Publications | Down Survey | 2003 Issue Contents

Pursing the Millennium: Thomas Russell's attempt to raise Antrim and Down in 1803

Although the seizure of Dublin formed the cornerstone of Robert Emmet's plan for insurrection in 1803, Dublin was not to be the only field of action. A number of supporting provincial risings were also planned, notably in Kildare, Wicklow and in Ulster. The Ulster rising was to be led by Thomas Russell, one of the most intriguing radical figures of his day, and the only United Irishman whose career spanned the founding of the society in 1791 and its last stand in 1803. Born in Dromahane, near Mallow, Co. Cork, in 1767, Russell was a former army officer who had fought in India in the 1780s. After his return to Ireland he became a close friend of Theobald Wolfe Tone and helped found the United Irishmen. One of the most committed and militant United Irish leaders, Russell settled in Belfast in the early 1790s and was a key architect of the United Irishmen's transformation into a revolutionary organisation. A rambler by nature, he was perhaps the most geographically and socially mobile of all the United Irishmen, equally at home at the table of aristocratic friends or eating potatoes in the cabin of a cottier. His contact with the poor convinced him of their political intelligence and discernment, and he became a fervent advocate of the political rights of the common man. On a personal level, Russell was an immensely charismatic figure, strikingly handsome, intelligent and charming, who exerted a strong fascination on contemporaries. He was a complex and contradictory man; deeply religious, he had trained to be an Anglican clergyman in his youth, but drank heavily and engaged in frequent casual sexual liaisons. It was this latter contradiction that led Tone to nickname him T.R' after the fictional character of a young clergyman who, despite his intentions to live a virtuous life, frequently succumbed to the temptations of women and drink. But for all his bantering. Tone loved him like a brother, and during his exile in America and France lamented Russell's absence as the greatest loss he had sustained.

During the mid-1790s Russell cropped up frequently in the reports of informers as one of the key leaders of the growing army of disaffected in the North. Dublin Castle regarded him as a particularly dangerous figure and ordered his arrest in September 1796. He spent the next six years in prison, in Newgate in Dublin, and Fort George, near Inverness in Scotland. Soon after his release in June 1802 he met Robert Emmet in Amsterdam, and they discussed the prospects of a future rising in Ireland. When in the spring of 1803 Emmet decided to prepare for insurrection, he summoned Russell home from exile in France.

As a United Irish veteran, well known and respected among Irish republicans, and a link with the martyrs of '98 such as Tone and Henry Joy McCracken, Russell was seen by Emmet as bringing essential experience and prestige to the venture. In particular. Emmet regarded Russell's reputation in the North as invaluable in giving the proposed insurrection a truly national character, and made him 'general of the Northern district'. Two veteran United Irishmen, James Hope originally from Templepatrick, County Antrim, and William Henry Hamilton of Enniskillen, were assigned to Russell, and the three travelled north in mid-July to make the final preparations. Hamilton was entrusted with fomenting a rising in counties Cavan and Fermanagh, while Russell and Hope were to concentrate their efforts on Down and Antrim. In Belfast, Russell met a number of his old United Irish colleagues, but found most of them reluctant to commit themselves to a rising. His preparations were given additional urgency when news came from Emmet that there had been an explosion at one of the arms depots in Dublin on 16 July which had excited some suspicions. To forestall discovery the date of the rising was brought forward to Saturday 23 July. Russell sent immediately for Hamilton, with orders to abandon his efforts in Cavan and entrusted him with raising County Antrim.

Russell was completely confident of success: he believed Ulster to be seething with disaffection and that he could rally an army of 50,000 men. However, as he sought to raise support in his old command of County Down, Russell continually met with apathy and caution: local people proved reluctant to commit themselves, particularly when they learned that there were no arms to be distributed. Around 20 July Russell moved on to County Antrim, where he hoped for a better response. But here too he met with disappointment. His first attempt to rally support was at Carnmoney, whose inhabitants had earned a notorious reputation for disaffection in the 1790s, but here only a small crowd of about a dozen people gathered to listen to him and these refused to help in any way. He travelled on to Broughshane, where he spoke to a larger crowd of about fifty. To impress them Russell donned his striking green uniform

With the date set for the rising fast approaching, Russell was running out of time and he spent the last few days desperately trying to organise support. On Thursday 21 July he held another meeting in Belfast with United Irish veterans of 1798. Russell was questioned closely on his plan and the level of support he expected, but he refused to reveal any such details, and the meeting broke up with only a handful of those present prepared to give a vague commitment to turn out.

