Taken from this Irish historical site

THE RISE OF THE DEFENDERS 1793-5

From The men of no property, Irish Radicals and Popular Politics in the Late Eighteenth Century, by Jim Smyth, 1992.

The year 1794 has been characterised as a lull in the overcrowded history of the 1790s. The reason is obvious. Coming after the Catholic and reform campaigns of 1791-3 and before the dramatic sequence of events which led from Fitzwilliam’s dismissal in 1795 to rebellion in 1798, this year has indeed an appearance of ‘comparative calm’. Taking into account the attendance figures at meetings of the Dublin Society of United Irishmen which began to decline in April 1793, the seeming fall-off in political activity – the ‘lull’ – might even be extended to 18 months. In fact those 18 months were formative in the development of the revolutionary movement. Political activity did not diminish, rather it was rerouted into clandestine channels. For example, almost all of the evidence relating to the Philanthropic Society, a major component of Dublin’s political underground before it merged into the United Irish movement, comes from 1794. In both Ulster and Dublin the United Irishmen began organising as a secret society late that year. If this decade is approached through the history of the Defenders, moreover, the notion of a lull becomes even less tenable. A major Defender riot occurred in Cavan in May, 1794, and in August Westmeath magistrates met to discuss ‘the late violences’ in the county. In the arena of popular direct action there was no ceasefire.

Such evidence of continuing Defender unrest has so far failed to dislodge the idea of an hiatus before Fitzwilliam. Perhaps this is because the standard accounts of the 1790s have proceeded from the twin perspective of high politics and the rise of the United Irishmen: the basic narrative history of the defenders has still to be written. In one respect this omission is surprising. A glance at any Irish newspaper over this decade or at, say, Sir Richard Musgrave’s Memoirs of the different rebellions in Ireland (1801), immediately confirms the defenders’ contemporary impact. Yet it is only in recent years that historians have begun to glimpse their significance – to the politics of the period and as Ireland’s first ‘associational’, ‘proactive’ movement. Before the United Irishmen began to build a mass-based revolutionary organisation in the later nineties – a mass-base largely consisting of defender lodges integrated into the new paramilitary structure – Defenderism represented organisational expression of popular disaffection. Lecky realised this, but he did not follow through the insight. No discussion of popular politics, therefore, can reasonably neglect the development of Defenderism.

I ‘BEAT[ING] THE PEOPLE INTO ANOTHER OPINION’: THE ASCENDANCY BACKLASH

The rise of the Defenders in this period can be read as the popular response to the application of Draconian law and order measures, ranging from the increased use of regular troops to quell disturbances to the (certainly perceived) partiality of the magistrates and courts. At one level the defenders’ story over 1793 to 1795, is the story of the repercussions of a tough ‘security policy’, and any attempt to explain their ‘rise’ must engage with the more general history of the time. But that ‘rise’ was not simply a matter of increasing numbers and greater geographical spread. In these years Defenderism became more ideologically complex, organisationally sophisticated and better led. A middle-class leadership emerged in Ulster. A mass revolutionary movement began to take shape.

The Defender movement expanded and politicised during 1792 as it interacted with the Catholic agitation conducted at parish level. One indication of these developments was the extension of defender activity, mainly arms raids, from Armagh along the Ulster border counties into Louth and Meath. Another was the increasing scale of violence perpetrated both by the Defenders and by the authorities. The number of capital convictions handed down at the spring assizes in 1793 was unprecedented. The aggressiveness of the Defenders and the harshness of ascendancy repression were conditioned by the crisis atmosphere generated by the Catholic and reform campaigns, and, from the spring, by war with France. The former were inspired by expectations of catholic ‘victory’, even a reversal of the land settlement, and by the prospect of French aid; the latter felt threatened by the possibility of French intervention and by a resurgent Catholic community. Protestants also felt abandoned by Britain. During 1792 the Defenders were said to have convened ‘little parliaments . . . (for so they did name themselves),’ and to have asserted that they would soon ‘have their own again’. In February 1793, during the parliamentary debates on Catholic relief, Dr Duigenan complained that:
the Catholics of the lower ranks are at this moment assembled in large bodies, with arms in their hands, breaking into, robbing and burning the homes of the peaceable Protestant inhabitants of the counties of Louth, Monaghan, Cavan and Meath, and even in the county of Dublin, making public declarations that they will not suffer any Protestant to reside within these counties, or in the kingdom, and the contagion is spreading through the nation.

Duigenan, a Protestant ‘ultra’, had an interest, in the context of these debates, in stressing Catholic disloyalty. Nevertheless his speech did voice real Protestant fears, and the reality of the situation which it described is corroborated by other evidence. Irish society had become tense and polarised. Extremism thrived. The consequent escalation in violence was first witnessed on 22 January, 1793, at Coolnahinch on the Meath-Cavan border, where 38 Defenders were killed. The breakdown of the comparative restraint which had hitherto governed rural unrest was then confirmed by the wave of anti-militia ballot riots which swept virtually the whole country between May and August.

The militia, established by an act which became law on 8 April, was designed as a domestic defence and peacekeeping force to replace the recently suppressed Volunteers. Volunteering had been suppressed because of its political interventions, and because even ‘loyalist’ corps did not come under government control. The militia was organised by county, officered by the local (Protestant) gentry, and composed of (mainly Catholic) conscripts, raised by ballot. The element of compulsory service provided the key grievance. When magistrates began embodying regiments in May, the persons, sometimes Catholic priests, who compiled the lists for balloting, were frequently targeted by the crowd. Another major grievance stemmed from the widely-held belief that militia units would be posted overseas. Popular resistance was fierce. Artillery had to be used at the town of Bruff in County Limerick, and the county as a whole was described as in ‘a state of insurrection’. In nearby Kerry on 18 June troops opened fire on some 5,000 rioters in Dingle, killing at least 12. There were serious clashes also, in Connaught, in counties Mayo, Sligo and Roscommon, at the Castlecomer intersection of Carlow, Kilkenny and Queen’s County, in Wexford, Meath, Fermanagh and Down. According to Bartlett, ‘in just over eight weeks as many as 230 lives had been lost . . . over five times the number of causalities sustained in the previous 35 years of agrarian disturbances in Ireland’.

