one of Cook’s newly discovered islands in the South Sea on a military plan, ‘in order to put a bridle on Spain in time of peace, and to annoy her grievously in that quarter in time of war’. He spent three months researching his scheme and delivered it by hand to the porter in Downing Street for the attention of the Prime Minister Mr Pitt. It was, he recalled, his first essay in politics. Tone, keen to make his fortune, also made a botched effort to enlist with the East India Company. Still smarting from these failed endeavours he was rescued by an advance of £500 on his wife’s inheritance from her grandfather. This allowed him to return to Ireland in 1789, finish his legal studies and enlist as a barrister on the Leinster circuit. He had little interest in a legal career and his ambitions soon turned to politics. He initially hoped to be taken up as a parliamentary candidate by the Whigs but by 1790 under the influence of Sir Laurence Parsons, an MP in the Irish House of Commons, he found his vocation as an Irish patriot:
I made speedily what was to me a great discovery, though I might have found it in Swift and Molyneux, that the influence of England was the Radical vice of our Government, and consequently that Ireland would never be either free, prosperous, or happy, until she was independent, and that independence was unattainable whilst the connection with England existed.
His political views evolved rapidly. These, as documented in two widely-read pamphlets, Spanish War! (1790) and An Argument on Behalf of the Catholics of Ireland (1791), propelled him to the centre stage of the United Irishmen and in April 1792 he replaced Edmund Burke’s hapless son Richard as the parliamentary agent of the Catholic Association. These were summarised as follows by William’s preface to the Autobiography:
The fact is though he preferred in theory a republican form of government, his main object was to procure the independence of his country under a liberal administration, whatever might be its form or name. His tastes and habits were rather aristocratical for the society with which he was sometimes obliged to mingle. I believe that, in reading these memoirs, many people will be surprised at (and some perhaps will blame) the moderation of his views. The persecutions of the government drove him much further than he proposed at first.
Spanish War! recalled but inverted the adventurer spirit with which he canvassed Pitt’s support for a South Seas colony to block Spanish trade. The London parliament could ask the king to declare war on Spain, but it could not, Tone insisted, do so on behalf of Ireland, which had its own separate and independent legislature. Spanish War! in the spirit of Swift’s Drapier letters, argued that Irish trade and prosperity would be, as ever before, undermined by England’s self-interest. Spanish War! identified some £113,543 of Irish exports (mostly linen, wheat, pork and butter) to Spain in 1789 against imports of £138,001 (including sugar cane, brandy and wine). In a volte-face from his submission to Pitt, he declared that peace with Spain was in Ireland’s interest and that Ireland would in no way benefit from any victory over Spain over trade routes:
Ireland has no quarrel, but, on the contrary, a very beneficial intercourse with Spain, which she is required to renounce to her infinite present detriment; she is called on, likewise, to squander her wealth and shed her blood in this English East Indian quarrel.
The man who tried in vain to enlist in the East India Company less than two years previously was no longer contented to be ‘the subaltern instrument’ of artful and ambitious England. As long as the good of the Empire was defined as the good of England, Ireland would suffer. If England’s warships were built in Irish harbours, if Ireland had its own navy, army, flag and colonies, only then would Ireland have a legitimate interest in England’s war.
Tone was a constitutional patriot before he became a rebel. Like other Protestant patriots he was preoccupied with Ireland’s lesser status compared to England. The aim of his Argument on Behalf of Catholics, he recalled in his autobiography, was to assert the independence of his country, to unite the whole people of Ireland and to ‘substitute the common name of Irishman in place of the denominations of Protestant, Catholic’. The pamphlet was addressed to Protestant Dissenters rather than to members of the Established Church or to Catholics:
The Protestants I despaired of from the outset for obvious reasons. Already in possession by an unjust monopoly of the whole power and patronage of the country, it was not to be supposed they would ever concur in measures the certain tendency of which must be to lessen their influence as a party, how much so ever the nation might gain. To the Catholics I thought it unnecessary to address myself, because, that as no change could make their political situation worse, I reckoned upon their support to a certainty; besides, they had already begun to manifest a strong sense of their wrongs and oppressions; and, finally, I well knew that, however it might be disguised or suppressed, there existed in the breast of every Irish Catholic an inextirpable abhorrence of the English name and power. There remained only the Dissenters, whom I knew to be patriotic and enlightened; however, the recent events at Belfast had showed me that all prejudice was not yet entirely removed from their minds. I sat down accordingly, and wrote a pamphlet addressed to the Dissenters, and which I entitled, An Argument on behalf of the Catholics of Ireland, the object of which was to convince them that they and the Catholics had but one common interest and one common enemy; that the depression and slavery of Ireland was produced and perpetuated by the divisions existing between them, and that, consequently, to assert the independence of their country, and their own individual liberties, it was necessary to forget all former feuds, to consolidate the entire strength of the whole nation, and to form for the future but; one people. These principles I supported by the best arguments which suggested themselves to me, and particularly by demonstrating that the cause of the failure of all former efforts, and more especially of the Volunteer Convention in 1783, was the unjust neglect of the claims of their Catholic brethren.
An Argument on Behalf of Catholics opened with an account of Ireland and its people that is echoed in how Ireland continues to represent itself. Ireland was ‘blessed with a temperate sky and fruitful soil’, ‘abounding with all the material for unlimited commerce’, ‘filled by 4,000,000 of an ingenious and gallant people’, ‘posted right in the track between Europe and America, within 50 miles of England, 300 of France’, yet, as he argued in Spanish War!, ‘with all these great advantages unheard of and unknown, without pride, or power, or name; without ambassadors, army or navy; nor of half the consequence in the empire she has the honour to make a part, with the single county of York, or the loyal and well regulated town of Birmingham!’ The choice facing the Protestant Irish was to preside over a stunted and inglorious country (‘unknown and unheard of in Europe, the prey of England, the laughing stock of the knaves who plunder us’) or to exert their power constitutionally to procure a complete and radical emancipation of their country, ‘by a reform in the representation of the people’. This new element to his political philosophy was his insistence of the need for solidarity with Catholics.
Tone’s proposal for dealing with the political fallout of Catholic Emancipation was to enfranchise such Catholics who had a freehold of £10 per year and to strike off ‘the wretched tribe of forty shilling freeholders’ whose votes were as much the property of their landlords as the sheep or the bullocks which they brand with their names. Doing so, would purge in one stroke, ‘the gross and feculent mass which contaminates the Protestant interest, and restore their natural weight to the sound and respectable part of the Catholic community, without throwing into their hands so much power as might enable them to dictate the law’.
An Argument on Behalf of Catholics addressed hackneyed Protestant fears of what would happen if Catholics were emancipated. There was, he argued, no threat of Rome rule (the Pope was being burned in effigy in Catholic France), or of a Catholic monarch (the Pretender to the throne was dead, Jacobitism was finished); he also dismissed the argument that if Catholics got the upper hand they would ally against England with France.
His solidarity with Catholics was, at this stage, mostly intellectual. How, he asked, could the Dissenters ground their title to liberty in Thomas Paine’s The
