Wolfe Tone

This article is about the Irish revolutionary leader associated with the rebellion in Ireland of 1798. For other uses, see Wolf tone (disambiguation).

Wolfe Tone
Portrait in the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin
Born	Theobald Wolfe Tone (1763-06-20)20 June 1763 Dublin, Kingdom of Ireland
Died	19 November 1798(1798-11-19) (aged 35) Dublin, Kingdom of Ireland
Burial place	Bodenstown Graveyard, Sallins, County Kildare, Ireland
Education	Trinity College Dublin King's Inns
Agent(s)	Society of United Irishmen, Catholic Committee and Convention
Spouse	Matilda Tone ​ (m. 1785)​
Military career
Allegiance	United Irishmen French Republic
Battles/wars	Battle of Tory Island

Theobald Wolfe Tone, posthumously known as Wolfe Tone (Irish: Bhulbh Teón; 20 June 1763 – 19 November 1798) was revolutionary exponent of a Irish independence and is an iconic figure in Irish republicanism. Convinced that, so long as his fellow Protestants feared to make common cause with the Catholic majority, the British Crown would continue to govern Ireland in the interest of England and of its client aristocracy, in 1791 he helped form the Society of United Irishmen. Although received in the company of a Catholic delegation by the King and his ministers in London, Tone, with other United Irish leaders, despaired of constitutional reform. Fuelled by the popular grievances of rents, tithes and taxes, and driven by martial-law repression, the society developed as an insurrectionary movement. When, in the early summer of 1798, it broke into open rebellion, Tone was in exile soliciting assistance from the French Republic. In October 1798, on his second attempt to land in Ireland with French troops and supplies, he was taken prisoner. Sentenced to be hanged, he died from a reportedly self-inflicted wound.

Since the mid-nineteenth century his name has been invoked, and his legacy disputed, by different factions of Irish Republicanism who have held annual, but separate, commemorations at his graveside in Bodenstown, County Kildare.

Early life

Tone was born on 20 June 1763. His father, Peter Tone, was a prosperous coach-maker who had a farm near Sallins, County Kildare and adhered to the established Anglican church. Although records are absent, he is said to have been the descendant, from the 17th century, of a Cromwellian soldier ("the first Tone to settle in Ireland") and of French Huguenot refugees. His mother, Margaret Lamport, the daughter of a sea captain in the West India trade, was a Catholic who according to Tone's early biographer, R.R. Madden, converted to her husband's church only when Tone was already eight years old. Tone, nonetheless, was baptised a Protestant, with the name Theobald Wolfe in honour of his godfather, Theobald Wolfe of Blackhall, County Kildare, a first cousin of Arthur Wolfe, 1st Viscount Kilwarden.

In 1783, Tone found work as a tutor to Anthony and Robert, younger half-brothers of Richard Martin, a Patriot member of the Irish Parliament for Jamestown, County Leitrim. Tone fell in love with Martin's well-connected wife, Elizabeth Vesey. While Tone later wrote that it came to nothing, a Martin biographer suspects that he was the father of the Martins' first child Laetitia born in 1785.

Tone studied law at Trinity College Dublin, where Kilwarden remembered him as a "sparkling conversationalist and rising talent". Tone was active in the College Historical Society, which had a record for honing oratory skills and preparing members for a life in politics. He was made a scholar in 1784 and graduated BA in February 1786. In 1798, after training in London's Middle Temple, he qualified in Dublin's King's Inns, as a barrister, a profession with which he was already disenchanted.

As a student, he had eloped with Martha (Matilda) Witherington, daughter of William and Catherine Witherington (née Fanning) of Dublin. When they married, Tone was 22, and Matilda was about 16. With the arrival of their first daughter, and his father's bankruptcy denying him an inheritance, he cast about for new employment. To British Prime Minister William Pitt he submitted a plan for a military colony on Captain Cook's newly reported Hawaiian Islands. When this elicited no response, he sought enlistment as a soldier in the East India Company but applied too late in the year to be shipped to south Asia. Styling himself an "independent" Whig, he followed the example of a number of college friends and began reporting on the proceedings of the Irish Parliament and the conduct of the London-appointed Dublin Castle executive.

