Greville-Nugent holds the Irish parliamentary seat of Longford, vacated by his father on his elevation to the peerage, from December 31, 1869, defeating John Martin. He has to relinquish the seat in May 1870 due to Judge Fitzgerald overturning the election result on the grounds of voting irregularities.
Greville-Nugent’s illegitimate son, Reginald Charles Fulke Greville, born August 19, 1866, is better known after changing his surname to Maugham (following a close friendship with the writer W. Somerset Maugham‘s great-aunt Julia) as the author of numerous books about Africa, and his most well-known work, Jersey under the Jack Boot.
Byrne is born on March 20, 1780, at Ballylusk, Monaseed, County Wexford, the eldest son of Patrick Byrne, a middling Catholic farmer, and Mary (née Graham). He joins the United Irishmen in the spring of 1797 and, although only seventeen, becomes one of the organisation’s most active agents in north Wexford.
When rebellion engulfs his home district on May 27, 1798, Byrne assumes command of the local Monaseed corps and rallies them at Fr. John Murphy‘s camp on Carrigrew Hill on June 3. They fight at the rebel victory at Tubberneering on June 4 and the unsuccessful attempt to capture Arklow five days later. After the dispersal of the main rebel camp at Vinegar Hill on June 21, he accompanies Murphy to Kilkenny but begins the retreat to Wexford four days later. Heavily attacked at Scollagh Gap, he is one of a minority of survivors who spurn the proffered amnesty and join the rebel forces in the Wicklow Mountains. He is absent when the main force defeats a cavalry column at Ballyellis on June 30 but protects the wounded who are left in Glenmalure when the rebels launch a foray into the midlands the following week. He takes charge of the Wexfordmen who regain the mountains and fight a series of minor actions in the autumn and winter of 1798 under the militant Wicklow leader Joseph Holt. On November 10, he seizes an opportunity to escape into Dublin, where he works as a timber-yard clerk with his half-brother Edward Kennedy.
Byrne is introduced to Robert Emmet in late 1802 and immediately becomes a prominent figure in his insurrection plot. He is intended to command the many Wexford residents of the city during the planned rising of 1803. On July 23, 1803, he assembles a body of rebels at the city quays, which disperse once news is received that the rising has miscarried. At Emmet’s request, he escapes to Bordeaux in August 1803 and makes his way to Paris to inform Thomas Addis Emmet and William James MacNeven of the failed insurrection. In his Paris diary, the older Emmet recalls passing on “the news brought by the messenger” to Napoleon Bonaparte‘s military advisors.
Byrne enlists in the newly formed Irish Legion in December 1803 as a sub-lieutenant and is promoted to lieutenant in 1804 but only sees garrison duty. The regiment eventually moves to the Low Countries, and is renamed the 3rd Foreign Regiment in 1808, the year he is promoted to captain. He campaigns in Spain until 1812, participating in counterinsurgency against Spanish guerillas. He fights in Napoleon’s last battles and is appointed Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur on June 18, 1813. With Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, the former Irish Legion, with its undistinguished and somewhat unfortunate history, is disbanded.
Though a supporter of Napoleon during the Hundred Days, Byrne is not involved in his return, yet he is included in an exclusion order from France which he successfully appeals. In November 1816, he swears the oath of loyalty to the now Royal Order of the Legion of Honour and becomes a naturalised French subject by royal decree on August 20, 1817. He becomes a half-pay captain but is recalled for active service in 1828 and serves as a staff officer in the French expeditionary force in Morea in support of Greek independence (1828–1830). His conduct on this campaign leads to his promotion as chef de bataillon (lieutenant-colonel) of the 56th Infantry Regiment in 1830.
