Thomas Russell (rebel)

Leader of the United Irishmen

Thomas Paliser Russell (21 November 1767 – 21 October 1803) was a founding member, and leading organiser, of the United Irishmen marked by his radical democratic and millenarian convictions. A member of the movement's northern executive in Belfast, and a key figure in promoting a republican alliance with the agrarian Catholic Defenders, he was arrested in advance of the risings of 1798 and held until 1802. He was executed in 1803, following Robert Emmet's aborted rising in Dublin for which he had tried, but failed, to raise support among United and Defender veterans in the north.

Russell was born in Dromahane, County Cork to an Ascendancy family that, early 1770s, moved to Dublin when his father, a veteran of the American War, was appointed Captain of Invalids at the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham. At the age of fifteen, he sailed with his brother's regiment to India. In July 1783 he was commissioned ensign in an infantry regiment and saw action in the Second Anglo Mysore War. At Cannanore he distinguished himself by carrying his wounded commanding officer from the battlefield. His services made him "favourably known" to Sir John Burgoyne and Lord Cornwallis. He was, however, disgusted by what he regarded as "the unjust and rapacious conduct pursued by the authorities in the case of two native women", and returned disaffected to Ireland in 1786. After briefly studying for the church ministry, he spent the next four years as a half pay officer in Dublin pursuing studies of science, philosophy and politics. In July 1790 in the visitors' gallery in the Irish House of Commons, he met Theobald Wolfe Tone. He found Tone equally critical of the proceedings in the chamber below where the patriot leader Henry Grattan was unable to capitalise on his triumph in securing Ireland's legislative independence from England (the "Revolution of 1782"") to effect meaningful reform. Writing his Autobiography six years later in Paris, Tone was to describe the encounter with Russell as "one of the most fortunate in my life".

At the end of August 1790, Russell was appointed as an officer to the 64th Regiment of foot stationed in Belfast. As an officer of the garrison, Russell was received into the society of the town's newly emerging professional and business class. Largely Presbyterian, they were resentful of the privileges and monopolies of the Anglican Ascendancy and sympathetic to what they perceived as the democratic ideals of the American, and now French, revolutions. With his keen mind and his own radical bent, Russell became a confidante of William Drennan, Samuel McTier, Samuel Neilson and later of Henry Joy McCracken, James Hope, and others who were to play a prominent role in the United Irish movement. It is said that Russell admired and respected men and women alike. Both Drennan's sister Martha McTier and McCracken's sister Mary Ann McCracken took him into their confidence. Mary Ann, who regarded Russell as "a model of manly beauty" with a grace "which nothing but superiority of intellect can give", McTier had Russell address meetings of other radically minded women and declared: "I admire that man much and had I the power I do believe that he would be the first man that I would serve". His advanced thoughts on their rights, however, did not preclude a conflicted relationship with women. His Journal was also to record the torment both of a love for the idealised and unapproachable Eliza Goddard (daughter of a close friend of McTier's) and of guilt ridden visits to Belfast prostitutes. In October 1791, and in the presence of Tone, invited to Belfast as the proponent of political union with disenfranchised Catholics, Russell attended the inaugural meeting of the Society of United Irishmen. While Tone recapitulated his Argument on behalf of the Catholics of Ireland, Russell presented a history of the Catholic Committee in Dublin and of his own negotiations with leading Catholics. The resolutions, which Tone had asked Russell to write, called for the elimination of all remaining sacramental tests and for an "equal representation of all the people" in the Dublin Parliament. After several months, and to avoid debt, Russell accepted the offer of Viscount Northland of Tyrone, the father of an old army friend, to become seneschal (a kind of stipendiary magistrate) to the Northlands' manor court at Dungannon. But Russell was appalled by the anti Catholicism of his fellow magistrates and possibly also of the Northland family, and he resigned in October 1792. His experience in Dungannon contributed significantly to his developing radicalism, and he never again served in any official position, or sought the patronage of his aristocratic friends. With Drennan's assistance, in 1793 Russell was to take a position more congenial to his friends: librarian at the Belfast Society for Promoting Knowledge (the later Linen Hall Library). The year before, under the active patronage of Dr James MacDonnell, the Society had organised the Belfast Harpers Assembly. As secretary, Russell ensured that transcriptions by his friend Edward Bunting of the melodies played were published. In 1794, Russell attended Irish language classes offered by Pádraig Ó Loingsigh (Patrick Lynch) at the Belfast Academy.

