Publications | Down Survey | 2003 Issue Contents

Thomas Russell: Bi-centenary lecture
Marianne Elliot

Thomas Russell was born on 21 November 1767 in Drommahane townland, Kilshannig parish, county Cork, the fifth and youngest child of John Russell (c. 1720-1792), a native of Kilkenny and a lieutenant in the 83rd foot regiment and his wife, first name unknown, nee O'Kennedy (d.1786). Although Russell was reared a Protestant of the Church of Ireland, his mother was probably Catholic and his paternal grandmother certainly was. She was a member of the O'Clear family - an establishled Catholic gentry family from the Kilkenny - Queen's County border - who had lost their lands because they had espoused the Jacobite cause in the 1690s. The family moved to Dublin in the 1770s where Russell's father was a captain of invalids at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham. The Russells were a deeply religious family, Thomas's elder sister, Margaret (1752-1834) playing a major part in his religious education during his education at home by his father. Thomas was destined for a career in the Church. Instead, in 1783, he joined his brother Ambrose (c. 1756-1793) in India, where Ambrose was a lieutenant in the 52nd foot regiment.

In 1783 Russell was appointed an ensign, first in the 100th foot regiment, then in the same regiment as his brother. They fought together at the battle of Cannanore, one of their commanders being Colonel John Knox, member of a prominent political family from county Tyrone, which later befriended and supported Russell. In 1786-7 Thomas returned to Ireland as an officer on half pay. Once again he contemplated taking holy orders and seems to have paid a visit to the Isle of Man, with this in view. However, nothing appears to have come of this, and in August 1790 he was made an ensign in the 64th foot regiment and posted to Belfast in September.

Early political involvement and personality
Whilst observing a session of the Irish House of Commons in July 1790, Russell met and befriended Theobald Wolfe Tone. Thus began one of the legendary friendships of Irish history, a friendship of unusual and moving intensity. Their journals speak almost with one voice, using the same code-words, quotations and popular songs of the day, and written very much with the other in mind. "You know how exactly our humours concurred," wrote Tone from America five years later, "and that particular style of conversation which we had framed for ourselves and which to us was so exquisitely pleasant; those strained quotations, absurd phrases and extravagant sallies". In the loneliness of his exile in Paris, Tone reflected on that friendship with a pining which tells us much of its special nature.

Russell spent the rest of that summer with the Tones in their holiday cottage at Sandymount, south of Dublin, where he helped Tone refine an earlier project for a British military colony on the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii). Russell is a key figure in Tone's journals, sharing (and influencing) his political ideas and becoming both a family friend and Tone's closest associate. Indeed Tone's famous journals grew out of the friendship, the two agreeing to keep such jottings for the other's amusement. Never as fluent as Tone, he has left only one published pamphlet, a handful of newspaper articles, and a more substantial body of scribblings, journals and letters, so illegible that many historians have simply ignored them. This, and a congenital inability to spell (there are even signs of dyslexia), was a further cause of teasing by his friends and family. His contribution to the development of Irish republican nationalism has been grossly underestimated. Until the welcome appearance of C.J. Woods's edition of his journals in 1991, and James Quinn's fine biography in 2002, there had been only one full biography ever written, and that in Irish (1957). Yet for a while the Dublin Government regarded Russell as a more dangerous revolutionary than Tone. His journal reveals ideas complementary to Tone's, and frequently more advanced, and the two had an intellectual relationship little short of symbiotic.

