Tone / Bartlett Life Of Theobald Wolfe Tone

Memoirs, journals and political writings, compiled and arranged by William T.W. Tone, 1826
1. Auflage 1998
ISBN: 978-1-84351-365-0
Verlag: The Lilliput Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 1002 Seiten

As I shall embark in a business, within a few days, the event of which is uncertain, I take the opportunity of a vacant hour to throw on paper a few memorandums relative to myself and my family ...' So begins Theobald Wolfe Tone's riveting autobiography, commenced in 1796 before he sailed with the French to Bantry Bay. Since its initial publication in 1826, the Life of Theobald Wolfe Tone, comprising the autobiography as well as a monumental collection of his journals, letters and political writings, has been regarded by historians as an indispensable source for the history of the 1790s, and for the life of Tone himself. Its blend of candid memoir, frank diary entries and political passion has contributed to the mystique of this Protestant revolutionary and founding father of Irish republicanism, who strove to promote 'the common name of Irishman' in place of the political and religious barriers that had divided his country. While there have been a number of abridged versions of the 1826 Life as compiled and edited by Tone's son William, this is the first new unabridged edition of the work. Using Tone's original manuscripts, editor Thomas Bartlett has restored passages suppressed - for reasons of primness and prudence - by the Tone family. Tone emerges in these pages as a man of great energy, wit and commitment. The development of his political ideas, the intimate details of his danger-filled life, the power of his prose - all are on display throughout this extraordinary compendium. Tone's Life, documenting the drama of his brief career, forms his most enduring legacy.

THOMAS BARTLETT is Professor of Modern Irish History at University College Dublin. He is author of The Fall and Rise of the Irish Nation: The Catholic Question 1690-1830 (1992), among other works, and co-editor (with Keith Jeffrey) of A Military History of Ireland (1996). Professor Bartlett is a member of the Royal Irish Academy.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Tone, Theobald Wolfe

Bartlett, Thomas

Leseproben

INTRODUCTION

1

Theobald Wolfe Tone was born on 20 June 1763 in 27 St Bride’s Street, just behind Dublin Castle, but the family soon moved to 44 Stafford Street (now Wolfe Tone Street), where he spent his childhood; he died in the Provost’s Prison, Dublin, on 19 November 1798. These dates communicate the essential fact concerning Tone: he was from first to last an eighteenth-century figure. And within the ‘long’ Irish eighteenth century (1690-1801), he was quintessentially a man of the 1790s.

The main source for Tone’s early life is the Life of Theobald Wolfe Tone – first published in 1826 in two volumes in Washington, DC, whither his surviving family had moved, and republished here in its entirety for the first time.1 In the candid autobiographical fragment that appears in the first volume of that edition, Tone provides details on his family, education and legal career. He was born into a middle-class Protestant family, the eldest of sixteen children, only five of whom survived childhood. His father, Peter Tone, was a coach-builder – a tradesman certainly, but at the luxury end of the market – and he had property interests too, and the family could afford servants. His mother, Margaret Lamport, was the daughter of a captain in the West Indies trade. She was a Catholic who converted to Protestantism when Theobald was eight years old. Tone does not mention this, but it is surely impossible that he did not know; and his flat assertion in 1796 that he was acquainted with ‘not one’ Catholic should not be taken literally.2 In his autobiographical memoir, Tone notes that while ‘my father and mother were pretty much like other people’, such was emphatically not the case with their children, all of whom had ‘a wild spirit of adventure’ which took them to the corners of the earth and earned at least four of them untimely deaths. No fewer than three died having taken arms against England (Theobald, Matthew, William), a fourth (Arthur) served in the Dutch navy in the Revolutionary Wars and later for the Americans in the War of 1812, and the fifth, Mary, married a Swiss, Jean Frédéric Giauque, dabbled in espionage for France, and appears to have perished of yellow fever in Santo Domingo in 1799.3 Theobald Wolfe Tone’s status as the first Irish republican may be open to question; but the Tones’ claim to be recognized as the first Irish republican family is surely incontestable.

Tone’s education was largely unremarkable. He was ‘sent at the age of eight or nine to an excellent English school kept by Sisson Darling’ and then, at the age of twelve, was enrolled in a Latin school conducted by the Rev. William Craig. Clearly of above-average ability, though very lazy, and very talented at appearing cleverer than he was, a fellowship at Trinity College, sole constituent college of the University of Dublin, was determined upon by his father and his teachers as an appropriate goal in life for him. The young Tone, however, had other ideas.

