Theobald Wolfe Tone
Theobald Wolfe Tone tried to make Irish Catholics and Protestants into one nation and cut his own throat in a Dublin cell in 1798. Born in 1763 in Dublin to a middle-class Protestant coach-maker's family, he was called to the bar, disliked it, and proposed a military colony in Hawaii to the British government before finding his subject in Irish politics. His pamphlet of 1791, addressed to the Catholics of Ireland by a Protestant, argued that the exclusion of three-quarters of the population from political life was what kept Ireland weak and English, and that the answer was a union of Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter. He helped found the Society of United Irishmen at Belfast the same year — initially a reform society of largely Presbyterian merchants — and became secretary of the Catholic Committee. The French Revolution radicalised the movement and the government suppressed it, and Tone was implicated in contacts with France and allowed to emigrate to America in 1795. He went on to Paris and spent two years persuading the Directory to invade Ireland. The first expedition of December 1796 reached Bantry Bay with 15,000 men and could not land in the weather; Tone wrote that they were close enough to throw a biscuit ashore. The rising of 1798 broke out and was crushed before the French arrived in force. Tone was taken at Lough Swilly in a French uniform, tried by court martial, and refused a soldier's death by firing squad. He died of the wound after a week. Every strand of Irish republicanism since has claimed him.
- Lived: 1763 CE – 1798 CE
- Nationality: Irish
- Roles: revolutionary, political_theorist, lawyer