Russell had a complex personality, convivial, gracious and thoughtful towards others, he was also deeply religious and introspective, his seriousness and intense self-criticism becoming the object of Tone's gentle mockery - a key feature in his journals. Russell's pursuit of the virtuous ideal frequently involved him in Rousseauistic musings on the imperfections of human nature, particularly his own He was an exceptionally tall (for the age) and handsome man; even the warrant for his arrest in 1803 was complimentary, describing him as "a tall, handsome man" of "dark complexion, aquiline nose, large black eyes, with heavy-eye-brows, good teeth, full-chested, walking generally fast and upright, and having a military appearance ... with a clear distinct voice, and ... a good address". He never married, though his character and good looks made him an object of fascination with a number offemmes des lettres, notably Mary Ann McCracken and William Drennan's sister, Martha McTier. Mary Ann McCracken - an early feminist and one of the few women to have any significant impact on the United Irishmen - fell in love with Russell on their first meeting. "A model of manly beauty," she reflected some forty years later, "he was one of those favoured individuals whom one cannot pass in the street without being guilty of the rudeness of staring in the face while passing, and turning round to look at the receding figure. Though more than six feet high, his majestic stature was scarcely observed owing to the exquisite symmetry of his form. Martial in his gait and demeanour, his appearance was not altogether that of a soldier. His dark and steady eye, compressed lip, and somewhat haughty bearing, were occasionally indicative of the camp; but in general, the classic contour of his finely formed head, the expression of almost infantine sweetness which characterized his smile, and the benevolence that beamed in his fine countenance, seemed to mark him out as one, who was destined to be the ornament, grace and blessing of private life."

Russell's seriousness and self-flagellation for his own failings prompted the friendly raillery of the more flippant and gregarious Tone. In contrast to the male companionability of Tone's education, Russell (youngest of five children by many years) had been educated at home by his father, a former trainee for the ministry. Russell emerged with u good knowledge of the classics, science and modern languages, but most of all of scripture and morals - unlike Tone, whose scriptural knowledge was sufficiently inadequate to suggest that he had neglected scripture classes at Trinity as he did so many others. Russell's private journals are full of moralistic and scriptural commentaries. He leamt Hebrew in order to study the Old Testament in its original language, and as a political prisoner in 1803 he conducted a disputation with the prison chaplain on the meaning of words in the New Testament.

His journals reveal a complex personality. After the publication of his Life in 1826, Tone was bitterly attacked by Russell's nephew for misrepresenting his friend as a womaniser and heavy drinker. In fact both are well documented and Matilda Tone, who published the Life, was far more critical of Russell in these respects than her husband. Yet no one knew better than Tone the moral torture poor Russell went through for human weaknesses which Tone accepted as natural. A tortured individual, he was 'torn between a heightened sexuality (with frequent resort to prostitutes and casual partners), and such an idealisation of pure love that when he finally encountered the beautiful Eliza Goddard -daughter of the port surveyor of Newry - his difficulty in communicating that love was such that he lost her entirely. It seems that recognition of his own lack of financial prospect also restrained him from proposing marriage and damned his prospects in the eyes of her father.

"Such is man or at least such I am" he wrote disconsolately after one of his casual encounters, "so vicious, so imperfect, with wishes and desires for virtue and a firm belief in revelation and yet lapsing into vice on the slightest temptation. I do not improve." His drinking bouts, many of them with Tone as companion, occasioned the same soul-searching, and an encounter with a Moravian settlement in County Antrim prompted an impressive journal entry on the Enlightenment dilemma of the contest between reason and passion in human motivation. His passionate admiration for France was to crumble on the discovery of old world corruption among her officials.

He was an unworldly man and as a result was constantly in financial distress. This was deepened by high moral principle. In July 1791 he had to sell his ensigncy because of the financial difficulties in which he found himself after a friend, the American Thomas Digges, for whom he had gone security, absconded. At the end of that year - through the good graces of the Knoxes - he was appointed Seneschal of the manor court in Dungannon, Co. Tyrone, only to renounce it in September 1792 because of the sectarianism which he witnessed in his fellow magistrates. He then thought of trying his fortune in France, of which he was a passionate admirer. But his father's death, on 5 December 1792 - throwing the maintenance of his sister upon himself -effectively terminated such plans and deepened his financial embarrassment. Although he was appointed librarian of the Belfast Society for Promoting Knowledge (today's Linenhall Library) in January 1794, imprisonment for his political activities (1796-1802) was to leave him in straightened circumstances for the rest of his life and dependent on the generosity of his Belfast friends, notably Dr James McDonnell, John Templeton, Martha McTier (sister to Dr William Drennan) and most of all Mary Anne McCracken. "I am much interested for this seemingly unfortunate young man, Russell", wrote Drennan's sister in November 1793; "he seems very poor, is very agreeable, very handsome and well informed and possess'd of most insinuating graceful manners - his dress betrays poverty and he associates with men every way below himself, on some of whom I fear he mostly lives".