That night Russell returned to County Down to make another effort to rouse the people for the insurrection scheduled to take place the following night. In a public house at Annadorn, a village about 4 miles east of Downpatrick, he summoned a meeting of eight or nine men. He announced that there was to be a general insurrection throughout Ireland, that blows would be struck simultaneously at Dublin, Belfast and Downpatrick, and that United Irish forces would also march on the villages of Clough and Seaforde. But again the locals were cautious: one of them telling Russell that his neighbours "would hit me in the face" if he suggested they turn out, while another bluntly maintained that "none but fools would join them".2

Later that day Russell travelled on to Loughinisland, where an inhabitant of the neighbouring village of Clough told him that the men of his village wanted nothing to do with any rebellion; the local priests had spoken against it and the people would "be hanged like dogs" if they turned out. By this stage Russell was exhausted from his constant travelling and exhortation, and was baffled and frustrated by the reluctance of the people to come forward. With time running out, he left Loughinisland, and set off towards Downpatrick.3

Here he planned to meet up with a contingent of rebel forces at Ballyvange, just outside Downpatrick, which had been chosen as the rendezvous for the attack on the town. Earlier in the day, a group of fourteen men, armed only with pitchforks, had formed here, but they grew tired waiting for orders and gradually melted away. By the time Russell arrived only three men remained. Since an attack on Downpatrick was now out of the question, Russell decided to return to Loughinisland to make yet another attempt to rally its inhabitants, but as they still refused to budge, he left in the early hours of the morning for County Antrim.4

In Antrim, however, his colleagues were faring no better. On Saturday 23 July Hamilton was bluntly told that Belfast would not act. Hamilton and Hope then travelled on to Kells, County Antrim, where some men seemed eager to make a stand, but they were too few to mount any effective action. Moving on to Ballymena they learned that a body of men had assembled, but most of them had returned to their homes when they heard the news that Belfast had not risen. The town's demoralisation was sealed when a false report was circulated that Russell had gone to Dublin to persuade Emmet to call off the entire insurrection. Only Hamilton, Hope and a local leader remained ready to act. The next morning they went to Slemish mountain and met some men from Carnmoney and Templepatrick, but they were too few to act on the original plan to march on Belfast or Carrickfergus. In Broughshane, Ballyclare and several other parts of Antrim, the story was the same: small groups gathered but they lacked determined leaders and decided to wait until some favourable news was received. Faced with such a paltry response Hamilton and Hope had no choice but to abandon their efforts and go into hiding and when Russell eventually arrived in the county he was unable to find them.5

The poor response to Russell's call was largely due to the understandable unwillingness of local people to sacrifice themselves in what must have seemed a hopeless effort. It was also the case that the government agents, notably James McGuicken of Belfast, had done much to sow seeds of doubt in their minds and generally frustrate Russell's plans. McGuicken managed to secure a position of authority among the disaffected in County Down which he used to caution local people against any rash acts6. He consistently advised the people to await the news from Dublin before coming forward-a step that appeared eminently sensible to most of them. When the effective disruption carried out by such agents is added to the rebel weaknesses, there is little wonder that the northern rising turned out to be the shambles it was.

Russell had completely misjudged the mood of the province: he barely managed to raise fifty men, let alone the 50,000. Ulster had undergone many changes since the mid-1790s when Russell had traversed its roads as a United Irish emissary-changes he failed to appreciate during his long imprisonment and exile. By 1803 the crushing defeats at Antrim and Ballynahinch in June 1798 were still fresh in people's memories and there was a marked reluctance to take on well-armed crown forces again. Moreover, the idealism generated by the French revolution in the early 1790s had largely dissipated in the wake of France's aggressive conduct towards her neighbours and Bonaparte's cynical manipulation of the revolution's ideals. By 1803 the heart had largely gone out of the northern United Irish movement, and many former United Irishmen had put the radicalism of their youth behind them and joined the yeomanry.

