1798, a cross-community rebel… – Slugger O’Toole

For Eire to be represented within the Union Flag, a 3rd heraldic gadget would should be mixed with these of Scotland’s St Andrew, older brother to St Peter and disciple to Jesus, who was martyred on an X-shaped cross or ‘saltire’, and England’s St George, martyred below Diocletian, partitioner of the Roman empire. Nonetheless, having died naturally, the uncanonised Patrick didn’t warrant an emblematic cross of any description. The crimson saltire ultimately attributed to him was the crest of the Geraldines, a household of Welsh aristocrats represented within the band of Cambro-Norman knights ‘invited’ to Eire in 1169 by Dermot, King of Leinster. However, on 1 January 1801 a Royal Proclamation declared that the brand new Union Flag could be “Azure, the Crosses Saltires of St. Andrew and St. Patrick quarterly per saltire, counterchanged argent and gules; the latter fimbriated of the second, surmounted by the Cross of St. George of the third, fimbriated because the Saltire”.

The discontent of the English mob in 1780 was rooted the Papists Act of 1778, meant to mitigate a physique of laws referred to as the penal legal guidelines, first launched by William within the 1690s with the categorical intent of “additional stopping the Progress of Popery”. The eccentric zealot Lord George Gordon reacted by forming a Protestant affiliation to oppose the enactment of any laws granting larger freedoms to Catholics, together with the appropriate to affix Britain’s severely depleted armed forces. For a number of days crowds of as much as 50,000 left a path of destruction a lot larger than that seen in Paris throughout your entire French Revolution. Practically 300 rioters have been shot lifeless by the 15,000 troops mustered to quell these unprecedented disturbances. Britain’s repute on the worldwide stage additionally suffered at a time when it wanted allies to combat its pricey struggle in America.

In Eire, the penal legal guidelines had included the 1695 Act for “higher securing the federal government by disarming papists”. This offered that “searches of dwellings shall be made solely between dawn and sundown” whereas an modification that got here into impact on 1^st July 1740 acknowledged that “all justices of the peace, magistrates and chief officers of cities and cities are ordered to make yearly searches for arms”. The penalty for the primary offence was a wonderful of 100 kilos, and for a second, to undergo praemunire, basically to be deemed treasonous and stripped of all rights and possessions and jailed indefinitely.

As in Scotland and England, legislative measures revoking the penal legal guidelines in Eire have been enacted throughout the last a long time of the 18^th century. One of many final, the 1793 Act “for the Reduction of His Majesty’s Popish or Roman Catholick Topics of Eire” swept away most remaining disqualifications. The Militia Act of the identical yr noticed the reorganisation of the Volunteers, native reservists first raised in 1778 to protect in opposition to French invasion whereas common troops fought in America. A lot to the consternation of Eire’s Protestants, this allowed Irish Catholics to enlist thus granting them entry to firearms. Certainly, in lots of elements of Eire the Protestant working-class felt betrayed and weak, an alien minority.

In Armagh, essentially the most populous county in Eire, the Protestant Peep o’Day Boys, an agrarian secret society that drew comparability within the Irish Home of Commons with “Lord George Gordon’s fanatics”, intensified the looking of Catholic properties for arms. To this they added the serving of written decrees advising Catholic tenants to relocate “to hell or Connaught”. Failure to conform would consequence within the destruction of possessions, significantly linen weaving equipment, so depriving focused households of their livelihood and eliminating industrial competitors. This marketing campaign of ‘papering and wrecking’ handed with comparatively little interference from the authorities.

‘The Armagh Troubles’ additionally resulted within the formation of the Defenders, a Catholic agrarian secret society that incessantly engaged in confrontation with the Peep o’Day Boys. Rural Eire had a protracted historical past of casual leisure violence referred to as ‘faction preventing’. All through the 19^th century, mass brawls involving lots of of antagonists grew to become a fixture at most giant gathering resembling markets, festivals, wakes, race conferences and patterns. Though sometimes deadly, these confrontations have been usually rooted in petty grievances between households or neighbours. By the top of the century, nevertheless, extra coordinated battles have been being organized alongside sectarian traces. One such confrontation occurred on 21 September 1795 at a cross-roads half-way between Loughgall and Portadown referred to as the Diamond.

The United Irishmen have been shaped in Belfast, in 1791, by Dublin lawyer Theobald Wolfe Tone and some primarily Presbyterian retailers. In 1792 he organized a conference of elected Roman Catholic delegates that pressured the Irish Parliament to go the Catholic Reduction Act of 1793. Tone noticed this not as an finish in itself however as a step in direction of a secular republic. An Anglican-born freethinker, he had first-hand expertise of the revolutions in America and France and his acknowledged purpose was “to unite the entire folks of Eire…, and to substitute the frequent identify of Irishman rather than the denominations of Protestant, Catholic, and Dissenter…”. The Society was formally suppressed in 1794, the yr after Britain and revolutionary France went to struggle.

In late December 1796, the French Expédition d’Irlande didn’t land any of its 15000 troops in a storm-wracked Bantry Bay. However, for the British, this tried invasion underlined the seriousness of the state of affairs and produced a draconian response. By 1797, the newspaper of the United Irishmen, the Northern Star, had been shut down, the Habeas Corpus act suspended, and martial regulation proclaimed. Along with abstract executions, anybody suspected of sedition might anticipate to obtain the routine navy punishment of flogging or picketing however now additionally improvised tortures resembling half-hanging and pitch-capping. All privately held arms have been confiscated, nevertheless, from its formation in 1795, the Orange Order was intently related to the yeomanry in mid Ulster who usually retained their weapons.