Such was the many-sided character of the handsome twenty-two year old who was to become Tone's closest confidant for the remainder of his life. Tone's pet-name for Russell was 'P.R, parish priest, clerk of this parish'. It was a take-off from Swift's Memoirs of P.P. Clerk of this Parish - the story of a pious young man, led astray by pleasure and women - and gently mocked Russell's internal moral dilemma. It was typical of their friendship, and Russell returned the compliment by calling Tone, John Hutton (a leading Dublin coachmaker of the day), a reminder of his background in trade. But Russell suffered more from the raillery than Tone, and it was something Tone agonised about during his lonely exile in Paris, haunted by recognition of how much Russell had meant to him.

"I have christened Russell by the name of RR Clerk of this Parish, and he makes a very conspicuous figure in my memoirs." There follows competing postscripts from the two friends. Russell: "Dear Matty - As to anything your wise husband may have said of me, I neither desire to know, nor do I care... 'I had a friend'". Tone had spent much of the previous day chastising Russell for his drinking and late nights and he had risen particularly early that morning to disprove the accusations. "I am at present composing a pretty moral treatise on temperance, and will dedicate it to myself, for I don't know who is likely to profit so much by it." Tone: "P.P. has been scribbling his bit of nonsense. He is a great fool, and I have much trouble to manage him. I assure you that you will be much amused by his exploits in my journal, which is a thousand times wittier than Swift's ... P.P. calls me 'his friend Mr John Hutton' ... He is writing a journal, but mine is worth fifty of it." It was, alas, too true. Russell did not write with facility.

Russell had commenced his journal earlier and it may well have been his idea to exchange in writing the lengthy conversational observations which were such a part of their friendship. Certainly Tone's daily account of his two weeks in Belfast tells us rather more of their friendship than of the United Irishmen. Russell was the constant object of Tone's teasing. On his first Sunday in Belfast, Tone accompanied Russell to church and listened to 'a vile sermon' denouncing smuggling as disloyal. Tone thought it nonsense, but Russell took it to heart and was greatly distressed by it. After church they joined the Belfast Sunday strollers on the Mall, which ran along the Blackstaff River south of Belfast from the White Linen Hall to Joy's Paper Mill. Russell's sense of guilt at his own moral failings intensified as Tone remarked on how all the women were flirting with him.

Belfast then hosted a large number of card clubs, dances, balls and coteries and the two friends were at the receiving end of its lavish private hospitality. At his home in Bridge Street Dr. James McDonnell, one of the town's outstanding intellectual figures at the time, though unusual in his Gaelic-Irish background, was one of their more particular hosts. "I find the people here extremely civil". Tone wrote to Matilda, "I have dined out every day since I came here, and have now more engagements than I can possibly fulfil". He disliked the card clubs, accompanied Russell twice to coteries at the Donegall Arms, but did not enjoy them. He found the women ugly, disapproved of their heavy make-up and had a dispute with Russell about the teeth of one unfortunate young lady. It was a particular obsession with him and suggests worries about his own. On the second occasion, when much against his better inclination Tone had agreed to accompany his friend, Russell lost his nerve in the lobby and they returned home. There Russell again changed his mind and wanted to return. It was after midnight and Tone was angry with him.