United Irishman

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.The encounter with Russell, Tone was later to describe as "one of the most fortunate" in his life.

With Russell providing the introductions, in October 1791 Tone addressed a small reform club in Belfast. Members were Protestant "Dissenters" from the established church, Presbyterians who, notwithstanding sometimes substantial commercial property, had no elected representation. Belfast was a parliamentary borough in the "pocket" of the town's proprietor, the Marquess of Donegall. They had coalesced around the proposal of one of their number, now resident in Dublin, William Drennan, for "a benevolent conspiracy, a plot for the people" dedicated to "the Rights of Man" and to "Real Independence" for Ireland. (Tone's diary records Thomas Paine's Rights of Man as the "Koran of Belfast").

They had invited Tone as the author of An Argument on behalf of the Catholics of Ireland. It was a tract which they had helped publish and which had appeared, in their honour, as the work of "a Northern Whig". The Argument embraced what had been the most advanced Volunteer position: that the key to constitutional reform was Catholic emancipation. So long as, "illiberal", "bigoted" and "blind", Irish Protestants indulged their fears of "Popery" and of Catholic repossession, the "boobies and blockheads" in Parliament and Dublin Castle would prevail. The choice was stark: either "Reform, the Catholics, justice and liberty" or "an unconditional submission to the present, and every future administration".

Tone was himself "suspicious of the 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".

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". Others were urged 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. Present were John Keogh, John Sweetman and other leading members of the city’s Catholic Committee.

Secretary to the Catholic Committee

In the new year, 1792, the Catholic Committee appointed Tone as an assistant secretary. He replaced Richard Burke, the son of Edmund Burke to whose who critical Reflections on the Revolution in France, Paine's Rights of Man was a response.

In December 1792, with and support and participation of United Irishmen, 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 to 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 reconcile and 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 "pockets" of either landed grandees or the government, to the forty-shilling freehold 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. The government then passed legislation raising militia regiments by a compulsory ballot system and outlawing extra-parliamentary conventions and independent militia. – this at a time when the United Irishmen were seeking to revive the Volunteer movement on the model of the French National Guard.

Conspirator

Statue of Tone, Bantry, County Cork

In April 1794, Tone helped provide the occasion for the government to begin its systematic suppression of the society. 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. Tone drew up a memorandum for Jackson testifying to the readiness of the country to rise, the Presbyterians being "steady republicans, devoted to liberty" and the Catholics "ready for any change because no change can make them worse".

An attorney named Cockayne, to whom Jackson had imprudently 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, including the memorandum, were in Tone's handwriting, and Tone had attended not the meetings of the Dublin Society since May 1793. He remained in Ireland until after the trial of Jackson but was advised by Kilwarden that to avoid prosecution he should leave. In 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.

Before leaving, Tone and his family travelled to Belfast, and it was at the summit of Cavehill overlooking the town that with Thomas Russell and three other members of the movement's Ulster executive, Samuel Neilson, Henry Joy McCracken and Robert Simms,Tone took the celebrated pledge "never to desist in our efforts until we had subverted the authority of England over our country, and asserted our independence".

Responding to the growing repression, the northern executive had just endorsed a "new system of organisation". Local societies were to split so as remain within a range of 7 to 35 members, and through baronial and county delegate committees, build toward a provincial, and, ultimately, a national, directory. 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

In August 1795, Tone took up residence in Philadelphia, the then capital of the United States, where he found himself in the company of Rowan, Tandy and Reynolds. Tone was instantly disillusioned. He found the Americans to be a "churlish, unsociable race totally absorbed in making money", and was appalled by the reactionary anti-French sentiment of George Washington and his Federalist Party allies—a "mercantile peerage"—entrenched in the U.S. Senate. His sympathies were with the Democratic-Republican opposition that was beginning to form around Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.

