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Death of James Orr, Weaver, Radical & Poet

James Orr, weaver, radical, and poet, dies on April 24, 1816.

Orr is the son of James Orr, who farms a few acres and is a linen weaver. His mother’s name is unknown. They live in the small village of Ballycarry, in the parish of Broadisland, County Antrim. He is an only child, born when his parents are middle-aged. They are unwilling to risk sending him to school, so they carefully educate him at home, his father having been very well educated. A near-contemporary source George Pepper (1829), claims that the youngster is something of a prodigy, able to read Spectator essays at the age of six. Later in life, partly thanks to membership of a local reading society, he is remarkably well read. Handloom weavers are reputedly one of the most literate and politically radical groups in the period, and he certainly fits the stereotype. Pepper also claims that William Orr is James Orr’s uncle, and that the younger man lives for three years with William Orr and his family, where his literary talents are nurtured and where he develops an interest in radical politics. Other sources do not support this account, but if there is a relationship it might explain an almost morbid interest in assizes, executions, and gallows, evident in several poems. This also might have been prompted by witnessing William Orr’s trial and execution.

Pepper “heard from good authority” that Orr in 1797 is secretary to the Antrim Association, of which William Orr is president; presumably this means the Society of United Irishmen. He sings a patriotic song called “The Irishman,” one of his most celebrated compositions, at a meeting of that body. The earliest publications traced are poems published pseudonymously (1796–97) in the Northern Star newspaper. This paper, edited by Samuel Neilson, is sympathetic to United Irish views, and it is clear that Orr, like many of his neighbours, is actively involved in the 1798 rebellion. Several poems dealing with the events of June 1798, provide a rare participant’s perspective. He takes part in the skirmish at Donegore, and flees after the defeat at the Battle of Antrim. Local sources record his successful efforts to prevent cruelty and looting by his colleagues. He goes into hiding in an Irish-speaking area, perhaps in the Glens of Antrim or in the Sperrin Mountains. After a short time, he escapes to the United States, but unlike many of his former comrades he finds himself unable to settle there, and very soon returns home to Ballycarry, and thenceforth makes his living as a weaver. In 1800, he seeks to join the militia set up to counter a feared Napoleonic invasion, but the local gentry in command rejects his application because of his United Irish associations.

Orr’s first verses are composed at meetings of a local singing school, where rival versifiers produce impromptu verses for the company to sing to the psalm tunes being practised, and he later writes songs for masonic meetings. He publishes poems in the Belfast newspapers. A few carefully written essays on morality and education, signed “Censor, Ballycarry,” are apparently also his work. A collection of poems is published in 1804, with almost 400 subscribers, and another selection is published in 1817 after his death by his friend Archibald McDowell. Orr had requested that the proceeds should go to help the poor of Ballycarry. His poems are an excellent source of information about the life and concerns of a fairly humble stratum of late eighteenth-century Ulster society.

Many of Orr’s best poems deal with subjects of interest to his community – weaving, social life, and farming – and are written in the Scots language still widely spoken in the area. He expertly uses Scots stanza forms, and joyously participates in the almost competitive composition of verse typical of the Scots tradition. Several of his poems rework themes found in Robert Burns or other earlier writers. His An Irish Cottier’s Death and Burial is derived from a Burns poem, The Cottier’s Saturday Night, but later critics acknowledge that the Orr poem is much more successful. He and his friend Samuel Thomson are pioneers in the use of written Scots in Ulster and are regarded as the two most skillful Scots poets in Ulster. Both are celebrated in their day, and their work in Scots has been rediscovered in the twentieth-century revival of interest in the traditional literature and history of the north of Ireland.

Orr’s verse in standard English is equally competent, even more ambitious and almost as interesting. The best of his work, particularly in Scots, is characterised by pleasing cadences and assured control of tone and technique. His novel and generally impressive experiments with soliloquies, verse epistles, and versified direct speech, in English and Scots, parallel his interest in extending the registers in which he could use the vernacular Scots language. He seems not to have known of William Wordsworth‘s poetry, but, apparently independently and arguably more successfully, produces verse written in “the language really used by men” (Wordsworth, preface to Lyrical Ballads (1798)). As well as fascinating foreshadowings of romanticism, his work more often reveals the influence of the enlightenment and of New Light presbyterianism. He is a member of the congregation of the Rev. John Bankhead, whose theological views are decidedly liberal, tending even towards unitarianism. His poems provide a great deal of evidence on his reading, interests, radical aspirations and convictions; and in them and in the prose essays, the reader encounters a humane and generous personality. Like many other United Irishmen, he is an enthusiastic freemason, and believes that freemasonry and education will help to usher in a peaceful millennium. His poetry reveals humanitarian concerns, not yet common in the period. He opposess slavery and cruelty to animals and children and expresses support for a contemporary popular rising in Haiti. In 1812, he signs a petition in favour of Catholic emancipation.