In reviewing his failure in the North Russell believed that "courage alone was wanting ... to render our success not only certain but easy"7, but much more than courage was wanting. The rebels lacked almost everything else required to effect a successful insurrection-popular support, arms, money, and a realistic plan of action. Russell was convinced that his very presence was itself enough to raise the province and the systematic planning and detailed preparations required for an effective insurrection were almost wholly neglected. His plan of action was rather makeshift: local contingents in the hinterlands of Belfast and Downpatrick were to seize the arms of the local yeomanry and them attempt to take the towns. But Russell's system of communications was inadequate even for this. His understandable obsession with secrecy meant that orders could not be conveyed to his lieutenants until the last minute, which resulted in the assembly of poorly organised groups who had no real idea of what action they were to take. Naturally enough these lost heart and soon dispersed when the expected instructions or signals were not received. Had Russell been able to distribute large quantities of arms, point to a French invasion or a successful seizure of the capital then enough men might have flocked to his standard to mount an insurrection worthy of the name, but without any of these his efforts were doomed.

It seemed that Russell's career had come full circle. He had found his most congenial home in Belfast and, like Tone, he idealised the town as the cradle of Irish republicanism. During the mid-1790s he had pounded the roads of Ulster recruiting United Irishmen, with considerable success. Seven years later, he seems to have believed that he was stepping back into the Ulster of 1796. Though he himself had gone from being a reformer to a revolutionary in a relatively short space of time, he failed to appreciate that, in a rapidly changing political landscape, things could just as easily happen in reverse. Now, as he sought to rekindle the enthusiasm of the 1790s, many former radicals looked on with apathy, if not downright hostility.

Russell's efforts to raise Ulster - riding through Antrim and Down in his general's uniform haranguing the unwilling inhabitants to take up arms and free their country - struck many contemporary observers as ludicrous. In the face of mass apathy that would have caused other men to re-think their plans, Russell never once thought of abandoning his mission. The picture that emerges is of a man with a tenuous grip on reality, maintaining a quixotic confidence in victory in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Some who had known him believed that in the last months of his life he had become mentally unbalanced. The United Irishman William Sampson accused the government of turning Russell's "once gentle heart ... to desperate madness" by imprisoning him without trial for almost six years, while his old friend from Belfast, Martha McTier, also believed that his mind had been greatly affected by his time in8 prison.8

Russell's career can be seen as breaking down into heroic and tragic phases. The heroic phase was the period of the mid-1790s when he showed immense courage, energy and resourcefulness in building up the United Irish movement throughout Ulster, and was later immortalised in ballad as the elusive and mysterious 'Man from God-knows-where'. The tragic phase was clearly his attempt to raise Ulster in the summer of 1803. What separated these phases was his imprisonment, which bore heavily on him: he was a physically active man and a lover of the outdoors, and was always at his happiest striding through the Mourne or Sperrin mountains observing the beauties of nature. The two and half years he spent in a gloomy, dank, badly-ventilated cell in Newgate, the worst of Dublin's prisons, greatly damaged both his health and his spirits, and he pined for freedom. Prison brought little refuge from the temptations that had plagued him on the outside - prostitutes and whiskey were readily available in Newgate - and as he indulged in them more and more he sank into the depths of despair, and bitterly castigated himself for relapsing into "fornication and lust".9

Russell was deeply troubled by his failure to reconcile his personal behaviour with his deeply-held religious beliefs. Born a Protestant, he respected all forms of Christian belief, and had played a key role in drawing Catholics into the founding of the United Irishmen in 1791. The unity of Catholic and Protestant was not just a means to an end for him as undoubtedly it was for many United Irishmen, but a sacred goal in itself. Always a regular reader of the Bible, during his imprisonment Russell increasingly found solace in millennialist prophecies which allowed him to make sense of his own and his country's sufferings. Millennialism - the belief that the Second Coming of Christ was imminent and would be followed by a thousand years of peace and justice on earth - became the dominant strand in his thinking during his incarceration.

