Eugene Dunphy charts the life and legacy of the United Irishman and patriot.

 

On the 19th of November 1798, the Edinburgh-based newspaper The Caledonian Mercury carried a detailed account of the court martial in Dublin of one of the most important figures within the United Irishmen. When the prisoner stood in the dock nine days earlier, the paper said, he was dressed in the uniform of a French officer and, on discovering that his accusers were intent on treating him as a common criminal, he addressed the court:

“The great object of my life has been the independence of my country, and to that object I have made every sacrifice”.
The prisoner’s name was Theobald Wolfe Tone, the ‘Father of Irish Republicanism’ whose life and work would be pivotal in shaping the future of Irish nationalism.

Born in Stafford Street, Dublin, on the 20th of June 1763, he was one of three boys born to coachbuilder Peter Tone, and his wife Margaret Lamport, Wolfe’s brothers being Matthew and William. Though from a Protestant family with Anglo-Irish roots, Wolfe Tone’s early life was marked by an acute awareness that his Catholic countrymen were subject to State-sanctioned sectarianism.

Tone studied law at Trinity College Dublin, but confessed that he only really applied himself when exams were looming. With the Enlightenment movement in Europe playing a crucial role in shaping his revolutionary ideas, it was while at TCD that this ‘sparkling conversationalist and rising talent’ developed a keen interest in reason, critical thinking and political discourse.

But his time at Trinity was not all law, rhetoric and logic. He met, fell in love with and married the daughter of a draper, Martha (‘Matilda’) Witherington, of whom he said, “If ever I succeed in life, I will consider it due to her counsel and example”.

After their first child and only daughter was born, Tone went back to study at Kings Inns in Dublin. He and Matilda would go on to have three more children but only one, William Theobald Wolfe Tone, survived to adulthood; Maria and Francis died from tuberculosis, while their second son Richard died in infancy.

Continue reading in this week’s Ireland’s Own