Orr never marries. His friend McDowell believes that the resulting lack of domestic comforts drives the poet to socialise in taverns, and it is said that local fame and popularity encourages his excessive drinking. He suffers from ill health in later life. A neglected cold in 1815 leads to tuberculosis. He dies on April 24, 1816, and is buried in the old Templecorran graveyard at Ballycarry. Some years later, freemasons erect an impressive monument over the grave.

Orr’s poems are republished by a group of local enthusiasts in 1935. Another selection appears in 1992. A plaque put up by the local district council commemorates “the bard of Ballycarry,” probably the most significant eighteenth-century English-language poet in Ulster.

(From: “Orr, James” by Linde Lunney, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)


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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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Birth of John Claudius Beresford, Tory MP and Lord Mayor of Dublin

John Claudius Beresford, Irish Tory Member of the UK Parliament representing Dublin City (1801–04) and County Waterford (1806–11), is born on October 23, 1766. He also serves as Lord Mayor of Dublin (1814-15).

Beresford is educated at Trinity College, Dublin. From 1783, he serves as a storekeeper for the port of Dublin. He is subsequently appointed to a wealthy sinecure post of Inspector-General of Exports and Imports. He is returned by his father, Hon. John Beresford, for the family borough of Swords to the Irish House of Commons in 1790. In 1798 he is returned for Dublin City, helped by his position in the port, and as a partner in a leading Dublin bank and a member of Dublin Corporation.

During the Irish Rebellion of 1798, Beresford leads a yeoman battalion which fights against the rebels with a particular ferocity. He keeps a riding school in Dublin, which acquires an evil reputation as the chief scene of the floggings by which evidence is extorted from the United Irishmen. As such, he becomes identified as one of the leading opponents of the rebellion, and the rebels deliberately burn the banknotes issued by his bank. His reputation for persecuting political opponents survives throughout his political career.

Beresford takes a prominent part in the Irish House of Commons, where he unsuccessfully moves the reduction of the proposed Irish contribution to the imperial exchequer in the debates on the Act of Union. He is to the last an ardent opponent of the union, taking the opposite position to his father. He resigns his post at the port on January 25, 1799, so as not to be tainted by it or by the suggestion that his actions are motivated by a desire to retain it.

Under a provision of the Act of Union 1800 Beresford retains his seat in the 1st Parliament of the United Kingdom (1801–02) without a fresh election, and in the Union Parliament he is a supporter of William Pitt the Younger and later Henry Addington. He has to give up his Irish business interests to play a full part in Parliamentary business. He is re-elected at the 1802 United Kingdom general election, being top of the poll.

On June 3, 1803, Beresford is the only previous supporter of the government to desert them and support a censure motion moved by Peter Patten, making a speech in support which is regarded as “absurd” by the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant for Ireland. In March 1804, he is appointed to the Irish currency committee, and therefore resigns his seat by accepting the Escheatorship of Ulster, a sinecure office of profit under the Crown.

After the death of his father on November 5, 1805, Beresford returns to Parliament by winning the by-election to replace him as MP for County Waterford. Politically, he allies to a family faction of the Marquess of Waterford, under the leadership of Henry de La Poer Beresford. The faction aims at trying to stop the government from giving power in Ireland to the Ponsonby family. Beresford is the chief spokesman for his group in their meetings with Ministers.

Although expected to go into opposition in 1806, Beresford in fact supports the government, because a run on funds at his bank leaves him in need of government support for credit. His support leads to his re-election at the 1806 United Kingdom general election in a contested election. This is a controversial decision within the government, with the Duke of Bedford admitting that Beresford had been guilty of persecution but believing he is now loyal, while Lord Howick believes it unlikely that he can be relied upon.

Howick turns out to be correct. In 1807 Beresford does not support the government and becomes a supporter of the Duke of Portland before his accession to the premiership later that year. He is unopposed in the 1807 United Kingdom general election. However, he is erratic, and some of his speeches are reckoned as doing more harm than good to the government’s cause. He strongly supports government against the proposal that peace negotiations with France begin in 1809.

In January 1811, Beresford suffers a further severe financial crisis which prevents his attendance at Parliament for some months. In June he resigns his seat through appointment as Escheator of Munster, being succeeded by his kinsman, Major General Sir William Carr Beresford. The next year, he attempts to get a government appointment but is refused as he already has a good pension. He serves as Lord Mayor of Dublin in 1814–15, where he is known for his “princely hospitality,” but thereafter withdraws from public life.

Beresford dies on July 20, 1846, at his house at Glenmoyle, County Londonderry.

(Pictured: Portrait of John Claudius Beresford, seated and wearing the chain of office of the Lord Mayor of Dublin, by William Cuming, August 1814)


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The Battle of Tory Island

The Battle of Tory Island, sometimes called the Battle of Donegal, Battle of Lough Swilly or Warren’s Action, is a naval action of the French Revolutionary Wars, fought on October 12, 1798, between French and British squadrons off the northwest coast of County Donegal, then in the Kingdom of Ireland. The last action of the Irish Rebellion of 1798, the Battle of Tory Island ends the final attempt by the French Navy to land substantial numbers of soldiers in Ireland during the war.

