A crackdown on its membership was instigated that drove Wolfe Tone into exile in America. To bolster their strength against both internal enemies and the threat of invasion by France, the Irish government began recreating the local defence force known as the Militia. This was a difficult and dangerous move. Not only was compulsory military service resented and resisted by many, but it also meant that the government had to take the risk of arming large numbers of Catholics, whom they did not entirely trust.
Their fears were compounded by the lack of regular troops in Ireland. Skilled soldiers were needed elsewhere in the war with France, and were replaced only with low-grade home service forces known as Fencibles.
Driven underground, the United Irishmen became radicalised. They now sought to break all ties with Britain in order to create a wholly independent Irish republic and embraced violence as a means to achieve this.
To build their military capability, they formed an alliance with a militant underground Catholic group called the Defenders. This greatly expanded the number of men available for armed insurrection and gave them a wider national reach.
However, this alliance would severely undermine the objective of leaving behind the religious violence of the past.
In December , their plan came within an ace of success when the French launched an expedition to land troops in Ireland. This had been negotiated by Wolfe Tone, who had returned from exile in America and now accompanied a French fleet bearing 14, men. The fleet succeeded in eluding the Royal Navy and was only denied by violent winter storms. Some of their ships were lost off the southwest coast of Ireland; the rest were forced to return to France. This narrow escape from invasion raised the level of tension in Ireland to fever pitch.
The government instigated a campaign of counter-insurgency, which in its severity amounted to a reign of terror. To break and cow its internal enemies, the government used ruthless methods of torture, summary execution, mass arrests and house burning. The Army and the Militia were supported in this work by the newly raised Yeomanry. This was composed overwhelmingly of loyalist Protestants and so served to further deepen sectarian divisions.
The government also established a network of spies which succeeded in penetrating and subverting the United Irishmen. This campaign resulted in the arrest and death of much of its leadership.
Most notable among them was Lord Edward Fitzgerald, the rebels' figurehead and foremost military leader, who was fatally wounded while resisting arrest on 18 May In the face of these growing threats, the United Irishmen felt compelled to launch their rebellion before it was too late.
It began on the night of 23 May, signalled by the halting of mail coaches leaving Dublin. However, the organisation had already been irretrievably damaged.
Lack of leadership saw the uprising quickly descend into a series of isolated and uncoordinated outbreaks in the counties surrounding Dublin. Dublin was placed under a strict military lockdown and was never seriously threatened. It was only in County Wexford that the rebellion managed to gain momentum.
Incensed by stories of government brutality, and invigorated by a victory over the hated North Cork Militia at Oulart on 27 May, the rebels succeeded in capturing Enniscorthy and Wexford town. However, they could not capitalise on this success and were bloodily checked in their attempts to break out and capture the towns of New Ross, Arklow and Newtonbarry now Bunclody. Frustrated and embittered, the rebels perpetrated many atrocities against their enemies.
Most cruelly, more than loyalists were burned to death in a barn at Scullabogue. But such actions could not turn the tide of events. Demoralised, the rebels were compelled to fall back to their camp at Vinegar Hill, near Enniscorthy, where they attempted to regroup.
Meanwhile, the rebellion had spread north to Ulster. But, once again, the rebels lacked the military strength to make much headway. Both McCracken and Munro were captured and executed. The authorities now turned their attention to the main rebel camp at Vinegar Hill. On 21 June, British forces under General Gerard Lake surrounded the site, subjecting it to a fierce artillery bombardment before storming the summit. The rebels suffered severe losses and were soundly defeated.
While many managed to escape into the surrounding hills, it was clear that the rebellion was now over. Again, in the desperation of defeat, the rebels resorted to atrocity, murdering 70 Protestant prisoners at the bridge in Wexford town.
In retribution, the victorious loyalist army unleashed an orgy of violence upon the defeated rebels. This appalled Lord Cornwallis, the newly installed Lord Lieutenant, who harboured hopes of reconciling the warring factions and bringing an end to the conflict.
Despite the crushing defeat at Vinegar Hill, the rebellion flared once more in August, this time in the west. With only around 1, men, the French commander was heavily reliant on the local people rising en masse in his support. The enduring memory of Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmet implies that the idea, the true impetus, has not been defeated. The United Irishmen , the main protagonists in the rebellion, were a diverse group.
Their membership incorporated the middle and lower classes; Protestants, Presbyterians and Catholics; rural farmers and industrial workers. J Smith noted speaking of John Locke and the differing interpretations surrounding his ideas that:. With this philosophy in mind they set forth their views in a letter to Simon Butler and Oliver Bond. They desired:. Such demands will always appeal to the lower classes and by the United Irishmen, with a largely indistinguishable amalgamation of Defenders, numbered , alone.
Social equality induced the masses toward demanding the reform expounded by the United Irishmen. Support was widespread among Catholics and farmers but by no means limited to these groups— R F Foster noted that. They represented members of the army, the law, medical science, the Church Dissenting and Catholic and the gentry, as well as booksellers, brewers and tradesmen.
