From heroic wife to general's widow

Grey overgrown tombstone. Green, green and more green. Waving angels. Sheep. The Garden of the Dead, 520,000 of them. Names from all over Europe and, in the midst of it all, the earthy remains of Matilda Tone.

When last year the marble headstone, which it took four muscular lads to uproot and load into a white, pick-up truck, was brought to a sculptor's workshop to be restored, the old inscription was again revealed. "Matilda, widow by her second marriage of Thomas Wilson. Born June 1769. Died March 18th, 1849. Revered and loved as the heroic wife of Theobald Wolfe Tone."

Here she rests now in Brooklyn, New York City.

Sitting in the window of her father's drapery shop on Grafton Street in Dublin in 1785, Martha caught the eye of a sharp young law student about town. A few musical evenings later and they were married, taking refuge from the fury of her parents in Maynooth. Tone, she called him, and he took great liberties with her name, changing Martha to Matilda. Her life was to mirror that of the melodramatic heroine for whom she was renamed.

She began life with Tone by rescuing him from a violent burglary. A foretaste of the independence and courage she would need to draw on in later years. Their marriage soon expanded to form a very particular menageatrois: the politics of the United Irishmen being the third party. An amicable agreement, though politics was an expensive bedfellow and Matilda ran the house on a shoestring.

Tone was an infrequent presence, as Matilda recalled in later life with nostalgia: "I see, feel and hear all that was round me 36 years ago, my little room and everything in it, my bed, my babe in arms and, above all, he that came every instant with a heart glowing with love and joy and tenderness to look if we were well, to caress and bless us . . . how I was loved and cherished then!"

Her comments were not always as flattering in the early days of their marriage. "Tone has constantly disappointed me and though he has promised to come with me next Sunday certainly, I shall wait no longer . . . if all men knew how to treat women as Tom [Russell] does, we should be much better than we are," she wrote, comparing Tone to one of his political colleagues.

She egged him on in moments of gloom and his correspondence demonstrates how much he depended on her. Matilda crossed the Atlantic twice with their young family, and was living in the Paris of the Directorate when news of his capture and death reached her in 1798: she was 28 years old.

The story traditionally ends here, with at best an approving nod to the "heroic wife". But for Matilda life was far from over. She bombarded Bonapartes Napoleon and Lucien, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord and the Ministere de la Guerre for her rights as a general's widow. She lived a life of relative retirement, dedicated to protecting Tone's memory from the threats of revisionism. She also defended her one surviving son's life from tuberculosis and United Irish attempts to place him in the punishing Irish Brigade of the French army. Taking a dim view of these attempts she remarked: "Do the Irish think that because Tone volunteered in their service and shed his best blood in their cause and left his family destitute in a foreign country that his posterity are to be their slaves?" Young William was sent to the prestigious Lycee Imperial.

"I lived 20 years in France and am almost a Frenchwoman," she wrote. But by 1820 Matilda had remarried, moved to Washington DC and was busy editing that handbook of Irish republicanism, the "Life" of Theobald Wolfe-Tone with her son.

"I have been for the best part of my life, and I can tell you I am not very young, hoping and watching for something to turn up for that country [guess where?], but I am afraid that now there is no hope, it's too small. . . do you know I sometimes wish it would grow," she remarked to Charles Hart who visited her in 1849. She died soon after at the age of 79, having outlived two husbands and all of her children.

Buried initially in Washington, when the cemetery there was sold her remains were transferred to Brooklyn in 1891. The tombstone's recent restoration was part of Irish-American commemorations of the United Irishmen's rebellion of 1798 .