The underlying – as distinct from the immediate – causes of the militia riots, the form which the riots assumed and their legacy, all testify to the widening gap that was opening up between the Protestant establishment and lower-class Catholics. In the politically fluid 1790s alienation from the ruling elite could quickly turn to active disaffection, particularly since there existed an alternative, middle-class and radical, elite, eager and ready to exploit popular discontents. Not that the division was purely sectarian. Yet politics were conducted in terms of the challenge to, and defence of, the ‘Protestant Ascendancy’. All conflict whether agrarian, class or ‘national’, tended to intersect at some level with the Catholic question. Bartlett argues that after such factors as unfavourable economic conditions and hostility to the method of recruitment are taken into account, the unique extent and violence of the militia disturbances can only be explained by reference to the previous year’s Catholic campaign. The populist style of the campaign had stimulated general expectations of imminent change, ranging from relief from tithes to a Catholic restoration. What the Catholics were in fact offered was a limited franchise, reluctantly conceded amid torrents of anti-papist rhetoric and, it seemed, the militia. There were even suspicions that the Catholic gentry and clergy had made a ‘deal’ with the Castle, engaging ‘to raise 10,000’ men in exchange for ‘their late emancipation’. Thus the insult of a ‘sell-out’ was added to the injury of expectations baffled. Once mobilised the Catholic masses had acquired a momentum of their own. Writing at the time of the militia riots Chief-Secretary Hobart reasoned that ‘the pains which have, for these last 18 months, been taken to persuade the people of the irresistible force of numbers, has given them such an idea of strength, that until they are actually beaten into another opinion, they will never be quiet – half the country is sworn to support the Catholic cause’.

Denis Browne, MP for Mayo, placed the disturbances in a broader context, attributing them to ‘the new political doctrines which have pervaded the lower classes – that . . . spirit [which] has been produced by the circulation of Paine’s Rights of Man, of seditious newspapers, and by shopkeepers who having been in Dublin to buy goods have formed connections with some of the United Irishmen’. While the United Irishmen did, in classic Whig fashion, condemn the militia as yet another source of government patronage, it is doubtful that they played any significant role in directly stirring up trouble. However, Queen’s County magistrates blamed ‘emissaries’ for provoking the unrest there, and in Tyrone George Knox referred to ‘the opposition fomented by the Jacobins’. It would probably prove impossible to separate the facts of radical involvement from the assertions of the paranoid official imagination, but clearly popular responses to militia balloting were sharpened by the larger political crisis. Following Whiteboy precedent, the full roster of ‘agrarian’ grievances – wage rates, the price of provisions, rents, tithes and taxes – were soon added to the original source of contention. What was new in the 1790s was the explicitness of the political dimension. Rioters in Westmeath told a magistrate that ‘it was well Lord Westmeath was not there, as he was the person who imprisoned [the United Irishman, Simon] Butler’. More ominously, some crowds invoked the cause of the French.

Since the political slogans adopted by the rioters bear all the hallmarks of Defenderism, it may be useful, at this point, to draw a distinction between ‘Defenderism’ and the Defenders. The first denotes a loose, pro-French anti-ascendancy, popular ideology, the second a specific organisation. While the anti-militia rioters in Meath were almost certainly Defenders the description of their counterparts in Limerick or Wexford as such probably only reflects the contemporary habit of blaming every outrage on ‘Defenderism’. The political undercurrents of the disturbances and the mass experience of armed conflict with State forces – the army – which they entailed, must, however, have facilitated the spread of the Defender organisation. For instance, Connaught, the region that witnessed the most violent opposition to the militia, emerged as a defender stronghold in 1794-5.

The extent and violence of the riots registered a shift in popular and ascendancy attitudes. This has been read as evidence of the breakdown of the ‘moral economy’. Patterns of paternalism and deference had already been eroded by the Defender tactic of raiding gentry homes. For these men at least, the ‘big house’ no longer held any terrors. Under the stress of polarisation and the communal antagonism generated by the Catholic resurgence, gentry hegemony collapsed. An analogous development was the historically unusual position in which the Catholic clergy now found itself. Whiteboys had ignored excommunication in the past just as Rightboys had resisted the payment of ‘excessive’ church dues. But the relationship between church and people was never under greater strain than in the summer of 1793, when priests involved in compiling lists for ballot attracted the popular wrath. Chapel doors were ‘nailed-up’ in Connaught, Cork and Kerry. At Athlone a priest was hanged almost to death and one newspaper reported ‘attacks on the persons of the clergy in many parts’. Two years later Arthur O’Connor remarked, ‘ask the Catholic clergy and they will tell you that their power is declined. Ask the Protestant gentry from one end of the kingdom to the other, and they will tell you that that superstitious power of the Catholic clergy is at an end’. They key word here is ‘superstitious’. O’Connor was making a case for the political maturity of the Catholic masses. Nevertheless such observations as his were not uncommon at the time. During the 1790s the influence of the clergy momentarily faltered. Since this was generally a law-upholding, conservative influence – ‘the Defenders’, it was pointed out, ‘are surely in a bad way – hanged by the laws here, and damned by [Archbishop] Troy hereafter’ – its weakening suggests growing political self-reliance among lower-class Catholics.

