Part 10
As it was, he soon gave up law for politics—his first venture in which was a pamphlet in the interests of the Whig Club. This procured for him the favour of Grattan, Forbes and Ponsonby, and put a little profitable law business in his way. But the prospects which were held out to him of a seat in Parliament did not materialise; and very soon, Tone, whose opinions matured rapidly under an “intensive” method of political culture, found he had so far outgrown “Whig” principles that he could enter into no alliance with them. Briefly put, the points of difference were these: Tone held that “the influence of England was the radical vice of the Irish Government, and consequently that Ireland would never be either free, prosperous or happy until she was independent, and that independence was unobtainable whilst the connection with England existed.” Grattan and those who thought with him were attached to the connection with England, and considered that if certain grievances (which they could not see were inherent in the system) were removed, all would be for the best, in the best of all possible worlds. In the illumination of his discovery Tone “began to look on the little politics of the Whig Club with great contempt: _their peddling about petty grievances instead of going to the root of the evil_,” and he rejoiced that with his poverty he had kept his independence and could develop his political creed without being bound by the tenets of the Whigs.
One afternoon Theobald brought home to dinner a new acquaintance whom he had met the previous day in the gallery of the House of Commons. Mrs. Tone was as much taken as her husband by the fascinating address of this tall soldierly man with the dark eyes, coal black silky hair, and olive complexion, whom Theobald introduced to her as Thomas Russell. Long afterwards these three who dined together then for the first time, remembering the date of their first re-union, felt inclined to keep its anniversary as a festival. As Tone, on the eve of the most momentous crisis of his life, the departure of the Bantry Bay expedition, sat in a quiet corner of Paris reviewing his past, he counted the day he made Russell’s acquaintance as one of the most fortunate in his life. He joins the name of the passionately loved wife with that of the beloved friend. “I frame no system of happiness for my future life on which the enjoyment of his society does not constitute a most distinguishing feature, and if I am ever inclined to murmur at the difficulties wherewith I have so long struggled, I think on the inestimable treasure I possess in the affection of my wife, and the friendship of Russell, and I acknowledge that all my labours and sufferings are overpaid. I may truly say, that, even at this hour when I am separated from both of them, and uncertain whether I may ever be so happy as to see them again, there is no action of my life, which has not a remote reference to their opinion which I equally prize. When I think I have acted well, and that I am likely to succeed in the important business wherein I am engaged, I say often to myself: ‘My dearest love and my friend Russell will be glad of this.’”[56]
Footnote 56:
“Autobiography,” p. 29.
A short time after they had made the acquaintance of Russell, the Tones went to spend the summer by the seaside at Irishtown, the doctor having prescribed sea-bathing as a cure for Mrs. Tone’s continued delicacy. Thither came Russell every day to visit them, and thither came also very frequently in his company Russell’s venerable father and his delightful brother, Captain John. Room was found, too, in “the little box of a house” for Mary Tone, and for William whenever he could spare a week from Matthew’s cotton factory at Prosperous. As Tone writes of these happy days he grows lyrical in his praise of them. “I recall with transport the happy days we spent during that period; the delicious dinners, in the preparation of which my wife, Russell and myself were all engaged; the afternoon walks, the discussions we had, as we lay stretched on the grass.... If I may judge we were none of us destitute of the humour indigenous in the soil of Ireland; ... add to this I was the only one who was not a poet, or at least a maker of verses, so that every day produced a ballad, or some poetical squib, which amused us after dinner; and as our conversation turned upon no ribaldry, or indecency, my wife and sister never left the table. These were delicious days. The rich and great, who sit down every day to the monotony of a splendid entertainment, can form no idea of the happiness of our frugal meal, nor of the infinite pleasure we found in taking each his part in the preparation and attendance. My wife was the centre and the soul of all. I scarcely knew which of us loved her best; her courteous manners, her never-failing cheerfulness, her affection for me and for our children, rendered her the object of our common admiration and delight. She loved Russell as well as I did. In short, a more interesting society of individuals, connected by purer motives, and animated by a more ardent attachment and friendship for each other, cannot be imagined.”[57]
Footnote 57:
“Autobiography,” pp. 29, 30.