It was just the kind of indecision in Russell which Tone mocked when in good humour, but criticised when not. Every journal entry carried references to Russell's hang-ups: "in the blue devils - thinks he is losing his faculties" and "P.P. at home in the horrors; thinks himself sick generally". Tone blamed it rather on his drinking, smoking and late nights and constantly nagged him about his bad habits. October 15: "I had been lecturing P.P. on the state of his nerves, and the necessity of early hours; to which he agreed, and as the first fruits of my advice and his reformation, sat up with Digges until three o'clock in the morning, being four hours after I had gone to bed". Tone looked upon his friend as something of a wayward 'youth' and frequently assumed an elder brother role. Russell wore his mental anguish openly and tended to invite such chiding from his friends.

Russell took the criticism in good heart, and seems to have been a good deal more patient of Tone's failings than Tone of his. On Sunday the 23rd Alexander Stewart had them to dinner "with a parcel of squires of County Down". The conversation was dominated by "fox hunting, hare hunting, buck hunting" and the superiority of the northern potatoes. They then went on to the Washington Club, where to Tone's mind anoth^ silly argument was in progress. It had been a tiresome day which ended with Tone getting drunk in the Donegall Arms. The next morning he was sick and felt guilty about his rudeness to Russell, who took it all with patience.

No residence in a new town would have been complete without a visit to the theatre and Tone and Russell took in the Carmelite playing in Rosemary Lane. It was not, however, one of the theatre's better seasons. It had been neglected by actor-manager Atkins because of his plans to build a second theatre in Belfast and another in Derry. A promising season with the celebrated Thomas Ryder was cut short by illness on October 10 and Tone and Russell were unimpressed by the remaining actors. Instead they spent their time searching the audience for a pretty face. Russell fell asleep and they left early.

Russell's personal melancholia reacted upon the depressing political situation. News of his favourite brother's death in India in March 1794 sent him into a spiral of despair which was completed by word that Eliza Goddard was to marry another. Tone had received news of Ambrose Russell's death in January 1794, but he and Matilda had thought it better to keep the news from him temporarily, having already exhausted themselves persuading him to return to Belfast to take up the preferred librarianship position. It was a strange act of friendship, but the state of Russell's mind in those months receives corroboration in Mrs McTier's letters to her brother. Russell's poverty became legendary in Belfast. Mrs McTier agonised over his sufferings when he could not even afford a black coat to mourn his brother. He lived in a "melancholy lodging ... in a dark and gloomy entry", scarcely ate and mixed with company far beneath him socially. She impressed on Drennan his contribution to the Catholic and reform campaigns, even though his name not actually penned to any of the writings, suggested all kinds of literary ventures which might bring him an income and ultimately appealed to the Catholic Committee in Dublin. Russell indeed, despite his penury, had become the provider for several hangers-on. His sister, whom he had settled near Dungannon, had a natural claim - however importunate she was in it - his niece and her husband had less and were criticised by Matilda Tone for "sponging on all his friends".

In Belfast after 1790 he made friends among the town's radicals and litteratti. Among these were the botanist John Templeton and the Irish music collector Edward Bunting, as well as members of the largely Presbyterian merchant class, which would found the United Irish Society. Russell was a typical Enlightenment man of letters, with a keen interest in the pursuit of knowledge generally. His jottings - often chronicling his extensive tours on foot through Ulster and north Leinster - reflect his interest in natural science in particular. He was also one of the very few United Irishmen with an interest in Gaelic culture. He took Irish lessons from the noted Gaelic scholar, Patrick Lynch of Loughinisland, assisted in the editing of an Irish-language dictionary, was a close friend of the traditional music collector, Edward Bunting, and was involved in the Belfast Harper's festival of 1792.