After five years of service in garrisons around France, including counterinsurgency duty in Brittany, Byrne retires from the army in 1835. On December 24, 1835, he marries a Scottish woman, Frances “Fanny” Horner, at the British Embassy Chapel in Paris. They live in modest circumstances in various parts of Paris and remain childless. Though it is unclear when he is awarded the Chevalier de St Louis, having initially applied for it unsuccessfully in 1821, this distinction is mentioned in his tomb inscription, under his Legion of Honour. John Mitchel, who visits him regularly in Paris in the late 1850s, recalls Byrne sporting the rosette of the Médaille de Sainte Hélène, awarded in 1857 to surviving veterans of Napoleon’s campaigns.
An early list of Irish Legion officers describes Byrne as an upright and disciplined man, with little formal instruction but aspiring to improve himself. He becomes fully fluent in French but also learns Spanish and his language skills are a useful asset in various campaigns. Because of his suspected Bonapartist leanings, he is under police surveillance for some time after the Bourbon Restoration. He does, however, cultivate a wide social circle in Paris over the years. Various references throughout his writings testify to an inquisitive and cultured mind. He intended publishing a lengthy criticism of Gustave de Beaumont‘s Irlande, sociale, politique et religieuse (1840), claiming that it misrepresented the 1798 rebellion, but he withdraws it after meeting the author, not wishing to prejudice the reception of such an important French work on “the sufferings of Ireland.”
A lifelong nationalist, Byrne acts as Paris correspondent of The Nation in the 1840s and is a well-known figure in the Irish community there. He works in the 1850s on his notably unapologetic and candid Memoirs, an early and significant contribution to the Irish literature of exile. This autobiography is acclaimed by nationalists when published posthumously by his wife in 1863, with a French translation swiftly following in 1864. His detailed testimony of key battles of the 1798 rebellion in the southeast and Emmet’s conspiracy are written with the immediacy of an eyewitness and make them an invaluable contribution to that period of Irish history.
Byrne dies on January 24, 1862, in Paris, and is buried in Montmartre Cemetery. On November 25, 1865, John Martin writes of him: “In truth he was a beautiful example of those natures that never grow old. A finer, nobler, gentler, kindlier, gayer, sunnier nature never was than his, and to the last he had the brightness and quickness and cheeriness of youth”.
Byrne’s engaging and dispassionate Memoirs have ensured his special status among Irish nationalists. Because of his longevity he is the only United Irishman to have been photographed. His wife had sketched him in profile in middle age, and the photograph taken almost three decades later shows the same, strong features though those of a frail, but dignified man of 79 years.
(From: “Byrne, Miles” by Ruan O’Donnell and Sylvie Kleinman, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009, last revised August 2024 | Pictured: Photograph of Miles Byrne taken in Paris in 1859)
Brenan is born in Cork, County Cork, on November 17, 1828. He begins to write verse at an early age and is one of the genuine poets of the Young Ireland movement. His earlier poems are published under the initials “J. B., Cork,” or “J. B—n,” and some of his American verses under the pseudonym “Gondalez.” He is also an able prose writer.
Brenan is an active member of the Cork Historical Society, and is one of the editors of the Cork Magazine, which appears in November 1847, and continues to be published until the end of 1848, when the journal ceases publication. Some of its contributors, who include Frazer, Martin MacDermott, Fitz James O’Brien, Mulchinock and Mary Savage, later either end up in jail or in exile.
In January 1848, John Mitchel visits Cork and, according to Michael Cavanagh, who publishes a sketch of Brenan’s life in Young Ireland, Dublin, in June and July 1885, Brenan for the first time “beheld the man he most admired on earth, and with whose future destiny, whether for weal or woe, he felt his own was bound up. Never had the archenemy of England a more faithful or earnest follower.”
Brenan contributes to the Mitchel’s United Irishman and sells his rifle to obtain train fare so he can take up his residence in Dublin, the headquarters of the revolutionary movement. He later publishes articles in John Martin‘s The Irish Felon urging the Confederate Clubs members, many of whom have arms, to be in readiness for action. “The sooner you realise the fact,” he writes in a letter addressed to the Members of the Provincial Confederate Clubs, “that the Confederation was got up for the purpose of doing something, the better for us all. Just think what it undertook to do. It undertook to defeat the strongest Government and to liberate the most degraded country that ever existed. It undertook to give – to a province—to strike the chains off millions of slaves and, if necessary, to wash out the iron moulds in blood.”