During these long days of summer leisure and talk, Tone’s old project of a military colony in the South Sea was revived, and a memorial on the subject was drawn up by him and Russell and sent to the Duke of Richmond. Both the Duke and Lord Grenville, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, showed an interest in the scheme, and it is possible that it might have led to something had not the threatened wars between England and Spain been averted by “a kind of peace called a convention.”
Shortly after this disappointment Russell was appointed to an Ensigncy on full pay in the 64th Regiment of foot and sent to Belfast where his regiment was then quartered. The last day he dined at Irishtown he arrived in a “very fine suit of laced regimentals,” and was set by his irreverent friends to cook the dinner in this attire.
The Tones did not remain long in their seaside cottage after Russell’s departure for Belfast. They returned to town for the winter, and here their eldest son William was born.
The winter found Theobald pursuing his political studies and founding a political club, consisting of literary friends of his who had already attained eminence; they included Dr. Drennan, the poet; Whitley Stokes and John Stack, Fellows of Trinity College; Joseph Pollock, Peter Burrowes and Thomas Addis Emmet. In spite of the distinguished talents each member brought to the re-union, the Club was anything but a success and it was soon dissolved.
At this time all Ireland was in a ferment owing to the influence of the French Revolution. The partisans of a settled order of things, including Grattan and his Whig friends, had followed Edmund Burke in their opposition to the new principles on which the French had set out to remodel the world. But those in Ireland who felt themselves “an oppressed, insulted and plundered nation” were heart and soul with the French people in their struggle for freedom. “In a little time the French Revolution became the test of every man’s political creed, and the nation was fairly divided into two great parties, the Aristocrats and the Democrats.”
Tone, of course, was an ardent Democrat, and these views of his, being speedily known, injured beyond any possibility of repair his prospects of success at the Bar—but brought him into close touch with two bodies of men who were each in their own way, struggling to be free—and nerved by the fight in France “to do or die” for liberty. These were the Catholics of Ireland, and the Dissenters of the North.
Russell’s stay in Belfast had brought him into close touch with the leaders of advanced thought in the northern city, whose programme of freedom embraced freedom not for themselves only but for the Catholics still enslaved by the Penal Laws. On the occasion of some Volunteer celebration in Belfast a resolution in favour of Catholic Emancipation was to be put forward, and Russell undertook to get Tone to draw it up. The commission was willingly accepted, and though the resolution was eventually not put to the meeting in the form Tone had given it, the circumstance had the result of setting him thinking more seriously than he had yet done on the state of Ireland. “I soon formed my theory, and on that theory I have invariably acted ever since!”
What was that theory which was to give a new impetus to Irish nationality, which was to be upheld at the cost of so much bloodshed and suffering, which was to be a dogma as living and peremptory in 1916 as in 1798—and in defence of which Patrick Pearse and his men were to face the guns of General Maxwell, as proudly as Wolfe Tone took command of the battery of the _Hoche_, in the glorious fight she put up, one little vessel against a whole fleet, on an October morning one hundred and eighteen years earlier. Here it is in Wolfe Tone’s own words: “To subvert the tyranny of our execrable Government, to break the connection with England, the never-failing source of all our political evils, and to assert the independence of my country—these were my objects. To unite the whole people of Ireland, to abolish the memory of all past dissensions, and to substitute the common name of Irishman in place of the denominations of Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter—these were my means.”[58]
Footnote 58:
“Autobiography,” pp. 50, 51. Pearse held “all Irish Nationalism to be explicit in these words. Davis was to make explicit certain things here implicit, Lalor certain other things; Mitchel was to thunder the whole in words of apocalyptic wrath and splendour. But the Credo is here: ‘I believe in One Irish Nation and that Free.’”—(“Ghosts,” p. 16.)