United Irishman
We can chronicle his political involvement from the time of his meeting with Tone. He was a corresponding member of a political club which Tone formed in Dublin in 1790, to which he was to have contributed essays on religious tolerance and Catholic emancipation. Although these did not materialize, his notes show advanced ideas, which were to influence Tone's pamphlet. An Argument on behalf of the Catholics of Ireland (1791). It was Russell who invited Tone to draw up the resolutions for a new political society to be founded in Belfast on 14 July 1791. Tone responded in a letter which stated that privately he supported the idea of separation from England, but realised then was not the time to pursue it. The letter fell into government hands and became the reason for Russell's questioning before a House of Lords secret committee two years later. The setting up in Belfast of the new society - to be called the Society of United Irishmen - was delayed until October, when Russell and Tone became founding members. Tone's diary of their two-week stay in Belfast, charting the serious and not-so-serious activities of the two friends is perhaps the most amusing part of Tone's diaries. At the end of that month Russell and Tone travelled to Dublin to help found the Dublin Society of United Irishmen. But Russell's influence on the Dublin society was intermittent. Indeed such was his work on behalf of Catholic emancipation in these years - particularly when Tone was employed by the Catholic Committee in 1792-3 - that he alienated some United Irishmen by refusing to communicate developments, anxious as he was not to jeopardise the Catholic campaign by giving its enemies the excuse of denouncing it as allied with dangerous radicals. His friends in Belfast thought the Catholic Committee ungenerous in not recognising his contribution. If Catholic emancipation had been granted in the 1790s as expected, the rebellions of 1798 and 1803 would not have taken place.

When war broke out between Britain and revolutionary France in February 1793, the Irish authorities clamped down on societies such as the United Irishmen and Russell was one of those summoned to appear before a secret committee of the Irish House of Lords in March 1793. For a while during that spring he also acted as secretary to the Dublin Society of United Irishmen and was one of the committee appointed to draw up their plans for parliamentary reform in 1793-4. But the Society was in some disarray because of the arrests of many of its leaders, and Russell and Tone - despairing of reform in Ireland - talked of going to live in America. But they remained and tried to pull the remnants of the Society back together.

Russell was also one of the few United Irishmen to believe in the equality of the sexes, both in terms of mental ability and opportunity. With the exception of Henry Joy McCracken he was also the only major United Irish leader with a genuine sympathy and understanding for the common people. In his lengthy walks in Ulster, he had often spoken with them and believed that their political ideas were more advanced and pro-French than the middle-class United Irishmen gave them credit for. The United Irish Society in the North had retained a cell-like existence very different from the public pirouetting of the over-sized Dublin body. It had, moreover, made significant headway among the skilled trades, whereas the elitism of the Dublin Society bothered some of its socially inferior members and in part explains its sometimes reckless outspokenness. Russell was unusual in spanning both. He had espoused the idea of armed revolution much earlier than Tone, whose fears of the Irish "sans culottes who are too ignorant for any thinking man to wish to see in power" never left him. He was likewise utterly convinced of the willingness and ability of the French to invade and the Irish people to join them and he considered revolution inevitable. Given such feelings and his willingness to mix socially with them Russell was popular with 'the young men' of Belfast, who were "far more violent than the others". They were suspicious of those leaders involved with the Northern Star, considered them "not ready enough for the field", but excepted Russell as someone who "would be ready to act".

Over the next few months the United movement in Antrim and Down was thus reorganised from "the base of society", as Thomas Addis Emmet described the process some years later, "the obscurity of its members" acting as a form of protection from security forces which tended still to over-concentrate on the celebrities. Indeed as late as 1798 Thomas Storey - the Belfast printer with whom Russell associated in late 1794 - was still so unknown to the Castle that it was having difficulty finding enough information to include him in the Banishment Act. Russell seems to have been the crucial bridge between these men and the original United Irish leaders. He was instrumental in persuading Tone that a revolution in Ireland was feasible and was one of the small inner group who persuaded Tone to use his exile to America in 1795 as a channel for negotiating military aid from France. Indeed he was to remind Tone of his undertaking when his friend thought of becoming a farmer in America instead. In May 1795 Russell was also one of the small group which gathered to give Tone a send-off at McArt's Fort on the Cavehill in Belfast and took a famous oath to overthrow of British rule in Ireland. He also provided the bridge which brought the middle-class United o Irish leadership into communication with lower social elements in the north, where the restructuring of the United Irish society as an underground revolutionary movement began in 1795-6. In 1796 he was appointed its military commander in county Down - the most organised United Irish county in the whole of the island, with an unusually strong connection between United Irishmen and Defenders. It was with good reason that the government considered Russell one of the most dangerous of the United Irish leaders.