In another letter to “the Young Men of Ireland” on July 22, 1848, he writes, “On you I principally rely. You realise that you are very ‘rash,’ rather inclined to be ‘violent,’ and have exceedingly little prudence to spare. Brothers, let your watchword be ‘Now or never—now and forever’ rashly.”
Brenan is associated with John Savage and John O’Mahony while Savage is operating on the slopes of the Comeragh Mountains. He is arrested and kept in prison for seven months alternately in Newgate Prison, Carrickfergus and Kilmainham Gaols. During his confinement he writes some fine poems, according to T. F. O’Sullivan, one, entitled Yearnings, evidently addressed to Mary Savage, sister of John.
After his release without trial in March 1849, Brenan becomes editor of the Irishman which had been started in Dublin by Bernard Fulham, and for six months attempts to rekindle the insurrectionary flame in the country. He is implicated in the attack on the Cappoquin police barracks on September 16, 1848, and in October escapes to the United States.
In America Brenan becomes associated with a number of journals, including Horace Greeley‘s New-York Tribune, Devin Reilly’s People, The Enquirer of Newark, New Jersey, and the New Orleans Delta in which he writes a series of papers under the pen-name Ben Fox. On August 27, 1851, he marries Mary Savage, in her parents’ house, on Thirteenth Street, New York.
Brenan writes some articles and poems for John Mitchel’s Irish Citizen in 1854. He is an enthusiastic supporter of the Southern cause and founds the New Orleans Times.
Brenan dies on May 27, 1857, at the early age of twenty-nine and is buried in the old French cemetery of New Orleans. During the last year of his life, he is almost totally blind. He is attended in his last illness by Dr. Dalton Williams. There are seven children of his and Mary’s marriage, only one of whom, Florence, survives their parents. She possesses her father’s literary ability but devotes her life to religion as a member of the Mercy Order.
Brenan’s best-known poem, “Come to Me, Dearest,” is addressed to Mary Savage before their marriage. The love story of Brenan and Mary is told in the sketch by Ellen Mary Patrick Downing, afterwards Sister Mary Alphonsus.
Martin first meets John Mitchel while attending Dr. Henderson’s private school in Newry. He receives an Arts degree at Trinity College Dublin in 1832 and proceeds to study medicine but has to abandon this in 1835 when his uncle dies, and he has to return to manage the family landholding.
In 1847 Martin is moved by the Great Famine to join Mitchel in the Repeal Association but subsequently leaves it with Mitchel. He contributes to Mitchel’s journal, United Irishman, and then following Mitchel’s arrest on May 27, 1848, he continues with his own anti-British journal, The Irish Felon, and establishes “The Felon Club.” This leads to a warrant for his arrest, and he turns himself in on July 8, 1848. He is sentenced on August 18, 1848, to ten years transportation to Van Diemen’s Land.
Martin arrives on the Elphinstone with Kevin Izod O’Doherty in Hobart, Tasmania, in November 1849. He accepts a “ticket of leave” which allows him to live in relative freedom at Bothwell, provided he promises not to escape.
While in Tasmania, Martin continues to meet in secret with his fellow exiles Kevin Izod O’Doherty, Thomas Francis Meagher, William Smith O’Brien, and John Mitchel. He and Mitchel live together before the arrival of Mitchel’s wife, Jenny. He chooses not to join Mitchel when Mitchel revokes his ticket of leave and escapes. Instead, he remains in Tasmania until he is granted a “conditional pardon” in 1854. This allows him to leave for Paris, and he returns to Ireland on being granted a full pardon in 1856.