Considering the Protestants hopeless, Tone first directed his efforts to an attempt to unite the Catholics and Dissenters. He accordingly sat down and wrote a pamphlet,[59] over the signature of a “Northern Whig,” in which he sought “to convince the Dissenters that they and the Catholics had but one common interest and one common enemy; that the depression and slavery of Ireland was produced and perpetuated by the divisions existing between them, and that, consequently, to assert the independence of their country, and their own individual liberties, it was necessary to forget all former feuds, to consolidate the entire strength of the whole nation, and to form for the future but one people.”[60]
Footnote 59:
“Argument on behalf of the Catholics of Ireland.”
Footnote 60:
“Autobiography,” p. 50.
The pamphlet had an immense success and its results a very decisive influence on the Tones’ fortunes. On the one hand, the Catholics, who under the capable leadership of John Keogh, were developing a new “forward” policy, sought out this champion of theirs and loaded him with attentions. Through John Keogh, Tone made the acquaintance of the principal Catholic leaders in Dublin, Richard MacCormick, John Sweetman, Edward Byrne, Thomas Braughall. During the winter of 1791 the Catholic leaders, who were for the most part men of great wealth, got into the fashion of giving splendid dinners to their political friends, and Tone was invariably a guest at these functions. Eventually he was offered, through the influence of Keogh, the position of assistant secretary to the Catholic Committee, with a salary of £200 a year. In those days one could live very comfortably on £200 a year, and poor Matilda Tone, who must have known many an anxious moment up to this, must have looked on it as affluence. Tone earned his salary well; and the astonishing success of the Catholic Convention was largely due to his energy and splendid power of organisation. In his efforts on behalf of the Catholics, and in his fidelity to their cause, Tone was greatly stimulated by his wife’s sympathy. He pays her, in this connection, one of the noblest compliments a wife ever received: “In these sentiments I was encouraged and confirmed by the incomparable spirit of my wife, to whose patient suffering under adversity, for we had often been reduced, and were now well accustomed to difficulties, I know not how to render justice. Women, in general, I am sorry to say, are mercenary, and, especially if they have children, they are ready to make all sacrifices to their establishment. But my dearest love had bolder and juster views. On every occasion of my life I consulted her; we had no secrets one from the other, and I unvaryingly found her think and act with energy and courage, combined with the greatest courage and discretion. If ever I succeed in life or arrive at anything like station or eminence I shall consider it as due to her counsels and her example.”[61]
Footnote 61:
“Autobiography,” p. 66.
The pamphlet had made an equally favourable impression on the Dissenters of the North, and especially on the advanced thinkers of Belfast. Its author was elected an honorary member of the first “or green” company of the Belfast Volunteers (an honour never before accorded to any one except Henry Flood) and invited to spend a few days in Belfast to make the personal acquaintance of the republican leaders there. He set off for the North about the beginning of October, accompanied by his friend Russell, who had left the army and happened to be in Dublin on his private affairs.
Of this trip Tone kept for his wife’s amusement a diary, a practice which he continued, when he was absent from her, to the end of his life. He and she were diligent readers of Swift, and he invokes the memory of Swift and Stella when he writes to tell her of all the news he has “journalised” for her, and which he looks forward to reading over with her when he gets home. He has christened his friend, Russell, “P.P. or Clerk of this Parish”—another reminiscence of Swift,[62] and he promises his wife she will be much amused by said P.P.’s “exploits in my journal, which is a thousand times wittier than Swift’s, as in justice it ought, for it is written for the amusement of one a thousand times more amiable than Stella.”
Footnote 62:
In the “Memoirs of the Clerk of the Parish,” Swift parodied Bishop Burton’s “History of His Own Times.”
