Читать книгу The Books That Define Ireland - Tom Garvin - Страница 11

6

William Theobald Wolfe Tone (ed.), The Autobiography of Wolfe Tone (1826)

The stature of Wolfe Tone (1763–1798) in the canon of Irish nationalism owes much to the posthumous publication of his autobiographical writings and diaries almost two decades after his death. A few of Tone’s pamphlets had an immediate impact during his life, particularly An Argument on Behalf of the Catholics of Ireland, published in 1791. After his death Tone’s reputation was overshadowed by those of other contemporaries, notably Lord Edward Fitzgerald. It was not until the 1840s, with impatience with Daniel O’Connell’s constitutionalism running high amongst Young Ireland nationalists, that Tone was first canonised as the great patriot of 1798. Patrick Pearse declared Tone’s Autobiography to be the first Gospel of the New Testament of Irish nationalism more than a century after Tone’s death. Tone’s grave became the topic of a ballad by Thomas Davis (Bodenstown Churchyard) and was described as the holiest place in Ireland by Pearse at an oration there in June 1913. Since then Sinn Fein and the IRA have held annual commemorations of Pearse’s performance at Tone’s graveside. During the period of the Northern Ireland conflict, a folk group named The Wolfe Tones did well with albums such as Rifles of the IRA (1969). That The Wolfe Tones went on to record an album titled A Tribute to Padraig Pearse illustrated perhaps not just Pearse’s hold on the Irish Republican imagination but also exemplified the extent to which romantic nationalists like him had successfully co-opted the real Wolfe Tone.

The first edition of the Autobiography edited out some passages of Tone’s journal. It included a memoir by Tone’s son and editor William, detailing his service as a cavalryman in the Napoleonic wars, and another memoir by Tone’s widow Martha, recounting how after his death in 1798 she engineered an interview with Napoleon in order to secure French citizenship for her son.1 An 1883 edition of Tone’s Autobiography edited by Barry O’Brien was republished several times. This also excluded the passages censored by William. In 1888 a French edition was published as Mémoires Secrets de Wolfe Tone; a portrait of Tone still hangs in the foyer of the French ambassador’s residence in Dublin. A 1937 abridged edition by Sean O’Faoláin restored the censored passages. These included Tone’s account of his early amours, expressions of his contempt for his brother-in-law (‘a most egregious coxcomb’), quarrels with his wife’s family (over prospective inheritances), and various scornful remarks about America. Tone lived there briefly in 1795 but couldn’t stand the place or its uncouth people. A definitive edition of the Autobiography was published in 1998, edited by Thomas Bartlett.2 This kept to the structure of the 1826 edition but included the excised passages, Tone’s correspondence and also reinstated political writings that had been excluded from various earlier abridged editions.

Tone was an Irish patriot for just the final eight years of his 35 year-long life. His political views were the product of his class, religion and, in particular, his life experiences. Tone had a lust for life and craved personal advancement. He sought the latter first in the service of the British Empire and when rebuffed he made common cause with his fellow Irishmen against England. It is not simplistic to understand much of his autobiography as an account of his efforts to find his place in the world. He was hardly the pious ideological martyr that Pearse represented him as. But then Pearse did not have access to the unexpurgated version of his memoir. Here, in one of the passages removed by his son William, Tone describes his infatuation with Eliza, wife of Humanity Dick Martin:

After one or two fugitive passions about the beginning of the year 1783 I fell in love with a woman who made me miserable for more than two years. She was the wife of Richard Martin of Galway, a member of Parliament, and a man of considerable fortune in that county. Martin was passionately fond of acting and had fitted up a theatre in which he had several dramatic representations. Mrs. Martin, independent of a thousand other attractions, was one of the first actresses I ever saw, and as I lived in the house with her, and being myself somewhat of an actor, was daily thrown into particular situations with her, both in rehearsals and on the stage, and as I had an imagination easily warmed, without one grain of discretion to regulate it, I very soon became in love to a degree almost inconceivable. I have never, never met in history, poetry, or romance a description that comes near what I actually suffered on her account. For two years our acquaintance continued, in which time I made three visits to her house of four or five months each. As I was utterly unable, and indeed unwilling, to conceal my passion from her, she very soon detected me, and as I preserved, as well as felt, the profoundest respect for her, she supposed she might amuse herself innocently in observing the progress of this terrible passion in the mind of an interesting young man of twenty; but this is an experiment no woman ought to make.