On return to Ireland Martin becomes a national organiser for the Tenant Right League. He begins to write for The Nation in 1860. He forms the National League with others in January 1864 – it is mainly an educational organisation but Fenians disrupt its meetings. He remains in contact with Mitchel in Paris through 1866. He opposes the Fenians’ support of armed violence, yet, together with Alexander Martin Sullivan in December 1867, he heads the symbolic funeral march honouring the Manchester Martyrs as it follows the MacManus route to Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin. He is briefly arrested for these activities, but the charges are dropped.
Martin is in the United States in December 1869 when he is nominated by Isaac Butt and his nationalists as the Irish nationalist Home Rule candidate to oppose Reginald Greville-Nugent, who is supported by the Catholic clergy, in the Longfordby-election. Greville-Nugent initially wins the vote, but the result is nullified by Judge Fitzgerald on the grounds that voters had been illegally influenced in the non-secret voting process. In the May 1870 re-run, Butt’s second candidate, Edward Robert King-Harman, like Martin a Protestant landlord, is also defeated, but this time legally.
Contradictions and factionalism are symptomatic of the struggle for influence and leadership at the time between the waning Church of Ireland and the rising Irish Catholic Church. Hence a secular Protestant land-owning, non-violent elite reformist nationalist who desires Home Rule like Martin, can find himself both sympathetic to and at odds with a militant organisation like the Fenians with their Jacobin– and American-influenced ideas of revolutionary republicanism and different social roots. Until Charles Stewart Parnell, the Isaac Butt-originated Home Rule forces could not obtain the support of the Catholic Church under the anti-Fenian CardinalPaul Cullen or manage to achieve more than short-term tactical alliances with Fenians, leading to a split and uncoordinated opposition to British rule. Protestants such as Martin and John Mitchel, with their early political roots in Young Ireland, are, whatever their political ideals, not part of the majority Catholic mainstream, which consists largely of tenants rather than landlords.
In the January 1871 by-election, Martin is elected by a margin of 2–1 to the seat of Meath in the British parliament as the first Home Rule MP, representing first Isaac Butt’s Home Government Association and from November 1873 the Home Rule League. This is unusual for a Protestant in a Catholic constituency, and is a measure of the popular esteem Martin is held in. He retains his seat in the 1874 United Kingdom general election as one of 60 Home Rule members. He is commonly known as “Honest John Martin.” In parliament he speaks strongly for Home Rule for Ireland and opposes Coercion Bills.
Martin dies in Newry, County Down, on March 29, 1875, homeless and in relative poverty, having forgiven tenant fees during preceding years of inflation and low farm prices. His parliamentary seat of County Meath is taken up by Charles Stewart Parnell.
Martin marries Henrietta Mitchel, the youngest sister of John Mitchel, on November 25, 1868, after twenty years of courtship. She shares her husband’s politics, and after his death campaigns for home rule believing this to be a continuation of the Young Ireland mandate. After the split in the party, she sides with Charles Stewart Parnell. She dies at her home in Dublin on July 11, 1913, and is buried in Newry.
As a member of the Irish Confederation during the Great Famine, Reilly together with John Mitchel and James Fintan Lalor advocate the refusal to pay rents, retention of crops by small tenant farmers and labourers to feed their own families, and the breaking up of bridges and tearing up of railway lines to prevent the removal of food from the country.
Reilly is involved in the failed Young Ireland Rebellion of 1848 and is forced to flee to the United States where he becomes active in U.S. political affairs in support of Irish independence. He is reported to be the founder of The People newspaper in New York City which folds after six months in 1849.
James Connolly claims that as the editor of the Protective Union labour rights newspaper for the printers of Boston, Reilly is a pioneer of American labour journalism and that Horace Greeley believed of his series of articles in The American Review on the European situation “that if collected and published as a book, they would create a revolution in Europe.”
It is possible that Connolly confuses The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, which is known for its political activism, with The American Review, which for a time had Edgar Allan Poe as an editorial assistant. Other sources refer to Reilly as being editor of the New York Democratic Review and later the Washington Union.
