Ирландиялық революционер Теобалд Вольф Тон өмірі мен қызметі

Irish revolutionary figure (1763–1798)
the Irish revolutionary leader associated with the [[Irish Rebellion of 1798

Theobald Wolfe Tone, posthumously known as Wolfe Tone (Bhulbh Teón; 20 June 176319 November 1798), was a revolutionary exponent of 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 Tone 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. These have held annual, but separate, commemorations at his graveside in Bodenstown, County Kildare.

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, 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, in 1788 he submitted a plan for a Roman style military colony on Captain Cook's newly reported Sandwich Islands. With Russell providing the introductions, (Tone's diary records Thomas Paine's Rights of Man as the "Koran of Belfast").

The Belfast club had invited Tone as the author of An Argument on behalf of the Catholics of Ireland. With an eventual print run of 16,000, in Ireland only the Rights of Man surpassed it in circulation. The Argument embraced what had been the most advanced Volunteer position: that the key to constitutional reform was Catholic emancipation. 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". 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. 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 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 property 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. United Irishmen at the time were seeking to revive the Volunteer movement on the model of the French National Guard.

In May 1794, evidence laid against Tone helped the government justify its proscription of the Society. In July 1793, the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, John FitzGibbon, Earl of Clare, had seized upon Tone's suggestion in a letter to Russell that independence "would be the regeneration to this country", to denounce all United Irishmen as committed separatists. Tone protested, but only by way of endorsing a connection to England where it did not involve the "gross corruption in the legislature" and the "sacrifice of [Ireland’s] interests to England". In April 1794, 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. 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 were in Tone's handwriting. Also, while entertaining hopes of serving Francis Rawdon, Lord Moira, as a private secretary, Tone had not attended meetings of the Dublin Society of United Irishmen since May 1793. Tone remained in Ireland until after the trial of Jackson but was advised by Kilwarden that to avoid prosecution he should leave. In an 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. 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. 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". 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 (where following the Irish example, radicals had formed the United Scotsmen), had died of tuberculosis on September 19. 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. With Lewines heavily reliant on Tone for introductions, Tone was unchallenged as a representative of the Irish cause until, returning again to Paris from Texel, he found Tandy recently arrived from the United States. A second still smaller expedition, accompanied by Tandy, touched land in Donegal on 16 September but departed on the news of Humbert's defeat. Six days before, Tone had embarked 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. In the ensuing battle of Tory Island he commanded one of the ship's batteries until, isolated and crippled after several hours of bombardment, the ship struck and Bompart 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 was arrested.

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