also provided the bridge which brought the middle-class United o Irish leadership into communication with lower social elements in the north, where the restructuring of the United Irish society as an underground revolutionary movement began in 1795-6. In 1796 he was appointed its military commander in county Down - the most organised United Irish county in the whole of the island, with an unusually strong connection between United Irishmen and Defenders. It was with good reason that the government considered Russell one of the most dangerous of the United Irish leaders. Arrest and imprisonment Russell was a regular contributor to the United Irish newspapers, the Northern Star and the Press, his most notable contributions being his poems against slavery and on the defeat of Gaelic Ireland at the battle of Aughrim (1691). In 1793 he co-wrote with William Sampson a satirical pamphlet in mock-epic form, Review of the Lion of Old England, which attacked the myth of the Glorious Revolution, showing how Britain's current war policy had aligned it with the most autocratic monarchs of Europe. The following year he contributed to a critique of Thomas Paine's Ages of Reason. His 1796 pamphlet A Letter to the People of Ireland on the Present Situation of the Country, proclaimed himself openly a United Irishmen (by then a banned seditious organisation), showed how the ordinary people had been betrayed by the gentry, backed by England, championed the cause of the Catholics, argued the necessity of unity of all religious persuasions and the virtues of the United Irishmen, and attacked England's treatment of Ireland, her promotion of the slave trade and her war against France. It was deemed seditious and a warrant was issued for his arrest. He surrendered himself voluntarily on 16 September 1796 and was taken from Belfast to Newgate prison in Dublin. Because he refused to give sureties for his good behaviour, he was not bailed and was to remain in prison until 1802 (after 1799 at Fort George in Scotland), the longest detention without trial of any of the state prisoners. When Lord Edward Fitzgerald was wounded and arrested on 19 May 1798, he was brought to Newgate, where Russell was the only United Irishman to see him; Russell was a regular contributor to the United Irish newspapers, the Northern Star and the Press, his most notable contributions being his poems against slavery and on the defeat of Gaelic Ireland at the battle of Aughrim (1691). In 1793 he co-wrote with William Sampson a satirical pamphlet in mock-epic form, Review of the Lion of Old England, which attacked the myth of the Glorious Revolution, showing how Britain's current war policy had aligned it with the most autocratic monarchs of Europe. The following year he contributed to a critique of Thomas Paine's Ages of Reason. His 1796 pamphlet A Letter to the People of Ireland on the Present Situation of the Country, proclaimed himself openly a United Irishmen (by then a banned seditious organisation), showed how the ordinary people had been betrayed by the gentry, backed by England, championed the cause of the Catholics, argued the necessity of unity of all religious persuasions and the virtues of the United Irishmen, and attacked England's treatment of Ireland, her promotion of the slave trade and her war against France. It was deemed seditious and a warrant was issued for his arrest. He surrendered himself voluntarily on 16 September 1796 and was taken from Belfast to Newgate prison in Dublin. Because he refused to give sureties for his good behaviour, he was not bailed and was to remain in prison until 1802 (after 1799 at Fort George in Scotland), the longest detention without trial of any of the state prisoners. When Lord Edward Fitzgerald was wounded and arrested on 19 May 1798, he was brought to Newgate, where Russell was the only United Irishman to see him; and when Tone was captured and capitally convicted in November 1798, it was Russell who tried to mobilize support to have him reprieved.
Russell had been unenthusiastic about the state prisoners' compact with government in August 1798 (the Kilmainham Treaty). This had followed the United Irish prisoners' offer to make a full disclosure of their contacts with France in return for a stay in the executions of other leaders and their own voluntary exile. Russell believed that government had broken the compact by altering their statement and continuing to detain them. He was one of those who then re-organised the United Irish Society from within prison, younger leaders still at liberty - notably Robert Emmet and Russell's niece's husband William Henry Hamilton - reconstructing it as a more secretive military organisation. In March 1799 he was sent with the other state prisoners to Fort George in Scotland and was released to Hamburg in June 1802. Russell remained with the group which accompanied Thomas Addis Emmet to Amsterdam and finally to Paris by September 1802.

