingdom of Great Britain. Upon that union, each House of the Parliament of Ireland passes a congratulatory address to Queen Anne, praying her: “May God put it in your royal heart to add greater strength and lustre to your crown, by a still more comprehensive Union.” The Irish Parliament is both before then subject to certain restrictions that made it subordinate to the Parliament of England and after then, to the Parliament of Great Britain; however, Ireland gains effective legislative independence from Great Britain through the Constitution of 1782.

By this time access to institutional power in Ireland is restricted to a small minority: the Anglo-Irish of the Protestant Ascendancy. Frustration at the lack of reform among the Catholic majority eventually leads, along with other reasons, to a rebellion in 1798, involving a French invasion of Ireland and the seeking of complete independence from Great Britain. This rebellion is crushed with much bloodshed, and the motion for union is motivated at least in part by the belief that the union will alleviate the political rancour that led to the rebellion. The rebellion is felt to have been exacerbated as much by brutally reactionary loyalists as by United Irishmen (anti-unionists).

Furthermore, Catholic emancipation is being discussed in Great Britain, and fears that a newly enfranchised Catholic majority will drastically change the character of the Irish government and parliament also contributes to a desire from London to merge the Parliaments.

According to historian James Stafford, an Enlightenment critique of Empire in Ireland lays the intellectual foundations for the Acts of Union. He writes that Enlightenment thinkers connected “the exclusion of the Irish Kingdom from free participation in imperial and European trade with the exclusion of its Catholic subjects, under the terms of the ‘Penal Laws’, from the benefits of property and political representation.” These critiques are used to justify a parliamentary union between Britain and Ireland.

Complementary acts are enacted by the Parliament of Great Britain and the Parliament of Ireland.

The Parliament of Ireland gains a large measure of legislative independence under the Constitution of 1782. Many members of the Irish Parliament jealously guard that autonomy (notably Henry Grattan), and a motion for union is legally rejected in 1799. Only Anglicans are permitted to become members of the Parliament of Ireland though the great majority of the Irish population are Roman Catholic, with many Presbyterians in Ulster. Under the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1793, Roman Catholics regain the right to vote if they own or rent property worth £2 annually. Wealthy Catholics are strongly in favour of union in the hope for rapid religious emancipation and the right to sit as MPs, which only comes to pass under the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829.

From the perspective of Great Britain’s elites, the union is desirable because of the uncertainty that follows the French Revolution of 1789 and the Irish Rebellion of 1798. If Ireland adopts Catholic emancipation willingly or not, a Roman Catholic Parliament could break away from Britain and ally with the French, but the same measure within the United Kingdom would exclude that possibility. Also, in creating a regency during King George III‘s “madness”, the Irish and British Parliaments give the Prince Regent different powers. These considerations lead Great Britain to decide to attempt the merger of both kingdoms and Parliaments.

The final passage of the Act in the Irish House of Commons turns on an about 16% relative majority, garnering 58% of the votes, and similar in the Irish House of Lords, in part per contemporary accounts through bribery with the awarding of peerages and honours to critics to get votes. The first attempt is defeated in the Irish House of Commons by 109 votes to 104, but the second vote in 1800 passes by 158 to 115.


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The Gibbet Rath Executions

The Gibbet Rath executions, sometimes called the Gibbet Rath massacre, refers to the execution of several hundred surrendering rebels by government forces during the Irish Rebellion of 1798 at the Curragh of Kildare on May 29, 1798.

News of the outbreak of the rebellion prompts Major-General Sir James Duff, Military Commander in Limerick, to gather a force of about 600 men, mainly Dublin militia members, backed up by seven artillery pieces, and sets out on a forced march to Dublin on May 27. His twin objectives are to restore communications between the two cities and to crush any resistance encountered on the way. As the soldiers enter County Kildare, they discover the bodies of several rebel victims, among them Lieutenant William Giffard, the son of the commander of the Dublin militia, Captain John Giffard, which reportedly inflames the soldiers.

However, by the time Duff’s column arrives in Monasterevin in County Kildare, at 7:00 a.m. on May 29, the bulk of the rebel forces have already accepted a government amnesty from Generals Gerard Lake and Ralph Dundas, following their defeat at the Battle of Kilcullen and had surrendered at Knockaulin Hill, several kilometres to the east of the Curragh on May 27. Not aware that the rebels are gathering to surrender on the Curragh plain, Duff reinforces his column and marches to the nearby town of Kildare, and on to the adjacent southwest corner of the Curragh.

Duff’s force had by now grown to 700 militia, dragoons and yeomanry with four pieces of artillery, three having been presumably left at Monasterevin. The designated place of surrender, the ancient fort of Gibbet Rath, is a wide expanse of plain with little or no cover for several kilometres around but neither the rebels nor Duff’s force have seemingly any reason to fear treachery as a separate peaceful surrender to General Dundas at Knockaulin Hill, who is accompanied only by two dragoons, has been successfully accomplished without bloodshed.

By the time of Duff’s arrival at Gibbet Rath on the morning of May 29, an army of between 1,000 and 2,000 rebels is waiting to surrender in return for the promised amnesty. They are subjected to an angry tirade for their treason by Duff who orders them to kneel for pardon and then to stack their arms. Shortly after the weapons are stacked, an infantry and cavalry assault results in the death of about 350 men. Accounts of why the massacre began differ. Rebel claims that Duff orders his troops to attack the disarmed and surrounded men are denied by Duff himself who claims that the rebels fired on his men, while another source records “one man in the crowd, saying he would not hand over his fire-lock loaded, blazed it off in the air”.

However, Duff redrafts his own official report of the engagement before submission to Dublin Castle, his final draft is transmitted without references to his knowledge of the surrender preparations. The original report reads as follows with the items in brackets excised from his final report:

“My Dear Genl. (I have witnessed a melancholy scene) We found the Rebels retiring from this Town on our arrival armed. We followed them with Dragoons; I sent on some of the Yeomen to tell them, on laying down their arms, they should not be hurt. Unfortunately some of them Fired on the Troops; from that moment they were attacked on all sides, nothing could stop the Rage of the Troops. I believe from Two to Three hundred of the Rebels were killed. (They intended, we are told, to lay down their arms to General Dundas). We have 3 men killed & several wounded. I am too fatigued to enlarge. I have forwarded the mails to Dublin.”

The grieving Captain John Giffard expresses his own satisfaction as follows:

“My troops did not leave my hero unavenged – 500 rebels bleaching on the Curragh of Kildare—that Curragh over which my sweet innocent girls walked with me last Summer, that Curragh was strewed with the vile carcasses of popish rebels and the accursed town of Kildare has been reduced to a heap of ashes by our hands.”

General Duff receives no censure for the massacre and, upon his arrival in Dublin the following day, is feted as a hero by the population who honour him with a victory parade. General Dundas, by contrast, is denounced for having shown clemency toward the rebels. However, because of the massacre, wavering rebels are discouraged from surrendering and there are no further capitulations in County Kildare until the final surrender of William Aylmer in July. Dr. Chambers considers that Lake and Duff are not in communication about the surrenders, being on opposite sides of the Curragh. Duff and his 500 men arrive in Kildare after a forced march from Limerick and find it sacked by the rebels, along with the piked body of Duff’s nephew.

Duff is later involved in an unsuccessful campaign after the Battle of Vinegar Hill to trap and destroy a surviving rebel column in Wexford led by Anthony Perry who fights and eludes Duff’s forces at the battle of Ballygullen/Whiteheaps on 5 July.

(Pictured: The statue of Saint Brigid at the Market Square of Kildare which is dedicated to the memory of the victims at Gibbet Rath)