Russell's years in Belfast probably played an important part in this regard. In Ulster several well-known Presbyterian ministers such as Samuel Barber, Thomas Ledlie Birch and William Steel Dickson, formed an important element in the leadership of the United Irishmen. They fused their advanced politics with apocalyptic beliefs, preaching sermons and publishing tracts with explicit millennialist themes throughout the 1790s. Such beliefs were widespread in the 1790s, when the French revolution, following so quickly on the heels of a successful revolution in America, created a consciousness of living in an era of unprecedented change. With old certainties disintegrating, people cast around for explanations, and to many it seemed that the events prophesied in scripture were finally coming true, and heralded the coming of Christ's kingdom on earth. Many observers, including Russell, believed that the millennium would come about through the progressive spread of liberty throughout the world, and that it was the duty of all Christians to do their utmost to create this New Jerusalem.11

After the failure of 1798 Russell's millennialism became the driving force behind his determination to renew the revolutionary struggle. 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 presently engaged in the time of troubles which the Book of Revelations had foretold would precede the coming of Christ's kingdom. As with many crusaders, adversity only served to steel his resolve. Although his efforts in 1803 failed dismally, he believed that the cause of justice and liberty had merely lost a battle in a war in which there could be only one ultimate victor. To his brother he had written some years earlier: "whatever attempts are made ... to extinguish liberty, or to retard her progress, I have no doubt of her ultimate and speedy success".12

These ideas were nurtured by Russell's anguished personal life. Painfully aware of the chasm between his virtuous intentions and sinful actions, he often contrasted his shame at his private behaviour with his pride in his political activism. In the last weeks of his life he wrote to a friend that while morally he acknowledged himself to be a grievous sinner, "politically I have done nothing but what I glory in". 13 He fervently hoped that his political actions would compensate for his moral failings, and that "our Lord and Saviour will, in eternal life, reward those who laboured for the welfare and happiness of mankind".14

Behaviour, therefore, that appeared redolent of madness to some contemporaries has to be seen in the light of Russell's millennialist beliefs. The statements he prepared for the government and his letters to friends and all seem perfectly sane. Moreover, level-headed conspirators such as Hope and Hamilton were willing to follow him, and such men would not have subjected themselves to the command of a madman. That said, there seems little doubt that Russell's millennialist zeal was carried to such an extreme that it seriously impaired his judgement during the last months of his life.

After his failure to raise Ulster Russell went into hiding. At first, he stayed at the houses of some sympathisers, but after a number of narrow escapes he was reduced to sleeping in ditches to avoid capture. In early September he heard of Emmet's arrest and went south to Dublin, possibly to attempt to rescue him. By now he was the most wanted man in Ireland, with a price of £1500 on his head. Spotted by an informer, he was arrested on 9 September in Parliament Street, only a stone's throw from Dublin Castle. The government believed it would be best to try him in his old stomping ground of County Down, where the execution of such a well-known and once popular figure would serve as a warning to any lingering pockets of disaffection and finally extinguish any remnant of rebelliousness.
On 20 October Russell was tried in Downpatrick, found guilty of high treason and sentenced to death. Even then millennialist matters were foremost in his mind. After sentence was passed he asked for three days to complete and publish a millennialist tract. However the authorities believed that Russell sought the extra three days only to allow time for a French invasion that might save his life, and they turned down his request. The sentence was carried out the following day on a makeshift scaffold outside Downpatrick gaol. Russell behaved with firmness and serenity, spoke briefly to the assembled crowd, gave his blessing to those who had attended him and put the rope round his neck himself. He was then hanged and after a few minutes cut down and beheaded, and his severed head displayed to the watching crowd. His remains were taken by some friends and hurriedly buried nearby in the small cemetery of Downpatrick parish church, where a plain stone slab marks his grave.