Last days
Of all the former leaders, Russell was the most eager to re-open negotiations with France. But he was also the most mistrustful of the new regime under Napoleon Bonaparte. It was this mistrust which now began to dictate the nature of plans for another rising, for although the United Irishmen knew that no rising in Ireland could be successful without French help, they sought to ensure that the French would be given no excuse to take control of the country. Robert Emmet raised the funding in Ireland. Russell recruited among the Irish exiles in France and returned to Ireland, via London, in April 1803. Russell's undoubted sympathy for the lower orders had left him with an unrealistic belief that the ordinary people were quite capable of rising without the French and he imparted his belief to Robert Emmet. In this both were deluding themselves. There was no general mood for rebellion in Ireland in 1803, even if there was widespread disaffection. Even those who were already implicated with Emmet when Russell returned were sceptical of his claims. On 18 July 1803 he travelled north from Dublin with Hamilton and James Hope, the Templepatrick weaver who had already played a key role in recruiting the artisans of Belfast and Dublin into the movement. En route through Newry his state of mind was not helped by sight of Eliza Goddard's former home. The number of people who harboured them and reports of drilling in the areas in Antrim and Down where they visited, gave some support to Russell's belief. But the middle-classes who had led the rebellion in 1798 were cool. Russell did not disguise his dislike of France under Bonaparte and seemed to have no proper plan to offer. He exhausted himself riding back and forth to former haunts in the two counties. But though he tried to inspire confidence by putting on his general's green uniform and issuing proclamations on behalf of the Provisional Government, he offered no arms, no chance of a French invasion (which witnesses said he seemed positively hostile towards), and no plan of campaign besides an overriding belief that the people would turn out automatically when called upon.

It was madness, and some thought in retrospect that years of imprisonment and impoverishment had unhinged Russell's mind. But there was more to it than this and his most recent biographer -James Quinn - makes a compelling case for a dogmatic millenialism. A fatalistic and melancholy man, with an unworldliness and all-embracing religiosity which made him such a foil to his friend Tone, Russell's sense that providence ruled all and would triumph eventually was clearly guiding his now impaired judgement. "1 go this moment", he wrote to Frank McCracken after the collapse of his own and Robert Emmet's attempts, "for the purpose of ... rectifying the mistakes that have taken place. Whether I fail or succeed is in the hands of God, but the cause I will never relinquish. He has for the present stopt our progress ... if you here (sic) of my friend [Hamilton] you will tell him or any other person I am gone to join anybody I can find in arms in support of their rights and that of mankind".

Russell had convened a meeting at Annadorn near Downpatrick on 22 July and announced to the 9 or 10 who turned up that there was to be a general rising, with the main action in Down planned for Downpatrick; but those present were unenthusiastic. He moved onto to Loughinisland thinking that Orange attacks in the area would at least pre-dispose the Catholics to join him. But here too he made the common mistake of thinking that Catholics were generally rebellious. They were not and the priests of the area had been warning their parishioners against such activities. Disillusioned, he returned to the outskirts of Downpatrick on the 23rd expecting to find a rebel force ready to attack the town. Instead only about 14, armed with pitchforks, had turned up under the shoe-maker James Corry earlier in the day, but most had gone home by the time Russell arrived. Although there is evidence of drilling in parts of Antrim and Down, notably in areas of Defender strength and - as with the plans for the south - the northern rising was aborted by news of the failure of Emmet's premature rebellion of 23 July 1803. Russell travelled to Dublin by boat in an effort to rescue Emmet, but was captured there on 9 September, the formal identification being made by his old patron, George Knox.