The political, as opposed to the direct, causes of the anti-militia riots, and the novel and dramatic form which they took, are indicative of deep and widespread popular disaffection. What were the consequences of the disturbances? The militia’s historian, Sir Henry McAnally, plays down the impact of these events. They did not, in his opinion, leave ‘in the popular soul any such bitter memories as remained after other episodes in Irish history. May 1793 is not one of the black months in that story; it is not the first chapter of 1798’. Given the scale of the bloodshed this seems a curious conclusion. Bartlett’s judgement that the riots ‘helped to create that atmosphere of fear and repression that made the ’98 possible and some sort of ’98 inevitable’ is more convincing. Indeed, in the nineteenth century, popular tradition in Wexford characterised the events of 1793 as the ‘first rebellion’. Coercion fuelled disaffection. As one pamphleteer observed, such measures were ‘ill-calculated to inspire men with a veneration for the government under which they live[d]’. The resulting disaffection was then channelled through, and expressed by, the Defenders.

If the militia riots had the effect of embittering ‘the people’ against the government, this process can only have been aggravated by the ‘show trials’ of certain Catholics in 1794. The trials had their background in the troubled county of Meath, from the start of 1793 the site of the most sustained Defender activity in Ireland. Meath was religiously mixed, with ‘Scotch’ Presbyterian settlements in the north and east, a thinly-spread Anglican landlord and farmer class and an overall, sometimes Irish-speaking, Catholic majority. Of an approximate population, in 1792, of 112,000, about 2,800 were ‘Protestants. As well as enjoying weight of numbers, the Catholic ‘interest’ was far from negligible in social and political terms. Nine hundred Protestant freeholders, worth £10 or more, polled at the last election before the Catholic relief act. By 1794 at least 170 Catholic freeholders had registered in the county. As in south Ulster this complex denominational and ‘ethnic’ geography led to the drawing of ‘cultural and settlement frontiers’. Defenderism and the politics of sectarianism flourished.

In October 1792, at the peak of the Catholic agitation, a Catholic meeting was held at Trim, a town bitterly described some years later as ‘remarkable for being the residence of great numbers of the descendants of the prostitutes of Cromwell’s army’. The meeting, at which the Navan mill-owner John Fay was secretary, publicly regretted the ‘severe disposition of our Protestant brethren’. A Protestant counter-meeting quickly replied. At the end of that year a number of Protestant gentlemen, including Thomas Butler, formed the County Meath Association to counteract Defenderism. These were the men who routed the Defenders at Coolnahinch. Butler the chaplain to the bishop of Meath, lived at Ardbracken, a prosperous ‘English’ settlement, with the largest rural Protestant community in the county. By February 1793, when the heavily fortified bishop’s palace was likened to a ‘Bastille’, it was a community under siege. As a magistrate Butler played a leading role in combating the local Defenders and had allegedly ‘declared openly a determination of taking off as many papists heads for insurrection as there were royalists murdered in France’. Certainly he had earned a tough reputation and his life was repeatedly threatened. On 24 October the threats were fulfilled

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The local ascendancy party responded immediately. County magistrates met twice in quick succession and offered rewards for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the killers. Both meetings were attended by the bishop of Meath’s brother-in-law, and a landowner in the county, the Speaker, John Foster. A few days later John Fay was arrested for the murder of Butler. Foster’s part in these events, and the political implications of Fay’s arrest, aroused a good deal of speculation (and suspicion) at the time. Fay’s home town, Navan, had been forward during the Catholic campaign and hosted its own society of United Irishmen. The whole affair
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In January, 1794, three Drogheda merchants who had been active in the Catholic Committee were charged, along with four others, with
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Defender attacks in Louth in 1792. At the trial in April John Philpot Curran, in a masterly and witty cross-examination, demolished the credibility of the chief crown witness. During the course of this confrontation the witness admitted that he had, while a prisoner in Dundalk, spoken with Foster, but denied Curran’s heavy hints that he had been bribed to give evidence. Summing-up the judge pointed out ‘such circumstances as tended to discredit the witness’. The jury retired for three minutes before returning a verdict of not guilty. Some years later Curran remarked that the trials were ‘scenes of more atrocity and horror than he had ever seen exhibited in a court of justice’. The imprint which these trials left on the popular consciousness can be imagined. As late as 1810 Walter (Watty) Cox’s Irish Magazine alluded to Foster’s less than impartial role in these affairs. What was the law, radicals could now ask, only an instrument of persecution?

By reinforcing popular perceptions of the State as enemy, ‘persecution’, judicial and military, had ‘negative’ politicising effects. That interlocking process of repression and disaffection became particularly acute in the years from the summer of 1795 to the summer of 1798. One fed off the other. The ascendancy resorted to repression because it was under attack and because its representatives were themselves frequently the victims of this campaign of violence; repression stimulated counter-violence, and so the cycle continued. This relationship is illustrated by the often personalised nature of Defender attacks. Active magistrates like Butler were prime targets. Another Anglican clergyman and active magistrate in Meath,
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This tougher ‘security policy’ was pursued within the context of a perceptible hardening of British attitudes towards Ireland. Again the Catholic question determined the situation. Shortly after the Portland Whigs formed a wartime coalition with Pitt on 11 July, 1794, the duke of Portland’s close associate, earl Fitzwilliam, emerged as the prospective lord lieutenant for Ireland. Fitzwiliam, a friend of Edmund Burke, had land and political connections across the Irish Sea. In August Grattan and George Ponsonby were invited to London, and Dublin was soon buzzing with rumours of an impending political shake-up. Fitzwilliam did, indeed, contemplate a ‘clean sweep’ of the existing administration, and within three days of his arrival in Dublin on 5 January, 1795, he sacked John Beresford, the first commissioner of the revenue. This rough handling of entrenched politicians was one reason for his undoing, the Catholic question the other. When it became known that this well-intentioned man would succeed Westmoreland hopes of full Catholic emancipation revived. In December the Dublin Catholics held a meeting attended by Keogh, McCormick and MacNevin, and issued a call for further Catholic relief. As in 1792 the leading Catholics then set about mobilising public opinion. A report of the proceedings of the meeting was circulated ‘throughout the kingdom’. At the end of January Grattan presented parliament with petitions from Antrim, Roscommon, Mayo, Leitrim, Waterford (town and county), Queen’s County, the cities of Galway, Kilkenny and Limerick and the towns of Newry, Navan, Castlebar and Sligo. As in 1792 an upsurge of Defender activity accompanied the rising political excitement.

