Napper Tandy has long been a household name in Ireland thanks largely to the opening lines of the ballad The Wearing of the Green, writes Brian Maye.
"I met with Napper Tandy and he took me by the hand/ And he said, 'How's poor old Ireland and how does she stand?'"
He pops up again in the Dublin song The Spanish Lady: "I've wandered north and I've wandered south,/ Through Stonybatter and Patrick's Close,/ Up and around by the Gloucester Diamond/ And back by Napper Tandy's house."
Tandy's balladic celebrity helped to earn him an entry in the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, where he is described as an "Irish politician, ineffectual revolutionary, and popular hero memorialised in the Irish ballad The Wearing of the Green."
The historian Roy Foster, in his Modern Ireland 1600-1972, refers to Tandy as "egregious". But in his excellent study of the 1798 Rebellion, The Year of Liberty, Thomas Pakenham calls Tandy "brave" and "redoubtable". He seems to have had a weakness for drink and a tendency to brag, but he was certainly not lacking in courage or patriotism.
James Napper Tandy, who died 200 years ago yesterday, was born in Dublin, the son of an ironmonger, and started his working life as a small tradesman. The political stir of the late 1770s turned his mind to politics and he became a member of the corporation of Dublin. His condemnation of municipal corruption and his proposal of a boycott of English goods, in retaliation for the restrictions imposed by the government on Irish commerce, made him popular. He was also part of the Volunteer movement that wrested first commercial and then political concessions from an English government fighting desperately to hold on to its American colonies.
Tandy was the foremost of the small revolutionary party who formed a permanent committee in 1784 to agitate for reform, and called a convention of delegates from all parts of Ireland which met in October that year. He became a member of the Whig club formed by Henry Grattan and co-operated with Wolfe Tone in founding the Dublin branch of the Society of United Irishmen. As secretary of that branch, he was the link between the upper-class Protestant leaders and the Catholic rank and file.
The violence of his opinions, strongly influenced by French revolutionary ideas, brought him prominently to the attention of the government. Intending to effect a fusion between the Defenders, a Catholic secret society which had its origin in agrarian violence in Ulster, and the United Irishmen, he took the oath of the Defenders. Faced with the threat of prosecution for this step and also for libel, he fled to America. There he continued his United Irishmen activities, coming into contact with Citizen Adet, minister plenipotentiary of the French Republic, from whom he received support for French action in Ireland.
He went to Paris in 1797, where he joined Wolfe Tone in urging the Directory to send an invasion force. It seems that the Irish in Paris quarrelled among themselves quite a bit. Wolfe Tone, who had described Tandy, somewhat patronisingly, to Talleyrand as "a respectable old man whose patriotism has been known for 30 years", has been portrayed as being disgusted by the lying and bragging by which Tandy persuaded the French that he was a person of great wealth and influence in Ireland, a man at whose appearance 30,000 men would rise in arms.
Tandy was commissioned a brigadier-general in the French army and given control of the corvette Anacréon, one of the fastest ships in the French navy. It set sail from Dunkirk in early September, a month behind General Humbert. A fortnight later it passed clean through the British naval blockade and sailed boldly into Rutland harbour in Donegal. The Anacréon was chiefly a gun-runner, containing arms for several thousand men, a pack of artillery and other useful equipment, but only 270 French troops and six Irish exiles.
They took possession of the village of Rutland and Tandy issued a proclamation, part of which went: "Let not your friends be butchered unassisted; if they are doomed to fall in this glorious struggle, let their deaths be useful to your cause, and their bodies serve as footsteps to the temple of Irish liberty." But on learning of the failure of Humbert's mission, and that Connacht instead of being in open rebellion was quiet, Tandy and his associates realised the futility of their mission. The Anacréon sailed round the north of Scotland to avoid the English fleet and reached Bergen safely. From there Tandy and three companions made their way to Hamburg en route to Paris.
But after a demand from the English government for their arrest and extradition, and despite a counter-threat from the French Directory, the Hamburg authorities, after long deliberations, allowed them to be taken to London in the autumn of 1799.
Tandy remained in prison until April 1801, when he was tried, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to death. However, he was reprieved and allowed to go to France. Napoleon had vigorously intervened on his behalf and is even said to have made his release a condition of signing the Treaty of Amiens (which brought a temporary halt to English-French hostilities).
England had hoped that Napper Tandy would be more or less ignored in France but they were wrong. French propaganda made the most of his arrival in Bordeaux. He was honoured with a military parade and Napoleon personally awarded him the pension of a full general. He began working on a scheme for a new invasion of Ireland but died on August 24th, 1803. His funeral was attended by the military and an immense number of the civil population.
In his Humorous Tales, Rudyard Kipling tells of hearing a peasant family chanting the chorus of The Wearing of the Green in pidgin English on a remote hillside in British India. So far had the fame of Napper Tandy spread.