Unfortunately, the identities of the great majority of these schoolmaster activists and of other middle-ranking Defender leaders are unknown, and most likely unknowable. Occasionally, however, it is possible to pick out faces in the crowd.
Probably the best documented of all Defenders is the Meath schoolmaster and freemason, Lawrence O’Connor. O’Connor and others were arrested in Kildare in July, 1795, for administering an oath to the country people to ‘be true to the French’. Tried and executed for high treason in September, he is chiefly remembered for his spirited and articulate defence in court. Lecky’s remark that O’Connor ‘was said to have been the only educated person who is known to have been identified with’ the Defenders, is utterly misleading. In fact schoolmasters, as noted earlier, were often leaders, or committee-men, at local level; a presence which enhanced the political calibre of the movement.
Less well known than O’Connor to students of the period, although he had achieved something of a national reputation by 1796, was the ‘celebrated "Switcher" Donnelly’. Arthur Donnelly, by profession a dancing instructor, came from Tyrone and acted as a defender commander at the battle of the Diamond. In November and December 1795 rewards were offered for his arrest in connection with a shooting. According to the magistrate who finally caught up with him in south Derry five months later, Donnolly was ‘by nature form’d to be a most dangerous conspirator, very great address, good choice of words and fluency of speech and great agility of body. Amazingly muscular and with desperate intrepid’. A regional organiser in west Ulster, he reportedly circulated like ‘quicksilver’ through Donegal, Tyrone, Antrim and Derry.
Donnelly’s career is instructive. When he was captured the newspapers referred to him as a Defender and a United Irishman. And by this time the merger or, more accurately, coalition, between the United Irishmen and Defenders was indeed already in place, at least in Ulster. The making of that coalition carried profound implications for both movements. Like the commencement of negotiations for French military aid, United Irish efforts to assimilate Defender lodges into their new military structures signalled the seriousness of their insurrectionary designs. It also posed problems for their strategy of forging a union of Irishmen of all creeds. Defenderism represented many things to many men, among them Catholic sectarianism. The experience of John Tuite – ‘Captain Fearnought’ of Meath – illustrates the consequent United Irish dilemma. Tuite was ‘sworn to both acts’ in 1795, that is he took first the Defender and then the United Irish oaths, but the Defender oath pledged him ‘to quell the nation of heresy’ as well as to ‘dethrone all kings, and plant the tree of liberty’. The second part of the oath indicates how interaction with the United Irishmen accelerated and strengthened the politicising impact of ‘French principles’; the first part shows how much more the secular radical gospel had still to do. Putting the best gloss possible on a coalition fraught with internal tensions, Emmet later asserted that the United Irishmen had infused Defenderism with ‘tolerance and republicanism’. Presumably Tuite’s trial report had escaped his notice.
Concerted and systematic attempts to co-opt the Defenders began in the spring of 1795, but lines of communication had been established as early as 1792. As Emmet remarked, ‘from the first formation of the union its most active members were extremely anxious to learn the views and intentions of the Defenders’. The best documented example of contact is the United Irish mission to Rathfryland in the summer of 1792. Wolfe Tone, Samuel Neilson and Alexandar Lowry were all involved in this episode. The names are important because the same individuals appear and reappear as the hidden history of the Defender-United Irish relationship is unravelled. While it is tempting to view the Rathfryland mission as an isolated attempt – in the context of the Catholic campaign – to settle sectarian feuding, other evidence, patchy and circumstantial though it may be, suggests that it in fact fits a pattern. Elliott dismisses Tandy’s excursion to the Louth Defenders later that year as an act of ‘bravado’ motivated by ‘curiosity’. Yet Tandy was probably introduced to the Defenders by the Rev James Coigly, who was in turn associated with the Belfast United Irishmen. Coigly, if not by then a Defender certainly exercised influence amongst them, and during the years 1791-3 travelled around counties Antrim and Derry propagating ‘union’. His activities were complemented by Emmet’s ‘most active’ United Irishmen. For instance, Thomas Russell travelled the length and breadth of Ulster during 1793-4. Not surprisingly the group reaching out to the lower classes and Defenders in this period was the northern-based, politically militant, and often socially radical faction of the United Irishmen, prominent among them Russell, Henry Joy McCracken, Neilson and Coigly. The committed, francophile position adopted by these men made some kind of convergence with the Defenders likely.