Tone bought a farm near Princeton, New Jersey, an area made desirable by the attraction of "a college and some good society", and thought to spend the approaching winter writing a history of the Catholic Committee. But letters received from John Keogh and Thomas Russell persuaded him to resume his mission. With the support of the French minister in Philadelphia, Pierre Adet, on new year's day 1796, he sailed for France.

When in February he arrived Paris, Tone found that, forwarded by Adet, his Memorials on the State of ireland had already come to the attention of Lazare Carnot, one of five members of the then governing Directory. Tone was not aware of it at the time, but his picture of Ireland as primed for liberation was being reinforced by the still more enthusiastic reports from two new United militants, formerly in the ranks of Grattan parliamentary opposition, Lord Edward Fitzgerald and Arthur O'Connor. By May, General Henri Clarke, the Irish-descendant head of the War Ministry's Bureau Topographique, had drafted an invasion plan. In June, Carnot offered General Lazare Hoche command of an expedition that would secure “the safety of France for centuries to come". According to a French sympathiser, Tone's enthusiasm for the venture was qualified by "the express condition that the French should come to Ireland as allies, and should act under direction of the new government, as Rochambeau had done in America". Tone had already recorded his resolve never to be an "accessory to subjecting my country to the control of France merely to get rid of England".

Hoche's expedition to Ireland

See also: French expedition to Ireland (1796) and Irish Rebellion of 1798

In End of the Irish Invasion; — or – the Destruction of the French Armada (1797), James Gillray caricatured the failure of Hoche's expedition

On 15 December 1796, an expedition under Hoche, consisting of forty-three sail and carrying about 14,450 men with a large supply of war material for distribution in Ireland, sailed from Brest. Accompanied by Tone, commissioned as a "chef de brigade in the service of the republic", it arrived off the coast of Ireland at Bantry Bay on 22 December 1796. Unremitting storms prevented a landing. Tone remarked that "England [...] had its luckiest escape since the Armada". The fleet returned home and the army intended to spearhead the invasion of Ireland was split up and sent, along with a growing Irish Legion, to fight in other theatres of the French Revolutionary Wars.

Tone served for some months in the French army under Hoche, who had become the French Republic's minister of war after his victory against the Austrians at the Battle of Neuwied on the Rhine in April 1797. In June 1797 Tone took part in preparations for a military expedition to Ireland from the Batavian Republic, the French-client successor state to the United Netherlands. However, the Batavian fleet under Vice-Admiral Jan de Winter was delayed in the harbour of Texel island that summer by unfavourable easterly winds and from mid-August by a British North-Sea fleet blockade. After Tone, and other troops assembled had disembarked, It eventually put to sea in the hope of reaching the French naval base at Brest, only to be destroyed by Admiral Adam Duncan in the Battle of Camperdown on October 11, 1797. Hoche who, straying from Tone's plans for Ireland, had begun to consider descent upon Scotland, had died of tuberculosis on September 19.

Rivalries in Paris

Back in Paris, Tone recognised the rising star of Napoleon Bonaparte, but was unable to deflect the conqueror of Italy from his grander vision of still greater conquests in the East. In May 1798, with the men and materiel that might have possible another descent upon Ireland, Bonaparte sailed for Egypt. Bonaparte was later to claim that he might have been persuaded to sail for Ireland had the United Irish agents in Paris not constantly quarrelled among themselves.

After his return from Bantry, Tone had been joined by a co-conspirator in the Jackson affair, Edward Lewines accredited by the Leinster directory in Dublin.. Able to cooperate with Lewines, Tone was unchallenged as a representative of the Irish cause until, returning again to Paris from Texel, he found that Tandy, recently arrived from the United States, was usurping their position. Willing to exaggerate his military experience, his standing in Ireland, and the readiness of the country to rise, Tandy appeared the more imposing figure. He had won over the radical luminaries in exile, Thomas Paine and the Scottish republican and escaped convict, Thomas Muir but also—and critically—new arrivals from Ulster. These included a further agent of the Dublin directory James Coigly, and fugitive members of the northern committee, John Tennent and Bartholomew Teeling. Witness to General Lake's "dragooning of Ulster", they insisted that the movement in Ireland had to act, if necessary in advance of the French, or face the break-up of its entire system. It was an outlook, more in keeping with the policy of the French who, after Bantry Bay, were waiting for reports of a rising in Ireland before again hazarding their troops.