Little, perhaps, did this dear lady, “a thousand times more amiable than Stella,” think, as her charming face dimpled over her husband’s ludicrous account of his own and his friend’s adventures, that she was reading one of the most important chapters in Irish history. For the business afoot in Belfast—the aim and object of Tone’s and Russell’s embassy was nothing less than the establishment of the United Irishmen—the union of Irish Catholics, Irish Protestants and Irish Dissenters under the common name of Irish _men_ against the common enemy. But perhaps she did, for nobody can have known better than she what a serious aim, what strength of will and tenacity of purpose, what a steel-like grip of principles and logical fidelity to their consequences lay under the light surface of her husband’s wit and drollery. The best minds in Ireland were the quickest to grasp Tone’s greatness and genius: Thomas Addis Emmet, John Keogh, Plunkett—to take three, out of three very different types. The best minds in France showed, afterwards, a like readiness of appreciation: Carnot, the Organiser of Victory, and General Hoche.
One thing, however, it is certain, Matilda Tone never dreamed of: the way in which the Journal’s family jokes—bad, if you like, as family jokes always are, except to the “family” itself, to whom they seem irresistibly funny—were to be interpreted against the diarist and his friend. It was one of the favourite jests of the merry little party of holiday-makers at Irishtown to represent “Tom” Russell, who was dignity and solemnity itself, something like a Spanish Don, in his courtesy and punctilio,[63] as a desperate character, a regular Jonah Barrington type of “Irishman.” It tickled their sense of the ludicrous, something in the same way as when they found Tone setting his dignified friend to cook the dinner in his “fine suit of laced regimentals.” “If you do not know who P.P. was, the joke will be lost on you,” writes Tone _à propos_ to the incidents in which solemn “P.P.” is made to figure as a regular “hell of a fellow.”
Footnote 63:
We have, among a host of other witnesses on this point, Charles Hamilton Teeling, himself a man of the finest courtesy, most fastidious sense of honour and highest breeding. When Lord Castlereagh, on the day of his own arrest, informed him that Russell was also among those arrested, Charles exclaimed: “Russell! then the soul of honour is captive.” (“Personal Narrative,” p. 19). He tells further on how Russell, when the prisoners were brought to Judge Boyd’s house for their committment, was pained by Neilson’s levity. “No man regarded etiquette and the punctilios of politeness more. He looked solemn, stroked up his fine black hair, and with a sweetness of countenance peculiarly his own, and in a gently modulated but sufficiently audible tone of voice he begged of his friend Neilson to respect the dignity of the Bench.” Russell was a deeply religious character, with that combined humility, consciousness of his own weakness, and striving after perfection which is the foundation of saintliness. There is nothing nobler, more touching, or more edifying in our history than the story of how he went to his death.
Unfortunately, later readers of the Journal, not knowing “P.P.,” nor the incorrigible practical joker who was his friend, have missed the point of the jokes and have taken the Journal’s accusations of excessive drinking and other peccadilloes as literal transcripts of facts. I do not here merely speak of Froude, who treats the Journal with his usual absence of all honesty in handling documents, detaches all the references to hard drinking, omits, _as a matter of course_, all reference to the fact that this Journal was written by Tone for his wife’s amusement, and on the strength of the diarist’s jokes against himself and his friend, makes out Russell and Tone as a pair of “ne’er-do-wells,” who, on a drunken spree, set out “to measure swords against the British Empire.”[64] We expect nothing better from Froude; but it is disconcerting to find Lecky and Barry O’Brien equally misled by Tone’s flippancy.
Footnote 64:
Froude, “English in Ireland,” III., 19.
* * * * *
We pass over a year or two, during which Tone was fully occupied by his work for the Catholic Committee, and the organisation of the first branches of the United Irishmen, and come to the year 1795, which was to be a turning point in his own life and in that of his dear ones—the beloved wife, their little nine-year-old daughter, and the two small sons, William, now aged four, and three-year-old Frank.