Britain’s enemies in Continental Europe have long recognised Ireland as a weak point in Britain’s defences. Landing troops there is a popular strategic goal, not only because an invader can expect the support of a large proportion of the native population, but also because at least initially they will face fewer and less reliable troops than elsewhere in the British Isles. Additionally, embroiling the British Army in a protracted Irish campaign will reduce its availability for other theatres of war. Finally, French planners consider that a successful invasion of Ireland might act as the ideal platform for a subsequent invasion of Great Britain.

The Society of United Irishmen, led by Theobald Wolfe Tone, launches an uprising against British rule in Ireland in May 1798. At the request of the rebels, a small French force under General Jean Joseph Amable Humbert is landed at Killala, County Mayo, but by early September both this expedition and the rebellion has been defeated.

Unaware of Humbert’s surrender, the French despatch reinforcements under the command of Commodore Jean-Baptiste-François Bompart on September 16. Having missed one invasion force, the Royal Navy is more watchful. Roving frigate patrols cruise off the principal French ports and in the approaches to Ireland, while squadrons of battleships from the Channel Fleet sail nearby, ready to move against any new invasion force. In command of the squadron on the Irish station is Commodore Sir John Borlase Warren, a highly experienced officer (and politician) who has made a name for himself raiding the French coast early in the war.

The squadron carrying the reinforcements is soon spotted after leaving Brest. After a long chase, the French are brought to battle in a bay off the rugged County Donegal coast in the west of Ulster, very close to Tory Island. During the action the outnumbered French attempt to escape, but are run down and defeated piecemeal, with the British capturing four ships and scattering the survivors. Over the next fortnight, British frigate patrols scour the passage back to Brest, capturing three more ships. Of the ten ships in the original French squadron, only two frigates and a schooner reach safety. British losses in the campaign are minimal.

The battle marks the last attempt by the French Navy to launch an invasion of any part of the British Isles. It also ends the last hopes the United Irishmen have of obtaining outside support in their struggle against the British. After the action, Wolfe Tone is recognised aboard the captured French flagship and arrested. He is brought ashore by the British at Buncrana, on the Inishowen peninsula. He is later tried for treason, convicted, and commits suicide while in prison in Dublin, hours before he is to be hanged.

(Pictured: Attack of the French Squadron under Monsr. Bompart Chef d’Escadre, upon the Coast of Ireland, by a Detachment of His Majesty’s Ships under the Command of Sir J. B. Warren, October 12, 1798, by Nicholas Pocock, 1799)


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Death of Robert Holmes, Lawyer & Nationalist

Robert Holmes, Irish lawyer and nationalist, dies in London on October 7, 1859.

Holmes, the son of parents who are natives of Antrim, County Antrim, and settled in Belfast, is born during a visit by his parents to Dublin in 1765. He enters Trinity College, Dublin in 1782, and graduates B.A. in 1787. He at first devotes himself to medicine, but he soon turns his attention to the law. In 1795, he is called to the bar. He spends a substantial period of his professional life travelling the northeast circuit in Ireland, where he gains a reputation for great ability and legal skill.

Holmes studies law and becomes one of the best-known defenders of the Nationalist leaders in Ireland. He speaks in 1846 in defence of Charles Gavan Duffy, editor of The Nation. Duffy had been indicted over an article written by John Mitchel, which comes to be known as the “Railway Article.” His defence proves successful and his speech on behalf of his client is described by Lord Chief Justice Edward Pennefather as “the most eloquent ever heard in a court of Justice.”

In 1798, during a parade of the lawyer’s corps of yeomanry, of which he is a member, Holmes throws down his arms on learning that the corps is to be placed under the military authorities, dreading that he might have to act against the populace. To one Joy, a barrister, who had used insulting language to him respecting this circumstance, he sends a challenge, for which he suffers three months’ imprisonment. In 1799, he publishes a satirical pamphlet on the projected Acts of Union, entitled A Demonstration of the Necessity of the Legislative Union of Great Britain and Ireland. With the rising of his brother-in-law, Robert Emmet, on July 23, 1803, he has no connection, although he is arrested on suspicion and imprisoned for some months. This retards his advancement. He declines to receive any favours from the government, refusing in succession the offices of Crown prosecutor, King’s Counsel, and Solicitor-General, and to the last he remains a member of the outer bar.

Holmes has for many years the largest practice of any member of the Irish courts, and is listened to with attention by judges, although he is not always very civil to them. His law arguments form an important set of articles in the Irish Law Reports, and he is an impressive advocate, notably in his speeches in Watson v. Dill, in defence of The Nation newspaper, and his oration on behalf of John Mitchel, tried for treason-felony on May 24, 1848. During the course of his practice he makes over £100,000.

Holmes marries, firstly, Mary Anne Emmet, daughter of Dr. Robert Emmet. She is the sister of Robert Emmet, who leads an unsuccessful rebellion in 1803, and whose brother, Thomas Addis Emmet, is a leading member, with Theobald Wolfe Tone, of the Society of United Irishmen. Both take part in the Irish Rebellion of 1798. The marriage produces one surviving child, a daughter, who later marries George William Lenox-Conyngham, chief clerk of the Foreign Office, and in turn has an only daughter who in 1861 marries Viscount Doneraile.