Bompart's expedition to Ireland and arrest

When, in the spring of 1798, the Leinster directory bent under the pressure of the same martial-law measures applied to the south and called for a general insurrection on May 23rd, Tone was in the dark. The most that he and the other Irish lobbyists had won from the Directory was the undertaking that once news was received that the country had risen, they would seek to break through to the more open Atlantic coast of Ireland and land smaller numbers of men and supplies. In late August 1798, General Jean Humbert succeeded in landing with a force of approximately 1,000 near Killala, County Mayo. He advanced into the country but, once it was clear that the main rebel conjunctions in Ulster and Leinster had already been decisively defeated, he surrendered. Among the Irish prisoners taken, was Tone's brother Matthew who was court-martialled and hanged.

A second still smaller expedition, accompanied by Tandy, touched land in Donegal on September 16, but departed on the news of Humbert's defeat. Tone was aboard with Admiral Jean-Baptiste-François Bompart and General Jean Hardy in command of a force of about 3,000 men. They encountered a British squadron at Buncrana on Lough Swilly on 12 October 1798. Tone, on the ship Hoche, refused Bompart's offer of escape in a frigate before the battle of Tory Island, and was taken prisoner when the French flotilla surrendered. Two weeks later, held with his fellow French officers in the privy-quarters of Lord Cavan's in Letterkenny, he was recognised by Sir George Hill, a Member of Parliament (and a leading member of the new Orange Order) and arrested.

Trial and death

At his court-martial in Dublin on 8 November 1798, Tone defended his desire separate Ireland from Great Britain “in fair and open war " and his honour.

I entered into the service of the French Republic with the sole view of being useful to my country. To contend against British Tyranny, I have braved the fatigues and terrors of the field of battle; I have sacrificed my comfort, have courted poverty, have left my wife unprotected, and my children without a father. After all I have done for a sacred cause, death is no sacrifice. In such enterprises, everything depends on success: Washington succeeded – Kosciusko failed. I know my fate, but I neither ask for pardon nor do I complain.

His one "regret" was the "very great atrocities" committed in the course of the summer rebellion,"on both sides". For "a fair and open war" he had been prepared; but if that had "degenerated into a system of assassination, massacre, and plunder" he did "most sincerely lament it".

His one request was that, as a ranking French officer, he might "die the death of a soldier" and be shot. The request was denied: found guilty of treason he was condemned to hang on the 12th. But on what was to be the morning of his execution he was found with a wound to his throat, the result—although a subject of some speculation—of an apparent attempt to take his own life. The story goes that the doctor who bound the wound told Tone that if talked it would re-open and he would bleed to death, to which Tone replied: "I can yet find words to thank you sir; it is the most welcome news you could give me. What should I wish to live for?".

Theobald Wolfe Tone died on 19 November 1798 at the age of 35 in the Provost Prison of the Royal Barracks, Dublin, not far from where he was born. He is buried in the family plot in Bodenstown, County Kildare, near his birthplace at Sallins, and his grave is in the care of the National Graves Association.

Political vision

One of the inscribed flagstones on the steps leading to the grave of Theobald Wolfe Tone

Later generations of Irish republicans have broadly been content with Tone's own succinct summary of his purpose:

To subvert the tyranny of our execrable government, to break the connection with England (the never failing source of 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 dissension; and to substitute the common name of Irishmen in place of the denomination of Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter—these were my means.

In the autobiography he began to compose in France, Tone claimed that already in 1790 he had advanced "the question of separation with scarcely any reserve". While not yet rejecting a personal union of crowns, in the Spanish War he had disputed Ireland's obligation uphold England in a colonial dispute with Spain and had called for a separate Irish navy.

