Ireland conflict, a folk group named The Wolfe Tones did well with albums such as Rifles of the IRA (1969). That The Wolfe Tones went on to record an album titled A Tribute to Padraig Pearse illustrated perhaps not just Pearse’s hold on the Irish Republican imagination but also exemplified the extent to which romantic nationalists like him had successfully co-opted the real Wolfe Tone.
The first edition of the Autobiography edited out some passages of Tone’s journal. It included a memoir by Tone’s son and editor William, detailing his service as a cavalryman in the Napoleonic wars, and another memoir by Tone’s widow Martha, recounting how after his death in 1798 she engineered an interview with Napoleon in order to secure French citizenship for her son.1 An 1883 edition of Tone’s Autobiography edited by Barry O’Brien was republished several times. This also excluded the passages censored by William. In 1888 a French edition was published as Mémoires Secrets de Wolfe Tone; a portrait of Tone still hangs in the foyer of the French ambassador’s residence in Dublin. A 1937 abridged edition by Sean O’Faoláin restored the censored passages. These included Tone’s account of his early amours, expressions of his contempt for his brother-in-law (‘a most egregious coxcomb’), quarrels with his wife’s family (over prospective inheritances), and various scornful remarks about America. Tone lived there briefly in 1795 but couldn’t stand the place or its uncouth people. A definitive edition of the Autobiography was published in 1998, edited by Thomas Bartlett.2 This kept to the structure of the 1826 edition but included the excised passages, Tone’s correspondence and also reinstated political writings that had been excluded from various earlier abridged editions.
Tone was an Irish patriot for just the final eight years of his 35 year-long life. His political views were the product of his class, religion and, in particular, his life experiences. Tone had a lust for life and craved personal advancement. He sought the latter first in the service of the British Empire and when rebuffed he made common cause with his fellow Irishmen against England. It is not simplistic to understand much of his autobiography as an account of his efforts to find his place in the world. He was hardly the pious ideological martyr that Pearse represented him as. But then Pearse did not have access to the unexpurgated version of his memoir. Here, in one of the passages removed by his son William, Tone describes his infatuation with Eliza, wife of Humanity Dick Martin:
After one or two fugitive passions about the beginning of the year 1783 I fell in love with a woman who made me miserable for more than two years. She was the wife of Richard Martin of Galway, a member of Parliament, and a man of considerable fortune in that county. Martin was passionately fond of acting and had fitted up a theatre in which he had several dramatic representations. Mrs. Martin, independent of a thousand other attractions, was one of the first actresses I ever saw, and as I lived in the house with her, and being myself somewhat of an actor, was daily thrown into particular situations with her, both in rehearsals and on the stage, and as I had an imagination easily warmed, without one grain of discretion to regulate it, I very soon became in love to a degree almost inconceivable. I have never, never met in history, poetry, or romance a description that comes near what I actually suffered on her account. For two years our acquaintance continued, in which time I made three visits to her house of four or five months each. As I was utterly unable, and indeed unwilling, to conceal my passion from her, she very soon detected me, and as I preserved, as well as felt, the profoundest respect for her, she supposed she might amuse herself innocently in observing the progress of this terrible passion in the mind of an interesting young man of twenty; but this is an experiment no woman ought to make.
His two-year relationship with Eliza was chaste. Tone came to regret not taking his chance to bed her when he found out, some years later, that she had eloped to Paris with another lover. Although he suffered severely from this passion he also reaped much benefit. The desire to render himself agreeable to a highly cultivated woman induced him ‘to attend to a thousand little things’ so that after the first transports of rage and grief at losing her had subsided, he considered himself on the whole considerably improved.
In 1785 he met his future wife. She was fifteen years of age and living on Grafton Street in the house of her grandfather, a rich old clergyman by the name of Fanning. Tone soon contrived to be introduced to Martha’s family and soon afterwards the couple eloped. They then returned to live with her parents, amicably for a short while, acrimoniously after that. In 1787 Tone left Martha and their daughter with her family and moved to London to complete his legal studies, seek his fortune and, as he intimated in another passage supressed by William, to sow his wild oats:
At the age of four and twenty, with a tolerable figure and address, in an idle and luxurious Capital, it will not be supposed I was without adventures with the fair sex. The Englishmen neglect their wives exceedingly in many essential circumstances. I was totally disengaged and did not fail to profit, as far as I could, by their neglect, and English women are not naturally cruel. I formed, in consequence, several delightful connections in London, and as I was extremely discreet, I have the satisfaction to think that not one of those to whom I had the good fortune to render myself agreeable ever suffered the slightest blemish in her reputation on my account. I cherish, yet, with affection the memory of one charming woman to whom I was extremely attached, and I am sure she still remembers me with a mutual regard.
In a foreshadowing of his later efforts to convince the French government that it was in its interest to invade Ireland, he proposed an English colony in one of Cook’s newly discovered islands in the South Sea on a military plan, ‘in order to put a bridle on Spain in time of peace, and to annoy her grievously in that quarter in time of war’. He spent three months researching his scheme and delivered it by hand to the porter in Downing Street for the attention of the Prime Minister Mr Pitt. It was, he recalled, his first essay in politics. Tone, keen to make his fortune, also made a botched effort to enlist with the East India Company. Still smarting from these failed endeavours he was rescued by an advance of £500 on his wife’s inheritance from her grandfather. This allowed him to return to Ireland in 1789, finish his legal studies and enlist as a barrister on the Leinster circuit. He had little interest in a legal career and his ambitions soon turned to politics. He initially hoped to be taken up as a parliamentary candidate by the Whigs but by 1790 under the influence of Sir Laurence Parsons, an MP in the Irish House of Commons, he found his vocation as an Irish patriot:
I made speedily what was to me a great discovery, though I might have found it in Swift and Molyneux, that the influence of England was the Radical vice of our Government, and consequently that Ireland would never be either free, prosperous, or happy, until she was independent, and that independence was unattainable whilst the connection with England existed.
His political views evolved rapidly. These, as documented in two widely-read pamphlets, Spanish War! (1790) and An Argument on Behalf of the Catholics of Ireland (1791), propelled him to the centre stage of the United Irishmen and in April 1792 he replaced Edmund Burke’s hapless son Richard as the parliamentary agent of the Catholic Association. These were summarised as follows by William’s preface to the Autobiography:
The fact is though he preferred in theory a republican form of government, his main object was to procure the independence of his country under a liberal administration, whatever might be its form or name. His tastes and habits were rather aristocratical for the society with which he was sometimes obliged to mingle. I believe that, in reading these memoirs, many people will be surprised at (and some perhaps will blame) the moderation of his views. The persecutions of the government drove him much further than he proposed at first.
Spanish War! recalled but inverted the adventurer spirit with which he canvassed Pitt’s support for a South Seas colony to block Spanish trade. The London parliament could ask the king to declare war on Spain, but it could not, Tone insisted, do so on behalf of Ireland, which had its own separate and independent legislature. Spanish War! in the spirit of Swift’s Drapier letters, argued that Irish trade and prosperity would be, as ever before, undermined by England’s self-interest. Spanish War! identified some £113,543 of Irish exports (mostly linen, wheat, pork and butter) to Spain