Tone was spending a pleasant musical evening with a friend of his in Merrion Square, when a servant was introduced bearing a letter which he had strict orders to deliver only into Mr. Tone’s hands. The latter read the letter and then said quietly to his friend, “Phil, we must finish this duet; I must go when it is done.” It transpired afterwards that the letter had come from Tone’s good friend of the old Temple days in London, Hon. George Knox, Lord Northland’s son, and its purport was to warn Tone that the Government had information of his connection with Jackson, the emissary of the French Government, and that it would be advisable for him to get out of the country as quickly as possible.
We know, now (what poor Tone went to his grave without suspecting) that the horrible treachery of Cockayne, the spy who had been set by Pitt to lead Jackson to destruction, was being outmatched by the treachery of Leonard MacNally, who had spared no trouble to implicate Tone and others with Jackson. Urged on by MacNally, though, as it appears, against his own instincts, Tone drew up a paper on the state of Ireland, “the inference from which was, that circumstances in Ireland were favourable to a French invasion.” Of this paper MacNally obtained possession, and there is no doubt at all that through him it fell into the hands of Government.
The friendship of two persons, with considerable influence in Government circles, saved Tone. These were George Knox—and of all persons in the world—Marcus Beresford! Through the powerful machinery which they were able to put in motion Tone escaped the consequences of his indiscretion, on the condition that he should leave the country.
He determined to go to America. But he had no intention of remaining there. Before he left Dublin, Russell and he walked out to see Thomas Addis Emmet in his charming villa at Rathfarnham. The master of the house showed his guests “a little study of an elliptical shape which he said he would consecrate to their meetings, if ever they lived to see their country emancipated.” Even in that solemn moment, Tone could not resist the temptation to rally poor Russell, who was doubtless looking more solemn than usual, in his grief at the near parting. But, though Emmet entered into the spirit of the jest, they all felt as much as Russell the seriousness of the moment, and it was a very thoughtful trio who walked back to town together, listening to Tone’s plans. Both Russell and Emmet agreed with the latter that his promise to Government was fulfilled by his going into exile. As to his future conduct after his landing in America he had given no guarantee. His intention was “immediately on his arrival in Philadelphia to wait on the French Minister, to detail to him fully, the situation of affairs in Ireland, to endeavour to obtain a recommendation to the French Government, and if he succeeded so far, to leave his family in America, and to set off instantly for Paris, and apply in the name of his country for the assistance of France in order to assert Ireland’s independence.”[65] The three friends were standing in a little triangular field while this conversation took place, and when they had shaken hands over the resolution that was implied in it, Emmet pointed out that “it was in one exactly like it in Switzerland, William Tell and his associates planned the downfall of the tyranny of Austria.”
Footnote 65:
“Autobiography,” p. 212.
When public excitement was at its height in consequence of Jackson’s trial and his tragic death in the dock, Tone, unwilling to incriminate any of his friends, abstained from paying any visits. But his friends sought him out, and for the short time Mrs. Tone and he were in Dublin after that they were never an instant alone. John Keogh and Richard MacCormick were among the kindest and most assiduous. Tone told these men of his plans, and received from them the most emphatic assurances of their approval.
On May the 20th, 1795, the Tones left Dublin. Matilda Tone and her children were never to see that city again, and Theobald was to enter it again only in the irons of the arch-enemy.
Mary Tone, who was devotedly attached to her beautiful sister-in-law and her charming children, made up her mind to leave Ireland with Theobald’s family. Her departure left old Peter Tone and his wife very desolate, as all their other children, William, Matthew, and Arthur were far away. The grief of the old couple was the hardest thing the emigrants had to endure. With his little property of 600 books, and £700 in money, Theobald felt himself sufficiently equipped “to make good”—and Matilda was not the woman to weaken his courage with any undue display of her own feelings. “We kept our spirits admirably. The great attention manifested to us, the conviction that we were suffering in the best of causes, the hurry attending so great a change, and perhaps a little vanity in showing ourselves superior to fortune, supported us under what was certainly a trial of the severest kind.”