Ireland Joined to United Kingdom

This series has six easy 5 minute installments. This first installment: Revolutionary France Attempts Invasion of Ireland.

Introduction
From the reigns of Elizabeth I to Victoria there were nine serious rebellions and numerous minor ones. Of the rebellions, the greatest was the one at the closing years of the eighteenth century. This was aided by attempts of the French revolutionary government to aid. The story ended with The Act of Union of 1800 which forcibly annexed Ireland into the United Kingdom of England, Ireland, Wales, and Scotland.

This selection is from Ireland 1494-1898 by William O’Connor Morris published in 1898. For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

William O’Connor Morris (1824-1904) was long a member of the Irish judiciary, and one of the most competent historians of these events.

Time: 1800

United Irish leaders, seeing there was no hope of accomplishing their ends by constitutional means, began, as Tone had done from the first, to think that revolution was their only chance. Their organization was made military; their societies were prepared for a call to the field; supplies of arms were eagerly sought; the districts in which they possessed influence were placed under the command of officers; and attempts were made secretly to enroll and drill levies capable of an armed rising. The emissaries sent to France became more numerous; the principal of these was Lord Edward Fitzgerald, a scion of the great Geraldine name; and the heads of the French Republic were invited to strike England through Ireland, and to set the Irish people free. At the same time, true to their policy from the first, the United Irishmen made renewed efforts to drag Catholic Ireland into their wake; the confiscation of the land was held out as a bribe to the peasantry; Irishmen were to have their own when they were released from the bonds of landlords and the collectors of tithe. A movement, now distinctly rebellious, was thus linked with a movement springing from the land; thousands of Catholics fell into the United Irish ranks; agrarian outbreaks, in many places, assumed the aspect of a predial war; and the tendency of Irish agrarian trouble to resist the power of the State, and to become revolutionary, grew very manifest. As yet, however, the United Irishmen, except in Ulster, were hardly organized; and the Catholic peasantry were still a chaotic mass, tossed hither and thither, without real leaders.

A movement, meanwhile, of a very different kind, directly opposed to that of the United Irishmen, but indirectly giving it powerful aid, had been acquiring considerable strength in Ulster, and even extending beyond its limits. In the Northern Province, the Celtic Irish, all Catholic, and the Protestant descendants of the old settlers, were, in many districts, closely intermixed; perennial feuds had existed between them. This state of disorder had greatly increased, as lawlessness had spread through parts of Ulster; and from 1791 to 1795 the Protestant “Peep 0’ Day Boys,” as they were called, and the Catholic “Defenders” came into repeated conflict. The first named body, largely composed of members of the Established Church, disliked the Presbyterian and United Irish movement, which Catholic Ireland was invited to join, and formed the “Orange” Society. The ranks of the Orangemen rapidly increased; their organization became powerful, and spread even to the Southern provinces; undoubtedly it obtained the support of a considerable number of the Ulster gentry, and possibly even of the Irish Government.

It is certain, however, that the Irish Catholics were not prepared to attempt to rise against the State in force. Wolfe Tone landed at Havre, France, in the first months of 1796 — one of other emissaries but their born leader — and his capacity and earnestness made a real impression on the Directory, then in the – seat of power in Paris. He advocated a formidable descent on Ireland, with the arguments of an enthusiast; it is to his credit that he made scarcely a stipulation for himself, and that he tried to obtain pledges that, in the event of success, his country was not to be made a dependency of France. A large fleet carrying fifteen thousand troops, under the command of the illustrious Hoche, set sail from Brest, in December, upon the enterprise. It is remarkable that it did not make for Dublin, or a port of Ulster, as Tone had advised; it sought to effect a landing on the extreme verge of Munster, perhaps because an attempt of the kind had proved successful more than a century before. The French navy, however, was in a wretched state; Hoche, in a frigate, never reached the Irish coast, and the principal part of the invading fleet, after making Bantry Bay in safety, was driven out to sea by a furious tempest. It has been thought, however, that Grouchy, the second in command, might have landed with a not inconsiderable force; if so Munster might have been over-run, and become, for a time, a French province; on this occasion, as on the day of Waterloo, Grouchy perhaps did England really good service. The failure of the expedition has been ascribed to chance. History more justly points out that it is not easy to invade an island, cut off from the Continent by a dangerous and most stormy sea, especially with an inferior naval force.

The failure at Bantry did not change the purpose of the United Irish leaders; but it made them cautious, and they resolved, if possible, not to attempt a rising before the French had made a successful landing. Ulster, nevertheless, and other parts of Ireland, were in a state of hardly suppressed rebellion, sustained by a savage war of classes, throughout nearly the whole of 1797. A United Irish Directory had been formed in Belfast, enforcing its mandates far and wide; an insurrectionary army was held in the leash, drilled, and to a certain extent, disciplined; it may have numbered, on paper, one hundred thousand men. Another United Irish Directory had its seat in Dublin; some of its leaders were able men; but their chief trust was placed in Lord Edward Fitzgerald who was to command the armed levies of the South, and whose great name seemed a tower of strength. These levies, it was said, numbered two hundred thousand men — an estimate, beyond doubt, excessive; but tens of thousands of the Catholic peasantry had by this time become United Irish men, and many of them had been rudely armed and disciplined. The plan of the conspirators was to seize the Castle of Dublin, as in r641, to occupy the capital, and to make the men in power prisoners; and then to rise generally throughout the country, when the invasion of the French had been made certain. In the interval of time remaining, fresh efforts were made to exasperate and extend the agrarian war; maps of the old confiscated lands were prepared; old prophecies that the Saxon was to be expelled from Ireland were noised abroad, and the peasantry were told that their alien masters were doomed. In this way the rebellious and the agrarian movements became thoroughly united in some districts; plantations were cut down and smithies blazed for the manufacture of a formidable weapon, the pike; and the organization of the “Whiteboy” system with its central and local secret societies, was set on foot to promote the United Irish cause. This combination, however, does not appear to have been complete in more than a few counties; and it did not exist, it has been said, in Connaught

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