THE RISE OF THE DEFENDERS 1793-5 (Continued. Part II)

From The men of no property, Irish Radicals and Popular Politics in the Late Eighteenth Century, by Jim Smyth, 1992.

The Defender problem had persisted through 1794, sometimes flaring up dramatically. In May Defenders descended upon a fair in County Cavan declaring that "they would destroy every Scotsman or Presbyterian they should find". One estimate put the death toll from this riot at over 30. Two days afterwards the army confronted ‘several thousand’ Defenders at the nearby village of Ballinaugh. Another 15 were killed and the troops burned the village to the ground. By this stage the focus of Defender activity was moving from Meath and from the sectarian feuding in Armagh, to the south Ulster, north Connaught region. In July and August disturbances were reported from Cavan, Westmeath, Leitrim, Longford, Roscommon and Sligo. Nor did the arrival of Fitzwilliam at the beginning of January 1795, and with it the prospects of Catholic emancipation, bring any respite. In fact Fitzwilliam complained that not a day passed after his arrival that did not bring news of unrest in the countryside. His recall in February did, however, instantly raise the political temperature.

Fitzwilliam had handled his brief ineptly. He made powerful enemies in Beresford and Fitzgibbon, both of whom lobbied against him in London. The king likewise left Pitt in no doubt about his opposition to further instalments of Catholic relief. Pitt, moreover, believed that Fitzwilliam had overstepped his authority. On 23 February the lord lieutenant was sent notice of recall. A number of contemporaries later looked back to Fitzwilliam’s dismissal as the critical moment in the crisis of the 1790s. Charles Teeling called it a ‘national insult’ and recorded the indignation which he had witnessed at the Antrim freeholdres meeting called to protest against the decision. Such scenes of public outrage were repeated across Ireland and the United Irish ‘system’ began to assume a more ‘general and imposing appearance’. In Wexford Edward Hay collected 22,251 signatures. Some years later he wrote of ‘the cup of redress [being] dashed from the lips of expectation, and it cannot be wondered at that the anger of disappointment should have ensued’. Levels of violence markedly increased. As early as 3 march large areas of Cavan, Roscommon and Sligo were characterised as ‘actually in a state of insurrection’. The Northern Star suggested that ‘the rejection of the Catholic Bill [which followed the recall] . . . gives the insurgents a plea for disaffection’.

Now that the political option had been closed off – Camden, Fitzwilliam’s successor, was explicitly instructed that ‘a stand should be made against the further claims of the Catholics’ – the government turned to counter-insurgency. Within days of taking up office the new lord lieutenant informed his superiors in London that ‘the quiet of the country depends upon the exertion of the friends of the established government, backed by a strong military force’ The reasons why the British government abandoned its previous strategy of conciliation for the politics of confrontation are unclear. It has been suggested that after the relief acts of 1792-3 the British government considered the ‘conciliation account’ closed, or alternatively, that Pitt wished to hold concessions in reserve to barter, at some future date, for Catholic support for a union. Pitt may also have been reluctant to undermine England’s Protestant garrison in Ireland during wartime. Whatever the reasoning which lay behind the new hardline policies the consequences were disastrous: repression, disaffection and violence.

In April eleven revenue officers were ambushed an killed after raiding an illicit still at Drumsna, County Leitrim. Their bodies, ‘most inhumanly mangled’, were only recovered the next day. ‘Whether this event gave [the Defenders] spirit,’ wrote Camden:
or drove them to desperation from an apprehension of the consequences, I know not. But from that period the numbers assembled were greater, and they proceeded with more system and appearance of order than they had previously done. One of the first acts of violence and of system was to put all the smiths in requisition, compelling them to make pikes.

In addition to worrying indications of ‘system’ and ‘order’, the authorities must also have been concerned by signs of politicisation, for instance, by the information which they had received that ‘the insurgents assume alternately the appellation of Defenders – United Brothers – and French Militia’, and that there was a ‘confused notion’ amongst them that a ‘general rising’ would soon take place. Large numbers of troops under the command of General Carhampton were dispatched to Connaught. Although he did not anticipate ‘very strong measures’, Camden, confident of the English cabinet’s support, was prepared to sanction methods ‘beyond what the very letter of the law allows’. A stance endorsed by Whitehall as ‘perfectly just, manly and liberal’. In June a Dublin paper referred to accounts ‘from various parts of the country’, ‘of the most atrocious acts committed by the soldiery on the poor unoffending peasants’. By the beginning of October Carhampton, in a wholly illegal exercise, had arrested 1,300 ‘Defenders’ without charge or trial, and sent them aboard a tender anchored off Sligo, for service in the fleet. The lord lieutenant was ‘a little afraid of the zeal of the magistrates carrying this too far’, but felt that ‘it had frightened these fellows more than anything’. His under-secretary took a more sceptical – and as events were to show – more realistic – view of the efficacy of repression. ‘Defenderism puzzles me more and more,’ he confided, ‘but ultimately grows more alarming daily, as the effect of executions seems to be at an end, and there is an enthusiasm defying punishment’. Strongarm tactics could prove counter-productive.

