Rome to evaluate the system. An evaluation was conducted the following year by the future Catholic Archbishop of Dublin Paul Cullen who concluded at the time that the schools ‘could not have been more Catholic than they are’.4 Even before the Devotional Revolution and the cementing of Catholic power usually attributed to Cullen, the widespread use of catechisms by lay teachers helped make this possible.
BF
Notes
1Michael Tynan, Catholic Instruction in Ireland 1720–1950 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1985).
2Various catechisms in the holdings of the Catholic Library in Dublin are cited.
3Rev. Martin Brenan, Schools of Kildare and Leighlin 1775–1835 (Dublin: MH Gill and Sons, 1935).
4Peadar McSuibhne, Paul Cullen and his Contemporaries, vol. 4, (Kildare, Leinster Leader, 1974), p.8.
6
William Theobald Wolfe Tone (ed.), The Autobiography of Wolfe Tone (1826)
The stature of Wolfe Tone (1763–1798) in the canon of Irish nationalism owes much to the posthumous publication of his autobiographical writings and diaries almost two decades after his death. A few of Tone’s pamphlets had an immediate impact during his life, particularly An Argument on Behalf of the Catholics of Ireland, published in 1791. After his death Tone’s reputation was overshadowed by those of other contemporaries, notably Lord Edward Fitzgerald. It was not until the 1840s, with impatience with Daniel O’Connell’s constitutionalism running high amongst Young Ireland nationalists, that Tone was first canonised as the great patriot of 1798. Patrick Pearse declared Tone’s Autobiography to be the first Gospel of the New Testament of Irish nationalism more than a century after Tone’s death. Tone’s grave became the topic of a ballad by Thomas Davis (Bodenstown Churchyard) and was described as the holiest place in Ireland by Pearse at an oration there in June 1913. Since then Sinn Fein and the IRA have held annual commemorations of Pearse’s performance at Tone’s graveside. During the period of the Northern 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