But beginning with James Connolly, who maintained that Tone would have been "a rebel even had he been an Englishman", left-wing republicans have suggested that for Tone, Irish independence was part of a broader radical vision. Typically reference is made to his diary entry for 11 March 1796: "If the men of property will not support us, they must fall; we can support ourselves by the aid of that numerous and respectable class of the community, the men of no property". He also records telling the French that a revolution in Ireland "was not to be made for the people of property".

Tone did not abandon Whig constitutionalism, so long as the talk was of reform. In 1792, in an address to Volunteers he disclaimed any intention of invading the "just prerogatives of our monarch" or the "constitutional powers of the peers of the realm". As a condition Catholic emancipation he had also offered that that the greater part of a non-confessional Irish electorate be disenfranchised. Anticipating the terms under which Catholics were eventually admitted to a United Kingdom parliament in 1829, he proposed raising the qualifying property/tenure threshold fivefold to the English standard ten-pound freehold. Much as Daniel O'Connell was to do in 1829, he argued that the more select franchise would allow the "sound and respectable part of the Catholic community" to recover its proper place and weight in society. It is also possible that Tone, who later claimed he had been "a Democrat from the very commencement", reasoned that since they could be “driven like cattle by their landlords to the polls", denying the vote to forty-shilling freeholders would be a blow to the aristocratic interest.

In either case, once in exile Tone appeared to "write off own class completely. "Petty despots", they could not see beyond "their rent rolls, their places, their patronage and their pensions" He apprehended a general massacre of the Anglo-Irish gentry and redistribution of their entire property. This he would hope to avoid: on landing the French should immediately issue a proclamation offering security and protection to religion and property, and a provisional national convention—at whose core he imagined a coalition of Catholic Committee and United leaders from the Presbyterian north—should only threaten absentee estates in Ireland as a bargaining counter.

Tone may have approved the advance of peasant proprietorship under the French Republic, and broadly to have shared Jefferson's faith in the republican virtues of independent smallholders. But he insisted that the United society he had known in Ireland had never "entertained" ideas of "a distribution of property and an agrarian law", and he advanced no such scheme himself. He ventured no more than relief from that "pest on agriculture", the tithes levied on top of rents by the landlord's established church.

In general, Tone appears to have followed the resolve of the Dublin Society of United Irishmen to "attend those things in which we all agree, [and] to exclude those in which we differ", and consequently to avoid directly engaging questions of economic inequality. From France, he wrote tracts addressed to the weavers of the Liberties in Dublin. These expressed sympathy for their hardships. but did not place him, in the estimation of James Hope, the self-educated weaver who organised in the Liberties, among those “few” United Irish leaders who "perfectly" understood the real causes of social disorder: "the conditions of the labouring class". As was the case with the Dublin society, Tone seemed to regard an "honest legislature chosen by the people" as a sufficient promise of redress regardless of the grievance.

It is matter of speculation as to what Tone, who prided himself on being a political pragmatist, would have found expedient in an Irish republic. In France, he criticised the Directory, not for a constitution that withdrew the franchise from men of no property, but for suffering themselves "to be insulted in the most outrageous manner" by the unsanctioned press. "It is less dangerous", he wrote, "for a government to be feared, or even hated, than despised". His recent biographer, Marianne Elliott, notes that Tone applauded the Directory's suppression in April 1796 of Babeuf's proto-socialist conspiracy. This is consistent with what she concludes was a commitment to equality in Tone that did not truly extend beyond the abolition of aristocratic and confessional privilege.

Wolfe Tone (1967) statue on St. Stephen's Green, Dublin by Edward Delaney

Legacy

"[Tone] rises", said William Lecky, the 19th-century historian, "far above the dreary level of commonplace which Irish conspiracy in general presents… His judgement of men and things was keen, lucid and masculine, and he was alike prompt in decision and brave in action." Yet, despite the efforts of his wife Mathilda and their son William who had collected his papers in a two-volume Life of Theobald Wolfe Tone (Washington in 1826), in the decades after his death, Tone's name languished in relative obscurity.