Russell seemed to be courting fate in these final days, to the extent that his friends thought they detected signs of insanity. Like Robert Emmet, he believed a French attack would soon take place (whatever his personal reservations); like Emmet he proclaimed his desire to minimise bloodshed and his trust in the patriotism of the 'lower orders'. Although imprisoned in Kilmainham after 12 September, no evidence has been found that he was able to communicate with Emmet, though he did with Anne Devlin. On 12 October he was transferred north for trial in Downpatrick, county Down - the main scene of his activities - and there tried and convicted on 20 October. Like Emmet he offered no defence, though defended ably by Henry Joy, relative of his close friends the McCrackens, who paid for his defence. In his own speech he spoke of his religious feelings, called on the rich to look after the poor and declared that several members of the jury had once shared the beliefs for which he was about to die. He spoke of past empires rising and falling and yet many governments of his day acted as if they were 'immutable'. The laws of God he had always followed. The 'laws of state' frequently clashed with these and he cited, pointedly, the Roman laws which had crucified Christ. "By my conduct I do not consider that I have incurred any moral guilt. I have committed no moral evil. I do not want many and bright examples of those who have gone before me, but did I want this encouragement the recent example of a youthful hero, a martyr in the cause of liberty, who has just died for his country, would inspire me." Russell spoke then of their difference in age. Whilst Russell had had time to experience the realities and delusions of the world (he was thirty-seven), Emmet "was surrounded by everything which could endear this world to him, in the bloom of youth, with fond attachments, and with all the fascinating charms of health and innocence; to his death I look back, even in this, with rapture."

Russell was convicted of high treason and was hanged and beheaded at Downpatrick gaol on 21 October. His remains were then buried in the nearby Protestant parish church. Four others were also executed for their part in the attempted northern rising. Despite Russell's reputation among the disaffected his end was low profile in comparison with that of Emmet. His speech lasted but twenty minutes and though considered "eloquent and energetic", the press thought it "unconnected" and it never became the stuff of legend like Emmet's. No propaganda machine (republican or government) was employed for Russell. He was not 'society' like Emmet was and his execution took place within the gaol's precinct, the doors opened only briefly to the public. Perhaps too the authorities had recognised their error in permitting Emmet to turn his own public execution a month earlier into the occasion when he completed his own reinvention as sacrificial martyr which he had commenced so effectively during his trial. A plain slab -organised and paid for by his friend Mary Anne McCracken, who had likewise supported him financially throughout the trial - marks Russell's place of burial.

Russell and Emmet were the only 'gentlemen' to be executed as a result of the 1803 attempt. Nearly all the rest of those executed in 1803 were working men, 22 with Emmet, 4 with Russell. Although like Henry Joy McCracken, Russell has always had the status of folk-hero in the north, particularly in south Down - a reputation reflected in the celebrated dialect poem by Florence Wilson, "The Man from God Knows Where" (1918), what happened in 1803 was a disaster for Ireland. The desperate sincerity of both these men aroused the sympathies of many who did not otherwise approve of their actions. But sincerity is a fundamental part of zealotry. Both men had lost touch with opinion in Ireland. There had been a return to milder government after years of crackdown after the 1798 rebellion and Catholics and Protestants alike were dismayed at the re-imposition of strict measures after 1803. The events exacerbated religious divisions and fast-tracked the process whereby northern Presbyterians in particular withdrew from liberal politics. His captivating personality may well have mesmerised young Emmet as it had done Tone, and, given his key role in revamping the United Irishmen from inside prison in 1799 and then convincing Robert Emmet that the working people would rally to another call-out, one may well ask that had Russell not been in prison in 1798 and thereby escaped the fate of most of the other original leaders, whether the event that we now call Emmet's Rebellion would ever have happened.

Marianne Elliott is Director of the Institute of Irish Studies at Liverpool University. She is the author of Robert Emmet. The Making of a Legend (2003) and a number of other books related to the topic of this paper.

Notes and References
1. Madden, Lives and Times of the United Irishmen (Dublin, 1846), 3rd ser.,ii, 261-5; Quinn, 'In pursuit of the millenium', (NUI Phd Thesis, 1995) 192-205. Dublin Evening Post, 25 Oct., Belfast News Letter, 28 Oct and 1 Nov 1803.