It has been estimated that, regardless of strong repression, by 1798 the variety of United Irishmen throughout Eire had grown to over 1 / 4 of one million. What adopted, nevertheless, is a story of two rebellions. Whereas Might 23^rd had been set because the date for a common rebellion throughout the Island of Eire, it quickly grew to become clear that Authorities infiltration, inner disagreements, and poor communications would thwart any coordinated begin to the rebel. However, on Might 27^th the rebels of Co Wexford managed to take Enniscorthy, the County’ second-largest city, from a detachment of the North Cork Militia who had been quartered on its inhabitants. Three days later they took Wexford City. Within the north, it was not till June 8^th that Presbyterian Henry Pleasure McCracken lead rebel forces in an unsuccessful assault on Antrim City. When the rebels commanded by fellow Presbyterian Henry Munro have been defeated on the Battle of Ballinahinch, Co Down, on June13^th, the rebellion in Ulster was over.

The United Irishmen of Co Wexford was led by an unlikely mixture of Catholic clergy and Protestant gentry resembling Colonel Anthony Perry. Perry was born in Co Down right into a household that owned property throughout Eire and, though a member of the Established Church, he married Eliza Ford of Ballyfad, Co. Down, a Roman Catholic. In 1792, Perry joined a department of the nonetheless unprescribed United Irishmen in Gorey, Co Wexford. By 1796, he was residing at Perrymount in close by Inch and was a lieutenant within the Coolgraney Corps of Yeoman Cavalry. Within the days earlier than the rebel, nevertheless, Perry and another Protestant thought of ‘too liberal’, together with all of the Corp’s Catholics, about half its energy, have been disarmed. In late Might of 1798, Perry was imprisoned in Gorey market-house the place, for a number of days, he was tortured by ‘Tom the Satan’ of the North Cork Militia, the reputed inventor of the pitch-cap.

However his accidents, upon his launch Perry mobilised the rebels of north Wexford and mustered them at Vinegar Hill, headquarters of the county’s United Irishmen. For a number of weeks they engaged in skirmishes and battles with Crown troops throughout Wexford and struck as far north as Meath. A number of miles north of the River Boyne, the dissident forces have been lastly damaged and scattered. Perry and one other insurgent chief, Fr. Mogue Kearns, a Catholic priest from Kiltealy, Co Wexford, fled southwest in direction of Co Offaly, then King’s County, however have been captured by a squadron of the Edenderry Yeomanry commanded by Captain John Ridgeway. Perry and Kearns have been tried by court-martial and sentenced to dying as traitors to the Crown. On 21^st July, they have been hanged earlier than a big crowd at Blundell Wooden in Edenderry and beheaded. They have been buried collectively in Monasteroris Cemetery, simply exterior the city.

The axe used to decapitate Perry and Kearns, two of essentially the most notable commanders of the 1798 rebel, grew to become a prized possession of the native Orange Lodge however it will not be the one trophy taken that day. The grandson of Captain Ridgeway, Sir William Ridgeway FBA FRAI, an Anglo-Irish classical scholar and Professor of Archaeology at Cambridge College, recorded that “the priest’s pistol was rigorously preserved by my household”. Considerably extra gruesomely, in January 1921, Ridgeway displayed the severed head of Kearns to Thomas Ulick Sadleir, a visiting Irish genealogist and heraldic knowledgeable. Nonetheless, Fr. Peadar Mac Suibhne of Knockbeg Faculty, Co Carlow, later information that within the mid-Nineteen Sixties, in a story paying homage to Oliver Cromwell’s a couple of years earlier, a visiting Jesuit historian rediscovered the top and had it interred in Monasteroris.

So profitable was the disarming of the Catholic peasantry that firearms, such because the pistol carried by Fr. Kearns, have been the protect of the insurgent elite. The rank and file have been obliged to improvise as greatest they might, and their weapon of selection was the pike, which proved significantly efficient in opposition to cavalry costs. Native blacksmiths laboured evening and day to provide iron pike-heads which have been then fixed to lengthy ash shafts. Nonetheless, not all of the blades used have been so lately manufactured. Most likely plundered from a Cupboard of Curiosities in one of many many Massive Housed raided for arms and provisions, there are quite a few examples within the museums of Britain and Eire of Bronze Age weapons which have been recommissioned. Quick, Center Bronze Age blades grew to become pikes, whereas longer, Late Bronze Age swords have been usually used as meant.

The extent and significance of the reuse of historical weapons by Irish insurgents had severe penalties for these lecturers working within the subject of Materials Tradition, the time period utilized by archaeologists when referring to the bodily objects produced by previous societies. Within the case of prehistoric intervals, such because the Irish Bronze Age, our wealthy assortment of steel artefacts has been pored over for clues to their perform, significantly the use-wear proof on bronze blades. Sadly, the conflation of historical and fashionable harm has resulted in a misapprehension concerning Bronze Age bellicosity.

Whether or not from 200 or 2000 or extra years in the past or yesterday, the previous will all the time have relevance for our modern lives. To repeat the phrases of George Santayana, “those that fail to study from the errors of their predecessors are destined to repeat them.”

For additional info on this matter, a three-part video presentation, ‘Folks, Pots and Pointy Issues: A Reassessment of Irish Bronze Age Materials Tradition’, could be discovered at The Ulster Archaeological Society’s web site.

David Bell is a Postdoctoral Analysis Fellow in Archaeology and Palaeoecology at Queen’s College, Belfast. He’s additionally a member of the Alliance Social gathering and Humanists UK however is writing in a wholly private capability.