After the Fitzwilliam episode and the mass arrests by Carhampton, the situation took yet another sharp turn for the worse. Remembered in Ireland as the incident which gave birth to the Orange Order, the so-called ‘battle of the Diamond’, which took place in north Armagh in September, 1795, and, even more so, the expulsions from the county which followed, are important in the 1790s for the effect which they had of further discrediting the ascendancy in Catholic eyes and of swelling the ranks of the Defenders and United Irishmen. Armagh had been plagued by sectarian feuding since the mid-1780s. In December 1794, for example, Defenders and Peep O’Day Boys, ‘young boys and idle journeymen weavers’, clashed at a fair. After the twelfth of July celebrations the following year a group of Catholics were attacked near Portadown. The tensions which such incidents revealed culminated in the set-piece battle at the Diamond, a townland appropriately close to Loughgall, over ten years before the ‘cradle’ of Defenderism. Although heavily reinforced by contingents from the neighbouring areas of Down, Derry and, particularly, Tyrone, the Defenders were badly beaten, suffering between 17 and 48 fatalities. This rout was then followed by the mass expulsion of Catholics. At least one church was burned down and Catholic homes and property – looms, webs and yarn – were destroyed. As the attacks continued through the winter and spread into Tyrone, Derry and Monaghan, the exodus was accelerated by the circulation of a prophecy foretelling great calamities about to befall the Catholics of the north. Estimates of the number of refugees ran from 3,500 to 10,000. Meanwhile the magistrates, many of them clergymen, displayed resolute partiality. In the opinions of General Dalrymple, then stationed in the north, ‘they seem[ed] inclined to give this contest an appellation that ought in prudence ever to be avoided, a religious dispute’. The county governor, Lord Gosford, addressing a meeting of magistrates there on 28 December, denounced the ‘ruthless persecution’ of the Catholics and ‘the supineness of the magistracy of Armagh’. This he noted, had ‘become a common topic of conversation in every corner of the kingdom’. If it had not, it was soon to be, as thousands of copies of the address were printed and distributed gratis. The refugees fled in many directions: to Antrim, Down and even Scotland. But by far the greatest number, maybe as many as 4,000, resettled in north Connaught. They carried with them tales of persecution and over the coming years the fear of ‘Orange’ massacres was skilfully exploited as a recruiting agent by the United Irishmen. The expulsions were not soon forgotten. The Defenders at the battle of Randalstown in 1798 carried a banner inscribed ‘REMEMBER ARMAGH’.

Undoubtedly the experience and perception of repression and injustice helped to spread and to deepen popular alienation from the government. It gave sustenance to Defenderism and the United Irishmen, just as the mounting tide of violence stiffened the ascendancy’s resolve. The ‘rise’ of the Defenders, then, was essentially a political phenomenon, inspired by Catholic agitation and the French revolution, and accelerated by repression and sectarian conflict. Yet traditionally they have been characterised, to use Lecky’s words, as a ‘revived Whiteboy system’. According to Thomas Pakenham their grievances were local, connected to the land and empty of political content. Although this view is no longer tenable it would be a mistake to entirely dismiss social and economic explanations. There is no necessary reason, after all, why such explanations should be incompatible with political ones. And in fact, the political and public order crisis of the 1790s was compounded by an economy and society under unusual stress. As the population explosion exerted greater and greater pressure on land, real wages plummeted against rising prices. As the government struggled to meet the bill for a hugely expensive war, taxation steadily increased. Relentless demographic pressure and severe economic hardship stimulated conflict between landlord and tenant – familiar terrain for the Irish secret society. Nor did the Defenders neglect agrarian matters. In Roscommon they even succeeded in forcing the graziers to raise wages and lower conacre rents. In another sense the movements’ ultimate aim, ‘to divide the land’, was agrarian too. Nevertheless, the classic Whiteboy grievances occupied a distinctly subordinate place among Defender priorities.

The significance of Defenderism, historically and for the politics of the period, lay in the way in which it transcended local and immediate issues – in the qualitative leap, which it represented, from rural discontent to mass disaffection. To the authorities this was a worrying and, as Cooke’s remark indicates, startling development. To the radical elite it offered rich opportunities. In order to tap the disaffection produced by the sequence of events from the militia riots to the Armagh expulsions, the United Irishmen had first to work out an accommodation with the Defenders, an accommodation which altered the course of revolutionary politics. What follows examines Defenderism as it has evolved by mid-decade; at the crucial moment when it was about to ‘merge’ into a revolutionary coalition with the United Irishmen.

II IDEOLOGY, ORGANISATION, LEADERSHIP

Defender ideology is difficult to pin down. The Defenders did not have a set of politics, like a political party, and any discussion of their aspirations, prejudices and beliefs, runs the risk of imposing retrospective coherence on what was in reality a tangled skein of half-formed ‘ideas’. Bearing this in mind , the main elements which made up the Defender mentality are clear enough. The best evidence for this mentality comes from the movement’s oaths and catechisms. The symbolism employed in these documents, a protean, inchoate compound of Biblical allusions and references to Irish history and the French revolution, gave the Defenders an attractive sense of mystique. One example of obfuscation, the password ‘ELIPHISMATIS’, was seized upon by the government-sponsored Faulkners Dublin Journal, which obligingly deciphered it as:

Every Loyal Irish Protestant Heretic I Shall Murder And This I Swear.
With nice irony, but equal plausibilty, the rival Dublin Evening Post suggested a number of alternatives including:
Every Lunatic In Patrick’s Hospital I Swear May Answer That Is Silly.
The inspiration is probably masonic. In the early 1780s, for instance, the Belfast Freemasons had a toast which ran ‘May every mason who stands in need of friendship be able to say EYPHA – I have found it’.