Britain's entry into the war against revolutionary France at the beginning of 1793 and the increased domestic repression that followed, caused the United Irishmen increasingly to despair of reform. At the same time, the possibility of French intervention and assistance encouraged the thought of insurrection. By mid 1793 Russell had shed his sympathies for the parliamentary patriots or Irish Whigs. In a letter to Belfast's United Irish paper the Northern Star he denounced Henry Grattan's parliamentary opposition as "insignificant" and accused him of "declaiming, and grinning, and chattering at the abuses of that ministry, which but for him would not now exist". Russell and his friend William Sampson (John Philpot Curran's Junior Counsel) suggested that, in Ireland, the English charters Grattan celebrated in his strict constitutionalism—Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights and Habeas Corpus—did little more than "amuse the masses". In June 1795, as a member of the Society's increasingly conspiratorial Northern Executive, Russell met with McCracken. Neilson, Robert Simms and, en route to exile in the United States, with Tone. At McArt's fort atop Cave Hill overlooking Belfast they swore the celebrated oath "never to desist in our efforts until we had subverted the authority of England over our country, and asserted our independence'". Russell travelled widely throughout Ulster, recruiting and organising for the United Irishmen. In September 1795 an informer reported that "Capt. Russell of Belfast has been appointed to the command of all the societies in the province of Ulster"; while sometime later, one of the government's most reliable agents informed the Castle that the United Irishmen were ready to rise and that "Russell now conducts all their plans". His role as a United Irish recruiter was commemorated in the well known ballad "The man from God knows where".

In 1796, Russell published a Letter to the People of Ireland on the Present State of the Country—the fullest exposition of his democratic and increasingly millenarian outlook. He castigated the aristocracy for stalling progress towards reform in the 1780s, their moral corruption, their unworthiness to govern, and their useless, parasitic existence and insisted that all men have not only the right, but the duty, to concern themselves with government and politics. Only if legislation seeks to serve "the whole family of mankind", rather than just self interested minorities, can there be some hope that it will reflect the natural justice ordained by God. He decried the cruelties of mill work and the poverty induced by the exactions and indifference of the aristocracy and the government. he recommended combination—unions—not for only tradesmen but also for labourers and cottiers. In July 1793, he argued:<blockquote> from what I can see, the men of property, whether landed or commercial, are decidedly against a struggle, which might risqué that and will do nothing. The people are begin[n]ing to see this and in time when they will feel their strength and injurys they will do it themselves and adieu to property! Russell was perhaps closer to Martha McTier in his estimate. In 1795 she wrote approvingly to her brother of Belfast's plebeian Jacobin Club (United Irishmen among them), describing it as composed of "persons and rank long kept down [who] now come forward with a degree of information that might shame their betters". Less controversially for Belfast, Russell had made clear his uncompromising opposition to slavery. The veteran anti slavery campaigner, Henry Joy McCracken's sister Mary Ann, remembered that as a young officer in Belfast, Russell had "abstained from the use of slave labour produce until slavery in the West Indies was abolished, and at the dinner parties to which he was so often invited and when confectionery was so much used he would not take anything with sugar in it". But Russell, with his experience in India, had a broader critique of the iniquities of the colonial trade in which Belfast was engaged. He cautioned:<blockquote>If the English, or any other people, think gold a sufficient cause to shed blood—if they are satisfied to fill the world with carnage and misery, that they may acquire cloves and nutmegs, and contracts, and slaves—let it not be so with us. With his close friend Henry Joy McCracken, Russell was a key figure in forming the alliance between the northern United Irishmen and the greatest body, existing, of "men of no property", the Defenders. A vigilante response to Peep O'Day raids upon Catholic homes in the mid 1780s, by the early 1790s the Defenders (drawing, like the United Irishmen, on the lodge structure of the Masons) were a secret oath bound fraternity ranging across Ulster and the Irish midlands. Such activities increasingly alarmed the authorities and on 16 September 1796, they finally struck. A large military force descended on Belfast, sealed off the town, and arrested several leading United men, including Russell. Charged with high treason, Russell was held in Newgate Prison where, in the spring and summer of 1798, he was forced to sit out the ill fated insurrection. He was considerably more reluctant than most of his colleagues to come to terms with the government, attempting from prison to instigate further armed resistance. In March 1799 he was detained for a further three years, with other state prisoners, at Fort George in Scotland. His letters reveal that as he brooded on the state of the world he increasingly found sense and solace in biblical prophecy. The combined effect of the continuation of the war in Europe, its spread to the Middle East, and the bloody summer of 1798 in Ireland, seems to have only intensified his belief that the world was then engaged in the time of troubles which St John had foretold would precede the coming of Christ's kingdom. His duty was to prepare the way by raising his hand against the war mongering British monarchy. At the end of June 1802, during what was to prove a brief cessation in the war with France, Russell was released on condition of exile to Hamburg.