James Quinn is Executive Editor of the Royal Irish Academy's Dictionary of Irish Biography. He has published a biography of Thomas Russell and several articles on radicalism in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ireland.

Further Reading:
James Quinn, Soul on Fire: a Life of Thomas Russell (Dublin, 2002) Brian S. Turner (ed.), A Man Stepped Out for Death: Thomas Russell and County Down (Newtownards, 2003) Francis P. Gallagher, A Blood Red Autumn: Thomas Russell and the Irish Rising of 1803 (Dundrum, Co. Down, 2003) Denis Carroll, The Man from God Knows Where (Dublin 1995) C. J. Woods (ed.). Journals and Memoirs of Thomas Russell, 1791 -5 (Dublin, 1991)

Notes and References
1. McClelland to Wickham, Carrickfergus, 9 Aug. 1803 (British Library, Hardwicke papers. Add. MS 35770/80-81).

2. Evidence of John Keenan of Annadorn, Belfast News Letter, 25 Oct. 1803; deposition of Patrick Doran, 4 Aug. 1803 (Myrtle Hill, Brian Turner and Kenneth Dawson (eds). 1798 Rebellion in County Down (Newtownards, 1998), 265).

3. Evidence of Patrick Lynch and James Fitzpatrick, Loughinisland, and Patrick Renaghan, Clough, Belfast News Letter, 25 Oct. 1803.

4. Evidence of John Tate of Downpatrick at Russell's trial, Belfast News Letter, 25 Oct. 1803; deposition of John Tate, a shoemaker, 1803 (Hill et al, 1798 Rebellion in County Down, 265, 270-71); see also Ruthven to R.R. Madden, Downpatrick, 17 Jan. 1837 (TCD, Madden papers, 873/671); Mary Ann McCracken to Madden, 2 July 1844 (TCD, Madden papers, 873/155).

5. R.R Madden, Lives and Times of the United Irishmen (Dublin, 1846), 3rd ser.,ii, 217; evidence at trial of Andrew Hunter and William Porter, Belfast News Letter, 28 Oct. 1803; Samuel McSkimin, 'Secret history of the Irish insurrection of 1803' in Frazer's Magazine, xiv (July-Dec.,1836), 556-7; memories of Mary Ann McCracken, n.d. (TCD, Madden papers, 873/672).

6. McGucken (aka 'Belfast') to Marsden, 8 July 1803 (M.MacDonagh (ed.). The Viceroy's postbag (London, 1904), 276-7)).

7. Russell to Frank McCracken, c. Aug. 1803 [?] (copy) (TCD, Madden papers, 873/640).

8. Memoirs of William Sampson (New York, 1807), 359; Martha McTier to Sarah Drennan, Oct. 1803 (D. A. Chart (ed.). The Drennan letters . . . 1776-1819 (Belfast, 1931), 331).

9. Russell's journal, 21 Nov. 1797 (TCD, Sirr papers, 868/1, f. 2).

10. Pieter Tesch, 'Presbyterian radicalism' in D. Dickson, D. Keogh and K. Whelan (eds). United Irishmen, 46-8; James Donnelly, 'Propagating the cause of the United Irishmen' in Studies an Irish quarterly review, Ixix (1981), 16-17; I. R. McBride, Scripture Politics: Ulster Presbyterians and Irish radicalism in the late eighteenth century (Oxford, 1998), 199.

11. Russell to Templeton, 5 June 1802 (TCD, Madden papers, 873/638).

12. Thomas Russell to John Russell, Fort George, 10 Dec. 1800 (copy) (TCD, Madden papers, 873/655).

13. Russell to Frank McCracken, Oct. 1803 (copy) (TCD, Madden papers, 873/642).

14. Russell to ?, 5 June 1802 (TCD, Madden papers, 873/673).

15. Russell's speech from the dock, 20 Oct. 1803 (TCD, Madden papers, 873/700, f. 3); Mary Ann McCracken to Madden, 2 July 1844 (TCD, Madden papers, 873/155).