Invitation to Belfast In July 1790 in the visitors' gallery in the
Irish House of Commons, Tone met
Thomas Russell, a disillusioned
East India Company veteran. He found Russell equally critical of the proceedings in the chamber below.
Henry Grattan's reform-minded
Patriots were floundering in their efforts to build upon the legislative independence from England (
the "Constitution of 1782") that the
Volunteer militia movement had helped secure. Tone later described the encounter with Russell as "one of the most fortunate" in his life. With Russell providing the introductions, (Tone's diary records
Thomas Paine's
Rights of Man as the "
Koran of Belfast").
An Argument on behalf of the Catholics of Ireland The Belfast club had invited Tone as the author of
An Argument on behalf of the Catholics of Ireland. With an eventual print-run of 16,000, in Ireland only the
Rights of Man surpassed it in circulation. The
Argument embraced what had been the most advanced Volunteer position: that the key to constitutional reform was
Catholic emancipation. Tone was himself suspicious of Catholic priests (regretting that the Irish people had been "bound" to them by persecution) and hostile to what he saw as "Papal tyranny" (In 1798, he was to applaud
Napoleon's deposition and imprisonment of
Pope Pius VI). But the
Argument presents the
French Revolution as evidence that a Catholic people need not endure
clericalism: in the
French National Assembly, as in the
American Congress, "Catholic and Protestant sit equally". It also recalls the
Patriot Parliament summoned by
James II in 1689. When Irish Catholics had a clearer title to what had been forfeit not ninety but forty years before (in the
Cromwellian Settlement), they did not use the opportunity to pursue the wholesale return of their lost estates. As for the existing Irish Parliament "where no Catholic can by law appear", it was the clearest proof that "Protestantism is no guard against corruption".
First resolutions Calling themselves, at his suggestion, the
Society of the United Irishmen, and approving Tone's draft resolutions, his hosts declared that "we have no national government — we are ruled by Englishmen, and the servants of Englishmen". The sole constitutional remedy was "an equal representation of all the people in parliament"—"a complete and radical reform". They urged others to follow their example: to "form similar Societies in every quarter of the kingdom for the promotion of Constitutional knowledge, the abolition of bigotry in religion and policies, and the equal distribution of the Rights of Man through all Sects and Denominations of Irishmen". Summarised by
James Napper Tandy as "all Irishmen citizens, all citizens Irishmen", the same resolutions were carried three weeks later at a meeting in Dublin. Tone helped the Committee in Dublin stage a national Catholic Convention. Elected on a broad, head-of-household, franchise, the "Back Lane Parliament" was seen to challenge the legitimacy of the
Irish Lords and
Commons. The impression was confirmed when the convention decided to make its appeal directly to London where the government, in advance of war with revolutionary France, had signalled a willingness to solicit Catholic opinion. In January 1793, Tone was included in the Convention delegation that, after being hosted by Presbyterian supporters in Belfast, was received by
George III at
Windsor. It was an audience with which, at the time, Tone believed he had "every reason to be content". Through its appointed
Dublin Castle executive, the British government pressed the
Irish Parliament to match
Westminster's
1791 Catholic Relief Act. This lifted the sacramental bar to the legal profession, to military commissions and, in the limited number of constituencies not in the "pockets" of either landed grandees or the government, to the property franchise, but not yet to Parliament itself or to senior Crown offices. But there was a substantial price to be paid for the passage, in April 1793, of similar legislation in Ireland. In the wake of the 1793 Relief Act, the Catholic Committee voted Tone a sum of £1,500 with a gold medal, subscribed to a statue of the King and, as agreed in London, voted to dissolve. United Irishmen at the time were seeking to revive the Volunteer movement on the model of the
French National Guard.
Separatist and conspirator In May 1794, evidence laid against Tone helped the government justify its proscription of the Society. In July 1793, the
Lord Chancellor of Ireland,
John FitzGibbon, Earl of Clare, had seized upon Tone's suggestion in a letter to Russell that independence "would be the regeneration to this country", to denounce all United Irishmen as committed separatists. Tone protested, but only by way of endorsing a connection to England where it did not involve the "gross corruption in the legislature" and the "sacrifice of [Ireland’s] interests to England". In April 1794, he was found to have been meeting in the prison cell of
Archibald Hamilton Rowan (a fellow United man serving time for seditious libel) with
William Jackson. An Anglican clergyman radicalised by his experience of revolutionary Paris, Jackson came to Ireland to ascertain to the potential support for a French invasion. An attorney named Cockayne, to whom Jackson had disclosed his mission, betrayed the memorandum to the government. In April 1794 Jackson was arrested on a charge of treason and dramatically committed suicide during his trial. Rowan, and two other parties to the conspiracy,
Napper Tandy and James Reynolds, managed to flee the country. None of the incriminating papers seized were in Tone's handwriting. Also, while entertaining hopes of serving
Francis Rawdon, Lord Moira, as a private secretary, Tone had not attended meetings of the Dublin Society of United Irishmen since May 1793. Tone remained in Ireland until after the trial of Jackson but was advised by
Kilwarden that to avoid prosecution he should leave. In an agreement brokered by a former Trinity friend,
Marcus Beresford, he was permitted to remove himself to the United States in return for giving an account of his role in the Jackson affair, albeit without breaking confidences or naming names. Beginning with an obligation of each society to drill a company, and of three companies to form a battalion, this structure was in turn adapted to military preparation. In this form, the society replicated rapidly across Ulster and, eventually, from Dublin out into the midlands and the south. As it did so,
William Drennan's
“test” or pledge, calling for "a union of power among Irishmen of every religious persuasion", was administered to
artisans,
journeymen and shopkeepers, many of whom had maintained their own
Jacobin clubs, and to tenant farmers and their market-town allies who had organised against the Anglican
gentry in secret fraternities. These were the "numerous and respectable class of the community, the men of no property" that Tone, despairing of his own creed and class, believed would ultimately carry the struggle. == Revolutionary exile ==