Holmes marries in 1810 at Childwall, Liverpool, as his second wife, the English educator and writer Eliza Lawrence. She dies in 1811.

After his retirement in 1852, Holmes resides in London with his only child Elizabeth. He dies at the age of 94 at her home, 37 Eaton Place, Belgrave Square, London, on October 7, 1859.

During the course of his life, Holmes is the author of three published works. The first, published in 1799, is entitled A Demonstration of the Necessity of the Legislative Union of Great Britain and Ireland, a satirical pamphlet ridiculing the arguments of its supporters. The next is An Address to the Yeomanry of Ireland, demonstrating the necessity of their declaring their opinions upon Political Subjects. His most important work however, according to Peter Aloysius Sillard, is The Case of Ireland Stated, which apparently goes through six editions, the last in 1847.

(Pictured: Image of Robert Holmes from Michael Doheny’s “The Felon’s Track”)


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Birth of Roger McCorley, Irish Republican Activist

Roger McCorley, Irish republican activist, is born into a Roman Catholic family at 67 Hillman Street in Belfast on September 6, 1901.

McCorley is one of three children born to Roger Edmund McCorley, a meat carver in a hotel, and Agnes Liggett. He has two elder brothers, Vincent and Felix. He joins the Fianna in his teens. His family has a very strong republican tradition, and he claims to be the great-grandson of the United Irishmen folk hero Roddy McCorley, who was executed for his part in the Irish Rebellion of 1798.

McCorley is a member of the Belfast Brigade of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) during the Irish War of Independence (1919–1922). He is commandant of the Brigade’s first battalion, eventually becoming Commandant of the Belfast Brigade. In June 1920, he is involved in an attack on a Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) police barracks at Crossgar, County Down. On Sunday, August 22, 1920, in Lisburn, he is involved in the assassination of RIC District Inspector Oswald Swanzy, who was held responsible by Michael Collins for the assassination of Tomás McCurtain, Lord Mayor of Cork.

McCorley is noted for his militancy, as he is in favour of armed attacks on British forces in Belfast. The Brigade’s leaders, by contrast, in particular, Joe McKelvey, are wary of sanctioning attacks for fear of loyalist reprisals on republicans and the Catholic population in general. In addition, McCorley is in favour of conducting an armed defense of Catholic areas, whereas McKelvey does not want the IRA to get involved in what he considers to be sectarian violence. McCorley writes later that in the end, “the issue settled itself within a very short space of time, when the Orange mob was given uniforms, paid for by the British, and called the Ulster Special Constabulary (USC).” The role of the USC, a temporary police force raised for counter-insurgency purposes, in the conflict is still debated, but republicans maintain that the organization was responsible for the indiscriminate killings of Catholics and nationalists.

On January 26, 1921, McCorley, is involved in the fatal shooting of three Auxiliary Division officers in their beds in the Railway View hotel in central Belfast. Shortly afterwards, he and another IRA man, Seamus Woods, organize an active service unit (ASU) within the first battalion of the Belfast Brigade, with the intention of carrying out attacks, with or without the approval of the Brigade leadership. The unit consists of 32 men. McCorley later writes, “I issued a general order that, where reprisal gangs [State forces] were cornered, no prisoners were to be taken.” In March 1921, he personally leads the ASU in the killing of three Black and Tans in Victoria Street in central Belfast. He is responsible for the deaths of two more Auxiliaries in Donegall Place in April. In reprisal for these shootings, members of the RIC assassinate two republican activists, the Duffin brothers in Clonard Gardens in west Belfast. On June 10 1921, both and Woods and McCorley units are involved in the killing a RIC man who is suspected in the revenge killings of the Duffin brothers. Two RIC men and a civilian are also wounded in that attack.

Thereafter, there is what historian Robert Lynch has described as a “savage underground war” between McCorley’s ASU and RIC personnel based in Springfield Road barracks and led by an Inspector Ferris. Ferris is accused of murdering the Lord Mayor of Cork Thomas MacCurtain and had been posted to Lisburn for his safety. Ferris himself is among the casualties, being shot in the chest and neck, but surviving. McCorley claims to have been one of the four IRA men who shot Ferris. In addition, his men bomb and burn a number of businesses including several cinemas and a Reform Club. In May 1921, however, thirteen of his best men are arrested when surrounded by British troops during an operation in County Cavan. They are held in Crumlin Road Gaol and sentenced to death.

On June 3, McCorley organizes an attack on Crumlin Road Gaol in an attempt to rescue the IRA men held there before they are executed. The operation is not a success; however, the condemned men are reprieved after a truce is agreed between the IRA and British forces in July 1921. On Bloody Sunday (July 10, 1921), he is a major leader in the defense of nationalist areas from attacks by both the police and loyalists. On that day twenty people are killed before he negotiates a truce beginning at noon on July 11. At least 100 people are wounded, about 200 houses are destroyed or badly damaged – most of them Catholic homes, leaving 1,000 people homeless.

