By Jim Smyth
The 19th of November 2023 marked the 225th anniversary of the death of Theobald Wolfe Tone (1763–98), founding member of the United Irishmen, agent to the Catholic Committee, envoy to revolutionary France, appointed ‘chef de brigade in the service of the republic’. Over the course of three days, beginning in Clifton House, Belfast, on Friday 17 November and concluding in Tailor’s Hall in Dublin on the following Sunday, Tone’s life, career and achievements were evaluated and re-evaluated, as his legacies were explored by a series of lectures, panels and round-table discussions. Clifton House, which opened as Belfast’s Poor House in 1774, was designed by Robert Joy, the uncle of Wolfe Tone’s friend and comrade Henry Joy McCracken. In December 1792 Tailor’s Hall hosted the Catholic Committee’s ‘Back Lane Parliament’, in which Tone played a crucial behind-the-scenes part.
The proceedings began, on what turned out to be a blessedly bright and crisp late autumnal morning, with a guided tour of Clifton Street graveyard, where Henry Joy and his sister Mary Ann McCracken, Dr William Drennan and several other United Irish luminaries are buried. In the Belfast sessions Ken Dawson explained the importance of ‘the Athens of the North’ to Tone’s political development and Clare Mitchell reflected on contemporary Protestant perceptions of the city’s republican moment. Tone’s formidable wife, Matilda, enjoyed much more than a walk-on part in both presentation and conversation. Participants ranged from new-minted Ph.Ds to the veteran Tone scholars Marianne Elliott and Thomas Bartlett. Members of the extended Tone family in the United States, led by the chair of the events’ organising committee, Citizen William Atkins, were in attendance. And on a note which captured the at once engaged and relaxed atmosphere of the conference, Ronan Sheehan concluded his talk with a song, The Wearing of the Green—‘I met with Napper Tandy and he shook me by the hand …’.
All this rises to a fitting tribute to the memory of a most consequential figure in Irish history, but Lord Edward Fitzgerald and Oliver Bond, to mention only two, also died 225 years ago. So, why Tone? The answer must start with a popular misunderstanding of Wolfe Tone as ‘the founding father of Irish republicanism’. That commonplace is wrong on at least two counts. First, he was not the only begetter of the United Irish movement. He was one of several, and Drennan or Samuel Nielson, for instance, have an equal or even better claim to the title. Second, Tone, Drennan and the rest did not ‘invent’ republicanism in Ireland; rather they refashioned an inherited republican tradition to meet the challenges of a new age, the age of the American and French revolutions.
Today the bottom-line definition of a republic is a ‘democratic’ polity without a king, and it is true that the English republic was born out of regicide in 1649. In the first half of the eighteenth century, however, the idea of a republic, partly to avoid the stigma of regicide, could accommodate the function of limited monarchy or ‘a single person’ within the framework of a mixed or balanced constitution. So long as the concept of res publica (the public thing)—civil liberty, religious toleration—was maintained, then the mechanics of constitutional arrangements, including kingship, did not matter all that much. That doctrine of equal citizenship before the law is as relevant today as it was in 1720. Thus two largely forgotten eighteenth-century commonwealthmen—Robert, 1st Viscount Molesworth, and the Dublin firebrand Dr Charles Lucas—deserve their place in the Irish republican tradition, long before Wolfe Tone was born. The purging of monarchy is a feature of the late eighteenth-century ‘Atlantic Revolution’, manifest in the ratification of the American constitution of 1787, Thomas Paine’s repudiation of the principle of hereditary power in his Rights of Man and the execution of the French king, Louis XVI, in 1793. Denounced by their enemies as would-be king-killers, the United Irishmen may therefore be credited with founding modern Irish republicanism.
Another reason for Tone’s comparative prominence in social memory is undoubtedly the enduring impact of his Life—memoir, journals and dairies—first published in 1826. It is vivacious, witty, disarming, fluently written and politically astute. Above all, it is the humanity of the man that shines through, his candour, courage and gift for friendship, devotion to family and fondness for claret (and women), and it is these qualities, surely, which account for the continuing appeal of his writings. His posthumous reputation thus firmly anchored by his book, the subsequent history of remembering Tone is tracked in meticulous detail in C.J. Woods’s Bodenstown revisited: the grave of Wolfe Tone, its monuments and its pilgrimages (2018). After it had rested undisturbed for almost half a century in a remote country churchyard near Sallins, Co. Kildare, in 1844 the Young Ireland leader Thomas Davis marked Tone’s grave with a black marble memorial slab. More elaborate structures were later erected, and from the 1870s onwards commemorative ceremonies were held every June in the ruined churchyard. Bodenstown, in short, offers a classic example of what the French historian Pierre Nora called a lieu de mémoire. In 1913 Patrick Pearse pronounced it ‘the holiest place in Ireland’.