Fortunately, not all Defender language is quite so opaque. ‘Are you concerned?’ begins a typical catechism,
I am
To what?
To the National Covention.
What do you design by that cause?
To quell all nations, dethrone all kings and plant the true religion that was lost since the reformation.
What do you fall by?
Sin
What do you rise by?
Repentance.
Where did the cock first crow that all the world heard?
In France.
What is your password?
Elishimorta.

According to another, ‘The French Defenders will uphold the cause and the Irish Defenders will pull down the British laws’. Defender ‘ideology’ combined elements of religious sectarianism, nationalism – the vague notion, as Emmet put it, that ‘something . . . ought to be done for Ireland,’ – francophilia and millenarianism. The theme of ‘deliverance’ jostles in these documents with Irish history; Saint Peter and Saint John with Patrick Sarsfield. When this sometimes bizarre collocation of imagery meshed with straightforward agrarian protest, Defenderism could mean almost anything to anyone. It was not a theoretical construct but a genuinely popular ideology, spontaneously generated from ‘below’ in response to the crisis of the 1790s; a loose, fluid cluster of ideas which tapped the sources of lower-class Catholic solidarity: religion and nationality.

The use of passwords and catechisms, as well as hand-signals, tokens and ‘certificates’, enabled Defenders to identify each other, maintained security, facilitated communication between lodges and indulged the perennial human taste for secrecy and ritual. These elaborate devices also had a self-legitimising function. A Defender ‘captain’, a schoolmaster, captured at Letterkenny in Donegal, had a ‘commission, with a large seal to it, a parchment muster roll’ listing 400 names, and ‘an address to the republicans of Ireland, signed Pichergru, General of the French Republic’. In Galway, Defenders raiding for arms ‘produced a card signed Captain Stout’.
The Defenders developed a remarkably sophisticated and flexible organisation. An expanding network of lodges had been built up through the agencies of ‘contagion’ – Defender territory ran across a geographically contiguous belt, stretching from north Leinster through south Ulster into north Connaught – emissaries and the militia. It was inevitable, given the system of balloting, that Defenders would be inducted into their county militia regiments. Members of these regiments, which were then stationed in other counties, administered the Defender oath to the locals. Unsurprisingly the Meath militia was particularly noted for this practice. As Defenderism spread it did not, at first evolve any formal hierarchy or central leadership. Rather it developed a loosely federated ‘horizontal’ structure. Lodges were numbered in sequence as they were established and co-ordinated in a low-level way by Masonic techniques. Once initiated any Defender might, it was claimed, travel through the country ‘ free of expense and in perfect safety, being supplied with liquor and lodged wherever they passed’.

The federated, cellular, structure was an effective form of clandestine organisation insofar as it proved more spy-resistant (though not entirely spy-proof) than the United Irishmen’s centrally-led pyramidal one, When an informer infiltrated a Defender lodge, he tended to stop there, whereas penetration of a local United Irish committee could give access, up through the baronial, county and provincial layers, to greater quantities of high quality information. For the historian, so often reliant on the same sources as were at the disposal of Dublin Castle, this presents more than the usual problems. Probably we will never know as much about the Defenders as we do about the United Irishmen, although more evidence survives, perhaps, than was once thought.

Beames notes the ‘striking omission from Defender documents . . . of any reference to agrarian grievance’. This observation, while true, is somewhat misleading. Agrarian grievances do feature in the reports of Defender activity. However, the omission does provide an important clue about the social profile of Defender membership. This was not a peasant movement. Weavers, blacksmiths, or Dublin’s urban craftsmen were as likely to be members as small peasant proprietors or agricultural labourers. Workers on the Royal Canal, for instance, ‘above 100’ of them refugees from Armagh, were organised into Defender lodges. Camden thought that the leadership was drawn from among ‘Alehouse-keepers, artisans, low schoolmasters and perhaps a few middling farmers’. This corresponds with other, ‘harder’, information. An imprisoned Defender from Longford named the committee-men in his lodge as a shopkeeper, a schoolmaster, a shoemaker and ‘two gentlemen’. Another Defender prisoner, this time form Louth, described the local ‘captains’ as ‘men of substance’. These descriptions, while many remain characteristically imprecise in the eighteenth-century style, are nonetheless revealing. Defender membership represents a cross-section of rural society below the level of gentry, it attracted the ‘middling sort’ as well as the ‘peasantry’ and men of no property.

THE RISE OF THE DEFENDERS 1793-5 (Continued. Part III)

From The men of no property, Irish Radicals and Popular Politics in the Late Eighteenth Century, by Jim Smyth, 1992.

One occupational group which stands out in the ranks of the Defenders everywhere is the schoolmasters. A number who were arrested during the disturbances in Connaught in 1795 were suspected by the authorities of acting as ‘the channel of communication’. In Roscommon, schoolmasters were described as ‘the principal Defender-makers’. This involvement in radical politics – numerous schoolmaster were also active United Irishmen – is best explained by the unique development of the profession. ‘Independent of all system and control’ by church or State, the predecessors of these rural teachers had been the scribes and bards who had lived by the patronage of the old Gaelic elite, and even in the nineties some were still Gaelic poets. That ‘cultural background’, it had been suggested, made the schoolmaster heir to ‘the resentments of the leaders of the old Gaelic landed class’. These ancient resentments then fused, in a way typical of Defender ‘ideology’, with new, French-inspired, democratic doctrines. Although most of the literary evidence relating to the incorrigible disaffection and to the political influence of the schoolmasters dates from the early nineteenth century, it can safely be read back into the 1790s. In 1795, for example, McNally referred to ‘Thomas Paine, whose works are now in the hands of almost every schoolmaster’.