His two-year relationship with Eliza was chaste. Tone came to regret not taking his chance to bed her when he found out, some years later, that she had eloped to Paris with another lover. Although he suffered severely from this passion he also reaped much benefit. The desire to render himself agreeable to a highly cultivated woman induced him ‘to attend to a thousand little things’ so that after the first transports of rage and grief at losing her had subsided, he considered himself on the whole considerably improved.

In 1785 he met his future wife. She was fifteen years of age and living on Grafton Street in the house of her grandfather, a rich old clergyman by the name of Fanning. Tone soon contrived to be introduced to Martha’s family and soon afterwards the couple eloped. They then returned to live with her parents, amicably for a short while, acrimoniously after that. In 1787 Tone left Martha and their daughter with her family and moved to London to complete his legal studies, seek his fortune and, as he intimated in another passage supressed by William, to sow his wild oats:

At the age of four and twenty, with a tolerable figure and address, in an idle and luxurious Capital, it will not be supposed I was without adventures with the fair sex. The Englishmen neglect their wives exceedingly in many essential circumstances. I was totally disengaged and did not fail to profit, as far as I could, by their neglect, and English women are not naturally cruel. I formed, in consequence, several delightful connections in London, and as I was extremely discreet, I have the satisfaction to think that not one of those to whom I had the good fortune to render myself agreeable ever suffered the slightest blemish in her reputation on my account. I cherish, yet, with affection the memory of one charming woman to whom I was extremely attached, and I am sure she still remembers me with a mutual regard.

In a foreshadowing of his later efforts to convince the French government that it was in its interest to invade Ireland, he proposed an English colony in one of Cook’s newly discovered islands in the South Sea on a military plan, ‘in order to put a bridle on Spain in time of peace, and to annoy her grievously in that quarter in time of war’. He spent three months researching his scheme and delivered it by hand to the porter in Downing Street for the attention of the Prime Minister Mr Pitt. It was, he recalled, his first essay in politics. Tone, keen to make his fortune, also made a botched effort to enlist with the East India Company. Still smarting from these failed endeavours he was rescued by an advance of £500 on his wife’s inheritance from her grandfather. This allowed him to return to Ireland in 1789, finish his legal studies and enlist as a barrister on the Leinster circuit. He had little interest in a legal career and his ambitions soon turned to politics. He initially hoped to be taken up as a parliamentary candidate by the Whigs but by 1790 under the influence of Sir Laurence Parsons, an MP in the Irish House of Commons, he found his vocation as an Irish patriot:

I made speedily what was to me a great discovery, though I might have found it in Swift and Molyneux, that the influence of England was the Radical vice of our Government, and consequently that Ireland would never be either free, prosperous, or happy, until she was independent, and that independence was unattainable whilst the connection with England existed.

His political views evolved rapidly. These, as documented in two widely-read pamphlets, Spanish War! (1790) and An Argument on Behalf of the Catholics of Ireland (1791), propelled him to the centre stage of the United Irishmen and in April 1792 he replaced Edmund Burke’s hapless son Richard as the parliamentary agent of the Catholic Association. These were summarised as follows by William’s preface to the Autobiography:

The fact is though he preferred in theory a republican form of government, his main object was to procure the independence of his country under a liberal administration, whatever might be its form or name. His tastes and habits were rather aristocratical for the society with which he was sometimes obliged to mingle. I believe that, in reading these memoirs, many people will be surprised at (and some perhaps will blame) the moderation of his views. The persecutions of the government drove him much further than he proposed at first.

Spanish War! recalled but inverted the adventurer spirit with which he canvassed Pitt’s support for a South Seas colony to block Spanish trade. The London parliament could ask the king to declare war on Spain, but it could not, Tone insisted, do so on behalf of Ireland, which had its own separate and independent legislature. Spanish War! in the spirit of Swift’s Drapier letters, argued that Irish trade and prosperity would be, as ever before, undermined by England’s self-interest. Spanish War! identified some £113,543 of Irish exports (mostly linen, wheat, pork and butter) to Spain in 1789 against imports of £138,001 (including sugar cane, brandy and wine). In a volte-face from his submission to Pitt, he declared that peace with Spain was in Ireland’s interest and that Ireland would in no way benefit from any victory over Spain over trade routes:

Ireland has no quarrel, but, on the contrary, a very beneficial intercourse with Spain, which she is required to renounce to her infinite present detriment; she is called on, likewise, to squander her wealth and shed her blood in this English East Indian quarrel.