In April 1922, McCorley becomes leader of the IRA Belfast Brigade after Joe McKelvey goes south to Dublin to join other IRA members who are against the Anglo-Irish Treaty. With McKelvey’s departure, Seamus Woods becomes Officer Commanding of the IRA’s 3rd Northern Division, which has up to 1,000 members, with McCorley designated as Vice Officer Commanding. McCorley for his part, supports the Treaty, despite the fact that it provides for the partition of Ireland and the continued British rule in Northern Ireland. The reason for this is that Michael Collins and Eoin O’Duffy have assured him that this is only a tactical move and indeed, Collins sends men, money and weapons to the IRA in the North throughout 1922.

However, McCorley’s command sees the collapse of the Belfast IRA. In May 1922, the IRA launches an offensive with attacks all across Northern Ireland. In Belfast, he carries out an assault on Musgrave Street RIC barracks. He also conducts an arson campaign on businesses in Belfast. His men also carry out a number of assassinations, including that of Ulster Unionist Party MP William J. Twaddell, which causes the internment of over 200 Belfast IRA men.

To escape from the subsequent repression, McCorley and over 900 Northern IRA men flee south, to the Irish Free State, where they are housed in the Curragh. McCorley is put in command of these men. In June 1922, the Irish Civil War breaks out between Pro and Anti-Treaty elements of the IRA. He takes the side of the Free State and Michael Collins. After Collins is killed in August 1922, his men are stood down. About 300 of them join the National Army and are sent to County Kerry to put down anti-Treaty guerrillas there. In the Spring of 1923, bitterly disillusioned by the brutal counter-insurgency against fellow republicans, he resigns his command.

McCorley later asserts that he “hated the Treaty” and only supported it because it allowed Ireland to have its own armed forces. Both he and Seamus Woods are severe critics of the Irish Free State inertia towards Northern Ireland after the death of Michael Collins. He comments that when Collins was killed “the Northern element gave up all hope.”

In 1936 McCorley is instrumental in the establishment of the All-Ireland Old IRA Men’s Organization, serving as Vice-President with President Liam Deasy (Cork No. 3 Brigade) and Secretary George Lennon (Waterford No. 2 Brigade).

In the 1940s, McCorley is a founding member of Córas na Poblachta, a political party which aspires to a United Ireland and economic independence from Britain. He dies on November 13, 1993, and is buried in the Republican Plot of Glasnevin Cemetery.


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Birth of Valentine Browne Lawless, 2nd Baron Cloncurry

Valentine Browne Lawless, 2nd Baron Cloncurry, Irish peer, politician and landowner, is born in Merrion Square in Dublin on August 19, 1773.

Lawless is the only surviving son of Nicholas Lawless, wool merchant, brewer, and banker, who becomes 1st Baron Cloncurry in 1789, and Margaret Lawless (née Browne), only daughter and heiress of Valentine Browne of Mount Browne, County Limerick. He is educated privately at Portarlington, Queen’s County (now County Laois), and at Blackrock, County Dublin. He enters Trinity College Dublin (TCD) in 1789, graduating BA in 1792. After completing a tour of Europe (1792–95) he returns to Ireland, where he joins the Society of United Irishmen and the loyalist yeomanry. Pressurised by his father, he decides to study law, and is at Middle Temple from 1795 to 1798. He later claims that at a dinner party in the spring of 1797 he hears the prime minister, William Pitt, discuss his plans for a legislative union with Ireland, prompting him to write an anti-union pamphlet in response. Like many of the claims in his published recollections, the story is unreliable.

During 1797 Lawless helps Arthur O’Connor form his United Irishman newspaper The Press, and Leonard McNally informs Dublin Castle that Lawless is its principal shareholder. In October 1797 Lawless attends a meeting of the executive directory of the United Irishmen, of which he is elected a member. Throughout this period and after his return to London he is carefully watched by the British secret service. His friendship with O’Connor, and the fact that he provides funds for Fr. James Coigly, arouse deep suspicion. After the outbreak of open rebellion in Ireland he is arrested at his lodgings in Pall Mall on May 31, 1798, on suspicion of high treason, and imprisoned for six weeks in the Tower of London. Arabella Jefferyes, sister of the Earl of Clare, apparently tries to extort money from Lawless in return for pleading his case to the Duke of Portland. He refuses the offer. On his release he tours England on horseback but is rearrested on April 14, 1799, and held until March 1801. His father votes for the Act of Union, hoping to secure his son’s release, and dies on August 28, 1799. Lawless succeeds him as 2nd Baron Cloncurry. His grandfather and his fiancée, Mary Ryal, also die while he is imprisoned.