Unfortunately, the identities of the great majority of these schoolmaster activists and of other middle-ranking Defender leaders are unknown, and most likely unknowable. Occasionally, however, it is possible to pick out faces in the crowd.
Probably the best documented of all Defenders is the Meath schoolmaster and freemason, Lawrence O’Connor. O’Connor and others were arrested in Kildare in July, 1795, for administering an oath to the country people to ‘be true to the French’. Tried and executed for high treason in September, he is chiefly remembered for his spirited and articulate defence in court. Lecky’s remark that O’Connor ‘was said to have been the only educated person who is known to have been identified with’ the Defenders, is utterly misleading. In fact schoolmasters, as noted earlier, were often leaders, or committee-men, at local level; a presence which enhanced the political calibre of the movement.

Less well known than O’Connor to students of the period, although he had achieved something of a national reputation by 1796, was the ‘celebrated "Switcher" Donnelly’. Arthur Donnelly, by profession a dancing instructor, came from Tyrone and acted as a defender commander at the battle of the Diamond. In November and December 1795 rewards were offered for his arrest in connection with a shooting. According to the magistrate who finally caught up with him in south Derry five months later, Donnolly was ‘by nature form’d to be a most dangerous conspirator, very great address, good choice of words and fluency of speech and great agility of body. Amazingly muscular and with desperate intrepid’. A regional organiser in west Ulster, he reportedly circulated like ‘quicksilver’ through Donegal, Tyrone, Antrim and Derry.

Donnelly’s career is instructive. When he was captured the newspapers referred to him as a Defender and a United Irishman. And by this time the merger or, more accurately, coalition, between the United Irishmen and Defenders was indeed already in place, at least in Ulster. The making of that coalition carried profound implications for both movements. Like the commencement of negotiations for French military aid, United Irish efforts to assimilate Defender lodges into their new military structures signalled the seriousness of their insurrectionary designs. It also posed problems for their strategy of forging a union of Irishmen of all creeds. Defenderism represented many things to many men, among them Catholic sectarianism. The experience of John Tuite – ‘Captain Fearnought’ of Meath – illustrates the consequent United Irish dilemma. Tuite was ‘sworn to both acts’ in 1795, that is he took first the Defender and then the United Irish oaths, but the Defender oath pledged him ‘to quell the nation of heresy’ as well as to ‘dethrone all kings, and plant the tree of liberty’. The second part of the oath indicates how interaction with the United Irishmen accelerated and strengthened the politicising impact of ‘French principles’; the first part shows how much more the secular radical gospel had still to do. Putting the best gloss possible on a coalition fraught with internal tensions, Emmet later asserted that the United Irishmen had infused Defenderism with ‘tolerance and republicanism’. Presumably Tuite’s trial report had escaped his notice.

Concerted and systematic attempts to co-opt the Defenders began in the spring of 1795, but lines of communication had been established as early as 1792. As Emmet remarked, ‘from the first formation of the union its most active members were extremely anxious to learn the views and intentions of the Defenders’. The best documented example of contact is the United Irish mission to Rathfryland in the summer of 1792. Wolfe Tone, Samuel Neilson and Alexandar Lowry were all involved in this episode. The names are important because the same individuals appear and reappear as the hidden history of the Defender-United Irish relationship is unravelled. While it is tempting to view the Rathfryland mission as an isolated attempt – in the context of the Catholic campaign – to settle sectarian feuding, other evidence, patchy and circumstantial though it may be, suggests that it in fact fits a pattern. Elliott dismisses Tandy’s excursion to the Louth Defenders later that year as an act of ‘bravado’ motivated by ‘curiosity’. Yet Tandy was probably introduced to the Defenders by the Rev James Coigly, who was in turn associated with the Belfast United Irishmen. Coigly, if not by then a Defender certainly exercised influence amongst them, and during the years 1791-3 travelled around counties Antrim and Derry propagating ‘union’. His activities were complemented by Emmet’s ‘most active’ United Irishmen. For instance, Thomas Russell travelled the length and breadth of Ulster during 1793-4. Not surprisingly the group reaching out to the lower classes and Defenders in this period was the northern-based, politically militant, and often socially radical faction of the United Irishmen, prominent among them Russell, Henry Joy McCracken, Neilson and Coigly. The committed, francophile position adopted by these men made some kind of convergence with the Defenders likely.

As the adversarial rhetoric and style of the reform campaign of 1792-3 had already demonstrated, certain northerners would not shirk direct – possibly violent – confrontation with the ascendancy, and the drift of events since the collapse of that campaign only served to harden attitudes. After the Dublin society’s plans for parliamentary reform were published at the beginning of 1794 the Northern Star announced ‘The question with us is not What reform is best? but – How can we possibly obtain any? The open and ‘political’ routes to reform were blocked. Meanwhile the revelations from the Rev William Jackson’s treason trial gave wide publicity to the possibilities of French intervention in Ireland. Circumstances conspired to encourage a revolutionary strategy. Not that men like McCracken needed much encouragement. As in Dublin it is likely that a shadowy network of lower-class clubs grew up alongside the United Irishmen in Ulster in the first half of the decade. The chairman of the ‘Irish Jacobins of Belfast’ in 1792 was a baker, the secretary ‘an obscure tinner and brazier’. In November, 1793, the Northern Star referred to ‘a society of tradesmen in this town [ie Belfast] which has subsisted for three years’. These tradesmen, ‘farmers, manufacturers and shopkeepers’, formed the organisational backbone of the ‘new’ underground United Irish movement which began to take shape in Ulster in 1794. ‘The scheme was calculated to embrace the lower orders, and in fact to make every man a politician’. The clandestine structure was so far advanced by May, 1795, that a general meeting of delegates from the various societies could be summoned at Belfast. These developments ran parallel to the welding of the Ulster Defenders into a more tightly centralised organisation.