The man who tried in vain to enlist in the East India Company less than two years previously was no longer contented to be ‘the subaltern instrument’ of artful and ambitious England. As long as the good of the Empire was defined as the good of England, Ireland would suffer. If England’s warships were built in Irish harbours, if Ireland had its own navy, army, flag and colonies, only then would Ireland have a legitimate interest in England’s war.

Tone was a constitutional patriot before he became a rebel. Like other Protestant patriots he was preoccupied with Ireland’s lesser status compared to England. The aim of his Argument on Behalf of Catholics, he recalled in his autobiography, was to assert the independence of his country, to unite the whole people of Ireland and to ‘substitute the common name of Irishman in place of the denominations of Protestant, Catholic’. The pamphlet was addressed to Protestant Dissenters rather than to members of the Established Church or to Catholics:

The Protestants I despaired of from the outset for obvious reasons. Already in possession by an unjust monopoly of the whole power and patronage of the country, it was not to be supposed they would ever concur in measures the certain tendency of which must be to lessen their influence as a party, how much so ever the nation might gain. To the Catholics I thought it unnecessary to address myself, because, that as no change could make their political situation worse, I reckoned upon their support to a certainty; besides, they had already begun to manifest a strong sense of their wrongs and oppressions; and, finally, I well knew that, however it might be disguised or suppressed, there existed in the breast of every Irish Catholic an inextirpable abhorrence of the English name and power. There remained only the Dissenters, whom I knew to be patriotic and enlightened; however, the recent events at Belfast had showed me that all prejudice was not yet entirely removed from their minds. I sat down accordingly, and wrote a pamphlet addressed to the Dissenters, and which I entitled, An Argument on behalf of the Catholics of Ireland, the object of which was to convince them that they and the Catholics had but one common interest and one common enemy; that the depression and slavery of Ireland was produced and perpetuated by the divisions existing between them, and that, consequently, to assert the independence of their country, and their own individual liberties, it was necessary to forget all former feuds, to consolidate the entire strength of the whole nation, and to form for the future but; one people. These principles I supported by the best arguments which suggested themselves to me, and particularly by demonstrating that the cause of the failure of all former efforts, and more especially of the Volunteer Convention in 1783, was the unjust neglect of the claims of their Catholic brethren.

An Argument on Behalf of Catholics opened with an account of Ireland and its people that is echoed in how Ireland continues to represent itself. Ireland was ‘blessed with a temperate sky and fruitful soil’, ‘abounding with all the material for unlimited commerce’, ‘filled by 4,000,000 of an ingenious and gallant people’, ‘posted right in the track between Europe and America, within 50 miles of England, 300 of France’, yet, as he argued in Spanish War!, ‘with all these great advantages unheard of and unknown, without pride, or power, or name; without ambassadors, army or navy; nor of half the consequence in the empire she has the honour to make a part, with the single county of York, or the loyal and well regulated town of Birmingham!’ The choice facing the Protestant Irish was to preside over a stunted and inglorious country (‘unknown and unheard of in Europe, the prey of England, the laughing stock of the knaves who plunder us’) or to exert their power constitutionally to procure a complete and radical emancipation of their country, ‘by a reform in the representation of the people’. This new element to his political philosophy was his insistence of the need for solidarity with Catholics.

Tone’s proposal for dealing with the political fallout of Catholic Emancipation was to enfranchise such Catholics who had a freehold of £10 per year and to strike off ‘the wretched tribe of forty shilling freeholders’ whose votes were as much the property of their landlords as the sheep or the bullocks which they brand with their names. Doing so, would purge in one stroke, ‘the gross and feculent mass which contaminates the Protestant interest, and restore their natural weight to the sound and respectable part of the Catholic community, without throwing into their hands so much power as might enable them to dictate the law’.