Embittered by his experience, Lawless tours the Continent from 1801 to 1805 before returning to his family estate at Lyons Hill, Ardclough, County Kildare. Throwing himself into improving his estates and into local concerns, he founds the County Kildare Farming Society in 1814. He is also involved in canal developments and agricultural improvements in the country. Opposed to the rural constabulary bill of 1822, he supports Catholic emancipation and the attempts of Daniel O’Connell to repeal the Act of Union. He breaks with O’Connell in the 1830s when his friend, Henry Paget, 1st Marquess of Anglesey, is viceroy, because he believes repeal can now be achieved through official means. The rift is never healed.

In 1831, Lawless is admitted to the Privy Council of Ireland (PC) and an English peer, but rarely attends the House of Lords. Involved in anti-tithe campaigns, he retires from politics in 1840. Travelling on the Continent in 1841 and 1842, he returns to defend O’Connell’s planned Clontarf meeting in the privy council but refuses to attend any further meetings after his advice on dealing with the Great Famine is ignored in 1846. In 1849 he publishes his personal reminiscences, which appear to have been ghost-written.

Lawless’s health begins to fail in 1851. He dies at the older family home, Maretimo House, Blackrock, on October 28, 1853, and is buried in the family vault at Lyons Hill.

Lawless first marries Elizabeth Georgiana, youngest daughter of Lieutenant-General Charles Morgan, at Rome on April 16, 1803. They have one son and one daughter. The marriage ends in divorce in 1811 after her adultery with Sir John Piers. In 1811, he then marries Emily, daughter of Archibald Douglas of England, and widow of Joseph Leeson. They have two sons and a daughter. The elder son, Edward, succeeds as 3rd Baron Cloncurry. He commits suicide in 1869 by throwing himself out of a third-floor window at Lyons Hill. The younger, Cecil-John, is an MP, but catches a chill at his father’s funeral and dies on November 5, 1853.

(From: “Lawless, Valentine Browne” by Patrick M. Geoghegan, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009 | Pictured: Lyons House, Lyons Hill, Ardclough, County Kildare)


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Birth of Henry Lawes Luttrell, 2nd Earl of Carhampton

General Henry Lawes Luttrell, 2nd Earl of Carhampton PC, Anglo-Irish politician and soldier, who both in public and private life attracts scandal, is born on August 7, 1743. He is spurned by colleagues in the British House of Commons who believe that in the election of 1769 he played an underhand role in denying his seat to the popular choice, the reformer John Wilkes. In 1788 he is publicly accused in Dublin of raping a twelve-year-old girl. Ten years later, his command in the suppression of the Irish Rebellion of 1798 is criticised by fellow officers for its savagery, and not least against women. His last years in Parliament are marked by his opposition to Catholic Emancipation, and to parliamentary reform.

Luttrell is the scion of an Anglo-Irish landed family, descendants of Sir Geoffrey de Luterel, who established Luttrellstown Castle, County Dublin, in the early 13th century. His grandfather, Henry Luttrell, had been a pardoned Jacobite commander murdered on the street in Dublin in 1717 supposedly by his former comrades. His father, Simon Luttrell, is successively titled Baron Irnham, Viscount Carhampton and Earl Carhampton, all in the Peerage of Ireland. His mother, Maria, is the daughter of Sir Nicholas Lawes, Governor of Jamaica, and the eventual heir to a slave plantation on the West Indian island which, on her husband’s death in 1787, passes to her son.

Educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford, Luttrell is commissioned into the 48th (Northamptonshire) Regiment of Foot in 1757. Two years later he becomes lieutenant of the 34th (Cumberland) Regiment of Foot.

Father and son, both accounted “notorious womanizers,” have a bitter relationship. His father once challenges him to a duel, but he declines, observing that his father is not a gentleman.

Luttrell, described as “strong in body, if not in mind,” achieves a reputation for bravery as a soldier during the Seven Years’ War, becoming Deputy Adjutant-General of the British Forces in Portugal. In 1768 he becomes a Tory Member of Parliament representing Bossiney.

With the support of the Grafton ministry and of the Court, in 1769 Luttrell stands in Middlesex against John Wilkes, the radical and popular figure who had already been the constituency’s three-time democratic choice. He loses the poll (1,143 votes to 269) but is seated in Parliament, Wilkes having once again been barred as an adjudged felon. As a result of the affair, for some months, Luttrell dares not appear in the street and is “the most unpopular man in the House of Commons.”

The government rewards Luttrell by appointing him Adjutant General for Ireland in 1770. He continues to sit in the Commons, where he describes the Whigs in their opposition to the conduct of the American War, as “the abetters of treason and rebellion combined purposely for the ruin of their country.”

Luttrell becomes active in Irish politics and between 1783 and 1787, he sits in the Irish House of Commons for Old Leighlin. On his father’s death in 1787, he succeeds to the earldom of Carhampton and other titles. He becomes Colonel of the 6th Dragoon Guards and Lieutenant-General of the Ordnance in Ireland.