As the adversarial rhetoric and style of the reform campaign of 1792-3 had already demonstrated, certain northerners would not shirk direct – possibly violent – confrontation with the ascendancy, and the drift of events since the collapse of that campaign only served to harden attitudes. After the Dublin society’s plans for parliamentary reform were published at the beginning of 1794 the Northern Star announced ‘The question with us is not What reform is best? but – How can we possibly obtain any? The open and ‘political’ routes to reform were blocked. Meanwhile the revelations from the Rev William Jackson’s treason trial gave wide publicity to the possibilities of French intervention in Ireland. Circumstances conspired to encourage a revolutionary strategy. Not that men like McCracken needed much encouragement. As in Dublin it is likely that a shadowy network of lower-class clubs grew up alongside the United Irishmen in Ulster in the first half of the decade. The chairman of the ‘Irish Jacobins of Belfast’ in 1792 was a baker, the secretary ‘an obscure tinner and brazier’. In November, 1793, the Northern Star referred to ‘a society of tradesmen in this town [ie Belfast] which has subsisted for three years’. These tradesmen, ‘farmers, manufacturers and shopkeepers’, formed the organisational backbone of the ‘new’ underground United Irish movement which began to take shape in Ulster in 1794. ‘The scheme was calculated to embrace the lower orders, and in fact to make every man a politician’. The clandestine structure was so far advanced by May, 1795, that a general meeting of delegates from the various societies could be summoned at Belfast. These developments ran parallel to the welding of the Ulster Defenders into a more tightly centralised organisation.
The chief architect of the revamped Defenders was a warm friend and associate of Neilson and McCracken, Charles H Teeling. During May and June, 1795, Teeling undertook a journey up the Antrim coast, along north county Derry, down through Tyrone, Fermanagh, Leitrim and Westmeath and into Meath. The purpose of his journey can be guessed. In Glenarm, County Antrim, for example, he stayed with a priest, the Rev D McDonnell, who is known to have subscribed to the Northern Star. In Leitrim he stayed with the Catholic Committee activist, Myles Keon. At approximately the same time Charles’ elder brother, the United Irishman Bartholomew, ‘traversed the whole island on foot’. It was no coincidence that after meeting with Robert Simms, Neilson and the younger Teeling before leaving for America in June, Tone pronounced himself competent to speak ‘for the Catholic, for the Dissenters and for the Defenders of Ireland’. Three months later Simms wrote to the exile that ‘the organisation which you were made acquainted with amongst the Catholics in this neighbourhood continues to increase and has spread as far south as Meath’. Teeling himself later drew a distinction between the ‘regularly organised body’ of Defenders in the north and their less disciplined southern counterparts, while Simms’ claim about its penetration into Meath is corroborated by government intelligence about Belfast emissaries being sent to that county, by Emmet’s reference to an exchange of ‘deputies’ between Belfast and Meath, County Dublin and elsewhere, by Tone’s assertion that Belfast exercised greater influence over the Catholics than Dublin and by the activities of Bartholomew Teeling by then – like Coigly – operating out of Dundalk.