Catholics, barristers, cloth-merchants and farmers, however, are not soldiers and while some United Irishmen did attain positions within the navy, few rebels possessed the weapons to achieve their ends. Private firearms owned by individuals suspected of being members of seditious groups were promptly confiscated and habeas corpus , having been partially suspended months earlier, left the disenfranchised Irish with little recourse to action.
The means for defence were gone and the safeguard designed to deny governments the power to incarcerate on a whim had vanished. By allowing laws to apply to some and not others, the British government simultaneously deprived the Irish of the means to defend themselves and vindicated the Irish demands for reform by denying their civil rights.
That the law was being applied differently to people based on creed is a justifiable reason to revolt and one that John Jones did not take into account when he remarked that. The surviving Loyalist will rejoice in the triumph of law and the restoration of order. The surviving Rebel will repent of his folly, and enjoy the comforts which Law and Order distribute. Law and order rather than providing comforts induced fear and anxiety to the point where there was nothing to lose.
To defy punishment is to remain resolute in the clutches of defeat. For surely punishment is only dealt out once defeated. If the Defenders remained indifferent to punishment then it follows that their defeat was beside the point; they already were defeated in that they had no rights. This being so, subsequent punishment inflicted on the body was of little consequence compared to the tyranny under which they were already living.
Resolve, however, was not solely an attribute of the rebels. The military uprising was put down with great bloodshed in the summer of Some of its leaders, notably Wolfe Tone were killed or died in imprisonment, while many others were exiled. The rebellion was failed attempt to found a secular independent Irish Republic. The s marked an exceptional event in Irish history because the United Irishmen were a secular organisation with significant support both among Catholics and Protestants, including Protestants in the northern province of Ulster.
However, the unity of Catholics and Protestants was far from universal and the fighting itself was marked in places by sectarian atrocities.
As a result of the uprising, the Irish Parliament, which had existed since the 13th century, was abolished and under the Act of Union Ireland was to be ruled directly from London until In the 18 th century, Ireland was a Kingdom in its own right, under the Kings of England. Executive power was largely in the hands of the Lord Lieutenant and the Chief Secretary, appointed by the British prime minister. However, Ireland also had its own parliament, which throughout the century, lobbied for greater control over trade and law making in Ireland.
The Irish parliament was subservient to the British parliament at Westminster, but increasingly, as the century wore on, agitated for greater autonomy. In , the Irish parliament managed to free itself from subservience to the Lord Lieutenant and, to an extent, from the British parliament through the passage of laws that enabled it to make its own laws for the first time without reference to Westminster.
Ireland in the 18th century had its own parliament but the majority of the population was excluded from political participation on religious and property grounds. However, membership of the parliament was confined to members of the Anglican Church of Ireland, which, allowing for some conversions, was overwhelmingly composed of descendants of English settlers.
The parliament was not a democratic body; elections were relatively infrequent, seats could be purchased and the number of voters was small and confined to wealthy, property-owning Protestants. Under the Penal Laws, enacted after the Catholic defeat in the Jacobite-Williamite war of the s, all those who refused to acknowledge the English King as head of their Church — therefore Catholic and Presbyterians — were barred not only from the parliament but from any public position or service in the Army.
Catholic owned lands were also confiscated for alleged political disloyalty throughout the 17 th century. Catholics, to a large extent the descendants of the pre-seventeenth century Irish population, also suffered from restrictions on landholding, inheritance, entering the professions and the right to bear arms.
Presbyterians, mostly descendants of Scottish immigrants, while not excluded as rigorously as Catholics from public life, also suffered from discrimination — marriages performed by their clergy were not legally recognised for instance. Although some of the Penal Laws were relaxed in , allowing new Catholic churches and schools to open, and allowing Catholics into the professions and to purchase land, the great majority of the Irish population was still excluded from political power, and to a large extent from wealth and landholding also, as the last decade of the 18 th century dawned.
Discontent among Catholics was exacerbated by economic hardship and by tithes, compulsory taxes that people of all religions had to pay, for the upkeep of the established, Protestant Church. Initially the United Irishmen, founded, mainly by Presbyterians in Belfast in , campaigned merely for reform, lobbying for the vote to be extended to Catholics and to non-property holders.
The United Irishmen, inspired by the American and French revolutions, initially lobbied for democratic reform. They were greatly inspired by the events of the American and French revolutions and respectively and hoped to eventually found a self-governing, secular Irish state on the basis of universal male suffrage. The leadership of the United Irishmen was largely Protestant or Presbyterian at the start and it recruited men of all sects, mainly in the richer, more urban, eastern half of the country.
Some of their early demands were granted by the Irish parliament, for example Catholics were given the right to vote in , as well as the right to attend university, obtain degrees and to serve in the military and civil service.
However the reforms did not go nearly as far as the radicals wished.
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