In 1788, Luttrell is publicly accused in Dublin of the rape of a 12-year-old girl. Having been paid to deliver a message, Mary Neal claims she is bundled into a brothel and there assaulted throughout the night by Luttrell. The keeper of the house, Maria Llewellyn, is charged in a case marked by accusations of witness tampering, the death in prison of Mary’s mother and newborn baby sister and by the insinuation that Mary was already working as a prostitute. The affair becomes a cause célèbre with the public intervention of Archibald Hamilton Rowan, later a founding member of the Dublin Society of United Irishmen. To clear Mary’s name he brings her to Dublin Castle to see the Lord Lieutenant, John Fane, 10th Earl of Westmorland. Westmorland, unmoved, pardons Llewellyn and sets her at liberty. Luttrell is never asked to answer for raping Mary Neal. In 1790 he re-enters the British Parliament as Member for Plympton Erle.

In 1791 and 1792, Luttrell helps vote down bills to abolish the slave trade. Negroes, he proposes, only want “to murder their masters, ravish their women, and drink all their rum.” At the same time, he opposes lifting civil disabilities on Roman Catholics by abolishing the Test Act in Scotland, and speaks scathingly of parliamentary reform.

In October 1793, a younger brother, Temple Simon Luttrell, is arrested in Boulogne and, until February 1795, is held in Paris where, on the strength of their sister Anne Luttrell being married to Prince Henry, Duke of Cumberland, he is publicly exhibited as the brother of the king of England.

In 1795, Luttrell is entrusted with the breakup and disarming of Defenders, the agrarian semi-insurgency, in Connacht. His proceedings and impressment of some 1,300 “rebels” into the British navy elicits criticism in otherwise loyal circles.

In 1796, with the leaders of the democratic party, the United Irishmen, preparing for a French-assisted insurrection, Luttrell is given overall command of the Crown forces in Ireland. He demonstrates still greater ruthlessness in attempting to “pacify” the country and suppress the eventual rising in the summer of 1798. His command has the unusual distinction of being upbraided by his successor as Commander in Chief, Sir Ralph Abercromby, for an army “in a state of licentiousness, which must render it formidable to every one but the enemy.”

Luttrell is seen by his critics as having “fanned the flame of disaffection into open rebellion” by “the picketings, the free quarters, half hangings, flogging and pitch-cappings” he directs.

In July 1799, Luttrell sells his Irish property and by his own later account, he takes no part in the Acts of Union. He claims to be “disgusted at the scene that was passing before me”, and to abandon Ireland because, under a “cowardly” government, he sees “the country likely to become Catholic.” When the Dublin Post of May 2, 1811 erroneously reports his death, he demands a retraction which they print under the headline Public Disappointment.

Luttrell purchases an estate at Painshill Park in Surrey and lives for several years in relative obscurity. From 1813 he harries the government of Robert Jenkinson, 2nd Earl of Liverpool, with the claim that George III had promised him a secure seat in the Commons. In June 1817, five weeks short of his eightieth birthday, he finds his own way back to Parliament as Member for Ludgershall and revenges himself, in the four years remaining to him, by voting with the opposition. This, however, does not extend to joining in the attacks on the domestic spy system in 1818 nor to voting for parliamentary reform in 1819. Moreover, in the wake of the Peterloo Massacre, he supports the government, lauding the use of deadly force against “the Radicals and their system.”

Luttrell dies at his home at Bruton Street, London, on April 25, 1821.


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Execution of James Dickey, Member of the Society of United Irishmen

James Dickey, a young barrister from a Presbyterian family in Crumlin, County Antrim, in the north of Ireland, is hanged at Corn Market, Belfast, on June 26, 1798. He is active in the Society of United Irishmen and is hanged with Henry Joy McCracken for leading rebels at the Battle of Antrim.

The Society of United Irishmen is formed in October 1791 by leading citizens in Belfast who seek a representative government in Ireland based on principles they believe have been modelled by the American and French Revolutions. At their first meeting they embrace the argument of Theobald Wolfe Tone for a “brotherhood of affection” between Irishmen of all religious persuasions. Tone argues that in Ireland the landed Anglican Ascendancy and the English appointed Irish executive employ division between Protestants and Catholics to balance “the one party by the other, plunder and laugh at the defeat of both.”

Despairing of reform, and in the hope of French assistance, in May 1798, the United Irishmen take up arms against the Dublin government and the British Crown. Beginning in Kildare, the insurrection spreads to other counties in Leinster before finally reaching the Presbyterian districts surrounding Belfast. On June 5, the Antrim societies of United Irishmen meet in Templepatrick where they elect textile manufacturer Henry Joy McCracken as their General. The next day McCracken issues a proclamation calling for the United army of Ulster to rise. The initial plan meets with success, as the towns of Larne, Ballymena, Maghera and Randalstown are taken and the bridge at Toome is damaged to prevent the government rushing reinforcements into Antrim from west of the River Bann.

According to the memoirs of James Burns from Templepatrick, Dickey commands the insurgents at Randalstown and kills Samuel Parker, a “traitor, with his own hands, while standing at his own door, where he went for the purpose.”

