Richard Musgrave was not entirely persuaded by Wolfe Tone’s famous claim that the 1798 Rebellion would unite “Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter”. According to a possibly apocryphal story, the Waterford MP’s wife once woke up in bed to find him strangling her and raving about popish traitors.
“You infernal papist rebel!” he roared. “You United Irishman, I will never part from you alive if you don’t come quietly!”
Sadly, Fergus Whelan laments in his episodic but illuminating study of the period, Musgrave’s bigotry turned out to be contagious. In 1801 this “crazy Orangeman” (as one contemporary dubbed him) published Memoirs of the Rebellion, an almost 1,000-page “instant history” that sold extremely well. Depicting the rising as an anti-Protestant crusade led by fanatical bishops directing an “ignorant rabble”, it shaped British public opinion and helped prevent Catholic Emancipation for nearly three decades.
Enemies of the State is a much shorter volume with a far nobler purpose. It focuses on three individuals who featured prominently in Musgrave’s narrative, explaining how he vilified them through “prejudices, exaggeration, half-truths and downright falsehoods”.
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James Harold, a parish priest at Rathcoole, was transported without trial to the barbaric penal colony of Norfolk Island for allegedly sheltering rebels but in reality had convinced his flock to hand over their pikes. His fellow cleric, Peter O’Neill, confessed to aiding the murder of an informer in east Cork but only after he was lashed 275 times by British troops and eventually received a pardon.
Felix Rourke is the most colourful character profiled here, a refined comic actor and United Irishman colonel who saved the lives of a captured Protestant minister and his family in Wexford. He still ended up being hanged from the rafters of Fr Harold’s burnt-out house.
Whelan’s collective biography skilfully detangles the web of loyalties that drove these turbulent events (to take one ironic example, the Orange Order opposed the Act of Union while some republican radicals welcomed it).
Enemies of the State is not the first book anyone should read about Tone’s rebellion and its aftermath, since Whelan assumes plenty of prior knowledge on our behalf. By showing in such meticulous detail how sectarianism can poison Irish political debate, however, he has written a valuable piece of historical detective work.
The ghost of Musgrave’s reaction is too terrifying to imagine.
Andrew Lynch is a freelance book reviewer