In 1843, with Mathilda's blessing, Thomas Davis organised a graveside commemoration, and the erection the first Bodenstown memorial. With his fellow Young Irelander (and Protestant) John Mitchel, Davis found in Tone an "alternative national hero" to Daniel O'Connell, "the Liberator", with whose constitutionalism and clericalism they were disillusioned. In his History of Ireland (1864), Mitchel drew uncritically from the Life, beginning what historian James Quinn suggests is a "long tradition in nationalist historiography of treating Tone's writing as sacred scripture". His portrayal of Tone as an uncompromising martyr in the cause of independence was adopted, in turn, by a succeeding generation of "physical-force" republicans, the Fenians. In 1873, their supporters began the practice of annual pilgrimages to Bodenstown.

In 1898, the centenary commemorations of the rebellion bore the “the stamp” of constitutional nationalism, O'Connell's home-rule successors. Attempts by William Butler Yeats, president in Dublin of the Wolfe Tone Memorial Association and, in Belfast, by Alice Milligan, author of her own six-penny version of Tone's Life, to celebrate his secular republicanism, were overwhelmed by accounts of 1798 that, focussed on the risings in Wexford (where, at Oulart Hill, rebels had been led to their first victory by a Catholic priest, John Murphy), effectively sidelined Tone and the other Protestant leaders. Meanwhile at Tone's graveside, Connolly claimed that his Irish Socialist Republican Party "alone" was "in line with the thought of this revolutionary apostle of the United Irishmen".

In 1912, Tom Clarke, veteran of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, revived the lapsed commemorations at Bodenstown. Speaking at the graveside in 1913, Patrick Pearse described the site as the "holiest place in Ireland", for "though many had testified in death to the truth of Ireland’s claim to nationhood; Wolfe Tone was the greatest of all that had made that testimony; he was the greatest of Ireland’s dead". But while Tone many have been an "apostle" for those who rallied to the republic proclaimed by Pearse, Clarke and Connolly in 1916, writers with influence in the new Irish state after 1922 dismissed him as not being Irish enough. The "Irish Irelander" D. P. Moran, described Tone as "a Frenchman born in Ireland of English parents", while in a work entitled Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen—for or against Christ? (1937), Leo McCabe (the Jesuit, Br Denis Peter Fennell) associated the veneration of Tone with nothing less than a Judeo-Masonic-Communist conspiracy to destroy Christianity. Conversely there were those who, stressing his work as an agent of the Catholic Committee, sought to adapt Tone to the state's Catholic-inflected nationalism. Aodh de Blácam, a close Fianna Fáil partisan of Éamon de Valera, insisted that Tone's "attachment to his mother's Catholic people was with him to the end".

Tensions surrounding Tone's legacy were evident in the 1934 Bodenstown commemorations. A Republican Congress contingent from Protestant districts in Belfast led, under the banner "Break the Connection with Capitalism" by Jack White, was stopped by IRA stewards and attacked by a hostile crowd. Each side accused the other of dishonoring, and misappropriating, Tone's memory.

In 1963 to celebrate the bi-centenary of Tone's birth, left-leaning elements of the IRA formed the Wolfe Tone Bi-centenary Directories, from which evolved in the following year the Wolfe Tone Societies. The WTS opposed the Republic of Ireland's entry into the European Economic Community and protested the Vietnam War. A key figure in the WTS was Roy Johnston, of Protestant background, who (In the tradition of the Republican Congress) looked to recruit Protestants in Northern Ireland to the cause of national unity in a workers' republic.

Following his bi-centenary, a memorial to Tone was commissioned for St Stephen's Green in Dublin. The work by Edward Delaney was unveiled in 1967 by Éamon de Valera. While noting that Tone would "not be happy that the nation was not yet united", he took the occasion to assert that the republic of which he was now president was that for which Tone had "longed for and worked for”.

Descendants

Of Tone's four children, three died prematurely. His eldest child, Maria Tone (1786–1803; died in Paris) and his youngest child, Francis Rawdon Tone (1793–1806) both died of tuberculosis. Another son, Richard Tone (born between 1787 and 1789) died in infancy.