The chief architect of the revamped Defenders was a warm friend and associate of Neilson and McCracken, Charles H Teeling. During May and June, 1795, Teeling undertook a journey up the Antrim coast, along north county Derry, down through Tyrone, Fermanagh, Leitrim and Westmeath and into Meath. The purpose of his journey can be guessed. In Glenarm, County Antrim, for example, he stayed with a priest, the Rev D McDonnell, who is known to have subscribed to the Northern Star. In Leitrim he stayed with the Catholic Committee activist, Myles Keon. At approximately the same time Charles’ elder brother, the United Irishman Bartholomew, ‘traversed the whole island on foot’. It was no coincidence that after meeting with Robert Simms, Neilson and the younger Teeling before leaving for America in June, Tone pronounced himself competent to speak ‘for the Catholic, for the Dissenters and for the Defenders of Ireland’. Three months later Simms wrote to the exile that ‘the organisation which you were made acquainted with amongst the Catholics in this neighbourhood continues to increase and has spread as far south as Meath’. Teeling himself later drew a distinction between the ‘regularly organised body’ of Defenders in the north and their less disciplined southern counterparts, while Simms’ claim about its penetration into Meath is corroborated by government intelligence about Belfast emissaries being sent to that county, by Emmet’s reference to an exchange of ‘deputies’ between Belfast and Meath, County Dublin and elsewhere, by Tone’s assertion that Belfast exercised greater influence over the Catholics than Dublin and by the activities of Bartholomew Teeling by then – like Coigly – operating out of Dundalk.

In many ways the politics of the 1790s, radical, Catholic and Defender, crystallised in the Teeling family. It played a crucial role in co-ordinating the coalition between the Defenders and United Irishmen. The father, Luke, a wealthy linen merchant from Lisburn, near Belfast, acted as a (hardline) United Irish surrogate at the Catholic Convention in 1792. It was he who that year paid for the Address to the Defenders, at Rathfryland and for the insertions of the Meath Catholics meeting called to protest against Fitzwilliam’s recall, and his young son Charles – then only 17 – acted as secretary. Charles’ brother-in-law, John Magennis, the self-styled ‘Grand Master’ of the County Down Defenders, represented that county at the Catholic Convention, handled the local Catholic Committee subscription and was in communication with the committee secretary (and United Irishman) Richard McCormick. Although the Defenders have usually been discussed at a general – and nameless – level, attention to detail reveals, at first in Ulster, then radiating outwards, a compact nexus of friends and relatives at the head of the movement. This was a group which was, moreover, deeply involved with the United Irishmen. The Teelings stood at the centre of the nexus and, as prosperous linen merchants, typified it.
In contrast with their land-owning co-religionists in north Connaught or the Dublin businessmen, Ulster’s Catholics had maintained a low political profile throughout the greater part of the eighteenth century. If this passivity was due, as Cullen suggests, to their comparative poverty, then their participation in the linen-led economic boom of the 1780s and 1790s would in part explain their new political self-confidence. Commercial relations with Belfast’s radical mercantile elite would also have facilitated politicisation. Bernard Coile, a prominent Lurgan linen merchant, subscribed to the Northern Star, and was associated with Neilson, McCracken, Coigly and Magennis. Magennis, like his fellow Defender commander, the Presbyterian, Alexander Lowry, was also in the linen trade. Both were intimates of Charles Teeling who attests to their social rank and ‘independent fortune’. This small leading group acted as a nucleus whose family, business and political connections fanned-out into an underground network spanning the northern half of Ireland. Coigly’s brother in Armagh – who employed 100 weavers – was a Defender/United Irishman. Coigly’s equally mobile colleague, ‘Switcher’ Donnelly, may have been a cousin, while his ‘close friend and relation’, Valentine Derry, led the Defenders in County Louth. The other main identifiable Defender leaders are Burke Rice, a man ‘possessed of considerable landed property’ in County Monaghan, and the Armagh publican, Robert Campbell. Government informants reported Campbell’s presence in Cavan late in 1795, and at Balbriggan, north County Dublin, shortly afterwards, as he ‘constantly travell[ed] from county to county’.

Once the cloak of anonymity is lifted then, the Defenders, it becomes clear, particularly in Ulster and Meath, possessed a coherent, radical, middle-class Catholic leadership. From its origins in Armagh in 1784 as the Catholic faction in a local sectarian feud, the Defender movement had gradually spread along lines of religious cleavage, or ‘cultural frontiers’, into County Down, Louth and south Ulster. Stimulated by the news and controversy about the French revolution and encouraged by the Catholic agitation, the Defenders were transformed into a politicised secret society. This process was then reinforced, and the Defender organisation expanded, from Meath across the north midlands into Connaught, by the continuing economic, political, and law-and-order crisis. The militia riots, the 1794 trials, the Fitzwilliam episode, Lord Carhampton’s activities, the Armagh expulsions and the propaganda which radicals extracted from each of these affairs, all contributed to the rise of the Defenders. BY 1795 Defenderism had a presence, form Donegal to Kildare, from Galway to Louth, in at least 16 counties and in Dublin city. They had successfully infiltrated the militia and knit far-flung lodges into a co-ordinated, if not well-disciplined, organisation. Lines of communication criss-crossed the country. Emissaries, equipped with catechisms, ‘commissions’ and the knowledge of the initiate, travelled around carrying instructions, proselytising and recruiting. Defenderism had evolved a chameleon ideology infinitely adaptable to varying local conditions: now sectarian, now agrarian, always francophile and anti-ascendancy. With the emergence of a recognisable regional command structure in Ulster, of a Catholic leadership aligned to the radical northern wing of the United Irishmen, the stage had been set for the making of a revolutionary coalition. The vast Catholic Committee-United Irish-Defender conspiracy of Sir Richard Musgrave’s paranoid imagination was not, after all, entirely detached from the historical reality.

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