Thomas Devin Reilly dies at the age of 30 on March 5, 1854. He is buried at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Washington, D.C., together with his infant child Mollie and wife Jennie Miller from Enniskillen.
After the failure of the Young Ireland Rebellion of 1848, O’Leary attempts to rescue the Young Ireland leaders from Clonmel Gaol, and is himself imprisoned for a week from September 8, 1849. He takes part in a further attempted uprising in Cashel on September 16, 1849, but this proves abortive.
On September 16, 1865, O’Leary is arrested and later tried on charges of high treason, eventually reduced to “treason felony.” He is sentenced to twenty years of penal servitude, of which five years are spent in English prisons, prior to his release and exile in January 1871. During his exile, he lives mainly in Paris, also visiting the United States, remains active in the IRB and its associated organisations, and writes many letters to newspapers and journals.
On the expiration of his 20-year prison term and therefore of the conditions associated with his release in 1885, O’Leary returns to Ireland. He and his sister, the poetEllen O’Leary, both become important figures within Dublin cultural and nationalist circles, which include William Butler Yeats, Maud Gonne, Rose Kavanagh, Rosa Mulholland, George Sigerson, and Katharine Tynan. He also functions as an elder statesman of the separatist movement, being active in the Young Ireland Society, and acts as president of the Irish Transvaal Committee, which supports the Boer side in the Second Boer War.
John O’Leary dies at his residence in Dublin on the evening of March 16, 1907. He is referred to famously by W.B. Yeats in his poem September 1913: “Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone/It’s with O’Leary in the grave.”
(Pictured: Painting of John O’Leary, a favorite subject of John Butler Yeats (1904). The National Gallery of Ireland owns three oil portraits of O’Leary.)
The Tenant Right League, an organisation which aims to secure reforms in the Irish land system, is founded in Dublin on August 9, 1850, at a meeting attended by representatives of the Tenant Protection Societies. Formed by Charles Gavan Duffy and Frederick Lucas, the League unites for a time Protestant and Catholic tenants, Duffy calling his movement The League of North and South.
The political background to the movement is the Encumbered Estates Act and the resultant change in land ownership at landlord level. In the North of Ireland, Protestant and Presbyterian ministers fear that the new landlords will destroy the “Ulster custom” of tenancy, which compensates tenants for any improvement undertaken. Concurrently, in the South of Ireland politically minded young Catholic priests are agitating for the adoption there of the Ulster custom as a measure of reform.
Support for the League initially comes from the Ulster Tenant Right Association led by William Sharman Crawford. The support is short-lived because of the involvement of Catholic clergymen from the south. As a constitutional movement, the League seeks to secure the adoption and enforcement of the Three Fs, namely fair rent, fixity of tenure, and free sale. All of these would aid Irish tenant farms, all of whom lack them.
For the larger tenant farmers fixity of tenure is the priority. On the other hand, the league never has the support of smaller tenants, whose prime concern is fair rents. The founders strive to establish a parliamentary party of Irish members who will oppose any government not prepared to grant “Tenant-right” also known as the Ulster Custom.
The League’s success is short lived and is ultimately destroyed and weakened when a number of prominent members break away and established the Catholic Defence Association. Supporters of the league are also intimidated by hostile landlords. The most serious blows to its success come when Lucas decides to take his complaint about the Archbishop of DublinPaul Cullen to Rome, which alienates clerical support. Lucas dies in October 1855 shortly after the failure of his mission, a month later Gavan Duffy emigrates to Australia.
The League finally dissolves in 1859, and the Independent Irish Party disappears by 1860. The demand for tenants’ rights is however continued by Bishop Thomas Nulty of County Meath and taken up again as a popular cause by the Irish National Land League in 1879, when the “Three Fs” are anchored in the Land Law (Ireland) Act 1881, previously pursued rigorously by Michael Davitt.
seamus dubhghaill 