An Argument on Behalf of Catholics addressed hackneyed Protestant fears of what would happen if Catholics were emancipated. There was, he argued, no threat of Rome rule (the Pope was being burned in effigy in Catholic France), or of a Catholic monarch (the Pretender to the throne was dead, Jacobitism was finished); he also dismissed the argument that if Catholics got the upper hand they would ally against England with France.

His solidarity with Catholics was, at this stage, mostly intellectual. How, he asked, could the Dissenters ground their title to liberty in Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man whilst riveting the fetters of the wretched Roman Catholics? As explained by his son William in the foreword to the first edition of the Autobiography:

When he first wrote his pamphlet in favour of Catholics he was not acquainted with a single individual of that religion, so complete at that period was the distinction in society between the several sects. In a few months he was a prime mover of their councils and accomplished the union between them and the dissenters of the North.

His diaries for late-1791 record a drink-fuelled debate (one of many) with a fellow Protestant who argued that for all protestations of good wishes towards Roman Catholics, thirty-nine out of forty Protestants would be found, whenever the question came forward, to be hostile to the liberation of the Roman Catholics.

The first volume of the Autobiography covered the period prior to his departure to the United States. The second volume of the diaries, written from France, depicts his involvement in three French efforts to invade Ireland between 1796 and 1798 and the articulation of his political aspirations for Ireland. An 18 July 1796 entry recorded a conversation with his French government liaison General Henri Clarke (whose father was an Irishman) about what kind of government might be installed in Ireland. Clarke favoured some kind of monarchy. ‘Where on God’s earth’, Tone replied, ‘would we go look for a King?’ There was no obvious candidate amongst the Irish nobility and he could not see, in any case, the Irish people spilling their blood for any monarch. ‘Maybe, after all,’ Clarke suggested, ‘you will choose one of your own leaders; who knows but it may be yourself?’ Tone replied that he had neither the desire nor the talents to aspire so high. He then outlined his own hopes and fears for an Irish revolution:

I summed up all by telling him that, as to religion, my belief was we should content ourselves with pulling down the Establishment without setting up any other; that we would have no State religion, but let every sect pay their own clergy voluntarily; and that, as to royalty and aristocracy, they were both odious in Ireland to that degree, that I apprehended much more a general massacre of the gentry, and a distribution of the entire of their property, than the establishment of any form of government that would perpetuate their influence; that I hoped this massacre would not happen, and that I, for one, would do all that lay in my power to prevent it, because I did not like to spill the blood, even of the guilty; at the same time, that the pride, cruelty, and oppression of the Irish aristocracy were so great, that I apprehended every excess from the just resentment of the people.

Tone went to sea with a French fleet three times between December 1796 and August 1798. Each attempt to land in Ireland ended in failure due to bad weather, poor leadership or poor seamanship. On Christmas Day 1796, contemplating failure, he recorded in his diary that if captured, the best he could expect was to be shot or killed in action. Perhaps there would be trial for the sake of striking terror into others, and then perhaps a hanging or disembowelling, which he wouldn’t mind as long as he was dead first. During a sea battle in August 1798 during which Tone turned down an opportunity to be safely evacuated, he was captured, court-marshalled and sentenced to death. He cheated the hangman by cutting his own throat. Whether he meant to take his life or defer his execution is unclear.

In March 1797 Tone recorded a conversation with Thomas Paine in Paris where he described the shattered state of Edmund Burke’s mind following the death of his son Richard. Paine retorted that it was the Rights of Man that had broken Burke’s heart and that the death of his son gave him an excuse to develop the chagrin which had preyed upon him since. Tone recorded that he was sure that The Rights of Man had tormented Burke exceedingly, but that he had seen himself the workings of a father’s grief on his own spirit and that Paine had no children. Two of Tone’s three children were to die of illness in France. Tone’s Autobiography is very much the story of his family by his family. All three memoirs, his own and equally well-crafted ones by his son William and his wife Martha, capture a life that cannot be reduced to any single political end.

BF

Notes

1William Theobald Wolfe Tone (ed.), The Autobiography of Wolfe Tone (Washington: Gales & Seaton, 1826).

2Thomas Bartlett (ed.), The Autobiography of Wolfe Tone (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1998).