Woods’s contention that the politics and history of the annual Bodenstown ‘pilgrimages’ reflect not only the shifts and mutations of republicanism but also the politics and society of Ireland more generally is exemplified by Pearse’s oration, which tells us much more about Pearse and his times than it does about Tone and his. Pearse described his hero as ‘the greatest of Irish Nationalists’, which doesn’t sound quite right. ‘Separatist’ would have made a better fit. As for holiness, the cheerfully less-than-holy Tone was also a militant secularist. Separation of Church and State is a fundamental republican doctrine, and Tone, in the true spirit of the Enlightenment, mocked the ‘idle anathemas’ and ‘the rusty and extinguished thunderbolts of the Vatican’. A deist (probably) who (most likely) took his own life, he would have been utterly astonished at the spectacle of the faithful reciting decades of the rosary at his graveside—a practice, its incongruity unnoticed, which went unchallenged until the mid-1960s. The timing is significant. Such a move would have been unthinkable in the Ireland of the 1950s.
Tone has on the whole got a good press from writers and historians. In The Irish: a character study (1947) Seán O’Faolain anatomises five national archetypes: the peasant, the Anglo-Irish man, the priest, the writer and the rebel. He chooses Tone as one of his rebels, and remarks on those things in ‘this modern Ireland that he would not have tolerated, such as the least sign of sectarianism, puritanism, middle-class vulgarity’. ‘One feels,’ he goes on, ‘that his laughter and humanity would have blown all these away.’ Or in other words, to paraphrase Éamon de Valera, when O’Faolain wanted to know what Wolfe Tone would have said he need only examine his own heart. O’Faolain fancied himself an anti-sentimental moderniser; a homespun revisionist, he deconstructed nationalist totems, notably Hugh O’Neill, earl of Tyrone, all for the benefit of a misguided nation. Yet he could not bring himself to topple Tone. And Conor Cruise O’Brien, according to Marion Kelly, shared his reticence—two intellectual bruisers both disarmed, it appears, by the man’s engaging style. Not so Tom Dunne, whose Wolfe Tone, colonial outsider (1982) casts his quarry as a disaffected adventurer with unlovely militarist tendencies. It is good to have an alternative voice but, analogously with Pearse’s pious oration, Dunne’s tendentious analysis tells us as much about the Irish historical revisionist project at high tide as it does about the historical Tone. Revisionism necessarily entails a measure of iconoclasm, and in 1982, with Pearse already safely dispatched, the ‘founding father of Irish republicanism’ must have stood out, like a gorgeous altar, waiting to be stripped.
Tone is still in the news. In June 2003 the Irish Times published an article by Paddy Cullivan entitled ‘Wolfe Tone did not take his own life in jail. He was murdered—and I know who did it’. That piece, which draws on Cullivan’s one-man travelling show, generated responses in the paper’s letters page and a debate between Cullivan and the scholar Sylvie Kleinman on Joe Duffy’s Liveline on RTÉ Radio 1. Cullivan denies Tone’s suicide in favour of an establishment conspiracy theory, but overlooks the nobility that attached to Stoic suicide in the eighteenth-century classical imagination. Wolfe Tone was a republican; rather than dishonour his French uniform by being hanged as a traitor, he chose to take his own life, ‘after the high Roman fashion’.
The Wolfe Tone 225 events coincided roughly with Trinity College Dublin’s invitation to propose new names for the recently ‘de-named’ Berkeley Library. Edmund Burke is celebrated by a statue at the front gate, and the executed rebel Robert Emmet has a lecture theatre named after him, whereas one of the college’s most illustrious graduates, Theobald Wolfe Tone, has to make do with a bust in the Long Room. Candidates for the new name must embody the value of ‘inclusivity’—code for race and gender, about which Tone, as an eighteenth-century dead white male, said nothing. And yet he formulated the most inclusive declaration, for his time, in our nation’s history, substituting for Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter ‘the common name of Irishman’.
Jim Smyth is a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin.
Submissions on the renaming of the Berkeley Library may be made online at https://www.tcd.ie/legacies/submissions/renaming-the-library/.
Search for ‘Wolfe Tone 225’ on YouTube for the proceedings of the three-day event, which will be published in a special History Ireland supplement in April 2024.