Only his son William Theobald Wolfe Tone survived to adulthood. Raised in France by his mother after Tone's death, William was appointed a cadet in the Imperial School of Cavalry in 1810 on Napoleon's orders. He was a naturalised French citizen on 4 May 1812. In January 1813 he was made sub-lieutenant in the 8th Regiment of Chasseurs and joined the Grand Army in Germany. His nom de guerre was the punning le petit loup – the little wolf. He was at the battles of Löwenberg, Goldberg, Dresden, Bauthen, Mühlberg, Aachen, and Leipzig. He received six lance wounds at the Battle of Leipzig, was promoted to lieutenant and aide-de-camp of General Bagneres and was decorated with the Legion of Honour.

After the defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo, he emigrated to the United States, where he was commissioned a Captain in the United States Army and died there on 11 October 1828 at the age of 37. Matilda Tone also returned to the United States, and is buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. William Tone was survived by his only child, his daughter Grace Georgina.

In popular culture

Several Gaelic Athletic Association clubs in Ireland are named in honour of Wolfe Tone. These include, in Armagh, Wolfe Tone GAC, Derrymacash; in Derry, Bellaghy Wolfe Tones GAC; in Meath, Wolfe Tones GAA, and in Tyrone, Drumquin Wolfe Tones GAC and Kildress Wolfe Tones GAC. In North America, there is the Chicago Wolfe Tones GFC in Illinois, and the Edmonton Wolfe Tones in Alberta, Canada. In Antrim, the Greencastle Wolfe Tones GAC is based in the Greencastle district of North Belfast, bordering Cavehill where members of the United Irishmen took their oaths.

In 1963, Brian Warfield, Noel Nagle, Tommy Byrne, and Derek Warfield formed The Wolfe Tones, an Irish republican band. They play Irish rebel music and have courted some controversy with songs celebrating the Provisional IRA.

In 1998, Tone, played by the actor Adrian Dunbar, was the protagonist in an RTE four-part television movie, The Officer From France.

The bicentennial year also saw publication of Belmont Castle: or, Suffering Sensibility "by Theobald Wolfe Tone & divers hands". Edited by Marion Deane, it is an epistolary novel that Tone wrote with two friends in 1790, manuscripts of which were found in his possession when he was arrested in 1798. It is described as "an elaborate roman à clef, satirizing the lives of several prominent figures of the Anglo-Irish establishment and redressing a painful love affair [with Lady Elizabeth Vesey] from Tone’s past".

References

• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: McNeill, Ronald John (1911). "Tone, Theobald Wolfe". In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 27 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 2–3.
• Seán Ua Ceallaigh (ed.), Speeches from the Dock, or Protests of Irish Patriotism (Dublin: M. H. Gill and Son, 1953).
• Herr, Cheryl. For the Land They Loved: Irish Political Melodramas, 1890–1925. Syracuse University Press, 1991.