McCracken leads a body of about 6,000 rebels in an attack on Antrim town. As promised, Catholic Defenders turn out, but in the march upon the town tensions with the Presbyterian United Irish causes some desertions and a delay in McCracken’s planned assault. McCracken’s men are defeated, and his army melts away. On June 15, Dickey, together with McCracken, James Hope, James Orr and about fifty other rebel survivors from Antrim, arrive at Slemish, near Ballymena. There they set up camp for three weeks before leaving under threat of attack from Colonel Green of the Tay Fencibles.

Dickey is captured by the Sutherland fencibles on Divis, a hill northwest of Belfast. He is court-martialed and hanged at Corn Market, Belfast on June 26, 1798. Famously, before his hanging he refuses to wear a black hood saying to the hangman, “Sir, don’t cover my face!” According to local legend he shouts, “Don’t think gentlemen, I am ashamed to show my face among you, I am dying for my country!” However, a loyalist source hostile to the United Irish cause, Henry Joy of the Belfast News Letter, has Dickey on the scaffold recanting his commitment to the “brotherhood of affection” between Catholic and Protestant. He supposedly warned the assembled that had “the Presbyterians of the north succeeded in their [republican] designs, they would ultimately have had to contend with the Roman Catholics.” It is testament to the sentiment that in the north is to largely expunge the memory of his, and McCracken’s, sacrifice.

Dickey is 22 years old at the time of his execution. His head is placed on a spike outside the Market House on Belfast’s High Street.

Dickey’s brother, John Dickey of Crumlin, is also implicated in the rebellion. He is informed on by neighbours who had noticed that he was making pikes and attending secret meetings of the United Irishmen late at night. Arrested and court-martialed, he refuses the terms granted by the government to the “State Prisoners” in Dublin. He is transported to the West Indies for penal servitude, but manages to escape and makes his way to the United States.


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Birth of Robert Stewart, 2nd Marquess of Londonderry

Robert Stewart, 2nd Marquess of Londonderry, KG, GCH, PC, PC (Ire), Anglo-Irish politician and statesman usually known as Lord Castlereagh, derived from the courtesy title Viscount Castlereagh by which he is styled from 1796 to 1821, is born in Dublin on June 18, 1769. As secretary to the Viceroy of Ireland, he works to suppress the Irish Rebellion of 1798 and to secure passage in 1800 of the Irish Act of Union. As the Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom from 1812, he is central to the management of the coalition that defeats Napoleon and is British plenipotentiary at the Congress of Vienna. In the post-war government of Lord Liverpool, he is seen to support harsh measures against agitation for reform.

Stewart is born in 28 Henry Street, in Dublin’s Northside. He is the second and only surviving child of Robert Stewart (the elder) and his wife Sarah Frances Seymour-Conway. His parents marry in 1766. He has recurring health problems throughout his childhood, and is sent to The Royal School, Armagh, rather than to England for his secondary education. At the encouragement of Charles Pratt, 1st Earl Camden, who takes a great interest in him and treats him as if he is a grandson by blood, he later attends St. John’s College, Cambridge (1786–87), where he applies himself with greater diligence than expected from an aristocrat and excels in his first-year examinations. But he then withdraws, pleading an illness that he admits to Camden is something “which cannot be directly acknowledged before women,” i.e. something sexually transmitted.

Early in his career in Ireland, and following a visit to revolutionary France, Stewart recoils from the democratic politics of his Presbyterian constituents in Ulster. Crossing the floor of the Irish House of Commons in support of the government, he takes a leading role in detaining members of the republican conspiracy, the United Irishmen, his former political associates among them. After the 1798 Rebellion, as Chief Secretary for Ireland, he pushes the Act of Union through the Irish Parliament. But it is without the Catholic Emancipation that both he and British Prime Minister William Pitt believe should have accompanied the creation of a United Kingdom.

From 1805 Stewart serves under Pitt and then the Duke of Portland as Secretary of State for War. In 1809 he is obliged to resign after fighting a duel with the Foreign Secretary, George Canning, in a dispute over the Walcheren Campaign. In 1812 he returns to government serving Lord Liverpool as Foreign Secretary and as Leader of the House of Commons.

Stewart organises and finances the alliance that defeats Napoleon, bringing the powers together at the Treaty of Chaumont in 1814. After Napoleon’s second abdication in 1815, he works with the European courts represented at the Congress of Vienna to frame the territorial, and broadly conservative, continental order that holds until mid-century. He blocks harsh terms against France believing that a treaty based on vengeance and retaliation will upset a necessary balance of powers. France is restored to the frontiers of 1791, and her British-occupied colonies are returned. In 1820 Stewart enunciates a policy of non-intervention, proposing that Britain hold herself aloof from continental affairs.

After 1815, at home, Stewart supports repressive measures that link him in public opinion to the Peterloo Massacre of 1819. Widely reviled in both Ireland and Great Britain, overworked, and personally distressed, he commits suicide on August 12, 1822. He is found in a dressing room seconds after he has cut his own throat using a small knife. He collapses and dies almost instantly.

(Pictured: “Robert Stewart, 2nd Marquess of Londonderry,” oil on canvas by Thomas Lawrence, National Portrait Gallery)