In many ways the politics of the 1790s, radical, Catholic and Defender, crystallised in the Teeling family. It played a crucial role in co-ordinating the coalition between the Defenders and United Irishmen. The father, Luke, a wealthy linen merchant from Lisburn, near Belfast, acted as a (hardline) United Irish surrogate at the Catholic Convention in 1792. It was he who that year paid for the Address to the Defenders, at Rathfryland and for the insertions of the Meath Catholics meeting called to protest against Fitzwilliam’s recall, and his young son Charles – then only 17 – acted as secretary. Charles’ brother-in-law, John Magennis, the self-styled ‘Grand Master’ of the County Down Defenders, represented that county at the Catholic Convention, handled the local Catholic Committee subscription and was in communication with the committee secretary (and United Irishman) Richard McCormick. Although the Defenders have usually been discussed at a general – and nameless – level, attention to detail reveals, at first in Ulster, then radiating outwards, a compact nexus of friends and relatives at the head of the movement. This was a group which was, moreover, deeply involved with the United Irishmen. The Teelings stood at the centre of the nexus and, as prosperous linen merchants, typified it.
In contrast with their land-owning co-religionists in north Connaught or the Dublin businessmen, Ulster’s Catholics had maintained a low political profile throughout the greater part of the eighteenth century. If this passivity was due, as Cullen suggests, to their comparative poverty, then their participation in the linen-led economic boom of the 1780s and 1790s would in part explain their new political self-confidence. Commercial relations with Belfast’s radical mercantile elite would also have facilitated politicisation. Bernard Coile, a prominent Lurgan linen merchant, subscribed to the Northern Star, and was associated with Neilson, McCracken, Coigly and Magennis. Magennis, like his fellow Defender commander, the Presbyterian, Alexander Lowry, was also in the linen trade. Both were intimates of Charles Teeling who attests to their social rank and ‘independent fortune’. This small leading group acted as a nucleus whose family, business and political connections fanned-out into an underground network spanning the northern half of Ireland. Coigly’s brother in Armagh – who employed 100 weavers – was a Defender/United Irishman. Coigly’s equally mobile colleague, ‘Switcher’ Donnelly, may have been a cousin, while his ‘close friend and relation’, Valentine Derry, led the Defenders in County Louth. The other main identifiable Defender leaders are Burke Rice, a man ‘possessed of considerable landed property’ in County Monaghan, and the Armagh publican, Robert Campbell. Government informants reported Campbell’s presence in Cavan late in 1795, and at Balbriggan, north County Dublin, shortly afterwards, as he ‘constantly travell[ed] from county to county’.
Once the cloak of anonymity is lifted then, the Defenders, it becomes clear, particularly in Ulster and Meath, possessed a coherent, radical, middle-class Catholic leadership. From its origins in Armagh in 1784 as the Catholic faction in a local sectarian feud, the Defender movement had gradually spread along lines of religious cleavage, or ‘cultural frontiers’, into County Down, Louth and south Ulster. Stimulated by the news and controversy about the French revolution and encouraged by the Catholic agitation, the Defenders were transformed into a politicised secret society. This process was then reinforced, and the Defender organisation expanded, from Meath across the north midlands into Connaught, by the continuing economic, political, and law-and-order crisis. The militia riots, the 1794 trials, the Fitzwilliam episode, Lord Carhampton’s activities, the Armagh expulsions and the propaganda which radicals extracted from each of these affairs, all contributed to the rise of the Defenders. BY 1795 Defenderism had a presence, form Donegal to Kildare, from Galway to Louth, in at least 16 counties and in Dublin city. They had successfully infiltrated the militia and knit far-flung lodges into a co-ordinated, if not well-disciplined, organisation. Lines of communication criss-crossed the country. Emissaries, equipped with catechisms, ‘commissions’ and the knowledge of the initiate, travelled around carrying instructions, proselytising and recruiting. Defenderism had evolved a chameleon ideology infinitely adaptable to varying local conditions: now sectarian, now agrarian, always francophile and anti-ascendancy. With the emergence of a recognisable regional command structure in Ulster, of a Catholic leadership aligned to the radical northern wing of the United Irishmen, the stage had been set for the making of a revolutionary coalition. The vast Catholic Committee-United Irish-Defender conspiracy of Sir Richard Musgrave’s paranoid imagination was not, after all, entirely detached from the historical reality.