Peter Tone’s business had failed as a result of injuries he had sustained in a severe fall, and in 1778 he was forced to sell up in Dublin and return to the family farmhouse at Bodenstown, Co. Kildare. Tone, however, was found lodgings ‘with a friend near the school’ and stayed behind in Dublin to continue his pre-university education. ‘In this manner’, he noted, ‘I became, I may say, my own master before I was sixteen.’ The result of this freedom might have been predicted. Tone quickly understood that two or three days at school a week would be more than sufficient to keep up with the Rev. Craig’s uninspiring lessons in Latin and Greek: the remainder of the week was therefore ‘lawful prize’. Together with a handful of friends, he spent his ‘free’ time walking in the country, going to the seaside for swimming parties, or debating, for even at this early age he had formed a debating society with his companions. Most importantly, perhaps, Tone also reports ‘attending all parades, field days and reviews of the garrison in Dublin in the Phoenix Park’. In France years later, awaiting orders to sail for Ireland with an invasion fleet, Tone reflected that his passion for the military life could be traced to his enjoyment of these military displays. Typically, he had also realized that a gorgeous military uniform would prove a decided asset in winning the affections of young women.4 With Tone, the lofty and the carnal frequently jostled for priority.

By now determined on a military career, Tone was understandably dismayed at the prospect of entering Trinity College; but his father was implacable, and Tone’s plea to be allowed to enlist in the British army was angrily rejected. Tone could have joined the East India Company army – his younger brother William had already run away to enlist in that force – but he declined to take this escape route for the truly adventurous. He submitted to his father ‘with a very bad grace’, took up his books once again, and managed to enter Trinity as a Pensioner in February 1781. But Tone’s hankering for a military life had not left him, and he was soon in dispute with his father over the latter’s refusal ‘to equip me for a volunteer and to suffer me to join the British army in America where the war [of American independence] still raged’. A year’s estrangement from his father (and from his studies at Trinity) resulted, and when Tone for a second time bowed before his father’s will, he found that he had to re-commence his studies in first year. He had already won a medal in his first year of study, but it was upon his return that he gained his reputation of being one of the outstanding students of his generation. By the time Tone graduated in 1786 he had been awarded a scholarship and three premiums.

More importantly, he had won three medals from the College Historical Society.5 Founded by Edmund Burke in 1745, the Historical Society was no ordinary student debating club; rather, it self-consciously and systematically set out, through a programme of historical study, rhetoric and oratory, to prepare its members for public life and service. Its membership was ostensibly an élite of both birth and talent, but speaking ability counted for more than parentage or wealth. In the face of stiff competition Tone excelled, attending regularly, speaking frequently and eventually becoming auditor, or chairman. Those historians who have probed Tone’s interventions in debate at the society’s meetings have concluded that he showed little or no trace of radical ideas at this time. Such a conclusion is not surprising: the society was primarily a forum for aspirant lawyers and politicians, and neither consistency nor advanced opinions were to be expected.6

The College Historical Society was also a social club, and here, especially, Tone was in his element, for he had a enormous capacity for friendship and for fun. He made many friends in the society, such as the future United Irishmen Thomas Addis Emmet, Peter Burrowes and Whitley Stokes; and while his path and that of the likes of William Conyngham Plunket and Charles Kendal Bushe (later Lord Chancellor and Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, respectively) would later markedly diverge, they never lost their affection for him. Against all the odds Tone had been a success at Trinity, and he looked back fondly on his time there: ‘I preserve, and ever shall’, he wrote, ‘a most sincere affection for the University of Dublin.’7 However, he was destined not to win a Fellowship: not through lack of ability, but because on 21 July 1785 he had married Martha Witherington, thus rendering himself ineligible.

By that date, although Tone had had a number of sexual encounters or ‘fugitive passions’ as he calls them, he was by no means sexually experienced.8 For example, a notable amour for Eliza Martin, wife of Richard Martin of Dangan, Co. Galway, while it had a huge effect on him, was, on the evidence supplied by Tone himself, certainly unconsummated. The two had been thrown together by a shared love of the theatre; visits to Galway followed, and as Eliza’s husband was frequently absent on political business (he was MP for Galway), she had turned to Tone for consolation and comfort. But Tone was determined not to take advantage, and ‘such was the purity of the extravagant affection I bore her’, he wrote, that he would not overstep the ‘bounds of virtue’. Years later, when he learned that Eliza Martin had run off a with an English merchant and discovered that her sexual proclivities were the subject of comment in the public prints, Tone reflected ruefully in his autobiographical memoir that he might have been too restrained: ‘my ignorance of the world prevented my availing myself of opportunities which a man more trained than I was would not have let slip’. The affair had more than its fair share of the absurd, and Tone’s first editors, his son, William, and (silently) his widow, Matilda – as he preferred to call Martha – probably suppressed the whole episode in the published Life more from embarrassment than from shame.9

Shortly after the relationship with Eliza Martin came to an end, Tone had set his eyes on Martha Witherington, then aged fifteen and ‘as beautiful as an angel’. After two years’ futile agonizing over...