Further reading

• Stephen McGarry, Irish Brigades Abroad (Dublin, 2013) (softback).
• T. W. Moody, R. B. McDowell and C. J. Woods (eds.), The Writings of Theobald Wolfe Tone 1763–98, Volume I: Tone's Career in Ireland to June 1795 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
• T. W. Moody, R. B. McDowell and C. J. Woods (eds.), The Writings of Theobald Wolfe Tone 1763–98, Volume II: America, France, and Bantry Bay, August 1795 to December 1796 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
• T. W. Moody, R. B. McDowell and C. J. Woods (eds.), The Writings of Theobald Wolfe Tone 1763–98, Volume III: France, the Rhine, Lough Swilly and Death of Tone, January 1797 to November 1798 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
• Life of Theobald Wolfe Tone by himself, continued by his son, with his political writings, edited by W.T. Wolfe Tone (2 volumes, Washington, 1826).
• Thomas Bartlett, (ed.), Life of Theobald Wolfe Tone Memoirs, Journals and political writings, compiled and arranged by William T.W. Tone, 1826 (Dublin, 1998) [softback].
• Autobiography of Theobald Wolfe Tone, edited with an introduction by R. Barry O'Brien (2 vols., London, 1893);
• Lives of the United Irishmen by R. R. Madden, (7 vols., London, 1842);
• History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, by W. E. H. Lecky, vols. iii, iv, v. (cabinet ed., 5 vols., London, 1892).
• "Wolfe Tone's Provost Prison", by Patrick Denis O'Donnell, in The Irish Sword, no. 42, Vol. XI, Military History Society of Ireland, Dublin, 1973.
• "Wolfe Tone: Suicide or Assassination", by Patrick Denis O'Donnell, in Irish Journal of Medical Science, no. 57, Dublin, 1997 (with T. Gorey)
• "By fair and open war to procure the separation of the two countries," Footsteps in Time by Kevin McCarthy, published by CJ Fallon.
• Chapter 13 "Theobald Wolfe Tone and County Kildare" by C. J. Woods; in Kildare History and Society (Geography Press, Dublin 2006) pp. 387–398. ed. by Nolan, W. & McGrath, T.
• Elliott, Marianne (1989). Wolfe Tone: Prophet of Irish Independence. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
• Elliott, Marianne (2012), Wolfe Tone, 2nd ed., Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• IrishKevinSmith.com
• Cork-guide.ie Archived 21 March 2009 at the Wayback Machine
• Chaptersofdoublin.com Memoirs by Jonah Barrington (1828)
• Citation: Wolfe Tone's Case (1798) 27 State Trials 624
• The Year of the French by Thomas Flanagan
• Sylvie Kleinman, "A Rough Guide to Revolutionary Paris: Wolfe Tone as an accidental tourist", History Ireland 16:2 (2008) 34–39. http://www.historyireland.com/volumes/volume16/issue2/features/?id=114441
• Sylvie Kleinman, 'Revue Historique des Armées France-Irlande' no. 253/2008, 55–65. "Un brave de plus: la carrière militaire de Theobald Wolfe Tone, héros du nationalisme irlandais et officier francais, 1796–1798". Online version not illustrated.
• Sylvie Kleinman, "Ambassador incognito and Accidental Tourist: Cultural Perspectives on Theobald Wolfe Tone's Mission to France, 1796–8", in Michael Brown and Rosalyn Trigger (eds), Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies, "The Auld Alliance: Irish & Scottish Connections with France Since 1500", Vol. 2: Iss. 1, September 2008 (University of Aberdeen), pp. 101–122.
• Sylvie Kleinman, "Un brave de plus: Theobald Wolfe Tone, alias Adjudant-general James Smith, French officer and Irish patriot adventurer, 1796–8", in Nathalie Genêt-Rouffiac & David Murphy (eds.), Franco-Irish Military connections, 1590–1945. Proceedings of the Vincennes Conference (Sept. 2007), Dublin: Four Courts, 2009, pp 163–188.
• Sylvie Kleinman, "Tone and the French Expeditions to Ireland, 1796–1798: Total War, or Liberation?", in Pierre Serna, Antonino De Francesco & Judith Miller (eds.), Republics at War, 1776–1840 Revolutions, Conflicts, and Geopolitics in Europe and the Atlantic World (Basingstoke, 2013). 83–103.
• Mathieu Ferradou, "De William Jackson à Theobald Wolfe Tone : un lobby irlandais entre le Comité de Salut public et le Directoire ? Revisiter l’historiographie de la genèse de l’expédition française en Irlande de 1796", in Alan Forrest and Pierre Serna (eds.), "La Révolution française dans l’historiographie anglaise", La Révolution française. Cahiers de l'Institut d'histoire de la Révolution française, 23, 2002, https://doi.org/10.4000/lrf.6859
• Regnault, Eugene (1843). The Criminal History of the English Government from the First Massacre of the Irish, to the Poisoning of the Chinese, Translated from the French, with Notes by an American. New York: J.S. Redfield, Clinton Hall.

External links

• Works by Wolfe Tone at Open Library
• Laragy, Georgina. "Wolfe Tone and the culture of suicide in eighteenth-century Ireland", History Ireland, Vol.21, Issue 6 (November/December 2013)
• Bartlett, Thomas. "Theobald Wolfe Tone: An Eighteenth-Century Republican and Separatist"